It was a strange seashore, backed as it was by the limitless vertical wall of the cable. There were skeletal trees growing from sandy deposits and a clear, still pool near the center. The area was littered with bone-white driftwood.
"We'll be here a day or two," Hautbois said as she passed Robin, carrying a huge burden of tent canvas. "Feeling better?"
"I'm fine, thanks." She smiled at the Titanide, but in truth, she was still shaky from her last bout of palsy. Hautbois had taken good care of her. Without her restraint, Robin would surely have injured herself.
She snagged Gaby's arm as she passed by and fell in step beside her.
"What are we stopping here for?"
"It's the garden spot of Rhea," Gaby said, sweeping her arm wide. But the joke seemed forced. "Actually, Rocky has some business here. Better count on two days. Maybe three. Getting tired of us?"
"No. Just curious. Should I be?"
"It might be better if you weren't. She has something to do, and I can't tell you what it is. That's for your own good, believe it or not." Gaby hurried away, back to the raft.
Robin sat on a log and watched the Titanides and Chris pitching camp. A month ago she would have forced herself to get up and help. Honor would have mandated it because to sit here was an acknowledgment that she was weak. Well, damn it, she was weak.
She had Hautbois to thank for being able to say that to herself. The Titanide had sung to her all through her recent seizure, in both English and Titanide. She had not let Robin turn away from her helplessness, had forced her to begin looking at ways to cope with it beyond sheer gutsiness. When Robin began to regain control, she found she did not resent what the Titanide had said. She learned Hautbois was a healer. That included doctor and psychiatrist and counselor and comforter, and possibly other things. Robin had the impression Hautbois would willingly have made love to her in the private, frontal mode, if it could have helped anything. Whatever Hautbois had done had given Robin more peace of mind than she had felt since ... she could not recall. She thought she must have breached her mother's womb ready to fight the whole world.
Nasu was agitating to get out. Robin opened her sack and let her writhe onto the sand, confident she would not go far. She dug in her pocket and came up with a piece of hard candy wrapped in a leaf, peeled it, and sucked on it. The sand was too cold for Nasu's likeing, so she coiled around Robin's ankle.
Cirocco was standing alone near the wall, motionless, looking at a tall crack in it. Robin followed it with her eyes and realized it was a space between two cable strands. Three of them abutted the island, which had once been an outer strand itself, making the little bay semicircular. There was a similar crack between the center strand and the one on the left. Below the sea, the strands would splay out widely. She remembered a picture of the conical mountain and its strand forest in Hyperion. Here the gaps between strands were no more than ten meters wide and partially clogged with barnacles.
She saw Gaby return from the raft bearing an oil lamp. Gaby hurried over to Cirocco and handed it to her. They were talking, but the constant noise of the sea obliterated the words before they reached Robin. Cirocco was not saying much; it fell to Gaby to do most of the talking, and she was animated about it. She did not look happy. Cirocco kept shaking her head.
At last Gaby gave up. She stood facing Cirocco for a moment. Then the two women embraced, Gaby standing on her toes to kiss her old friend. Cirocco hugged her once more, then entered the crack between the cables. The light of her lantern was visible for a short time, then gone.
Gaby walked to the edge of the circular cove, as far from everyone else as she could get. She sat and put her head in her hands. She did not move for two hours.
Cirocco's absence passed in relaxation and games. The Titanides did not mind it, nor did Chris. Gaby was nervous much of the time. Robin grew more bored by the hour.
She took up whittling, taught by the Titanides, but did not have the patience for it. She wanted to ask Chris to teach her to swim but felt she should not be naked in front of him again. Gaby solved the problem by suggesting she wear a bathing suit. One was quickly improvised. The idea of a bathing suit was as unexpected to Robin as wearing shoes in the shower, but it did the job. She took three lessons in the central body of water she had misnamed a tidepool. (There were no tides in Gaea.) In return, she tutored Chris in fighting, something he knew little about. The lessons had to be called off temporarily when she herself learned something, which was that testicles are amazingly easy to injure and can cause their owner a great deal of pain. She exhausted her store of apologies and was genuinely sorry, but how could she have known?
Only two incidents livened an otherwise comatose two days. The first was soon after Cirocco had left, when Gaby seemed to want to move around. She took them along a narrow trail leading from the campsite to the high ledge girdling the cable. All seven of them spent the next hour walking carefully on irregular ground that sloped toward a fifty-meter drop into the sea. They went almost halfway around the cable to a point where the ledge had broken away. Just short of that was a recess between two cable strands. Standing in it was a squat stone pilaster, and sitting on that was a golden statue of an alien creature.
It reminded Robin of the Frog Queen from a childhood tale. It was obviously aquatic; though it had six legs, they ended in broad flippers. It squatted, looking out to sea, hunchbacked and broad. Nothing grew on it, though it was draped with dried seaweed. Its single eye was a hollow socket.
"That's been here at least ten thousand years," Gaby said. "There used to be an eye in the socket. It was a diamond about as big as my head. I saw it once, and it seemed to glow." She kicked at the sand, and Robin was startled to see a creature the size of a large dog emerge and slink away on six flippered feet. It was yellow and rather ugly. There was very little flesh on its bones. The thing did not look much like the statue, yet there was a family resemblance. It turned once, opened a mouth with several thousand long yellow teeth, hissed, and continued to shuffle away.
"Those things used to be so mean a wolverine would have a heart attack just to look at them. They were so quick your guts would be on the ground before you saw them. They'd hide in the sand like that one was doing. As soon as the first one jumped out, they'd be coming from all over. I saw one take seven mortal hits from a rifle and still live to kill the man who shot it."
"What happened to them?" Chris asked.
Gaby picked up a big shell and threw it to shatter against the image. A dozen heads immediately appeared above the sand, open-mouthed. Robin reached for her weapon, but it wasn't necessary.
The creatures looked around in confusion, then wriggled back into concealment.
"They were put here to guard the idol's eye," Gaby said. "The race that made it is long gone. Only Gaea knows anything about them. You can be sure it wasn't really an idol because nobody in here ever worshiped anything but Gaea. Some kind of monument, I guess. Anyway, it's been at least a thousand years since anyone cared about it or visited it.
"Until about fifty years ago. That's when the pilgrims started coming, and Gaea created these creatures as perversions of the original ones. She gave them one drive in life, and that was to protect the eye at all costs. They did a damn good job. The eye wasn't taken until about fifteen years ago. I personally know of five people who died right here where we're standing, and there were surely many more than that.