* * *
Bastiano’s heart pounded; he was certain he’d heard someone laugh. It had been a strange laugh, an eerie sound, but he was absolutely sure he’d heard it. He swallowed, his mouth dry, as he looked about and saw no one.
Did I dream it? he wondered. Is the sun making my mind play tricks on me? Gods, I’m thirsty. He put a hand to his eyes, which watered in the bright light of afternoon, and closed them again.
The duke stirred audibly, and Bastiano’s eyes flew open. He turned and looked down at Torsione, whose eyelids fluttered and finally opened.
“Bas?” The duke coughed, his voice as dry as salt flats in the desert.
“Torsione,” breathed Bastiano, tears springing to his eyes in relief. He exhaled the tension he’d been holding in his chest and shoulders and shook his head. “You’re awake, you’re all right, thank the gods,” he stammered, his hands shaking as he reached down and touched the duke’s arm.
Torsione tried to move and winced at the pain. “What happened? What’s wrong?” he grunted as he tried to sit up. “Where are we?”
Bastiano shifted obligingly, helping Torsione to sit up with his back against the tree. “An island, I think. I’ve only been up for a little while,” he lied. The duke gritted his teeth against some pain that bloomed and faded as he settled against the palm tree. “You weren’t out long. You saved me, Torsione. You pulled me out of the water, and passed out. I’d be dead if it weren’t for you. In fact, I was worried for a little while there that you would die, but you’re fine, you’re all right.” His smile brightened, his eyes flitting over the duke’s form.
Torsione sat still for a moment, with his eyes closed. “Are we . . .” he swallowed. He opened his eyes, pale blue with dazed disbelief. “Are we the only ones, Bas?”
Bastiano hesitated, but nodded a little after a moment. “I think so. I have not seen anyone else,” he said, and paused again. “Nor heard any sign of them,” he lied. The strange laugh from a few moments ago still jangled in his mind, but now he was sure it had just been a hallucination. He would have seen sign of any other survivors by now, he was quite sure.
Torsione blinked, his breathing shaky, and looked out at the ocean spread before them. It may as well be the surface of the moon, Bastiano worried. We are lost here.
“Have any of our belongings washed up? The cargo?” Torsione put a hand to his head. “What happened to the ship?”
“I—” Bastiano felt helpless. “I don’t know.”
He thought carefully. He had woken up on the beach beside Tor, but before that—before everything had gone black—he thought he remembered trying to swim, the ship splintering in the water all around them with showers of sparks and burning and smoke. The darkness of the night swallowed them all, and the ship, too.
“All I know is the ship went down,” Bastiano said at last. “I was swimming, albeit very poorly, and you must have . . . found me, somehow,” he managed to say, looking away from the duke’s surprised gaze. “You brought me to shore, though it’s nothing short of miraculous, I’d say. It was the dead of night when the ship went down, and you found an island.” He cracked a smile and lifted his eyebrows, cheerfully. “Devil of a stroke of luck, that.”
“I pulled you from the water,” echoed the duke, as though trying to remember.
“I should say so,” Bastiano chuckled: a thin, reedy sound.
“And you watched over me all this time?”
The note of wonder in the duke’s voice made Bastiano look up at him again. Torsione’s eyes were a radiant light blue that challenged the sky for hue, even with his battered state and his concerned brow.
Bastiano pressed his lips together and nodded again, riveted by the duke’s stare.
“Bas,” said Torsione, his voice broken and quiet. “That’s a hell of a thing, that we’ve survived together.”
Bastiano’s heart leaped sideways in his chest, joyful and terrified. “I think so, too,” he admitted, his voice small.
“Better stick together, hadn’t we,” said the duke, still staring at him. They were still quite close, the duke leaning on the tree now, and Bastiano just beside him, within arm’s reach.
“I’d planned on doing as much,” Bastiano murmured.
“So much so as to not look for food or shelter until I woke up?” Torsione closed his eyes again. “You’re a very devoted nurse, Bas. Perhaps you’ve found your calling.”
The moment had passed, and Bastiano let out his breath slowly and chuckled after a moment to mask the shuddering nervousness that threatened to overthrow him entirely. “How do you feel?” he asked, tactfully changing the subject. “Other than a headache and dehydration and such. I’m feeling those, too.”
Torsione opened his eyes, considering. “Very sore. Tired. I don’t remember pulling you out of the water, but that would explain the strain in my arms and legs from swimming with you in tow.” He paused. “Other than that, probably all right, except the hunger and thirst.”
“I’m going to look for something to eat,” Bastiano decided, standing up. He shrugged out of his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Stay here and rest. Neither of us will last very long without food.”
“Don’t go too far,” mused Torsione, squinting in the light. “And be careful. Just because you haven’t seen anyone doesn’t mean there isn’t anyone here.”
“I’ll be careful,” Bastiano promised, and lingered a moment before setting off past their little grove of trees and toward the forest itself, leaving the duke to lie in the shade.
Stephen Montanto heard crying. It was not the hysterical sobbing of an overzealous woman, nor the uncertain wail of a child. It was a quiet, hiccupping sob that did not stop, but ebbed and flowed like the waves somewhere beyond him.
He opened his eyes slowly and found himself on his back staring up at what appeared to be a rocky ceiling of sorts. He felt dry and worn out. He remembered waking on the beach alone, crying to himself about his cowardly fate. No doubt he was now brought fully into his own hell, or at least a deeper level of the afterlife, this time made of stone and lichen, and the soft, uneasy crying of a man. The echoes of his own tears, perhaps.
“Stephen?” whispered the crying voice, faltering in its sorrow for a moment. There was sniffling, and the shifting sound of fabric against stone. “Stephen, are you awake?”
Stephen Montanto shut his eyes again and stayed very still. Demons would be tricky. No doubt they would try to appear to him in his hell as faces he had known in life, faces he had no doubt betrayed. After a moment of uncertain silence, he ventured to peep one eye open again.
The woeful countenance of Truffo Arlecin had appeared over his head, and the warm salty tears of the young man fell like startled raindrops onto Stephen’s own cheek and chin. He winced in spite of himself.
“Stephen! You’re awake!” Truffo seemed hopeful, giving the older man an encouraging sort of jostle at the arm.
The valet grunted, his head pounding, and he batted at the younger man’s hands with his own. “Don’t touch me, demon,” Stephen rasped, his throat dry. “Sent to torment me, are you, devil?”
“Devil? It’s me, Truffo,” the young man whined, recoiling from him and sniffling aloud. “You’re not dead, you old fraud, you’re alive! This isn’t Hell—or at least, it isn’t, yet.” The fool gave a small choked sob and swallowed back whatever else he was going to say.
Stephen sat up slowly, using the wall of the rocky alcove for a brace. He was very sore indeed, and even as his mind caught up to his eyes in seeing his surroundings, he felt as weak as a baby bird fallen from the nest. By the saints, he was thirsty.
“What do you mean, ‘yet’?” he demanded, his voice thin and rough as straws. Truffo looked toward the mouth of the little cave, where the shore and sea lay several dozen yards off.
“It’ll be back soon,” the fool whispered, his hands shaking. “It’s hideous, Stephen—it ate a bird right in front of my very eyes! Raw! Blood and feathers everywhere!”
“Not a man nor a fish, some sea-skinned devil I’ve never heard the likes of before in all my life,” breathed the fool. “It dragged me in and knocked me out, and when I came to, you were here, and I thought for sure you were dead!” Truffo’s dark eyes brimmed over heavily with tears.
“Shush, shush now, stop that sobbing,” growled Stephen, feeling an ache growing both in his stomach and the back of his skull. “We survived a shipwreck, didn’t we? We’ll survive this, somehow. Some luck will find us yet, you’ll see, boy.”
“I never thought I’d die on an island in the middle of nowhere,” wailed the fool piteously. “I’m too young—too posh—too poetic for this fate!” Stephen frowned at the whining. Truffo was not very old after all; his melancholic humor and his usually lofty wit made him seem far older, but in truth the boy was not much more in age than Prince Ferran himself. Stephen’s heart tugged at the thought.
Prince Ferran! he thought. How young to be swallowed by the sea, and we poor servants left to carry on without the masters.
“Come, come boy,” he urged, beckoning Truffo to sit beside him against the wall. “We’ll muddle through together, monster or no. But we won’t get far without food or water, so we’ll have to think of something. And stop crying, you’ll dehydrate yourself even more.”
Truffo scrambled over beside him and sat hugging his knees and sniffling quietly. Stephen sighed. We’ll have to think of something, the valet thought, and tried not to dwell on how thirsty he was.
There was a great splash nearby, and the sound of braying laughter, followed by more splashing. Stephen’s brow furrowed sharply, and Truffo stiffened beside him, his sniffles quieting to a trembling breath.
“It’s back,” whispered the fool.
“It?” Stephen said, as though he wasn’t worried, but his mind raced. What is it? he wondered. What does it want with us?
They sat still and listened as the thing guffawed triumphantly and made its way up the beach with heavy steps and a lumbering gait, toward the mouth of the narrow cave. A smell like rotting seaweed wafted into the cave on the breeze, and Truffo whimpered. Then the daylight that blinded them at the mouth of the cave was blocked by a huge dark shadow, and Stephen had to blink to clear his vision.
It was mannish in appearance, but Truffo had been right—its skin bore patches of peculiar bluish-green scales, fading almost to gray at the edges, as though the creature had been dipped in different jars of paint. The rest of its body was dark, and it had oversized hands and feet, with strong legs and broad shoulders. It moved a little like a gorilla, using its knuckles to balance, and its mouth was set sideways in its face, its nose feminine and small. Its eyes, though unevenly large and disproportionate to one another, were the gentlest cornflower blue Stephen had ever seen.
Stephen felt the remainder of his disbelief flee his body like steam from a kettle, and he stared unabashedly at the creature before them while Truffo curled smaller and smaller, armadillo-like, beside him. The creature stared back, its huge shoulders shifting slightly, but Stephen could not draw his gaze away from those petal-soft pale blue eyes. Finally, the creature’s mouth opened in an unsettling, shark-like smile.
“You are awake!” The monstrous man’s voice was more youthful than Stephen had thought it would be, and had the heaviness of a simple mind and a foreign tongue to it. “I am most glad, most glad to have you here; most glad, welcome guests.”
Stephen frowned. “Guests?” he heard himself saying.
The monster bobbed its head the way a dog wags its tail. “Yes, most welcome guests, most welcome here. I am most glad, most glad to see you. You are blessed to have been spit back out by the sea.”
Stephen felt his stomach shudder at the memory of drowning, and was once again quite certain that he very much ought to be a dead man.
“You are much amazed, I think, by my humble appearance,” the creature went on, anxiously, “and by your own survival. I am most glad that you are both awake. I will make you well again.” Their unusual host lumbered forward another step or two to hold out its large hands. In each strange palm there was cradled what appeared to be half of a coconut, filled with white fruit and a hazy liquid. “Drink these, good lords, and be well again!”
“Don’t,” cried Truffo. “Poison!” The creature recoiled some, surprise painting a picture of absurdity on its face.
“You are thirsty, my lords,” ventured the creature. “I only want to help you. The sun is hot and you must drink.”
“I’ve survived a bloody shipwreck only to be kidnapped by a monster,” moaned Truffo, his head in his hands.
“Who are you?” demanded Stephen, although his eyes were fixed on the coconut halves, the liquid inviting even in its haziness.
“My name is Karaburan,” replied the creature, sitting at the entrance to the cave like a mother bird perching at the mouth of a nest to feed her young. “I am no monster, I assure you, my lords. I am a man, truly I am, though outwardly my appearances do show me to be unlike anyone you’ve ever seen before, I think.”
“That’s an understatement,” grunted Stephen, still eyeing the coconuts.
“Please, my lord,” insisted Karaburan, “drink and you will feel so much better.”
Stephen reached for one half, ignoring Truffo’s whimpering. “If it’s poison, lad, it’s poison, but I can fathom nothing worse than dying of thirst right now. You’d best drink it, too. If we die, we die.” He passed the other coconut bowl to Truffo, who looked pale.
Stephen brought the coconut to his mouth and drank deeply; the liquid was a little thicker than water and tasted strange, but did not seem to be bitter or vile in any way. He drank until there was no more in his coconut shell, and Truffo tasted his portion of the stuff reluctantly beside him.
After a few moments, Stephen did note that he began to feel less woozy, and his vision cleared, his headache fading away in small increments.
“What is it?” he asked the monster, brandishing the empty bowl. “Some sort of spell?”
“No magic, my lord, just the fresh water within the nut. A natural remedy to the sun’s effects. Keep you from being thirsty, keep you from falling asleep in the sun and withering away.” Karaburan gave him the blank, hopeful smile again. “You feel already how much better you are for drinking it?”
“Yes.” Stephen frowned at the peevish boy beside him. “Truffo, just drink it. I do feel better.”
Truffo did not seem to like the taste, but he obeyed, and when the bowl was empty, he looked reluctantly up at the large beast of a man.
“Is there more?” the fool ventured in a small voice.
Karaburan threw back his head and gave a strange, barking laugh, slapping his hands on the ground and on his own thighs. “More? More! Of course there’s more! The island provides! Wait here, my lords, and I will fetch another.” With that, the monster gathered himself up and loped away on all fours.
“What a monster!” shuddered Truffo, rubbing his face. “There are little children all over the world whose closets and under-the-beds are missing their master of mayhem! But I do feel a little better. Even if it is poisonous,” he added.
“It seems a kindly monster,” mused Stephen. He felt odd about the entire thing, as though he were in some elaborate dream. Now that he physically felt somewhat revived, he wasn’t quite as attached to the notion that he might be dead, but it puzzled him as to why the ugly creature would try to rescue them; weren’t monsters supposed to devour their unwanted guests? And where had Karaburan come from? “Perhaps it’s only lonely,” he said aloud, thoughtfully.
Truffo blinked red eyes at him. “A lonely monster,” he drawled. “What a novelty.”
“He calls us lords,” added Stephen, a curious mixture of disbelief and hunger in his voice. Truffo bobbed his head from side to side as if trying to rid his ears of water.
> “He doesn’t know any better,” said the fool.
“He doesn’t at that,” agreed Stephen. “And if he’ll keep us healthy by bringing us water and food, why, who are we to not be lords?”
“The philosophers say a man must have a master,” Truffo recited in a weary voice. “A man is wont to kneel before his betters, and allow another man to be his ruler. That is how the Great Wall of Chineh started. Or the Great Chain of Being, one of the two.”
“Then perhaps we are the answer to this thing’s prayers,” whispered Stephen. “Perhaps our afterlife is meant to be here, on this desert place, cared for by a monster that will love us as his lords and one of us, his king.” An island paradise, a willing but hideous slave—it seemed a likely enough afterlife. The only thing missing is a woman, really, mused Stephen.
“King?” protested Truffo. “You mean kings, plural! There are two of us after all, Stephen Montanto.”
“Yes, and I am your better, Truffo. And your elder. You are a fool, and I am a valet. Was. These were our past lives. Now, et in Arcadia ego.”
Truffo gaped at him for a moment, slightly boggle-eyed. “You mean you get to be the king now because you used to be the valet?” He screwed up his face, one eye closing altogether. “What does it make me, then?”
“My valet,” he chuckled, amused at Truffo’s expression.
“And the monster?”
“Our slave,” answered Stephen Montanto, and a smile began to creep across his face.
* * *
Karaburan had gathered more coconuts into the canvas sack and was on his way into the forest at the center of the island in search of other nuts and fruits to offer his guests. He had crossed over to the place where the soft sandy soil became hard packed dirt, but stopped as a strange sound like clinking glasses drifted to him on a cool and slender breeze.
The sound clutched at his heart, though he could not understand why, and he found it hard to breathe, or even move. Karaburan stood still as a stone, listening with the whole of his body, and after several minutes more, the sound faded, seemingly without consequence, and he relaxed. He let out his breath slowly, shaking himself like a wet dog.
On the Isle of Sound and Wonder Page 8