"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.
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.