They were returning, the guards, and herded between their lines three men. Two were Hawaikans, their bare dark bodies easily identifiable. But the third—Ashe! Ross almost shouted his name aloud.
The human stumbled along and there was a bandage above his knee. He had been stripped to his swimming trunks, all his equipment taken from him. There was a dark bruise on his left temple, the angry weal of a lash mark on neck and shoulder.
Ross’s hands clenched. Never in his life had he so desperately wanted a weapon as he did at that moment. To spray the company below with a machine gun would have given him great satisfaction. But he had nothing but the knife in his belt and he was as cut off from Ashe as if they were in separate cells of some prison.
The caution which had been one of his inborn gifts and which had been fostered by his training, clamped down on his first wild desire for action. There was not the slightest chance of his doing Ashe any good at the present. But he had this much—he knew that Gordon was alive and that he was in the aliens’ hands. Faced by those facts Ross could plan his own moves.
The Foanna chant began again, and the three prisoners moved; the two Hawaikans turned, set themselves on either side of Ashe, and gave him support. Their actions had a mechanical quality as if they were directed by a will beyond their own. Ashe gazed about him at the Wreckers and the robed figures. His awareness of them both suggested to Ross that if the natives had come under the control of the Foanna, the human resisted their influence. But Ashe did not try to escape the assistance of his two fellow prisoners, and he limped with their aid back down the hall, following the Foanna.
Ross deduced that the captives had been transferred from the lord of the castle to the Foanna. Which meant Ashe was on his way to another destination. Ross and Loketh swiftly returned to the sea cave.
“You have found Gordon!” Karara read his news from his face.
“The Wreckers had him prisoner. Now they’ve turned him over to the Foanna—”
“What will they do with him?” the girl demanded of Loketh.
His answer came roundabout as usual as the native squatted by the analyzer and clicked his answer into it.
“They have claimed the wreck survivors for tribute. Your companion will be witches’ meat.”
“Witches’ meat?” repeated Ross, uncomprehending.
Then Karara drew a ragged breath which was a gasp of horror.
“Sacrifice! Ross, he must mean they are going to use Gordon for a sacrifice.”
Ross stiffened and then whirled to catch Loketh by the shoulders. The inability to question the native directly was an added disaster now.
“Where are they taking him? Where?” He began that fiercely, and then forced control on himself.
Karara’s eyes were half closed, her head back; she was manifestly aiming that inquiry at the dolphins, to be translated to Loketh.
Symbols burned on the analyzer screen.
“The Foanna have their own fortress. It can be entered best by sea. There is a boat . . . I can show you, for it is my own secret.”
“Tell him—yes, as soon as we can!” Ross broke out. The old feeling that time was all-important worried at him. Witches’ meat . . . witches’ meat . . . the words were sharp as a lash.
8: The Free Rovers
Twilight made a gray world where one could not trace the true meeting of land and water, sea and sky. Surely the haze about them was more than just the normal dusk of coming night.
Ross balanced in the middle of the skiff as it bobbed along the swell of waves inside a barrier reef. To his mind the craft carrying the three of them and their net of supplies was too frail, rode too high. But Karara paddling in the bow, Loketh at the stern seemed to be content, and Ross could not, for pride’s sake, question their competency. He comforted himself with the knowledge that no agent was able to absorb every primitive skill, and Karara’s people had explored the Pacific in outrigger canoes hardly more stable than their present vessel, navigating by currents and stars.
Smothering his feeling of helplessness and the slow anger that roused in him, the man busied himself with study of a sort. They had had the longer part of the day in the cave before Loketh would agree to venture out of hiding and paddle south. Aided by Loketh, Ross used the analyzer to learn what he could of the native tongue.
Now he possessed a working vocabulary of clicked words, he was able to follow Loketh’s speech so that translation through the dolphins was not necessary except for complicated directions. Also, he had a more detailed briefing of the present situation on Hawaika.
Enough to know that they might be embarking on a mad venture. The citadel of the Foanna was distinctly forbidden ground, not only for Loketh’s people but also for the Foanna’s Hawaikan followers who lived and worked in an outer ring of fortification. Those natives were, Ross gathered, a hereditary corps of servants and warriors, born to that status and not recruited from the native population at large. As such, they were armored by the “magic” of their masters.
“If the Foanna are so powerful,” Ross had demanded, “why do you go with us against them?” To depend so heavily on the native made him uneasy.
The Hawaikan looked to Karara. One of his hands raised; his fingers sketched a sign toward the girl.
“With the Sea Maid and her magic I do not fear.” He paused before adding, “Always has it been said of me—and to me—that I am a useless one, fit only to do women’s tasks. No word weaver shall ever chant my battle deeds in the great hall of Zahur. I who am Zahur’s true son can not carry my sword in any lord’s train. But now you offer me one of the great to-be-remembered quests. If I go, so may I prove that I am a man, even if I go limpingly. There is nothing the Foanna can do to me which is worse than what the Shadow has already done. Choosing to follow you I may stand up to face Zahur in his own hall, show him that the blood of his House has not been drained from my veins because I walk crookedly!”
There was such bitter fire, not only in the sputtering rush of Loketh’s words, but in his eyes and the wry twist of his lips, that Ross believed him. The human no longer had any doubts that the castle outcast was willing to brave the unknown terrors of the Foanna keep, not only because he was bound to aid Ross, but because he saw in this venture a chance to gain what he had never had, a place in his warrior culture.
Shut off from the normal life of his people, he had early turned to the sea. His twisted leg had not proved a handicap in the water, and he stated with confidence that he was the best swimmer in the castle. Not that the men of his father’s following had taken greatly to the sea, which they looked upon merely as a way of preying upon the true sea rovers.
The reef on which the ships had been wrecked was a snare of sorts—first by the whim of nature when wind and current piled up the trading ships there. Then, Ross was startled when Loketh elaborated on a later development of that trap.
“So Zahur returned from his meeting and set up a great magic among the rocks, according to the spells he was taught. Now ships are drawn there so the wrecks have been many and Zahur becomes an even greater lord with many men coming to take sword oath under him.”
“This magic,” asked Ross, “of what manner is it and where did Zahur obtain it?”
“It is fashioned so—” Loketh sketched two straight lines in the air, “not curved as a sword. And the color of water under a storm sky, both rods being as tall as a man. There was much care to set them in place, that was done by a man of Glicmas.”
“A man of Glicmas?”
“Glicmas is now the high lord of the Iccio. He is blood kin to Zahur, yet Zahur must take sword oath to send to Glicmas a fourth of all his sea-gleanings for a year in payment for this magic.”
“And Glicmas, where did he get it? From the Foanna?”
Loketh made an emphatic denial of that. “No, the Foanna have spoken out against their use, making even greater ill feeling between the Old Ones and the coast people. It is said that Glicmas saw a great wonder in the sky and followed it to a high place of his own country. A mountain broke in twain and a voice issued forth from the rent, calling that the lord of the country come and stand to hear it. When Glicmas did so he was told that the magic would be his. Then the mountain closed again and he found many strange things upon the ground. As he uses them they make him akin to the Foanna in power. Some he gives to those who are his blood kin, and together they will be great until they close their fists not only upon the sea rovers, but upon the Foanna also. This they have come to believe.”