The Paladin's Odyssey (The Windows of Heaven) (41 page)

“I’m not being diplomatic. It’s just the truth.”

“I still like it,” she teased.

A’Nu-Ahki climbed up the ladder hole from below decks. “Hope you don’t mind me eavesdropping, but I think only U’Sumi and I should go ashore. Yafutu needs to be ready to move the ship away
quickly
if need be. T’Qinna can’t cover a retreat, handle the wheel, and move the throttle-levers at the same time, even using the flying bridge’s helm controls.”

Yafutu shouted,
“But I’m not afraid to go!”

A’Nu-Ahki said, “No one says you are
, Son
. You’re no child anymore
; n
ot after what you’ve seen, and after what you’ve done for us on this ship. You do the Fleet-house of Ursunabi proud!
Y
ou’re the
only
man for the job, Yafutu.”

T’Qinna put her arm around Yafutu. “Come on, kid, guess it’s up to us to put these two veteran
tacticons
ashore and watch their backs.”

Yafutu steered the
Amirdu
in toward the nearest floating island on her port side to avoid fouling what remained of the out-rig nacelle in the giant vine mat. U’Sumi swung the grappling line, which hooked onto a woody vine loop above his head. He looked up into the flying bridge, where T’Qinna
stood
with a fitted arrow.

“It looks clear from up here,” she said.

U’Sumi extended the gangplank to where he and his father could climb up onto the island’s surface.

T

he ground—if one could call it that—swayed gently with the sea. Centuries of leaf humus supported a variety of shrubs and even many shallow-rooted trees. The mulch filled the gaps in the underlying giant vine mat, providing a spongy surface to walk, or at least scramble, over. Colorful birds hooted and screeched all
around them like bloated dragons, while the occasional predatory roars of real dragons
called
in the distance.

U’Sumi and his father found coconut trees barely fifty paces in from the gangplank. After gathering over a hundred of the pods and tossing them down onto the
Amirdu’s
deck, they ventured further inland to look for the water-fruit Yafutu had described.

The haze brightened as U’Sumi followed his father into the jungle. He was not sure exactly when he
noticed
that
the birds had gone silent. Then he felt it
, s
omething or someone watching them
—
perhaps
the predator they
ha
d heard farther off. U’Sumi looked over his shoulder
and
froze.

“Pahp!” he whispered, “look!”

A’Nu-Ahki turned and gazed up into the sky. He slowly pulled his son down with him into a crouch behind a stand of ferns.

A clawed hand yanked at U’Sumi’s liver from the inside. The pale disk of the sun was not the only light in the hazy sky.

“What is it, Pahp?”

A’Nu-Ahki gazed up at the glowing orange semi-circle hovering just above tree level. “A Watcher.”

“In that? Why would they be here?”

“I don’t know. Let’s stay under the trees.”

“What about the ship? It’s visible from up there.”

“We need to draw that thing away from the ship, into the greenery.”

They stood and
went
deeper
into the floating jungle, making noise as they
did
. U’Sumi sensed the radiant object
pursue
them
above the
trees
, though the foliage was too thick for him to see it. Whether it followed or not, he could not shake
the
feeling
of
something
malevolent
watch
ing
them
.

T’

Qinna squeaked,
“Do you see that?”

Yafutu nodded, too terrified to speak.

The glowing orange
half—
disk floated over the trees
where
she had just watched U’Sumi and his father disappear in
to the greenery
. It slowly began to follow them, apparently disinterested in the ship.

Terror hijacked her lips. “
Yafutu;
cut the lines and pull in the plank
!
We need to move away from shore.
Pandura’s
sent the gods to find me!
”

The youngster obeyed without a word.

Just as Yafutu
cut the last line from
the tangle of tree-sized fronds, a line of squat ugly savages appeared out of the jungle and rushed the ship. Spears flew from the vine-tangled bluff. T’Qinna heard breaking glass from a window in the wheelhouse. She took aim at the nearest of what could well have been “d
emon trolls
” and loosed her arrow. The missile took the little monster in the left eye, killing instantly.

The savages fled the rim of their floating world
,
and threw no more spears. T’Qinna fitted a second arrow, but held fire. The enormity of what had just happened came to her as
Yafutu reached the wheel and
the
Amirdu
moved away to a safe distance.

The boy
found her still in her frozen horror when he
came
topside to continue steering from the flying bridge
a minute later
. “You can put the bow down, my Lady
;
they can’t throw this far.”

She sat down by
Yafutu
. “We left them there
…
with those things!”

He just nodded.

“And I killed one. Did you see it?”

“Yes, Lady. Demon trolls.”

She glared at him and shrieked, “Am I a demon troll too
?
”

Yafutu recoiled, his eyes filling with uncomprehending tears. “You are beautiful past all words! They are hideous! I don’t understand!”

T’Qinna immediately softened and pulled him into her arms. How could he have understood? He didn’t see the family resemblance. He had not just faced a tribe of contorted caricatured miniatures of himself.

The savage struck in the eye by T’Qinna’s arrow
was
a woman; her
starved
empty-sock breasts had flopped up when she had fallen backward.

Caught forever in the frozen mirror of her memory was that sun-flashed negative, pygmy parody of her
own face
. Whereas the background hue of T’Qinna’s leopard-spot skin was soft white, the tiny spear-woman’s had been black—not brown, nor even dark brown, but pitch black—with slit-thin lips somehow even blacker, stretched around pointy-filed yellow teeth like a quiver of spitting darts poisoned with the green venom in her huge remaining eye.
Her spots had been larger than T’Qinna’s markings
;
pale white
,
like orderly leper sores the color of snail-meat trailing around the scowling face of that
huge
misshapen head.

T’Qinna imagined that if the natural contours of her own face and skull were
extremely
distorted and enlarged
—
with
the colors reversed
—
then
she too would have had the little savage woman’s wide bi-lobed cranium and light yellow hair spiking from the flat depression on top of her head, recessed between the lobes. The hate-filled flash of that enormous iridescent green eye, now indelibly etched into her mind, said it all.

Not quite all.

T’Qinna could still hear Pandura berate her mother, from where she had hidden as a six-year-old, behind the lilac bush in the garden near the Court of Children. She still smelled the cloying sweetness of the flowers she would forever detest, as she peered through the shrub to watch her mother and grandmother argue. It was perhaps her very first coherent memory.

“Why you ever kept the spawn of that spotted savage is beyond me!”
Pandura had yelled.
“How can your father and I believably work to create human beings that are closer to divinity when you shamelessly rut with such animals and then keep the
disgraceful
byproduct?
You’re lucky she’s female and can still attract certain low-born men! The other priests and priestesses whisper about your degenerate tastes behind your back and laugh!”

The child in her still wept. Then T’Qinna realized
that
it wasn’t her trying to sniff back the tears, but the boy huddled into her side.
The boy she had lashed out at with more rage than she had realized she had.

“It’s going to be alright, Yafutu,” she said, even though she was certain that nothing would ever be
“
alright
” again.
I left him to die!
“We need to watch the shore
,
and not drift away. The men will double back and show themselves once it’s safe. You’ll see. They have to!”

No they don’t,
said
that
hopeless whisper inside—the one that always told her how U’Sumi was just too good to be real.
Even if they did get back, he’d know you left him, and even if he didn’t, you would know.

Something large rammed the hull from out of the depths and slapped angrily along the port side. Yafutu throttled the engine up to f
lank
spee
d away from the floating island.

T’Qinna
’s
nails bit into her palms as she
screamed.

T

hey dropped from the trees so rapidly that U’Sumi barely had time to turn into a back-to-back sword-fighting stance with his father. About twenty child-sized savages
had
instantly encircled them with wood javelins all pointed inward, beneath U’Sumi’s sword arc. If he or his father struck, they would both be giant pin cushions before their blades found targets.