by David Drake
"—mind."
Sweat was dripping from his face, making him look as though he'd been ducked again in the pond.
Dennis tried to give the hook to Chester, who had already gathered in the line and spindle before it could twirl away in the pond's slow current. His hand was shaking badly, but Chester wrapped the hook with the tip of one tentacle and wiped it clean on the side of the bag before starting to re-attach it to the leader.
Drops of blood from the cut brightened the Cariad's lips so that she smiled even more richly than before. "Now I've saved you from the water, beloved," she said, "and you've saved me from the hook... Come and kiss me, my dearest—"
"No!" Dennis said, shouting to quench his own desire. Standing, the Cariad's body curved, her hips to one side and her bosom to the other. He couldn't imagine how he'd ever thought that she was innocent.
He wanted to hold her so badly; but her ancient yellow eyes seemed to laugh as they looked into his soul.
"Only the once, little heart," whispered the Cariad's ripe, red lips. "An then you will go and I will stay, if you would have it so."
Dennis looked sidelong at his companion. "That can be no harm, can it, Chester?" he asked as if the question were an idle one and his heart and soul weren't fixed on hearing the proper response to it.
"If you taste her blood, Dennis," said the robot coolly, "then you will love her forever—for that is her wish, and the blood will seal it."
For a moment, Dennis saw his life sinking into the amber eyes and the slim arms that reached to embrace him. Then his throat made a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream; he began to run the rest of the way across the bridge, his bare feet slapping the pavement and the long sword clipping his ankle for all that he tried to control the swinging with a hand on the pommel.
"Dennis, my heart," called the girl-thing behind him, the sun an iridescent dazzle in her hair. Her form quivered at the corner of his eye and she was a fish, curving back into the water with scarcely a splash, so clean was the dive.
Chester was at the youth's side, loping easily on the harm surface. His bent limbs struck tick-whisk! tick-whisk! with a regularity that reassured Dennis.
The fish rolled to the pond surface beside Dennis and his companion. The ring shot spikes of light from one ray of a dorsal fin. "Be my lover, my Dennis, little heart," the fish called. "Do not leave me when I need you so greatly, my beloved."
"Run," Dennis gasped to himself. "Run, run..."
Dennis knew he was safe when the reeds of the pond margin brushed the roadway beside him, but he continued running for another thirty yards—until the tops of the great trees were a solid canopy above him, and the undergrowth was a wall to either side.
Gasping for breath, Dennis leaned against a treetrunk streaked green by the vines using it as a support to coil skyward. He looked back the way they had come.
A slim girl sat on the roadway at the pond's edge. The sun jeweled her hair and the water droplets on her breasts.
She waved the hand which wore the diamond ring.
"We'd best be going," Dennis said to his companion.
But it was several moments more before he was willing to turn his eyes from the Cariad and resume walking along the road through the jungle.
"And I think, Chester," the youth said when they were well out of sight of the pond, "that I will be satisfied with the fruit and nuts which you tell me are safe to eat. I do not need to try fish again, for the time."
CHAPTER 21
In the evening, the sky darkened again before sunset. The needlepoint patches of blue became pools of roiling cloud.
"He who runs abroad from evil, finds evil where he flees," Chester said.
Dennis laughed and patted the robot's carapace. The cut across his palm still stung, and there seemed to be a little swelling in the hand itself. Despite that, he felt surprisingly good. "But can the wanderer find shelter from the rain, my friend?" he asked.
Chester rose cautiously onto the tips of his eight tentacles. Even so, the robot's egg-shaped body was no higher than Dennis' shoulders. Chester rotated slowly, moving his limbs in sets of four, a few inches clockwise at a time.
At last he said, "Here is a tree that became hollow before it fell, Dennis. It will give us shelter from the rain."
Dennis couldn't imagine how his companion could see a fallen tree or anything else through the leaves and gathering darkness, but he followed Chester willingly into the undergrowth. A few yards away—though each step was a battle—was the bole of a forest giant, just as the robot had said.
Upright, the tree had been twenty feet across at the base. Now, on its side, more than half that diameter was a cave whose lip was orange and yellow with the shelf fungus eating its way into the wood which remained.
Chester paused. The first drops of rain rapped against leaves, but the downpour hadn't yet penetrated the triple canopy.
Dennis climbed in. The interior of the trunk was damp and had a hint of reptilian sharpness. It made him wish that he'd drawn the sword before entering. Chester followed, a barely-visible glimmer in silhouette as the storm thundered down and washed away the last of the daylight.
The hollow was slimy, and Dennis could hear water running through a knothole somewhere farther back in the trunk; but in comparison at least to the night before, he was dry and comfortable. The tree was real, not a dream like the dead wizard's cabin, and Chester lay beside him with his limbs coiled.
Dennis laughed. "How is it that heroes spend the nights between one adventure and the next, Chester," he asked.
"You are a hero, Dennis," the robot said softly. "And it is in a fallen tree that you are spending the night."
"I'm no hero," the youth murmured. "I know that now."
But he slept easily, wrapped in the fuzzy warmth of his friend's compliment.
CHAPTER 22
For seventeen days they followed the road, while Dennis learned to live from the jungle—if not precisely in it.
Each midday they rested. Dennis trained himself to lie so still that the lizards skittered past and across him as if he were a fallen log. Once he amused himself by flicking lumps of nutmeat from the tip of his thumb toward the lizard that lay like a purple-black shadow on the underside of a branch ten feet above him. At last he got a bead into the proper position—a hand's breadth from the lizard's blunt nose—and the lizard's pink tongue snatched in the nutmeat.
"It is not nuts but insects that the lizard eats, Dennis," said Chester.
"The nuts do not harm me, Chester," the youth replied. "Will the nuts harm the lizard?"
"The nuts will not harm the lizard, that is so."
"Then no harm has been done," Dennis said, smiling up at the little creature. "For which I am glad."
The lizard's throat worked as it swallowed down the pellet instead of spitting it out again as expected.
"Perhaps that's my mission, hey?" Dennis chuckled to his companion. "To convert first myself, then the lizards of the jungle, to a diet of nutmeats?"
"Lowly work and lowly food are better than luxury far from home," the robot grumbled.
But when Dennis thought of Emath, he wasn't sure that a palace or village in the power of the sea hag made a proper home for anything human.
CHAPTER 23
Chester's carapace shone with a brushed finish applied by thorns and horny bark.
Dennis' clothing was reduced to rags, but the cuts in his skin didn't fester as he'd expected on his first miserable hours beyond the village perimeter. At Chester's suggestion, he washed them in the citric astringence of a fruit whose orange pulp was too bitter for him to eat. The half-ripe interiors of large, warty-hulled nuts provided a salve that seemed to do more than merely keep insects from swarming to feed on Dennis' exposed flesh.
He topped nuts and hacked down fruit-clusters with the Founder's Sword. He was learning to use its weight with precision—and to respect the quality of the edge it would hold.
The blade was burnished, now. Chester had sh
own his companion a gourd which split into a mass of white rags. Dried for a day on Dennis' back as he tramped in the sun, the rags became a coarse cloth with enough embedded silica to sweep away all hints of rust.
Dennis cleaned and sharpened the sword every night, as the rain fell from the darkness on their shelter—a log or a cave or a thatching of tub-great leaves over a frame of vines and saplings. A careful polish with the gourd he'd prepared during the day, then short, firm strokes with his whetstone to grind any hint of nicks or wear out of the star-metal blade.
Ramos had taught him how to sharpen with a stone; taught him also that even a king's son must keep his tools—a blade is no more than a tool—ready for use at all times.
But for all the tales of the jungle and its terrors, Dennis found nothing on which to try the sword save fruits, and nuts and—very occasionally—sharp-spiked tangles that had managed to grow across the paved surface.
CHAPTER 24
On the eighteenth day, the road ended.
The jungle grew to the edge of a glassy bowl a mile across, roofed with more sky than Dennis had seen since leaving Emath. Nothing grew in the bowl's interior, though the surface was crazed with a myriad of tiny cracks, and rainwater pooled in many of the smooth irregularities of the surface.
Weeks of familiarity had taught Dennis that the road was indestructible; but here the pavement ended in gobbets burned from pink through all the colors of the spectrum—indistinguishable from the soil fused to glass beyond.
The air was hot. The unhindered sun blazed down and in reflection from the sides of the bowl. Dennis felt as cold as he had when thinking of the Wizard Serdic.
"What happened here, Chester?" he asked. His voice sounded in his own ears like that of a little boy.
"This planet is not so old as the universe, Dennis," the robot said quietly. "And the thing that happened here to the road and the city beyond the road, that was not so old as the planet.
"But they are all three very old, the universe and the planet and the thing. We must not be troubled by them now, you and I."
Dennis squinted across the bowl, his eyes struggling with the haze and heat waves. He could see no hint of the pink road continuing; and even if it did, he was no longer sure he wished to walk it.
"All right," he said decisively. "We haven't seen any of the lizardmen's trails crossing the road in... Two days? No, three. We'll go back to where we last saw a trail and take that to where it leads us."
His hand reached instinctively for the pommel of his sword and lifted the blade and inch or two, making sure that it ran free in its scabbard. They hadn't met any lizardfolk on the way, save the three in his dream of the corpse. Dennis didn't know—no one in Emath had known—how the scaly denizens of the jungle would react when humans entered their villages instead of the other way around.
"The wise man takes counsel patiently before he acts," Chester said. Though Dennis knew the robot could move or see in any direction, the normal 'front' of his carapace now looked off into the jungle as if he were ignoring his companion.
"Well, all right," Dennis said in the exasperation he always felt at his companion's unwillingness—or perhaps inability—to volunteer anything but quoted wisdom. "What would you do?"
"I will do whatever my master wishes me to do, Dennis," Chester said primly. "But—there is a city not so far away from here, though it be through the jungle with no trail save the trail that we make for ourselves."
The youth shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked back at the road they had followed so far. "A village of the lizard people, Chester?" he asked.
"It is a village of men, Dennis," Chester replied. "Though it was not made by men or by lizardfolk either. It is called Rakastava."
Dennis thought for a moment. "It doesn't mean crossing—that, does it?" he asked. His thumb gestured over his shoulder without looking at the bowl which death itself had excavated.
"It does not," the robot said, and a light-silvered tentacle pointed the way to their right. A clump of sword-edged leaves with black, spear-shaped tips rimmed the road there for several yards. "But there is no trail."
Dennis drew the Founder's Sword and slashed a broad gap through the immediate vegetation. "We can handle the jungle," he said.
CHAPTER 25
A day and a half later, he knew enough to be less positive if the question came up again. The difficulties weren't particularly from the undergrowth—away from the tunnel of light which the road let fall to the ground, lesser vegetation was stunted and easy to avoid.
The footing was worse than terrible. Streams; bogs that might be ankle-deep or over his head; fallen timber that Dennis might have to circle for a hundred yards because it was too soft with rot to climb; and the rare outcrop of quartz or other faceted stone that would slash through even the calluses his bare feet had formed tramping the hard, smooth roadway.
Dennis didn't see Rakastava until he hacked through an unexpected tangle of briars. Beyond them, he noticed that his feet were on grass and his face in sunlight.
"This is Rakastava, Dennis," Chester said needlessly.
Dennis let his breath out slowly.
No one could have doubted that the crystal spires of Emath Palace were artificial, built by the men of old with tools more wondrous than those they had bequeathed to their progeny. No one could have doubted—save Hale and later his son, the only men who had seen the palace rise by itself, an organic part of the headland on which it stood.
Rakastava seemed instead to be a great vaulting hill, brown and barren; wholly a thing of the Earth and not hands... but Dennis wondered.
The city or city-huge palace had no gates or windows, only slopes too steep to climb. They rose hundreds of feet in complex curves. The exterior of Rakastava was brown; reddish-brown in its own shadow, closer to golden in the portions which the sun flooded—but the same color throughout, a uniformity as false to nature as the oily smoothness of the walls when Dennis tested them with one hand.
His other hand held the great sword which he had thought not to sheathe.
"Chester, how do we—" Dennis began. The shrill, broken note of a trumpet interrupted him and drew his eyes upward.
Three men were leaning over a high battlement to stare down at Dennis and his companion. Their tunics were splashes of orange, yellow and chartreuse, and their peaked caps were all bright blue. As Dennis watched, the man in chartreuse straightened and raised the trumpet to his lips again.
He wasn't a very skillful trumpeter. It took him three tries to get the effect he wanted; and that (though clear and loud) was by no means musical.
A section of solid wall near Dennis drew back to either side in accordian pleats. The movement was noiseless, but a medley of human sounds came from the opening in advance of more people appearing.
"Do not tie yourself to a fiend, though he be powerful," Chester quoted morosely.
"I don't understand," Dennis said, glancing from the gateway to his companion—and back to the gate, as his sword shifted across his body.
"You will understand, Dennis," Chester said. The robot composed his limbs at precise intervals around his body, as if they were no more mobile than table legs.
Half a dozen children scampered out the gate, carrying banners on short poles. They made an effort to look serious, but one's peaked cap was sideways over her curls. When she tried to straighten it surreptitiously, her banner dipped across the back of the boy next to her—who jabbed with his elbow in response.
Before a general melee could break out, a middle-aged woman with a flute paced out in time with the stately music she played. Unlike the trumpeter, she was expert indeed. Her flushed face suggested that she as well as the children had rushed to get into position to greet the newcomers.
Behind the flautist came—"marched" would imply too much organization—six men wearing swords, breastplates, and neck-flared helmets. The sheathed swords looked sturdy enough to be real weapons, though their hilts were gorgeously ornamented. None of the swords h
ad the length or heft of Dennis' star-metal blade.
The armor was too light to be intended for more than decoration. The tallest of the six, a man of at least half again Dennis' age, strode forward from his companions. His trousers and tunic were black, and his armor was plated with black chrome. The sunlight danced on its smooth curves as it had over the surface of the Cariad's pond.
The flautist paused.
"In the name of King Conall and the people of Rakastava," boomed the man in black, "I welcome you, stranger, to our community. I am Gannon, the King's Champion."
"I, ah," Dennis said.
He drew himself up straight—he was a little taller than Gannon, he noted—and said, "I am Dennis, Prince of Emath. My companion and I are adventuring through the jungle."
His words sounded impressive—and they were true, though the greatest adventure he'd had outside of dreams was to run from a fish-girl... But he was barefoot and his clothing hung in tatters. The splendidly-attired folk of Rakastava must think him a fool and a braggart to speak that way!
Gannon's eyes moved from the great sword to something beyond Dennis. His face paled, and there was no mockery in it.
Dennis glanced behind him to see what it was that affected the King's Champion. Had Chester done something, or had they been followed by a monster? But the robot was motionless, and there was nothing else—
Except the wall of the jungle itself.
He'd become used to it in the weeks since he'd left Emath. It was neither friend nor foe, just fringing undergrowth and the majesty of the vine-draped monarchs toward whose peaks Dennis stared while he lay resting on his back.
The jungle might have denizens more fearful than the birds and lizards which had brightened its vegetation and his life as Dennis journeyed among them, but—
The Founder's Sword quivered as Dennis' grip tightened on it. The terrors of the jungle might find a terror of their own to face if they met him now.