Nightmare! She had to be dreaming … but when the third blow struck, she knew what she saw was terrible reality:
A flaming torch, its light revealing three tall beings with glowing yellow eyes and hideous muzzled faces, grinning at her through discolored tusks. Aborigines. They had something of the appearance of the savage Glismak, but were even uglier and more ferocious looking. Two of them wore short kilts with gleaming pearls sewn on them, and were decked out with many strings of shells. They held stout wooden clubs studded with some kind of triangular animal teeth and one of them carried a torch. The third, who was much taller and more grandly attired, had a finely made sword of human style at his side and a huge pearl suspended around his neck. He stood looking down at the two bedraggled children with folded arms.
The warrior who had kicked Jan awake with his stubby-clawed webbed feet pointed to her and Niki, uttering a satisfied phrase in his native tongue. He pointed out to sea, where the Raktumian trireme was anchored, lit up like a festival float with skyrockets soaring up from it.
The impressive aborigine glowered and barked a question.
“I do not understand you,” Niki said, calm now. “Do you speak the human language?”
“Yes,” the being croaked. “I am the High Chief Har-Chissa of the Aliansa. Who are you and what are you doing here? Humans have been forbidden to come to these islands. And yet two of your ships have dared to anchor just off our sacred Council Isle, while numbers of others are slowly approaching. Did you come from that ship?”
“Yes.” Niki brushed some of the sand from his face and tried to speak in a way befitting his station. “I am Crown Prince Nikalon of Laboruwenda and this is my sister, Princess Janeel. We were held prisoner by our enemies, and we escaped.”
“Whose great ship is that?” Har-Chissa demanded.
“It belongs to the Raktumian pirate nation. It is heavily armed, and also carries a powerful sorcerer on board.”
The Chief spoke urgently to the warriors in the native language, then turned again to Niki. “And the second ship—the smaller one anchored beyond that point of land. Who does it belong to?”
A tingling sensation made Jan’s scalp stir. Who, indeed! Could it be the long-awaited rescuers? Could it be their mother?
“I do not know what ship that is,” Niki said. “It may belong to our own people, come to save us from the pirates. If the ship is from Laboruwenda, you will gain a rich reward by taking my sister and me to it.”
The High Chief roared with laughter, spoke to his followers, and they laughed with him. Then Har-Chissa reached down with one monstrous three-clawed hand, seized the Prince by his wet hair, and pulled him painfully upright. The children saw the Sea Oddling’s slavering teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
“Take you to them? Insolent cub! Before morning both ships will be sunk by our warriors and their crews will be dinner-guests of the fishes. Thus do the Aliansa deal with saucy invaders! As for you two, we have a special treat.”
“And what is that?” Niki inquired, still trying to maintain his dignity.
“We have a custom,” Chief Har-Chissa said. “Those who dare to set foot on our islands unbidden must join the drums.”
“The—the drums?” Jan faltered.
Har-Chissa let go of Niki, so that he almost fell on top of Jan. Then the Chief gave an order, and the two warriors began binding the Prince and Princess with shaggy ropes.
“What do you mean—join the drums?” Niki cried. “What are you going to do with us?”
“Relieve you of your skins,” the Aliansa leader said. “You two will make rather small drums, but perhaps their tone will be interesting.”
13
Queen Anigel woke late in the evening with a throbbing headache. The Three Moons were up and the Lyath was very quiet. She went below to find something to eat and seek out her sister, but Kadi was not in the noga’s tiny saloon, nor did she answer when Anigel called out.
With a chill knot forming in the pit of her stomach, Anigel went to the forecastle and questioned Jagun. Her worst suspicions were confirmed when the little Nyssomu reluctantly admitted that Kadiya had gone off over an hour ago, leaving the ship in the company of Lummomu-Ko and two other Wyvilo, Mok-La and Huri-Kamo.
Anigel raced up on deck, crying out frantically to her talisman: “Show me Kadiya!”
Her mind saw threefold moonlight dappling the surface of the now calmed sea. One of Lyath’s rescue rafts floated there, little more than a platform of thick bamboo two ells square, covered all over with heaped and trailing fronds of wet seaweed, so that it looked a mere mass of flotsam. At first it seemed as if there were no living thing about the raft. But then amidst the weed Anigel spied a gleam of yellow eyes, and she realized that the three Wyvilo were clinging to the raft’s edge with only the tops of their heads above water, and these disguised with the trailing plants. The raft seemed to be drifting briskly, in spite of the lack of wind. Doubtless the Wyvilo were propelling it with their partially webbed feet.
Kadiya was not visible, but she was surely among them.
“But what can she hope to accomplish?” Anigel exclaimed furiously.
“Great Queen, the Lady Farseer hopes to sink the pirate flagship,” Jagun said, “and by marooning Portolanus on this hostile shore, gain time to retrieve her talisman.”
The voice of the Nyssomu distracted Anigel and her vision dissolved. “Lords of the Air! Doesn’t Kadi realize that the sorcerer must be safeguarding himself with his damned magical machines? She and the Wyvilo will be discovered and killed!”
“My Lady Farseer and her warriors intend to approach the Raktumian ship with the disguised raft and then swim underwater. I begged her not to go, but she was adamant.”
“If I had only wakened in time!…”
Jagun hung his head. “Great Queen, it pains me to tell you this, but the fruit drink I gave you in the afternoon contained a few drops of tylo extract, sufficient to bring about a brief, deep sleep. My Lady ordered this, and knowing that it would not harm you, I obeyed.”
“You may have thereby brought about Kadiya’s death,” said the Queen starkly.
“Yes,” said the little man, his voice breaking. “But she bade me to do it if I loved her, saying it was her only chance to recover her talisman, and without it she would rather be dead …”
“The fool!” cried Anigel. “If she sinks the pirate ship, what will happen to Antar and the children, confined below? They could be forgotten in the confusion!”
Jagun’s great eyes bulged in distress. “I fear the Lady Farseer did not think—”
“No,” the Queen retorted grimly. “She wouldn’t. Her talisman is all that matters to her.” Anigel considered for a moment. “Jagun, bespeak my sister’s Wyvilo companions and tell them to remind Kadiya of the danger to my loved ones. Say also that if she does not call off this rash scheme, I will be forced to warn Portolanus of her coming.”
“Oh, Great Queen—you could not do that!”
“I do not know whether I could or not! Let us pray that the mere threat will be enough to bring that idiotic Kadi to her senses!… Now bespeak her, while I descry what is happening on the Raktumian ship.”
Anigel asked her talisman to show her the forepeak locker where the children were confined. The vision vouchsafed was very dim, and she saw little Tolivar clinging to a chain, looking out of the wide-open hawsehole. On the floor was an indistinct lump of bedding, and she thought that Niki and Jan must have gone to sleep. She then called up a Sight of Antar, and found him in a cramped chamber belowdecks lit by a single guttering candle-lantern, conversing amiably with a group of galley slaves about the possibility that he would have to join them in rowing the trireme back to Raktum. One of the King’s ankles was chained and he had been stripped of his royal garments, so that he now looked much like the other oarsmen, except that his body was clean and not yet scarred from the lash.
Satisfied that her family was still safe, Anigel asked the talisman to show her Portolanus.
r />
He was at the very stern of the trireme, in the after part of the high deck called the poop royal, and perfectly visible to Anigel’s farseeing eye. Either he did not care whether she watched him, or else the incantations he was performing left him with no occult energy to spare in masking his form. His eyes were once again starry and blazing as he chanted in a strange language. The three acolytes were in their repulsive trance, kneeling frozen side by side like man-sized dolls dressed in yellow, purple, and black. Resting atop a cloth-of-platinum cushion at the sorcerer’s feet was the star-box.
Two sailors, seeming nearly frightened out of their wits, stood by a small derrick-crane, grotesquely out of place on the gilded and bedizened royal lounge deck. The crane’s long arm was thrust over the stern, and from it hung a rope with a hook at the end. From this, only an ell or two above the water, dangled an even more prosaic object—a wide-bladed shovel. Most of the ship’s crew and officers, as well as Queen Regent Ganondri, the boy-King Ledavardis, and their mob of courtiers, were gathered on the main deck below watching the magical proceedings as well as they could.
Jagun diffidently tapped Anigel’s arm.
She emerged from her vision and asked him: “Does my sister agree to forbear?”
“Great Queen, she was full of remorse when reminded of the great peril attending the King and the children. She now swears by the Flower that she will do nothing to endanger them. She has given up her plan to sink the pirate ship.”
“Thank God! And is she on her way back here, then?”
Jagun hesitated, then shook his head. “She says she will watch, and if there is any way to frustrate the sorcerer’s theft of her talisman without causing hurt to your royal family, then she must try it. I had the Wyvilo remonstrate with her, but she would yield no further.”
Anigel bit her lip. That would have to suffice—but damn Kadi’s stubbornness!
Jagun flinched at the anger in her eyes, and she felt pity for him, torn between loyalty to his mistress and a sure knowledge that what she had done was not only futile but possibly even disastrous. It was not his fault, poor old soul, that Kadiya was a self-centered firebrand.
“Jagun—would you like to share my vision of the pirate ship?”
“Oh, yes, Great Queen!”
“Then take my hand,” Anigel said, “and we will watch what happens.”
The trireme in its deep-water anchorage loomed up against the night sky like a floating castle adorned for a gala ball. Lamplight shone from many of the portholes, and there were innumerable lights on the many-leveled decks and even up in the rigging of the three masts. The gold leaf and the bright enamels on the flagship’s woodwork glimmered splendidly, and the gaudily dressed Raktumians gathered on deck were clearly visible to those watching secretly from the water.
“They will be dazzled by all that light,” Lummomu-Ko whispered to Kadiya, “and will not see us if we are cautious in venturing closer.”
Slowly the three big aborigines and the human woman paddled with their feet, clinging to the raft with only their hands and heads out of water, and those well-camouflaged with seaweed strands. They were approaching the trireme from the bow, and the attention of those on board was fixed on the stern, where Portolanus’s chanting had reached a frenzied pitch. He was shrieking a single word over and over, but his voice was by now so overused and ragged that the infiltrators could not tell what he was saying.
“The children are in the forepeak, in the chain-locker,” Kadiya said softly. “With all that ruckus at the stern, it should be an easy matter to creep up the anchor chains and rescue them. King Antar poses a knottier problem. If the pirates did not move him, then he is still confined in the lowest of the three oarsmen’s compartments on the shoreward side of the ship. But I do not see how we can get to him. The holes in the hull for the oars are too small to admit us.”
“There must be accommodation-doors in the side of the ship for the on-loading of supplies and the off-loading of refuse and ordure,” Lummomu said. “Surely such things would not be trucked through the body of a grand vessel like this.”
“Any doors in the hull would be tightly fastened and too high above the water for us to reach,” said Mok-La. He was a shrewd Wyvilo logger who was nearly the equal of Lummomu in strength. “But we could probably gain access to the galley compartments by entering through the anchor hawseholes and breaking out of the chain-locker into the forward holds.”
“The battle-axes we brought will likely enable us to do the job if we are careful,” said Huri-Kamo, the third Wyvilo, who was known for his ingenuity and mechanical acumen. It was he whom Kadiya had consulted as to the practicality of sinking the pirate ship, and he had speedily come up with a good plan—which now was perforce abandoned.
Mok-La said: “Most of the crew will be up on deck, watching the sorcerer raise the sunken talisman. With luck, we can break into the compartment where the King is held without too much commotion, subdue whatever guards are about, and free him.”
“It could work,” Lummomu said. “Shall we take a chance, Lady of the Eyes?”
Kadiya’s words were almost inaudible. “I was unforgivably selfish not to think of the danger to Anigel’s family when we set forth on this mission. The only way I can atone is to attempt to rescue them. If I succeed with your help, my friends, my sister’s heart will be eased and her talisman saved from the foul sorcerer. If we fail … we may lose our lives, but Anigel will be no worse off than before.”
“We are at your service, Lady, even if it should lead us to pass beyond,” the leader of the Wyvilo tribe said. The other two warriors also grunted their assent.
“Very well,” she said. “This is what we will do: We will take the raft apart. Its ropes will be useful for those who must escape with the King, and we can all easily swim to shore from here. After we ascend the chain, Lummomu and Huri will take the ropes and attempt to find and free King Antar. Let us hope that they can leave the ship through one of the accommodation-doors, sliding down a rope. Meanwhile, I will carry little Tolo down one anchor chain while Mok brings Niki and Jan down the other. We will swim as quickly as we can with the children to the shore of Council Isle. If Lummomu and Huri succeed in liberating Antar, they will swim ashore with him. If the King cannot be found, or if the worst happens, those of us on the island will hide until daybreak, then try to make our way through the forest to the place where Lyath lies at anchor. We can attract Anigel’s attention there and with luck be off and away before the Raktumian trireme can catch us. Is this agreed?”
The Wyvilo grunted.
And so they brought the raft cautiously up under the stem of the gigantic ship, where it would no longer be visible from above. The lashings of the bamboo raft were carefully undone and the many small ropes knotted into one long one. After this the rescuers swam to the chains and began to swarm stealthily up the huge links.
From the deck above came a tremendous shout. Kadiya and the Wyvilo feared for a moment that they were discovered; but then there was a great splash astern and more screaming and yelling, and they realized that the tumult was a reaction to whatever wizardry Portolanus was engaged in. The rescuers abandoned all wariness at that point, and climbed as fast as they could. In a few minutes more Kadiya reached the hawsehole on her side and found herself face-to-face with little Prince Tolivar.
“Aunt Kadiya!” the child squeaked. But his face wore an aspect of consternation, not delight.
“We have come to rescue you,” said she. “This will be easiest if you go back down inside and wait with Niki and Jan. Hurry!”
“But I don’t want to go—”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Kadiya snapped. “Be quick, now! There is no time to waste. My Wyvilo friends, here, must find King Antar and save him before the sorcerer discovers what we are about.”
With a panicked expression, Tolo disappeared from the opening. Kadiya climbed easily inside and Mok-La followed at her heels, cursing under his breath at the tightness of the hole’s fit about hi
s powerful body. Lummomu and Huri were already inside the other hawsehole and sliding down.
“By the Holy Moons!” Lummomu’s voiced boomed up from below. “The other two younglings are gone!”
Kadiya tumbled to the planks, then made a dash to take hold of Tolo, who was trying to hide behind a great pile of chain. “Where are your sister and brother?” she demanded.
Tolo burst into terrified wails. “Th-they escaped and swam ashore … I didn’t go … b-because I wanted to be the sorcerer’s apprentice instead of a rotten old second prince.”
For a moment Kadiya was rendered speechless. Then she said to the Wyvilo: “All three of you go to seek out the King. I will take care of this silly little vart-scat. May the Lords of the Air go with you.” And she said to Tolivar: “No more nonsense! Climb on my back and hold tight to my neck. We are going to swim ashore.”
The weeping little Prince cried: “I won’t!”
Huri-Kamo had already broken through the locker door with the broadax that was the traditional Wyvilo weapon. The hold beyond was black and untenanted. The other two aborigines, their luminous eyes aglow, drew their own axes from the back-sheaths and slipped away.
Kadiya untied the sodden seaman’s neckerchief she wore and brandished it at the balky child. “If need be, I shall stuff this into your mouth, and tie you to my back with my belt. But first, I shall wallop your royal bottom so that you will eat your meals standing for a month! Now … are you ready to come quietly?”
“Yes,” said Tolo forlornly, rubbing the tears from his eyes with his grubby fists. Then a malefic little smile touched his lips. “But it will be your fault if the Sea Oddlings get us as well as the others.”
“The—what?”
“Sea Oddlings. I saw their torches on the beach.”
It was only when she had swum well away from the trireme that Kadiya saw how Portolanus planned to retrieve her talisman from the depths. She had traveled a hundred or so ells shoreward with Prince Tolivar, finally gaining a clear view of the area around the stern, and from there she saw that the water aft of the ship was fearfully roiled, all full of white foam and an uproar of choppy waves. The sorcerer was leaning over the rail shaking his fist and shouting. His eyes shone like white beacons, and the shovel suspended at the end of the crane-hook swung wildly in their light. The people on the main deck had fled as far forward as they could get, howling and cursing.