"I know you don't trust me," Gerrard replied easily, laying out a saddle blanket on the grassy floor, "but trust your own daughter." He glanced at the lithe and muscular woman. "Takara was imprisoned in hell, but she emerged stronger than she had been before. She was annealed by Rath, not destroyed by it."
As she helped her father sit on the saddle blanket, Takara locked eyes with Gerrard. She mouthed a silent thanks.
Gerrard nodded. He felt a sudden strong connection to this woman. It was not the heady wine of desire-though Takara had a fiery beauty, to be sure. Instead, this was the wordless understanding that comes between folk who have faced down the same foes. It was the strange, sudden camaraderie of strangers.
"Sleep now, Father. You are exhausted. Others will rest here too-those with the worst injuries. You won't be alone. You needn't fear monsters."
Petulant to the last, Starke rolled away from her. Tears emerged from beneath his bandage and bore in them red flecks of dried blood.
Takara patted his shoulder once more and then stood to leave.
Gerrard joined her. As they walked away, past stalls of six-legged tigers, he whispered quietly, "You are showing a great deal of grace under pressure."
She continued a few more paces before responding. "My father-the father I loved and grew up with-is a different man than this husk. My father is dead. That doesn't mean I shouldn't honor him by caring for this… poor creature."
Shaking his head in wonder, Gerrard felt again the sense of connection. "You have lost so much, and still you fight on."
"What else is there for heroes to do?"
It had taken all day to empty the wounded vessel. Five crew members had been killed in the crash. Four others were wounded badly enough to need bed rest in the stables. Two had such severe head and neck injuries that Orim had refused to let them be moved from the ship. She tended them throughout the long day in Weatherlight's own sickbay.
The rest of the crew had to make themselves at home in the open air. They had off-loaded the stores of food and drink that would see them through and had rigged makeshift shelters with torn sections of sailcloth. All the while, Gerrard moved among them, planning the next day's expedition to Mercadia.
When the sun set on the dust flats, the air quickly grew uncomfortably cold. The crew huddled around a bonfire built from shattered hunks of Weatherlight's hull and simsass stalks rained in the crash. The fire lit five graves dug that afternoon on the hillside. Already, the bodies lay within, and three sailors, sweaty and stripped to the waist despite the cold night, waited with shovels to fill in the spots.
Atalla watched it all from a shattered window.
The crew of the vessel stood to attention as Gerrard, Hanna, and Sisay passed in front of them, followed by Karn and Tahngarth. The bridge crew of Weatherlight stood to one side of Hanna as she spoke solemnly.
"We lost dear friends this morning-Danis, Groud, Steepen Willm, Erkika, and Bevela. We lost dear friends on Rath-Ertai, Crovax, and Mirri. We have spoken their names to each other in grief, and all have mourned according to our own traditions. I want now to speak the name of my grief, the name of my dear friend and companion Mirri." Her eyes glistened in the firelight.
Sisay put out a hand to gently touch hers.
"Mirri gave her life that we might live," Hanna continued. "She did this without thought. That was the way she lived her beliefs. It was during this last journey that I came to know her best. We became friends when she and I traveled through the Skyshroud Forest on Rath. It was a friendship born of mutual respect. She passed through the dangers of the Stronghold," she continued, "was wounded defending Crovax, and slain defending the rest of us…"
Karn spoke into the choked silence. "I join in mourning Mirri, for I remember her life and the brave deeds she did, but now she is gone."
Sisay said, "Mirri is dead, but we, her friends, her comrades, will always remember her. In our memories, she will live."
Tahngarth said simply, "I salute you, Mirri, a warrior worthy of Talruaa."
Last, all eyes turned to Gerrard. He had been standing in the shadows behind Hanna, shaking his head quietly. As the silence stretched, he looked up, caught unaware, and blurted the first thing that came to his mind. "So many lost. We have lost so many friends…" Uncertain what else to say, Gerrard peered numbly out at the crew. Orange light illuminated Takara's hair, and her face shone white in the firelight. The fine bones beneath her skin were lit as though from within. Her green eyes returned his gaze. He said at last, "We have lost so much, but we must keep fighting. What else is there for heroes to do?"
The ranks of the sailors bent and rose, tossing handfuls of dust into the air where it briefly formed a black cloud before falling back to earth. They also scooped dirt into each of the five graves. Their voices murmured together an orison for their fallen comrades.
A sudden, loud rumble broke the quiet. A fine spray hissed above the fire.
"That sound came from the ship," Gerrard said.
Cries rose in the distance.
Sisay seized a burning branch from the fire and rushed into the night. Gerrard and Hanna followed, Tahngarth and Karn bringing up the rear.
From the direction of the dry riverbed, perhaps fifty yards to the north of the farm, they saw a strange, ghostly light. Clouds of fine mist sparkled, turning blue and green. Figures moved in that mist. They were the size of men but had wings of skin like dragons. The advancing cloud cast a dark and sinuous shadow on the ground beneath it. Within that shadow more figures darted.
But it wasn't a shadow. The river was running That was impossible. Hours ago the bed had been dry and cracked. The blazing sun had evaporated every drop of moisture from the soil, leaving it baked and gritty. Yet now, a torrent of water flooded down the center of it, splashing over the banks and washing in puddles out over the field- the field where Weatherlight lay.
"All hands to the ship!" Gerrard shouted even as they ran.
"What is it?" Hanna gasped as she clambered over a brake of simsass and climbed down toward the field.
"Water," Gerrard answered.
"I've never seen water like this," Hanna replied.
The flood swirled and lapped as if it were alive, driven by conscious purpose. It was limned with light, each wavelet shining with a glow that seemed to amplify the light of the twin moons overhead in the starry sky. Through the flood, figures moved like darting merfolk. Atop it came dark shapescraft of some sort propelled rapidly over the waves. In the mists above, winged, semi-human figures soared and dove.
Gerrard and Hanna reached the field, near the Weatherlight. Something long and heavy thudded into the ground next to Hanna's feet. With a kind of slow-motion detachment, she saw that it was a spear, a slender stone head bound tightly to a wooden shaft. She looked up. The riverbank, deserted a moment before, was filling with dark figures.
They rose from the deep, descended from the mists, and shot across the crests of the waves in canoes. The force of the waters propelled them forward, and they steered with slim paddles, wielded by oarsmen in the rear of the craft. Those in the front of the boats were clearly warriors, who wore headdresses made of woven grass, colored by dyes in brilliant reds and oranges. They were bare-chested, clad in loincloths, and armed with spears, bows, and arrows. Some stood in the prows of their canoes, and others leaped to the shore, hurling missiles. There seemed to be hundreds of the dark figures.
With bare fists, Gerrard attacked one of the warriors. With a quick punch to the temple, he sent the man to the ground. The warrior rolled, groaning. Gerrard smashed him in the jaw, knocking him out. He yanked up the warrior's spear and tossed it back toward Hanna. "You think you can make use of this?"