“Your gallantry does you credit. But the getting may be slightly harder than you suppose. I’ll go with you. Two soldiers from Ryhgon’s school should be a match for twenty or so drunken Zakorians.”
They sidled away from the group on the beach and abruptly took to the indigo channels of the forest.
It began in a sort of grim humorousness, that climb through the jungle. It eased the tension in both of them, brought back certain pleasant memories of conspiracies at Lin Abissa. Yet, as they moved steadily upward, the presence of the forest began to steal on them, to overpower them with its flat, dark essence.
The gut of the jungle was all shadow, with edges of icy blue where the moon tipped its leaves. It purred and rustled and throbbed. Those small numerous eyes that had ignited below at the edge of the beach winked like stars in the undergrowth. The grasses crackled with the flame of unfelt winds.
“Spies everywhere,” Yannul whispered.
But neither of them smiled. To Raldnor it seemed the whole forest pressed close, all of it animate, watching, hostile. He felt for the first time the coldness of the shadows that were not cold in any physical sense, the oppression, the almost psychic smells of age, of something ripening on its own rottenness. The island, quiescent by day, stirring at nightfall, had breathed into its own dark life and found itself penetrated and deflowered. They had disturbed its primeval dusk. It hated them.
The plateau leaped abruptly into orange nearness through tall fern.
On the bald rock men and their whores shouted and sang, eating their fill and drinking from the broached barrels. A great bonfire flapped its skirt at the sky. Two or three women were dancing naked, holding burning twigs in their hands in imitation of the fire-dancers of Zarduk.
“Do you see your girl?” Raldnor asked.
“No. We’ll have to move closer.”
A few steps more and a female figure jumped up.
“Yanl of the Lans—and Ralnar,” she slurred, immediately knowing them both, particularly Yannul, but she was not the one Yannul sought. She led them to the fire, nevertheless, and gave them beer, and wound her arms about Yannul. At this, a man came staggering up, his eyes bloodshot.
“You’re with me, Hanot. Don’t waste your time on that landsdog. Jurl’ll want to know you’ve seen fit to join us, masters,” he jeered and careened off, dragging the woman with him.
“There she is, little Rella or Rilka, I forget her name,” Yannul said, “and having trouble, too.”
He ran toward a disturbance in the shadows, with Raldnor following. They pulled up four sailors and dealt with them swiftly. Yannul half-lifted a struggling, clawing girl, and convinced her, at the cost of almost losing his eyes, that he was not part of the prolonged rape which had been planned, but Yannul, to whom she had told her secret fears in the dark. She was small-boned, with a fine straight profile uncommon among Zakorians. She might indeed have been an Alisaarian. She smiled at him uncertainly, but her trust quickly gave way to a look of pure fright.
“Well, so we’re to be honored after all,” Jurl’s voice said behind them. “The dogs have come to fill their bellies.”
“Back to back for the fight,” Raldnor said to Yannul, “like the training floor at Abissa.” He found a savage grin on his face. “But first an appetizer. This man’s Ryhgon’s breed, and we both have a score to settle with him.”
He could not make out Jurl’s face against the fire. It did not matter. A sudden seething and intolerable hate came on him. He knew abruptly that it did not belong to him, but had filled him like an empty vessel. Hatred—the island was alive with it. It crawled in his blood, in his brain.
He felt the dead places of his mind tear open in a swift, unlooked-for agony. Not Anici or Astaris to enter them now—no sweet woman with thoughts like splintering crystal, no otherself all warm fire. Not now. This was an alien, a dreadful and unstoppable thing. A possession. He felt the entity collect itself, focusing through the jungle’s purple eye, yet seeking expression incredibly through his own. He felt something break out of him. It was horror and fear. But it made him grin and laugh in an impossible madman’s triumph.
Jurl suddenly shuddered and clutched at his throat, his belly. A sharp cry burst from his mouth. He fell and screamed and clawed, and rolled into the fire.
All around them panic dropped on the feasters. They grew silent, heads raised like the heads of animals snuffing the wind, tensed for the first feeling of pain.
It came swift, that retribution. They leaped and shrieked like demons in the glare of the flames, all caught in a pattern of terror and death.
Yannul said urgently to the girclass="underline" “Did you eat the fruit?”
“They gave me beer and fruit,” she whispered, her eyes wide, “but I hadn’t had food for three days. I sicked it up.”
“Good girl,” said Yannul, proud of her, his face very pale.
“There’s nothing we can do here,” Raldnor said.
He turned back into the trees, shaking like an old man after fever, and they followed him.
The forest was very silent as they made their way back through the shadows. No eyes opened. There was only the sound of the falls, the sea.
On the beach Tullut’s men sat huddled at their fire.
“The fruit was poisonous, Tullut,” Yannul said, “in the end.”
His Alisaarian girl began to cry. He comforted her.
They slept by the fire. At dawn Tullut took two men with him to the plateau to see if any had been purged of the poison and still lived—as did Yannul’s girl. They came back inside the hour. They did not say what they had seen on the plateau; certainly no one returned with them.
They took what was left of the bird meat and barrels filled with fresh water and rowed for the ship. There was a full wind blowing—a warm, not an angry wind. It blew them out of sight of the island. They were glad enough. Ten men and one woman were all that remained to crew this tattered, burned hag-ship, once a beautiful thing, riding proud on the western seas. They were not enough to take her oars; they could only let the wind push them as it wished. They were all tired out, immobilized and drained by what had been done to them. Many days passed; they did not cut notches and lost count of them. Overhead the position of the stars was strange. There came a lull.
“I’m finished, Ralnar Am Dorthar,” Tullut said, addressing Raldnor by the name he had chosen to go by. “The food is gone, the wind’s stopped. This blue sea has no end. We’re becalmed in hell. The voyage was cursed from the beginning.”
“You took ill luck with you,” Raldnor said. “Don’t you say it’s bad fortune to carry a felon or a wanted man?”
“Oh, some sailors’ yarn. Most of our men were felons, Ralnar. They’ve paid for it, I think. There’s some talk among us—to make a death pact. It’s our custom. This is an arduous way to reach the gods.”
“There’s been too much death,” Raldnor said.
“I know it, Ralnar. Elon was my father—Did they tell you? He got me on a girl at Hanassor, only a Zastis mistake, but he saw me schooled, bought me my commission on this ship. This damned ship. I inherited too much of him. He was a good man, but it’s weakness in me.”
Raldnor said gently: “I guessed your grief, though you hid it very well. I, too, once held back grief so no one should see it. A man should have no shame in weeping.”
“No, Ralnar. But then our customs are different. How is it your hair turned white after the burning mountain? I’ve heard it happens from shock or fear, but you’re a brave man. You were braver than that bastard Jurl.”