David Drake - Out of the waters

Treading water, Uktena looked out toward his opponent. Procron showed no signs of returning to try conclusions again. Carefully, painfully, the shaman began to stroke for shore.

Alphena, waist deep when the sea was at rest, watched for a moment in hesitation. She bent and took off her sandals, throwing them to shore. Holding the axe helve with her knees, she pulled her tunic over her head. After rolling it into a loose rope and retrieving the axe, she walked in the shallows toward the line Uktena was taking.

Overhead, the clouds were breaking up again. Alphena thought it had rained briefly, but the swirling battle had whipped the sea to froth; the spatters she felt might have come from that.

Uktena had paused. A swell lifted him; when it dipped away again, he lay as motionless as a mass of seaweed.

Alphena sloshed forward. "My friend!" she called. "My friend Uktena!"

The black spire had closed again. Procron must have returned to his fortress; at any rate, Alphena couldn't see him any more.

Uktena roused and splashed feebly. Alphena shouted, but it wasn't a word. She bobbed out as far as she dared and flung the end of her rolled tunic toward the shaman. For a moment she was afraid that he wouldn't take it; then one of his sinewy hands twisted itself into the fabric.

Alphena's feet didn't touch bottom when her nose was above water. She dipped, digging her toes into the sand as she pulled hard on the makeshift rope. With the slack that gave her, she fought a foot or two closer to shore and repeated the process. She could swim, but not well and not while holding the axe. She wasn't going to let go of the axe.

After a very long time, she could walk normally. Uktena tried to get to his feet. His eyes were blank. Alphena threw his right arm over her shoulders and gripped that wrist with her left hand. Staggering-she was exhausted, and the shaman was a solid weight, not large but all bone and muscle-she started for the kiva.

She saw the pipe. Bending carefully she retrieved it and held the reed stem alongside the axe helve.

Smoke hung over the village. The end poles of one of the huts stood at the edge of a blackened oval. In the center, the ground had been blasted into a waist-deep pit on whose edges grains of sand in the soil had been fused into glass. Several other fires lifted coils of smoke from the pines in the near distance.

The three sages squatted with their heads close together, whispering among themselves. They didn't call to Alphena, but their eyes followed her and the shaman. The villagers watched also, in silence.

"Bring us food and water!" Alphena shouted. "At once!"

She didn't know whether she would be able to get Uktena into his underground chamber. There was time enough to decide that when they reached the entrance.

"And bring my sandals and tunic!" she added. "I left them where we came out of the water."

They would have been that much more to carry. She still had the axe, though.

Alphena walked slowly toward the kiva under the weight of her friend. She tried to forget the image of the monster which had battled the Atlantean wizard.

A bird-or frog, or lizard, or Venus knew what-squealed imperiously from the canopy above them. Hedia didn't bother to look up. She was numb from stress and from stumbling through the jungle.

And from lack of sleep, now that she thought about it. She hadn't slept since the previous morning when she was on the run from the Servitors, and she hadn't slept well then.

Lann gave a sharp bark and halted. Hedia stopped also, but she lost her balance and almost toppled into the ape-man. She lifted the spear-with difficulty; the muscles of her arms didn't obey any better than her legs were doing-and tried to look in all directions to find the threat.

There was no threat. They were back in the ruined keep where Hedia had first escaped from the Servitors. It was Lann's keep, she had been told by one of the hunters on the ship. Now Lann was squatting, pulling apart the vegetation that had grown through the blocks of shattered crystal.

Hedia looked for a place to sit. An oval slab of roof had fallen without breaking further. Its longer axis was greater than she was tall. Vines had squirmed up from around its edges, but no shoot could penetrate crystal which was nearly a foot thick. She used the dagger to saw through a few stems, then pulled them out of the way and seated herself.

She had wanted to get off her feet even more than she wanted something to eat, but she was hungry enough to eat a snake raw. She looked around hopefully, then reminded herself that she might better watch what the ape-man was doing. Her chances of escaping the Minoi-not to mention her only realistic chances of getting something to eat-depended on him.

Lann raised a piece of charred wood. A branch flung burning into the fortress when Procron shattered it? Hedia thought. Then she noticed that the underside of the wood had been carved in the supple likeness of a woman's calf. It was part of a wooden statue; the fragment had been perfectly modeled.

The ape-man put the leg down beside him and dug again into the pile before him. The fortress had crumbled into chunks of varying size, ranging mostly from as big as Hedia's fist down to sparkling sand. No more wood appeared, though his spade-like hands came out blackened by charcoal. His palms were longer than a man's whole hand, with relatively short fingers.

Hedia wondered if Lann-when he was human-had carved the statue himself, and who he had used for a model. Absently, she rubbed her own right calf.

The ape-man rose to a half-crouch, not quite as erect as even his normal bent posture. He walked splay-footed a few paces further into the ruin. Bending, he began to tear out saplings with spindly trunks and a few broad leaves.

The bird called again. Lann leaped erect and screamed a challenge. Sweeping up a block as big as his own head, he hurled it toward the sound. The missile crashed against a tree trunk as loudly as a ballista releasing, but it must have missed. The bird gave a startled squawk and flew away. It sent back a diminishing series of complaints.

Hedia rolled her legs under her so that she could leap off the slab in any direction if she needed to, but she continued to smile. She was confident that none of the men she'd met in the past would have realized how tense she was, although Lann might smell it in her sweat.

She was watchful rather than afraid. This wasn't a new experience for her, though it was unusual in that the ape-man wasn't drunk.

Lann gave a final growl, then pulled up another sapling. Its roots bound a piece of garnet or ruby, a fragment of a triangle which would have been have been four inches on a side when it was whole. Lann buffed it clean with his thumbs and set it on a woody runner thick enough to have been the trunk of a small tree. He went back to work.

Hedia wondered how long ago the destruction had occurred. Her first thought would have been "decades," but the night she had spent in this soggy jungle had shown her how quickly plants sprouted here.

Cooing with excitement, the ape-man came up with two more crystal fragments. He rubbed them clean like the first piece, then licked the mating surfaces with a black tongue the size of a toilet sponge.

He fitted the parts together with care that Hedia wouldn't have thought his broad fingers were capable of. Holding the recreated triangle in his left hand, he touched it in the center with his right.

The crystal buzzed and turned a brilliant, saturated red which didn't illuminate the ape-man's hand or anything else. Music played and dancers, both male and female, whirled about the jungle with high steps and complicated arm movements.

Hedia would have said they were real human beings with identifiable features, but they danced unhindered through trees and piles of rubble. The music was bewitchingly unfamiliar, similar to that of an organ but much finer and more clear.