We must be alert, Hiero replied. He stretched, feeling so stiff that he could hardly move, although the sleep had done him a lot of good.
Luchare awoke at the movement from her place nearby. “Is that today’s new sun, that dim glow? We must have had a long sleep. But I still feel like sleeping again. Is that wicked?”
“No, it’s not. We’re both still exhausted. I’m going to declare a rest day. I think we can finish those crossbows and cut some bolts for them too, which will make me feel a lot better. We’re going to need some missile weapons for hunting, if for no other reason,”
The day began more pleasantly than any in weeks. Hiero managed to finish his own crossbow and to cut some bolts from seasoned dead saplings washed up on the island’s shore.
Luchare was no help, for she spent most of the time arranging her hair, bathing, and pelting Hiero with bunches of flower petals whenever she caught him looking “too serious.” At mid-afternoon, he gave up on any further work simply to lie with his head in her lap while she gossiped about her past life and speculated on their future together.
“I hope we have a long and happy one, love,” he said at last. “But we’re a far and distant way from it now. And you’ve never mentioned, in all your gabble, just what led you to run away from D’alwah. An arranged marriage, one might guess?”
She gasped in astonishment. “I knew it! You were too peering into my mind!”
“No.” He smiled up at the indignant face and with his finger transferred a kiss on the end of the dark, aquiline nose. “You admitted you were no slave once before. You’re the daughter of one of your great nobles, I imagine, because, by your own admission, only the priesthood and the nobility get a chance to learn as much as you have. So it was a fairly easy guess. How great a noble is your father, in your own country’s terms, I mean?”
“The greatest,” she said in dull tones. There was a silence.
“The actual king, eh?” Hiero no longer smiled. “Now that’s a pity. Are you the only child? It might be important.”
“I had one older brother, but he was killed in a battle with the Unclean. My father wanted me to marry and cement an alliance with the next most powerful state. I knew, everyone knows, ail about Efrem of Chespek. He beats and tortures his concubines. His first queen went mad and he had her blinded, divorced her as not being legally married, since the kings cannot marry people who are physically maimed, you see, and put her in a nunnery. That’s what I was running away from.”
“Can’t say as I much blame you,” Hiero said, chewing a grass stem. “I rather was hoping to establish contact with various countries, especially yours, so that I could open a trade route and, more important, we could start to recivilize your area. Stealing a princess, the only princess, is a bad start.”
She bristled. “What do you mean ‘recivilize?’ I’ll have you know, Per Desteen, my bearded priestling, D’alwah is a great and powerful nation, with two walled cities and countless churches and other big palaces and buildings of stone. To say nothing of a great and brave army!”
Hiero smiled affectionately at her and said nothing. He rolled over on his stomach and still said nothing, his chin pillowed on his arms, apparently staring away off over the lake.
“I see,” she said after an even longer pause. “Those things aren’t enough to be called civilized by themselves, are they, Hiero?”
“Well, what do you think?” he asked. “They go along with a basis of chattel slavery, a stranglehold on wealth and education by a small, propertied class, crushing taxes, a state religion which seems to have degenerated, at least in part, into sheer superstition, and finally, incessant, bloody warfare with your neighbors. That last would be too silly and meaningless in any case, but it weakens your society terribly, just when it needs its strength the most to fight the Unclean and the ravening monsters of your own forests. Now, you tell me if that’s civilization. I’d call it pretty advanced barbarism and a plain path downhill to complete ruin.”
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “It’s just that, having been raised as the royal princess of D’alwah and flattered and lied to by everyone from the time I could talk, I had no way of knowing anything could, or should, rather, be any different.”
“I know,” he said, patting her shoulder. “The amazing thing, little princess, is that you turned out the way you did. Not only lovely but smart, smart enough to admit you don’t know everything. The only kind of brains worth having, that is.”
Her face bent over his, and he pulled her down. The tall grass hid them from any observation, and he breathed into her ear, “Now?”
“I’m afraid,” was the husky, low-voiced answer. “I’m a virgin. That’s one reason I was supposed to be so valuable.”
“You’ll be my wife when we can find another priest. As far as I’m concerned, you’re my wife right now. And my love. Forever and ever, until God calls us home. That’s what our marriage service says.”
Her lips came down on his then and silenced him. The grasses waved gently in the afternoon sun. Once there sounded a small cry, so soft and brief that even the bear could hardly hear it These humans! he thought. At least that’s over with and we can concentrate on other matters. He drowsed too in the warm sunlight, half-listening to the grinding sounds of Klootz remorselessly demolishing his cud, over and over. The island slept, the silence broken only by the muted call of birds and insect hum.
They both awoke in early evening, or rather were awakened. Neither one said a word as they quickly drew on their clothes. The messages from Gorm, Awake! They come! had hit their two sleeping brains like a thunderclap. In the instant that this took, the terrible wailing cry which had grown so familiar to them came again, louder than they had ever heard it, and this time it did not cease.
“Aoough, aaaouugh, aaaooough!”
Now, in great volume, it came from all around them. In the half-light over the twilight lagoon, their island no longer seemed a haven of safety, but a tiny morsel of helpless sanity in a chaotic and implacable world. Hiero himself spared a brief and regretful thought for their first love-making, sandwiched between perils and duties, a moment already pre-doomed to evanescence.
With the morse and the bear, they rapidly took stations in the center of their island. Around them, the booming menacing wail grew louder still. “Aoough, aaaooough, aaough!”
Now, clearly outlined in the yet strong light, the travelers saw their enemies, and all knew at once that they had been watched from the beginning of their voyage through the drowned metropolis.
From every side but the open south they came, in small, narrow craft, half raft, half canoe, apparently made of tightly bound reeds, pointed at either end. From out between the encircling buildings, across the quarter mile of open water around the island, the strange craft surged, propelled by their owners’ webbed hands, as well as paddles. And the white heads in the water between the boats showed where many more were coming fast by simply using their native element.
A new Leemute! Take a frog, Hiero thought, and stand him up; give him a high-vaulted skull and a pallid skin, white and sickly-looking. Give him evil black eyes, like huge bubbles of sparkling, vicious jet. Give him almost man size. Give him knives of bone, as white as his skin, and spears offish bone and bleached bone clubs. And give him hate! As the things came steadily on, the priest thought of Gorm’s first impression. A frog that thinks. Must have been a scout and we’ve been stalked.