She saw Gaby return from the raft bearing an oil lamp. Gaby hurried over to Cirocco and handed it to her. They were talking, but the constant noise of the sea obliterated the words before they reached Robin. Cirocco was not saying much; it fell to Gaby to do most of the talking, and she was animated about it. She did not look happy. Cirocco kept shaking her head.
At last Gaby gave up. She stood facing Cirocco for a moment. Then the two women embraced, Gaby standing on her toes to kiss her old friend. Cirocco hugged her once more, then entered the crack between the cables. The light of her lantern was visible for a short time, then gone.
Gaby walked to the edge of the circular cove, as far from everyone else as she could get. She sat and put her head in her hands. She did not move for two hours.
Cirocco's absence passed in relaxation and games. The Titanides did not mind it, nor did Chris. Gaby was nervous much of the time. Robin grew more bored by the hour.
She took up whittling, taught by the Titanides, but did not have the patience for it. She wanted to ask Chris to teach her to swim but felt she should not be naked in front of him again. Gaby solved the problem by suggesting she wear a bathing suit. One was quickly improvised. The idea of a bathing suit was as unexpected to Robin as wearing shoes in the shower, but it did the job. She took three lessons in the central body of water she had misnamed a tidepool. (There were no tides in Gaea.) In return, she tutored Chris in fighting, something he knew little about. The lessons had to be called off temporarily when she herself learned something, which was that testicles are amazingly easy to injure and can cause their owner a great deal of pain. She exhausted her store of apologies and was genuinely sorry, but how could she have known?
Only two incidents livened an otherwise comatose two days. The first was soon after Cirocco had left, when Gaby seemed to want to move around. She took them along a narrow trail leading from the campsite to the high ledge girdling the cable. All seven of them spent the next hour walking carefully on irregular ground that sloped toward a fifty-meter drop into the sea. They went almost halfway around the cable to a point where the ledge had broken away. Just short of that was a recess between two cable strands. Standing in it was a squat stone pilaster, and sitting on that was a golden statue of an alien creature.
It reminded Robin of the Frog Queen from a childhood tale. It was obviously aquatic; though it had six legs, they ended in broad flippers. It squatted, looking out to sea, hunchbacked and broad. Nothing grew on it, though it was draped with dried seaweed. Its single eye was a hollow socket.
"That's been here at least ten thousand years," Gaby said. "There used to be an eye in the socket. It was a diamond about as big as my head. I saw it once, and it seemed to glow." She kicked at the sand, and Robin was startled to see a creature the size of a large dog emerge and slink away on six flippered feet. It was yellow and rather ugly. There was very little flesh on its bones. The thing did not look much like the statue, yet there was a family resemblance. It turned once, opened a mouth with several thousand long yellow teeth, hissed, and continued to shuffle away.
"Those things used to be so mean a wolverine would have a heart attack just to look at them. They were so quick your guts would be on the ground before you saw them. They'd hide in the sand like that one was doing. As soon as the first one jumped out, they'd be coming from all over. I saw one take seven mortal hits from a rifle and still live to kill the man who shot it."
"What happened to them?" Chris asked.
Gaby picked up a big shell and threw it to shatter against the image. A dozen heads immediately appeared above the sand, open-mouthed. Robin reached for her weapon, but it wasn't necessary.
The creatures looked around in confusion, then wriggled back into concealment.
"They were put here to guard the idol's eye," Gaby said. "The race that made it is long gone. Only Gaea knows anything about them. You can be sure it wasn't really an idol because nobody in here ever worshiped anything but Gaea. Some kind of monument, I guess. Anyway, it's been at least a thousand years since anyone cared about it or visited it.
"Until about fifty years ago. That's when the pilgrims started coming, and Gaea created these creatures as perversions of the original ones. She gave them one drive in life, and that was to protect the eye at all costs. They did a damn good job. The eye wasn't taken until about fifteen years ago. I personally know of five people who died right here where we're standing, and there were surely many more than that.
"But after it was gone, there was nothing left for the guardians to do. Gaea didn't program them to die, so they eat a little and get a little older. But waiting to die is what they're doing."
"So it was all just for a challenge?" Robin asked. "It wasn't even here before she started daring people to ... to go out and prove themselves..." She was unable to finish the thought. It brought back her anger in full force.
"That's it. Something she didn't tell you, though, is that Gaea is rotten with places like this. I'm sure she fed you the whole spiel about a hundred and one dragons and jewels as big as blimp turds. The thing is, this place has been scoured by pilgrims for fifty years, all of them looking for some stupid thing to do. A lot of them have died trying it, but the thing about humans is if enough of them keep coming, they'll eventually do just about anything. The dragons have had the worst of it. There's not many left, and there's plenty of humans. Gaea can whomp up another dragon anytime she feels like it, but she's way behind. She's getting old and can't keep up anymore. Things break down and don't get repaired for a long time, if ever. I doubt there's a dozen dragons left, or two dozen unplundered monuments."
"There's a quest shortage," Valiha said, and couldn't understand why Robin laughed so hard.
Chris was subdued on the way back. Robin knew he had visions of doing something worthy of tales, even if he was not aware of it. He was, after all, a man and trapped in peckish toy-soldier games. Robin could not have cared less if there were no more dragons.
The second incident was more interesting, however. It happened after their second sleep period. Gaby, who had not slept the first time, awoke and came out of her tent to find huge tracks in the sand. She howled for the Titanides, who came from the raft at a gallop. By the time they arrived Chris and Robin were awake, too. "Where the hell were you?" Gaby wanted to know, pointing at a meter-long footprint.
"We've been down working on Constance," Hornpipe said. "Hautbois discovered the waves had damaged one end and-"
"But what about this? You were supposed to be-"
"Now wait a minute," Hornpipe said hotly. "You told me yourself there was nothing to worry about here. Nothing from the land and nothing-"
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Let's don't argue." Robin was not surprised Gaby had backed down so quickly. Titanides got angry so seldom that there was something sobering about it when one did. "Let's take a closer look at this."
They proceeded to do that, examining one track in detail and following the whole series to see where the creature had come from and where it had gone. The results were frightening. The tracks appeared at one edge of the cove, went straight to the camp, made a circle around Gaby's tent, then vanished again at the edge of the water.
"What do you think it was?" Valiha asked Gaby, who was down on one knee, studying a track by the light of her lantern.
"I sure as hell wish I knew. It looks like the claw of a bird. There are birds that big in Phoebe, but they can't fly or swim, so what would they be doing here? Maybe Gaea's whipped up something new again. Damn if it doesn't look like a giant chicken."