"Chester, I can't stay in Emath," Dennis said in sudden resolution. "My father never told me not to go out into the jungle. I'll do that tonight. I'll find—some other place to live."
He couldn't live in Emath and watch it be destroyed because of something he hadn't done, something his father wouldn't permit him to do. Perhaps if he left, the sea hag would spare the village.
And perhaps one of the jungle's hidden monsters would gobble Dennis down; and then he could stop worrying about what he ought to do.
"Oh—" Dennis said. Death was something he knew only from books, where it seemed noble and heroic. Being alone was a fear of a much more serious order.
"C-chester, would you go with me if I leave Emath?" he asked.
A tentacle looped his shoulders and tickled the back of his left ear. "I will go with you wherever you wish, Master Dennis," the robot said softly.
Dennis jumped to his feet, speaking quickly so that emotion wouldn't choke him. "Right," he said, "great. I'll need food—I'll get some bread and sausages from the cooks."
He frowned. "That's the sort of food people take when they go out in the jungle, isn't it, Chester?"
Everything Dennis knew about the jungle was from books or the little he saw across the dragon-guarded perimeter. No human beings left the village for the lowering back-country. Occasionally, men straggled in wearing rags and a look of fear, but they weren't the sort who got invited to the palace. All the inland trade was in the scaly hands of the lizardmen.
"People might well take bread and sausage when they went out into the jungle, Dennis," the robot said. Dennis couldn't be sure from the tone whether Chester was agreeing with, warning—or gently mocking his human companion.
"Right, well," the youth said, deciding to take the words at face value. "And I'll take a fishing line too, so that we can catch our own food. Ah—"
He looked down at Chester. Dennis' first enthusiastic movement had left him still on the roof, poised by the casement of the window opening to his personal suite. "Ah, there's water in the jungle, isn't there? I mean, pools and streams?"
It struck him suddenly that Chester might be as ignorant of this business as Dennis was himself. After all, the little robot had been brought to Emath by sea and hadn't left the perimeter since.
"There are pools and streams in the jungle, Dennis," said Chester, calming that momentary fear. "And there is also rain."
"Sure, but I'm not going to walk around with my mouth turned up," the youth said while his mind concentrated on things he thought were more important.
He pursed his lips, squeezed the cool crystal of the transom with both hands, and added, "And I'll need a sword. Chester, I'm going to take the Founder's Sword from his tomb."
He waited for Chester to respond. Nothing happened. Dennis looked down at his side and found the little robot waiting as motionless as he was silent.
"Do you think I should do that?" Dennis prodded.
"It is not mine to think or not think about what you should do, Dennis," Chester said, as close to a lie as the youth had ever heard from his mouthless companion; but when Chester continued, "It may be that I can open the vault without your taking your father's keys," Dennis knew that he'd been answered after all.
"Right," said Dennis buoyantly, hopping into his suite without touching the waist-high transom. "First the fishing line and the food, then the sword—and then the jungle."
And escape forever from the sea hag, relief whispered in his mind; but he wasn't proud enough of the thought to speak it aloud.
CHAPTER 11
The burlap shopping bag brushed Dennis' pants leg awkwardly as he walked. The bag's side-panels were embroidered with the Seal of Emath in blue yarn—a leaping fish with a woman's face, too crude to have features even in better light than that of the village streets at night.
The Seal of Emath was the sea hag—in the false, conventional style that fishermen joked about the creature. Now Dennis understood why.
Dennis hadn't really thought about how he was going to carry the food until he got to the kitchen. The rope-handled shopping bag seemed the best alternative there.
He'd collected bread and three different kinds of sausage—summer sausage, liverwurst, and a hard, spicy pepperoni—because he wasn't sure which was proper. Anyway, it was difficult to make little choices now that his mind was filled with the large one, the decision to leave home forever.
Dennis had also collected the wide-eyed concern of all the kitchen staff, but they'd helped him anyway. An undercook had even curtsied and offered him an apple brought from the far north... which Dennis took to avoid embarrassing her.