Out of the Waters-ARC Page 36

  She saw the pipe. Bending carefully she retrieved it and held the reed stem alongside the axe helve.

  Smoke hung over the village. The end poles of one of the huts stood at the edge of a blackened oval. In the center, the ground had been blasted into a waist-deep pit on whose edges grains of sand in the soil had been fused into glass. Several other fires lifted coils of smoke from the pines in the near distance.

  The three sages squatted with their heads close together, whispering among themselves. They didn't call to Alphena, but their eyes followed her and the shaman. The villagers watched also, in silence.

  "Bring us food and water!" Alphena shouted. "At once!"

  She didn't know whether she would be able to get Uktena into his underground chamber. There was time enough to decide that when they reached the entrance.

  "And bring my sandals and tunic!" she added. "I left them where we came out of the water."

  They would have been that much more to carry. She still had the axe, though.

  Alphena walked slowly toward the kiva under the weight of her friend. She tried to forget the image of the monster which had battled the Atlantean wizard.

  ***

  A bird--or frog, or lizard, or Venus knew what--squealed imperiously from the canopy above them. Hedia didn't bother to look up. She was numb from stress and from stumbling through the jungle.

  And from lack of sleep, now that she thought about it. She hadn't slept since the previous morning when she was on the run from the Servitors, and she hadn't slept well then.

  Lann gave a sharp bark and halted. Hedia stopped also, but she lost her balance and almost toppled into the ape-man. She lifted the spear--with difficulty; the muscles of her arms didn't obey any better than her legs were doing--and tried to look in all directions to find the threat.

  There was no threat. They were back in the ruined keep where Hedia had first escaped from the Servitors. It was Lann's keep, she had been told by one of the hunters on the ship. Now Lann was squatting, pulling apart the vegetation that had grown through the blocks of shattered crystal.

  Hedia looked for a place to sit. An oval slab of roof had fallen without breaking further. Its longer axis was greater than she was tall. Vines had squirmed up from around its edges, but no shoot could penetrate crystal which was nearly a foot thick. She used the dagger to saw through a few stems, then pulled them out of the way and seated herself.

  She had wanted to get off her feet even more than she wanted something to eat, but she was hungry enough to eat a snake raw. She looked around hopefully, then reminded herself that she might better watch what the ape-man was doing. Her chances of escaping the Minoi--not to mention her only realistic chances of getting something to eat--depended on him.

  Lann raised a piece of charred wood. A branch flung burning into the fortress when Procron shattered it? Hedia thought. Then she noticed that the underside of the wood had been carved in the supple likeness of a woman's calf. It was part of a wooden statue; the fragment had been perfectly modeled.

  The ape-man put the leg down beside him and dug again into the pile before him. The fortress had crumbled into chunks of varying size, ranging mostly from as big as Hedia's fist down to sparkling sand. No more wood appeared, though his spade-like hands came out blackened by charcoal. His palms were longer than a man's whole hand, with relatively short fingers.

  Hedia wondered if Lann--when he was human--had carved the statue himself, and who he had used for a model. Absently, she rubbed her own right calf.

  The ape-man rose to a half-crouch, not quite as erect as even his normal bent posture. He walked splay-footed a few paces further into the ruin. Bending, he began to tear out saplings with spindly trunks and a few broad leaves.

  The bird called again. Lann leaped erect and screamed a challenge. Sweeping up a block as big as his own head, he hurled it toward the sound. The missile crashed against a tree trunk as loudly as a ballista releasing, but it must have missed. The bird gave a startled squawk and flew away. It sent back a diminishing series of complaints.

  Hedia rolled her legs under her so that she could leap off the slab in any direction if she needed to, but she continued to smile. She was confident that none of the men she'd met in the past would have realized how tense she was, although Lann might smell it in her sweat.

  She was watchful rather than afraid. This wasn't a new experience for her, though it was unusual in that the ape-man wasn't drunk.

  Lann gave a final growl, then pulled up another sapling. Its roots bound a piece of garnet or ruby, a fragment of a triangle which would have been have been four inches on a side when it was whole. Lann buffed it clean with his thumbs and set it on a woody runner thick enough to have been the trunk of a small tree. He went back to work.

  Hedia wondered how long ago the destruction had occurred. Her first thought would have been "decades," but the night she had spent in this soggy jungle had shown her how quickly plants sprouted here.

  Cooing with excitement, the ape-man came up with two more crystal fragments. He rubbed them clean like the first piece, then licked the mating surfaces with a black tongue the size of a toilet sponge.

  He fitted the parts together with care that Hedia wouldn't have thought his broad fingers were capable of. Holding the recreated triangle in his left hand, he touched it in the center with his right.

  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 15

  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.
<
br />   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.