A, B, C Page 5

  “What of the jewels and of Hama?” inquired Geo. “Is he a god of Aptor under whom these forces are being marshaled? And are these jewels sacred to him in some way?”

  “Both are true, and both are not true enough,” replied the Priestess.

  “And one more thing. You say the last attempted invasion by Aptor into Leptar was five hundred years ago. It was five hundred years ago that the religion of Argo in Leptar purged all her rituals and instituted new ones. Was there some connection between the invasion and the purge?”

  “I am sure of it,” declared the Priestess. “But I do not know what it is. However, let me now tell you the story of the jewels. The one I wear at my neck was captured somehow from Aptor during that first invasion. That we captured it may well be the reason that we are still a free nation today. Since then it has been guarded carefully in the Temple of the Goddess Argo, its secrets well protected, along with those few chronicles that mention the invasion—which ended, incidentally, only a month before the purges. Then about a year ago, a small horde of horror reached our shore from Aptor. I cannot describe it. I did not see any of what transpired. But they made their way inland and managed to kidnap Argo herself.”

  “You mean Argo Incarnate? The highest priestess?”

  “Yes. Each generation, as you know, the first daughter of the past generation’s highest priestess is chosen as the living incarnation of the White Goddess Argo. She is reared and taught by the wisest priests and priestesses. She is given every luxury, every bit of devotion; and she is made Argo Incarnate until she marries and has daughters. And so it is passed on. At any rate, she was kidnapped. One of the assailants was hacked down: instantly it decayed, rotted on the floor of the convent corridor. But from the putrescent mass of flesh, we salvaged a second jewel from Aptor. And before it died, it was heard to utter the lines I quoted to you before. So I have been sent to find what I can of the enemy, and to rescue or find the fate of our young Argo.”

  “I will do whatever I can,” said Geo, “to help save Leptar and to discover the whereabouts of your sister priestess.”

  “Not my sister,” said the woman softly, “my daughter in blood, as I am the daughter of the last Argo: that is why this task fell to me. And until she is found dead or returned alive”—there she rose from her bench—“I am again the White Goddess Argo Incarnate.”

  Geo dropped his eyes as Argo lifted her veil. Once more that evening she held forth the jewel. “There are three of these,” she said. “Hama’s sign is a black disk with three white eyes. Each eye represents a jewel. With the first invasion, they probably carried all three jewels, for the jewels are the center of their power. Without them, they would have been turned back immediately. With them, they thought themselves invincible. But we captured one and very soon unlocked its secrets. I have no guards with me. With this jewel I need none. I am as safe as I would be with an army, and capable of nearly as much destruction.

  “When they came to kidnap my daughter a year ago, I am convinced they carried both of their remaining jewels, thinking that we had either lost or did not know the power of the first. Anyway, they reasoned, they had two to our one. But now we have two, and they are left with only one. Through some complete carelessness, your little thief stole one from me as I was about to board when we first departed two months ago. Today he probably recognized me and intended to exact some fee for its return. But now he will be put to a true thief’s task. He must steal for me the third and final jewel from Hama. Then we shall have Aptor and be rid of their evil.”

  “And where is this third jewel?” asked Geo.

  “Perhaps,” said the woman, “perhaps it is lodged in the forehead of the statue of the Dark God Hama that sits in the guarded palace somewhere in the center of the jungles of Aptor. Do you think your thief will find himself challenged?”

  “I think so,” answered Geo.

  “Somewhere in that same palace is my daughter, or her remains. You are to find them, and if she is alive, bring her back with you.”

  “And what of the jewels?” asked Geo. “When will you show us their power so that we may use them to penetrate the palace of Hama?”

  “I will show you their power,” said Argo, smiling. With one hand she held up the map over which she had spoken. With the other she tapped the white jewel with her pale fingernail. The map suddenly blackened at one edge, flared. Argo walked to a brazier and deposited the flaming paper. Then she turned once more to Geo. “I can fog the brain of a single person, as I did with Snake, or I can bewilder a hundred men. As easily as I can fire a dried, worn map, I can raze a city.”

  Geo smiled. “With those to help, I think we have a fair chance to reach this Hama and return.”

  But the smile with which she answered his was strange, and then it was gone. “Do you think,” she said, “that I would put such temptation in your hands? You might be captured, and if so, then the jewels would be in the hands of Aptor once more.”

  “But with them we would be so powerful—”

  “They have been captured once; we cannot take the chance that they be captured again. If you can reach the palace, if you can steal the third jewel, if my daughter is alive and if you can rescue her, then she will know how to employ its power to manipulate your escape. However, if you and your friends do not accomplish all these things, the trip will be useless; and so perhaps death would be better than a return to watch the wrath of Argo in her dying struggle, for you would feel it more horribly than even the most malicious torture of Aptor’s evil.”

  Geo did not speak.

  “Why do you look so strange?” asked Argo. “You have your poetry, your spells, your scholarship. Don’t you believe in their power? Go back to your berth. Send the thief to me.” The last words were a sharp order, and Geo turned from the room into the dark. The sudden chill cleared the inside of his nostrils, and he stopped to look back at the door, then out to sea. A moment later he was hurrying to the forecastle.

  chapter three

  Geo walked down into the bunk room, still deserted except for Urson and Snake.

  “Well?” asked Urson, sitting up on the edge of his berth. “What did she tell you?”

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” Geo said heavily. He touched Snake on the shoulder. “She wants to see you now.”

  Snake stood up, started for the door, then turned back.

  “What is it?” Geo asked.

  Snake dug into his clout again and pulled out the thong with the jewel. He walked over to Geo, hesitated, then placed the thong around the poet’s neck.

  “You want me to keep it for you?” Geo asked.

  But Snake turned and was gone.

  “Well,” said Urson. “So you have one for yourself now. I wonder what they do. Or did you find out? Come on, Geo, give up what she told you.”

  “Did Snake say anything to you while I was out?”

  “Not a peep,” answered Urson. “And I came no nearer sleep than I came to the moon. Now come on, what’s this about?”

  Geo told him.

  When he finished, Urson said, “You’re crazy. You and her. You’re both crazy.”

  “I don’t think so,” Geo said. He concluded his story by recounting Argo’s demonstration of the jewel’s power.

  Urson fingered the stone up from Geo’s chest and looked at it. “All that in this little thing. Tell me, do you think you can figure out how it works?”

  “I don’t know if I want to,” Geo said. “It doesn’t sound right.”

  “Damn straight it doesn’t sound right,” Urson reiterated. “What’s the point of sending us in there with no protection to do something that would be crazy with a whole army? What’s she got against us?”

  “I don’t think she has anything against us,” Geo said. “Urson, what stories do you know about Aptor? She said you might be able to tell me something.”

  “I know that no one trades with it, everyone curses by it, and the rest is a lot of rubbish not worth saying.”

  “Such as?�
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  “Believe me, it’s just bilge water,” insisted Urson. “Do you think you could figure out that little stone there, if you had long enough, I mean? She said that the priests five hundred years ago could, and she seems to think you’re as smart as some of them. I wouldn’t doubt you could work it.”

  “You tell me some stories first,” said Geo.

  “They talk about cannibals, women who drink blood, things neither man nor animal, and cities inhabited only by death. I’m fairly sure it’s not what you’d call a friendly place the way sailors avoid it, save to curse by; still, most of what they say is silly.”

  “Do you know anything more than that?”

  “There’s nothing more to know.” Urson shrugged. “Every human ill there is at one time or another has been said to come from Aptor, whether it’s the monsters that brought the Great Fire, or dandruff. I’ve never been there and I’ve never wanted to go. But I’ll welcome the chance to see it so that on my next trip I can stop some of the stupid babble that’s always springing up about it.”

  “She said the stories you’d tell would not be one tenth of the truth.”

  “She must have meant that there wasn’t even a tenth part of the truth in them. And I’m sure she’s right. You just misunderstood.”

  “I heard her correctly,” Geo assured him.

  “Then I just don’t believe it. There are half a dozen things that don’t match up in all this. First, how that four-armed fellow happened to be at the pier after two months just when she was coming in. And to have the jewel still, not have traded it or sold it already—”

  “Maybe,” suggested Geo, “he read her mind too when he first stole it, the same way he read ours.”

  “And if he did, maybe he knows how to work the things. I say let’s find out when he comes back. And I wonder who cut his tongue out. Strange One or not, that makes me sick,” grunted the big man.

  “About that,” Geo started. “Don’t you remember? He said you knew the man it was.”

  “I know many men,” said Urson, “but which one of the many I know is it?”

  “You really don’t know?” Geo asked.

  “You say that in a strange way,” Urson frowned.

  “I’ll say the same thing he said,” Geo went on. “What man did you kill? I just can’t understand the reason….”

  Urson looked at his hands awhile, stretched his fingers, turned them over in his lap, examining them. Then, without looking up, he said, “It was a long time ago, friend, but the closeness of it shivers in my eyes. I should have told you, yes. But it comes to me sometimes, not like a memory, but like something I can feel, as hard as metal, taste it as sharp as salt, and the wind brings back my voice, his words, so that I shake like a mirror where the figure on the inside pounds his fists on the fists of the man outside, each one trying to break free.

  “We were reefing sails in a flesh-blistering rain when it began. His name was Cat. The two of us were the two biggest men aboard, and that we had been put on the reefing team together meant this was an important job to be done right. Water washed our eyes; our hands slipped on wet ropes. It was no wonder my sail suddenly flung from me in a gust, billowing down in the rain, flapping against a half-dozen ropes and breaking two small stays. ‘You clumsy bastard,’ bawled the Mate from the deck. ‘What sort of fish-fingered son of a bitch are you?’

  “And through the rain I heard Cat laugh from his own spar. ‘That’s the way luck goes,’ he cried, catching at his own cloth, which threatened to pull loose. I pulled mine in and bound her tight. The competition that should go rightly between two fine sailors drove a seed of fury into my flesh that should have bloomed as a curse or a return gibe, but the rain rained too hard and the wind roared too loud, so I bound my sail in silence.

  “I was last down, of course, and as I was coming—there were men on deck—I saw why my sail had come loose. A worn mast-ring had broken and caused a main rope to fly and my canvas to come tumbling. But the ring also had held the nearly split aft mast together, and in the wind, a crack twice the length of my arm pulled open and snapped to, again and again, like a child’s noise clapper. There was a rope—a near, inch-thick line—coiled on a spike. Holding myself to a ratline mostly by my toes, I secured it and bound the base of the broken pole. Each time it snapped to, I looped it once around and pulled the wet line tight. They call this whipping a mast, and I whipped it till the collar of rope was three feet long to the top of the cleft and she couldn’t snap anymore. Then I hung the broken ring on a peg nearby so I could point it out to the ship’s smith and get him to replace the rope with metal bands.

  “That evening at mess, with the day’s incidents out of my mind and hot soup in my mouth, I was laughing over some sailor’s tale about another sailor and another sailor’s woman when the Mate strode into the hall. ‘Hey, you sea scoundrels,’ he bellowed. There was silence. ‘Which of you bound up that broken mast aft?’

  “I was about to call out, ‘Aye, it was me,’ when another man beat me by bawling, ‘It was the Big Sailor, sir!’ That was a name both Cat and me were often hailed by.

  “ ‘Well,’ snarled the Mate, ‘the Captain says that such good thinking in times hard as these should be rewarded.’ He took a gold coin from his pocket and tossed it on the table in front of Cat. ‘There you go, Big fellow. But I think it’s as much as any man should do.’ Then he clomped from the mess hall. A cheer went up for Cat as he pocketed the coin; I couldn’t see his face.

  “The anger in me started now, but without direction. Should it go to the sailor who’d called out the name of the hero? Naw, for he had been down on deck, and through rain and darkness he probably could not have told me from my rival, anyway, at that distance. At Cat? But he was already getting up to leave the table. At the First Mate, the same First Mate of this ship, friend, that we’re on now? But Jordde was out stomping somewhere on deck.

  “Perhaps it was this that caused my anger to break out the next morning when we were in calmer weather. A careless salt jarred me in a passageway, and suddenly I was all fists and fire. We scuffled, pounded each other; we cursed, we rolled: we rolled right under the feet of the Mate, who was coming down the steps at the time. He sent a boot into us and a lot of curses, and when he recognized me, he sneered, ‘Oh, the clumsy one.’

  “Now, I’d had a fiery record before. Fights on ship are a breach few captains will allow. This was my third, and one too many. And Jordde, prompted by his own opinion of me, got the Captain to order me flogged.

  “So, like meat to be sliced and bid on, I was led out before the assembled sailors at the next sunrise and bound to the mast. I thought my wrath went all toward the First Mate now. But black turned white in my head, hard as something to bite into, when he flung the whip to Cat and cried, ‘Here, Cat, you’ve done your ship one good turn. Now rub sleep off your face and do it another. I want ten stripes on this one’s back deep enough to count easily with a finger dipped in salt.’

  “They fell, and I didn’t breathe the whole time. Ten lashes is a whipping a man can recover from in a week. Most go down to their knees with the first one, if the rope is slack enough. I didn’t fall until they finally cut the ropes from my wrists. Nor was it till I heard a second gold coin rattle down on the deck from the First Mate’s hand and the words to the crew, ‘See how a good sailor gets rich,’ that I made a sound. And it was lost in the cheer that sprang from the other men.

  “Cat and one other lugged me to the brig. As I fell forward, hands scudding into straw, I heard Cat’s voice: ‘Well, brother, that’s the way luck goes.’

  “Then the pain made me faint.

  “A day later, when I could pull myself up to the window bars and look out on the back deck, we caught the worst storm I’d ever seen. The slices in my back made it no easier. Pegs threatened to pull from their holes, boards to part themselves; one wave washed four men overboard, and while others ran to save them, another came and swept off six more. The storm had come so suddenly not a sail had been ro
lled, and now the remaining men were swarming the ratlines.

  “From my place at the brig’s window I saw the mast start to go and I howled like an animal, tried to pull the bars away. But legs passed my window running, and none stopped. I screamed at them, and I screamed again. The ship’s smith had not yet gotten to fix my makeshift repair on the aft mast with metal. Nor had I yet even pointed it out to him as I had intended. It didn’t hold ten minutes. When it gave, its breakage was like thunder. Under the tug of half-furled sails, ropes popped like thread. Men were whipped off like drops of water shaken from a wet hand. The mast raked across the sky like a claw then fell against the high mizzen, snapping more ropes and scraping men from their perches as you’d scrape ants from a twig. The crew’s number was halved, and when somehow we crawled from under the frayed fabric, one mast fallen and one more ruined, the broken bodies with still some life numbered eleven. A ship’s infirmary holds ten, and the overflow goes to the brig. The choice of who became my mate was between the man most likely to live—he might take the harder situation more easily than the others—and the man most likely to die—it would probably make no difference to someone that far gone. The choice was made for the sicker one, and the next morning they carried Cat in and laid him beside me on the straw while I slept. His spine had been crushed at the pelvis and a spar had pierced his side with a hole big enough to put your hand into.

  “When he came to, all he did was cry—not with the agonized howls I had given the day before when I watched the mast topple, but with a little sound that escaped from clenched teeth, like a child who doesn’t want to show the pain. It didn’t stop. For hours. And such a soft sound, it burned into me deeper than any animal’s wail.