You…know…the…man…Snake said.
Geo and Urson exchanged puzzled frowns.
sleep…said Snake. You…sleep…now…
“Maybe we ought to try,” said Geo, “and find out what’s going on.” He crossed to his bunk and slipped in.
Urson hoisted himself onto the upper berth, dangling his feet against the wooden support. “It’s going to be a long time before sleep gets to me tonight,” he said. “You, Snake, little Strange One.” He laughed. “Where do you people come from?” He glanced down at Geo. “You see them all around the city. Some with three eyes, some with one. You know, at Matra’s House they say they keep a woman with eight breasts and two of something else.” He laughed again. “You know the rituals, know about magic. Aren’t the Strange Ones some sort of magic?”
“The only mention of them in rituals says that they are ashes of the Great Fire. The Great Fire was back before the purges, the ones I spoke to the Priestess about, so I don’t know anything more about them.”
“Sailors have stories of the Great Fire,” Urson said. “They say the sea boiled, great birds spat fire from the sky, and metal breasts rose up from the waves and destroyed the harbors. But what were the purges you mentioned?”
“About five hundred years ago,” Geo explained, “all the rituals of the Goddess Argo were destroyed. A new set was introduced into the temple practices. All references to the earlier ones were destroyed, and with them, much of Leptar’s history. Stories have it that the rituals and incantations were too powerful. But this is just a guess, and most priests are very uncomfortable about speculating.”
“That was after the Great Fire?” Urson asked.
“Nearly a thousand years after,” Geo said.
“It must have been a great fire indeed if ashes from it are still falling from the wombs of healthy women.” He looked down at Snake. “Is it true that a drop of your blood in vinegar will cure gout? If one of you kisses a female baby, will she have only girl children?” He laughed.
“You know those are only tales,” Geo said.
“There used to be a short one with two heads that sat outside the Blue Tavern and spun a top all day. It was an idiot, though. But the dwarfs and the legless ones that wheel about the city and do tricks, they are clever. But strange and quiet, usually.”
“You oaf,” chided Geo, “you could be one too. How many men do you know who reach your size and strength by normal means?”
“You’re a crazy liar,” said Urson. Then he scrunched his eyebrows together in thought, and at last shrugged. “Well, anyway, I never heard of one who could hear what you thought. It would make me uncomfortable walking down the street.” He dropped his head down and looked at Snake between his legs. “Can you all do that?”
Snake, from the middle bunk, shook his head.
“That makes me feel better,” said Urson. “Once we had one on a ship. Some captains will take them on. He had a little head, the size of my fist or even smaller. But a great big chest, a huge man in every other way as well. And his eyes and nose and mouth and things weren’t on that bald little knob, but on his chest, right here. One day he got into a fight and got his head, if you could call it that, broke right in half with a marlin pin. Bleeding all over himself, he went down to the ship’s surgeon, and came up an hour later with the whole thing cut off and a big bandage right where his neck should have been, and his big green eyes blinking out from under his collarbone.” Urson stretched out on his back, but then suddenly looked over the edge of the berth toward Geo. “Hey, Geo, what about those little baubles she had. Do you know what they are?”
“No, I don’t,” Geo said. “But she was concerned over them enough.” He looked up over the bunk bottom between himself and Urson. “Snake, will you give me another look at that thing again?”
Snake held out the thong and the jewel.
“Where did you get it?” Urson asked. “Oh, never mind. I guess we learn that when we go to sleep.”
Geo reached for it, but Snake’s one hand closed and three others sprang around it. “I wasn’t going to take it,” explained Geo. “I just wanted to see.”
Suddenly the door of the forecastle opened, and the tall Mate was silhouetted against the brighter light behind him. “Poet?” he called. “She wants to see you.” Then he was gone.
Geo looked at the other two, shrugged, then swung off the berth and made his way up the steps and into the companionway.
On deck it was dark. Stars flecked the heavens, and the only thing to distinguish sea from sky was that the bottom half of the great sphere in which they seemed suspended was lightless. Light fell through a cabin window here and another farther on. Geo paused to look in the first, and then, on distinguishing nothing, went toward the second.
Halfway along, a door before him opened and a blade of illumination sliced the deck. He jumped.
“Come in,” summoned the Priestess of Argo. He turned into a windowless cabin and stopped one step beyond the threshold. The walls rippled tapestries, lucent green, scarlet. Golden braziers perched on tapering tripods beneath pale blue smoke that moved into the room, piercing faintly but cleanly into his nostrils like knives. Light lashed the polished wooden newels of a great bed on which silk, damasked satin, and brocade swirled. A huge desk, cornered with wooden eagles, was spread with papers, instruments of cartography, sextants, rules, compasses; great, shabby books were piled on one corner. From the beamed ceiling, hung by thick chains, swayed a branching petrolabra of oil cups, some in the hands of demons or the mouths of monkeys, burning in the bellies of nymphs or between the horns of satyrs’ heads, red, clear green, or yellow.
“Come in,” repeated the Priestess. “Close the door.”
Geo obeyed.
She walked behind her desk, sat down, and folded her hands in front of her veiled face. “Poet,” she said, “you have had moments to think. What do you make of this all? What can you tell me of this journey we are about to make that I shall not have to tell you?”
“Only that its importance must be of great concern to Leptar.”
“Do you know just how great the concern is?” she asked. “It is great enough to jar every man, woman, and child in Leptar, from the highest priestess to the most deformed Strange One. The world of words and emotions and intellect has been your range till now, Poet. But what do you know of the real world, outside Leptar?”
“That there is much water, some land, and mostly ignorance.”
“What tales have you heard from your bear friend, Urson? He is a traveled man and should know some of what there is of the earth.”
“The stories of sailors,” said Geo, “are menageries of beasts that no one has ever seen, of lands for which no maps exist, and of peoples no man has met.”
She smiled. “Since I boarded this ship I have heard many tales from sailors, and I have learned more from them than from all my priests. You, on the docks this evening, have been the only man to give me another scrap of the puzzle except a few drunken seamen misremembering old fantasies.” She paused. “What do you know of the jewels you saw tonight?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“A common thief hiding on the docks has one; I, a priestess of Argo, possess another; and if you had one, you would probably exchange it for a kiss from some tavern maid. What do you know of the god Hama?”
“I know of no such god.”
“You,” she said, “who can spout all the rituals and incantations of the White Goddess Argo, you do not even know the name of the Dark God Hama. What do you know of the Island of Aptor?”