THE SEA HAG(40)

Each midday they rested. Dennis trained himself to lie so still that the lizards skittered past and across him as if he were a fallen log. Once he amused himself by flicking lumps of nutmeat from the tip of his thumb toward the lizard that lay like a purple-black shadow on the underside of a branch ten feet above him. At last he got a bead into the proper position—a hand's breadth from the lizard's blunt nose—and the lizard's pink tongue snatched in the nutmeat.

"It is not nuts but insects that the lizard eats, Dennis," said Chester.

"The nuts do not harm me, Chester," the youth replied. "Will the nuts harm the lizard?"

"The nuts will not harm the lizard, that is so."

"Then no harm has been done," Dennis said, smiling up at the little creature. "For which I am glad."

The lizard's throat worked as it swallowed down the pellet instead of spitting it out again as expected.

"Perhaps that's my mission, hey?" Dennis chuckled to his companion. "To convert first myself, then the lizards of the jungle, to a diet of nutmeats?"

"Lowly work and lowly food are better than luxury far from home," the robot grumbled.

But when Dennis thought of Emath, he wasn't sure that a palace or village in the power of the sea hag made a proper home for anything human.





CHAPTER 23




Chester's carapace shone with a brushed finish applied by thorns and horny bark.

Dennis' clothing was reduced to rags, but the cuts in his skin didn't fester as he'd expected on his first miserable hours beyond the village perimeter. At Chester's suggestion, he washed them in the citric astringence of a fruit whose orange pulp was too bitter for him to eat. The half-ripe interiors of large, warty-hulled nuts provided a salve that seemed to do more than merely keep insects from swarming to feed on Dennis' exposed flesh.

He topped nuts and hacked down fruit-clusters with the Founder's Sword. He was learning to use its weight with precision—and to respect the quality of the edge it would hold.

The blade was burnished, now. Chester had shown his companion a gourd which split into a mass of white rags. Dried for a day on Dennis' back as he tramped in the sun, the rags became a coarse cloth with enough embedded silica to sweep away all hints of rust.

Dennis cleaned and sharpened the sword every night, as the rain fell from the darkness on their shelter—a log or a cave or a thatching of tub-great leaves over a frame of vines and saplings. A careful polish with the gourd he'd prepared during the day, then short, firm strokes with his whetstone to grind any hint of nicks or wear out of the star-metal blade.

Ramos had taught him how to sharpen with a stone; taught him also that even a king's son must keep his tools—a blade is no more than a tool—ready for use at all times.

But for all the tales of the jungle and its terrors, Dennis found nothing on which to try the sword save fruits, and nuts and—very occasionally—sharp-spiked tangles that had managed to grow across the paved surface.





CHAPTER 24




On the eighteenth day, the road ended.

The jungle grew to the edge of a glassy bowl a mile across, roofed with more sky than Dennis had seen since leaving Emath. Nothing grew in the bowl's interior, though the surface was crazed with a myriad of tiny cracks, and rainwater pooled in many of the smooth irregularities of the surface.

Weeks of familiarity had taught Dennis that the road was indestructible; but here the pavement ended in gobbets burned from pink through all the colors of the spectrum—indistinguishable from the soil fused to glass beyond.

The air was hot. The unhindered sun blazed down and in reflection from the sides of the bowl. Dennis felt as cold as he had when thinking of the Wizard Serdic.

"What happened here, Chester?" he asked. His voice sounded in his own ears like that of a little boy.

"This planet is not so old as the universe, Dennis," the robot said quietly. "And the thing that happened here to the road and the city beyond the road, that was not so old as the planet.

"But they are all three very old, the universe and the planet and the thing. We must not be troubled by them now, you and I."

Dennis squinted across the bowl, his eyes struggling with the haze and heat waves. He could see no hint of the pink road continuing; and even if it did, he was no longer sure he wished to walk it.

"All right," he said decisively. "We haven't seen any of the lizardmen's trails crossing the road in... Two days? No, three. We'll go back to where we last saw a trail and take that to where it leads us."

His hand reached instinctively for the pommel of his sword and lifted the blade and inch or two, making sure that it ran free in its scabbard. They hadn't met any lizardfolk on the way, save the three in his dream of the corpse. Dennis didn't know—no one in Emath had known—how the scaly denizens of the jungle would react when humans entered their villages instead of the other way around.