THE SEA HAG(8)

In his need for the information, he ignored the insult he was offering the man beside him; but Ramos only nodded in haughty assurance.

"It may be so, Dennis," said Chester.

"The people?"

It wasn't clear—even to Dennis—who the boy expected to answer. Chester rested silently on his eight limbs, the tips slightly raised so that not they but the metallic curves beneath the tips took the robot's weight.

"Not the people, lad," Ramos said. "The people came after, when I took out word that the harbor was here. I sailed The Partners up-coast and down."

Talk of that past prodded the older man into motion again. He stood up, rising slowly to his full height instead of the stoop in which he had shuffled across the room initially. He said, "I went to every little settlement: where they dragged their boats up a creek-mouth and where they scraped their keels on a shingle shore. I told them—"

Ramos was sixteen years and a lifetime younger now. His voice boomed in the open room and out across the water.

"—there was harborage that would keep them safe in the worst of storms! Fishing boats and great high-decked traders, it was all one. They could shelter beneath the crystal walls of a palace like none they ever dreamed of, beneath the protection of King Hale."

Ramos sagged as though his hamstrings had been cut. The collapse was utterly unexpected. Dennis jumped up, but far too late to have kept the older man from falling—

Except that Chester had already caught Ramos and was supporting him with four flexible limbs, because Dennis had told him to help Ramos, and the robot never forgot an instruction.

"No, no, I'm all right," said Ramos softly; and perhaps he was, but Chester didn't let go until he'd lowered his charge to the ledge again. Dennis settled back, afraid to appear too concerned about the older man's sudden collapse.

Ramos met his eyes. With a firmness that was a matter of present will rather than past memory, Ramos said, "I told them they would be under the protection of King Hale and Queen Selda."

His pause was only to prove that he was in control of his words and his emotions. "And so they have been, all who came then at my urging or later as the word spread of its own accord."

Dennis swallowed. He couldn't absorb all he had been told, much less accept it. But in this moment—when the world was shifting around him, and the ageless crystal palace in which he'd been born was suddenly a construct younger than many of the fishing boats in the harbor—Dennis couldn't doubt the story either.

But while Emath might have been built recently, it had not been built by men.

"Where did the palace come from, Uncle Ramos?" Dennis asked.

The older man shook his head sadly. "A god, a sea demon. There are plenty of demons out on the water, lad. Besides the ones we men bring with us."

His hand played with the window frame as if it were the the shroud of a sailing vessel... and slipped away because it was not, because it was only slick stone with no life or meaning to him. "Nobody doubted, Dennis. People we'd known all our lives came to Emath—boys we'd played with, girls we'd met at night beneath the shelter of the sail spread as a tarpaulin. And it was all King Hale this and Queen Selda that..."

"But surely somebody would have remembered," Dennis said, letting the doubt he wanted to feel enter his voice.

Ramos smiled. "I think at first they all remembered," he said. "But they didn't want to, because they wouldn't be able to understand it. I didn't want to remember, lad. But I built the tomb with these hands—"

He raised them. They no longer shook.

"—and nothing can change that."

Ramos glared at the floor and the filth in which he had been living these weeks, these months; longer. "Not even the liquor!"

Dennis made his decision as he stood up. He didn't know what his new knowledge meant, but he was certain of what he owed Ramos—for himself and for his father—in the immediate present.

"You can't stay here," he said briskly, now the prince that he'd been raised to be. "Come on, Uncle Ramos. We'll help you to my room for now. You can bathe and sleep there tonight while I have the servants clean—" he caught the disgust that had almost broken out into words "—clean up."

Ramos stood obediently. He looked tired, but he was in no need of the help Chester and the boy were ready to give. The drink had burned out of him; and so had the emotion that had staggered Ramos with memories of the woman he'd loved—and had lost when his world shifted, as he'd now shifted the world of the boy who called him 'Uncle'.

"I think..." said Dennis wonderingly. He put his arm around the older man's in affection, not for need as they shuffled together through the debris to the door. "I think that you can wear some of my clothes, Uncle Ramos. Until we see what kind of shape yours are in."