THE SEA HAG(39)

"If you taste her blood, Dennis," said the robot coolly, "then you will love her forever—for that is her wish, and the blood will seal it."

For a moment, Dennis saw his life sinking into the amber eyes and the slim arms that reached to embrace him. Then his throat made a sound somewhere between a groan and a scream; he began to run the rest of the way across the bridge, his bare feet slapping the pavement and the long sword clipping his ankle for all that he tried to control the swinging with a hand on the pommel.

"Dennis, my heart," called the girl-thing behind him, the sun an iridescent dazzle in her hair. Her form quivered at the corner of his eye and she was a fish, curving back into the water with scarcely a splash, so clean was the dive.

Chester was at the youth's side, loping easily on the harm surface. His bent limbs struck tick-whisk! tick-whisk! with a regularity that reassured Dennis.

The fish rolled to the pond surface beside Dennis and his companion. The ring shot spikes of light from one ray of a dorsal fin. "Be my lover, my Dennis, little heart," the fish called. "Do not leave me when I need you so greatly, my beloved."

"Run," Dennis gasped to himself. "Run, run..."

Dennis knew he was safe when the reeds of the pond margin brushed the roadway beside him, but he continued running for another thirty yards—until the tops of the great trees were a solid canopy above him, and the undergrowth was a wall to either side.

Gasping for breath, Dennis leaned against a treetrunk streaked green by the vines using it as a support to coil skyward. He looked back the way they had come.

A slim girl sat on the roadway at the pond's edge. The sun jeweled her hair and the water droplets on her breasts.

She waved the hand which wore the diamond ring.

"We'd best be going," Dennis said to his companion.

But it was several moments more before he was willing to turn his eyes from the Cariad and resume walking along the road through the jungle.

"And I think, Chester," the youth said when they were well out of sight of the pond, "that I will be satisfied with the fruit and nuts which you tell me are safe to eat. I do not need to try fish again, for the time."





CHAPTER 21




In the evening, the sky darkened again before sunset. The needlepoint patches of blue became pools of roiling cloud.

"He who runs abroad from evil, finds evil where he flees," Chester said.

Dennis laughed and patted the robot's carapace. The cut across his palm still stung, and there seemed to be a little swelling in the hand itself. Despite that, he felt surprisingly good. "But can the wanderer find shelter from the rain, my friend?" he asked.

Chester rose cautiously onto the tips of his eight tentacles. Even so, the robot's egg-shaped body was no higher than Dennis' shoulders. Chester rotated slowly, moving his limbs in sets of four, a few inches clockwise at a time.

At last he said, "Here is a tree that became hollow before it fell, Dennis. It will give us shelter from the rain."

Dennis couldn't imagine how his companion could see a fallen tree or anything else through the leaves and gathering darkness, but he followed Chester willingly into the undergrowth. A few yards away—though each step was a battle—was the bole of a forest giant, just as the robot had said.

Upright, the tree had been twenty feet across at the base. Now, on its side, more than half that diameter was a cave whose lip was orange and yellow with the shelf fungus eating its way into the wood which remained.

Chester paused. The first drops of rain rapped against leaves, but the downpour hadn't yet penetrated the triple canopy.

Dennis climbed in. The interior of the trunk was damp and had a hint of reptilian sharpness. It made him wish that he'd drawn the sword before entering. Chester followed, a barely-visible glimmer in silhouette as the storm thundered down and washed away the last of the daylight.

The hollow was slimy, and Dennis could hear water running through a knothole somewhere farther back in the trunk; but in comparison at least to the night before, he was dry and comfortable. The tree was real, not a dream like the dead wizard's cabin, and Chester lay beside him with his limbs coiled.

Dennis laughed. "How is it that heroes spend the nights between one adventure and the next, Chester," he asked.

"You are a hero, Dennis," the robot said softly. "And it is in a fallen tree that you are spending the night."

"I'm no hero," the youth murmured. "I know that now."

But he slept easily, wrapped in the fuzzy warmth of his friend's compliment.





CHAPTER 22




For seventeen days they followed the road, while Dennis learned to live from the jungle—if not precisely in it.