Hiero Desteen (Omnibus) (28 page)

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.

So exhausted were the two humans that they slept through the afternoon and most of the entire night that followed. Hiero awoke in the darkness before dawn and realized at once what had happened. Before he could even form a self-reproach, the bear's voice echoed in his mind.
You needed the rest. Nothing has come near. But still
—
something watches. I know it, just as I know the sun rises.

We must be alert,
Hiero replied. He stretched, feeling so stiff that he could hardly move, although the sleep had done him a lot of good.

Luchare awoke at the movement from her place nearby. "Is that today's new sun, that dim glow? We must have had a long sleep. But I still feel like sleeping again. Is that wicked?"

"No, it's not. We're both still exhausted. I'm going to declare a rest day. I think we can finish those crossbows and cut some bolts for them too, which will make me feel a lot better. We're going to need some missile weapons for hunting, if for no other reason,"

The day began more pleasantly than any in weeks. Hiero managed to finish his own crossbow and to cut some bolts from seasoned dead saplings washed up on the island's shore.

Luchare was no help, for she spent most of the time arranging her hair, bathing, and pelting Hiero with bunches of flower petals whenever she caught him looking "too serious." At mid-afternoon, he gave up on any further work simply to lie with his head in her lap while she gossiped about her past life and speculated on their future together.

"I hope we have a long and happy one, love," he said at last. "But we're a far and distant way from it now. And you've never mentioned, in all your gabble, just what led you to run away from D'alwah. An arranged marriage, one might guess?"

She gasped in astonishment. "I knew it! You were too peering into my mind!"

"No." He smiled up at the indignant face and with his finger transferred a kiss on the end of the dark, aquiline nose. "You admitted you were no slave once before. You're the daughter of one of your great nobles, I imagine, because, by your own admission, only the priesthood and the nobility get a chance to learn as much as you have. So it was a fairly easy guess. How great a noble is your father, in your own country's terms, I mean?"

"The greatest," she said in dull tones. There was a silence.

"The actual king, eh?" Hiero no longer smiled. "Now that's a pity. Are you the only child? It might be important."

"I had one older brother, but he was killed in a battle with the Unclean. My father wanted me to marry and cement an alliance with the next most powerful state. I knew, everyone knows, ail about Efrem of Chespek. He beats and tortures his concubines. His first queen went mad and he had her blinded, divorced her as not being legally married, since the kings cannot marry people who are physically maimed, you see, and put her in a nunnery. That's what I was running away from."

"Can't say as I much blame you," Hiero said, chewing a grass stem. "I rather was hoping to establish contact with various countries, especially yours, so that I could open a trade route and, more important, we could start to recivilize your area. Stealing a princess, the only princess, is a bad start."

She bristled. "What do you mean 'recivilize?' I'll have you know, Per Desteen, my bearded priestling, D'alwah is a great and powerful nation, with two walled cities and countless churches and other big palaces and buildings of stone. To say nothing of a great and brave army!"

Hiero smiled affectionately at her and said nothing. He rolled over on his stomach and still said nothing, his chin pillowed on his arms, apparently staring away off over the lake.

"I see," she said after an even longer pause. "Those things aren't enough to be called civilized by themselves, are they, Hiero?"

"Well, what do you think?" he asked. "They go along with a basis of chattel slavery, a stranglehold on wealth and education by a small, propertied class, crushing taxes, a state religion which seems to have degenerated, at least in part, into sheer superstition, and finally, incessant, bloody warfare with your neighbors. That last would be too silly and meaningless in any case, but it weakens your society terribly, just when it needs its strength the most to fight the Unclean and the ravening monsters of your own forests. Now, you tell me if that's civilization. I'd call it pretty advanced barbarism and a plain path downhill to complete ruin."

"I suppose you're right," she said. "It's just that, having been raised as the royal princess of D'alwah and flattered and lied to by everyone from the time I could talk, I had no way of knowing anything could, or should, rather, be any different."

"I know," he said, patting her shoulder. "The amazing thing, little princess, is that you turned out the way you did. Not only lovely but smart, smart enough to admit you don't know everything. The only kind of brains worth having, that is."