The Sea Hag

by David Drake

  "It was not a trap, Dennis. You wished to see certain things, and to show you those things required time. The time to see them, and the longer time to journey to where they were to be seen."

  Dennis remembered the way his companion had urged him to leave the room of the machines—and how Dennis had masterfully insisted on watching Hale's third meeting with the sea hag. "I didn't know that," he said.

  "You did not ask that, Dennis," Chester said primly.

  One of the walls of the corridor where they were pausing was a true window, a plate of perfect clarity with neither facets nor filaments to diffuse the view beyond it. That view was of the open sky to seaward, sulphurous now as the sun set with no clouds to turn the event into a spectacular.

  There would be a storm tomorrow, though. Of that, Dennis was certain.

  "I would have stayed even if I'd known how—how long it was taking," he said. "But I thought it was just a few minutes we were there."

  "That is so, Dennis," Chester agreed with the same tone of cool disapproval as before.

  Dennis began walking again. The robot fell in beside him.

  "Chester?" the youth asked without looking at his companion. "If I didn't ask you a question, and it was—really important that I know the answer anyway... Would you let me—hurt myself anyway because I was too stupid to ask?"

  Chester slipped a tentacle into the youth's right hand, brushing the palm gently with the hair-fine tip. "Sometimes the guide," he said in a more diffident tone than he usually used for his pedantic catch-phrases, "is not himself a wise man."

  Dennis squeezed the tentacle. "So long as he's a friend," he said.

  CHAPTER 9

  Three places were laid for dinner on the balcony which opened from the anteroom of the royal suite. Liveried servants waited there in feral nervousness—for diners; for orders; for anything, even a chewing-out, because that would be better than frightened uncertainty. Nobody knew what was wrong in Emath Palace; but everyone knew something was wrong.

  Nobody knew but King Hale; and now, his son.

  The servants leaped to attention when Dennis and Chester entered the suite. "Your highness," said the carver, bowing with a watery shimmer of the blue and silver flounces of her dress.

  "Your highness-ighness-ness," echoed the three placemen—bobbing like birds and slightly out of synchronous in their haste to do the right thing.

  "Will you be dining now, your highness?" asked the carver.

  "Not—" Dennis began. He realized that he hadn't eaten since the night before. He ought to feel starved—and probably he would, if his stomach weren't so knotted up with fear.

  He wasn't afraid yet of the sea hag—because before he confronted her, he had to face his father.

  "Not yet, thank you," he said, marveling that, though his face burned with the emotions he felt, his voice remained steady. "Ah—do you know if the King has returned as yet?"

  The servants darted quick, side-long glances at one another. A placeman bowed and said, "Your highness, I believe one of the cooks did mention that King Hale had entered the suite by the back stairs."

  Dennis realized that he was still limb-in-limb with Chester. He released the tentacle and said, "Thank you. I can't give you much direction on dinner, I'm afraid."

  Terribly afraid. And what did it matter to them that the prince clung to a mechanical toy the way infants do a blanket or a fuzzy doll?

  Dennis reached out as he stalked toward his parent's suite. His friend's looping grip was waiting for his hand.

  Hale's chamberlain was outside the room Dennis' parents shared. "Your highness," he said, bowing.

  The door was crystal with the look of water in the depths of the sea, dense and an indigo blue scarcely removed from black. It was as solid as the walls around it, but Dennis could still hear the angry shouting from within—Hale's deep, booming drumbeats punctuated by Selda's shrill insistence.

  The chamberlain stepped aside, looking off down the corridor as if oblivious to the sounds. Dennis opened the door, held it for Chester, and closed it behind him on the sudden stillness with which his parents greeted his entry.

  "Father, Mother," he said, bowing formally. "I need to talk to you about tomorrow."

  Selda's face was still contorted with the angry words she'd been ready to hurl at her husband. She remained poised for a moment, staring at her son and his companion. Then she collapsed into a chair carved delicately from a single giant fishbone and began to cry with her hands over her face.

  Selda was a plump woman but on those rare occasions when Dennis could think of his mother as a human being instead of a fixture in his life, he could see that she was good-looking.

  When Dennis was very young, Selda's hair had been a sandy, pleasant red; for the past while, however, her locks had a harsh vibrancy that nature had intended only for the preparation of crushed leaves that she used to dye it. She wore increasingly more make-up as well. Now it was running from beneath her fingers in streaks of black and scarlet and bleached-flour white.

  "Mom," Dennis said, striding to her. He felt her shoulders quake beneath his hands as she cried.

  "I don't have anything to talk to you about," Hale grunted as reached to a lacquered sideboard. "Neither of you!"

  The cabinet stuck. Hale's great shoulder muscles bunched and jerked the brass latchplate out in a shower of splinters.

  The sideboard held an assortment of liquors. Hale took out a square green bottle like the ones Ramos had been guzzling down. He unstoppered it by pinching the end of the cork with his fingernails.

  "I've seen the sea hag," Dennis said. "Tomorrow I'll go to her as agreed."

  Hale shifted his hand on the bottle, gripping it by the neck.

  "What does he mean, Hale?" Selda asked, looking up fearfully like a startled nestling.

  Hale smashed the bottle against the edge of the sideboard. Lustrously veneered wood shattered instead of the thick glass.

  Hale swung the bottle at the wall. Fortified wine streamed from the spout as his arm moved, exploding in bubbles and aroma among the fragments of glass.

  He turned to his son. The bottle had broken just below the neck. It winked from the clenched fist like a lamphrey's mouth of jagged, translucent teeth—a fisherman's weapon in a madman's hand.

  "You will not do that thing," Hale said in a voice of absolute certainty.

  For a moment, Dennis thought his father was about to kill him. It was just a thought, a fact, like the weather or the hour of the day. If Hale killed him, then Dennis wouldn't have to see in life the creature whose lightning-lit image had been terror to watch...

  "H-hale?" Selda said. She got up shakily and faced her husband, standing between the two men in the room. "Put that down. Please put that down."

  Hale brushed her aside with his left arm—not a blow, but forceful enough to have pushed the woman out of the way no matter how willing she was to have resisted. Selda caught herself on the chair back, then slid with it to the floor and her sobbing.

  Hale threw down the bottleneck. It broke further and skittered in a dozen directions. He stared at Dennis; Dennis met his father's eyes.

  "You don't think you're a boy any more, is that it?" Hale said softly. "Well, maybe you're not... But you're still my son, laddy. And I say you'll not do this—d'ye hear?"

  Dennis felt his expression tremble. He could face anger, now that he knew what the anger hid; but his father had undermined his composure by treating him for the first time as an adult. "Father, if I don't go—"

  Hale shook his shaggy head. "It doesn't matter to you. It's my bargain, and my decision."

  "But—"

  "It's my decision!"

  Dennis spun to the door and jerked it open. It took all his remaining strength of will to plunge into the anteroom again before his own tears joined those of his mother.

  This time, the cause was more complex than anger and frustration, though; and he half thought he heard his father start to cry also as the thick panel slammed shut.


  CHAPTER 10

  "I always used to like the night, Chester," Dennis said as he watched the sea surge and glow. "Remember? We'd lie out here and wonder which star men really came from?"

  His back was supported by one of the smooth-contoured crenelations that decorated this roofline. The crystal was slightly chilly—it remained cool even in the direct glare of the summer sun.

  The metal of the robot's case was warm and reassuring as Dennis reached out to his companion.

  "Well, I still like it," the youth admitted aloud. "It's just that I haven't been having a good time at nights recently. I—"

  He paused and looked at Chester, a dull blur against the vague light retained by the structure of the palace. "I don't know what to do, Chester. My father's been a good ruler, a really great one, even if he..."

  It was hard for a boy who's been raised a prince to find that he is both a man—and a fisherman's son. Though a prince as well, of course.

  And Dennis was still a boy, too, unless he was careful about the way he reacted to danger and frustration.

  "If you listen to the judgment of your heart," the robot said with the pompous weight of wisdom in his voice, "you will sleep untroubled."

  As a friend in the darkness, Chester added, "What is it that you would do, Dennis?"

  "I'd go out to the sea hag," Dennis said simply. Stated that way, he could forget all the doubts and terrors that the decision implied. "But I can't go against Dad."

  "Do not leave a fool to rule the people," Chester said; but that was the program talking and not the friend Dennis had made over sixteen years together.

  Hale was being foolish in this.

  "...all will be yours to command..." the sea hag had bargained as Hale stood on the deck of The Partners. Knowing that, Dennis couldn't be sure how much of the way he obeyed his father was a result of the sea hag's magic...

  Chester would ask what Dennis wanted to do if he couldn't do the right thing—and even in his princely willingness to be sacrificed, Dennis felt an underlying joy that he didn't have to hurl himself into that waiting, stinking maw. But if he couldn't do that—

  "Chester, I can't stay in Emath," Dennis said in sudden resolution. "My father never told me not to go out into the jungle. I'll do that tonight. I'll find—some other place to live."

  He couldn't live in Emath and watch it be destroyed because of something he hadn't done, something his father wouldn't permit him to do. Perhaps if he left, the sea hag would spare the village.

  And perhaps one of the jungle's hidden monsters would gobble Dennis down; and then he could stop worrying about what he ought to do.

  "Oh—" Dennis said. Death was something he knew only from books, where it seemed noble and heroic. Being alone was a fear of a much more serious order.

  "C-chester, would you go with me if I leave Emath?" he asked.

  A tentacle looped his shoulders and tickled the back of his left ear. "I will go with you wherever you wish, Master Dennis," the robot said softly.

  Dennis jumped to his feet, speaking quickly so that emotion wouldn't choke him. "Right," he said, "great. I'll need food—I'll get some bread and sausages from the cooks."

  He frowned. "That's the sort of food people take when they go out in the jungle, isn't it, Chester?"

  Everything Dennis knew about the jungle was from books or the little he saw across the dragon-guarded perimeter. No human beings left the village for the lowering back-country. Occasionally, men straggled in wearing rags and a look of fear, but they weren't the sort who got invited to the palace. All the inland trade was in the scaly hands of the lizardmen.

  "People might well take bread and sausage when they went out into the jungle, Dennis," the robot said. Dennis couldn't be sure from the tone whether Chester was agreeing with, warning—or gently mocking his human companion.

  "Right, well," the youth said, deciding to take the words at face value. "And I'll take a fishing line too, so that we can catch our own food. Ah—"

  He looked down at Chester. Dennis' first enthusiastic movement had left him still on the roof, poised by the casement of the window opening to his personal suite. "Ah, there's water in the jungle, isn't there? I mean, pools and streams?"

  It struck him suddenly that Chester might be as ignorant of this business as Dennis was himself. After all, the little robot had been brought to Emath by sea and hadn't left the perimeter since.

  "There are pools and streams in the jungle, Dennis," said Chester, calming that momentary fear. "And there is also rain."

  "Sure, but I'm not going to walk around with my mouth turned up," the youth said while his mind concentrated on things he thought were more important.

  He pursed his lips, squeezed the cool crystal of the transom with both hands, and added, "And I'll need a sword. Chester, I'm going to take the Founder's Sword from his tomb."

  He waited for Chester to respond. Nothing happened. Dennis looked down at his side and found the little robot waiting as motionless as he was silent.

  "Do you think I should do that?" Dennis prodded.

  "It is not mine to think or not think about what you should do, Dennis," Chester said, as close to a lie as the youth had ever heard from his mouthless companion; but when Chester continued, "It may be that I can open the vault without your taking your father's keys," Dennis knew that he'd been answered after all.

  "Right," said Dennis buoyantly, hopping into his suite without touching the waist-high transom. "First the fishing line and the food, then the sword—and then the jungle."

  And escape forever from the sea hag, relief whispered in his mind; but he wasn't proud enough of the thought to speak it aloud.

  CHAPTER 11

  The burlap shopping bag brushed Dennis' pants leg awkwardly as he walked. The bag's side-panels were embroidered with the Seal of Emath in blue yarn—a leaping fish with a woman's face, too crude to have features even in better light than that of the village streets at night.

  The Seal of Emath was the sea hag—in the false, conventional style that fishermen joked about the creature. Now Dennis understood why.

  Dennis hadn't really thought about how he was going to carry the food until he got to the kitchen. The rope-handled shopping bag seemed the best alternative there.

  He'd collected bread and three different kinds of sausage—summer sausage, liverwurst, and a hard, spicy pepperoni—because he wasn't sure which was proper. Anyway, it was difficult to make little choices now that his mind was filled with the large one, the decision to leave home forever.

  Dennis had also collected the wide-eyed concern of all the kitchen staff, but they'd helped him anyway. An undercook had even curtsied and offered him an apple brought from the far north... which Dennis took to avoid embarrassing her.

  He began to crunch it quickly as soon as he left the palace. An apple just didn't seem the thing to carry along on a dangerous trek into the jungle.

  Dennis was pretty sure that none of the staff would slip off to tell the king what his son was doing. The way Hale was acting now, the servants were afraid to see him even when they were required to do so.

  Dennis tossed the apple core into the gutter.

  "The man who uses his provisions wisely, Dennis," said Chester in a tone of cool disapproval, "will never want."

  "I didn't ask her for an apple," Dennis snapped back.

  Then he said, "I feel foolish walking about with a shopping bag, Chester. I'm sorry."

  A group of children were playing around a pool of lantern light in the street, watched by an old woman in a mob cap. "Good evening, your highness!" the woman called, trembling back and forth on her rocking chair as she waved a hand in greeting. "A fine evening to you!"

  "Good evening, lady," Dennis responded in a cheerful voice, waving his own free hand as he and Chester passed. The children stared, whispering among themselves in voices that occasionally rose with high-pitched awe.

  "I don't know who she is, Chester," Dennis muttered to his companion as darkness cover
ed them again. "I didn't think anybody could recognize me in the dark anyway."

  He looked down at the clothing he'd chosen: a cloak, a plain cotton tunic, and drab blue trousers.

  Of course, the bag did have the royal seal on it. And—

  "It may be that I can be recognized though you are not, Dennis," said Chester, putting words to the thought that had just struck the youth.

  Well, it wouldn't matter in the jungle.

  They'd had to tramp almost all the way around the harbor, since the Tomb of the Founder was on the landspit opposite the palace. Even now, Dennis wasn't willing to disobey his father by crossing the harbor the easy way—on one of the many water taxis available at the piers.

  Wasn't willing, or wasn't able because of the sea hag's magic.

  Most of the bars and entertainment areas for seamen were concentrated near the end of the harbor, but one brightly-lit establishment was doing a cheerful business next to the wall separating the village from the graves and solemnities of the cemetery.

  A woman sat on the rail of the third-floor roof with her back to the street, singing to an invisible audience and accompanying herself on a one-string lute. As Dennis passed the tavern, the singer paused, stretched, and looked down at him. Her eyes gleamed as her jeweled combs in the light of the sconces at the tavern's entrance; her breasts were deeper shadows within the pink froth of the chemise she wore.

  The singer smiled down. Dennis blushed and walked away quickly.

  "He who knows how to hold his heart," murmured Chester, "knows the most important thing of all."

  "Just leave that, all right?" Dennis said.

  For a wonder, Chester said nothing more on the subject.

  The cemetery was closed from the remainder of the landspit by a fence and gate. Five years before, Hale had replaced the wooden palings of Dennis' youth with wrought iron. Sections of the fence were already skewed at slight angles from one another, but the gilt spikes on top glittered bravely in the starlight.