U’Sumi stood up straight. “You’re forgetting shores where there must be a fresh water supply. The Floating Lands have plant and animal life, don’t they? They support those Qingu you spoke of.”
Yafutu slumped against the wheel. “The Qingu are demons!”
“Demons don’t eat their own dead—as you said the Qingu do—because demons don’t die. What if they’re just horribly inbred people whose ancestors were trapped on these floating vegetation mats when they broke away from a coastal jungle? If plants grow there, then there must be plant juice, or even fruit.”
“Those of my people who’ve survived the Floating Lands speak of water-fruit pods and trees with juicy stems. But to go there is death!”
“Wrong!” U’Sumi said. “To go there might be death. To not go there will definitely be death, in little more than two weeks!”
T
he fog lasted two days, during which large shadowy shapes sometimes drifted close enough to just make out in silhouette. U’Sumi often heard the sounds of birds and the occasional roar of some large reptile nearby. Before, they had each stood one-person night watches. Now only one at a time could safely get any sleep.
On the third day since Leviathan destroyed the impeller, the mists thinned to a haze, where the sun’s disk intermittently grew visible—just not brightly enough to charge the tiny black cells covering the sun-sails. The ship seemed hemmed into a large lake or bay with jungle on nearly all sides and the water dead calm.
U’Sumi came into the wheelhouse, where Yafutu hugged the helm as if it was his lost mother. The youth stepped away from the wheel when he noticed he was no longer alone.
“We need to approach one of the islands,” U’Sumi said. “It looks like the sun might break through this afternoon. What do you think?”
“That soon we’ll all be joining my family.”
U’Sumi put his hand on Yafutu’s shoulder. “I’ll defend you with my sword and my last breath, Little Brother. There’s no other way. E’Yahavah will watch over us, and I won’t let us die for lack of trying to live. He got us free from the Evil that consumed the Gates of the Setting Sun, didn’t he?”
Yafutu nodded then looked up. “We have line and grappling hooks. They say the wood-vines the islands float on are soft and easy to hook. The one thing we don’t need to worry ’bout is running aground. Ship’s armory has a few swords, so the Seer, the Lady, and I will also be armed.”
“I won’t need a sword,” T’Qinna announced as she entered the wheelhouse. “The Caretaker gave U’Sumi a bow and a quiver of arrows with Phoenix Fire. I used to practice archery for sport back in Epymetu. I wasn’t bad at it, either. Split an apple at a hundred cubits more than once.”
Yafutu’s eyes brightened. “That’s even better. You don’t want to get close enough to Tiamatu’s creatures to have to use a sword.”
U’Sumi said, “Sorry, Yafutu, but T’Qinna stays with the ship.”
She put her hands on her hips, and stuck out her jaw at him. “I can take care of myself, Sir Paladin!”
U’Sumi smiled. “I know you can. That’s why I need you, sharp with a fitted arrow, in the flying bridge. You may need to take care of us all by covering our retreat and by keeping intruders from taking the ship while we’re gone. It’s just sound tactics, is all. You’re the only archer.”
T’Qinna was instant sweetness again. “Your diplomacy skills are improving. I like that.”
“I’m not being diplomatic. It’s just the truth.”
“I still like it,” she teased.
A’Nu-Ahki climbed up the ladder hole from below decks. “Hope you don’t mind me eavesdropping, but I think only U’Sumi and I should go ashore. Yafutu needs to be ready to move the ship away quickly if need be. T’Qinna can’t cover a retreat, handle the wheel, and move the throttle-levers at the same time, even using the flying bridge’s helm controls.”
Yafutu shouted, “But I’m not afraid to go!”
A’Nu-Ahki said, “No one says you are, Son. You’re no child anymore; not after what you’ve seen, and after what you’ve done for us on this ship. You do the Fleet-house of Ursunabi proud! You’re the only man for the job, Yafutu.”
T’Qinna put her arm around Yafutu. “Come on, kid, guess it’s up to us to put these two veteran tacticons ashore and watch their backs.”
Yafutu steered the Amirdu in toward the nearest floating island on her port side to avoid fouling what remained of the out-rig nacelle in the giant vine mat. U’Sumi swung the grappling line, which hooked onto a woody vine loop above his head. He looked up into the flying bridge, where T’Qinna stood with a fitted arrow.
“It looks clear from up here,” she said.
U’Sumi extended the gangplank to where he and his father could climb up onto the island’s surface.
T
he ground—if one could call it that—swayed gently with the sea. Centuries of leaf humus supported a variety of shrubs and even many shallow-rooted trees. The mulch filled the gaps in the underlying giant vine mat, providing a spongy surface to walk, or at least scramble, over. Colorful birds hooted and screeched all around them like bloated dragons, while the occasional predatory roars of real dragons called in the distance.
U’Sumi and his father found coconut trees barely fifty paces in from the gangplank. After gathering over a hundred of the pods and tossing them down onto the Amirdu’s deck, they ventured further inland to look for the water-fruit Yafutu had described.
The haze brightened as U’Sumi followed his father into the jungle. He was not sure exactly when he noticed that the birds had gone silent. Then he felt it, something or someone watching them—perhaps the predator they had heard farther off. U’Sumi looked over his shoulder and froze.
“Pahp!” he whispered, “look!”
A’Nu-Ahki turned and gazed up into the sky. He slowly pulled his son down with him into a crouch behind a stand of ferns.
A clawed hand yanked at U’Sumi’s liver from the inside. The pale disk of the sun was not the only light in the hazy sky.
“What is it, Pahp?”
A’Nu-Ahki gazed up at the glowing orange semi-circle hovering just above tree level. “A Watcher.”
“In that? Why would they be here?”
“I don’t know. Let’s stay under the trees.”
“What about the ship? It’s visible from up there.”
“We need to draw that thing away from the ship, into the greenery.”
They stood and went deeper into the floating jungle, making noise as they did. U’Sumi sensed the radiant object pursue them above the trees, though the foliage was too thick for him to see it. Whether it followed or not, he could not shake the feeling of something malevolent watching them.
T’
Qinna squeaked, “Do you see that?”
Yafutu nodded, too terrified to speak.
The glowing orange half—disk floated over the trees where she had just watched U’Sumi and his father disappear into the greenery. It slowly began to follow them, apparently disinterested in the ship.
Terror hijacked her lips. “Yafutu; cut the lines and pull in the plank! We need to move away from shore. Pandura’s sent the gods to find me!”
The youngster obeyed without a word.
Just as Yafutu cut the last line from the tangle of tree-sized fronds, a line of squat ugly savages appeared out of the jungle and rushed the ship. Spears flew from the vine-tangled bluff. T’Qinna heard breaking glass from a window in the wheelhouse. She took aim at the nearest of what could well have been “demon trolls” and loosed her arrow. The missile took the little monster in the left eye, killing instantly.
The savages fled the rim of their floating world, and threw no more spears. T’Qinna fitted a second arrow, but held fire. The enormity of what had just happened came to her as Yafutu reached the wheel and the Amirdu moved away to a safe distance.
The boy found her still in her frozen horror when he came topside to continue steering from the flying bridge a min
ute later. “You can put the bow down, my Lady; they can’t throw this far.”
She sat down by Yafutu. “We left them there… with those things!”
He just nodded.
“And I killed one. Did you see it?”
“Yes, Lady. Demon trolls.”
She glared at him and shrieked, “Am I a demon troll too?”
Yafutu recoiled, his eyes filling with uncomprehending tears. “You are beautiful past all words! They are hideous! I don’t understand!”
T’Qinna immediately softened and pulled him into her arms. How could he have understood? He didn’t see the family resemblance. He had not just faced a tribe of contorted caricatured miniatures of himself.
The savage struck in the eye by T’Qinna’s arrow was a woman; her starved empty-sock breasts had flopped up when she had fallen backward.
Caught forever in the frozen mirror of her memory was that sun-flashed negative, pygmy parody of her own face. Whereas the background hue of T’Qinna’s leopard-spot skin was soft white, the tiny spear-woman’s had been black—not brown, nor even dark brown, but pitch black—with slit-thin lips somehow even blacker, stretched around pointy-filed yellow teeth like a quiver of spitting darts poisoned with the green venom in her huge remaining eye. Her spots had been larger than T’Qinna’s markings; pale white, like orderly leper sores the color of snail-meat trailing around the scowling face of that huge misshapen head.
T’Qinna imagined that if the natural contours of her own face and skull were extremely distorted and enlarged—with the colors reversed—then she too would have had the little savage woman’s wide bi-lobed cranium and light yellow hair spiking from the flat depression on top of her head, recessed between the lobes. The hate-filled flash of that enormous iridescent green eye, now indelibly etched into her mind, said it all.
Not quite all.
T’Qinna could still hear Pandura berate her mother, from where she had hidden as a six-year-old, behind the lilac bush in the garden near the Court of Children. She still smelled the cloying sweetness of the flowers she would forever detest, as she peered through the shrub to watch her mother and grandmother argue. It was perhaps her very first coherent memory.
“Why you ever kept the spawn of that spotted savage is beyond me!” Pandura had yelled. “How can your father and I believably work to create human beings that are closer to divinity when you shamelessly rut with such animals and then keep the disgraceful byproduct? You’re lucky she’s female and can still attract certain low-born men! The other priests and priestesses whisper about your degenerate tastes behind your back and laugh!”
The child in her still wept. Then T’Qinna realized that it wasn’t her trying to sniff back the tears, but the boy huddled into her side. The boy she had lashed out at with more rage than she had realized she had.
“It’s going to be alright, Yafutu,” she said, even though she was certain that nothing would ever be “alright” again. I left him to die! “We need to watch the shore, and not drift away. The men will double back and show themselves once it’s safe. You’ll see. They have to!”
No they don’t, said that hopeless whisper inside—the one that always told her how U’Sumi was just too good to be real. Even if they did get back, he’d know you left him, and even if he didn’t, you would know.
Something large rammed the hull from out of the depths and slapped angrily along the port side. Yafutu throttled the engine up to flank speed away from the floating island.
T’Qinna’s nails bit into her palms as she screamed.
T
hey dropped from the trees so rapidly that U’Sumi barely had time to turn into a back-to-back sword-fighting stance with his father. About twenty child-sized savages had instantly encircled them with wood javelins all pointed inward, beneath U’Sumi’s sword arc. If he or his father struck, they would both be giant pin cushions before their blades found targets.
U’Sumi slowly lowered his sword after a quick glance over his shoulder showed his father doing likewise. Neither dropped them, however.
A’Nu-Ahki said, “Peace.”
One of the savages made a croaking laugh, his large black V-shaped head wreathed in spike-stiff dirty yellow fuzz. “Peeees sez ee! Killa killa from iz landz does ee! Girly killa Qingu girly vit hissy featha-stick!”
U’Sumi surmised that the little savages must have rushed the ship, and that it had escaped, since they carried no spoils or prisoners. Thank you E’Yahavah; please let T’Qinna and Yafutu be well…
“We’re sorry about that,” A’Nu-Ahki said to the Speaker. “But our ‘girly’ would not have used the feather-stick unless you first used sticks of your own—like these.” He gently nudged the closest spear away. “My name is A’Nu-Ahki, but my friends call me Nu. You may call me Nu. By what name may I call you?”
The Speaker seemed puzzled. “Name? I Qingu! I big cunsort uv Tiamtu! Tiamtu iz mudda, Tiamtu iz luvva, Tiamtu is big Laaady-girl!”
U’Sumi noticed that a couple of the Qingu spearmen were female. He nodded toward one of the women and asked, “Like this laady-girl?”
The Speaker shrieked and slapped the woman U’Sumi had looked at, while the others pressed their javelins in closer. “She not Laaady-girl—only Tiamtu iz Laaady-girl! She nothing—just girly-girl!”
As if to prove his point, the Speaker ran the poor woman through her stomach with his spear, pinning her to a soft-wooded vine frond. She gurgled and twitched for several eternal seconds, heaved dark blood, then slumped with her glazed eyes open like a fish.
It all happened so fast, so unexpectedly, that U’Sumi had no time even to raise his sword. The sharpened bone-tipped spears jabbed under his arms, at his middle, in warning. Only now did he pray for his battle-dance to come, though under a sense of profound shame for not having thought of it before then, and because his own words had set things off. How could I have known the little devil would do that?
Shadow-mind answered him from the murky depths; “He’s a little devil—what do you expect from devils?”
A’Nu-Ahki roared, “That wasn’t necessary!”
“Big wurds! Vaht iz ‘nesti-ssssery?’ No uze big wurds! Name? Nesti-ssssery? Big wurds! Not need! I be Qingu! We be Qingu! If you not Qingu, you be Tiamtu food! Tiamtu sumday eat da whole world!”
Two of the Qingu detached from the circle of spears and produced serrated seashell knives and bone scrapers. U’Sumi gagged as they indifferently butchered their impaled comrade. He almost retched, but the rest of the mob nudged him and his father on through the trees, leaving the two to their grisly work.
He still gripped his sword, but even the slightest attempt to lift it brought spear pricks. The Qingu seemed to fear the shiny metal—perhaps had never before seen metal—and did not seem to know what to do about it, or what would result from trying to separate it from U’Sumi’s arm. It may even have been that the little trolls thought the swords were part of his and his father’s arms in some way; how could one tell with people so alien that they didn’t even know that individuals had names?
That was fine with U’Sumi. Let them get used to the idea that they were in control of the game. Why they had not tried to disarm him and his father might be beyond him, but he wouldn’t complain about good fortune.
After plodding over the moving forest floor for almost an hour, they entered a clearing with one face toward the ocean, on the right. U’Sumi was sure it was on the same side of the floating island as the Amirdu, though a peninsula or two of vegetation might make doubling back along the shore difficult. A village of sorts filled the clearing—mostly open tents made of giant leaves—with only one crude wooden lean-to structure in the middle.
The Speaker led his prisoners toward the lean-to, as an orange light rose over the misty woods from which they had just emerged. U’Sumi felt rather than saw the Watcher disk, which hung silently overhead at his back. His head began to hurt, as fire-fly specks began to swirl before his eyes like hundreds of cavorting stars. Other Qingu came out fr
om under the trees, their dull green eyes entranced by the lights.
Under the lean-to, a worm-eaten idol of wood and bone in the form of a short-necked leviathan sat on a stand made of oddly-shaped human skulls. The fire-fly lights seemed to spiral in on the ratty sculpture in a way that increased U’Sumi’s disorientation.
An even chugging sound approached from the ocean side of the clearing. U’Sumi recognized the comforting engines of the Amirdu, though the ship was still far off, invisible beyond the trees. It did nothing to raise his hopes. How could the small vessel put in for a friendly passenger pick-up?
The Qingu—especially their Speaker—seemed not to hear it.
“Tiamtu, big Laaady-Girl! Bringa bringa food food to da mudda, da luvva, who eats da whole world!”
The Qingu all began a guttural chant, as the spearmen drove U’Sumi and his father back from the lean-to idol, toward the ocean—this time drawing blood with their prods; fresh blood U’Sumi knew would attract leviathans to him better even than the smell of his own mounting terror.
Y
afutu Ursunabi steered Amirdu around the jungle point, revolutions at full and not caring. Below, he heard T’Qinna’s cat howling and scraping across the deck. For over an hour now, something from the bottomless deep had relentlessly bumped against the hull, driving the ship as if it was some terrified animal into a hidden snare somewhere ahead. First, it slammed into the port side, then the starboard, inboard of the nacelle. Each time, Taanyx scrambled away from the thump, unable to embed her claws in the polished teak-wood deck.
Not even full speed could escape it.
“I just left them! I just left them!” T’Qinna kept crying at him.
The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) Page 25