Flight to Opar

  19.

  The storm struck a few minutes after the Tower of Kho fell. The survivors would connect the two later in cause and effect, and the story would spread throughout the two seas that it was Kho Herself who had started the fires and then sent the storm to uproot even the piles and scatter the debris of Rebha across the Kemti. Where once it had risen fifty feet above the waters, where its tower could be seen for twenty-six miles away, where the smoke from the tower could be seen a hundred and twenty mile's away, now there was nothing to show that anything but the sea had ever rolled over this place.

  At this moment, those in the rowboat were concerned only for themselves. The first blow of the storm front almost overturned them. They recovered and, while Lalila and Abeth bailed with crocodile-leather buckets, the men bent their backs to keep the boat in a straight line with the waves. If it was allowed to slide at an angle down the mighty waves, it might—undoubtedly would—go under or roll over and not come; up again. At least not with its occupants still in it.

  A trireme came up then, and somehow they managed to transfer to it, climbing up rope ladders, hanging on to other ropes thrown down to them. Abeth clung tightly to Hadon's neck, her legs wrapped around his torso, while he was half lifted to the deck. An especially heavy sea buried the deck a moment later. He heard a cry and, when he had shaken the water from his eyes, looked around. A moment ago Hinokly had been beside Hadon. Now he was gone. There was no time to reflect on his fate or feel sorrow for him. He had come through many adventures, survived much while others had died. And then, after all that, he too had gone down to dread Sisisken's house.

  Clinging to ropes stretched along the decks, they followed an officer. Twice, heavy seas almost tore them loose. They half fell down a ladder into a hold jammed with refugees picked up before the storm burst. The hatch was closed and the people were left in darkness and terror, where the stench of vomit fought with that of fear. The child Abeth whimpered now and then; Lalila soothed her, but her voice betrayed her own suppressed panic. Hadon sat by them, holding one arm around Lalila. Paga and Kebiwabes pressed close to his back; Ruseth huddled in front of him. After what seemed hours, and might have been, Hadon spoke to Ruseth.

  "How long can such a ship stand up to a storm like this?"

  "There is no way of predicting," Ruseth said. "We can only hope that Piqabes has no plans for taking us to her bosom."

  A minute later everyone in the hold was hurled forward, forming a heap six feet high against the bulkhead. A rending of timbers sounded even above their cries. Something struck the hatch cover, splintering it, and water poured in. Hadon fought to his feet and pulled Lalila, who was clinging to Abeth, out of the writhing, kicking, yelling mass. He held her up as he dragged her and the child to the foot of the ladder. Just as they reached it, the deck canted far to one side, pitching them backward against the far bulkhead. Fortunately for them, their impact was softened by the bodies of others.

  They scrambled up to try for the ladder again. Once more the deck tilted, this time precipitating them forward against the ladder. Again they were spared immediate contact with hard wood. Those who had been trying to get up the ladder involuntarily acted as shields. Nevertheless, even the reduced effect of collision was enough to hurt Hadon and Lalila. Abeth was lucky; she suffered very little injury.

  Those who were able to got up the ladder by pushing or pulling others out of the way. Presently all except the badly injured and Hadon's party were out of the hold. Hadon had restrained his comrades from joining the panic-stricken flight. He had yelled at them to wait, even punching the bard in the belly to keep him from the ladder. Then, with the way cleared, he said, "We can go now."

  Hadon leading, they climbed up the steep steps. By then they could see things better; dawn had just come. The sky was still blackish gray, but the wind had died down as if Piqabes had issued a fiat. The waves were rollers again, no longer the high sharp cliffs which had sent the ship bucking and plunging.

  In fact the ship, though leaning to one side now, did not seem to be moving much. Its rise and fall were very slight, and its forward progress seemed to be nil.

  Hadon gave a cry. The others, crowding up after him, exclaimed also. They were on the forward section of the vessel, a fortunate circumstance for them. The aft part was gone. It had broken off and disappeared into the sea.

  Hadon went down the leaning deck to the railing. He looked over the side at the shattered stumps of oars projecting from the three tiers below. Bodies hung out of the ports, but others, injured or whole men, were climbing out of the ports down to a surface under the wreck.

  Hadon felt a sense of unreality. What had the ship struck? What was holding it up?

  "It looks like logs, hundreds of tree trunks, thousands perhaps," he murmured.

  "That's what they are," Ruseth said. "We have struck one of the colossal rafts of the K'ud"em'o, people of the Sea Otter totem who dwell on the coast below the city of Bawaku." Bawaku, Hadon knew, was an important port city on the western coast of the Kemu. It too was in revolt against Minruth."

  There was more life aboard the ship now. The sailors had recovered from the shock of the collision and were untying themselves from the ropes on the decks or coming up out of the hatches. An officer was shouting at some seamen to cut the rigging loose from the mast, which had snapped off and fallen across the foredeck. Several bodies lay beneath it.

  "What does he think he's doing?" Ruseth said. "This ship isn't ever going to sail again."

  Hadon looked around, then said, "The officer is a datoepoegu, a lieutenant. He's the only officer I see. The others must have been on the aft section or injured belowdecks."

  "There are many hurt men," Lalila said, referring to the cries and calls for help from below.

  Hadon pointed across the logs. "Here come some people. These must be the K'ud"em'o."

  About fifty men and women with some children and dogs were advancing across the surface of the immense raft, their dark features indicating basic Khoklem stock: snub noses, thick lips, straight dark hair. Their chests were painted with red stylized heads of sea otters. Their long hair was gathered into seven pigtails, caught around the roots in bright blue beaded bands. The teeth of the men were filed to sharp points.

  They wore otterskin codpieces secured by narrow strips of skin around the hips and thighs. Aside from these and metal bracelets, anklets and rosaries, they were naked.

  The women wore little triangular aprons of skin held by strings around the hips. Their cheeks were heavily rouged; their lips were painted with some bluish substance; large rings of bronze or gold dangled from their noses. All carried tridents or short stabbing swords. They did not, however, act belligerent or defensive; they just seemed curious.

  By this time the lieutenant had realized he was the only officer aboard. He called the men away from the useless task of freeing the mast and set them to attending to the wounded, as he should have done at first.

  Hadon threw a rope over the side of the vessel and let himself down. The ship had broken through the waist-high wall of small logs along the edge of the raft and thus admitted the sea. Water was ankle-deep here, mainly because the weight of the ship was causing this part of the raft to sink a little below the surface.

  Hadon advanced through the water past the ship for twenty yards, then halted where the logs were just surface-wet. The raft people slowed down, talking among themselves. Their dogs, large skinny, mangy brutes, ran barking toward him. He waited, his right hand held up in the universal sign of peace. The beasts stopped only a few inches from him, and one nosed his calf from behind. He did not flinch; he waited, as still as a tree. A man wearing the only hat in the crowd, a high wide-brimmed cylinder with three long white feathers projecting from the top, came up to him. He was very broad, huge-paunched, slit-eyed, and stank of fish. Hadon supposed his grin was friendly, though the filed teeth made it look sinister.

  Introductions were made. The man was Qasin, the chief of the Red Sea Otter clan. His na
me meant Black Heart, though this did not necessarily imply anything derogatory about his character. He certainly seemed generous enough. He offered to take the injured off and have them carried to a "sick persons' area." At least this was the interpretation Hadon made of the man's pronunciation. Qasin spoke Trade Khokarsan, the lingo understood in most large seaports and used by the polyglot crews of merchant and naval ships. His pronunciation of certain consonants and vowels made it difficult to understand him.

  Hadon was able to make him understand that he had no authority over the ship or its crew. He and his friends were just passengers, picked up after the destruction of Rebha.

  At this Qasin's eyes widened, and he asked Hadon to explain. The chief gave a shout then, and the others ran up to him. He jabbered away at them in a language which did not sound in the least like any Khokarsan Hadon had ever heard. In fact it resembled the language of the Klemqaba, the primitive peoples who lived far south of Bawaku.

  Partway through the speech, the crowd began to rejoice, singing, dancing, whirling around and around, hugging and kissing. When the chief was finished speaking to his people, he turned to Hadon.

  "We do not exult because all those people have been killed," he said. "Though doubtless they must have done something to deserve it, otherwise Piqabes would not have sent such a death among them. But we are happy because this means that Rebha is no longer a peril to us. Too many times our rafts have drifted into it, and the commander of Rebha has fined us heavily for the damage and the deaths our rafts caused. Yet we cannot be blamed for that, since Piqabes sends the currents which take our rafts sometimes into the piles of Rebha."

  "Other times, though we do not come within dangerous proximity of Rebha, yet we come too close to it according to the laws of Rebha. Then the commander sends his marines to our rafts, and we are fined for breaking the laws. And the profits made from our hard voyage are taken away from us. These marines also take our women aside, presumably for questioning, and then rape them. If we dare complain, we are fined for making trouble, for lying!"

  "We have no love for Rebha and especially none for its navy. But Piqabes has revenged us. All honor to the Goddess of the Two Seas!"

  Qasin uttered what sounded like a string of orders to his people. Meanwhile others had joined them, coming from up and down the raft. At least three hundred were finally gathered there. When their chief had finished, they swarmed up the ropes of the canted vessel. The datoepoegu tried to stop them, but they ignored him. When he drew his sword and threatened them, he was struck from behind with the flat of an ax. His unconscious body was dragged along the deck and thrown into the sea from the broken end of the galley. Hadon thought he was surely dead, but the officer broke surface a minute later, sputtering and choking. He managed to swim to the raft, where Hadon gave him a helping hand aboard.

  After he had recovered enough to sit up and speak, the officer said, "I must have your name! I want you to be a witness when the time comes to put these savages on trial! You saw how they made an unauthorized boarding of one of His Majesty's ships and how they attacked me, one of his commissioned officers!"

  "If I were you, I'd keep silent about my intentions," Hadon said. He turned and waded away.

  He helped Lalila and Abeth down off the ship. By then most of the living sailors and refugees were off. Those who could walk were pressed into service to carry their more injured companions. Litters were taken from the ship's stores or quickly made from planks torn from the vessel. As soon as the sailors were marched away, under guard, the dismantling of the galley started. Hammers, saws and crowbars of bronze ripped up planks; ropes were coiled and carried off; the stores were emptied. In an astonishingly short time, the ship had disappeared. Its wood and metal fittings were transported inland—if such a term could be used for what was after all only a huge raft. The stores and ropes were carried toward a small village at the western end.

  The dead from the ship had been laid out, side by side. Their clothes and rings and weapons were removed and taken away somewhere. The lieutenant was by then up on his feet and protesting vigorously. No one paid him any attention, which was a kindness, relatively speaking. The officer kept demanding that Hadon help him get the ship back. Hadon told him to leave them alone. Couldn't he see that he was completely at the mercy of the raft people? If the K'ud"em'o wished, they could kill him and throw his body into the sea. If he persisted, Hadon said, he would be endangering his whole crew. Should the Red Sea Otters find it necessary to slay him, then they would have to kill all the witnesses—which also meant that Hadon and his group could be in grave danger, even though they were not naval personnel.

  In fact, Hadon said, glaring at the officer, if he did not cease his useless, indeed dangerous, meddling, Hadon himself might shove him back into the sea. He wasn't particularly concerned about the possibility of the lieutenant's sudden demise, but he did not want to get involved in repercussions.

  "You are a traitor!"

  "I am no follower of the blasphemer and traitor, King Minruth," Hadon said, sneering. He put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Should he behead this stupid fellow and avoid trouble in the future? Not to mention earning the gratitude of the raft people?

  "You are a rebel, a denier of the primacy of Resu!" the officer said.

  "Since I am in my right mind, of course I am," Hadon said. "As for who is the rebel and who is not, there is no question. You are the rebel and the traitor, and no doubt loathsome Sisisken, great Kho's eldest daughter, has marked you as an early guest in her house."

  The officer turned pale. Hadon walked away, going toward a priestess who was administering final rites to the dead. She chanted the song of the dead while daubing the forehead of each corpse with black, blue and red clay, arranging the spots to form the corners of a triangle. Her nubile attendant, whose face and breasts were painted in alternating circles of black and white, swung a censer of burning pine needles over the face of each corpse after the priestess daubed it. Nine times the censer swung while the attendant shouted the name of the victim. Where she had not been able to learn the name from the survivors because of too mutilated features, she gave the name of the first man created by Kho, Qawi.

  The chief, Qasin, stood for a while watching his wife and Queen, the head priestess, work among the dead. Then he nodded, and six muscular men began to throw the bodies into the sea. After the eighth corpse sank, the greasy back of a gruntfish appeared, and the ninth corpse was swallowed by cavernous jaws.

  "Piqabes wastes nothing," Qasin said, making the ancient sign used now only among old people and primitives. "The fish eat our dead, and we eat the fish."

  20.

  While they followed the chief to the central village, Hadon told the story of his group, tie had hesitated at first about revealing their identities, but the attitude of the K'ud"em'o seemed to make it safe. Besides, Hadon felt this would assure the K'ud"em'o that they were not with the sailors.

  The chief was astonished. He had had no news since the raft had been launched from the homeland coast five months ago, and news from Khokarsa reached there three months late.

  Qasin listened carefully, though interrupting frequently with exclamations of horror or rage. It was not, however, the political changes which upset him, since his tribe's loyalty to the concept of empire was rather tenuous; it was the religious upheaval which drove him into a frenzy.

  They came to the central part of the raft which, Hadon learned, was a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its broadest. Here stood fifty beehive-shaped huts made of bamboo poles and mahogany shingles. They stood on stilts, the ends of which were driven into holes drilled into the logs. Each housed about ten people and several dogs. In bad weather, they also held goats and the pet monkeys and parrots.

  The center hut was the largest. This was the shrine of green-eyed Piqabes, goddess of the sea. Standing before its entrance was a great block of mahogany wood with a stairway of twelve steps cut on each side. On top of this was set an immense upright oblo
ng of granite. A hole had been cut through its upper part, and its interior had been chiseled into a spiral arrangement.

  "The stone of C'ak'oguq"o," the chief said, seeing Hadon's questioning expression. "She is our goddess of healing, though you may call her Qawo if you wish. The stone sits before her temple in our chief village," Qasin continued. "That is, until we have put together our raft and placed our supplies and trading goods on it. Then it is carried with much ceremony to the raft and placed here, before the Temple of Piqabes."

  Hadon was amazed at the chief's story. Every two years an enormous number of valuable trees were cut in the highlands of the K'ud"em'o country. These were floated down the main river, through a number of rapids and over many cataracts. Eventually they were brought to the mouth of the river and into a bay protected by a great breakwater of earth built by the tribe. The mouth of the river was at a shallow level at this time, since the tribe had diverted the main flow through an ancient channel.

  The logs were arranged in the quiet area behind the breakwater into a raft three times as long as wide. Great vines held two-thirds of the logs together. The rest were secured by bridges of wood, fitted with underpins driven into holes bored in the logs. After the raft was completed, houses erected on it and the supplies, animals and people moved onto it, the breakwater was destroyed. This was comparatively easy, since the action of the sea had been slowly tearing it down anyway. The river was rediverted into the main channel, which moved the raft seaward and helped crumble the earthen breakwater.

  The river's pressure slowly pushed the raft out into the Kemu. Here the sea current caught it and ponderously shoved the giant assemblage of logs toward the southeast.

  The raft people lived on their floating wooden island for six months while it moved toward Wethna. Their main food was the fish they caught, but they drank goat milk and ate goat meat; their storehouses provided nuts and berries, okra for soup and emmer wheat and millet flour to bake bread. They also drank wine and the harsh peaty liquor, s"okoko, purchased from the Klemqaba to the south. They kept enough to sell at Wethna after watering it down five to one. The K'ud"em'o were not cheating the Wethnans by this dilution; only the Klemqaba could drink the fiery liquid straight and live to brag of it.