This was not, however, Hadon's concern. Even if it was he would have forgotten it because of a sudden and much more immediate worry. Five days before the group was to leave on a merchant galley, plague struck Wethna.
No one knew who brought the disease into Wethna, but most supposed that some sailors were responsible. It did not matter. What did was that this particular plague, called the sweating sickness, spread with frightening swiftness. And it killed with even more terrifying speed.
Kebiwabes was the first of the group to hear of it. He hurried home from a tavern at which he had been singing. He was bursting to tell the news, which was that several dozen people on the docks had been laid low with the disease. He found Hadon in its grip.
It ran its course in the usual three days. First Hadon was seized with an unaccountable sense of dread, a sense of overpowering but nameless doom. About fifteen minutes later he began shivering violently. He felt as if he had suddenly been plunged into the icy waters of a mountain lake. Then he became dizzy, suffered an agonizing headache and great pain in his neck, shoulders, arms and legs. He was unable to lift even his head.
Three hours later he felt like he was on fire and began the profuse sweating which lasted for a day and a night. The perspiring stopped suddenly, but it was followed by more headache, intense thirst, a rapid beating of the heart and then delirium.
At the end of its course, Hadon was free of the plague's symptoms but was forced to stay in bed for four days because of extreme weakness. He was unattended by any doctor during this whole time. Though the bard and Lalila took turns looking for a physician while Hadon was nursed by one or the other, they could not get one. The doctors were either too busy to come or were themselves sick or dead. His friends could only nurse him and hope for the best. Lalila and Paga took turns squeezing water from a rag over his feverish body and lifting his head so he could drink great quantities of water.
The noise of the streets outside, the chatter and yelling of nearby pedestrians and the not too distant sounds of the marketplace, had died. Except for the tramping of feet and muffled booming of a drum as patrols passed, or the cry of the corpse-collectors to bring out the dead, all was quiet. Now and then a man or a woman screamed or a child cried.
A day after Hadon's sickness passed, Kebiwabes was seized with the irresistible sensation of impending death. Lalila and Paga now had two patients to take care of, though Hadon was no longer a constant concern.
The bard did not die during the first day, which meant he would probably survive.
Lalila and Paga had to take turns going out after water and food. The bazaar was closed, the sellers having fled to their homes or out into the country. But there was food to be had if one had enough money. A few merchants had set up a market on the docks, guarded by soldiers who would admit only those who could show their money. Once Lalila was robbed on her way home by a hungry trio. She was knocked down and her basket was grabbed and run off with. She made two trips that day, taking Paga with her the second time. She did not like to leave the convalescent and the sick one without any care, but if they did not get food, they would die anyway.
Sometimes, when the wind shifted, they could smell the odor of bodies burning in the great charnel pit outside the west wall. Then the giant bronze bells in the temples of Kho and Resu would toll sadly.
Lalila and Paga waited to be struck, thinking it inevitable. But neither was felled, and the child also escaped the malady. Abeth did become ill four weeks later, though with a sickness which resembled typhus.
The sweating disease raged through the city, slaying ten thousand out of a population of fifty thousand. At least a third of the city fled into the country as soon as the disease gained momentum. They took it with them, of course, and it spread through the rural areas. Eighty thousand farmers, fishermen, woodcutters and artisans died. The whole land of Wethna lay under a pall of stinking smoke from corpse-fires.
Among the victims was the beautiful wife of the rich merchant. He had stayed in the city, gathering the profits from his food supplies. She went to their villa up in the hills and was killed, not by the sweating sickness, but from snakebite. She encountered a cobra while strolling in her garden one evening.
In seven weeks the sickness had passed through the land and was gone. The survivors came out of hiding and began to put the nation together again.
Abeth's sickness passed, leaving her thin and listless. Not until almost two months after they had arrived at Wethna was the child fit for travel.
Hadon had gone back to work for the merchant since they needed money desperately. His position as bodyguard enabled him to overhear many of the details of his employer's business. He learned about a small fishing boat which the merchant had purchased at a low sum from the widow of a man who'd died of the plague. After looking it over, Hadon decided it was just the size he needed. He bought it at a fair price and still had money saved to rerig the boat. The men he hired to do the work evidently thought he was crazy. What was the yard attached to near the bottom of the mast and running lengthwise? What was the purpose of this? And why was he cutting a perfectly good sail diagonally, so that he now had two useless triangular sails?
Hadon smiled and said he was trying an experiment. He did not tell the truth because of what Ruseth had said about people's reactions to his own ship. He did not want to be suspected of sorcery and subjected to a court of inquiry.
On morning, an hour after midnight, he and the others took the boat out of the harbor. By dawn they were out of sight of the city. Hadon did not worry about being pursued. Who could care that he left? His employer would just shrug his shoulders and count himself lucky that he did not have to pay him for the last week—until he found that Hadon had charged his account for the provisions. The two sums balanced each other, so Hadon figured he had not done anything dishonest.
They reached the strait in five days. Before then, though, they knew something had happened there. They saw the wreck of a beached trireme, and two miles further on they came across a number of corpses floating over a wide area. Hadon took the vessel up boldly in daylight to the very mouth. There was no sign of a fleet until he got close to the entrance of the strait. The stern of a bireme jutted up from the water, almost blocking off the passage of Hadon's craft. He could not understand what was keeping the ship from sinking, since the depth here was about four hundred feet.
He had the sails dropped, and they rowed slowly past the wreck and the western wall. The sun was directly overhead at this time, enabling them to see for some distance down into the water. Hadon whistled and Kebiwabes swore. The galley was held up by a score of other ships, piled one on top of each other.
"There must have been a hell of a battle here," Hadon said. "But who tried to get out? The Kethnans?"
"More than likely," the bard said. "They must have tried to run the gauntlet of the marines on the cliffs. And some must have made it, otherwise Minruth's fleet would still be here. They must have closed with the blockaders then, and in the battle everybody was sunk."
That seemed the only logical explanation, though it could have been pirates who came through the strait, not Kethnans. Who it was did not matter; the way was clear. The marines stationed above had either deserted their posts or been killed by the invading fleet. Maybe a Khokarsan ship or two had survived the battle and taken the marines home, since one ship could not maintain the blockade.
The strait was still going to be closed to any vessel larger than a small fishing boat for some time. Eventually the current would move the wrecks on out into the deeper waters, or else the Kethnans would clear the top wrecks. Meanwhile, Hadon and his crew, not even excepting Lalila, who was far gone in pregnancy, rowed the boat through the fifty dark, silent miles of the winding strait. Because of their short-handedness they made slow progress, having to sleep at night. It took them over a week to get their vessel through, during which they worried about pirates or Kethnans. They were done for if they encountered another craft of any size. It would be
impossible to flee.
But no one else was in the strait and, on the tenth day, they came out against the current from the darkness and the silence. Like Keth the ancient hero who first entered the Southern Sea, they were dazzled by the brightness of the equatorial sun.
Hadon said, "Lalila! I was afraid our child would not be born in Opar. But now we have a good chance to make it on time. If Kho is with us, we shall be in my native city a week before your term is up."
Lalila smiled, though she looked tired, wan and anxious. Paga, forever the pessimist, growled, "Babies do not always come on schedule, Hadon."
22.
Kebiwabes said that their journey from Khokarsa to Wethna had enough material for two epics. The voyage from Wethna to Opar had enough adventures to make three epics, and it wasn't even finished. Hadon, in a typical statement, replied that all bards exaggerated enormously, though their experiences since the flight from the capital of Khokarsa could easily make one epic, if the bard was long-winded enough.
"And I suppose," Kebiwabes said, "that you would compress all of the adventures into a lyric, into nine or twenty-seven lines?"
"That would be the ultimate in poetry," Hadon said. Then, seeing that the bard looked hurt, he added, "Don't pay any attention to what I say now, Kebiwabes. I am tired and hungry and anxious, since Lalila is so swelled that she seems about to burst like an overloaded wine sack. And I am taking my frustration and fear out on you."
"Not to mention that you have no taste," Kebiwabes said. He walked to the other end of the boat, which wasn't very far, and looked out ahead. His back expressed his anger. What the bard had said was not really too exaggerated. There had been many times when Hadon thought they would all be dead within a minute. But somehow, with mighty Kho giving them invisible yet evident help, they had come through.
There had been other times when no danger pressed close, yet they felt imperiled. Just three days before, at dusk, their boat was passing close to a desolate marshy region, swamps which stretched inland for miles, then abruptly ended at sheer mountains. The only protuberance between the sea and the mountains was a hilly mass about a mile inward. Hadon was telling them that this was supposed to be the site of an ancient city.
"It was founded by Bessem, the exiled son of Keth. He quarreled with his father and then killed his brother in a rage, so he was forced to flee. Keth did not go after him—he was an old man then, almost sixty—but he proclaimed that if Bessem came back, he was to be slain instantly, without trial. So Bessem traveled south along this coast and stopped when he got here. This was not a marsh at that time, but a lowland which sloped gently to the mountains. And here Bessem built a city of red stone quarried from the mountains. It was called, of course, Mibessem, the city of Bessem."
"All went well. Many people came from Kethna and Sakawuru and from the Northern Sea, the Kemu, to live in the city of giant stone blocks. This was when the Sea of Opar was almost unknown and Mikethna was itself only a small colony. In fact it was about the same time that the priestess Lupoeth led an expedition into the hinterland and found the place which would later become Opar, city of treasures."
Though the city of Mibessem prospered, however, there were at the same time unsettling stories told of something which lived in the mountains beyond the city. It was said to play a reed flute, its music driving men mad and enchanting women so they followed the player into the mountain forests and were never seen again. Misshapen creatures would be seen at dusk, near the limits of the farmlands around the city, and these, though they seemed bestial, resembled some of the women who had wandered away.
"It was said that Bessem, in an ill-advised moment, had chosen to build his city in the land of a demon. And it was said that this demon was in fact the chief of demons, the leader of those nameless creatures whom mighty Kho scourged from the Kemu so that Her people might settle there. The demons who were not killed or buried so deeply underground that they would not be able to dig their way back until the crack of doom—these demons fled into the land along the Southern Sea."
"And so now the nameless demon was angry because his refuge had been invaded. Yet he was under the ancient restraint imposed by great Kho on his kind. He could not lay a hand or a paw or a tentacle on a human being in anger. What the Mother of All had failed to do, however, was to prohibit the nameless ones from using other methods. Moreover, a demon could touch, or even embrace, a human if it did not do it in anger or with intent to harm. And so the flutist of the shadows, the distorted one, the nameless one who breathes at night outside windows, this thing played his reed flute. And men went crazy and women followed him into the burrow near the mountains. And there they laid strangely with it and conceived and bore hideous children."
"Now Bessem was a hero of old, you understand, a mighty man whose like the two seas have not seen for centuries. So he armed himself with a spear that two strong men today could not pick up, and he strode into the wilderness to find the nameless thing and destroy it. But he did not come back, and the flute played again in the fields outside the city. Sailors told about this in Kethna and the ports of the Kemu."
"And so one day the Empress of Khokarsa sent a ship to Mibessem to determine if the stories she had heard were indeed true. If they were, a priestess was to rid the land of the demon. The ship took a year to get to Kethna because of storms and troubles with pirates. There the captain was told that he was too late. A Kethnan merchantman putting into the port of Mibessem at dusk had heard weird blood-chilling music from a reed flute. It was heard miles over the still sea, long before the lookout could see the red city. In fact he never did see it, since he had mistaken the dark hill where it once stood. Or perhaps he saw its outer shell, the earth piled up over it by the nameless demon. No one knows, because no one has ever dared enter the swamp and dig into the hill.
"And so the ship neared the shore, which was no longer a fine sand beach but a swamp. The gentle slope had subsided into a perfect flatness, and crocodiles and hippopotamuses swam among the palm trees and the other trees growing on little islets."
"Where were the people? No one knew, but it was feared they had met some terrible fate and were lying under the waters of the swamp. Or perhaps under the earth that something evil and irresistible had thrown over the once-proud towers and massive walls of Mibessem."
"In any event, the crew of the ship did not stay long. The fluting became louder and louder, and they heard a splash as of mighty feet in the swamp. The trees bent as though something gigantic was brushing against them. Even the priestess became frightened, and the captain shouted at his rowers to get the galley out of there. They did escape whatever was walking in the swamp, but they did not outrun the noise of the flute until they had put many miles between them and the former land of Mibessem."
Hadon stopped. The only sound was the wind whistling through the rigging and the splash of water against the bow. And then, sending utter terror into them, there came from the shore the music of a flute.
Abeth screamed. Kebiwabes swore and turned pale beneath his sunbronze. Lalila's large violet eyes became even larger. Paga grabbed some shrouds and clung to them while he stared inland, his eyes huge and the nostrils of his flat nose distended. Hadon gripped the tiller as if it were the only real thing in the world. All else seemed wavy, slightly distorted, impalpable. Until that moment he had been enjoying the story, scaring himself and the others. Paga, of course, had looked skeptical and he had several times snorted disbelief. But evidently he had been more impressed than he had let on.
The sun disappeared below the horizon of the sea. Darkness fell swiftly. The shrilling notes became louder.
Hadon came out of his freeze and gave orders, quietly, so that the player in the swamps, whatever it was, would not hear him. He moved the tiller until the boat swung southwest. The boom traveled around, restrained by ropes in the hands of Paga and Kebiwabes. Hadon kept her steady, not coming around to beat back until the music had disappeared for an hour.
After a while Paga aske
d, "What do you suppose it was? Some fisherboy playing his flute?"
Hadon replied, "There are no fisherfolk, no villages, in this area. No one would dare live here."
"Maybe some fishing boat was driven into the swamp by a storm," Paga said. "Maybe it was wrecked. One of the survivors, perhaps the only one, used his flute to attract our attention."
"He could have done that better by shouting," Hadon said. "Do you want us to go back there to look for him?"
Paga did not reply. The others said nothing, but they would not have kept silent, it was evident, if Hadon had put the boat about. He had no intention of doing that.
The subject was not brought up again. It seemed best to everyone that they talk no more about the unknown flutist.
23.
The pillar of smoke they saw all day was not from the port of Opar, Nangukar. That place had already been burned down and the ashes cooled by the rain. This smoke was from a pyre of pirate corpses. Eighty Mikawuru had been slain during the pirate raid. The attackers had been beaten off but had managed to rescue twenty of their dead. They had sailed off, leaving sixty of their fellows and a town in flames. The pirate corpses were being consumed by flames now, which meant their souls would flit through the clouds until Kho decided they had suffered enough as phantom nomads, driven by the winds. Then their ghosts would be sent down into the earth to awful Sisisken's dark house.
As Hadon swung his boat to the beach—all the quays were destroyed—he was stunned. All the buildings around the fort were burned. The huts and houses, the long halls, the warehouses, the stores and taverns, everything was in ashes. The two great wooden gates of the fort had been torn off, and some of the wooden buildings inside the walls had been leveled by fire.
Rebuilding had already started. The place was a buzz and yell of labor, with wagons full of newly cut lumber or bamboo, drawn by oxen, everywhere. Hammers and saws pounded and screeched.