THE SEA HAG by David Drake

The hollow was slimy, and Dennis could hear water running through a knothole somewhere farther back in the trunk; but in comparison at least to the night before, he was dry and comfortable. The tree was real, not a dream like the dead wizard’s cabin, and Chester lay beside him with his limbs coiled.

Dennis laughed. “How is it that heroes spend the nights between one adventure and the next, Chester,” he asked.

“You are a hero, Dennis,” the robot said softly. “And it is in a fallen tree that you are spending the night.”

“I’m no hero,” the youth murmured. “I know that now.”

But he slept easily, wrapped in the fuzzy warmth of his friend’s compliment.

CHAPTER 22

For seventeen days they followed the road, while Dennis learned to live from the jungle—if not precisely in it.

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.

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