Out of the Waters

by David Drake

  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.

  The pieced-together crystal gave a pop and shivered to sparkling powder. The dancers vanished, leaving only ruins and the jungle.

  Lann gulped, then gave a series of gulps like nothing Hedia had heard from him before. She looked closely, afraid that the toy had injured her protector when it burst.

  The ape-man squatted on his haunches, his head bowed and his fingertips touching the dug-up soil in front of him. He was crying.

  Hedia got to her feet and went to Lann’s side. She placed her hands on his shoulders and began rubbing them. His long, reddish hair was softer than she had imagined, more like a cat’s fur than a horse’s. The ape-man’s skin was loose over the muscles, but those muscles were as firm as a bronze statue.

  She squatted, still massaging him. She would rather have kneeled, but she didn’t want to chance lumps of broken crystal in the dirt.

  “There, now,” she said. He wouldn’t understand the words, but he could hear her tone. “We’re alive, dear Lann. You saved me. You’re so strong, darling. I’ve never met a man as strong as you. No one could be as strong as you.”

  The ape-man turned his head to look at her; his biceps rubbed her breasts. She smiled.

  His broad, flat nostrils suddenly flared. He stood, taking Hedia by the shoulders.

  His member protruded from its furry sheath. It was not, she was glad to see, nearly as much out of ordinary human scale as the remainder of Lann’s physique was.

  Lann turned Hedia around and started to bend her over. Not on this ground, not even if you were no stronger and heavier than I’m used to.

  She wriggled free of his hands. He hooted in obvious surprise, but he followed when she touched his fingertips and led him to the slab where she had been sitting.

  It took a series of gestures and pats for Hedia to convince the ape-man to sit on the edge. She was about to straddle him in a sitting position when a whim struck her. She touched Lann’s shoulders again, then mimed shoving him backward. Still puzzled but willing, the ape-man lay flat.

  About time, Hedia thought as she stood over him, because I’m really ready!

  She lowered herself, carefully at first but then driving herself down with a scream of satisfaction.

  The last time I did this … Hedia thought. She burst out laughing.

  It would never have been like this with poor dear Saxa. Even if the Servitors hadn’t appeared.

  CHAPTER XV

  Alphena laid the shaman down full length on the mat that he’d used to cover the entrance to the kiva. She sat beside him for a moment, waiting to catch her breath.

  Nobody seemed to be coming from the village with food and her garment. She got to her feet. The axe was balanced in her hand, the shaft upright. She had gotten the feel of the weapon and was coming to like it.

  Two women—Sanga and her companion from the field—immediately started from the huts carrying pots. Moments later a boy followed at a run with Alphena’s tunic.

  Alphena smiled in a fashion and sat down again. She supposed she looked foolish, muddy and nude, but these westerners weren’t laughing. That showed they understood the situation. She might not be the magician that they thought she was, but with this axe she could certainly teach a few barbarians to respect a citizen of Carce.

  The women approached with their heads bent so low that they were looking at their own bosoms rather than at the ground. “Mistress,” Sanga muttered. She didn’t have her infant with her.

  They had brought a pot containing maize and flat beans cooked into a porridge, a separate container of meat stew, and a skin bottle. Both pots were of red clay. They weren’t glazed but they had been blackened during firing and were marked on the outside with herringbone scratches.

  The women started off as soon as they delivered the food. Alphena said, “Wait!” to stop them.

  She tried the skin. It was water, but some kind of berries had been crushed into it to counteract the brackish taste; it would do.

  “You,” she said, pointing to the woman whose name she didn’t know. “Bring us a basin of plain water. I want to wash off.”

  The boy handed the tunic, damp but folded, to Alphena. He seemed about six years old, and as naked as she was. Unlike the young women, he stared at her in fascination.

  Uktena rolled onto his elbow. Sanga wailed softly. She didn’t disobey Alphena’s order to remain, but she sank to her knees and turned her head away. The other woman scampered away.

  The shaman’s muscles bunched as though he were about to sit up. Instead he relaxed and smiled. He said, “You brought me out of the sound, little one.”

  “I said I would stand with you, my friend,” Alphena said. “We have food. Is there anything else you want from the village?”

  “No,” Uktena said. “Sanga, was anyone from Cascotan injured when we fought?”

  “No, master,” the woman mumbled. Her eyes were closed. “We ran into the woods when we saw what was happening.”

  Sanga looked up cautiously—she seemed more afraid of Alphena than of the shaman. Perhaps she was right in her concern, because Uktena wouldn’t deliberately hurt his own people.

  She said, “Bocascat’s hut burned. And trees near where we were hiding burned. It was like lightning, but purple and much worse.”

  She lowered her head again and whispered, “Master, will it happen again?”

  “Yes,” said Uktena. “It will happen until the Atlantean dies or I die.”

  “Sanga, you can go,” Alphena said, hearing the rasp in her voice. Didn’t they see what Uktena was risking for them?

  “You too, boy,” she added to the child. She wondered if the word meant slave in this language as it did in her own.

  Sanga turned thankfully. The boy might have lingered, but the woman twined her fingers in his hair and dragged him yelping after her.

  Uktena scooped porridge with three fingers of his right hand. He swallowed and said, “Will you go with me tomorrow, little one?”

  “Yes,” Alphena said. She was bone tired. She had been at the end of her strength by the time she got the shaman to shore; if he had fallen a little farther out in the sound, she would have been unable to help.

  But she would go. She would try.

  Uktena gave her a smile that looked straight into her heart. She blinked.

  “We will eat,” he said, “and sleep. I will be able to manage the ladder. And in the morning, my friend Alphena, we shall see what we shall see.”

  “Yes,” Alphena said.

  And every morning. Until Procron dies, or Uktena dies.

  Or I die.

  * * *

  HEDIA STRETCHED LUXURIANTLY while the ape-man resumed rummaging among the overgrown rubble. She ached, and she suspected she would ache still more by the next morning, but she wasn’t complaining. No, quite the contrary.…

  The bird or one like it sounded its clear gong-note from the canopy again. Lann ignored it as he lifted a block of crystal at least half the size of the one Hedia now lay on. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who had found the recent break to have been a much-needed relief from stress.

  Lann tilted backward at a thirty-degree angle and waddled to the edge of where the undamaged fortress had stood. He pitched the block outward. A simple beast wouldn’t have bothered to discard it where it wouldn’t get in the way of further excavation. His huge flat feet seemed to grip on any slope.

  Someone so big should be clumsy. Hedia had known—briefly—a pair of acrobats, and they even in combination weren’t nearly as flexible as Lann had proven. She grinned broadly
and got to her feet.

  The ape-man returned to the cavity he had opened in the foliage. He squatted, cooed with delight, and plunged his hands deep in the hole. Whatever they gripped resisted for a moment; then he lifted it to the surface.

  Hedia went over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, both to warn him of where she was standing and—as she knew in her heart—to proclaim her ownership. She looked at the object Lann was cleaning with his thumbs, then tongue.

  Blurs of light swirled about them. They sometimes seemed to resemble paintings viewed sharply from one side or the other.

  Making tiny burbling noises, the ape-man displayed a circular orichalc ring holding a lens six inches across, ground from a material so clear that only the few remaining streaks of dirt on its surface proved that the frame wasn’t empty.

  The posts to which the frame had been attached, though barely wires, were orichalc; Lann had wrenched them apart. That was the most remarkable feat of strength Hedia had seen him perform yet.

  Lann held the apparatus by one of the broken posts. He glanced toward Hedia to make sure he had her attention, then touched the lens with a finger of his free hand. Though the finger looked like a watercock from a public distribution point in Carce, the motion was precise and delicate.

  Images appeared, this time vivid and complete. Hedia wasn’t so much seeing them as existing in their midst in place of the jungle where she had been a moment earlier.

  They were close to the keep of a Minos, a tall spire whose crystal walls were as black as the smoke rolling from a funeral pyre. Around it spread the usual village of huts, but the figures living in them were not human—or at any rate, were not wholly human.

  A woman pranced on hind legs like a zebra’s, and a man with the head of a deer turned the wheel of a pump. Many residents had the arms, legs, or head of monkeys like the one which had chittered in the canopy when Hedia sailed past in the grip of the Servitors.

  One pair, an obvious couple, aroused her interest as well as her disgust. Each was half human, half goat: the male’s upper half was human; his mate was human below the waist.

  Hedia didn’t see any hybrids with great apes like Lann, but she now knew what she was looking at. This was the keep of Procron, before the other Minoi grouped to drive him from Atlantis.

  Lann moved his index finger slightly. Hedia was almost sure that he didn’t actually touch the lens, but its viewpoint shifted slowly toward the smoky crystal walls.

  She wondered if anyone else—herself, for example—could control the device, but it didn’t really matter. That wasn’t the sort of business that a lady, that a citizen of Carce, bothered with. There were slaves to handle mechanical things.

  She and Lann entered the spire. About them objects moved with the detached silence of vultures circling in the high sky.

  Procron, helmetless but otherwise bright in orichalc armor, was the only human or part-human figure present. Three Servitors—no, four; one stood in an alcove midway up the inward-sloping walls—waited motionless.

  Are we actually present, watching this? Hedia wondered. Or is it a stage show, being acted by ghosts or demons?

  Procron turned so that he would be facing Hedia if she were present in his reality. He had dark, narrow features, black hair, and eyes as fierce as an eagle’s. He cradled in both gauntleted hands the skull of something nearly human. Either it had been carved from diamond or diamond had replaced the original bone.

  Purple light crackled, blurring the edges of the orichalc armor and the surfaces of objects close to Procron, including one of the Servitors. The Minos began to rise gradually; for a moment Hedia thought that he was simply growing taller.

  The diamond skull seemed alive. Fire blazed in its cavities and highlighted its complex sutures.

  It’s real. No sculptor could carve pieces of crystal so perfectly.

  The spire was over a hundred feet high. The purple light brightened around Procron as he rose. As he passed, the Servitor in the alcove spread its glass arms, then let them fall to its side like those of a marionette whose strings had been jerked, then cut.

  When Procron reached the peak, his gleaming form paused for a moment. Nothing in the tall room moved; the wheels and spirals and other spinning objects—Hedia wasn’t sure whether they were glass or merely forms of light—remained frozen.

  The top of the spire split open, the two halves folding down like black wings. Procron stood in open air. The sky had been clear when Lann took their viewpoint through the crystal walls; now it was a roiling black mass, sending down sheets of rain which splashed on the hovering Minos and dripped into the fortress.

  Procron lifted the diamond skull. Lightning struck him. To Hedia everything went white, then shimmering purple. Lightning struck again, a huge bolt which boiled water from the surface of the spire and ignited several huts in the cantonments built at its base. The walls were dimly transparent from inside, making the smoky yellow flames visible.

  Procron lowered the skull toward his own head. The third lightning bolt seemed to focus the whole sky onto the Minos. Sizzling fireballs spat out like blobs ejected from the heart of Aetna.

  Nothing moved; there was no sound in all the world.

  Procron raised his empty hands to the sky. Purple fire from his spreading fingertips split the clouds, shoving them away with the violence of waves bursting through a wall of sand.

  Where Procron’s human head had been, now the diamond skull rested. The mouth opened, and the Minos laughed. His voice was the thunder which had not followed the third lightning bolt. His armored form began to sink toward the floor of the fortress as the peak folded closed above him.

  Hedia was transfixed. She was only dimly aware that the ape-man beside her had pointed toward the lens—now invisible—again.

  They were back in the jungle. Lann set the lens on a section of wall which hadn’t been thrown down during Procron’s attack. He stepped into the cavity from which he had lifted the device.

  Hedia looked around, disappointed to return to this wilderness of destruction but thankful as well. Procron was frightening, even when viewed from a great distance through time and space. Even without the transformation she had just watched, she knew that Procron wasn’t a man whom she could expect to twist to her will.

  The ape-man was straining at another large fragment of the ruin. Hedia frowned and moved a little farther away. People concentrating on a difficult task tended to forget everything else, and she didn’t want to find herself under a slab of crystal because Lann didn’t remember she was present.

  The distant thump, thump she heard was a flying ship; probably several of them. The Minoi had found them.

  “Lann!” she said urgently. “I hear ships coming!”

  The ape-man straightened slowly, pivoting a block too large for even him to carry. His lips were drawn back in a grimace which bared his teeth.

  There was a deeper blackness in the leaf mold over which the crystal had lain: the entrance to a tunnel. Lann had been aware of the approaching vessels long before she was.

  The ape-man gave a great cry and with a final push sent the overbalanced block toppling into the surrounding vegetation. It had been almost too much, even for him. He fell forward, sprawling across the edge of the pit he had just created.

  Hedia hesitated for a moment. Lann drew in whooping gasps that sounded as though he were being strangled, but the beating sails of the Minoi were drawing closer.

  She jumped down beside the ape-man and put her hand on his shoulder. “Lann?” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

  The ape-man straightened as much as he ever did. It was like standing beside a horse: powerful, exciting, but for the moment not even marginally human.

  “Wook!” he said. He took the lens in his left hand and wormed his way through the mouth of the tunnel.

  His hand reached back to summon her, but Hedia was already poising to follow. She wore the dagger on the bandolier and dragged the orichalc spear behind her.

  She
didn’t know where they were going, but she knew what it would mean to be captured again. That wasn’t going to happen if she could prevent it.

  * * *

  THE SAILS BEAT ONLY FITFULLY, like the breaths of an animal in its death throes. Corylus looked back on their course, his face as blank as he would have kept it if he were on the wrong side of the Rhine and the bushes around him were rustling. He didn’t see the giant eel, but by now it couldn’t be far behind.

  “There’s an island,” the sprite called from the bow. “To the west, see?”

  A finger of stone thrust up from the horizon, casting its long shadow toward them against the glowing red water. Only a thumbnail edge of the sun was still visible.

  “Yes!” Corylus said with a rush of relief. He moved to her side, calling, “Master, steer to that island, if you please. Ah, will you, will we, be able to rise to the top?”

  It was another nearly vertical pillar, at least as tall as the first one, and again there was no beach at the base. The ship’s keel was some twenty feet above the wave tops; not nearly high enough to land on the island, and probably not safe from the eel if it caught up with them either.

  The Ancient chuckled but said nothing. Corylus felt the ship turn slightly. It moved like a piece of driftwood which had been in the water so long that it could barely float.

  Corylus had tied his helmet to the base of the mast, using a cord clipped from the netting which held the bread. He slipped it on, though he didn’t close the face guard yet. He lifted his sword and let it fall back, just making sure that it was free in the scabbard.

  “Are you afraid of what’s on this island?” the sprite said. “Nothing lives here. Nothing for longer than you can imagine.”

  Corylus lifted his chin in understanding. “I’m glad to hear that,” he said.

  And he was. But they were going to land anyway, even if it meant battling wolfmen until he or all of them were dead. There was at least a chance with that, but an eel several hundred feet long was an adversary as hopeless as an avalanche was.

  If we can land, that is.