THE SEA HAG(5)

Dennis swept bottles away and sat down on the bed. The mattress squelched; more debris rolled down the coverlet in response to his weight. Dennis took the bottle and knife from Ramos whose fingers didn't resist.

"I'll get some servants up here at once," the boy said quietly.

"No guts, these servants, you know that?" Ramos said, glaring truculently for a moment before closing his eyes and letting his body settle back onto the mattress. "No sporting instinct. They stick their heads in, and if they don't have more wine, I throw empties at 'em. That's sporting enough, ain't it, Royal Crown Princeling?"

"What's the matter, Uncle Ramos?" Dennis asked softly. The horn-scaled knife clicked against the bottle when he switched both objects to his right hand. He twined the fingers of his free hand with those of Ramos, marveling at how near to a size he was with the man he remembered as a giant.

Ramos opened his eyes again. "I'm not your uncle, boy," he said; but without the anger that had edged every word he'd spoken thus far tonight.

"I've always called you that, Uncle Ramos," Dennis said.

Ramos made a mighty effort to sit up, but the mattress was too soft and Dennis didn't realize what the older man was trying to do until it was too late to help.

Ramos let himself flop back. He smiled and said, with something between bitterness and affection, "I didn't always call your father 'king', you know, boy."

"Is my father angry with you?" Dennis asked. "Is that why..." He started to gesture to complete the question, then realized that he didn't need—or want—to call attention to the filth in which the old man was living.

"Hale angry with me?" Ramos said. The bed rocked with laughter which became a paroxysm of coughing without a perceptible transition. He pounded himself on the chest, then rolled onto his side.

With Dennis' help this time, Ramos levered himself into a sitting position. He crossed his long legs beneath him like a sailor mending nets on shipboard.

Ramos started to spit, then caught himself and fumbled for a moment till he found a napkin on the bed. He cleared the phlegm from his throat into the linen, which he folded neatly and tucked into a pocket.

"Your father doesn't care enough about me to be angry, Dennis," he said. His eyes were pale blue, winking from beneath his bushy eyebrows like aquamarines in a matrix of granite. "All Hale wants is for me to keep out of sight and not remind him of what he is."

"What is my father?" Dennis said with almost no inflection. By summoning all his concentration, he was able to keep his eyes meeting the older man's.

"Oh, nothing so very bad, boy," the older man said. There was no mockery in his voice, nothing but mild sadness. "Do you know what I am?"

"You're the Captain of the Guard, Uncle Ramos."

Ramos ruffled the boy's hair. His fingers moved slowly, as if his joints were sticking. "What kind of guard do we need here in Emath, Dennis?" he chided. "I was a soldier once; but mostly I'm just a fisherman."

His expression hardened, his voice taking on the strength and timbre Dennis remembered from childhood. "And I would to god," Ramos continued, "that I'd realized that years ago and not pretended to be what I'm not."

His blue eyes held Dennis like pincers. "And I would to god that Hale did the same: told the world he was a fisherman and not pretend to be a king!"

"But—" said Dennis. The bottle and knife in his right hand rang together as instinct made him jerk back. "But he is king, Ramos. Look at the palace."

Dennis made a circular gesture which freed his hand from the older man's without him drawing it away quite deliberately. "We've always ruled in Emath, as long as there've been men on Earth. Look at the—" he gestured again, toward the window facing the other spit of the harbor "—Founder's Tomb."

"Oh, aye," said Ramos ironically. He squinted at Chester and said, "Here, you. Give me a hand up and we'll look at the tomb, we will."

"Help him, Chester," Dennis said, for Chester took orders only from his owner—and even then, the little robot had a tendency to respond literally rather than according to Dennis' broader intent.

"The fool who does not help others," said Chester equably—he braced himself with four tentacles while the tips of the remaining four eased beneath Ramos' elbows and the points of his jutting hip bones "—loses all he has."

Ramos got up from the bed, unfolding like a jacknife. A bottle turned under his foot. He kicked it aside violently; plates and more bottles clashed in its skittering path.

Dennis moved in front of the older man and swept a track to the window clear with the side of his own boot. Ramos followed him, his second step steadier than the first and the third as firm as that of the laughing, sober giant he'd been in Dennis' earliest memories.