Gods of Earth (31 page)

“I speak some of their song language,” Wadjet said. “But I will have to go in.”

“What?” Sarah and Chance said simultaneously. Seth yipped in indignation.

“They won’t swallow you?” Sarah asked.

“No. They eat only the tiniest little things. And they are gentle creatures.”

That sounded unlikely to Chance. But Sarah added, “Won’t they just crush you—I mean, even by accident?”

Wadjet laughed. “I have been in the water with such as them before,” she said proudly. “And even bigger—the blues and right whales. Guardian, bring the skysail in. I’ll drop the other sails.”

The Guardian pulled the line, then the skysail, up onto the deck. The boat leaned forward under the weight of the water caught in the sail as he lifted it from the sea and dragged it onto the deck. It splashed water around them, soaking their shoes and the bottom of their pants, and then the strange blue fabric shrank quickly. The whales watched, patiently, curious, surfacing here and there by the boat and rolling to the side, so that sea streamed down their gray flanks as each turned a single huge black eye upon Chance and Sarah and Wadjet.

Then, without another word, Wadjet began to strip off her clothes. The Guardian gave her one last envious look, then thudded across the deck and down the stairs to watch what happened through the clear bow of the ship. Seth and Thetis followed.

Chance stood, too stunned to consider etiquette, as Wadjet undressed. She pulled off her shirt, exposing small, upturned breasts with dark aureoles. Chance watched them as she pulled off her bright pants. Underneath, she wore short black briefs that clung to her skin. Her long legs were hairless and smooth and strong. The outline of her behind was strong and round.

Chance realized suddenly that he was staring. With his mouth open. Wadjet turned and smiled at him, her green eyes and her white fangs flashing, expressing her gleefully predatory glare, and then she put a foot on the gunwale.

Chance flushed red and knelt down, pretending to prepare to look into the water, but really to hide his embarrassment. His eyes met Sarah’s. She had been watching him. She frowned and touched the scar on her face, and then turned hastily away, to go below deck. Chance opened his mouth to call to her, but did not know what to say.

Seth whined unhappily as Wadjet lifted her arms and leaned forward, and then dove into the blue sea filled with monsters.

Wadjet loved the water. Warm and slick, it touched her everywhere: the salty blood of the Earth, wrapping her in its life. She parted her lips and teeth and tasted the wet quick of it: salt and iron, magnesium and air, and the indefinable subtlety of tiny animals and plants, living and dying against her tongue. She snapped her teeth, wishing she could swallow it all as it swallowed all of her.

Then her body shook, from the deep center of her heart out to her fingers and toes: the call of the whale that slowly bent through the dark water beneath her.

“Little thing from above,” it sang out. Identification constituted, for the whale kind, a greeting. “Hard. Silent. Slow. Tailless.”

Wadjet surfaced, gasped air, and dove into the blue again. She kicked till her hands touched the rough skin of the whale, sharply coarse with small barnacles. She pressed herself against it, getting her throat close to its ear.

“I sing.”

“You sing,” the whale responded.

“Why do you follow?”

“Promise,” the whale began. But she could wait no longer. She had to listen as best she could while surfacing for air.

“All the seas made clean again,” it continued. “Whales given ocean dominion.”

Her head broke the surface, and she gasped twice. Chance stood on the boat, looking at her. The thought flashed into Wadjet’s mind: innocent, but only a little wild, this boy. He would never immerse himself into the dark ocean and give himself over to uncertainty. Part of her mischievously longed to seize him, and pull him into the depths. And to do other things with this dark-eyed boy. Her fangs against his flesh. Against his.…

She dived back to the waiting whale. Still looking toward the boat, she saw in the bow the Guardian; the coyote; feeble, trembling Thetis; and the sword bearer. She liked the sword bearer. She liked Sarah more because Sarah disliked all of them. Sarah was another she’d like to seize, to taste again.…

Wadjet flashed her teeth at them as she passed.

The whale moaned, a vague prompting to Wadjet.

“The…” she hesitated, as she settled again by its ear, not knowing the whale phrase for a god. “The strong surface dweller. The powerful one. He promises?”

“The worldchanger,” the whale answered. “His servants promised sharing if we follow you who escaped the encircled school of men.”

The whale, taking pity on her, surfaced with Wadjet lying atop. She took a few slow breathes, and then they slowly sank under the water so that the humpback could sing.

“His servants may ask us to stop you,” the whale said. “His servants may ask us to force you to thin water.”

Wadjet was growing breathless. She did not love being under the water long, when it was so much work to hum the words.

“We ask clear way on the whale road. We go to the skyriver.” She did not know if that was the right word for Yggdrasil, though she remembered that phrase from somewhere.

“We swim with you,” the whale answered, uncommitted. “We wait to hear from distant pods. We wait to decide. We wait.”

She asked more questions, and listened between gasps to the answers, but then finally the beast surfaced, and Wadjet let go his great back and watched the gray singer dive into blue, then black, depths. Whales did not say goodbye.

She swam to the ship. It had drifted ahead a bit and she caught up to it at the swimming platform on the stern. Chance, eyes wide with fear and wonder, stood there, and held out his strong hand to her. She smiled at him, and took it in her own.

CHAPTER

28

C
hance pulled Wadjet from the water. She almost fell back, and he hugged her to catch their balance. Wadjet smiled and thanked him in a soft voice, a sound like a cat purring.

Sarah came onto deck just then, the Guardian following, in time to see Chance standing, his hands lingering on Wadjet’s hips. He stepped back guiltily. His clothes were wet down the front. He licked the saltwater that had come off Wadjet’s hair and onto his lips.

Thetis had somewhere found a towel, and Sarah took it and threw it at Wadjet after she had climbed back onto the deck. The Steward caught it, showing no reaction.

“The whales debate whether to help the god,” Wadjet said. She rubbed the towel over her chest.

“Ha-how do they know?” Seth asked.

“Their voices can carry very far. Many miles below the water. There are whales by Disthea that have sent them word. This must mean that the city is held by the soulburdened. They expect that the god will soon be free and are told that through him the soulburdened shall come to rule the world. They are asked to track us. They may be asked to stop our ship.”

“Will they?” Sarah asked.

Wadjet wobbled her head, an expression Chance had never seen before but which seemed to assert uncertainty. “There are several dozen near us now. The cows care only to get to the warm waters of the north, so that they may mate and calve. It is hard labor, and they cannot eat now. They see no reason to trust the god. But the bulls are eager to show their strength. They have no loyalty to the god, but they are tempted. And the bulls remember the violence of men, especially here in the seas by the red lands, where men hunt whales for meat and because they are soulburdened.”

The Guardian growled angrily.

“What should we do?” Thetis asked. She handed Wadjet her clothes.

“There is nothing that I can think to do,” Wadjet said, as she pulled on her shirt. “The bulls will goad each other on, and perhaps nothing will come of it, or perhaps they will try to stop us. But until that happens, we should race for the north.”

“Why not go to the shore now,” Chance asked, “and go the rest of the way afoot?”

The Guardian shook his head. “That would take very long. Too long. And we have moved too far north. The shore here is a thin coast of towns, barely living along the edge of the red lands. The men who dwell there are dangerous and cruel. They could slow us. And beyond the red lands is the Filthealm. Those who dwell there are not men anymore. Each would as soon eat you as speak with you.”

“Bad,” Seth growled in agreement. With reluctance, he admitted, “Worse even than being on a-a-a-a boat beside whales.”

Chance shuddered. Even in the Valley of the Walking Man, Trumen told stories of the cannibals of the red lands and the Filthealm. He had not been sure the stories were true.

“No,” the Guardian continued. “We must save time and strength for the great threats that await us where Yggdrasil stands: there we
must face the modghasts, and then Ma’at, Keeper of the Gate, with his Anubin warriors.”

“Will the leviathans… will they try to kill us?” Sarah asked. “Will we have to fight them?”

“They would not mean harm,” Wadjet said. “If they decide to stop our flight, they can push the boat where they like. But they may argue until we land. Even the most impatient bulls do not—how do you say it?—decide, make decisions quickly. They might be told to stop us, and then we might sail to Yggdrasil while they argue still about whether to obey, or who should stop us.”

Seth looked out at the huge gray forms swimming alongside. “Our luck-ck won’t be-be that good.”

The drizzle stopped and wind rose. Wadjet set the skysail, and they sped north again, bouncing on small waves.

The clouds blew away in time to expose a flaming orange sunset over a hint of land in the east. Seth eyed the sea warily, his hackles rising every time a whale surfaced and blew a white cloud of spray. But the whales came no closer to the boat.

Chance and Sarah sat on the deck and ate from bowls of fish stew, cooked with some cod that Wadjet had caught off of a dragline during the afternoon. Soon the rest of the crew gathered with them and sat in a circle. Sarah frowned but said nothing when Wadjet sat next to Chance, folding her long legs elegantly, her knee resting against his.

“What is the plague that kills your people?” Chance asked her, as she blew upon her soup.

“It does not harm my people.”

Chance looked perplexed.

“It attacks chimpanzees. And some gorillas. It is a form of the barrenness plague.”

“What’s a chimpanzee?” Sarah asked.

“An ape. Much like us, but covered with black hair.”

“Are they soulburdened?”

Wadjet shrugged. “Some are.”

“And you care for them even though they are not men and not all soulburdened?”

Wadjet shrugged again.

Chance hesitated before he spoke. “You said you were.…”

“An exile,” Wadjet said. “A criminal.”

Chance nodded. “And if you help… if you help with this plague, then you’ll be… forgiven?”

Wadjet snorted, a sarcastic sound more like a growl than a human puff of air. “I don’t ask forgiveness. I would help friends. And show fools that I could help where they are powerless.”

And Chance thought, I know her, I know her in part, now. For I am the same. I always wanted to be the best Puriman, because so many doubted that I was a Puriman. But I wanted to do it in my own way. She wants to be better than the Stewards, at being a Steward, even though they tell her that she is not a Steward.

They were silent awhile, thinking as they ate soup. Seth noisily lapped from a bowl, and then sat between Chance and Sarah. He crossed his paws and laid his head on them with a contented sigh.

“And the Barren makes them, the.…” Sarah hesitated.

“Chimpanzees,” Wadjet said. “And gorillas.”

“… the chimpanzees sterile now?”

“Yes. They are much like us, and so a form of the disease was able to adapt to them. Once there were many apes here in these lands, but a form of the barren plague wiped them out here. Now this plague, in this form that attacks the chimpanzees, has come to our lands.”

“Not all of the apes in these lands were susceptible to the disease,” Mimir said. “A small group of apes adapted immunity. One now serves the Hexus in some capacity.”