The Sword & Sorcery Anthology (24 page)

“Kill one, kill all, kill devil!” said Alyx gleefully. Edarra grabbed
her arm. Taking the lady by the crook of her elbow, Alyx began to
run, while behind them the fashionable merriment of Ourdh (the
guests were pouring wine down each other’s backs) grew fainter and
fainter and finally died away.

They sold the necklace at the waterfront shack that smelt of
tar and sewage (Edarra grew ill and had to wait outside), and with
the money Alyx bought two short swords, a dagger, a blanket, and
a round cheese. She walked along the harbor carving pieces out of
the cheese with the dagger and eating them off the point. Opposite a
fishing boat, a square-sailed, slovenly tramp, she stopped and pointed
with cheese and dagger both.

“That’s ours,” said she. (For the harbor streets were very quiet.)

“Oh,
no!”

“Yes,” said Alyx, “that mess,” and from the slimy timbers of the
quay she leapt onto the deck. “It’s empty,” she said.

“No,” said Edarra, “I won’t go,” and from the landward side of
the city thunder rumbled and a few drops of rain fell in the darkness,
warm, like the wind.

“It’s going to rain,” said Alyx. “Get aboard.”

“No,” said the girl. Alyx’s face appeared in the bow of the boat, a
white spot scarcely distinguishable from the sky; she stood in the bow
as the boat rocked to and fro in the wash of the tide. A light across
the street, that shone in the window of a waterfront café, went out.

“Oh!” gasped Edarra, terrified, “give me my money!” A leather
bag fell in the dust at her feet. “I’m going back,” she said, “I’m never
going to set foot in that thing. It’s disgusting. It’s not ladylike.”

“No,” said Alyx.

“It’s
dirty!”
cried Edarra. Without a word, Alyx disappeared into
the darkness. Above, where the clouds bred from the marshes roofed
the sky, the obscurity deepened and the sound of rain drumming
on the roofs of the town advanced steadily, three streets away, then
two...a sharp gust of wind blew bits of paper and the indefinable trash
of the seaside upwards in an unseen spiral. Out over the sea Edarra
could hear the universal sound of rain on water, like the shaking of
dried peas in a sheet of paper but softer and more blurred, as acres of
the surface of the sea dimpled with innumerable little pockmarks...

“I thought you’d come,” said Alyx. “Shall we begin?”

Ourdh stretches several miles southward down the coast of the
sea, finally dwindling to a string of little towns; at one of these they
stopped and provided for themselves, laying in a store of food and a
first-aid kit of dragon’s teeth and ginger root, for one never knows
what may happen in a sea voyage. They also bought resin; Edarra
was forced to caulk the ship under fear of being called soft and lazy,
and she did it, although she did not speak. She did not speak at all.
She boiled the fish over a fire laid in the brass firebox and fanned the
smoke and choked, but she never said a word. She did what she was
told in silence. Every day bitterer, she kicked the stove and scrubbed
the floor, tearing her fingernails, wearing out her skirt; she swore to
herself, but without a word, so that when one night she kicked Alyx
with her foot, it was an occasion.

“Where are we going?” said Edarra in the dark, with violent impa
tience. She had been brooding over the question for several weeks and
her voice carried a remarkable quality of concentration; she prodded
Alyx with her big toe and repeated, “I said, where are we going?”

“Morning,” said Alyx. She was asleep, for it was the middle of the
night; they took watches above. “In the morning,” she said. Part of
it was sleep and part was demoralization; although reserved, she was
friendly and Edarra was ruining her nerves.

“Oh!” exclaimed the lady between clenched teeth, and Alyx
shifted in her sleep. “When will we buy some decent
food?”
demanded
the lady vehemently. “When? When?”

Alyx sat bolt upright. “Go to sleep!” she shouted, under the
hallucinatory impression that it was she who was awake and working.
She dreamed of nothing but work now. In the dark Edarra stamped
up and down. “Oh, wake up!” she cried, “for goodness’ sakes!”

“What do you want?” said Alyx.

“Where are we going?” said Edarra. “Are we going to some miser
able little fishing village? Are we? Well, are we?”

“Yes,” said Alyx.

“Why!” demanded the lady.

“To match your character.”

With a scream of rage, the Lady Edarra threw herself on her
preserver and they bumped heads for a few minutes, but the battle—
although violent—was conducted entirely in the dark and they were
tangled up almost completely in the beds, which were nothing but
blankets laid on the bare boards and not the only reason that the
lady’s brown eyes were turning a permanent, baleful black.

“Let me up, you’re strangling me!” cried the lady, and when Alyx
managed to light the lamp, bruising her shins against some of the
furniture, Edarra was seen to be wrestling with a blanket, which she
threw across the cabin. The cabin was five feet across.

“If you do that again, madam,” said Alyx, “I’m going to knock your
head against the floor!” The lady swept her hair back from her brow
with the air of a princess. She was trembling. “Huh!” she said, in the
voice of one so angry that she does not dare say anything. “Really,”
she said, on the verge of tears.

“Yes, really,” said Alyx, “really” (finding some satisfaction in the
word), “really go above. We’re drifting.” The lady sat in her corner,
her face white, clenching her hands together as if she held a burning
chip from the stove. “No,” she said.

“Eh, madam?” said Alyx.

“I won’t do anything,” said Edarra unsteadily, her eyes glittering.
“You can do everything. You want to, anyway.”

“Now look here—” said Alyx grimly, advancing on the girl, but
whether she thought better of it or whether she heard or smelt
something (for after weeks of water, sailors—or so they say—develop
a certain intuition for such things), she only threw her blanket over
her shoulder and said, “Suit yourself.” Then she went on deck. Her
face was unnaturally composed.

“Heaven witness my self-control,” she said, not raising her
voice but in a conversational tone that somewhat belied her facial
expression. “Witness it. See it. Reward it. May the messenger of Yp—
in whom I do not believe—write in that parchment leaf that holds all
the records of the world that I, provoked beyond human endurance,
tormented, kicked in the midst of sleep, treated like the off-scourings
of a filthy, cheap, sour-beer-producing brewery—”

Then she saw the sea monster.

Opinion concerning sea monsters varies in Ourdh and the
surrounding hills, the citizens holding monsters to be the souls of the
wicked dead forever ranging the pastureless wastes of ocean to waylay
the living and force them into watery graves, and the hill people
scouting this blasphemous view and maintaining that sea monsters
are legitimate creations of the great god Yp, sent to murder travelers
as an illustration of the majesty, the might and the unpredictability
of that most inexplicable of deities. But the end result is much the
same. Alyx had seen the bulbous face and coarse whiskers of the
creature in a drawing hanging in the Silver Eel on the waterfront of
Ourdh (the original—stuffed—had been stolen in some prehistoric
time, according to the proprietor), and she had shuddered. She had
thought,
Perhaps it is just an animal,
but even so it was not pleasant.
Now in the moonlight that turned the ocean to a ball of silver waters
in the midst of which bobbed the tiny ship, very very far from anyone
or anything, she saw the surface part in a rain of sparkling drops and
the huge, wicked, twisted face of the creature, so like and unlike a
man’s, rise like a shadowy demon from the dark, bright water. It held
its baby to its breast, a nauseating parody of humankind. Behind her
she heard Edarra choke, for that lady had followed her onto the deck.
Alyx forced her unwilling feet to the rail and leaned over, stretching
out one shaking hand. She said:

“By the tetragrammaton of dread,

By the seven names of God.

Begone and trouble us no more!”

Which was very brave of her because she did not believe in charms.
But it had to be said directly to the monster’s face, and say it she did.

The monster barked like a dog.

Edarra screamed. With an arm suddenly nerved to steel, the thief
snatched a fishing spear from its place in the stern and braced one knee
against the rail; she leaned into the creature’s very mouth and threw
her harpoon. It entered below the pink harelip and blood gushed as
the thing trumpeted and thrashed; black under the moonlight, the
blood billowed along the waves, the water closed over the apparition,
ripples spread and rocked the boat, and died, and Alyx slid weakly
onto the deck.

There was silence for a while. Then she said, “It’s only an animal,”
and she made the mark of Yp on her forehead to atone for having
killed something without the spur of overmastering necessity. She
had not made the gesture for years. Edarra, who was huddled in a
heap against the mast, moved. “It’s gone,” said Alyx. She got to her
feet and took the rudder of the boat, a long shaft that swung at the
stern. The girl moved again, shivering.

“It was an animal,” said Alyx with finality, “that’s all.”

The next morning Alyx took out the two short swords and told Edarra
she would have to learn to use them.

“No,” said Edarra.

“Yes,” said Alyx. While the wind held, they fenced up and down
the deck, Edarra scrambling resentfully. Alyx pressed her hard and
assured her that she would have to do this every day.

“You’ll have to cut your hair, too,” she added, for no particular
reason.

“Never!” gasped the other, dodging.

“Oh, yes, you will!” and she grasped the red braid and yanked; one flash of the blade—

Now it may have been the sea air—or the loss of her red
tresses—or the collision with a character so different from those
she was accustomed to, but from this morning on it became clear
that something was exerting a humanizing influence on the young
woman. She was quieter, even (on occasion) dreamy; she turned to
her work without complaint, and after a deserved ducking in the sea
had caused her hair to break out in short curls, she took to leaning
over the side of the boat and watching herself in the water, with
meditative pleasure. Her skin, that the pick-lock had first noticed as
fine, grew even finer with the passage of the days, and she turned a
delicate ivory color, like a half-baked biscuit, that Alyx could not help
but notice. But she did not like it. Often in the watches of the night
she would say aloud:

“Very well, I am thirty—” (Thus she would soliloquize.) “But what,
O Yp, is thirty? Thrice ten. Twice fifteen. Women marry at forty. In
ten years I will be forty—”

And so on. From these apostrophizations she returned
uncomfortable, ugly, old and with a bad conscience. She had a
conscience, though it was not active in the usual directions. One
morning, after these nightly wrestlings, the girl was leaning over
the rail of the boat, her hair dangling about her face, watching the
fish in the water and her own reflection. Occasionally she yawned,
opening her pink mouth and shutting her eyes; all this Alyx watched
surreptitiously. She felt uncomfortable. All morning the heat had
been intense and mirages of ships and gulls and unidentified objects
had danced on the horizon, breaking up eventually into clumps of
seaweed or floating bits of wood.