by Speer, Flora
She pulled on her clothes, then went above to help him. But she took a moment when Reid was busy with the sails to look shoreward and whisper a regretful farewell to the peaceful cove and the land surrounding it, the place where she and Reid had first truly acknowledged their love, the place she would always think of as the Golden Land.
Chapter 13
“I have never seen such devastation before.’’ Alla watched the viewscreen in horrified fascination as the shuttlecraft flew over the area between the volcanoes and the sea. “The lava flow has covered almost all the land.”
“The lava was channeled far out to sea by that ridge of rocks.” Tarik indicated a dark grey area on the viewscreen. “It must have been a high promontory once, and if there was a bay beside it, which appears likely, it is gone now.”
“No one could live through something like that,” Herne said sadly from his seat next to Tarik. “We won’t find Reid alive down there, or anyone else, either.”
“Tarik, are those buildings?” Ignoring Herne’s pessimistic remarks, Alla pointed to the viewscreen in sudden eagerness. “There, just beyond the volcanic flow.”
Tarik maneuvered the shuttlecraft so they could see better.
“By all the stars!” he exclaimed. “That never showed up on the computer model. It looks like a ruined version of our headquarters. Herne, how do your instruments read?”
“The volcano appears to be quiescent,” Herne reported, adjusting a dial. “There are occasional seismic rumblings, but they are not strong enough for us to feel them, or to cause any damage to the shuttlecraft. If they increase, we can lift off. I’d say it’s safe to land, if you want a closer look.”
“Please,” Alla begged. “If there is a chance we could discover what has happened to Reid—”
“Say no more,” Tarik told her. “I want to find Reid, too. But more than that, this area is a mystery that must be solved before any of us can feel safe in our own settlement. We need to know why and how our computer model was falsified, though I believe we can see below us the reason why it recently changed shape.”
Tarik brought the shuttlecraft down well away from the still-smoking lava, landing on a small patch of smooth rock that looked as though it had been swept clean by a giant broom or whirlwind. Alla was the first one out. She stood blinking in dazzling sunlight that reflected off ruined white stone buildings. The light seemed unnaturally bright because of a lingering thin haze of volcanic ash that splintered the sun’s rays and hurt the eyes.
“The damage is worse seen from the ground.” Herne joined her, squinting against the sun. He was followed by Tarik, who strode past them, heading toward the remnants of the white building.
“Look at this,” Tarik called to them. “I was right about this place. Here is a knee-high wall, like the one around our headquarters, and when it was standing that building in the center must have been a larger version of ours.”
“There were several smaller buildings,” Alla observed.
“This was possibly an important center for whatever society built it,” Herne guessed, “but I doubt if anyone is alive here now.” Then, seeing Alla’s determined look, he added, “Still, I may as well survey it, just to be sure.” He pulled a small heat sensor out of his waist pocket and headed for the ruins. Knowing that the sensor would detect the body heat given off by any living organism, Alla followed him, holding her breath in hope.
The six smaller buildings had been destroyed to their foundations. Most of the large building was in rubble, only a curved portion of the outer wall and two columns remaining upright, but those columns were identical to the ones around the headquarters building.
“We could have learned so much from these people,” Tarik mourned.
“You don’t know there was anyone living here before the eruption,” Herne pointed out. “It is reasonable to assume these buildings date from at least the same period as our headquarters, and they may have been vacant even longer.”
“How long do textiles last in the sun and open air, Herne? Not six hundred years, surely. This is recent.” Alla had pounced upon a piece of sheer, pale blue fabric that was partly caught beneath a fallen column. She tugged at it, then stopped. ‘Tarik, come here.”
Hearing the stricken note in her voice, he went to her at once and fell to his knees to push at the stone.
“Herne, come help me,” Tarik called. “Let’s move this piece to see what’s beneath it.”
Herne hurried to his side, handing the heat sensor to Alla. The two men pushed hard until the stone rolled over. They all stared at what lay beneath it, until Alla turned her head aside, refusing for pity’s sake to look any longer.
“She must have been beautiful when she was alive,” Tarik said softly.
“She’s not long dead,” Herne said. “In this extremely dry heat, I’d say four or five days at most.”
“Then there were people living here!” Alla cried. “Reid could have reached these buildings. He could still be alive!”
“‘Could’ doesn’t mean ‘did,’” Herne responded sharply. “Tarik, I suggest we roll the stone back to cover her again. We’d never get the huge piece off that’s pinning her legs, and there may be scavenger birds or animals. I’d hate to leave her exposed like this.”
Tarik agreed, and the two men fell to work. Alla moved out of their way, still holding the heat sensor. It began to click. Because she had been clutching it in both hands and holding it close to her body while the woman was uncovered, Alla thought she might have overheated the sensing mechanism inside the device. To cool it she laid it down in the shade of a large section of a column that was leaning crookedly across another column. The heat sensor began to hum.
“Either I’ve broken it,” Alla said to no one in particular, “or there is something alive in that pile.” She picked up the sensor.
“You’ve probably broken it.” Herne had come up behind her. With an annoyed expression, he took the instrument out of her hands. “I wish people with no mechanical aptitude would leave my equipment alone.”
“You gave it to me to hold!” Alla flared. “Tarik, there is something under that column.”
“Thanks to you, this is broken,” Herne declared, holding up the sensor. “You just had a false positive reading.”
“Get the spare and double-check the reading,” Tarik suggested.
They waited until Herne returned from the shuttlecraft. Alla was in a state of uneasy excitement. Could it possibly be Reid buried beneath the columns? Had he found his way out of the forest and walked across the mountains to this place? All her intelligence told her it was impossible, but her heart was filled with hope.
Laying the second heat sensor down in the shady spot where the first had been, Herne switched it on. Immediately it began to emit a loud hum.
“Find the exact location,” Tarik instructed. “We don’t want to move heavy stone unnecessarily.”
“I think we should call for another shuttle. We need more help,” Herne said.
“There isn’t time!” Alla cried. “You said that woman had been dead for four or five days. What if someone has been trapped under those stones for all that time? Before the others can get here, he could die.”
“He?” Herne frowned at her.
“She’s right.” Tarik was inspecting the jumble of broken columns and other debris. “Let’s try to haul this big stone out first. I think then we ought to be able to see if anything really is inside this pile.”
It took all three of them, but they managed to do it without disturbing the precariously balanced columns.
“Alla, you are the thinnest one here,” Tarik said. “Can you squeeze into that space?”
“I think so.” She got down on her hands and knees, and crawled beneath the columns until she was flat on her belly with her left arm jammed down at her side and her right hand at chin level. She did not care that it was dangerous. This might be Reid. Or it might be someone who could tell her where he was. It was worth the risk. Tarik slid his
hand in to pass her a flexible tubelight. When she switched it on, she drew in her breath in amazement, forgetting to be disappointed because it was not Reid.
She had never seen so perfect a male face. It appeared to be chiseled out of the same smooth white stone as the columns. She might have thought it was a statue except for the blue dot and twin crescent tattoo on the forehead and the fact that the man breathed in short, noisy gasps. Balancing the tubelight between her left shoulder and her chin, she inched her right arm forward until her fingers touched his cheek. Pale eyelids rose. Sea-blue eyes stared at her, then closed again. Alla was stricken by the pain and hopelessness in those eyes.
“We will help you,” she told the unknown man. She was fully aware that the chances were good he could not understand her, but still she wanted to reassure him and the sound of her voice might do that. “We will get you out of here. I promise it won’t take long. Just stay alive. Please, please, stay alive.”
The ground shuddered a little. Small pieces of shattered stone rained on Alla’s head. She felt the columns above her shifting. Heavy white dust sifted downward, coating her out-thrust right arm and hand, along with the still face before her, making the man look even more like a statue.
“Alla?” That was Tarik, sounding urgent. “Alla, are you all right?”
She began to back out of the cramped space. It was hard to do. After a few moments of struggle, she was glad to feel two pairs of hands on her lower legs, pulling her free of the stones. Then she sat in shatteringly bright sunlight, breathing deeply, but still refusing to admit to herself that she had been afraid.
“There’s a man in there,” she finally was able to say. “I think he has been badly hurt, but he is alive. I told him we would get him out.”
“What?” Herne glared at her, looking angry, while Tarik helped her to stand.
“It’s not Reid,” she said, nearly weeping with disappointment. “Not Reid.”
While Tarik and Herne hurriedly discussed how best to employ the equipment they had aboard the shuttlecraft to free the injured man, Alla stood staring at the pile of broken stone columns where he lay. She was fighting hard to control both sorrow and elation. To be part of saving a life that surely would have ended soon without help was cause for rejoicing. But where was Reid? Was he here, buried under rubble like the man at her feet? Was he somewhere else, and was he safe or hurt? Was he dead, as Herne believed? She could not think so. She could not feel that Reid was dead.
When Tarik ordered her to take one of the heat sensors and use it to survey the entire walled area, she examined every atom of the temple complex along with any likely places within walking distance. There was no other sign of life.
Extracting the man from the unstable rubble surrounding him was a tedious job, made more dangerous for him and difficult for his rescuers by the occasional earth tremors that shook the area. They got him out toward evening, strapped him to a stretcher, and laid him in the cargo hold of the shuttlecraft, where Herne at once began using his diagnostic rods and various treatment instruments.
Alla sat beside Tarik on the flight back to headquarters.
“Perhaps, when he can talk again, he’ll be able to tell us about Reid,” she said.
“Don’t expect too much,” Tarik cautioned her. “According to Herne, he’s seriously dehydrated and badly enough injured that he might not live. It will be a long time before he can speak, if he ever does.”
“He will know something about Reid,” Alla whispered, half to herself. “He will. I’m certain of it.”
* * * * *
Reid and Janina sailed due north on a sea as deeply blue and calm as the sky above them. They stayed within sight of land, riding the current that swept toward the polar region. Once they left the low green area around the mouth of the river where they had stopped for several days, the coastline quickly became a dull, lifeless grey-brown.
The sky, however, more than made up for the colorless land. Each evening, they were treated to a vibrantly brilliant sunset as the volcanic ash still in the upper atmosphere turned purple, green, and red in startlingly beautiful combinations. Sunrises were almost as colorful, and Janina much preferred them. Coward that she was, she feared the long nights, during which sea monsters might creep up on them to devour them before they even saw the terrible creatures. Sunrise, on the other hand, meant that they had survived another night and had hours of daylight ahead of them when they would be able to see any lurking monsters and at least try to sail away from them. She did not tell Reid of her fears, but she knew he was aware of them. She also knew that he did not believe the sea monsters really existed.
On the sixth day after leaving the river, they reached an area of dark red-and-gold striated rock cliffs, which had been eroded by sea and wind into wildly improbable shapes. The topmost layer of rock hung far out over the sea, like a canopy. Well beyond the cliffs, individual rocks rose out of the water in striped, treacherous beauty. Foam broke the surface of the sea in many places where Janina could see no rocks, but she knew they were there, hidden and dangerous.
“We are going to stop overnight,” Reid decided. “I don’t want to navigate this part of the coast in the dark if I don’t have to, and if I remember the computer model correctly, there won’t be any other places to drop anchor so we can rest until after we have rounded the cape.”
He then proceeded to maneuver the boat so close to the overhanging rocks that Janina began to be afraid they would be dashed onto them.
Before long, Reid found what he was searching for, a sheltered inlet with a narrow opening to the sea. Inside it, the water was quiet and crystal clear, allowing him to navigate easily around the many rocks that jutted out of the little harbor.
“Time for a bath,” Reid declared once they were safely anchored. He flashed her a grin, reminding her of the baths they had enjoyed together at their first anchorage. But this was a very different place from that sunny cove.
“It’s too cold,” Janina protested, “and those rocks look dangerous.”
But Reid was already pulling off his clothes. He stood poised on the stern for a heartbeat of time, a tall, strong, magnificently proportioned man. Then he was gone, cutting into the water with hardly a splash.
Janina hung over the side, looking for him. She wished she could be as brave and carefree as Reid was, instead of constantly worrying about sea monsters. Reid surfaced farther away from the boat than she would have believed possible. He waved to her, beckoning her to join him.
Vowing not to show her fear of the water, not to let him know what a quivering coward she was, she removed tunic and trousers, then quickly went down the ladder. The water was unbelievably cold. Left to herself, she would have dipped no more than one foot in it, but Reid was calling her and she wanted him to think she was as indifferent to danger as he was. She decided that the best way to go in was all at once. It would be less painful that way.
She released her grip on the ladder, letting herself fall into the icy wetness. Just as she plunged beneath the surface she remembered to hold her breath, but the cold made her gasp, so she choked on the salty water. She thought she had fallen to the center of the world before she began to rise again, too slowly for her empty lungs. She bobbed to the top, gulping for air, shivering violently from the cold. Then, recalling Reid’s lessons, she lay on her back and began to float. She was certain she would freeze to death within a moment or two.
“Swim,” Reid ordered from just beside her. “Turn over and move your arms and legs. It will warm you.”
It did help a little. Still, she was glad to climb out of the water onto a striped rock that angled upward at one side of the inlet. Here, where they were sheltered from the wind, a late-season sun had warmed the rock. Janina sat down on it, pushing wet hair out of her face. She saw the boat riding at anchor more than half the distance across the inlet.
“Did I swim that far?” she asked in amazement.
“You are better at it than you think.” Reid perched beside her, re
sting one hand on her thigh. “I regret there is no soft beach we could use for a bed tonight. This rock is hard, and the bunks are so narrow.”
She met his dark eyes and melted into them. Then she felt the rough rock against her back as Reid’s weight bore down on her, his mouth searching for hers. She cried out in pain. He pulled away from her at once.
“This bed is too rough for you to lie on,” he said. “Shall we swim back to the boat?”
“Can you wait?” she asked, surprised at his suggestion.
“Not very happily,” he teased her, “but wait I will. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I thought,” she blushed a little and her tongue stumbled as she recalled their romantic interludes in the cove. ”I thought when the man wanted, it had to be done at once.”
“Sometimes it is sweeter for waiting,” he answered, mischief lighting his face. “I’ll show you.”
He rose and went back into the water. It looked to Janina as though he simply walked off the rock into the sea, but when she tried it, she slipped on a wet spot and fell hard, knocking the air out of her. She skidded across the wet edge of the rock and fell into the water. Reid caught her hair and pulled her to the surface, then towed her away from the rock.
“Can you swim or are you injured?” he asked, his face filled with concern for her.
“I can swim,” she sputtered, unwilling to let him know how the salt water stung the scrapes on her legs or the scratches on her back. Knowing that he cared what happened to her made her feel braver. Somehow she made it to the ladder at the stern of the boat. There Reid stopped her.
“I want you,” he said, and kissed her hard.
Janina responded eagerly. He was so warm, and they had not made love since leaving the river. There had been no time, for they had taken turns sleeping and sailing the boat. She did not trust the unknown water of the inlet. It was deeper than the river cove had been, and any kind of terrible sea creatures might lurk there. But if this was where Reid wanted her, in the same way in which she had once wantonly assaulted him, then she would not resist. She could feel his hardness against her when he held her. Her arms were around his neck. He caressed her body quickly with eager, knowing hands, and suddenly the water did not feel cold any more. But she thought it likely they would both drown if he did not hold on to the ladder when he finally took her. Then she heard his deep chuckle.
