I was irked. "Are you sure your boat knows what she is doing?"
To answer, Vanity suddenly emitted a shrill, bloodcurdling scream.
"Lux fiat!" shouted Quentin, and a corona of flame appeared around his head. He had his walking stick raised high, shivering with eldritch power, his cloak billowing around him in a wind that was touching nothing but him. Victor rose slightly into the air, and tiny hissing dots of matter fled from his azure-flaming eye in all directions about us. I could not see them, but their internal nature was watchful and dangerous: some sort of prepared nanomachine package.
I did not flinch, of course, because I saw the utility and the inner nature of her scream. It was not a scream of fear or pain.
Colin stumbled into view at that moment and wrestled the bag hoodwinking him off his head. As leader, I bestowed on him the privilege of riding with Quentin, because Vanity and I were not going to do any naughtiness to restore him to lusty boy form. Colin scrambled on the ground for a moment, looking no doubt for a rock or stick to use as a club, but all he came up with was a handful of grass and fern. The bouquet of grass did not make a very good bludgeon, but his anger and shock made it burst into flame, which was pretty impressive, considering. The hairs of his head stirred and stood up, and the veins stood out on his neck as he screeched his war cry.
"WINDROSE!"
(I assume it was his war cry. He was standing only two feet from me, so I doubt he was calling for me.)
Vanity was making a little pirouette in the grass. "See?" she said brightly. "No one heard me. No one is in earshot, Leaderess. Deserted. Argent Nautilus did exactly as told."
Colin threw the burning twigs from his hand with a scowl. "Scared the piss out of me, Red! You owe me a pair of new silk boxers. And that is the last time I fly through the air with Quentin."
Darkness gathered itself up around Quentin as silently as a black silk handkerchief when he whispered the word to end his spell, and banished whatever fallen angel had lent him a blazing crown.
I said, "Let's find dry ground and make camp. We can look at the empty huts in the morning: groping into them at night is not a good idea."
No one moved. Victor said slowly, "I suppose we should look for higher ground, if we want it dry."
Did I mention that none of us were Boy Scouts? We had never been camping. We had never been anywhere on our own. So: take four young Titans and a young Phaeacian princess, set them in the middle of dark tropic scrub at night, and have them try to find a campsite. It was midnight, so those of us who get tired (everyone but Victor) were tired, and it was dark and tangled underfoot, so those of us who get cross (everyone but Victor) were cross. Everything we stumbled into seemed to have thorns and every patch that did not have thicket was flinty and hard, a rubble of rocks no sleeping bag could sit on. The ground was furthermore cut in places with some sort of drainage ditches or furrows, which threatened to stub toes, twist ankles, or break legs in the dark, and more than once we stepped in slime that Victor told us calmly was guano.
"At least," he said, "I assume it's guano. I can detect oxalic, uric, carbonic, and phosphoric acids, as well as earth salts and impurities."
"What's guano?" asked Colin.
"Bat crap," said Victor.
"Bat crap!" yodeled Colin, as loud as if he were helping Vanity check to see if anyone was in earshot. By some dull throb of feminine intuition, I was sure the phrase would turn into Colin's curse of choice over the next few days, and we'd be hearing a lot of it.
"Hold up, troops," I said in an exhausted voice. "Let's head toward the sound of the shore. Maybe we can find some nice, soft, sandy beach to make a tent."
"Pitch a tent," Vanity said. "You make a bed."
I was carrying all the gear, of course, in a large fold of my fourth-dimensional energy-wings, with the gravity world-lines all bent away, so that, for me, it was feather-light. When we found the sand, there was a shimmer of reddish light as I pulled the knapsacks and newly bought tents, tarps, and bedrolls into this three-space. I had it blue-side red at first, so all the lettering or trademarks on the fabric were mirror-reversed. I guess I was tired. I rotated the mass of it out of the hyperplane and back into it, and carefully flattened out the crinkles, so that everything was oriented right.
Well, we could not pound tent stakes into the sand, so I made the executive decision that we could sleep under the stars on a warm night just in our sleeping bags.
How soft the sand was. I nodded off, congratulating myself on my decision.
I dreamed I was back with Grendel Glum at the bottom of the sea. Waking up half-drowned, with a sodden sleeping bag twisted like heavy concrete about your ankles, in the darkness before dawn is not pleasant, nor is having half your gear carried off by the tide. We were all muddy with sand by the time we recovered what we could recover and retreated to the rocks above the high-tide line.
You see, I could tell you the fluxions Newton used to calculate the pull of the moon on the tides.
We had done them in math class. But I did not know what any seven-year-old who went backpacking with her father might know: Don't pitch camp below the tide line.
I lost the vote of confidence before breakfast.
Vanity cooked a splendid breakfast with some of what we salvaged from our foodstuff, and she managed to get a fire started with just one match, like a real Girl Guide, and when we were done debating and voting, she was in charge.
Her first decree was to name the place Vanity Island.
I got KP.
Six Score Leagues Northwest of Paradise
We explored the island in about, I dunno, fifteen minutes that first morning, some of us still dripping from our saltwater dunking when the high tide tried to carry off our rucksacks. There was something cute about an island that you can explore on foot in a quarter hour.
At sunup, a flock of seabirds took to the air from a nesting place atop the big rock in the middle of the island. We followed the raucous noise through the coconut palms to the nesting grounds, at its highest point maybe twenty-five feet above sea level. The birds screamed at us, but did not seem afraid. Too few generations of them exposed to guns, I suppose.