Hiero Desteen: 01 - Hiero's Journey (28 page)

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.

Luchare and Hiero had become so inured to their toil that the first light of dawn was a surprise, brought to their notice by the fact that they could now see one another's faces clearly.

"My love," the priest said wearily, "if I look half as dirty and tired as you do, I must be the worst-looking thing around."

"You look much worse," was the answer. "I may never kiss you again, at least not until I can scrape you off with a knife first." Tired as she was, the girl's voice was buoyant with love and happiness.

"Look at that damned morse," Hiero grunted, changing the subject. "He's getting back at me for all the riding, galloping, spurring, and general hard labor I've put him through."

Klootz was indeed asleep, only his great ears twitching under his antlers, giant legs tucked neatly under his barrel. Beside him, the bear also slept on, as usual allowing nothing to come between him and his rest.

"They're supposed to be on watch. We could have been eaten by now with guards like that!"

"I know, Hiero, but we haven't been. I'm so tired and dirty it would almost be a relief, anyway. Where are we, do you suppose?"

The raft was drifting slowly along what once must have been a mighty avenue. The close-packed buildings on either side were so tall, even in their antique ruin, that most of the sunlight never reached the water lapping at their sides. As a result, few plants grew here. The water, too, seemed much deeper. The two had been using the paddles for the last hour or so.

They could see light far ahead and equally far behind, but great, ruined structures hemmed them in on both sides. There were bays and gaps in the looming, moss-hung cliffs and walls of stone, shadowed niches and caves, but the general effect was that of being in the bottom of some vast canyon. As the daylight grew, this effect was heightened, rather than the reverse.

Hiero looked about him carefully. Then his eye returned to one spot; he saw something which sent a cold chill up his spine.

Luchare!
His mental voice jolted her as no spoken word could have.
Don't make a sound. Look at that opening to the right, at the water through the big hole in that building.

The gloomy light was nevertheless quite strong enough to delineate the place Hiero was staring at. A huge masonry wall, or possibly a vast gate, for it was hard to tell, had collapsed in a distant age. The water flowed through the wide gap and into a still pool, hundreds of yards across, completely surrounded by more shadowed and lofty structures as far as the two could see.

In the middle of the pool, directly opposite the entrance to the watery "street" on which now rode the raft, a tall, thin object rose directly from the surface of the quiet water. At first, Hiero had assumed that it was some inanimate structure of an unknown type, perhaps a spire of some long-sunk house. But his eye had strayed back to it, warned by a physical sense he could not define, and with a thrill of horror he saw that it was ever so gently moving. Then the shape, like
that of a giant amber leaf, complete with ribs, or vanes, became clear. They were looking at a colossal fin, whose owner lay just under the turgid surface of the water. The sheer bulk of the creature defied the imagination.

It must lie there in ambush,
Hiero sent,
waiting for what passes. If we stay still, there's a chance.

Indeed, a gentle current was taking them past the opening, although at a rate which seemed absolutely leaden. The two animals still lay in the center of the raft, apparently asleep. Yet both were not.

I heard you,
came Gorm's thought.
What is the danger? I can see nothing.

Something very large, just under the water,
came Hiero's answer.
Do not move. It watches. It could eat this whole raft, I think. I will try to reach its mind.

Try he did, on every mental band he knew, including the new one he had learned to use while on Manoon. But as the raft lazily drifted on, he had to acknowledge defeat. Whatever monster lay embayed back there, it sent out nothing he could distinguish from the thousands of other life essences in the waters around them. The size of the thing was no clue to its mental activity, and its sheer bulk gave off no mental radiation, at least not any that he could perceive.

They drifted until even the buildings around the place where they had seen the fin were out of sight. Then and then only did Hiero signal to Luchare to resume paddling. And both did so with great care, being careful to splash as little as possible.

They had still a very long way to go down the gloomy canyon when Hiero exclaimed aloud, "Push her over to this side. I see something we badly need."

Between the two of them, they got the raft wedged into the angle of a great building which jutted out a little beyond its fellows. Hiero told Luchare to hang on and hold it there.

"Look," he said, "we're in luck—a copper band around this level of windows."

He had glimpsed the sickly verdigris of the copper as the raft approached it and remembered their three-quarters-finished crossbows. Using his belt knife and the pole's butt end, he managed to pry a strip weighing several pounds loose and onto the raft. Under the coating of verdigris, the metal was untouched.

"I think it's bronze," he said, looking carefully at it. "Better than copper too, lots harder. We have enough to tip a hundred arrows here. Lucky it lasts forever."

Luchare shivered. "I'm glad too, but let's get moving. I still find this place makes me sick. All those old windows seem to be watching us. And where are we going to spend today? The sun's all the way up now, even if it looks so gloomy down here."

"I don't know. We'll have to keep paddling, that's all. Maybe we'll find an island or a cove or something. Perhaps an opening in the side of one of these buildings. One without an occupant," he added.

Despite the steady increase of light, they had little choice, save to keep moving. The gentle current was growing stronger, for one thing, and for another, no more large breaks in the walls of stone occurred. The eddying stream helped now, though; the opening at the far end of the long line of buildings drew rapidly closer, far more rapidly than if they had been forced to propel themselves unaided. And the current also had prevented the formation of any mats of vegetation, so that no more cutting was necessary.

Still, it was almost noon when the raft shot from the darkness between the lines of towering ruins and out into the sunlight. For a moment the passengers were dazzled by the light, but when they saw clearly, Luchare let out an exclamation of delight and, dropping her paddle, clapped her hands together.

They had emerged into, and now were drifting in, a small lake whose clear blue water indicated great depth and a probable close connection with the Inland Sea. Around its fringe, many buildings formed a ring, save in one direction, the south, where a wide gap was evident.

But it was the middle of the lake that held their attention. A small, green island, covered with bushes and palm trees and showing patches of grass here and there, rose out of the lake's waters. Bright-colored flowers, yellows and blues, glowed amid the herbage. And flocks of small birds circled here and there, while a raft of mingled geese and ducks, brown and white, fed in the shallows on the side facing the raft. After the days and nights in the gloom and stench, the insects and frogs, the fear and the labor, the place looked like Paradise.

"Come on, Hiero," she urged. "Let's get over there quickly. That place is big enough even to have a spring. We can get clean. Those trees may have fruit, and we can probably get a few ducks. Hurry!"

But the priest stood immobile, holding his paddle. True, the island did indeed look inviting. Perhaps too much so! He had not forgotten, tired though he was, the stealthy sensations of the past few days, the weird calling in the twilight, the feeling that the party were somehow being kept under observation. This place was still surrounded by the drowned city and its ravaged buildings, attractive though it looked.

But fatigue won over caution. They had to rest somewhere, and both he and Luchare were nearly at the end of their respective ropes. Also, the need for food, fresh food, and clean water was urgent. And the animals needed them both as well.

"Come on, then," he said and began to paddle. "At least we can hide there for the rest of the day. But don't talk so loudly! This place is no Abbey home for the aged and unwell! I still sense some strange mental undercurrent that scares me, that I can't pin down."

A gently sloping beach on one end made the little island almost perfect. And there
was
a
spring, or rather a dew pond, filled with clear, sweet water, set in the island's center and surrounded by tall ferns and sweet-smelling flowers. To make matters complete, Hiero found a bed of freshwater clams in the shallows of the beach, and the three carnivores feasted on the raw, juicy shellfish until they could hold no more. Klootz paid the clams no attention but began to put away pounds of grass and shrubbery at once.

By mid-afternoon, washed, cleaned, and with full stomachs, all were fast asleep, save for Klootz, who still roved the island, selecting the finest bits of leaf and twig while mounting an alert watch at the same time. Even he had rolled in the clear water, and now he was engaged at intervals in rubbing the last of the soft velvet off his great rack of gleaming, black antlers. At times he paused and looked about, then, seeing nothing, fell to eating again.