Kavin's World

by David Mason

  I remembered, and laughed with her; and for a while it was as though the weight lifted from me.

  The old directions were correct. Each point we passed checked against them, and one day we saw the marshes along the shore, where that river was said to be, and the other markings. We steered closer, and I scanned the wide plain of reeds for signs of the canoe-men. There were none as far as I could see. I determined that we could fill every water cask, if the river was indeed behind that marsh; and more than that, bowmen could bring fresh game to help our rations. I saw flights of birds, among them duck, and my mouth watered; we had eaten much salted beef of late.

  So once more the ships hove to, lying close together in the broad channel. Boats were lowered, and assembled in a small flotilla, while crews and passengers who had not spoken together in many days exchanged loud calls. Bren, now on his feet, and Caltus, whom I valued, both came into my boat as we prepared to go to the shore. And to my surprise, another boat came close, and one oarsman gestured at me with a bow, as he pulled with one hand. It was that hairy old devil, the chief called Kakk Marag, still with us, it seemed.

  What was more, he’d learned to speak, though not well; as we drew together, he leaned toward me.

  “You big one, hey,” he said, grinning broadly. “Listen, I-you talk like you, yes, yes. I knock on head for you. You many good one, you; let fool-boy live, send good woman help he. You not eat he. I serve you, much.”

  I gathered he was grateful, a most surprising idea. I did not bother to point out that his son and he lived only because I had almost forgotten I had them about. Nor did I mention the occasion on which I had ordered their deaths, and how by simple accident the matter had been foregone. If the barbarian wanted to think of me as a merciful man, he might do so.

  I grinned back at him, and dismissed his protestations with a lordly wave of the hand. Lately, I noticed how easily such gestures came to me; a certain mysterious something teaches a man how to look like a proper prince once he’s become one.

  The old goat had a certain skill with the bow, I recalled; and then, uneasily, I hoped his gratitude was real, and that only ducks would be his mark today.

  Then, we pulled away, and rowed for the green shoreline.

  Once among the reeds, we were lost to sight by those on the ships, while we could see the ship’s masts, but that was all. We moved slowly, searching, until one man called out that he had found a current. Then, along a narrow path, we came into the river itself.

  It was a broad, slow stream, still salt where we had entered, winding out of sight toward the west. All our boats now fell into line, rowing steadily upward, as we tasted the water occasionally. Then, after a while, it freshened more and more. Finally we halted to fill the casks.

  The banks were not so swampy here; tall grass, on a plain, surrounded us. Parties of us went ashore, while a guard remained behind in the boats, and the hunt began.

  This was no pleasure hunt; this was most serious slaying, and we worked at it hard. I saw bird after bird fall to old Kakk Marag’s shots, while I missed oftener than I liked, and bit my lip in envy.

  Finally, I found his workman-like shooting too difficult a competition; I called Caltus, and three others, and the five of us went farther into the tall grass, hoping to find an easier game. I had seen marks near the water’s edge, which might have been small hoofprints, and I hoped for deer of some sort.

  We went forward, pushing through the grass until it grew shorter and we could see about us. The land was an open plain, with here and there small clumps of twisted trees; it seemed to stretch to the horizon, all the same look. Then, I saw four small deerlike creatures leap from cover, and run, within easy arrow shot; and all together, we let fly.

  Mine went down, with a clean stroke through the neck; and Caltus brought one down, too. A third arrow took one in the flank: the beast fell, but rose again and limped on.

  Cursing our unhorsed state, I ran after it with the others; the hunt laws forbid leaving a cripple to run. It went on, just ahead of us, nearly a mile and then, staggering, it fell. We came up to it, puffing and wheezing.

  The creature was smaller than a deer, with two straight horns; a buck, we found, and dead now. But there would be good meat here, and the one who had slain it set about making it ready to carry. As he did so, I stared about me.

  The village was nearly hidden in the grass, and we had come upon its low stockade, nearly under our noses. It was a collection of mud and wattle houses, half under ground, and even so, small as kennels. And there was not a sign of life about it.

  “Beware,” Caltus said, seeing it as I did. “Remember the poisoned spears spoken of in that book, Prince?”

  “If there were any spears, we’d have them in us by now,” I said. “I’ll see what’s here.” And I went forward, into the place.

  It was as silent as a grave, which I found it resembled in other ways. Each low hut contained bones; the bones of men, women, and children, all of tiny size; the largest could not have been bigger than a ten-year-old boy. Each lay in composed posture, on mats; some with their weapons and shields, some seated near what had once been a cooking fire, in which broken pots still lay. All the bones were yellowed with time; whatever it was had happened a long time ago.

  We stood in the dead village, silently looking around us, a strange chill over our spirits.

  “What could have done this?” Caltus asked; and I bent over one small pile of bones, to look more closely.

  “Neither arrowheads, nor broken bones,” I said, straightening up. “Some poisonous vapor, in the night?”

  “Disease,” Caltus said, but it was obviously not that either.

  We left very hurriedly, took up our kill, and hastened back to where the others waited. With their own meat, we went on back, seeing other deer as we walked, all too far to shoot. There seemed to be no carnivorous animals to prey on the creatures, which struck me as strange. The deer seemed aware of us as a danger; maybe that was only instinct, of course. But where there are deer, there are usually great cats, wolves, other beasts of prey. And here there were none.

  The sky had been graying with cloud, and darkening. We carried all we could, now, of meat for the ships. Kakk Marag had slain a huge number of birds, and we had the deer. Now we loaded every boat and cast off.

  As we moved with the current, a few drops of rain pattered on the river, and I glanced at the sky.

  “We’ll get a wetting, I think,” I said to Caltus.

  And at that moment, the steersman of our boat let go his oar, and staggered to his feet, with a hideous choking scream. His face was purple, and he flailed wildly at the empty air; the boat tipped and rolled as he struggled with the unseen.

  Eight

  At that moment, as our steersman choked there, I felt real terror. It’s one thing to fight man or beast, however terrible, that one can see; and quite another to see a man strangling, in broad daylight, under hands that are invisible. Our frozen moment of hesitation was nearly the steersman’s death; the thing was as strong as ten men, and clawed, it seems, for blood sprang out from torn skin as he fought it.

  Then, the nearest of us grasped at the man, and our hands found the thing he fought. Its skin was cold, slimy, and scaled like a lizard’s, and it seemed to have more than one pair of clawed arms, as well as fangs. We fought it, as the other boats turned toward us, and we were fortunate that the boat did not overturn in our struggling. But at last we had it down, beating at it with oars, until it ceased to move.

  The rain was beginning in earnest now, and as it came down, the water ran over the thing lying there in the boat’s bottom, revealing it in wetness. It seemed made of wet fog, even as it was. But it was substantial enough; a creature like a great lizard, with only one pair of arms, not many; its busyness had given us that false idea. Dimly, we could see great-fanged jaws, and eyes like saucers. The jaws moved weakly, even now that the creature must be nearly dead.

  Four of us lifted it, and rolled it over the side. It did n
ot sink at once, but drifted near us, leaving a curious shaped depression on the water. We shipped our oars again, and pulled, while I stared back at the thing, cold fear down my spine.

  “I wonder,” Caltus said, staring at the shape in the water, as we left it behind. “Could that foul thing be what killed those in the village? That, or its ancestor…”

  “Look!” I pointed. “There’s more than one kind of invisible beast here! Look at the dead thing!”

  A valley of water had appeared, a spray of foam, cutting straight as an arrow toward the floating dead creature. The thing that came, swift as an arrow, was huge and hungry; and a single snapping sound, like the breaking of a mast, was all it took. Then it submerged in a plume of bubbles, and the invisible corpse too was gone.

  “This strikes me as a most unhealthy country,” Caltus observed. “Thank the gods that thing in the water is a carrion eater by choice. It would make short work of a boat.”

  “I have an idea this land may have still other… inhabitants,” I said, staring at the shore. In the wet grass and mud, there were marks. I pointed them out, silently, and Caltus looked and turned pale.

  “It would have to be bigger than a ship,” he said, in a low voice.

  “It is,” I said. “Listen.”

  We could hear it, on the shore… breathing.

  It stalked us as we rowed; sometimes we saw the grasses bend before it, and sometimes we heard the huge, soft, sounds it made. And as we rowed, we sweated, cold sweat, and prayed to every god we knew.

  Then we were among the reeds again, and then we slid through, into the open sea; the ships lay ahead, lanterns lit in the growing dark.

  I hailed the Luck, which lay nearest, and faces lined the rail as our boats came under her lee.

  “You, up there!” I cried. “Bring bags of bread flour, to the ship’s side!”

  They thought I had gone mad, of course; when I ordered all the boats to form in line, close to the Luck’s gallery, and none to try to go aboard just yet. Then I spent another few minutes convincing those aboard the Luck to fetch up the flour. At last it came, with lamentations by the chief cook, who swore there’d be no more bread now.

  “Sprinkle it over all, everything in the boats!”

  Now they were quite sure I had been struck with insanity. Not till I threatened rope and yardarm did they set about the lunatic task. Bag after bag floated over us, in a white cloud, which turned to paste in the drizzle; we became pale specters, sticky-faced.

  Then, in the second boat, they saw it.

  This one looked like a man, or an ape; it was no larger than those dead village folk had been, and bearded, with a wide, toothed, and snarling mouth. But its ears were pointed like a cat’s, and it had a lashing tail. It bit viciously at the first to try to seize it, and another man pinned it down with a short dagger. Then the bitten man shrieked and folded down, dead, though his wound was only a scratch.

  At that, the men in the boat killed the thing, and flung it into the sea.

  The third boat was clear of invisibles; but the fourth yielded the most surprising one of all.

  It could not be, but it was… a woman. She was tall, with a strange triangular face, long hair that hung about her flour-coated body where she stood in the thwarts. She showed no evidence of panic, and none of any wish to attack; in fact, the outlined face, flour-fogged, seemed calm and smiling. She was naked, finely made; the boat’s crew gaped at her, and she stood gazing down at them, then up at the ship’s side.

  But the rest of us were not in any mood to accept another invisible with equal calm, not now. An arrow from Kakk Marag’s bow, sang past her, and thumped into the ship’s timbers; she whirled in obvious terror, and sprang for the hanging lines overhead. A second arrow missed; the rolling boats were ill to shoot from. And she was scrambling now like a jackanapes, up the lines and out of sight. The pouring rain washed her as she went; and now she was quite gone. But she was aboard, I knew.

  There were no others, now, we hoped. The flour had marked out our would-be stowaways; and I was glad we did not have the small one aboard, at least. The woman-shape seemed somehow less dangerous. Although only a day or so of time would tell, I thought gloomily; the pleasing form meant nothing, if the creature had the habits of the other invisibles.

  Well, we should simply have to hunt it down, sooner or later. One by one, the boats were hoisted in to their own ships, and in the Luck, as the others, the cooks took charge of our game bag.

  The rain was coming down steadily now, and a light wind from the southwest made the dark sea around us fleck with white foam. But our anchorage was firm, and I had no intention of sailing till morning; it would be too easy to lose touch in the rainy darkness. Before going below, I looked once more toward the distant shore, now nearly invisible. It may have been an illusion, or it may have been a swirl of fog; but in the flicker of lighting, I seemed to see enormous shapes moving, very slowly, in the marshes.

  I glanced along the deck, where light from lamps and from the galley fire made yellow pools. Seamen moved about, and there was a rich smell of cooking. Somewhere, an invisible woman must stand, watching this; what was she?

  Then Samala came toward me along the deck, carrying a smoking platter; she brought it gravely to me, and offered it silently. I took it, feeling a little confused, and ate a little. It was amazingly good, better than the venison of lost Dorada’s woods.

  A cask of wine was brought out on deck, and men passed back and forth, while we held feast under the shelter of a spread sail against the rain. We could see lights and hear voices from the other ships about us, holding their own feasts, and the sound of singing.

  Bren, under the lee of the foredeck, found a lute, belonging to one of the seamen, and now played an ancient song of Dorada, a wild and slightly lewd ballad of the ways of a fisherman with a sea-witch. It was very funny, and a little sad to hear it, and all of us joined with him on the refrain.

  And suddenly, as we sat there, I found Isa also beside me, with Samala on my other hand. The three of us shared our food, in an odd, understanding silence, almost like some ritual of sharing. I do not now understand precisely what took place, except that a thing became known to all of us, at that moment.

  Later, I heard the voice of Caltus, the captain of arms-men, chanting a war-ballad of Meryon, and thumping the luteback melodiously and noisily in the shouted choruses. And much later, the sound of Isa’s voice, who sang in a strange language I had never heard before, some old song she may have heard as a child.

  All of us aboard the Luck that night were very merry, especially Thuramon, whose capacity for wine was truly a magician’s. During a part of the evening, he performed conjuring tricks, some very surprising indeed, even more surprising since by that time he could not see too well. One of his smaller fire demons singed his beard before being put down, for example.

  And for myself, I discovered that there was a great deal I had never known before; and that women are all very much alike and at the same time very different.

  By morning, the rain had ceased entirely, and we sailed before a strong, fresh wind, our decks shining clean and wet, our pennons flying out straight from every masthead. In some way, that night was a turning point: in all of us, it was as if our despair had been washed away in the rain.

  That ancient captain’s scrolls had been accurate enough, we saw. The sandy coasts were passed, and several times we saw the craggy islands on our starboard side. Then, in the dawn of another day, a high line of pointed mountains stood against the sun; the Island of the Dragons. And, westward, we saw the green of the forest land, which the scroll had also mentioned.

  “Because of the beasts,” I said thoughtfully to Thuramon as we watched the green land draw closer. “What beasts? Beasts such as those invisible creatures we saw… or did not see, worse luck. Something like that, I’d keep well away from. We would find no home in such a land.”

  “The woman,” Thuramon said blandly. “She is still on board.”

 
I glanced at him. “How do you know?”

  “She takes food, regularly, from the galley,” Thuramon said. “The cooks are quite used to it by now, though they nearly panicked at first.” He laughed. “They think she is your goddess, Tana, the goddess of the figurehead, come to life. Word went throughout the ship, and now they’re rather pleased she lives aboard in such a way, and takes what the cooks believe a kind of sacrifice. She has a gourmet’s taste, I hear; nothing but the finer tidbits, which lift invisibly away and are gone, so.” He waved his hand.

  “I’ve made no attempt to catch her,” I said. “She’s done us no injury… though I thought she might, at first. What is she, Thuramon?”

  He shrugged. “A living creature, as much flesh and blood as you are.”

  “She makes no sounds,” I said. “It seems odd that she’s never spoken a word. Perhaps she can’t…”

  Thuramon shook his head. “Oh, no. She can. The cooks have heard her laugh, and night watches, the men swear she sings in a strange language, but very softly. And one man said he heard her speak in our own language, a word or two.”

  “She has had time to learn our tongue,” I said. “I wish she’d learn it well enough to speak with me. I’ve a mighty curiosity about her, how it must feel to be so… well, what would you call it, wizard?”

  “To be born so, and not need spells and ointments,” Thuramon said. “How convenient, in a way, for a magician, or a thief… or a ruler—all of whom have something in common.”

  At that, a sudden clear peal of woman’s laughter came from the empty air, and I turned, staring hard. But there was nothing to see.

  “All right,” I said. “Good lady, you have taken free passage aboard my Luck: you are welcome enough, but remember, I am captain here. Pay for your passage with this much: harm none aboard, do my ship no damage, and you’re free of this deck. Agreed?”

  The laugh came once again, from a point farther away than before; then silence.