Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (27 page)

"I wish we had a boat," the girl said, looking about. "But it would have to be a big one to hold Klootz. Then we could get out of this mud, at least."

"Up north we build—Holy Mother, forgive my dumbness!" he exploded. "We build
rafts,
rafts for our animals when there's no bridge! And I've been sitting ail day staring at a thousand log piles, logs all but covered with long vines! The only thing I haven't been given is someone to step up and kick me awake! Come on down from there and we'll get to work!"

It was true. The storm-brought drifts of logs lay everywhere. All about their islet were numbers of them, a few with leaves still left on their branches.

Even Gorm was a help now. Klootz was hitched to a vine rope and tugged free the ones they wanted, while the bear helped untangle branches and vines. Hiero hacked off limbs with his sword-knife and generally supervised, while Luchare bound the big logs tightly together with cut lengths of tough vine.

At length they had done all they could. The priest had cut two twenty-foot poles and also made a couple of crude paddles, the latter in case the water grew too deep for the poles. The whole raft was about thirty feet long and fifteen wide. It was incredibly clumsy, but absolutely necessary, Hiero felt.

I
(can)
swim,
Klootz sent, gingerly testing the structure with a huge foot.

No, Stupid,
his master came back.
Danger under the water. You ride.

It took every ounce of everyone's muscle to get the great thing off the mud and into the water deep enough to float, especially with the big morse aboard. He finally had to leap onto it from the islet, and the shock drove the raft momentarily under the surface. But he landed neatly and stood carefully, and it rose again, spilling water, and floated.

The Peril and the Sage

The huge raft was even clumsier than Hiero had feared. Still, with patience, it was just possible to move it slowly along. The chief problem was the vast, tangled mats of vegetation which lay entwined on the water's surface. He had to lean over and cut them aside with his sword, and he finally sat down and lashed the sword firmly to one end of his pole. He used leather thongs from his repair kit and tied everything twice before he was satisfied,

From then on, he could cut more easily, and without having a fear that something would seize his arm as he leaned far over the raft's edge, and also without having to put down the pole.

Something bad near!
suddenly came the bear's mental voice.
Not a human, something else which thinks and not-thinks.

Hiero rested on his pole, and so did Luchare. The great raft moved sluggishly forward for a few yards on momentum alone while all strained to hear the night, both with physical senses and mental ones. But there was nothing, nothing save the almost deafening chorus of frogs and insects, a medley of croaks, trills, and stridulations which made ordinary speech almost inaudible.

It is gone,
Gorm sent.
It was quick, like a moving fish. Now
—
nothing.

The priest did not delude himself into believing the bear might be mistaken. Gorm's alertness had saved them several times already. If his quick mental perceptions, which after all were not human, had detected something, then something was there!

Thinks and not-thinks!
There was no time to try and find out what the bear meant, not now. Worried and frustrated by the intangible menace, Hiero looked all around, taking in the still, dark water, the nearer buildings, and the patches of floating plants. He noted in passing that Klootz' huge, flat antlers were hung with the last shreds of velvet and were now almost ready for use as weapons.

But under the pale moonlight, nothing stirred. At last Hiero signaled to Luchare and thrust his pole deep in the mud again. Once more, the ponderous raft slid forward, headed for the wide opening between two towering ruins. Frogs blinked and fell silent, their cold eyes goggling from huge lily pads and bladderworts as the cumbersome thing went by. Once it had gone, the renewed chorus broke out in its wake.

As they passed into the first shadows of the shattered monoliths, the raft met with its first major check, a tangled mass of some floating weed. Hiero ran to the front of the raft (it had no real bow) and began to hack with his pole-knife while Luchare aided him by thrusting the cut portions aside. Fortunately, there was deep water under the weeds; and, once cut, they were little trouble. Still, it was arduous work, for the raft had to be poled a few yards and then the cutting had to commence again. It was to be only the beginning of such work.

Through the night, the raft's slow progress continued. Black windows and gaping rents in the rotted, ancient masonry leered down at the wayfarers as they struggled on. Once, a cloud of bats issuing from one such ruin and swirling up across the face of the moon made everyone jump, but beyond that, nothing happened but hard work.

On two occasions they encountered a bank of thick mud, risen up invisible under the water plants ahead, and were forced to backtrack and seek another opening through the maze of the old city. Fortunately, there was one available each time. Again, while crossing wide stretches of water (perhaps, Hiero reflected, the remains of ancient squares or parks), they had lost touch with the bottom entirely. He blessed God's aiding his forethought in cutting the crude paddles. The silt-laden water was so clam that even these were sufficient to move the raft along until the poles could be brought into use once more.

As the first light of dawn came into the eastern sky, the Metz looked forward at his human partner, and somehow both managed to grin. They were both filthy, drenched in sweat, palms blistered by their pole work, and it seemed that not an inch of their bodies was unbitten by gnats and mosquitoes. But they were alive and healthy, and they must have come quite a distance, which was some satisfaction.

"I don't want to travel by day, not in this place," Hiero said aloud. "Look, over there, a sort of sloping place. We can spend the day there and still be at least partly hidden."

The rapidly growing light revealed them to be in one of the numerous squares, as Hiero had come to call them. On three sides, vast and rotted stone structures loomed up far above their heads, pierced with countless windows and ancient scars and rents, black openings on nothing. Long vines and twisted lianas hid many other places.

The fourth side was more hopeful,, however. Some huge building had evidently collapsed under the weight of the countless years, and in the not-too-distant past. The result was a great pile of rubble and broken stone, thrusting up in an irregular mound from the quiet waters of the lagoon. A few large bushes grew in one place, probably survivors of the original structure, but otherwise it was quite bare of vegetation.

Soon the raft lay in a shallow cove next to the island mound. Leaves covered it, and to a casual inspection, it was one more tangle of drifted logs. The travelers, two- and four-legged, soon were huddled together under the clump of bushes, waiting in sticky irritability for the sun to rise even higher and add another dimension to their discomfort.

Gorm
—
what was the thing that frightened you?
Hiero sent.
The mind touch you caught as we started, I mean.

Something new,
the bear admitted, as he tried to cover his sensitive nose from the crowding mosquitoes.
Only one, whatever it was; a bad mind, quick, sly, full of hate for everything not like itself But not a human, not any animal I know either. Maybe
— there was a pause as the young bear reflected—
maybe, a little like a frog, but one that thinks!

While the others absorbed this, he added,
It went away. Perhaps to find more.
With this parting message, he covered his nose completely with his forepaws and fell asleep. His thick, black fur saved him from most of the other bites, and he seemed to have the ability to sleep anywhere, at any time.

"We'll have to keep watch," Hiero said to the girl. "Try and sleep, and I'll take the first one." He wiped the sweat from his eyes with a filthy hand and managed to get dirt in one of them. As he rubbed harder, Luchare pulled his hand down and from somewhere produced a damp and (relatively) clean cloth with which she sponged his face, cleaning his eye out in the process.

"There," she said in a tone of satisfaction. "Now keep your dirty fingers out of it. What do you think Gorm felt, Hiero? Could he be imagining things? This place is enough to make anyone have bad dreams, even a bear." She looked out at the brooding land, or rather waterscape, before them. Even under the now completely risen sun, the silent hulks of the past were not a pleasant sight. The green vegetation mats of water plants, the vines crawling up the buildings' shattered faces, the trees and bushes on their pinnacles, all added to the feeling of desolation.

"He doesn't imagine things," the priest said. He was trying to ignore the dirty, but enchanting, face so close to his and concentrate instead on what he was saying.

"There's something here, maybe a lot of somethings. I can't tap the mental channels, but I
can feel
thought going on around me, do you understand. Maybe several kinds of thought. We're going to have to be careful, very careful."
And lucky, very lucky,
he added to himself.

Another long day passed. They ate and drank sparingly. The canteens were running low, and though Klootz and the bear did not seem to mind the lagoon water, Hiero tested it and it was foul, full of green matter and with a sickening smell. He did not intend to drink of it except as a last resort.

The sun reached zenith, and the afternoon began and slowly waned. Luchare finally slept, and so did both animals. Save for the humming insects, which never ceased their myriad assault, no sound broke the silence. The towers were empty of bird life, and none appeared in the blue, cloudless sky. Listening on all the mental channels known to him, the priest could detect no coherent thought. Yet all around him, intangible and in stealth, some spying, probing presence seemed to glare at them. A busy undercurrent of activity was at work; he felt it in his bones, but could neither actually locate nor identify it.

They had just repacked the raft and were easing the big morse aboard when they froze in their tracks. The light of late evening still let them see the buildings around them clearly, but their eyes could detect no movement. The frog chorus had barely begun.

From out of the distant east, in the direction they themselves wanted to travel, there came the same strange cry they had heard the previous evening. The frogs fell silent.

"Aoooh, aoooh, aaaoooooouh," it wailed mournfully. Three times it came, and then there was silence once more, save for the insect buzz. Slowly the frogs began again, while the two animals and their human friends stood in the gathering dark, each immersed in his or her own thoughts.

"Oh, I hate this place!" Luchare burst out. "It's not like the rest of the world at all, but some dead, wet, horrible wasteland full of moaning ghosts! The City of the Dead!" She broke into tears, burying her face in her cupped hands. Her long-held control had finally given way.

Hiero moved to her side and put his arms around her and patted her back, until at length her wet face was raised to his, a question in the great eyes which he had no trouble answering. He lowered his head and drank in the wild sweetness of her lips for the first time. Her strong, young arms rose and tightened around his neck, and when the kiss finally ceased, she buried her face in his jacket. He still stroked her back, saying nothing, his eyes staring sightlessly over her head into the gathering night. The bites of a dozen midges and mosquitoes were unfelt.

"What was that for?" came a muffled voice from his shirt. "A present for a frightened child?"

"That's right," he agreed in cheerful tones. "I do that to all the scared brats I meet. Of course, sometimes it recoils on me. I might even get to like it."

She looked up at once, suspicious that he was laughing at her, but even in the last light of day, what she saw in his eyes was so plain that her face was jammed back into his chest once more, as if what she had read in his expression had scared her. There was another short silence.

"I love you, Hiero," came a small voice from his chest.

"I love you, too," he said almost sadly. "I'm not at all sure it's a good idea. In fact, I'm fairly certain it's a bad one, a very bad one. I have been set a task so important that the last sane human civilization may fall if I should fail to carry it out. I need a further distraction like a third leg." He smiled down at the angry face which had popped up again.

"I seem to be helpless, however." He tightened his grip around the firm body. "Win or lose, we stay together from now on. I'd worry more if you were somewhere else."

She snuggled closer, as if somehow she could bind herself to him. They stood thus, the world forgotten until a mental voice whose very flatness made it seem sardonic broke in.

Human mating is indeed fascinating. But we are in a dangerous place to study it. That is something of which I feel certain.

This acted like a pail of cold water. They almost sprang apart. Studiously ignoring the bear, who sat looking up at them from the middle of the raft where he sat next to Kiootz, they seized their poles and pushed off into the humming, croaking dark. The moon had not yet risen, but the stars were out, and both of them had excellent night vision.

Once again, a night of toil and discomfort lay before them. Yet they detected no signs of an enemy, though there were moments when the appearance of one would have come as an almost welcome distraction. On and on through the drowned city they poled, hacked, and paddled their way. Hiero fell overboard once, but popped back up in a second, streaming foul, muddy water, at least cool for a few seconds.

The moon rose and made their task a little easier. The silent, black buildings stared down from a thousand ruined eyes as they struggled past. Perhaps they were following boulevards and esplanades which had once echoed to the tramp of vanished parades. All were buried now, forgotten and lost under the weight of centuries of mud and water.