"Come over here, girl. Get in the boat."
She tightened her lips, suddenly furious, logic and reason melting like a summer mist. "I'll wait."
"Don't be foolish, we haven't time for it. Wepi, Ahtay, put her in."
She caught hold of Sassa, brought him diving and screaming past Shipayupal, talons ripping at his face, missing this time, but making the threat palpable; at the same time she brought out the darter. When the hawk was circling overhead again, she showed them the weapon. "I will not be handled. Don't touch me."
"You'd best do what she says." Rohant's cracking rumble came with an underpinning of soft snarls from Magimeez and Nagafog; he was standing in a gap in the brush, holding Asteplikota cradled like a baby in his arms, the black cats looming beside him, huge and ominous, creatures out of myth and nightmare; they showed their teeth and twitched their tails as he spoke; Kikun waited behind him, nearly extinguished under the pouches, her harpcase and their blanket rolls. "None of us are in a mood to take any chousing."
Shapayupal scowled at Asteplikota. "What happened to him?"
Rohant cleared his throat, spat to-one side. "Cutter hit him. You got a doctor on that ship? We've done the best we could, but that isn't much."
"Yes. There is a doctor. We knew about the strafe and thought if you survived you might need tending." Pale blue eyes flicked from Rohant to Shadith, slid over Kikun in an uneasy wince. "You are unharmed?"
"Luck of the toss." Rohant whistled to the cats and marched • for the boat with them pacing on each side, heads turning, yellow eyes gleaming, red mouths open, showing the tearing fangs. The sailors scattered, scrambling to put distance between them and the beasts. Eyes wide with a struggling mix of fear and delight, the piper boy stayed in the boat, backed up as far as he could from Rohant as the Ciocan settled Asteplikota carefully across two thwarts with the cats beneath him to support him where the thwarts didn't.
Rohant straightened, ran his eyes over the nervous locals. "Get in, let's go. The painkiller's wearing off and he's going to need help soon. The cats are tame enough, they won't touch you long as I tell them not, to." He looked over his shoulder at the boy. "You're not afraid, are you."
The boy managed a wobbly grin, sweaty hands clutching the pipe as if it were a safety line.
Kikun grinned, his eyes gleaming copper in the brilliant sunlight. He dumped his load beside Shadith, climbed into the boat, and settled in the bottom beside Nagafog's head; he scratched behind the beast's ears, then began slapping his hand rhythmically on the nearest thwart, threading a whistle through the drumming, a cheery tune that the piper boy picked up, his sound uncertain at first, then strong.
Sheepishly, the sailors came back, laid hands on the boat to push it into the water, Shipayupal started toward them.
"Wait." Shadith caught his arm, stopped him. "There's not enough room for all of us and our gear in that boat. And no point in trying to overload it. Aste has to go now, no question of that. Answer's simple, they can send it back for us."
"Us?"
"Certainly. You don't expect me to wait here alone, do you? Or trust you to come back for me? Forget that. We wait together."
He opened his mouth to object, heard the beat of Sassa's wings, and changed his mind. With a shrug he waved the boat off, kicked together a pile of dry weed, and lowered himself to wait for its return.
"Who are you? Where do you come from?"
Leaning against the pile of pouches, Shadith thought about the questions as she fought off a weariness that turned her bones to water; her brief sleep had left her nearly as tired as when she laid down. She had no inch-nation to open her soul for Shipayupal; on the other hand, she didn't want to antagonize him any more than she had to. In her mind if not in her heart, she regretted using Sassa to intimidate him; she'd humiliated him in front of the others and he wasn't going to forget that. She definitely didn't need any more enemies; this was another time she'd let her mindset get warped by fear and anger. Cool she wasn't, and she kept paying for it. This body she'd acquired was a powerful drag on her mind when it came to crises. It reacted as its original owner had trained it; war was bred into the bone of its people, attack and destroy were the approved mode of action. She kept forgetting how intricately mind and brain were interwoven; for so long, so very long, she'd been a sketch of a person, mechanically reproduced inside an unliving matrix; now everything was new, her immediate reactions were raw, undirected by reason. Ahlahlah, what do I do now? I'd like to forget it and just sit here. Just sit and listen to the ocean tickle at the sand. Gods, if it weren't for Aste, I'd say run like hell for the city and crash the kanaweh headquarters, I'm sure the skipcom's there, where else would it be?
"We were kidnapped and dropped here," she said after a silence she knew was too long; her voice was flat, unconvincing, she couldn't dredge up the energy to make that worn list of half-truths and whole-lies sound believable. "We were picked up like stray cows and carted off," she said, and thought how blah it is. "I don't know why, all I know is I want to get back where I belong." Even that had no strength behind it, though it was the one fully true thing she said.
"Word is you claim to be Nikamo-Oskinin."
"Claim? I claim nothing. That's somebody else's stupid mistake."
"You're a singer?"
"I'm a student of music. From a half dozen other places. I don't belong here. How many times do I have to say it?" She closed her eyes, rubbed at her temples. Her head was aching; she felt sick and wondered if she was catching Rohant's cold.
"And the green one?"
"Green? He's more gray than green. I've known him… what? three days. Ask him what he is."
"And the big man?"
"Same." She got to her feet, stood staring out across the ocean. The ship was a faint waver of sail and spar against the pale clutter between sea and sky; she couldn't see the longboat for a minute or so, then it heaved up and vanished again. About halfway there. She moved her shoulders, trying to shrug off the fatigue that dragged at her; she was tired of talking, she was tired of thinking. She pulled the harpcase over to her. She'd been too busy to worry before, but now she was anxious about the harp, what the gouts of steam and scalding water might have done to it.
Scowling as she felt small blisters like a bad case of measles, she ran her hands over the wood, then threw the latches and took out the harp. There were a few stains on the padding, she chewed her lip when she saw theta, turned anxiously to the instrument. There were traces of moisture on the dark, lustrous wood. She took the polishcloth from its niche and began wiping gently at the damp places, inspecting them, wiping again and again until the glow was back, deep and alive. She tightened the strings, tried each, listening for the tones and halftones and undertones. When she was-finished with that, she played one of her simpler homesongs, played until she broke a fingernail and had to stop. Sighing, she eased the strings, shut the harp away. It was time anyway, the boat was coming back.
As soon as they were onboard, the ship turned east and ran for the islands.
Chapter 14. Stuck in an eddy (Atehana)
About an hour before midnight the ship dropped anchor in a halfmoon bay carved out of the southern end of a small island.
A thin spray of stars glittered like ice crystals flung across the cloudless black sky, the moons were milky bright, one a hairline crescent near the eastern horizon, just rising, one almost overhead, a flattened half, and a third in the west, nearly full, beginning to drop below the mountainous spine of another, larger island some distance off. The air was chill with wisps of fog drifting across the dark water like the fitful exhalations of hypothalassan monsters.