Out of the Waters (48 page)

Something squirming and huge spread across the shoreline and beyond, covering the land. It was not a shape but a blackness too pure to have form.

The shadow was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. Uktena faced east.

The top of the black fortress split open. Procron, a figure in orichalc armor without the helmet, drifted out like a wisp of gossamer. In place of his human head flashed a diamond skull brighter than the fiery metal.

Uktena walked forward with the same awkward determination as before. His feet touched but did not sink into the slowly moving water. He raised his right arm, bent at the elbow; his left hung at his side. He was chanting, but Alphena could not make out the words.

She went out fifty feet from the shore, trying to follow. There the low waves caught the hem of her tunic and with that purchase threatened to pull her over. She lifted the garment, preparing to fling it away, but she stopped when she thought about what she was doing. Grimacing, she backed to where the water reached only to mid-shin.

Alphena had seen many gladiatorial battles. Splashing in water that would shortly be over her head, she would be completely useless in a fight against an enemy who walked on air.

Worse, if Uktena took notice of her, she would handicap him. She didn't mind risking her life, but she dared not risk the life of the friend she was supposedly helping.

Brilliant purple light flashed from Procron's skull, sizzling against a clear barrier an arm's length short of Uktena's chest. The bolt dribbled off like rain blown against a sheet of metal.

The sea beneath Uktena hissed. Alphena—near the shore now, a quarter mile behind him—felt her legs tingle and the hair rise on her arms and the back of her neck.

Uktena continued forward. Alphena thought she heard his voice in the thunder rumbling overhead.

Procron drifted closer, his arms folded across his chest. He slammed out another bolt, brighter than the sun at noon.

Uktena staggered, half-turning. Alphena fell backward in the water from the visual shock. She blinked furiously, trying to clear the orange afterimages flaring across her eyes.

Uktena resumed his advance. His form was shifting, swelling.

Alphena squeezed her eyes closed, pretending that what she saw was because afterimages were distorting her vision. She whispered, “Vesta, make him safe. Make him not be changed.”

Huge, tentacled, and many-legged, the thing that had been Uktena approached the Atlantean. Both hung in the air. Procron loosed a series of dazzling, crackling bolts, flinging Uktena back. Tentacles shriveled and the swollen body seemed to deflate, though the purple haze which spread about the scene blurred the forms of both combatants.

The sea beneath them was bubbling. Dead fish and stranger creatures rocked on the surface, many of them boiled pink or red. Alphena's skin itched as though she had gotten a bad sunburn.

Uktena surged toward Procron again. A purple flash and thunderclap drove them apart short of contact.

Procron tumbled, his armor flashing brightly, but he regained control above the water. Wobbling, dipping like a skylark instead of rising smoothly, the Atlantean took an aerial post midway between the shore and his gleaming fortress.

Black and smoking, the creature Uktena had become dropped into the sea. Spray and steam spouted fifty feet in the air.

The wave from the impact sent Alphena tumbling. She got to her feet and began sloshing toward where the shaman had hit. She screamed and raised her axe to threaten anybody who came close to her.

Uktena bobbed into view. For a moment he lay sprawled facedown on the slow swell; then his head lifted and he shook himself.

Treading water, Uktena looked out toward his opponent. Procron showed no signs of returning to try conclusions again. Carefully, painfully, the shaman began to stroke for shore.

Alphena, waist deep when the sea was at rest, watched for a moment in hesitation. She bent and took off her sandals, throwing them to shore. Holding the axe helve with her knees, she pulled her tunic over her head. After rolling it into a loose rope and retrieving the axe, she walked in the shallows toward the line Uktena was taking.

Overhead, the clouds were breaking up again. Alphena thought it had rained briefly, but the swirling battle had whipped the sea to froth; the spatters she felt might have come from that.

Uktena had paused. A swell lifted him; when it dipped away again, he lay as motionless as a mass of seaweed.

Alphena sloshed forward. “My friend!” she called. “My friend Uktena!”

The black spire had closed again. Procron must have returned to his fortress; at any rate, Alphena couldn't see him anymore.

Uktena roused and splashed feebly. Alphena shouted, but it wasn't a word. She bobbed out as far as she dared and flung the end of her rolled tunic toward the shaman. For a moment she was afraid that he wouldn't take it; then one of his sinewy hands twisted itself into the fabric.

Alphena's feet didn't touch bottom when her nose was above water. She dipped, digging her toes into the sand as she pulled hard on the makeshift rope. With the slack that gave her, she fought a foot or two closer to shore and repeated the process. She could swim, but not well and not while holding the axe. She wasn't going to let go of the axe.

After a very long time, she could walk normally. Uktena tried to get to his feet. His eyes were blank. Alphena threw his right arm over her shoulders and gripped that wrist with her left hand. Staggering—she was exhausted, and the shaman was a solid weight, not large but all bone and muscle—she started for the kiva.

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 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.