The Nonborn King (13 page)

She left him still huddled in a heap and set off into the dusk. The sky was the color of a duck's egg over the water, deepest blue lashed with violet mare's tails above the spine of Kersic A few stars, fuzzy, were coming out. Huldah hummed tunelessly as she strode along. It was damp and chilly, but she didn't mind. And the God was well-covered with his rug of woven rabbitskin strips Her heart lifted with thinking of him. So beautiful, so joybringing even in the endless sleep! (His poor lost hand would soon be fixed when lazy Grandpa finished the last sanding and smoothing ) If she humed back after the futile vigil there would still be time to worship him, and Grandpa would wake up and watch and groan

"I hate you. Grandpa," she said

Pushing through the high marquis, she came at length to the land's end where there was a cleared space among twisted umbrella pines, and a tall silver-gray pile of wood Huldah put down the firepot and the torch and went to the sheer western up of the promontory- She sal on the edge with her strong legs dangling and the rising wind tickling as it blew up her skirt.

Down there in that cove, in a place of sharp reefs that the waters now covered, she had found him The wonder. The marvel. The joy. The God from the Sea. His eyes had never opened during the months she had nursed him; but she knew that they would some day, now that his terrible hurts were healed He would awaken and love her.

"Then we will kill Grandpa," Huldah decided

8

ON THE MAGHREB SHORE OF AFRICA. BLACK WAVES LAPPED at the base of the Rif Range and the old volcanic hills that had once anchored the southern end of a broken rubble dike. A thin drizzle had started.

Kuhal Earthshaker, Second Lord Psychokinetic. had camped in the most sheltered spot he could find, a steep-walled wadi carrying a trickle of water that vanished into beach shingle before ever reaching the New Sea. There were palms and blooming acacia trees, and a poignant cluster of pink narcissus nodding in deep shadows beside a little spring.

He had propped the Firvulag coracle up like a dome above a fairly dry niche. Fian rested beneath it. Kuhal had managed to light a fire with his feeble creativity, but the supper pickings were meager: a palm heart, a couple of baked bird's eggs with their embryos, some delicious bui insubstantial acacia flowers fried in the last of the hamster fat. A snake of mouth-watering dimensions had got away. Kuhal knew better than to cook the abundant but poisonous narcissus bulbs Fian moaned. The drizzle was turning into sharp gusts of rain that tapped on the coracle skins.

COLD!

cold

cold

COLD

COLD

66

COLDCOLD cold

THE POSTDILUVIUM

i/i know.

cold cold COLD

6?

COLDCOLD cold

The sleeping-robe that Kuhal had made from small animal pelts was now almost falling to pieces. Its sinew threads had rotted and most of the fur had fallen from the fragile leather- He had tried to mend it with fresh skins, but the older portions tended to tear away from the patches. He tucked the ragged thing as closely as he could about Fian, then went off to scout more wood for the fire. He found dead branches on a tree up the arroyo. Thorns ripped his hands as he broke them up and heaped them onto the smoking fire. He crept back under the coracle's shelter and took off his soaked and slimy poncho, draping it over a thwart to serve as a curtain and heat-trap. The antelope hide stank abominably.

Fian stirred, plucking at the bandages of dirty rose-gold fabric that covered his dreadful head wounds. Kuhal restrained his brother's hands and pressed them firmly back beneath the fur coverlet. They were clammy, the skin stretched tight over stark bones and tendons, pulse fluttering in the web of blood vessels.

dying. No.

we die together... No.

we die cold?... No!

socoldbloodsiowsheartslows NO I/I WARM US!!

The conjoined mind struggled. One half was frantic to cut loose and make an end to months of suffering. The other, remorseless in love, commanded life. [psycho A kinetic] [vaso A dilator} (stimu A lation} A A H

The pain was coming mostly from the infected facial nervesthat and the damp cold- Having mustered up barely enough PK to boost his brother's impeded circulation, Kuhal now steeled himself to assume the pain again with his redactive faculty. His strength was almost inadequate to manage the shunt. This would be his tenth night in a row without sleep, the outer limit. They would have to lay up here tomorrow. Rest well, gel warm and dry, find some substantial food. Plan's will to live had diminished almost to nullity,

Sleep, Fian.

yes Sleep, dearbrother.

yes Sleep, soulmirror.

yes Sleep, gentleintuitor.

yes Sleep, lovedselfwounded

yes Sleep, Fianmindofmymind, sleep.

[slow-wave thela rhythm] Sleep.

For most of the day, Fian had been delirious, and the mental tempests of the right hemisphere of the Brain assaulted the fatigue-drugged defenses of the left until Kuhal himself suffered a hallucination.

He had trudged along the eternal beach, towing Fian through the shallows in the derelict Firvulag coracle. Suddenly he had seemed to see a city in the mists far out on the water. It was as luminous as an earthbound sun, Muriah, reborn in splendor! Kuhal heard the Tanu women singing the Song, cheering arena crowds at the Spring Sport Meeting, glass trumpets sounding, and me clangor of jewel-bright swords beating on glass shields.

Bewitched, he dropped the coracle rope. Home! They were almost home! After months of creeping westward along the African shore, wretched castaways, half-crazed and starving, battered into metapsychic impotence, a miracle had happened.

Arms outstretched, Kuhal waded toward the vision, into deep water.

The more seriously injured brother, with greater intuitive power in his share of the Brain, recognized the phantom for the sham it was. Summoning up a pulse of coercive force, he had compelled Kuhal to return, to take the rope in hand.

"Now we will go to the Blessed Isle together," Fian had said.

But Kuhal's brainstorm had passed. Obstinately, he chose life for them. They came ashore.

"I am dying slowly," Fian had said. "Why not make an end to it?"

"You won't die. I won't let you. We're going to get back to the European mainland. Just as soon as the rains stop, the wind will shift to the south. I'll rig a sail for the coracle."

"It won't do us any good to cross to the other shore. The others are all dead in the Flood."

"We don't know that! Our farsensing power is too weakened to perceive beyond earshot, if that far."

"Kuhal! Mind of my mind. Death is all there is for us... if we are to remain united."

Screaming, Kuhal had denied it. Death was unthinkable. Separation was unthinkable- "Trust me! You've always trusted me, followed me. We're one."

And the pain flowed forth, and hopelessness, and Fian said, "If you won't follow me, I may have to go alone."

"No!" At Kuhal's lowest conscious level the truth crept out: I am afraid...

Sitting in the rain-beaten shelter, Kuhal Earthshaker who had been Second Lord Psychokinetic to the great Nodonn held his sleeping twin tightly. The fire was hissing; soon the rain would put it out. Fian's brainwaves were slow and peaceful. He felt no pain. But for the wakeful brother it was otherwise:

[slow thera]

[slow theta] FEAR

[slow theta}

[slow theta}

?

IT WAS POURING AND GETTING PRETTY DARK BY THE TIME THAT the ronin Yoshimitsu Watanabe came to the twelfth troll-gate on the Redon Track.

"Rotten Firvulag extortionists," he grumbled.

He reined in and considered the matter with weary disgust. He'd lost so much time already, swimming flooded fords and detouring around washouts and landslides- If he reached Goriah at all tonight it would be in the wee hours, when hospitality was hard to come by. even if a traveler had money. And if he was broke...

Yosh's famished chaliko took advantage of the halt to scratch up a few chufas from the muddy earth. He urged her forward again with a soft, "Hup, Kiku." She came to the edge of a precipice and looked down at the foaming torrent below, whickering uneasily. The defile was narrow but extremely steep, clogged by downed timber. It was spanned by a simple bridge of adze-flattened logs. At either end of this were the "gates," man-high cairns, each topped by a pole from which dangled a colored parchment lantern shaped like a fantastic horned skull. Large fireflies imprisoned inside were a fitful source of illumination.

If a wayfarer wanted to use the bridge, it was obligatory to drop the customary offering into holes at the base of the cairns. Gate-crashers were subject to being eaten by the troll. Yosh unfastened his capelike straw mino and let it slide off so that the ominous magnificence of his red-laced uma-yoroi would be clearly visible to any nocturnal predator. In two swift movements he replaced his straw rain hat with the armored kabuto. When his hands came down from his head, they gripped the makeshift (but lethal) nodachi that had been sheathed behind his right shoulder.

He held the longsword before him. He and Kiku stood as motionless as an equestrian statue. The ghostly lanterns bobbed and flickered. Tepid rain rattled on the jungle greenery and a few tree frogs peeped a spring madrigal.

"Now, listen here, you!" Yosh said in ringing tones. "I'm a man of honor. I hold to the Human-Firvulag Alliance- I've paid your damn tolls all the way from the Paris Basin without a mumbling word. But now I've got only three silver bits leftIf I give them to you, I'll be flat skinned when I pull into Goriah city tonight- No money for a bed, for food, fodder for my mount, anything. So I'm not paying! You'll have to take it out in trade!"

The frogs fell silent, leaving only the sound of rain and the cascade's muffled drone. Suddenly a green glow sprang into being at the near end of the log bridge. Something tall and dripping and hideous bounded onto the trail, menacing the Japanese warrior and his horselike steed. The apparition was reptilian, with webbed hands and a scaly body. The head resembled the homed skull of the lanterns, covered in pebbly hide, and there were enormous bulging eyes that shone like green searchlights.

Before the thing could pounce, Yosh opened his mouth. He summoned forth the kiai, the spirit-shout of the ancient bujutsu masters, a vocal vibration of such stupefying volume and horrific timbre that it seemed to strike the troll like a physical blow. The creature staggered and fell back on one knee, clapping its taloned flippers over the sides of its head.

Urged on by Yosh, the chaliko mare leaped- She was a huge animal, more than nineteen hands. Her forefeet, armed with semiretractiie claws larger than a man's palm, landed only centimeters from the troll's paralyzed body. The point of Yosh's great nodachi hovered above the belly of the Firvulag.

"The sword is iron, not bronze or glass," Yosh said. "You speak Standard English? This is a blood-metal weapon! Nopar o beyn! One prick, and you're warm meat. I've killed twentytwo Howlers and two Tanu with this nodachi, and I'm ready to pop for my first Firvulag if you just blink ugly."

The troll let its breath out in a fluttering gasp. "You, say you hold to the Alliance, Lowlife?"

"I have so far. Are you going to be reasonable about the toll?"

The creature's eyes blazed. "Don't I deserve to make a living? Three times the bridge washed out this winter and I had to fix it! Two bits is cheap. I'm not even making my maintenance expenses. And besides, the royal tax gougers take a thirty percent rake-off."

The sword didn't waver. "I can't afford it. Times are hard in the North Country with the world turned upside down since the Flood. That's why I'm going to Goriah. Well? You ready to die for a lousy two bits?"

The monster's radiance dimmed. "Oh, hell. Pass and be damned lo you. Look, can I shape-shift and get up? This cold mud is murder on my lumbago."

Yosh nodded and lifted his sword. The reptilian form quivered and seemed shot through with sparks of color that coalesced into the softly gleaming body of a medium-sized exotic. His face was seamed, his nose long and pointed, and his beady little eyes glowered from under extraordinarily bushy red brows. He wore a conical scarlet cap with matching breeches (now soaked with mud), a ruffled shirt laced at the throat, a leather jerkin embroidered in exquisite designs of twined stylized animals, and hobnail jackboots with turned-up tips.

"Look, we can make a deal," the troll said. "You're still more than thirty Lowlife leagues from the City of the Shining One. A long way to go on a bad night. And like you said, your wallet's short of the jingties. You'd need even more than those three bits to find decent up-putting in Goriah. But my brother-in-law Malachee runs a nice lavem just a few kloms from here where you can gel a good meal and a flop and a bag of roots for your brute for only two bits- Then in the morning I'll let you across for a cut rale: one silver piece instead of the usual two. What say?"

Yosh's eyes narrowed. "No shit?"

The Firvulag turned up his hands. "Humans and Little People are allies! King Sharn and Queen Ayfa made it official. Nobody'll zap you in your bed at Malachee's."

"But a human staying at a Firvulag tavern, "

"Not so common in the hinterlands, but getting pretty usual around this neck of the woods, especially since the Shining One sent out his call for recruits. Our people can use the business! Look, I sent two other Lowlives to Malachee's already tonight. Footsloggers- You'll have company."

Yosh grinned. He slid the longsword back into its scabbard on his back. A touch of his heels and a slight body movement on his pan caused the chaliko to draw away from the bedraggled exotic. "Okay. I accept the deal. How do I find this place?"

"Go back along the trail until you come to that turn leading to the cliffs alongside the Strait of Redon. Hang a right at the cork-oak grove, then follow the ley until you run smack into a tumulus. That's it- Malachee's Toot. Tell 'em Kipol Greenteeth sent you."

He shambled to the edge of the gorge, then looked back over his shoulder. "That battle-yell of yours is really a traditional Firvulag gag, you know. But the old tricks are the best. No hard feelings." Giving a sardonic salute, Kipol Greenteeth sank into the ground.