Destiny's Lovers (20 page)

“Tamat!” Janina stretched out her arms toward
the red glare. “Reid, take us back. I have to find Tamat, I have to
help her. Sidra will think only of herself. Take me to Tamat.”

“We have been forbidden to go back.” Reid
held her fast, as though he feared she would throw herself into the
sea and try to swim to the village. “We would be killed the instant
we set foot on shore. We don’t know what has happened in Ruthlen.
Tamat may be dead already. We have no choice but to go on.”

“No. Tamat needs me. I have to find her. I
can’t fail her again!” She began to fight him. Screaming and
weeping, she pummeled his chest, biting and scratching and
shrieking, while Reid tried to hold her. The blanket she had been
wrapped in fell away, leaving her naked. She felt Reid’s hands on
her, touching her, inflaming her overwrought senses. And suddenly,
irrationally considering their desperate situation, she wanted him
to make love to her, wanted him in her arms.

“Stop yelling and listen to me!” Reid
ordered, shaking her hard. “If I’m right, if that was a great wave
we felt, then the water will recede quickly and there will be
another, and possibly a third wave, until the force of it is
expended. We are too near the shore for safety. We have to sail
into deep water before we are caught by the waves and thrown onto
land. If that happens, the boat will be wrecked and we will be
killed.”

“Not deep water. The sea monsters live
there!” Hysterical now, she flung herself at him, wrapping her bare
arms and legs around him. She cried his name over and over, as
though he were the only thing she could depend on in a world gone
mad. “Reid, Reid, hold me. Please hold me. I’m so frightened.”

The boat began to rock violently. Reid shoved
her away from him, slamming her onto the seat by the tiller and
holding her there.

“If you don’t stop screaming, I’ll hit you,”
he shouted, his voice like a slap across her face. “Get yourself
under control. Go below, find a packet of clothes, and put them on.
Then come back here and help me raise the sails. And be quick about
it.” He watched her as though he feared a renewed attack of
hysteria.

The sound of a cataclysmic explosion roared
through the night, nearly deafening them. Flames poured into the
sky from a mountain far astern. An incandescent cloud above the
mountain began to expand, lighting the night with its glow. The
once-calm sea began to roll and heave; the wind began to blow.

“You are right, Reid.” Janina slumped on the
seat, drained of all emotion in the face of that spectacle, at last
accepting what had happened and willing to stop fighting what could
not be changed.

Ruthlen must be destroyed by now, she
thought, and though its people had teased and tormented her during
much of her youth and no one of them except Tamat had ever loved
her, still Janina felt pity over so great a loss of life at one
blow. She even pitied Sidra for the swift obliteration of
everything that cruel and imperious woman had wanted to rule.

Osiyar’s end caused Janina greater regret,
for he had never deliberately been unkind to her, and he had always
respected and cared for Tamat. It was Tamat’s death that made her
heart ache most of all, yet even as she grieved she knew it was a
loss that could not have been postponed much longer in any
case.

“Tamat is certainly dead after that
explosion,” she told Reid in a remarkably steady voice, “and I said
good-bye to her this morning, knowing then that I would never see
her again. I’m sorry I have been behaving so badly. I won’t weep
any more, or cause you any trouble. I’ll try to help instead. I
know a little about handling a boat, although I haven’t been on the
water since my parents died. I’ll get dressed.”

She felt amazingly calm. From somewhere
within her battered spirit there now arose a new determination to
remain alive. She reminded herself that Tamat had sent them the
boat so they could live. She would do whatever Reid asked of her
and, coward though she was, she would try her best to hide her fear
of the sea monsters.

She started below. She was halfway through
the hatch when the shock wave hit them. The pressure of it lifted
their boat out of the water before smacking it down hard against
the surface of a wildly churning sea.

Reid had been standing by the tiller. Janina
saw him fly overboard just before she fell downward into the cabin.
She hit her head, then sat on the deck for a while, too dazed to
move, while the mad rocking of the boat made her dizziness even
worse. When she could see in single images again, she crawled up
the ladder and stuck her head through the hatchway. Reid was
nowhere to be seen.

“Reid! Reid!”

A groan answered her, a half-strangled sound
coming from below the stern. Grasping the tiller for balance she
bent over, straining to see through the red-tinged darkness. Reid
was in the sea, hanging on to the rudder.

Nearly blind with fear, certain that a sea
monster would appear at any moment to snatch him away from her,
Janina grabbed at his clothing and began to pull. It took a long
time to get him into the boat. She lost her hold on him several
times while they bobbed about on the dangerously rough sea. Each
time Reid reached for the railing, he was washed away from it,
until a wave caught him, lifting him higher. He took advantage of
it, clutching the railing, his chest now at a level with it, and at
last Janina, by bending far over the stern, got a good-sized piece
of his trousers between her hands. Reid hung there uncertainly for
a long moment when the stern began to sink again, until Janina
pulled once more, using all her strength. The stern lifted. Janina
pulled again, Reid helping as much as he could while still holding
on to the railing to keep himself from falling back into the
water.

As she finally hauled him over the stern, the
bow of the boat plunged downward into the trough between two waves.
Reid and Janina rolled over and over together, nearly falling
through the hatchway before Reid put out a hand to stop them. They
lay there for a while, catching their breath. Janina’s bare back
and buttocks were pressed hard onto the deck by Reid’s weight. Reid
was dripping seawater all over her. She felt his sudden hardness,
sensed rather than saw that his mouth was about to touch hers. She
lifted her face to his.

The boat rolled again, throwing them across
the cockpit once more. Reid let her go and reached for the
tiller.

“Do you know how to raise the sails?” he
asked, shaking his head hard as if to clear his brain of the last
vestiges of his fall into the sea.

“I think so,” she replied in obvious
uncertainty. “It has been so long since I helped my father on his
boat.”

“Here, take the tiller.” He seized her arm
and put her hand on the smooth wood. “Just hold it steady. I’ll get
the sails. It’s not too different from the rigging I’m used
to.”

Janina sat watching his red-outlined figure
in the darkness while he worked with the practiced movements of an
expert sailor. The wind was rising, making the sea even rougher.
She struggled to hold the tiller steady.

“Go below and put on some clothes,” Reid
ordered, dropping into the cockpit once more.

“You first. You’re dripping wet,” Janina
said.

He did not argue. A moment later she saw a
dim glow from the cabin and knew he had found the switch for the
solar bulbs. By the time he returned in fresh, but too-small tunic
and trousers and a heavy jacket, she was shivering and glad to
follow his command to finally put on some clothing. She took the
opportunity to make two cups of hot dhia and find some slightly
damp bread. These she brought to Reid at the tiller. She stood
beside him, swallowing her share while he ate his. She was not
hungry, but she knew that if she was going to be of help to him at
all she would have to stay healthy and capable of work.

They scarcely knew when night changed into
day. The sky was dark with clouds of volcanic ash that blotted out
the sun and fell upon the boat and the sea until the waves were
coated with the pale grey floating particles. Reid ordered her to
brush as much of it as she could off the boat.

“It’s so light, it’s hard to move it,” she
complained, sneezing through a cloud of fine grey-white dust.

“If it piles up, it will be heavy,” he
replied, “and heavier still when it gets wet.” Then he sent her
below to find cloths to wrap around their faces so they would not
inhale the dust with each breath.

Janina was greatly relieved when Reid,
deciding the danger of more great waves had passed, began to sail
closer to shore. The wind continued strong at their back, and the
current added its northward motion to help carry them along
parallel to a rocky, barren coast that offered no harbor inviting
enough to make them want to stop. Another night and day, followed
by a third night of steady sailing took them well beyond the
immediate debris thrown out by the volcano to a dawn of hazy blue
sky and pale sunshine.

Among the ship’s stores, Janina located
several pair of the slit eye protectors the fisherfolk used against
the dazzling sunlight. When she took a pair to Reid, she found him
watching the shore, which had changed in character. No longer did
precipitous rocks fall off abruptly into the sea leaving no place
to drop anchor. Instead, a strip of green scrub-land edged the
water, with a range of low, worn-down hills in the background. Reid
adjusted his eye protectors before once more turning his gaze
shoreward.

“There’s a river,” he said, pointing. “I
think it’s time to stop and rest.”

He moved the tiller and sheeted the sail,
sending the boat toward land. A short time later they were sailing
between green banks overgrown with bushes and a few stunted-looking
trees. Reid continued up-river along its meandering course until
they were well away from the sea, and the river had narrowed
considerably. Only then did he order Janina to lower the sail. He
dropped the anchor in a little cove with a gravelly beach backed by
a single clump of trees.

“This looks safe enough,” he said. “The trees
will shade the boat from the late-day sun.”

After the rough seas they had endured, it was
strange to be at rest. In this sheltered place, the boat hardly
moved at all.

“Now,” Reid said, “before anything else, we
sleep.”

They’d had only short snatches of rest for
three nights, taking turns and always on guard against the weather
or another great wave or, in Janina’s case, against the sea
monsters she still expected to appear and destroy them. She needed
no prodding to make her lie down upon her bunk while Reid took the
narrow berth opposite her. He rolled over once, wrapping the
blanket around himself, then lay silent. In the unaccustomed
stillness, however, it some time before Janina could fall
asleep.

It was almost evening before she was awakened
by a movement on deck, followed by a loud splash. Lifting her head
in alarm, she saw that Reid was gone from his berth. Fearing that
something terrible had happened to him, Janina leapt from her bunk
and climbed up into the cockpit to look for him.

When she emerged from the cabin, she found a
scene of peaceful beauty spread before her. The sun lay low in the
sky, bathing the distant hills with orange-gold light. The trees
edging the shore shook out their leaves in a sun-sparkled, windy
dance. Yellow-and-white flowers starred the rough grass and ran
across the gravel beach on slender vines.

“Join me,” called a voice from below.

Janina looked down to see Reid floating on
the smooth surface of the cove.

“What are you doing?” she cried, too
frightened to move.

“Jump in,” he invited. “Or climb down if
you’d rather. Use the ladder at the stern. I found it in one of the
lockers. Too bad we didn’t know about it when I fell
overboard.”

“Why are you in the water?” she asked.

“After three days of hard work, I needed a
bath.” He laughed up at her, mocking her fear. “So do you. Come in,
Janina. Don’t look so frightened. The water is much too shallow
here for your huge sea monsters. That’s one reason I sailed so far
upriver before stopping, just in case they do exist.”

“I’m afraid of the water. I don’t know how to
float on it the way you are doing.” It was worse than that. She
could see that Reid had taken off all his clothes before he went
into the river. She would have to do the same. She wasn’t sure she
could bear it if he tried to touch her or wanted to kiss her.
Thinking about what had happened in the sacred grove and
immediately afterward, she felt a terrible shame. Remembering how
she had wanted him to make love to her their first night on the
boat, she was embarrassed at the very thought of Reid holding
her.

“It isn’t deep,” he said encouragingly,
apparently not seeing her confusion. “Look, I’m standing, and there
is no current in this spot. You won’t drown. I won’t let you.”

I’ll drown in your eyes or your kiss, she
thought, and whatever you say now, you will let me.

“If you don’t come in,” he said, “I’ll climb
aboard and throw you in.”

She thought he probably meant it. He probably
found her unwashed body repulsive in the close quarters of the
boat. She turned her back to him and began to strip off her tunic
and trousers, noticing as she did so the bruises on her arms and
legs and hips, evidence of how many times she had been thrown
against something hard during their days at sea. Perhaps Reid would
consider those black-and-blue and yellow marks unattractive and
would not want to touch her.

She went down the ladder awkwardly, hating
the thought of immersing herself in the river. At the temple, daily
baths were taken in a carved stone tub with the sides comfortingly
near. But the temple was gone, and this limitless space was all she
had, this empty world peopled only by Reid and herself.