by John Dalmas
At supper they talked about other things—about agriculture in Almeon and how things were done there. The talk introverted Brokols a bit, making him compare life there with life in Hrumma. It would be difficult to live in Almeon again, even if he'd be welcome there. Almeon was beautiful—greener than Hrumma, more fertile—but the way people lived, the oppressions there, would be hard for him to take now.
They'd made a mistake sending him to Hrumma, he realized. He'd been a misfit at home, but had learned early to conceal, to conform, to fool even himself; there'd be a lot like him there. And he'd never realized it until he'd come to know Hrumma. Nor had Almeon built cultural defenses in him—a set of "we're the best because . . .." They hadn't needed to, when he'd known so little of any alternative until he was grown.
He wondered if the Djezian culture had impacted Glembro Dixen at all like the Hrummean had impacted himself. Kryger, he assumed, was beyond being appreciably touched; Kryger was Almeon.
Almeon was much more advanced technologically, of course. The fruit custard he was eating was delicious, but he couldn't help thinking that it would have been nicer chilled.
Hrumma had excellent artisans though, and he wondered if he knew enough about electricity, and about physics and chemistry in general, to get them started on a refrigeration plant after the war.
Hrumma after the war? A free Hrumma? He'd forgotten about that problem, and remembering it, his spirits slumped.
After supper he sat in the garden with Juliassa, on facing chairs under Torissia's chaperonage. The youthful aunt sat far enough away to give them privacy of conversation if they spoke quietly. From a hedge, a flute bird warbled a liquid cascade of notes.
"I dreamed of you again last night," she said smiling. "It was—most pleasant."
Brokols nodded. "And I dreamed of you. That was my first dream. Then, when I'd gone back to sleep, I dreamed another dream less pleasant."
Her gaze was direct. "Tell me about it. About the later dream that was less pleasant."
He didn't start at once. It had been realistic, as dreams go, like the dream in which the Almaeic army had been embarking in the time of lenn harvest.
"I dreamed," he said, "that the army had left Almeon. But the training camps were full of men, a second army. I watched them train. They were new, green. Their cadre was cursing them, working them hard."
He looked bleakly at Juliassa. "It seemed that the fleet planned to return to Alemon when they'd unloaded the first army, to get the second and bring them over." His lips were thin, straight. "And with two such armies, it seems to me there can be no possible victory over the empire."
Juliassa didn't answer for a moment, but neither did she look frightened or dismayed. "We'll just have to follow the advice of Vessto Cadriio then," she said. "And Allbarin and Panni. We'll have to do all we can, and hope that our efforts will bring Hrum's intervention."
"What further can I do?" Brokols asked. "Besides die in battle eventually."
"You might take your dream to Panni," she said.
The suggestion took Brokols by surprise, and he decided that he would, the next day.
* * *
He saw Panni sooner than that, that night in another dream. Panni wasn't in a cave or on a hilltop. He was sitting on a roof somewhere, with an exceedingly old, spidery-looking man that Brokols somehow knew was Tassi Vermaatio, the Is-ness of Hrum. They went somewhere together, the three of them, and did something that Brokols couldn't afterward remember. But when he woke to gray dawn and morning birdsong, a thought stuck in the front of Brokols' mind: Go talk with K'sthuump.
Forty-Nine
The next morning Brokols talked with Allbarin and got ready agreement. Nor did Allbarin have any difficulty with the amirr. Yes, Juliassa could ride with Brokols to Hidden Haven, properly accompanied. So a mounted courier was sent to the herb farm where she worked, to send her home, while Brokols went home and packed his own gear.
It was noon before they left Theedalit—Brokols, Juliassa, and Torissia, with Jonkka and two other guards—riding kaabors. Two pack animals followed, with sleeping and cooking gear and food. Brokols couldn't help thinking of the train of gear and retainers that would accompany a princess of the imperial house, were she to set out on an overnight outing in the country.
The daily thundershower obligingly let them get out of town, then in booming tones announced itself as storm instead of shower. Violently it slashed and beat on hooded oilskin ponchos for more than half an hour, while it marched across the plateau on electric legs, inspiring thoughts of charcoaled death. In the minds of the Hrummeans it resurrected the storm god, Borrsio, from his relegation to superstition, reestablishing him as a genuine aspect of Hrum, at least for a little while.
It ended abruptly, and the sun emerged to laugh at them. Humans and kaabors steamed, and the ponchos came off. All that was left of the storm was its tracks—puddles on the hoof-beaten road.
They reached Hidden Haven in midafternoon. The soldiers were gone, had left after the project had decided they didn't need the place anymore. Juliassa led at once to the inlet. There'd been concern that they'd miss K'sthuump, for it was the time of summer when the serpents departed the firths and inlets to travel north. They still could be seen in the Firth of Theed, but the departures generally began in the south and worked northward.
But at Hidden Haven too the serpents hadn't left yet. A juvenile, less shy than before, raised its head to breathe, its pink, still scaleless neck no larger than Juliassa's arm. Juliassa called to it; it whistled shrilly in acknowledgement and disappeared. Brief moments later, K'sthuump showed herself, swimming toward the beach, talking as she came.
"Suliassa! I had not thought to see you again! It is good! It is good! How go the preparassions of your tribe for the great death fight?" She asked the question cheerfully, as if the matter wasn't deadly serious, then grounded herself on the shoaling beach, barely awash, her head raised on arched blue neck.
"I'm glad I found you here," Juliassa said. "I was afraid you'd be gone already."
"Ah! I will not go. I will stay here. I am too old to go again with the people to the northern waters. Too slow to keep up. I will wait here for them to come back."
Juliassa didn't say anything for a long moment. It seemed to her that K'sthuump might easily die if she stayed here alone all that time—most of a year. The serpent read her emotion and what lay beneath it.
"Or maybe die, come back as young. I can't use this old body forever; it wears out." A series of grunts/laughs came from the long throat.
"But I won't know you in a different body," Juliassa protested. "And you won't remember me."
"Perhaps. But if we wiss it to happen, we will meet again. As perhaps we have in some life before." K'sthuump looked at Brokols, who'd understood none of the sullsit they'd spoken, then said to Juliassa: "Your mate has something to tell me. Perhaps this is good time to say what it is."
Juliassa glanced at Brokols and nodded. "Elver," she said, "say what you want to tell K'sthuump."
He told the old serpent his dream of the training camp, and that it seemed to him the fleet would go back for a second army; maybe even a third, if the emperor deemed it necessary for complete conquest. He spoke in brief sentences, letting Juliassa interpret each in turn, suspecting all the time that the serpent didn't need the interpretation. "I told the dream to a wise man called the Lamp of Hrum," he finished, "and he told me to talk with you about it."
"Ah!" The serpent made a long cooing sound, remarkable from her scaly neck. "Of course!"
The slit pupils fastened on Brokols, the being looking out through them at the Almite, the big-ship person become Hrummean. "You have made grenades to war with, have you not? The stones that go boom?"
He nodded. "That's right."
"Can you not make very big grenades and destroy the many ships with them when they come to the Dssezes? Then they cannot go back and bring more enemies."
He stared. It would take some doing, but it definitely seemed po
ssible. And a sea serpent had suggested it, a creature to whom empire, explosives, perhaps even conquest were foreign concepts.
"Thank you, K'sthuump," he said. "I believe we can. Your suggestion is all that I need to begin."
* * *
Then, while Juliassa and K'sthuump carried on a private conversation, Brokols walked back up the path to the hamlet to examine the buildings there. They were the way the grenade project had left them.
Now they might need Hidden Haven again for a new project; his mind was playing with the problems. Attach an explosive charge to the hull under water, then explode it so the ship would fill and sink. It would take a huge amount of powder of course, for 200 ships. And how could they attach explosives to them? The sullsi, of course! They could swim considerable distances underwater and had arms and hands. It would take a lot of them though, and he'd need to find a way to explode the charges.
He took an armload of firewood back to the beach, arriving to see three sullsi swimming up the inlet in a playful synchronized formation, all clearing the water at once in a vee of three. They too beached themselves, in their case out of the water. For a moment Juliassa didn't recognize Sleekit; his nose was swollen and his voice different.
"Juliassa!" Sleekit said. "You may have saved me a difficult decision."
"How so?"
"It seemed to me I shouldn't leave, Hrum had called to me to return south, and the reason had to do with you. Yet as far as I could see, I had accomplished nothing by coming back.
"But you were gone, and this is not a good place for sullsi in the season of cold water; food will be scarce for us, is already so. Could it be that I was mistaken? That I had heard falsely? What was I to do?"
"I'm very glad you came," Juliassa said. "Although I too don't know why you were called."
She turned to the other humans then and translated briefly for them.
"I don't know why they were called, either," Brokols said. "But we do need them. We need someone to attach ship-killing devices to the Almaeic fleet. The job requires hands and arms, and the ability to stay under water for a longish time.
"But Sleekit and his two friends won't be enough. There's to be 200 ships, each requiring its own ship-killing device. And each device will probably require two sullsi to attach it. If a pair of sullsi can attach devices on two different ships, it'll require 200 sullsi. If they can attach them to four, it'll take 100. Ask him if he can get us 200 sullsi."
Juliassa and Sleekit talked at some length. No doubt it had taken some explanations to make the matter clear.
"When?" Sleekit wanted to know.
"Soon. We might need them in as soon as fifty days," Brokols said. "It depends on when the fleet arrives."
She passed it on to Sleekit in her slow-paced sullsit. When she'd finished, the big sellsu lay there for a bit without speaking. When he did speak, it was a brief exchange in rapid sullsit to his packmates. Then he turned to Juliassa and talked to her at the slower pace she was used to and could understand.
She looked at Brokols. "Sleekit says he'd be glad to help, and he supposes he could interest some adventurous sullsi—perhaps 10 or 20, perhaps a few more—but not 200."
When she'd finished, Sleekit spoke again. "The sullsi feel no attachment to the Hrummeans, nor worse than distaste for the big-ship people. And to help would be a hardship; the sullsi follow the movements of the yerrcha, in order to keep themselves fed in their numbers. When one is away from the yerrcha, one must travel slowly in order to fish a lot."
Fifteen or twenty, perhaps a few more. Brokols pursed his lips, then spoke. "Tell him the big-ship people are dangerous to the sullsi. Long ago, many sullsi raised their young on the beaches of Almeon, the land of the big-ship people. Then the big-ship people began killing the sullsi for their flesh, their fur, and oil, until the sullsi stopped going to those islands. Now they are said to raise their pups on cliffy beaches of a great wild continent where they must worry about a very dangerous land people, very savage, called sauroids in our language.
"If the big-ship people conquer Hrumma and the lands to the north, as they intend to, they will probably hunt you here, too, till all of you are either dead or have found a new and distant place.
"What I want to do is destroy the fleet of big ships. Then perhaps they will not conquer us here, and the sullsi will be safe. But I'll need the help of many sullsi. At least 100."
Sleekit gazed long at Brokols. Then K'sthuump spoke to the sellsu. "Suliassa's mate tells the truth," K'sthuump said, "at least the truth as he knows it. It seems that the big-ssip people actually did those things, and might well do them here if they win in the great killing fight."
The sellsu's eyes hardened. "This gives the situation a different look. Knowing this, my people would want to help you. But in fifty days? Or sixty? If I were to leave at once, that would not be nearly enough time. They would be far away by the time I could catch and tell them." He turned to K'sthuump again. "Unless the long necks help."
K'sthuump nodded her head and sinuous neck in an apparent affirmative. "I will give this matter the taste of urgent, that my people will not only have the knowledz in their memory, but will be aware of it at once and tell any sullsi that they see. Young Vrronnkiess males, unmated, do not come south with the families. There will be some where the sullsi are now. And the sullsi are almost always willing to stop and listen to my people.
"Meanwhile, my people must also consider what may happen to our nursery sites if the big-ssip people prevail." She paused to concentrate for just a moment. Now," she said, "every one of my people knows, and knows that they know."
"Then the three of us will wait here until we know what part we have in this," Sleekit said.
When Juliassa had resumed the conversation for him, Brokols spoke. "I believe I have a special role for you three right here," he said. "We humans must first make such ship-killers, and they are something that has never been made before. We will have to try this and try that until we have made one that does what it's supposed to. You can help us test them."
When Juliassa had finished translating that, she paused, then continued on her own. "And I can have the flesh of land animals sent for you three to eat while you're here. You too, K'sthuump. So you don't have to work long hours fishing. I'll send off for it tomorrow."
She paused, her attention on Sleekit's swollen, somewhat distorted face. "What happened to your nose, Sleekit?"
He snorted ruefully. "I am no longer young. I begin the change of life."
"Change of life?"
"Male sullsi change when they get old, ready to stop breeding." Sleekit held out a hand, and Juliassa became aware that it was changing too. Hand and arm both had thickened, and the hand itself had grown larger. "Before long I will have a sword on my face. My hands and arms will be thick and strong. I will be a protector, able to speak only with difficulty. And the sarrkas will fear me."
He grunted the string of clicks/coughs that passed for chuckling among the sullsi. "I will no longer float on my back with the pack around me and tell stories." He gestured at the other two sullsi. "Triivarum and young Krootar here will be the ones to tell this story. My place will be to listen for sarrkas, and to drive off or kill any that come around. Great sagas are told about certain protectors; perhaps I will be the subject of a saga instead of the teller."
All three sullsi laughed then, but Juliassa looked sober. It seemed to her she'd be losing a good friend, though she didn't say so. Sleekit seemed content or even happy at the prospect of being a protector; she wouldn't deliberately impose her unhappiness on him.
Then his gaze caught hers. "I will miss talking to Juliassa, when the change is complete," he said. "But I will enjoy hearing her talk to me."
No one had anything much to say after that. Jonkka laid a fire with dead twigs from a bush and some of the wood Brokols had brought down, then lit them with a large waxed match from a pouch he carried. The humans cooked and ate their supper around the small fire. When she'd finished eating, Juliass
a asked Sleekit and K'sthuump questions about their people, and after a little, K'sthuump and the sullsi swam away.
Fifty
Accompanied by her chaperone and guards, Juliassa spent the evening on the beach, talking with Sleekit and K'sthuump. In the hamlet, Brokols and Reeno sat down together at a table to sort out design problems and rough parameters. Reeno jotted notes as they talked, ending up with a list.
* * *
1. The mine must be waterproof.
2. It must be easily attachable to ships.
3. It must explode under water.
4. It must be big enough to sink a ship, but small enough that a single sellsu can handle and control it while a second sellsu attaches it to a ship's bottom.