Kavin's World (13 page)

The sky had been graying with cloud, and darkening. We carried all we could, now, of meat for the ships. Kakk Marag had slain a huge number of birds, and we had the deer. Now we loaded every boat and cast off.

As we moved with the current, a few drops of rain pattered on the river, and I glanced at the sky.

“We’ll get a wetting, I think,” I said to Caltus.

And at that moment, the steersman of our boat let go his oar, and staggered to his feet, with a hideous choking scream. His face was purple, and he flailed wildly at the empty air; the boat tipped and rolled as he struggled with the unseen.

Eight

At that moment, as our steersman choked there, I felt real terror.
It’s
one thing to fight man or beast, however terrible, that one can see; and quite another to see a man strangling, in broad daylight, under hands that are invisible. Our frozen moment of hesitation was nearly the steersman’s death; the thing was as strong as ten men, and clawed, it seems, for blood sprang out from torn skin as he fought it.

Then, the nearest of us grasped at the man, and our hands found the thing he fought. Its skin was cold, slimy, and scaled like a lizard’s, and it seemed to have more than one pair of clawed arms, as well as fangs. We fought it, as the other boats turned toward us, and we were fortunate that the boat did not overturn in our struggling. But at last we had it down, beating at it with oars, until it ceased to move.

The rain was beginning in earnest now, and as it came down, the water ran over the thing lying there in the boat’s bottom, revealing it in wetness. It seemed made of wet fog, even as it was. But it was substantial enough; a creature like a great lizard, with only one pair of arms, not many; its busyness had given us that false idea. Dimly, we could see great-fanged jaws, and eyes like saucers. The jaws moved weakly, even now that the creature must be nearly dead.

Four of us lifted it, and rolled it over the side. It did not sink at once, but drifted near us, leaving a curious shaped depression on the water. We shipped our oars again, and pulled, while I stared back at the thing, cold fear down my spine.

“I wonder,” Caltus said, staring at the shape in the water, as we left it behind. “Could that foul thing be what killed those in the village?
That,
or its ancestor…”

“Look!” I pointed. “There’s more than one kind of invisible beast here! Look at the dead thing!”

A valley of water had appeared, a spray of foam, cutting straight as an arrow toward the floating dead creature. The thing that came, swift as an arrow, was huge and hungry; and a single snapping sound, like the breaking of a mast, was all it took. Then it submerged in a plume of bubbles, and the invisible corpse too was gone.

“This strikes me as a most unhealthy country,” Caltus observed. “Thank the gods that thing in the water is a carrion eater by choice. It would make short work of a boat.”

“I have an idea this land may have still other… inhabitants,” I said, staring at the shore. In the wet grass and mud, there were marks. I pointed them out, silently, and Caltus looked and turned pale.

“It would have to be bigger than a ship,” he said, in a low voice.

“It is,” I said. “Listen.”

We could hear it, on the shore… breathing.

It stalked us as we rowed; sometimes we saw the grasses bend before it, and sometimes we heard the huge, soft, sounds it made. And as we rowed, we sweated, cold sweat, and prayed to every god we knew.

Then we were among the reeds again, and then we slid through, into the open sea; the ships lay ahead, lanterns lit in the growing dark.

I hailed the
Luck,
which lay nearest, and faces lined the rail as our boats came under her lee.

“You, up there!”
I cried. “Bring bags of bread flour, to the ship’s side!”

They thought I had gone mad, of course; when I ordered all the boats to form in line, close to the
Luck’s
gallery, and none to try to go aboard just yet. Then I spent another few minutes convincing those aboard the
Luck
to fetch up the flour. At last it came, with lamentations by the chief cook, who swore there’d be no more bread now.

“Sprinkle it over all, everything in the boats!”

Now they were quite sure I had been struck with insanity. Not till I threatened rope and yardarm did they set about the lunatic task. Bag after bag floated over us, in a white cloud, which turned to paste in the drizzle; we became pale specters, sticky-faced.

Then, in the second boat, they saw it.

This one looked like a man, or an ape; it was no larger than those dead village folk had been, and bearded, with a wide, toothed, and snarling mouth. But its ears were pointed like a cat’s, and it had a lashing tail. It bit viciously at the first to try to seize it, and another man pinned it down with a short dagger. Then the bitten man shrieked and folded down, dead, though his wound was only a scratch.

At that, the men in the boat killed the thing, and flung it into the sea.

The third boat was clear of invisibles; but the fourth yielded the most surprising one of all.

It could not be, but it was… a woman. She was tall, with a strange triangular face, long hair that hung about her flour-coated body where she stood in the thwarts. She showed no evidence of panic, and none of any wish to attack; in fact, the outlined
face,
flour-fogged, seemed calm and smiling. She was naked, finely made; the boat’s crew gaped at her, and she stood gazing down at them, then up at the ship’s side.

But the rest of us were not in any mood to accept another invisible with equal calm, not now. An arrow from Kakk Marag’s bow, sang past her, and thumped into the ship’s timbers; she whirled in obvious terror, and sprang for the hanging lines overhead. A second arrow missed; the rolling boats were ill to shoot from. And she was scrambling now like a jackanapes, up the lines and out of sight. The pouring rain washed her as she went; and now she was quite gone. But she was aboard, I knew.

There were no others, now, we hoped. The flour had marked out our would-be stowaways; and I was glad we did not have the small one aboard, at least. The woman-shape seemed somehow less dangerous. Although only a day or so of time would tell, I thought gloomily; the pleasing form meant nothing, if the creature had the habits of the other invisibles.

Well, we should simply have to hunt it down, sooner or later. One by one, the boats were hoisted in to their own ships, and in the
Luck,
as the others, the cooks took charge of our game bag.

The rain was coming down steadily now, and a light wind from the southwest made the dark sea around us fleck with white foam. But our anchorage was firm, and I had no intention of sailing till morning; it would be too easy to lose touch in the rainy darkness. Before going below, I looked once more toward the distant shore, now nearly invisible. It may have been an illusion, or it may have been a swirl of fog; but in the flicker of lighting, I seemed to see enormous shapes moving, very slowly, in the marshes.

I glanced along the deck, where light from lamps and from the galley fire made yellow pools. Seamen moved about, and there was a rich smell of cooking. Somewhere, an invisible woman must stand, watching this; what was she?

Then Samala came toward me along the deck, carrying a smoking platter; she brought it gravely to me, and offered it silently. I took
it,
feeling a little confused, and ate a little. It was amazingly good, better than the venison of lost Dorada’s woods.

A cask of wine was brought out on deck, and men passed back and forth, while we held feast under the shelter of a spread sail against the rain. We could see lights and hear voices from the other ships about us, holding their own feasts, and the sound of singing.

Bren, under the lee of the foredeck, found a lute, belonging to one of the seamen, and now played an ancient song of Dorada, a wild and slightly lewd ballad of the ways of a fisherman with a sea-witch. It was very funny, and a little sad to hear it, and all of us joined with him on the refrain.

And suddenly, as we sat there, I found Isa also beside me, with Samala on my other hand. The three of us shared our food, in an odd, understanding silence, almost like some ritual of sharing. I do not now understand precisely what took place, except that a thing became known to all of us, at that moment.

Later, I heard the voice of Caltus, the captain of arms-men, chanting a war-ballad of Meryon, and thumping the luteback melodiously and noisily in the shouted choruses. And much later, the sound of Isa’s voice, who sang in a strange language I had never heard before, some old song she may have heard as a child.

All of us aboard the
Luck
that night were very merry, especially Thuramon, whose capacity for wine was truly a magician’s. During a part of the evening, he performed conjuring tricks, some very surprising indeed, even more surprising since by that time he could not see too well. One of his smaller fire demons singed his beard before being put down, for example.

And for myself, I discovered that there was a great deal I had never known before; and that women are all very much alike and at the same time very different.

By morning, the rain had ceased entirely, and we sailed before a strong, fresh wind, our decks shining clean and wet,
our
pennons flying out straight from every masthead. In some way, that night was a turning point: in all of us, it was as if our despair had been washed away in the rain.

That ancient captain’s scrolls had been accurate enough, we saw. The sandy coasts were passed, and several times we saw the craggy islands on our starboard side. Then, in the dawn of another day, a high line of pointed mountains stood against the sun; the Island of the Dragons. And, westward, we saw the green of the forest land, which the scroll had also mentioned.

“Because of the beasts,” I said thoughtfully to Thuramon as we watched the green land draw closer. “What beasts? Beasts such as those invisible creatures we saw… or did not
see,
worse luck. Something like that, I’d keep well away from. We would find no home in such a land.”

“The woman,” Thuramon said blandly. “She is still on board.”

I glanced at him. “How do you know?”

“She takes food, regularly, from the galley,” Thuramon said. “The cooks are quite used to it by now, though they nearly panicked at first.” He laughed. “They think she is your goddess, Tana, the goddess of the figurehead, come to life. Word went throughout the ship, and now they’re rather pleased she lives aboard in such a way, and takes what the cooks believe a kind of sacrifice. She has a gourmet’s taste, I hear; nothing but the finer tidbits, which lift invisibly away and are gone, so.” He waved his hand.

“I’ve made no attempt to catch her,” I said. “She’s done us no injury… though I thought she might, at first. What is she, Thuramon?”

He shrugged. “A living creature, as much flesh and blood as you are.”

“She makes no sounds,” I said. “It seems odd that she’s never spoken a word. Perhaps she can’t…”

Thuramon shook his head.
“Oh, no.
She can. The cooks have heard her laugh, and night watches, the men swear she sings in a strange language, but very softly. And one man said he heard her speak in our own language, a word or two.”

“She has had time to learn our tongue,” I said. “I wish she’d learn it well enough to speak with me. I’ve a mighty curiosity about her, how it must feel to be so… well, what would you call it, wizard?”

“To be born so, and not need spells and ointments,” Thuramon said.
“How convenient, in a way, for a magician, or a thief… or a ruler—all of whom have something in common.”

At that, a sudden clear peal of woman’s laughter came from the empty air, and I turned, staring hard. But there was nothing to see.

“All right,” I said. “Good lady, you have taken free passage aboard my
Luck:
you are welcome enough, but remember, I am captain here. Pay for your passage with this much: harm none aboard, do my ship no damage, and you’re free of this deck. Agreed?”

The laugh came once again, from a point farther away than before; then silence.

I shrugged, and turned back to watch the land.

“I’ll anchor, close inshore,” I told Thuramon. “Then we’ll see by experiment how these beasts look, and what danger they may be. Possibly they may be gone by now, as the spearmen were.”

“I think not,” Thuramon said. “Look there.” It was like a gull, high over the forest, but it was very high, and yet clearly visible; therefore, very large. Against the blue sky, it wheeled slowly, soaring on long wings, as I watched.

While we made anchor two or three bowshots from the shore, it still circled up there, as if it hunted something below.

The shore was a white beach, and beyond it trees so immense that the eye was at first deceived about their true size; one of them might have been large enough to build a whole ship the size of the
Luck,
carved entire from its bole. A breeze, laden with the scent of growing things, blew lightly from the land, and our crews lined the rails, looking. We had been too long at sea.

Then, from high overhead, we heard a strange, high sound, like a giant flute, a musical rising and falling, a cry like nothing any of us had ever heard before. Out of the sky, the dragon fell toward the forest, wings folded back, beak out like a lance, and as it dived, it emitted that musical cry again.

Just at treetop level, its great wings opened, and it vanished stooping like a falcon on its prey; and somewhere, among the trees, there was a squalling cry. A moment later, the dragon reappeared, sailing low over our mast tops. It was a beautiful creature, its armor shining with a blue-green luster, and its wings rainbowed where the sun shone through them. It lugged some sort of beast in its claws as it flew.

The thing it carried looked bigger than a dog, nearly the size of a small pony, but doglike in shape. It was gray-white, and furred, hanging limply in the dragon’s jaws.
And as it went over, a great splash of blood dropped, on to the white deck of the
Luck.

The splash had fallen near one of the men at arms, who glanced down at it, curiously; then he knelt, poking at it curiously with his dagger. Suddenly, he emitted a cry of surprise.

“Lord Prince!” he called. “Look here? What kind of beast bleeds thus?”

As I came to him, Thuramon behind me, he held up the iron dagger with which he had touched the spot. The point was eaten away as if it had been rusted off. And where the blood had lain on the deck was a deeply burned spot, etched a finger’s depth into the white wood, smoking slightly.