THE SEA HAG(6)

"There, I'm all right," he said, running his fingers down the edge of the window casement—not for support, but for reassurance that the support was there should he need it suddenly.

Chester released the old man, but two silvery tentacles quivered just short of touching: Dennis, not Ramos, had ordered him to help.

The Founder's Tomb was of local rock, the porous laterite limestone used for pillars and thresholds in the houses below the palace's crystal walls. By day it was a hulking thing whose red color was as dull and angry as coals banked in a furnace; but at night, it disappeared into darkness like the jungle beyond. Only when a wave of some size washed the headland did the tomb appear, in silhouette against the glowing sea.

"Look at my hands, boy," Ramos said, raising them beside his shoulders with the palms out. They trembled, and the calluses that had sheathed them once had sloughed away; but the scars from decades of brutal work still remained. Dennis remembered with a shock that his father had hands like that also.

"I built your 'Founder's Tomb' with these hands, boy," Ramos said. Instead of bitterness, his hoarse voice glowed with pride: pride in a piece of craftsmanship, and pride as well in the physical labor the job had entailed.

"I did it, and your father beside me. Cut the stone, sledged it to the headland, and hoisted it into place."

Ramos paused, looking out into the night. "Wasn't easy, boy, but we did it. Hale thought he needed it, that nobody'd take him for a king if he didn't have ancestors back to the Landing. But I don't know..."—now the voice was bitter—"It seems to me that they never doubted, not a one; and him no more than a fisherman who owned a boat in shares with me as grew up with him Downcoast."

"But the palace...?" Dennis whispered.

He couldn't believe what Ramos was telling him—but neither did he doubt it. Dennis' mind reviewed the vision of his father rowing out to sea every day of the past weeks: the practiced motions, the flat arcs his oars cut above the surface, the minimum of froth and fuss as they bit and drove him forward on the swell. Another old fisherman, going out on the sea that was his livelihood...

Ramos began to shake. Dennis reached to support him, but the older man said, "Wait, no. I'm all right." He leaned over the casement and vomited into the night.

"Oh!" Dennis said. "Let me—"

One of Chester's tentacles touched the boy's lips. "Do not let your tongue go where it was not summoned," the robot quoted as his touch turned Dennis aside.

"There," Ramos murmured after the third spasm had wracked him. He lowered himself carefully to sit on the window ledge. "There, I'm all right." He smiled ruefully at Dennis.

The boy sat down on the other side of the broad ledge. Shards of green glass twinkled jealously on the ground forty feet below.

Ramos reached over and squeezed the boy's knee gently. "Don't look so stricken, lad. Hale's a good man, always has been. I spoke out of place. It was the liquor talking, not your Uncle Ramos."

"Tell me about the palace," Dennis said. "Please, Ramos."

Smiling—toward the sea, not his young questioner—and pinching a curl into a lock of hair that should have been cut long since, Ramos said, "We owned the boat together—built her together, near enough, lad, as bad a shape as she was in when we bought her from old Kilkraus. We named her The Partners. Would have liked to call her the Selda, both of us; but we didn't dare, because we didn't know which of us she'd pick when the time came for that."

"My mother?" Dennis said.

His body was growing cold. He felt a sort of creepy disorientation. It was as if the ledge on which he sat had tilted up 30 degrees while he continued to talk in seeming normalcy.

It was just that everything looked different from the angle at which he was viewing them since he'd entered Ramos' room.

"Oh, aye, your mother, lad," Ramos said with his smile for the night. "Old Kilkraus' daughter, and a fine woman for all she chose Hale and not me... but that was later."

As Ramos talked, his mind sharpened and his tongue gained flexibility. He pointed into the harbor, leaning forward with an easy certainty of his balance that made Dennis queasy to watch. "She was a little craft, The Partners, not like those down there at the docks. There were no safe harbors on the coast, so we had to drag her ashore every night."

"But there's a harbor here—" Dennis protested, his sense of skewed reality increasing.

Chester touched the boy's cheek with a tentacle. "Do not let yourself be known as the prattler, Dennis," the robot said, "because your tongue is everywhere."

"There was no harbor at Emath," said Ramos with a flat voice and a flat smile for the boy. "Nothing but rough red cliffs—and the Banned Island to seaward, where any boat swamped if it tried to land."