“Those sounds they make,” Claude said. “Could ordinary bare-necked people such as yourself communicate with them?”
Martha shook her head. “They answered to their names, and there were perhaps a dozen simple voice commands they’d respond to. But the principal means of communicating with them was through the torc. They could grasp very complex mental commands. And of course they were trained with the pleasure-pain circuitry so that they required little supervision for routine tasks such as housework.”
Madame shook her head slowly. “So close to humanity, and yet so far away from us. Their life span is only fourteen or fifteen years in captivity. Probably less in the wild. So fragile, so helpless-seeming! How did they ever survive the hyenas, the bear-dogs, the sabertooth cats, and other monsters?”
“Brains,” Richard said. “Look at that one who came to us. Her family won’t be hungry tonight. There’s natural selection working right in front of us. That little ape is a survivor.”
Felice looked at him with a wicked expression. “I thought I noticed a family resemblance… Here you go, Captain Blood. Have some of your great-great-et-cetera grandmother’s fruit for dessert.”
They left the Danube behind them and walked. It felt like the temperature was over forty in the September sun, but their adapted bodies could take it. Over the sunburnt grass, through thickets of brittle maquis, over boulders in the dry watercourses they walked. Richard had set their goal, the notch between two long hills that lay due north beyond slowly rising land with hardly a patch of shade and no water at all. They stripped to shorts, backpacks, and broad-brimmed hats. Madame passed a precious squeeze-bottle of sunburn cream. Richard led and Felice took the rear, the athlete ranging out tirelessly to be sure that no animal stalked them and to search, without luck, as it turned out, for some spring or other source of water. Between the two marched Claude and Madame, supporting Martha between them. The engineer became weaker as the hot hours of hiking accumulated; but she refused to let them slow down. None of them wanted to stop, in spite of the fact that there seemed to be nothing ahead of them but the dry stubbly upland reaching to the undulating horizon. Above it hung a pale-yellow, pitiless sky.
At last the sun dropped low and the sky turned to a light green. Madame called a halt near a rock-choked ravine where they could at least relieve themselves in privacy. Madame led Martha off and when the two returned, the old woman’s face was grim.
“She is hemorrhaging again,” she told Claude. “Shall we stop here? Or shall we make again a litter from one of the cots?”
They decided upon the lifter. While there was still daylight, they wanted to press on. Just a few kilometers farther and they would reach the brow of the hills.
They continued on as they had done earlier in the journey, one at each corner of the modified cot Martha lay with her lower lip clamped between her teeth, twin spots of bright rose on her pale cheeks the badges of her mortification. But she said nothing. The heavens turned to ultramarine and then to indigo, and the first stars appeared. However, they could still see well enough to walk and so they kept going, higher and higher, closer to the notch.
At last they were at the summit. The four of them set the litter down and helped Martha to her feet so that she could stand with them and look northward. About five kilometers away and just slightly below the pass where they rested was a long rampart. It reared up from the countryside behind the line of hills in a virtual jungle of spiny maquis scrub and curved away on both sides in a great arc that eventually melted into the northern horizon. The bare lip of the crater gleamed pale in the dusk.
Felice took Richard’s head between her hands and kissed his mouth, standing on tiptoe. “You did it! Right on the nose, buccaneer-baby, you did it!”
“Wen, I’ll be damned,” said the pirate.
“I don’t think so.” Claude’s broad Slavic face wore an exultant smile. “Oh, Madame. The Ship’s Grave!” Martha’s voice broke her eyes spilled tears. “And now, now…”
“Now we will make camp,” the Frenchwoman said practically. “We will rest well and recover our strength. For tomorrow, our work really begins.”
The skeleton had been laid out in state in the belly compartment of the fifth flyer that they inspected.
Unlike the other craft, which had had their hatches closed, the sepulchre of Lugonn was wide open to the elements. For long years the mammals, birds, and insects of the maquis had made free with it. Felice had, as always, been first up the boarding ladder of the exotic craft. Her cry of triumph at finally finding the remains of the Tanu hero was followed by a tortured howl that raised the neck hairs of the other four members of the expedition.
“He has no torc! No torc!”
“Angélique!” Claude shouted in alarm. “Reach out and stop her doing any harm in there!”
“No… torc!” A shriek of diabolic rage echoed within the flying machine and there was a thudding sound. As Richard and Claude clambered up the ladder, Madame Guderian stood beneath the shadow of the metal bird’s wings, eyes wide, mouth drawn into a strained grimace, both hands clenching the gold at her throat. It took every bit of her coercive metafunction to restrain Felice, to force the girl to back off from the instinctive urge to destroy the source of her frustration. Driven by furious disappointment, the athlete’s latencies trembled on the brink of operancy. The old woman felt her own ultrasenses being tested to the limit. She held, pressed the volcanic thing that writhed within her mind-grasp while at the same time her telepathic voice cried: Wait! Wait! We will all search! Wait!
Felice let go her opposition so abruptly that Madame Guderian staggered backward and collapsed into Martha’s frail arms.
“Okay!” Richard shouted from above. “I popped her one. She’s out cold!”
“But did she ruin anything?” Martha called, easing Madame to the dusty ground.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Richard replied “Get up here Marty, and have a look at this frigger yourself. Like something out of a goddam fairy tale.”
Felice lay in a heap on the far side of the flyer’s belly compartment, which measured about three by six. She had managed to seize Lugonn’s helmeted skull and dash it to the desk in a paroxysm of rage; but the interior of the ancient craft was so deep in dust, animal droppings, and other organic trash that the relic had come to no harm. Claude knelt down and restored the head to its place. Resting on his haunches, he studied the legend laid out before him.
Lugonn’s armor, heavily jeweled and filmed with gold, was now so dimmed and crusted that his bones could barely be discerned within the articulated plates and scales of glass. The crystalline helmet, crested with a peculiar heraldic animal, was a baroque and incredibly intricate piece of craftsmanship, so gorgeous, even coated with grime, that one forgot that it had a utilitarian purpose: to deflect photonic beams. Carefully, Claude raised the visor and unfastened the overlapping gorget plates and hinged cheekpieces. Lugonn’s skull was mutilated by a great wound, perfectly circular and a full twelve centimeters in diameter, which drilled through the naso-orbital region and obliterated the rear of the skull opposite the eyes.
“So that much of the tale was true,” the old man murmured.
He could not resist inspecting the skull for nonhuman attributes. Most of the differences were subtle; but the Tanu had possessed only thirty teeth and he had been notably longheaded as well as massively built. Aside from anomalies in the positions of some cranial sutures and the mental foramina, the Tanu skull seemed almost completely humanoid.