The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  Aria would have embraced him, but she couldn't move—couldn't speak.

  "I accept your bargain, Princess Aria," said the sea hag.

  The flattened membrane spread, extending still further. It covered the jewelry, the gold and things far more precious... covered the cloak...

  Flowed over the Princess Aria and drew her back into the open maw—with her lute, and with all the things she had meant to offer in trade to the sea hag.

  Dennis turned. His eyes were trying to focus on a reality he had left utterly from the moment in which the sea hag engulfed him. He could hear Chester's tentacles clicking on the stone stairs, coming to greet his master's return, but there was something moving on the phosphorescent sea, and Dennis was sure that it must be important.

  "Who is it?" he called. "Who are you?"

  But the sea hag and her treasures had submerged so softly that not even the slap of waves on the stone answered Dennis' cries.

  CHAPTER 57

  "But how could she do that?" Dennis muttered, sitting on the coping with his face in his hands. He'd suspected that the ripples in the sea were—something wrong. If he'd just rushed them, perhaps with his sword he could have...

  Done little or nothing, to be logical. The sea hag had been in water too deep for Dennis to reach the creature, much less for him to use his blade effectively.

  "She can't have thought I'd want her to do that, to sacrifice herself."

  "One never knows the heart of a woman," Chester said smugly, "any more than one knows the sky."

  Dennis looked up sharply. The phosphorescence was fading from the water, but there was still enough light for him to peer at his companion as though there were something to be read in the metallic countenance.

  "Did you put her up to this?" he demanded. "Did you tell her to throw herself away, Chester?"

  "Master..." the robot replied with an unexpected hesitation. "There were questions that she asked me, the Princess Aria. I answered those questions... and now you are back with me, as I would wish if my makers had permitted me to wish."

  Dennis face grew very still. Then he nodded and hugged the robot's smooth body to him.

  "It's not what I'd have wanted, Chester," he whispered. "But it's all right. It's all right." He paused. "So long as we get her back."

  "It may be, Dennis," Chester said in a meek voice, "that you will wish to slay the sea hag after the Princess Aria is returned to you."

  The youth straightened to look at his companion, though he could barely make out the robot's shape. "I don't care about killing it, Chester," he said. "So long as it gives me back my Aria—and leaves us alone."

  "Do not trust your enemy," Chester quoted, "lest his heart contrive your destruction."

  Dennis got up. His companion's tentacle curled into his palm and led the way through darkness toward the stairs. It struck him forcibly that Chester was showing more initiative than his human builders, so many generations ago, might have intended.

  "All right, Chester," he said aloud. "Maybe we'll finish the thing for good and all, if that's what you think we must do. But first, we must free my Aria..."

  CHAPTER 58

  "Prince Dennis," Conall said as he and Dalquin quickened their stride to keep up with the younger, taller man. "I don't mean to intrude, but really I must know what has happened to my daughter."

  "Sir," said Dennis, "she's no longer here, through no will of my own. And Chester and I are going to get her back immediately."

  The youth knew he was being uncommunicative not so much because time was short, but because he didn't want to tell Conall what had befallen the princess. Conall would blame Dennis—

  And Dennis already blamed himself, whatever Chester or reason might say.

  Even reason admitted that if Aria had never met a vagabond named Dennis, she wouldn't be in the sea hag's gullet now.

  "Yes, but—" said Conall, looking about him in awkward concern. The cattle byres were clean, as everything in Rakastava was clean: but the warm, animal odor of cows still hung in the air.

  "Open," Dennis said to the wall. Direct sunlight drew wordless gasps from the two citizens of Rakastava, though Conall and Dalquin had seen the sun before.

  Had seen the sun several times during their lives, in fact.

  Dennis strode onto the cow path, knowing that Conall would not follow with his questioning.

  "Do not be called, 'the rude one', Dennis," Chester said, "because of your disregard for others."

  Dennis turned. "Sir," he said, "I—"

  His tongue touched his lips, and he remembered the salty taste of Aria's blood. "I love your daughter. I will have her back from, from where she is. On my life, I promise you."

  He bowed, hoping the king didn't realize that in Dennis' mind, the forfeit of his life was at least as probable as the success he'd promised. His duty to courtesy done, Dennis and Chester continued down the trail.

  Behind them, they heard Dalquin saying, "Now Dennis is a good lad and a brave one, sir. He'll not let your daughter come to any harm."

  Around a corner of the path, Dennis shook his head sadly. If only he could be so confident.

  "What if the sea hag stays deep in the sea, Chester?" he asked. "It doesn't matter that we can—go to her through the mirror if we, if I drown before..."

  "It is not to the sea hag that we will go, Dennis," the robot replied calmly, "but to its life, which is on the Banned Island beyond the jaws of Emath Harbor."

  "You mean the hag will be on the Banned Island," Dennis said, half in question as he tried to make sense of Chester's words.

  "The creature may be there and may not," Chester explained with a note of exasperation. "But its life is on the island, and it will come to its life when you hold that in your hands."

  Dennis frowned. "Chester, how can the sea hag's life be separate from her?" he asked.

  "Because she is not really alive, Dennis."

  "That can't be!" Dennis said with unintended firmness.

  "Am I alive, Dennis?"

  "Of course you are!"

  "Then the sea hag is alive, Dennis; but her life is on the Banned Island."

  The pasture was bright and a friend to Dennis by now, all the things Rakastava was not. Some of the differences—the way the grass tickled and could cut; the insects that buzzed and sometimes stabbed; the excessive heat when the sun was full in the sky—were discomforts and bad from any logical standpoint, but...

  But life wasn't a sterile endeavor, and life wasn't truly possible in an environment as sterile as that of Rakastava.

  "We won't stay in Rakastava," Dennis said aloud. "In the city. We'll go back to Emath or build a house in this pasture or something."

  "After you have slain the sea hag, Dennis," Chester reminded. "And first, it is to Mother Grimes and not Malbawn's mirror that we must go."

  Dennis loosened his sword in its scabbard. "She's dead, isn't she, Chester?" he asked, remembering the way his companion had let him enter Mother Grimes' house unwarned—because he had not asked for advice as he should have done.

  "She is dead, Dennis," the robot agreed. "But her baton is there where you left it, and you will need it now."

  Dennis stopped in the tall grass. "I said I didn't want anything to do with that."

  "Do not squander the little you have when there is no one else to support you," Chester quoted sharply.

  "Chester, I saw what that, that stick did to you," the youth pleaded. "I don't want to touch it. Look, my sword is good enough."

  He drew the long blade, as though sunlight dancing on the metal were an argument.

  "Dennis," the robot said gently, "on the island, the sea hag will try to stop you. She will send out things that are of her and not of life; and for those you might trust your sword, though it is my mind that the sword would fail you."

  Dennis swallowed. "But—" he began.

  "But the sea hag has still greater powers," Chester continued, ignoring his master's interruption. "She will send things that have the
semblance of persons... but it may be that she will send the persons themselves. If she does that, Dennis, and you trust your sword... you will wish it was on yourself instead that you had used your blade."

  Dennis closed his eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the vision he had just seen—Aria falling in two parts, a shocked look on her face as she died; and blood, so much blood...

  "Right," he said. "Let's go find the baton."

  CHAPTER 59

  Dennis expected Mother Grimes' house to look more weathered, but essentially the way it had been when he glanced back at it after hacking his way clear.

  "Oh..." he murmured in distaste and horror when he saw the reality. "Oh. I should have known."

  The "house" was Mother Grimes, a chitinous shell to draw in the unwary. Dead, Mother Grimes decayed as quickly as her sons had rotted where Dennis left their corpses sprawled in the grass.

  The roof had fallen in; the upper portions of the walls were bare and white. The layer of flesh which had pretended to be wood and brick and stone was now slumped onto the ground as a pond of thick green fluid in which maggots swam and feasted.

  Dennis stared at what he had seen and walked into, thinking it was a house. He nibbled at his lower lip, wondering what kind of deceptions he would face on the Banned Island.

  "The baton is here, Dennis," Chester said from a short distance away. One tentacle pointed to the ground, where the object had fallen when Dennis hurled it away from him. "Do you wish that I should carry it?"

  The youth shivered in the sunlight.

  "No," he said in a firm voice. "I'll carry it, Chester. It's part of my duty, I think."

  The robot didn't respond directly, but Dennis thought he read approval in the expressionless features.

  CHAPTER 60

  When they reached Malbawn's hut, Dennis' sweat-sticky skin prickled all over from grass-cuts and nervousness. The shade of the sagging roof was comforting.

  Chester wasn't unlatching the pieces of star-metal armor so that Dennis could put it on. The youth gestured toward the suit and said, "Ah, won't I...?"

  "The armor will be of no use to you today, Dennis," Chester said. There was no compromise in his tone, though he added, "You may wear it if you wish, to shield your fear if not your body."

  "No, I don't need that," Dennis said coldly. Chester's calculated insult had frozen away the nervous flutterings that nibbled Dennis' mind the way insects and itching had worked on his skin in the pasture.

  Chester touched Dennis' wrist with a tentacle, then withdrew it. "He whose good character makes him gentle," the robot said, "is master of his own fate."

  Dennis took his right hand from the pommel of his sword and rubbed the robot's carapace, the way he'd done for friendship and reassurance all his life.

  "I'm frightened, Chester," he said quietly. "But I'll be all right. What do we do now?"

  "It is now that we must go to the Banned Island, Dennis," the robot replied.

  Dennis opened his mouth to give the order, but the mirror was already shifting and clearing on—

  A sight as striking, and as clearly artificial, as the glitter of Emath Palace.

  The Banned Island rose out of the sea like a poplar spiking upward from a close-mown lawn. There was a forest fringe at the island's base, and that in itself was a hint of unnatural power.

  The jungle, as dense and green as that of the hinterland beyond Emath Village, grew down to the tide line. There was no raised corniche to protect the vegetation from waves tossed high by storms, yet some of the trees visible were centuries old.

  Dennis licked his dry lips, remembering Hale the Fisherman, wrapped in storm and certain doom when he first met the creature to whom he bargained an unborn son.

  The sea hag ruled the Banned Island; and she ruled also the tempests which would have devastated it.

  Beyond the jungle was a spire of porous rock, reddish-brown and probably laterite like the stone of the Emath headlands. The spire was five or six hundred feet high, tall enough to dwarf the greatest of the forest giants at its feet.

  Even in the mirror's shrunken and foreshortened view, Dennis could see that the rock's crumbling surface made the spire impossible to climb. It was little more than a vertical gravel pile, with no hand- or foothold that would take a human's weight.

  A circular glass staircase was built along—or grew from—one side of the rock. Emath Palace was all facets and lines, while this staircase seemed to have dripped down like icicles. All its parts were smooth and rounded, but they spread in a baroque profusion of landings and balconies buttressed to the spire by shining cantilevers.

  The top of the spire was covered with a dome of smooth crystal.

  Dennis drew his sword, gripping the hilt firmly to prevent his hand from trembling. "Closer," he ordered, and the mirrored vision swooped down obediently.

  Dennis still couldn't see through the glass dome. It reflected the sky and, he realized with a jolt of fear, showed him and Chester distorted in the curves of the surface. Memory of the sea hag's arms extending for him raised the youth's voice an octave as he shouted, "Back! Take me away from the dome!"

  The companions' viewpoint flip-flopped in two sudden stages. The island was a thorn sticking out of the steel-gray sea, visible mostly for the ring of froth its margin scraped from the gentle surf.

  Dennis took a deep breath. He had no reason to suppose the dome's reflection was as dangerous as his instinct had told him... but he was willing to trust instinct when it told him to fear anything connected with the sea hag.

  "Chester," he said in a controlled voice, "is the sea hag beneath the dome?"

  "The life of the sea hag is there, Dennis, that is so," Chester agreed.

  "Then that's where we—" Dennis began, but Chester interrupted him by continuing, "But the mirror will not take us beneath the dome."

  "Eh?"

  "The mirror will carry us only within the dome's surface, where we will stay so long as the sea hag wishes, or for eternity; and eternity will end first, it is my belief."

  "Then how are we to—" Dennis blazed; and caught himself, because he was venting anger instead of thinking or even asking for help. He didn't need Chester to tell him the answer, not if he thought for himself.

  "The mirror will set us on the shore of the island," Dennis said formally. His face wore the smile that calm had returned to him. "From the shore we will climb the stairs to the dome, where we will take the sea hag's life, be it in her body or apart from it."

  "Her life is not in her body, Dennis," Chester said with equal calm.

  "And we will release the Princess Aria," Dennis continued. "As she released me."

  "So we shall do," the robot said. "If you are as bold as you showed yourself in Rakastava, Dennis; and if you are as wise as you are bold."

  "Mirror, show us the shoreline," Dennis ordered. And, as their viewpoint rushed down like a funnel's sides sloping to the throat, the companions stepped forward onto a shore of coarse red shingle crumbled from the island's rock.

  The sea lapped Dennis' feet. He looked around him and jumped in surprise at what he hadn't seen through the mirror because of the angle. "Chester!" he blurted. "There's a boat here on the shore!"

  "Why should there not be a boat, Dennis?" the robot replied coolly.

  Dennis ran his hand over the sun-cracked wood of the gunwale. It was ordinary enough, a net-tending skiff like the one in which his father had made his lonely journeys; but it was properly drawn onto the shore, not cast up by a storm surge, and this was—

  "But Chester, no boats can land on the Banned Island. Anyone who tries founders in a storm or, or—"

  "Or is drawn down by the sea hag, that may be," Chester said, completing the thought. "But the choice is the choice of the sea hag; and the sea hag may choose to allow a landing."

  "Well, it doesn't concern us," Dennis said; but it concerned him very much to know who might be on the island, with him and with the sea hag.

  He couldn't see the stairs becaus
e of the foliage overhanging the narrow beach. A faint path—bruised leaves and twigs broken here and there—led into the vegetation.

  To himself and to Chester, he said, "We'll find the sea hag's life. And we'll trade it to her for Aria. And then we'll leave."

  "The crocodile is merciless, Dennis. There is no truce with it."

  Dennis shrugged his shoulders.

  The sea hag had bargained and had kept her bargains. However dangerous it might be to let the creature live, Dennis knew in his heart that he would keep any bargain he made with her.

  He could look at his father and see what came of trying to cheat.

  Careful not to let the baton in his left hand brush him when he swung his arms, Dennis strode forward.

  CHAPTER 61

  The undergrowth caught at them in its familiar way. Dennis could have cut his path broadly with a few swipes of his sword: his thick, practiced wrists driving the star-metal edge would lop down anything smaller than a full-grown tree. But... once past the jungle's sunlit fringe, Dennis could walk without a real struggle.

  The jungle and its denizens had been friends to him. The birds that hooted away in explosions of brilliant color were a reminder of the life and beauty in the world. The lizards counselled patience with their rigid bodies and bright, darting eyes.

  And even the bark and leaves had a delicate architecture which Dennis realized was beyond the ability of men—or the sea hag—to duplicate.

  So instead of slashing his way through the jungle, he stepped with care; twisting free of thorns if he hadn't dodged them in time; accepting that his clothes would be torn by the time he reached his destination—but that torn clothes wouldn't matter, whether he survived the day or did not survive.

  Dennis had proved he could kill. If he chose to prove that he spared life wherever possible, that that was nobody's business but his own.

  "A wise man avoids harming others so that he not be harmed himself," Chester quoted from behind him.