The Seadragon's Daughter (24 page)

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Authors: Alan F. Troop

BOOK: The Seadragon's Daughter
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“Now!”
she mindspeaks and I thrust against her, her grip inside almost unbearably tight, her body thrusting back, her song turning to a single note droning on and on until it suddenly turns into a high-pitched growl. Lorrel’s body freezes and goes rigid, pulsing from tight to loose inside, shuddering as she orgasms, shrieking out an almost inaudible note as I orgasm too.
Lorrel’s song slows but doesn’t stop, her body still spasming inside, her contractions slower now, less powerful. I find the tune still impossible to resist, glad to let it lull me toward sleep, glad to let it keep my mind away from Chloe and from anger and my shame.
When the last of Lorrel’s spasms comes and goes and I shrink away from her, she rolls to my side and presses herself against me. As we both drift into sleep she mindspeaks,
“Now we shall have a son. His name will be Dela, and one day he will rule this srrynn.”
24
 
A distant splash wakes me. Opening my eyes, I stare into darkness and wonder whether morning’s come, or late afternoon, or if I’ve only slept a few hours. I curl my lip. I am no stranger to caves. I’ve spent time underground before. I dislike most the lack of the natural pattern of darkness and light.
The bed of seaweed beside me smells of Lorrel, but she no longer lies beside me. Sitting up, I listen for her breathing and hear only the slight rustle of the drapes as they move with the sighing of the cave air. I’m just as glad to find myself alone. The Pelk girl has brought little good into my life.
Stretching, I wince at the wounds Lorrel inflicted upon me the night before, the tightness of my sex-sore muscles. I frown at the memories the pain brings, wish I could wipe them from my mind. But I can forget them no more than I can ignore the hard-used ache in my loins.
I think of Chloe and smile when I find I can picture her again. Whatever Lorrel and the Pelk have done to me, however they’ve overwhelmed my will, they have not conquered my thoughts. Still, I moan when I think how lost I was in Lorrel’s embrace.
Curling my claws into fists, I strike my head once, then again and again. How could I have allowed such a thing to occur? I rake a claw across my chest and welcome the aroma of my fresh blood flowing. How can I expect Chloe to forgive me? I rip myself again. What right do I have to ask for her help? I dig furrows down my right thigh. Letting my blood flow and the pain throb, I stare into the dark and moan.
But after a while, my blood clots on its own and my pain lessens and I tire of my self-pity. Whether or not Chloe will ever be able to accept what I’ve done, I know I owe it to her and to my children to find my way out of this place. I owe it to Henri to make sure no Pelk female ever can overtake his life the way Lorrel has mine.
I suck in a breath and stretch my body and concentrate on healing my injuries. I am Don Henri’s son, I think. If he could find his way out of this place, then so can I.
 
It takes me only a few minutes to heal my wounds and soreness. Standing up, I feel my way forward, shaking my head at the blackness around me. As well as my kind can see in the dark, we do require some light, if only just a flicker of it. When I stumble into the seaweed drapes, I fumble with them until I finally find the center.
Parting them, I step out from my alcove and find the srrynn’s safehold virtually deserted. Only a few glowholes still give off their feeble green light. The seaweed tents of the night before have all come down, and only a few Pelk still seem to be sleeping in their now open nests.
I smile at a thin shaft of bright daylight that burns through the gloom near the cavern’s far right side. Weaving my way around nests and the piles of nautical junk the srrynn has collected, I make my way toward the light.
Halfway there I come across the bulk of a large creature sleeping in an open nest under a seaweed blanket. Since I have seen no other Undrae among us, I kick its rear haunch and mindspeak,
“Derek! Wake up, you lazy creature!”
He moans, digs further under his blanket, and I kick him again.
“Damn it! Have some bloody mercy,”
he mindspeaks, throwing off the blanket, sitting up, holding his head with both front claws.
“You got me into this. The least you can do is help,”
I mindspeak.
He looks at me with one bloodshot green eye, motions at a large gourd by the side of the nest.
“Look, old man. Why don’t you pass that to me?”
Liquid sloshes inside it as I pick it up and hand it to my brother-in-law. He upends it and takes a long swallow before he lowers it.
“There now. That’s a bit better.”
He holds out the gourd to me.
“Care to take a draw of it?”
he mindspeaks.
I shake my head and he shrugs and takes another swallow before he puts it down.
“Remarkable stuff you know. Different from ours.”
“Our what?”
He snorts a laugh.
“Dragon’s Tear wine, old man. What else do you think would make time more bearable in a dark hole like this?”
“I thought you were happy here,”
I mindspeak.
“I was happy in Coconut Grove. You bloody well fixed that.”
I glare at him.
“Get over it, Derek. You were wrong. You were beaten. No one said you couldn’t go on and have a life somewhere else.”
“Just Pa.”
“My God, you’re older than me. You could have just gone.”
“Just tell him to piss off? That would work. Sure. And you think the bugger wouldn’t tear me from limb to limb?”
“No one says if we get out of here that you have to go back to live with them in Morgan’s Hole. You could go look for an Undrae mate.”
“Look, old man, I could get killed doing that. You know how many males they attract when they’re in heat. Here I get plenty of food and plenty of quiff. . . .”
He pauses, looks at me with both eyes.
“Come to think of it, I’m surprised you’re already up. I heard the circle last night—and the rest. You’ve had some of your own, haven’t you?”
He makes a show of smelling the air.
“Righto! Quiff for sure.”
I frown at him.
“Give me a break, Derek. You know how I feel about Chloe. I’m sick over what happened.”
“Give yourself a break, old man. Do you think you could have resisted? No one can withstand the force of their songs. Sybyli told me in the old days dozens of them would form large groups called Syrees. They’d gather near rocks or cliffs and wait for ships to sail near them. Not one of those ships ever resisted the lure of their bloody songs, not a single, bloody sailor ever escaped.”
“But they were humans. I am of the Blood.”
“So am I. So was your bloody father.”
I sigh.
“I just need to get out of here,”
I mindspeak.
Derek looks around.
“So? There’s not a soul here to stop you. Mowdar and the men are all out on a dolphin hunt. My wives and the other females are above gardening or tending to other chores.”
“Aren’t there any guards?”
“What for? As long as they have the antidote, we might as well be chained here.”
“Have any of your women mentioned anything about a way to neutralize the poison?”
I mindspeak.
He shakes his head twice.
“I only know I live in fear of not getting the antidote before the poison starts to burn.”
Derek stands, picks up the gourd, drinks from it again and mindspeaks as he puts it down,
“Come on. Now that you’ve woke me, I’m hungry. We might as well go above and see what the women have found for us.”
 
We walk toward the light streaming into the cave, stopping when we come upon a large pile of clothes. They look well worn and I wrinkle my nose at the musty smell they give off.
“Don’t look down on them, old man. We need them to go above,”
Derek mindspeaks, shrinking, his scales smoothing, his wings compressing, sinking into his back. I shift shape too, smile as I feel the familiar form of my human body.
Even in his human form, Derek measures inches taller than I, his body broader, his muscles larger and better defined. Still, with our emerald-green eyes, our mutual choice of blond hair and our square-jawed good looks—Derek lacking only my cleft chin—I wouldn’t be surprised if a stranger took us for brothers.
We rummage through the pile like two women at a weekend department store sale, Derek holding out shirts and pants for my consideration, I doing the same for him. In the end we both choose shorts and tank tops—a red one for Derek, and a black one for me.
“Don’t bother searching for shoes or sneakers. The Pelk don’t like to cover their feet,” Derek says and smiles. “God, it feels bloody good to talk out loud to someone again. Even in their human form these people only mindspeak. You’d think they’d want to learn English—so they can go into town sometimes—but Sybyli says Mowdar forbids them from having much to do with human ways. It’s too bloody Undrae, she said.”
 
Narrow steps have been carved into the cavern wall, and I follow Derek as he makes his way up them. I squint at the glare of the daylight that comes through the hole in the cavern wall at the top of the steps. Derek squints too, ducking when he reaches the hole and squeezing through it. I follow, blinking when I come out from under a large rock into a bright, small clearing surrounded by mangrove trees—each one clustered just inches from the next.
Looking up, I see that the sun has yet to reach its apex. “It’s early still,” I say.
Derek nods, stretches, inhales a long breath, “Good go that, waking me up. I always feel best up here.”
I look around the small clearing and see only the knee-high arched roots and the rough, reddish brown branches and dark green leaves of red mangrove trees clustered so close that it looks like an impenetrable wall of green, thirty feet high, encircling us. “So where did everyone go?”
Stepping onto the gnarled reddish gray arch of a nearby mangrove root, Derek grabs a branch and pulls himself into a tree. “There are no paths on the ground. They travel through the branches.” He points forward. “The lagoon is this way. By now they should have some fish for us.” Then he gestures to the right. “The gardens are that way. None of them are very large. They trim away branches so sunlight can hit the ground. Pretty smart of them, huh? Everything they do above, they do to avoid discovery. That’s why they come above in their human forms, wearing clothes. It makes problems less likely in case some bloody human wanders by or flies overhead.”
After going only a few yards I begin to recognize why Derek steps on certain roots, grabs particular branches and knows when and where to turn. The bark on the top of the roots and branches we walk on has become smooth and glossy from the constant traffic of Pelk feet. Likewise, smaller branches, higher up, used for gripping have lost most of the leaves and the brown berries and long green seed pods that dangle from their undisturbed neighbors.
Traveling through the trees reminds me of the jungle gym I played in at school as a child—only springier. I have little trouble keeping up with Derek’s pace, and within minutes we find ourselves in the branches of a large mangrove, overlooking the lagoon that Lorrel and I swam through the day before.
Pelk women in their human forms busy themselves on the lagoon’s beach, some carrying baskets full of lobsters, crabs and flopping fish, others simply sitting in the sun and weaving seaweed nets. They wear a dizzying array of mismatched shorts and pants, T-shirts and blouses, a few even decked out in long skirts. Other Pelks swim nude in the lagoon, diving and surfacing with even more crustaceans and fish. After searching through them a few times now, I realize that Lorrel isn’t among them.
“Look at that, old man,” Derek says, tapping me on my shoulder and pointing to a large rock jutting over the water a dozen yards from us. I stare at the pale green iguana basking in the sun and think how much I’d like to do the same thing after spending so much time in the dark chill of the underground.
My brother-in-law stares with me. “My God, I’m tired of fish,” he says, leaning out from the branches so he can be seen from below.
“Sybyli! Tantra! Delsi!”
he mindspeaks.
One female on the beach and two of the swimmers stop what they’re doing and look up toward him. He points to the iguana.
The Pelk on the beach shakes her head and returns to her work. The two in the water look at each other. One dives, the other swims toward the rock. “That’s my third wife, Tantra,” Derek says.
I nod, examine her. She is the smallest of the three but thicker, her wet black hair hanging only as far as her shoulders, her breasts larger than Lorrel’s, almost pendulous. The girl slows as she approaches the rock, her eyes only on the iguana. The beast stares at her too, his leg muscles bunching as he prepares for flight.
Tantra stops, treads water and begins to sing. Derek chuckles and says, “You’re in for a treat, old man. I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.”

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