by Tom Deitz
“She’s pregnant,” Div said flatly. “We found out on the road.”
“Then that settles it!” Merryn spat, fighting back a surge of joy that was almost as strong as the mix of concern, confusion, and frustration that was already encumbering her convictions.
Strynn’s face was hard as iron. “It settles nothing, Merry. You have a duty, and I have a duty. I don’t want to lose this child. But I don’t want to lose the Kingdom either. I don’t have to tell you which one would be harder to replace. Besides, the longer I delay, the greater the risk will be.”
“No,” Merryn stated flatly.
“My chance. My child. My choice.”
“The heir to two great clans,” Merryn countered.
“My chance. My child. My choice,” Strynn repeated, not moving. “And not, except for the addition of geens, a decision I’m only making now.”
“Not a decision anyway,” Krynneth echoed softly, from where he was sitting calmly at the foot of his tree.
And for some odd reason that settled it.
A hand later—with everything Merryn had preserved from her own gear along with everything of use that could be salvaged from the Ixtian dead or butchered from the more intact portions of their mounts—they were riding north. It was slow going, granted, for the horses were tired—Boot to the point of exhaustion—and they had to make frequent stops to confirm the trail when the geen prints veered over bare rock or stretches of hard earth.
But increasingly, Merryn was heartened to find, they were moving toward the mountains and slopes of true, living green.
CHAPTER XII:
ON THE SHORE
(SOUTHWEST OF ERON–HIGH SUMMER: DAY LXXVI–MORNING)
Avall thrust an armload of freshly harvested “cauf” ferns into Riff’s grateful care, wiped soil-stained hands on his tunic, and ambled over to where Rann was crouched at the juncture of wall and floor, midway along their shelter’s length. Rann’s arms moved rhythmically, accompanied by the raspy sound of metal on stone, and the soft ping of a hammer that made a counterpoint melody of metal on metal. Avall squatted beside him, watching.
“This stone works fairly well,” Rann offered without looking up. “Or would if we had decent tools. A quarter here with a brace of my kinsmen, and we’d have this ground as flat as the floor in the Royal Suite, and a good start on getting the walls trued. There’s plenty of height for more than one level, and it wouldn’t be hard to close off the front if we had to, though I’d as soon leave it open for the view and the ventilation. Or we could—”
Avall stilled the hammer with a touch. “You sound resigned to staying here.”
Rann paused, laid down the tools, then twisted around to look at him. A thin skim of sweat moistened his brow; his hair was bound back with a strip of tunic trim. “There are worse places I can think of,” he said flatly.
“You’re not serious!” Avall blurted out. “About staying, I mean.”
A shrug. Rann picked up the broken knife he’d been using as a chisel and fingered its edge absently. “I repeat: There are worse places. Mostly what I’m doing is weighing options. One is to stay on this island; one is to establish a base on the shore; one is to hightail it back to the battle and all that entails.”
Avall snorted in frustration. “Including my obligation. I haven’t forgotten that, you know. It gnaws at me constantly.”
“I know. But something tells me that The Eight have taken you out of that game for a while. Not that I’d blame you for being concerned—or for trying to return. It’s your Kingdom, after all; and your family and friends at risk. And if you do decide to go back, rest assured that I’ll go with you. But in the meantime, there are supplies we’ll need. And tools. And while this island is a wonderful place, we’ll exhaust its resources before we exhaust those on the mainland—if that’s what it is—and, geens notwithstanding, we really do need to be over there well before that occurs.”
“And of course reaching the mainland is also the first step on returning to Gem-Hold.”
Rann nodded solemnly. “It is.” He paused, gazing past Avall’s head toward a new source of noise in the cave. Avall twisted round to follow his gaze. The remaining foragers were returning—which is to say Lykkon and Myx, since Bingg had assumed cooking duties for the day, and Riff was keeping an eye on Kylin, just in case. The harper seemed fine, if somewhat confused, but kept complaining of a headache and splashes of color before his blind eyes, for which reason he was lying down with a wet cloth across his brow. At least he was ambulatory. And (when not resting) was soaking up anything anyone would tell him about their present situation. “I can make a harp,” he had announced already. “A flute would be easier, though.”
“Soon,” Avall had assured him, not wishing to add that, however highly his countrymen prized music and art, both were luxuries when set against survival.
Myx, it evolved, had speared two more fish, each larger than the one that Bingg had caught the first day out; and Lykkon had shot a bird with bow and arrow—but lost an arrow in the process, which wasn’t good, even if Rann said they could strike points out of fire-glass.
Avall cleared his throat meaningfully. “Now that we’ve secured our day’s rations,” he began, “I guess it’s time to think about the future. Fortunately”—he glanced at Kylin—“we have one less thing to worry about and one more able body.”
“Marginally able,” Kylin corrected. “I’ll do what I can, but I’m not very strong, and most of the things I’m good at—”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Avall warned. “You saved me, don’t forget. By doing that you saved countless other lives, as well as making the Chief of the Ninth Face look stupid, clumsy, and ineffectual. I’ve no doubt you’ll display similar resourcefulness here.
“In any case,” he continued, “it’s time we talked about getting off this island. It’s a fine place as far as it goes, but we obviously can’t stay here indefinitely. We’d already ruled out swimming to the mainland because that wasn’t viable with you unconscious, Kylin—and because it would take forever to get any of our gear across. And that was before we saw what lives in the water. That leaves building a raft or a boat.”
“A raft would be easier,” Riff observed. “If for no other reason than because we could build one large enough to accommodate all of us and the supplies we have here a lot faster than we could build a boat that would accomplish the same things.”
Lykkon nodded. “And while there are plenty of trees on this island, they’re either way too big to be workable, or too small. Whereas a raft—”
“There’s thick-cane down by the shore on the south side,” Bingg supplied. “I saw it from up top. There’s more up there, for that matter, but the growth onshore is larger, plus we wouldn’t have to carry anything we made so far to set it afloat.”
“Which means that we spend the afternoon looking for cane to cut and a good place to build the thing once we’ve secured the raw materials,” Rann said with a sigh.
Avall shot him a wicked grin. “Did anyone here besides Riff spend more than a quarter at Seacraft? And if so, did you spend it studying boat-building instead of learning the names of fishes, which is mostly what I did?”
“I studied basic shipwrighting,” Myx volunteered. “But it was basic. I crewed a couple of fishing boats, read the prescribed texts, and helped hew a half dozen beams and true, peg, and caulk some planks.”
“Which might be useful and might not,” Avall mused. “In any case, unless someone has a better suggestion, thick-cane would seem to be our best choice. It’s light, strong, and it floats unless you pierce the chambers between the knots—and if you do that, you’ve got more problems than getting from here to shore.”
“Which sounds like we’ve just filled up the afternoon,” Lykkon chuckled. “So much for the rural life of leisure.”
“The question is,” Rann broke in, “do we have anything besides swords that will actually cut thick-cane? Knives will take forever, but it wouldn’t be good fo
r our primary weapons to abuse them that way.”
“I’ve got a whetstone,” Lykkon informed him calmly. “And a saw. I’d suggest we use the latter.”
A hand later, fortified with the smaller fish and more augmented cauf, and equipped with their sturdiest clothing and virtually everything they possessed that had an edge (Rann’s caution notwithstanding), everyone except Kylin began the trek to the island’s southern shore.
For the first third of the journey, they followed the route Avall and Rann had established the previous morning—a route which actually took them out of the way for a while, since it initially tended north. Roughly halfway to the shore, however, the pitch of the path lessened significantly, so that it was possible to turn back south without having to navigate any dangerously steep slopes. The second third of their journey thus ran below their cave, midway between it and the lake, but views of either the nearer or farther coast were intermittent, courtesy of trees, which, though more widely spaced than in other places, admitted sufficient light to support a luxurious understory, which in turn allowed a wealth of head-high ferns and ankle-thick mosses to flourish. The latter made for slow going, but the ground underfoot was soft enough that a functional trail would not be slow in forming.
The last third of the journey was the most difficult, because the terrain turned very steep indeed, so much so that they finally found themselves standing on a ledge looking down at the tops of the very thick-cane they hoped to harvest. The patch itself extended a good way to either side of where they stood, with the left-hand portion blocked by a fissure too wide to jump, beyond which—and higher up, of course—the path continued maybe a dozen spans more to where a handsome waterfall frothed and rumbled beside an all but sheer escarpment that thrust a blade of stone toward the opposing shore. The upper extremes of the patch were swathed in a froth of more ferns and flowers that slopped over the ledge on which they were standing, while the lower reaches were invisible, but clearly fought an ongoing battle with a good-sized crescent of beach. All in all, it was quite beautiful—and extremely exotic, to people born to a cold and rugged land.
“We backtrack,” Myx announced, indicating the least steep part of the bank. “Then we can swing around at the bottom. Better not to go down and through,” he added. “If this is like what little thick-cane I’ve seen back at Plantcraft, it’s got razor edges on the leaves. And who knows what sorts of poisonous things might live in there.”
Bingg rolled his eyes. “That’s all I need to hear.”
“Lead the way,” Avall concluded—as much because Myx had the lone wide-sword, which was good for chopping away undergrowth, as for any other reason.
Because of the detritus on the designated slope, it took far longer than expected to reach the base of the thick-cane patch, and everyone except Bingg slipped at least once, so that they were all blotched with a healthy application of wood mulch by the time they gained their goal. Happily, the beach was even larger than it had looked—easily a quarter shot across, in fact. On the right it was bounded by the rocks atop which the birds Avall and Rann had seen the previous day nested; the back was walled by the canebrake itself; while the left ended at the imposing spear of stone down which the lower reaches of the newly discovered waterfall slid—a fall, they now saw, that emptied into what was more than a stream but definitely not a river.
“Keep a close eye on the lake,” Avall advised, though they were south and west of the rocks the water-beast had seemed to frequent. “That creature Rann and I saw might or might not be entirely aquatic, but it was definitely an air-breather. I wouldn’t be surprised if it denned on land—and in that case, there’s a good chance its den is on this island and close to the coast.”
“We should post watch anyway,” Rann agreed, glancing at the sky, where a skim of clouds now showed. “Not that we’re likely to accomplish much today regardless.”
“But this would be a great place to build the raft,” Lykkon observed. “Plenty of work space and a gradual slope to the water. Eight, it wouldn’t be a bad site for a permanent dock if we wind up staying here—assuming we could improve the trail.”
“We should probably explore farther around,” Myx observed absently, gazing toward the waterfall. “When we finish, I mean. We’re over a quarter of the way around the island as it is, and it wouldn’t be much trouble to add another couple of shots to what we’ve already surveyed.”
Avall nodded, then sauntered over to the nearest stand of thick-cane. To his unpracticed eye, it looked like good, sturdy stuff; though it was hard to tell, since he had never seen any in the wild, the plant being native to Ixti, and only growing in Eron in greenhouses. This stand clearly needed no such encouragement, since each stalk was easily three times as tall as he was and most were as thick as his forearm. There would be no trouble finding enough to make any size raft they wanted, either—but there might be trouble cutting enough.
Riff studied the knobby lengths carefully. “We can get two sections out of most of these,” he informed them. He paused, did a bit of quick ciphering in his head. “Might be better to use the whole length, in the long run—for stability and to carry more of us at a time.” He did more calculations. “So, say we make a raft two spans square, which is about as small as would be useful and as big as we can easily move. And say twenty-four widths per span. That’s forty-eight lengths of thick-cane—or more. A railing would also be good, as would cross-bracing. And there’s five of us who can do a full man’s work, so that works out to about ten stalks each that we’d need to cut. But it’s going to take at least a hand per stalk, unless we want to savage our blades … so we’re looking at two or three days just to cut enough without killing ourselves. And that, in turn, raises the question of how to join the stalks together. We’ve got one length of tent rope that came with us, but that won’t be enough. We’ll have to use vines and probably peg some stuff, and maybe see if we can contrive some glue.”
“So we’re looking at maybe an eight to get off this place,” Avall summarized. “Assuming we spend half of each day scavenging for food.”
“It’s something to target,” Riff agreed. “And will give us an idea how much we have to ration—not that we’ll be able to go wild once we reach the mainland, either.”
Avall nodded, and reached over to run a hand down a length of smooth, hard cane skin.
“There’s better over here,” Bingg called, from where the patch angled back toward the escarpment.
They followed dutifully, noting that the waterfall formed a tiny pool in the vee between thick-cane and cliff. The stream ran from that pool to the sea; a dark opening lurked behind it. Avall angled shoreward to investigate the stream more thoroughly—back in Eron such places were a good source of freshwater mussels and clams. The others moved to the left, closer to the cave.
Avall had actually squatted at the edge of the clear, shallow water when he saw two things at once, both of which set him shouting.
One was the distinct trail of what could only be claw-edged flippers leading toward the cave. The other was a flash of movement inside it, as though something large and leathery lurked there.
“Watch the cave!” he yelled.
Too late.
Something came lurching out of the blackness toward the rest of their party: something as tall as their tallest, owing to a long, supple neck that issued from a squat, turtle-shaped body that was close to a span long itself. The head was the size of a man’s head but oval and far less distinct from the neck, of which it looked like a bulbous extension. Teeth showed, too: very sharp teeth. And that head moved on a neck like slick, wet lightning.
Jaws flashed out toward Bingg and would have bit him had he not danced back. By which time Avall could see the beast’s appendages. And tell, indeed, that they were very like a sea lion’s flippers, though the beast itself was clearly reptilian.
The odd thing was the silence. Most predators made noise when they felt threatened. This one didn’t.
But at least there was on
ly one, and it a small one—smaller than the one he and Rann had seen, anyway—possibly an adolescent. Which meant that the parents could be lurking nearby. Except that this cave was too small for one of them.
All of which reasoning took Avall perhaps three breaths before he’d unsheathed his sword and rushed into the fray. The beast was not actually that large, he realized, it was just that its parts covered a lot of space and moved quickly. In spite of that, Myx was poking at it with his homemade spear, while Riff and Bingg tried to circle it.
“Go for the neck,” Rann yelled, a long-knife flashing in his hand, while Lykkon tried to thrust his own sword past snapping jaws to connect with something vital.
Finding a flipper within easy range, Avall slashed down at it, and was rewarded with a gush of dark blood and a shrill, honking screech from the beast. Encouraged, he waded closer to the side, making a pair with Myx, opposite.
But it was Lykkon—Lykkon the scholar—who got in a lucky slash at the neck that severed the windpipe and at least one major artery. Blood fountained everywhere, showering them with gore. Myx and Riff caught the brunt of it.
Rann gave the beast its death blow: a second chop that severed the head.
“Food,” Riff grunted. “If no one has a delicate stomach.”
“Maybe,” Avall agreed, eyeing the shore speculatively, and wondering if it was wise to let the creature’s blood reach the stream that fed it. All they needed was for this lad’s kin to come honking up, primed for vengeance. “If we’re going to work here regularly, we’ll need more than one escape route,” he told Myx flatly, with another survey of the surrounding terrain.
Myx—who had very sharp eyes—squinted toward the cave. “There’s a more gradual slope in the angle,” he said. “Hard to see because it’s in shadow.”
“You and Riff check it out,” Avall told him. “Let us know what you find. We ought to get some of these cut today if we can.”
“And someone ought to see if there’s anything edible on that,” Rann added, pointing toward the inert monster. “If it’s like most large animals, there’s a nice chunk of solid meat along the spine. I’d start with that—unless someone else wants to—”
