The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  A lamp hung from the bracket just inside the door. Its wick was turned low. The rush mats that softened the floor hadn't been changed in months, perhaps years. Scavenging insects, startled by the newcomers, sank within the woven rushes like oil being absorbed in filthy sand.

  Plates—fine porcelain decorated with gilded rims and the palace crest—were scattered on the floor. On some of them, the food appeared not to have been touched.

  "Uncle Ramos...?" whispered Dennis. The stench of the room made him jump as though he'd been slapped in the face.

  "What's the matter, kid?" Ramos said with heavy irony. "You don't like my singing?"

  He hawked and spat. "For many the ships—" he repeated, but his voice broke in a fit of coughing.

  Ramos was a big man, tall where Dennis' father was broad. He was shockingly gaunt now, but even so his heavy bones made him look a giant as he sprawled on the bed. He was wearing his state robes, scarlet and cloth-of-gold; but they were as stained and foul as the floor mats.

  There were plates on the bed; but mostly there were bottles, squat green quarts of fortified wine from Bredabrug far down the south coast. The mats beneath the open windows sparkled with bottles that had smashed on the casements instead of flying out of the room.

  "Hob-nobbing with the common folk, are you, kid?" Ramos asked.

  He'd turned his head to the door when Dennis entered, but now he let his eyes rock back to an empty window—or to nothing. Glass clinked as Ramos rummaged with one arm among the bottles beside him.

  Dennis swallowed hard. "Uncle Ramos," he said as he walked toward the bed, pretending he didn't feel the way the rushes wriggled beneath his boots. "Are you sick? And why haven't the servants...? Why have they—"

  Ramos had found a full bottle among the empties quivering as the bed moved. "Have a drink with nobody, your Royal Crown-Princeness, sir," he said, still lying flat on the bed.

  He had a folding sailor's knife in his right hand. The knot-breaking marlinspike blade was open. He began worrying at the cork—without effect, because he was using the wrong end of the knife.

  Dennis forgot his horror. When he was a child, Ramos had carried him perched on one shoulder like a pet lizard. He'd felt taller than the ships' masts then—and perfectly safe, because Ramos steadied him with a hand as solid as carven stone.

  Dennis swept bottles away and sat down on the bed. The mattress squelched; more debris rolled down the coverlet in response to his weight. Dennis took the bottle and knife from Ramos whose fingers didn't resist.

  "I'll get some servants up here at once," the boy said quietly.

  "No guts, these servants, you know that?" Ramos said, glaring truculently for a moment before closing his eyes and letting his body settle back onto the mattress. "No sporting instinct. They stick their heads in, and if they don't have more wine, I throw empties at 'em. That's sporting enough, ain't it, Royal Crown Princeling?"

  "What's the matter, Uncle Ramos?" Dennis asked softly. The horn-scaled knife clicked against the bottle when he switched both objects to his right hand. He twined the fingers of his free hand with those of Ramos, marveling at how near to a size he was with the man he remembered as a giant.

  Ramos opened his eyes again. "I'm not your uncle, boy," he said; but without the anger that had edged every word he'd spoken thus far tonight.

  "I've always called you that, Uncle Ramos," Dennis said.

  Ramos made a mighty effort to sit up, but the mattress was too soft and Dennis didn't realize what the older man was trying to do until it was too late to help.

  Ramos let himself flop back. He smiled and said, with something between bitterness and affection, "I didn't always call your father 'king', you know, boy."

  "Is my father angry with you?" Dennis asked. "Is that why..." He started to gesture to complete the question, then realized that he didn't need—or want—to call attention to the filth in which the old man was living.

  "Hale angry with me?" Ramos said. The bed rocked with laughter which became a paroxysm of coughing without a perceptible transition. He pounded himself on the chest, then rolled onto his side.

  With Dennis' help this time, Ramos levered himself into a sitting position. He crossed his long legs beneath him like a sailor mending nets on shipboard.

  Ramos started to spit, then caught himself and fumbled for a moment till he found a napkin on the bed. He cleared the phlegm from his throat into the linen, which he folded neatly and tucked into a pocket.

  "Your father doesn't care enough about me to be angry, Dennis," he said. His eyes were pale blue, winking from beneath his bushy eyebrows like aquamarines in a matrix of granite. "All Hale wants is for me to keep out of sight and not remind him of what he is."

  "What is my father?" Dennis said with almost no inflection. By summoning all his concentration, he was able to keep his eyes meeting the older man's.

  "Oh, nothing so very bad, boy," the older man said. There was no mockery in his voice, nothing but mild sadness. "Do you know what I am?"

  "You're the Captain of the Guard, Uncle Ramos."

  Ramos ruffled the boy's hair. His fingers moved slowly, as if his joints were sticking. "What kind of guard do we need here in Emath, Dennis?" he chided. "I was a soldier once; but mostly I'm just a fisherman."

  His expression hardened, his voice taking on the strength and timbre Dennis remembered from childhood. "And I would to god," Ramos continued, "that I'd realized that years ago and not pretended to be what I'm not."

  His blue eyes held Dennis like pincers. "And I would to god that Hale did the same: told the world he was a fisherman and not pretend to be a king!"

  "But—" said Dennis. The bottle and knife in his right hand rang together as instinct made him jerk back. "But he is king, Ramos. Look at the palace."

  Dennis made a circular gesture which freed his hand from the older man's without him drawing it away quite deliberately. "We've always ruled in Emath, as long as there've been men on Earth. Look at the—" he gestured again, toward the window facing the other spit of the harbor "—Founder's Tomb."

  "Oh, aye," said Ramos ironically. He squinted at Chester and said, "Here, you. Give me a hand up and we'll look at the tomb, we will."

  "Help him, Chester," Dennis said, for Chester took orders only from his owner—and even then, the little robot had a tendency to respond literally rather than according to Dennis' broader intent.

  "The fool who does not help others," said Chester equably—he braced himself with four tentacles while the tips of the remaining four eased beneath Ramos' elbows and the points of his jutting hip bones "—loses all he has."

  Ramos got up from the bed, unfolding like a jacknife. A bottle turned under his foot. He kicked it aside violently; plates and more bottles clashed in its skittering path.

  Dennis moved in front of the older man and swept a track to the window clear with the side of his own boot. Ramos followed him, his second step steadier than the first and the third as firm as that of the laughing, sober giant he'd been in Dennis' earliest memories.

  "There, I'm all right," he said, running his fingers down the edge of the window casement—not for support, but for reassurance that the support was there should he need it suddenly.

  Chester released the old man, but two silvery tentacles quivered just short of touching: Dennis, not Ramos, had ordered him to help.

  The Founder's Tomb was of local rock, the porous laterite limestone used for pillars and thresholds in the houses below the palace's crystal walls. By day it was a hulking thing whose red color was as dull and angry as coals banked in a furnace; but at night, it disappeared into darkness like the jungle beyond. Only when a wave of some size washed the headland did the tomb appear, in silhouette against the glowing sea.

  "Look at my hands, boy," Ramos said, raising them beside his shoulders with the palms out. They trembled, and the calluses that had sheathed them once had sloughed away; but the scars from decades of brutal work still remained. Dennis remembered with a shock that his
father had hands like that also.

  "I built your 'Founder's Tomb' with these hands, boy," Ramos said. Instead of bitterness, his hoarse voice glowed with pride: pride in a piece of craftsmanship, and pride as well in the physical labor the job had entailed.

  "I did it, and your father beside me. Cut the stone, sledged it to the headland, and hoisted it into place."

  Ramos paused, looking out into the night. "Wasn't easy, boy, but we did it. Hale thought he needed it, that nobody'd take him for a king if he didn't have ancestors back to the Landing. But I don't know..."—now the voice was bitter—"It seems to me that they never doubted, not a one; and him no more than a fisherman who owned a boat in shares with me as grew up with him Downcoast."

  "But the palace...?" Dennis whispered.

  He couldn't believe what Ramos was telling him—but neither did he doubt it. Dennis' mind reviewed the vision of his father rowing out to sea every day of the past weeks: the practiced motions, the flat arcs his oars cut above the surface, the minimum of froth and fuss as they bit and drove him forward on the swell. Another old fisherman, going out on the sea that was his livelihood...

  Ramos began to shake. Dennis reached to support him, but the older man said, "Wait, no. I'm all right." He leaned over the casement and vomited into the night.

  "Oh!" Dennis said. "Let me—"

  One of Chester's tentacles touched the boy's lips. "Do not let your tongue go where it was not summoned," the robot quoted as his touch turned Dennis aside.

  "There," Ramos murmured after the third spasm had wracked him. He lowered himself carefully to sit on the window ledge. "There, I'm all right." He smiled ruefully at Dennis.

  The boy sat down on the other side of the broad ledge. Shards of green glass twinkled jealously on the ground forty feet below.

  Ramos reached over and squeezed the boy's knee gently. "Don't look so stricken, lad. Hale's a good man, always has been. I spoke out of place. It was the liquor talking, not your Uncle Ramos."

  "Tell me about the palace," Dennis said. "Please, Ramos."

  Smiling—toward the sea, not his young questioner—and pinching a curl into a lock of hair that should have been cut long since, Ramos said, "We owned the boat together—built her together, near enough, lad, as bad a shape as she was in when we bought her from old Kilkraus. We named her The Partners. Would have liked to call her the Selda, both of us; but we didn't dare, because we didn't know which of us she'd pick when the time came for that."

  "My mother?" Dennis said.

  His body was growing cold. He felt a sort of creepy disorientation. It was as if the ledge on which he sat had tilted up 30 degrees while he continued to talk in seeming normalcy.

  It was just that everything looked different from the angle at which he was viewing them since he'd entered Ramos' room.

  "Oh, aye, your mother, lad," Ramos said with his smile for the night. "Old Kilkraus' daughter, and a fine woman for all she chose Hale and not me... but that was later."

  As Ramos talked, his mind sharpened and his tongue gained flexibility. He pointed into the harbor, leaning forward with an easy certainty of his balance that made Dennis queasy to watch. "She was a little craft, The Partners, not like those down there at the docks. There were no safe harbors on the coast, so we had to drag her ashore every night."

  "But there's a harbor here—" Dennis protested, his sense of skewed reality increasing.

  Chester touched the boy's cheek with a tentacle. "Do not let yourself be known as the prattler, Dennis," the robot said, "because your tongue is everywhere."

  "There was no harbor at Emath," said Ramos with a flat voice and a flat smile for the boy. "Nothing but rough red cliffs—and the Banned Island to seaward, where any boat swamped if it tried to land."

  He waited a moment in grim silence, waiting to see if Dennis would object again.

  The boy nodded, agreeing that he had heard the words. He was slipping into a reality different from the one in which he'd lived for almost sixteen years. It was as frightening as if the ground had fallen away from him in the darkness; but if he waited and listened, maybe it would all make sense...

  "A little craft, as I say," Ramos continued, a touch of humor in his grin at last, "and a sweet one. We worked her together for choice, but either of us could handle her alone in fine weather, and the weather couldn't have been more fine the day Hale took her out while I lay on my cot, raving with fever while Selda sponged my forehead."

  Ramos leaned out into the night, turning toward the sea rather than the harbor he faced when looking at Dennis. "Not so very long ago," he said musingly. "But a lifetime naytheless."

  "Before I was born," Dennis said, afraid to give the words even enough inflection to make them a question.

  "A year before you were born, lad," Ramos said to the phosphorescent sea. "Exactly a year."

  He turned sharply, hard eyes in a hard face—glaring at the bottle Dennis still held. Then the granite lines of Ramos' visage softened and he smiled again. "Not your fault, lad," he said. He was answering a question that Dennis couldn't guess, much less ask.

  Firmly again but without anger, the older man continued, "That was in the morning. By noon, my fever had broken and the sky was black with the storm that had blown up. Boats from our village were flying back, those who'd sailed south; but Hale had taken The Partners north, up the coast, and she didn't come home in the face of the storm that shook the shutters and lifted roof slates from our huts."

  "At Emath," Dennis said, forced by his confusion to spike down at least the physical setting of the new reality Ramos forced him into.

  "There was no Emath," the older man said harshly. "Only cliffs, boy, bare teeth of rock with raw jungle above them."

  He glared. Dennis nodded, and Dennis' fingers wrapped themselves into knots as complex as those of sea-worms breeding.

  "Not your fault," Ramos repeated softly. He cleared his throat and swallowed instead of spitting.

  "We lost boats that day," he continued. "Fully crewed boats. And I'll tell you something you'll understand some day soon, I'd judge, from the size of you: I cursed myself, lad; because I'd lost my boat and a friend closer nor ever a brother was to me—and I was glad in my heart, for it meant that Selda was mine."

  Ramos bent forward, his eyes fixed on Dennis' eyes. The boy did not flinch, even when Ramos reached out and took Dennis' jaw between a thumb and forefinger so gnarled with sinew that they looked like net supports roped in brown seaweed.

  Ramos lifted the boy's chin slightly, then turned it to look at the fuzz-downed face from an angle. "Not yet," he muttered to himself. "But you'll understand soon."

  "What happened to my father?" Dennis said, trying not to choke on his awareness that Ramos' light touch could crack his neck if a fit of madness took the big old man. The world was going mad already, it seemed...

  Ramos jerked his hand back into his lap as if the same thought had danced through his head—and he found it more horrifying than even the boy did.

  "Nothing happened to Hale," he said harshly. "The Partners sailed back with the next dawn, clean and as ship-shape as if she'd just been careened. And your father Hale took me and took Selda aboard, and he told us that he was a king now in a crystal palace."

  He looked into the darkness while his hand stroked Dennis' knee with the affection of an old man for something he's known and loved for years. "We thought he was mad, Dennis; but we went with him because we loved him, both of us. And he sailed us up the coast to here, to Emath, and it was as you see it—harbor and palace, all perfect, and nothing but rock and danger three days before when we fished the same coast together."

  Ramos' hand curved up and gripped Dennis, as gently as could be without the least doubt that he meant the boy to meet his eyes for what he said next: "I will not lie to you, lad. If all the gods stood here before me, I would tell them the same thing. There was nothing—and when your father came back, there was Emath. And he was king of it."

  The ledge on which Dennis sa
t was as solid as all portions of the palace—beyond wear and apparently beyond destruction. He felt as if he were sitting instead on a scrap of timber in a maelstrom, whirling downward toward an end as horrifying as the ride.

  "Chester?" Dennis said, turning to his robot companion. "Is this so?"

  In his need for the information, he ignored the insult he was offering the man beside him; but Ramos only nodded in haughty assurance.

  "It may be so, Dennis," said Chester.

  "The people?"

  It wasn't clear—even to Dennis—who the boy expected to answer. Chester rested silently on his eight limbs, the tips slightly raised so that not they but the metallic curves beneath the tips took the robot's weight.

  "Not the people, lad," Ramos said. "The people came after, when I took out word that the harbor was here. I sailed The Partners up-coast and down."

  Talk of that past prodded the older man into motion again. He stood up, rising slowly to his full height instead of the stoop in which he had shuffled across the room initially. He said, "I went to every little settlement: where they dragged their boats up a creek-mouth and where they scraped their keels on a shingle shore. I told them—"

  Ramos was sixteen years and a lifetime younger now. His voice boomed in the open room and out across the water.

  "—there was harborage that would keep them safe in the worst of storms! Fishing boats and great high-decked traders, it was all one. They could shelter beneath the crystal walls of a palace like none they ever dreamed of, beneath the protection of King Hale."

  Ramos sagged as though his hamstrings had been cut. The collapse was utterly unexpected. Dennis jumped up, but far too late to have kept the older man from falling—

  Except that Chester had already caught Ramos and was supporting him with four flexible limbs, because Dennis had told him to help Ramos, and the robot never forgot an instruction.

  "No, no, I'm all right," said Ramos softly; and perhaps he was, but Chester didn't let go until he'd lowered his charge to the ledge again. Dennis settled back, afraid to appear too concerned about the older man's sudden collapse.