by David Drake
“What is there to laugh about!” Aria said, looking up in real anger. She thought he was laughing at her.
“If I wanted green grass and plenty of water,” Cashel said quietly, “I should've stayed home in Barca's Hamlet. And sometimes that's what I think: I should've stayed home in Barca's Hamlet.”
Aria looked at him like he was crazy. That was a change from her crying, at least. She stuck her head under the limestone and began to slurp more of the water they had no utensils to dip up.
“We could leave her here,” Zahag said. He'd made a circuit of the outcrop to squat at Cashel's side. “There's other females and anyway, this one isn't strong enough to be much use. She can't even pick berries!”
“I told her mother I'd bring her back,” Cashel said. He'd stopped trying to argue with the ape about helping people whether you liked them or not. Aria wasn't part of Zahag's band—or Cashel's, she'd made that clear as springwater—and Zahag didn't figure he owed her anything.
The bushes that grew every double pace or two across the landscape were of a dozen or more varieties when Cashel examined them closely. They were all low to the ground; all thorny and small-leafed; but for a wonder, many of them carried dark berries the size of a woman's little fingernail on the undersides of their branches. The berries didn't have much flesh, but the kernels inside were crunchy and edible as well.
Berries had kept the trio going during the three days they'd walked across this wasteland. You'd have thought that Aria, whose hands and wrists were far more delicate than those of her male companions, would have had the easiest time picking berries from among the thorns.
That was true, in a way, because the first time Aria tried she'd pricked herself. She'd flatly refused to try again. Cashel and Zahag had to forage for her as well as themselves.
Aria drew her head back from the brackish pool and straightened. She glared at Cashel and the ape.
“You didn't tell her mother you'd bring her back,” Zahag said deliberately. “You said you'd get her away from Ilmed. And you did that, right?”
“If you'd just left me alone...” Aria said. Her tone started out angry, but it sank swiftly into bleak despair. “I would have married the most powerful wizard ever, Ilmed would have made me queen of all the world! And instead...”
She turned to survey the surrounding wasteland. Her eyes filled with tears and she sank to the ground again, sobbing.
“If you challenge the chief ape,” Zahag said with gloating harshness, “then you'd better be stronger than him or able to run faster. Otherwise you get your neck cracked. I guess Ilmed learned that a little before he died.”
Cashel cleared his throat. “Time we got moving,” he said. He'd have liked to travel by night, but the track was so faint that he figured they'd get lost in the darkness. There wasn't even a moon in this place.
He leaned over and touched the girl's elbow to make sure she knew he meant it. Her dress was a mass of fluff and tatters like the seeds starting to spill from a milkweed pod. Her feet weren't hardened for this trek either, though he'd plaited her sandals of a sort from the gray-green bark of the shrubbery. Cashel would never have his sister's touch with fabrics, but he could make out.
Aria continued to cry. She clamped her arm close to avoid Cashel's touch.
“And as for Ilmed...,” Cashel said with a grating anger that he only half-regretted. Couldn't the girl even try? “He thought that because he had power, he could do anything he pleased. That's no way for a man to live, nor a woman either.”
He cleared his throat again. “Now get up, mistress,” he said. “I won't leave you here, but I might decide to drag you if you won't walk!”
The 17th of Heron
“ 'Silver hidden in the greedy soil,' ” Garric read from the volume of Celondre, “ 'has no luster, my wise friend Kristas. Only in wise use does the metal gleam.' ”
He sat with his back to one of the four pillars across the front of the little temple. Inside, Tenoctris examined the carvings just below the roofline. If there had ever been a cult statue, it had vanished in the ages since the temple was built.
Liane sat cross-legged against the base of the next pillar over, facing Garric. She listened with a relaxed smile.
Garric believed Tenoctris that this land wasn't part of the world from which the Gulf had sucked them, but it obeyed the same rules. The sun rose and set, creeks ran downhill and breezes blew, and the tension he'd felt beneath the brooding green sky was absent. He was glad to have a few days of quiet; and glad also that he had someone with whom to share Celondre's Odes.
He was glad to know Liane. For most of Garric's life he'd never have dreamed of meeting a noblewoman. Now he was reading poetry to one, and she smiled at him.
“ 'The man who masters his own appetites,' ” Garric read, “ 'has a kingdom greater than if he joined Haft to Bight and ruled far Dalopo besides.' ”
In Garric's mind, King Carus laughed boisterously. Garric lowered the codex and grinned at his companion. “Of course,” he said, “it's easy to say that if you're a poet with a country house in Ornifal and nobody would ask you to command a single trireme after the way you botched things the first time you tried.”
“And if half the stories about Celondre's private life are true,” Liane agreed, “he wasn't notable for mastering his own appetites either. Naked women posing in every room of his house in case the whim struck him!”
She giggled. “Of course we weren't supposed to read the Lives of the Poets” she added. “Mistress Gudea said each lyric should be appreciated for what was in its words alone. To import other considerations undermines a poem's innate ethos.”
“How can it be wrong to get as much information as you can in order to understand something?” Garric said in amazement. He grinned, wondering how much the next thought that drifted through his mind had to do with the ancestor in his mind. “Of course, it gets harder to decide when you know a lot. The easy choices are the ones you make when you don't know enough to see how complicated things are.”
Liane nodded, but the direction of her eyes led Garric to peer around the shaft of the column behind him. Graz had arrived, accompanied by the two females Tenoctris had sent as messengers to find him.
“Tenoctris?” Liane called as she rose gracefully. “Master Graz is here.”
There were human structures scattered throughout this landscape. None was particularly large—this fane, a rich man's private chapel rather than a community temple, was typical. All showed the lichens and weathering of great age. Tenoctris' art had led her to this particular site, but it was Liane who'd identified it.
Tenoctris came from the building with a smile of satisfaction just as the Ersa leader reached the slab on which the structure rested. The chapel had been modeled on a full-sized temple with a three-step base, each layer so high that it would be cut by several human-sized steps to the central doorway.
This was a toy-like copy and, to Garric's untrained eye, it looked ill-proportioned. Part of his mind wondered if real aesthetics had anything to do with academic pronouncements like the one Liane had just repeated.
He put the volume of Celondre away in his belt wallet and rose also. He smiled as King Carus would have done.
The humans bowed to Graz. Bowing didn't seem to be an Ersa custom, but the way Graz's ears flattened against his round skull was perhaps an equivalent.
“There was a connection between your First Place and the hillside where we entered the present world,” Tenoctris said with her usual lack of small talk before getting down to business. “The temple here has a connection to a known part of the world which my companions and I left. Known to Mistress Liane, that is.”
She nodded to the younger woman. Garric gave Tenoctris his hand and helped her to the ground as an excuse to step down himself.
There was an inherent challenge when an armed male stood above another, and the Ersa were inhumanly attuned to body language. Garric wasn't sure he'd have been quite so aware of that without Carus' guidance
—but he was aware.
“The ruins of the palace of the Tyrants of Valles are outside the city of Valles,” Liane said to the Ersa leader. “My teacher, Mistress Gudea, took us on a day trip there. She said that the study of history was just as important as that of literature.”
She grinned. “Not as important as etiquette, of course, but very important. There was a temple exactly like this one in the grounds of the old palace, though the honey suckle had grown over it.”
Tenoctris touched the sandstone pillar. “This is a node that leads back to my world, our world,” she said.
She gestured to Garric and Liane, but her eyes remained on Graz. “There are other nodes here also. I don't know where they lead. Some of them probably terminate in places which none of us would choose to see.”
With a smile as hard as sunlight winking from the edge of a stone knife Tenoctris added, “We wouldn't want to live there either, but in many cases survival wouldn't be an option anyway. This is the only portal which I think it's safe to open.”
“Valles is the capital of our world,” Garric said. His words blurred over the chaotic political situation—there'd been no true King of the Isles since Carus drowned in a wizard's cataclysm a thousand years ago—but this was close enough for present purposes. “I won't say you'll be welcome there, but I don't know of any reason why you shouldn't be.”
As if people had ever needed reasons to hate or kill!
“Anyhow,” he concluded, knowing he sounded lame, “I don't know of a better spot you could come to. And the three of us will do all that we can to help you.”
“I will look inside this place,” Graz said. “There are more of them in your world?”
“Many,” Liane said. “We live in buildings like this and much bigger.”
Liane too was only hinting at a situation that was more complicated than words could explain. The Ersa had no concepts for what lay behind human descriptions of politics or artificial structures. Was the weather of the Ersa home world as changeless as that in the Gulf, or had they lost the knowledge of building when they exiled themselves into a place where the need was absent?
Graz and Tenoctris entered the little temple. The Ersa females walked silently to a nearby pine tree and began opening cones for the tiny nuts within.
“Mistress Gudea wanted us to remember that Valles had been a great city during the Old Kingdom,” Liane said to Garric in a low voice. There wasn't enough room in the nave to hold four with comfort, nor did the younger people have any reason to join the senior pair inside. “She was particularly determined to drive that home in me, since I was from the upstart island of Sandrakkan.”
She looked at Garric and added with a twinkle in her voice, “And unlike Carcosa on Haft, Valles had rebuilt after the Old Kingdom fell. Not that Mistress Gudea had any students from so backward as place as Haft.”
“The great men of Ornifal...” Garric said. The voice was his but the memories behind the words were not. “The landowners, the rich merchants—they didn't try to break the kingdom the way nobles did on some other islands. But they didn't help to hold the kingdom together, either.”
Liane looked at him, her face suddenly without expression. She didn't back away, but he knew the cold anger in his voice had surprised her.
Garric couldn't help it. He tried, but his control meant only that he trembled with emotions that he couldn't release in the physical action they demanded.
“The great men just wanted things to stay quiet,” he said. “They paid any shoeless usurper who demanded their support because they claimed it was cheaper than getting involved. Cheaper to stand aside and watch the Isles break up in chaos!”
Graz stepped out of the temple. His ears were extended so fully toward Garric that the Ersa looked as though he had three heads on his narrow shoulders. Tenoctris followed him.
Garric lifted his empty hands and managed a laugh. All the fury had washed out of him, but it left him weak with its passing.
“I was talking about ancient history,” he explained, “Nothing that's worth getting angry about at this late date.”
Graz fluttered his ears; they shrank to normal size. “My people will stay here,” he said. “We have shared a world with humans in the past. I think it is better that we not do so again.”
Tenoctris nibbled her lower lip. “Master Graz,” she said. “I can understand your decision, but I think you're making a mistake.”
She spread one hand in the direction of the meadow rolling away from the little temple. “This seems to be a lovely place and of course it is... but it's more than that too. A location where so much power comes together isn't a proper home for living beings.”
“Nevertheless,” Graz said, “we will stay here. I wish you well on your journey, humans. But do not return.”
The Ersa leader walked away with his stiff-legged, mincing stride. His people wouldn't have an easy time on Ornifal or anywhere in a human world, Garric knew; but Garric knew also that when Tenoctris gave advice, the path of wisdom was to accept it. Still, the Ersa had the same right that humans did: to make their own choices, and to live or die by them.
“If you two are willing...” Tenoctris said. She plucked a twig from the pine tree and stripped the needles off between her fingers. “I think it'd be a good idea for us to leave immediately. Graz has drawn a lesson from what happened in the Gulf, but it led him to a belief that I regret.”
Garric and Liane exchanged glances. “Of course,” Liane said. “We're ready now.”
“You know...” Garric said, returning to the train of thought that he'd been following when Graz and Tenoctris returned. “The ordinary people on Ornifal wanted the Isles to stay united. They wanted to sleep safe in their beds and not have to take a spear with them when they went plowing for fear pirates would sweep the district. The people would've been willing to help hold the kingdom together, I think, if their leaders had let them.”
The two women watched him in concern. His left hand squeezed a fold of his tunic and the medallion hanging beneath it.
Garric laughed. “Well, maybe this time their leaders will have better sense,” he concluded in a voice shaky with emotion.
“Indeed they will, lad!” echoed a voice in his mind. “Even if we have to knock that sense into their heads!”
The false Nonnus crouched in the stern, talking with the steersman as they both eyed the shore forty paces off the dispatch vessel's port side. The oarsmen rested, adjusting their kit and swigging water from the basin the coxswain carried back between the pairs of benches.
One man stood and urinated on his left hand. A rower had told Sharina that urine toughened cracked skin so it healed as calluses.
She supposed the crewmen would know. They were a dour lot who didn't volunteer information and gave only short answers to direct questions, but they were skilled oarsmen.
This island was a shallow cone made of black basalt instead of the usual limestone or coral sand. It was bigger than most of the islets Sharina had noted as the dispatch vessel crossed the Inner Sea on the ceaseless labor of its oarsmen. The low sun illuminated occasional clumps of spiky grass, but most of the vegetation seemed to be groundsels shaped like huge cabbages, and giant lobelias whose shaggy flower columns stood taller than a man.
She stood in the bow as if to stretch. The vessel was designed for swift transit with no concession whatever to the comfort of its crew or passengers. The false Nonnus had landed the mast and sail, depending instead on the oars even when the wind might be fair. Sharina tried to visualize how crowded the ship would haye been if the lowered mast and yard filled the narrow aisle between the benches.
“All right, we'll go on,” the false Nonnus said in a carrying voice. “I don't like the shore here.”
Oarsmen muttered and looked to the coxswain. He squared his shoulders and said, “I don't like being out at sea at night in a cockleshell like this.”
The false Nonnus didn't stand—he didn't have the Pewleman's sense of balance, Sharina rea
lized. Scowling, he said, “There's a sandy beach on the horizon. We can reach it with the light we have left.”
The sun was fully down. The western horizon was still pale, but stars were already visible in the direction the vessel was heading.
“And don't ever argue with my orders again!” the false Nonnus added in the real man's voice but not his manner.
Sharina went over the railing in a clean dive and stroked for the volcanic island. Nothing she'd seen there looked edible. There might not even be fresh water, but she had to get away.
Her tunic dragged at her. She would've alerted the false Nonnus if she'd removed the garment before she dived, and she didn't dare struggle in the water at the vessel's side while she stripped it off. She didn't think the crew would shoot arrows or javelins after her, but one of them might well have knocked her silly with an oar.
The thin wool fabric wasn't a serious impediment. Her powerful crawl stroke had brought her most of the way to shore before the men could organize their response.
The real Nonnus swam like one of the seals he'd hunted as a youth on the islands north of the main archipelago. The man who wore Nonnus' semblance only shouted orders while the coxswain bellowed a conflicting set. Both men were trying to turn the vessel after the escaping girl, but they were going about the process in different fashions.
Few sailors could swim. If one of the oarsmen had been the exception, and if he'd had the initiative to dive over the side after Sharina, well—
She had memories of how Nonnus coped with danger. And she had his keen-edged Pewle knife as well.
Because Sharina lifted her face between strokes only enough to gasp a mouthful of air, her fingers touched the shore before she saw it. She scrambled out of the water on all fours, dodging lobelias as she ran uphill. Her tanned limbs and the wet brown wool of her tunic were invisible against the background in this light, though her blond hair would be a beacon once the moon rose.
Sharina stayed below the crest as she worked to the left around the island. The shrubbery didn't have thorns. Basalt fractured with sharper edges than, say, limestone, but Sharina's feet hadn't been in the water long enough for her soles to soften.