THE SEA HAG(7)

He waited a moment in grim silence, waiting to see if Dennis would object again.

The boy nodded, agreeing that he had heard the words. He was slipping into a reality different from the one in which he'd lived for almost sixteen years. It was as frightening as if the ground had fallen away from him in the darkness; but if he waited and listened, maybe it would all make sense...

"A little craft, as I say," Ramos continued, a touch of humor in his grin at last, "and a sweet one. We worked her together for choice, but either of us could handle her alone in fine weather, and the weather couldn't have been more fine the day Hale took her out while I lay on my cot, raving with fever while Selda sponged my forehead."

Ramos leaned out into the night, turning toward the sea rather than the harbor he faced when looking at Dennis. "Not so very long ago," he said musingly. "But a lifetime naytheless."

"Before I was born," Dennis said, afraid to give the words even enough inflection to make them a question.

"A year before you were born, lad," Ramos said to the phosphorescent sea. "Exactly a year."

He turned sharply, hard eyes in a hard face—glaring at the bottle Dennis still held. Then the granite lines of Ramos' visage softened and he smiled again. "Not your fault, lad," he said. He was answering a question that Dennis couldn't guess, much less ask.

Firmly again but without anger, the older man continued, "That was in the morning. By noon, my fever had broken and the sky was black with the storm that had blown up. Boats from our village were flying back, those who'd sailed south; but Hale had taken The Partners north, up the coast, and she didn't come home in the face of the storm that shook the shutters and lifted roof slates from our huts."

"At Emath," Dennis said, forced by his confusion to spike down at least the physical setting of the new reality Ramos forced him into.

"There was no Emath," the older man said harshly. "Only cliffs, boy, bare teeth of rock with raw jungle above them."

He glared. Dennis nodded, and Dennis' fingers wrapped themselves into knots as complex as those of sea-worms breeding.

"Not your fault," Ramos repeated softly. He cleared his throat and swallowed instead of spitting.

"We lost boats that day," he continued. "Fully crewed boats. And I'll tell you something you'll understand some day soon, I'd judge, from the size of you: I cursed myself, lad; because I'd lost my boat and a friend closer nor ever a brother was to me—and I was glad in my heart, for it meant that Selda was mine."

Ramos bent forward, his eyes fixed on Dennis' eyes. The boy did not flinch, even when Ramos reached out and took Dennis' jaw between a thumb and forefinger so gnarled with sinew that they looked like net supports roped in brown seaweed.

Ramos lifted the boy's chin slightly, then turned it to look at the fuzz-downed face from an angle. "Not yet," he muttered to himself. "But you'll understand soon."

"What happened to my father?" Dennis said, trying not to choke on his awareness that Ramos' light touch could crack his neck if a fit of madness took the big old man. The world was going mad already, it seemed...

Ramos jerked his hand back into his lap as if the same thought had danced through his head—and he found it more horrifying than even the boy did.

"Nothing happened to Hale," he said harshly. "The Partners sailed back with the next dawn, clean and as ship-shape as if she'd just been careened. And your father Hale took me and took Selda aboard, and he told us that he was a king now in a crystal palace."

He looked into the darkness while his hand stroked Dennis' knee with the affection of an old man for something he's known and loved for years. "We thought he was mad, Dennis; but we went with him because we loved him, both of us. And he sailed us up the coast to here, to Emath, and it was as you see it—harbor and palace, all perfect, and nothing but rock and danger three days before when we fished the same coast together."

Ramos' hand curved up and gripped Dennis, as gently as could be without the least doubt that he meant the boy to meet his eyes for what he said next: "I will not lie to you, lad. If all the gods stood here before me, I would tell them the same thing. There was nothing—and when your father came back, there was Emath. And he was king of it."

The ledge on which Dennis sat was as solid as all portions of the palace—beyond wear and apparently beyond destruction. He felt as if he were sitting instead on a scrap of timber in a maelstrom, whirling downward toward an end as horrifying as the ride.

"Chester?" Dennis said, turning to his robot companion. "Is this so?"