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?”
“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.