Destiny's Lovers (22 page)

They slept together in one narrow bunk that
night. The lack of space did not stop Reid from making love to her
with skill and inventiveness. But in the chill morning mist it was
a newly efficient Janina who took charge.

“We will need food for our journey,” she
said. “This is a small boat, but there ought to be enough storage
space in the hold. I think we should begin by scrubbing out that
part of the boat. It probably reeks of fish and will make
everything we put into it smell and taste of fish. Then I will
teach you which plants to dig or pick, and you will teach me to be
a better sailor so I can be of more help to you.”

She had a few other suggestions, to most of
which Reid agreed at once. He was well pleased by the way she had
accepted their circumstances. Her fragile appearance was deceiving.
She was proving to be tougher and far more resilient than he had
expected, considering her restricted and sheltered background.

They worked quickly, not wanting to waste any
more good weather than necessary. The little boat was soon
spotless. They packed the newly clean hold with roots and berries
which Janina guaranteed would last for more than the twenty days
Reid estimated their journey would take. She cut wild herbs and
hung them from the mast to dry so they would be able to brew hot
dhia to help keep them warm in the polar chill. They would not have
time to dry the fish Reid caught each day, but they found salt in
the hold along with a few containers intended for the storage of
fish in brine, and these they packed full. They saw no animals
large enough to justify expending the time necessary to hunt and
snare them. Janina insisted they could live quite well on what they
were storing.

The fisherfolk had apparently gone barefoot
while aboard, and so did Reid and Janina. Knowing warmer gear would
be needed soon, Reid used lengths of heavy cloth he found packed in
a locker, which were originally intended as material for sail
patches, to make clumsy shoes for both of them. Among the clothes
they had found on the boat were several pairs of heavy stockings,
which would provide added warmth for their feet.

Janina found a pair of oars stored beneath
one of the bunks, so they were able to use the smaller boat, in
which they had been set adrift, to ferry supplies from shore to the
larger boat.

To range farther and find more food, they
sailed the boat up and down the river until Janina handled it with
easy familiarity. Reid tried to teach her to swim, and Janina did
her best to learn, knowing it might be necessary to know how. She
never spoke of the terror she felt about returning to the open sea.
She thought they would probably be killed on the northward voyage,
if not by sea monsters, then surely by cold and ice. She had heard
tales of the bitter polar regions when stories about the ancestors
were recounted, though no one in Ruthlen had ever dared to travel
so far.

The nights were becoming noticeably colder. A
golden haze lay upon the land each afternoon. Ripe fruit or small
nuts hung from every bush.

“Tomorrow we will rest and eat all we can of
food that won’t travel well,” Reid decreed on one especially lovely
evening. “The following day, if the weather holds, we will leave
here.”

“I suppose that is best,” Janina agreed. “We
can’t wait much longer, can we? It will be too cold.” She promised
herself once again that she would not let Reid know how frightened
she was. She wanted to suggest they stay where they were until the
cold weather had come and gone, but she knew he would never agree
to that. He was too eager to see his friends again and to learn the
fate of his cousin, Alla.

Since they would be forced to remain on the
boat for many days to come, they took blankets and slept ashore
that night. Reid made a fire and cooked fish. Janina contributed
bread made from their precious store of flour, and flavorful roots
roasted among the coals. They finished with a selection of delicate
yellow-and-purple striped berries.

Twin half moons rose one after the other,
shedding a hazy silver mantle over the landscape, their light
diffused by the volcanic ash still drifting high in the atmosphere.
Reid drew Janina into his arms.

“There won’t be much time for this after
tomorrow,” he said, kissing her brow. “We will both have to work
constantly, and take turns sleeping.”

“I know.” They sat on a blanket with their
heads together, holding each other close. After a while Reid lifted
her tunic, sliding his hands along her ribcage, and then up her
arms, flinging the garment onto the gravel after he had removed it.
He knelt beside her and buried his face in her breasts. Janina
caught his head, holding him hard against her. It was always like
this. He touched her and began to caress her and instantly she was
lost. She could think of nothing but Reid.

He pushed her back onto the blanket and then
pulled off his own clothing. Janina lay watching him in the
firelight, admiring the way his smooth muscles moved beneath his
bronzed skin, feeling the heat of desire lapping up inside her,
threatening to overwhelm her. She smiled up at his darkly handsome
face when he bent over her.

“But you are still half dressed,” he
murmured, laying his hands on the waist of her trousers. He slid
the trousers down a little and lowered himself to kiss her tender
flesh. Janina began to tremble. He pushed the trousers lower still.
She lifted her hips to help him. His hands cupped her buttocks
before slipping around to caress her belly and move down into the
tangle of silver hair between her thighs. Her trousers were gone,
her legs fell apart, and Reid’s hands were driving her mad. And his
mouth. She had never known, never guessed, anything like that was
possible. She grabbed at him, holding him in both hands, reveling
in the way he responded so eagerly to her touch. She cried out in
disappointment when he pulled away from her. But his own hands
stayed where they were and she knew she could not endure much more
of his loving torture.

Then, just as her body began to explode, he
entered her, not in his usual gentle way, but with the hard,
driving force of his own passionate need. She met him with a
matching desire, pushing upward against him, clutching him to her,
fingers digging into his back. An instant later her wild cry of
fulfillment echoed through the night, followed by Reid’s deeper
expression of ultimate pleasure.

* * * * *

The next morning they spent playing naked in
the water. Janina endured the final swimming lesson with laughing
good humor, enjoying the caress of Reid’s hands when he helped her
to move her arms correctly. His lightest touch could ignite her
senses. To cover her sudden desire for him, she laughed and teased
him, then squealed in mock fear when he dove under her, caught her
across his shoulder, and staggered out of the water to toss her
laughing onto the beach and take her with no further preliminaries.
His body was cool and wet, his manhood hard and demanding. She
closed her eyes and gave herself up to him with unquestioning
love.

They slept the afternoon away, then ate their
evening meal on the beach. They made love one last time before
dowsing the fire and rowing back to the boat. Janina had expected
to be unable to sleep, but she drifted off at once. She did not
waken until Reid called through the hatch to say the sun was up and
all was ready for their departure.

She pulled on her clothes, then went above to
help him. But she took a moment when Reid was busy with the sails
to look shoreward and whisper a regretful farewell to the peaceful
cove and the land surrounding it, the place where she and Reid had
first truly acknowledged their love, the place she would always
think of as the Golden Land.

“I have never seen such devastation before.’’
Alla watched the viewscreen in horrified fascination as the
shuttlecraft flew over the area between the volcanoes and the sea.
“The lava flow has covered almost all the land.”

“The lava was channeled far out to sea by
that ridge of rocks.” Tarik indicated a dark grey area on the
viewscreen. “It must have been a high promontory once, and if there
was a bay beside it, which appears likely, it is gone now.”

“No one could live through something like
that,” Herne said sadly from his seat next to Tarik. “We won’t find
Reid alive down there, or anyone else, either.”

“Tarik, are those buildings?” Ignoring
Herne’s pessimistic remarks, Alla pointed to the viewscreen in
sudden eagerness. “There, just beyond the volcanic flow.”

Tarik maneuvered the shuttlecraft so they
could see better.

“By all the stars!” he exclaimed. “That never
showed up on the computer model. It looks like a ruined version of
our headquarters. Herne, how do your instruments read?”

“The volcano appears to be quiescent,” Herne
reported, adjusting a dial. “There are occasional seismic
rumblings, but they are not strong enough for us to feel them, or
to cause any damage to the shuttlecraft. If they increase, we can
lift off. I’d say it’s safe to land, if you want a closer
look.”

“Please,” Alla begged. “If there is a chance
we could discover what has happened to Reid—”

“Say no more,” Tarik told her. “I want to
find Reid, too. But more than that, this area is a mystery that
must be solved before any of us can feel safe in our own
settlement. We need to know why and how our computer model was
falsified, though I believe we can see below us the reason why it
recently changed shape.”

Tarik brought the shuttlecraft down well away
from the still-smoking lava, landing on a small patch of smooth
rock that looked as though it had been swept clean by a giant broom
or whirlwind. Alla was the first one out. She stood blinking in
dazzling sunlight that reflected off ruined white stone buildings.
The light seemed unnaturally bright because of a lingering thin
haze of volcanic ash that splintered the sun’s rays and hurt the
eyes.

“The damage is worse seen from the ground.”
Herne joined her, squinting against the sun. He was followed by
Tarik, who strode past them, heading toward the remnants of the
white building.

“Look at this,” Tarik called to them. “I was
right about this place. Here is a knee-high wall, like the one
around our headquarters, and when it was standing that building in
the center must have been a larger version of ours.”

“There were several smaller buildings,” Alla
observed.

“This was possibly an important center for
whatever society built it,” Herne guessed, “but I doubt if anyone
is alive here now.” Then, seeing Alla’s determined look, he added,
“Still, I may as well survey it, just to be sure.” He pulled a
small heat sensor out of his waist pocket and headed for the ruins.
Knowing that the sensor would detect the body heat given off by any
living organism, Alla followed him, holding her breath in hope.

The six smaller buildings had been destroyed
to their foundations. Most of the large building was in rubble,
only a curved portion of the outer wall and two columns remaining
upright, but those columns were identical to the ones around the
headquarters building.

“We could have learned so much from these
people,” Tarik mourned.

“You don’t know there was anyone living here
before the eruption,” Herne pointed out. “It is reasonable to
assume these buildings date from at least the same period as our
headquarters, and they may have been vacant even longer.”

“How long do textiles last in the sun and
open air, Herne? Not six hundred years, surely. This is recent.”
Alla had pounced upon a piece of sheer, pale blue fabric that was
partly caught beneath a fallen column. She tugged at it, then
stopped. ‘Tarik, come here.”

Hearing the stricken note in her voice, he
went to her at once and fell to his knees to push at the stone.

“Herne, come help me,” Tarik called. “Let’s
move this piece to see what’s beneath it.”

Herne hurried to his side, handing the heat
sensor to Alla. The two men pushed hard until the stone rolled
over. They all stared at what lay beneath it, until Alla turned her
head aside, refusing for pity’s sake to look any longer.

“She must have been beautiful when she was
alive,” Tarik said softly.

“She’s not long dead,” Herne said. “In this
extremely dry heat, I’d say four or five days at most.”

“Then there were people living here!” Alla
cried. “Reid could have reached these buildings. He could still be
alive!”

“‘Could’ doesn’t mean ‘did,’” Herne responded
sharply. “Tarik, I suggest we roll the stone back to cover her
again. We’d never get the huge piece off that’s pinning her legs,
and there may be scavenger birds or animals. I’d hate to leave her
exposed like this.”

Tarik agreed, and the two men fell to work.
Alla moved out of their way, still holding the heat sensor. It
began to click. Because she had been clutching it in both hands and
holding it close to her body while the woman was uncovered, Alla
thought she might have overheated the sensing mechanism inside the
device. To cool it she laid it down in the shade of a large section
of a column that was leaning crookedly across another column. The
heat sensor began to hum.

“Either I’ve broken it,” Alla said to no one
in particular, “or there is something alive in that pile.” She
picked up the sensor.

“You’ve probably broken it.” Herne had come
up behind her. With an annoyed expression, he took the instrument
out of her hands. “I wish people with no mechanical aptitude would
leave my equipment alone.”

“You gave it to me to hold!” Alla flared.
“Tarik, there is something under that column.”

“Thanks to you, this is broken,” Herne
declared, holding up the sensor. “You just had a false positive
reading.”