THE SEA HAG(21)

The sideboard held an assortment of liquors. Hale took out a square green bottle like the ones Ramos had been guzzling down. He unstoppered it by pinching the end of the cork with his fingernails.

"I've seen the sea hag," Dennis said. "Tomorrow I'll go to her as agreed."

Hale shifted his hand on the bottle, gripping it by the neck.

"What does he mean, Hale?" Selda asked, looking up fearfully like a startled nestling.

Hale smashed the bottle against the edge of the sideboard. Lustrously veneered wood shattered instead of the thick glass.

Hale swung the bottle at the wall. Fortified wine streamed from the spout as his arm moved, exploding in bubbles and aroma among the fragments of glass.

He turned to his son. The bottle had broken just below the neck. It winked from the clenched fist like a lamphrey's mouth of jagged, translucent teeth—a fisherman's weapon in a madman's hand.

"You will not do that thing," Hale said in a voice of absolute certainty.

For a moment, Dennis thought his father was about to kill him. It was just a thought, a fact, like the weather or the hour of the day. If Hale killed him, then Dennis wouldn't have to see in life the creature whose lightning-lit image had been terror to watch...

"H-hale?" Selda said. She got up shakily and faced her husband, standing between the two men in the room. "Put that down. Please put that down."

Hale brushed her aside with his left arm—not a blow, but forceful enough to have pushed the woman out of the way no matter how willing she was to have resisted. Selda caught herself on the chair back, then slid with it to the floor and her sobbing.

Hale threw down the bottleneck. It broke further and skittered in a dozen directions. He stared at Dennis; Dennis met his father's eyes.

"You don't think you're a boy any more, is that it?" Hale said softly. "Well, maybe you're not... But you're still my son, laddy. And I say you'll not do this—d'ye hear?"

Dennis felt his expression tremble. He could face anger, now that he knew what the anger hid; but his father had undermined his composure by treating him for the first time as an adult. "Father, if I don't go—"

Hale shook his shaggy head. "It doesn't matter to you. It's my bargain, and my decision."

"But—"

"It's my decision!"

Dennis spun to the door and jerked it open. It took all his remaining strength of will to plunge into the anteroom again before his own tears joined those of his mother.

This time, the cause was more complex than anger and frustration, though; and he half thought he heard his father start to cry also as the thick panel slammed shut.





CHAPTER 10




"I always used to like the night, Chester," Dennis said as he watched the sea surge and glow. "Remember? We'd lie out here and wonder which star men really came from?"

His back was supported by one of the smooth-contoured crenelations that decorated this roofline. The crystal was slightly chilly—it remained cool even in the direct glare of the summer sun.

The metal of the robot's case was warm and reassuring as Dennis reached out to his companion.

"Well, I still like it," the youth admitted aloud. "It's just that I haven't been having a good time at nights recently. I—"

He paused and looked at Chester, a dull blur against the vague light retained by the structure of the palace. "I don't know what to do, Chester. My father's been a good ruler, a really great one, even if he..."

It was hard for a boy who's been raised a prince to find that he is both a man—and a fisherman's son. Though a prince as well, of course.

And Dennis was still a boy, too, unless he was careful about the way he reacted to danger and frustration.

"If you listen to the judgment of your heart," the robot said with the pompous weight of wisdom in his voice, "you will sleep untroubled."

As a friend in the darkness, Chester added, "What is it that you would do, Dennis?"

"I'd go out to the sea hag," Dennis said simply. Stated that way, he could forget all the doubts and terrors that the decision implied. "But I can't go against Dad."

"Do not leave a fool to rule the people," Chester said; but that was the program talking and not the friend Dennis had made over sixteen years together.

Hale was being foolish in this.

"...all will be yours to command..." the sea hag had bargained as Hale stood on the deck of The Partners. Knowing that, Dennis couldn't be sure how much of the way he obeyed his father was a result of the sea hag's magic...

Chester would ask what Dennis wanted to do if he couldn't do the right thing—and even in his princely willingness to be sacrificed, Dennis felt an underlying joy that he didn't have to hurl himself into that waiting, stinking maw. But if he couldn't do that—