Gods and Warriors (9 page)

The monster ship floated in the bay. It was ten times bigger than any boat Hylas had ever seen. It had a beak-like prow with a great yellow all-seeing eye. Oars jutted from its flanks like the legs of an enormous centipede, and from its back grew a tree with vast green wings. Once, Telamon had mentioned that some ships had wings so that they could fly before the wind, but Hylas hadn’t believed him.

Below him, on the shore, men were pitching tents and heading into the surrounding pine forests to look for firewood. They weren’t Crows; they were Keftians. Like the young man in the tomb, they were beardless, and wore kilts bordered with spirals and cinched at the waist. Their weapons were splendid bronze double axes with curving twin blades, like back-to-back crescent Moons; but they’d left them casually propped against the rocks, as if they didn’t think they’d need them. Didn’t they know about the Crows? Weren’t they afraid?

Then Hylas saw something that made his heart race. Tethered to the stern of the ship was a little wooden boat. Like a calf keeping close to its mother, it bobbed in the shallows. He could swim for it.

As dusk came on, he picked his way down the slope into
the scrub between the tents and the woods, and settled down to wait.

The Keftians had brought animals with them; he watched them kill and skin a ewe. While it was sizzling on a spit, they gutted a netful of fish and set them to bake in the embers, then poured wine from jars and mixed it with water, toasted barley meal and crumbled cheese. Soon Hylas caught the dizzying smells of roast mutton and sizzling fat.

The flaps of the largest tent twitched and a woman stepped out—and suddenly stealing the boat became a whole lot harder.

She wasn’t a woman, she was a priestess. Her tight green bodice was cut away to reveal her breasts, and at her neck she wore a collar of blood-red stones the size of pigeons’ eggs. Her ankle-length skirt was a Sea of overlapping waves of purple and blue, spangled with tiny glittering fish like little bits of Sun. Golden too were the snakes entwining her arms and her crinkly black hair. Her pointed fingernails were yellow as the claws of hawks, and her haughty face was painted stark white.

Even from twenty paces, Hylas felt her power. Now what? To steal from a priestess would be the worst thing he could do. Who knew what curses she might send after him?

A slave handed her a stone bowl so thin it seemed filled with light. Chanting in her strange clicking tongue, she flicked wine on the fire, then moved to the shallows and cast gobbets of fat upon the waves. The offering over, her
men settled down to eat, but she stayed at the water’s edge, staring out to Sea.

A crow swooped for a scrap of fat from the shallows, then glided past her. She watched it intently. Hylas had a horrible feeling that it was the same crow he’d seen earlier, and that it was telling her about him.

Sure enough, she turned to face his hiding place. He froze. Her dark gaze swept toward him. He felt the power of her will. He fought the urge to jump to his feet and give himself up.

At that moment a girl burst from the tent and shouted something furious in Keftian.

All heads turned. Hylas breathed out. The eye of the priestess was averted.

The girl had the same dark eyes and crinkly hair, and he guessed they were mother and daughter; but if the priestess resembled a handsome hawk, her daughter was a scrawny young fledgling. She wore a purple tunic spangled with tiny golden bees, and a thunderous scowl. As she stalked across the pebbles she snarled incomprehensibly at her mother.

With a word and a chopping motion of her palm, the priestess cut her short. The girl stood seething with her shoulders up around her ears. The priestess turned back to the Sea. The girl was defeated.

A young man—a slave?—approached the girl and touched her arm, but she shook him off. The young man didn’t look Keftian; Hylas didn’t know
what
he was. His
skin was reddish brown and his eyes were rimmed with black. He wore a kilt of unbleached linen, and the amulet on his chest was a single staring eye. Like the Keftians, he had no beard; but even stranger than that, his smooth brown head was bald.

Again he touched the girl’s arm and gestured to the tent. The fight went out of her and she followed him.

The wine had its effect and the camp grew noisy; men stumbled into the pinewoods, then back to the fire. The Moon rose. At last things began to quiet down, and the tents went dark. A single guard remained by the fire. Soon he too was snoring.

Holding his breath, Hylas crept past the tents and ducked behind a boulder a few paces from the fire. Now for the dangerous bit: the pebbly shore. He wished the moonlight wasn’t so bright.

He was about to make his move when a shadowy figure slipped from the priestess’s tent and stole toward him. In consternation he recognized the girl.

Go away,
he snarled at her in his head.

For one heart-stopping moment she passed so close that he heard the clink of her bracelets. She didn’t see him. When she reached the fire she halted and stood scowling down at it. Her fists were clenched, her body taut as a bowstring.

What does she have to scowl about? thought Hylas. Somewhere in the mountains, Issi was battling to survive—and here was this rich girl who had
everything
: slaves,
warm clothes, all the meat she could eat. What more could she possibly want?

Suddenly the girl snatched a stick from the fire. She blew on its tip to make it glow red. She stared at it with alarming intensity, her bony chest rising and falling. Hylas saw that the spangles on her tunic weren’t bees, as he’d thought, but tiny double axes. Still she went on staring at the stick. He wondered if she was mad.

Suddenly she sucked in her breath—and pressed the burning brand to her cheek.

With a cry, she threw it away. Hylas couldn’t repress a start. She caught the movement and saw him. Her eyes widened. She cried out. The guard woke up, spotted Hylas, and shouted the alarm. Men burst from the tents.

Warriors appeared at the edge of the woods.
Crows.
To his horror, Hylas realized that there must be a camp in there: a whole dark, silent camp of Crows that he’d never suspected.

The first warrior reached the shore and spotted him. He saw the notch in Hylas’ earlobe. He shouted, “It’s one of
them
!”

Hylas blundered past the girl and flung himself into the Sea.

He went under and came up spluttering. Shouts behind him, and sounds of running feet. His food sack and water skin were dragging him down. He shrugged them off. Arrows whistled past him. He dived underwater and swam blindly for the boat.

His hand struck wood. Somehow he scrambled in and untied it, found the oars and started rowing clumsily into the bay. He was used to handling light reed crafts, but this was much heavier; it bucked in the swell like a startled donkey.

Over his shoulder he glimpsed men pushing another boat into the shallows—where had that come from? Already they were leaping in and hauling on the oars, and at the front an archer was crouching to take aim. Hylas ducked. The arrow hit the side of the boat and stuck there, quivering.

He rowed till his muscles burned.
Fool,
he berated himself. The Keftians weren’t afraid of the Crows—
because they were in league with them.

As he struggled past the dark bulk of a headland, the swell strengthened and he felt it pulling at the boat. Then he was heading into a white wall of fog, and behind him the shouts of the Crows were abruptly muffled. The Sea was
helping
him.

Hope lent him strength, and he rowed deeper into the fog.

He paused to listen.

No voices. No splash of oars. Just the slap and suck of waves against the sides of the boat, and his own sawing breath.

“
Thank
you,” he murmured to whatever spirits might be listening.

He rowed till he could row no more. With the last of
his strength, he drew in the oars and curled up in the bottom of the boat. Fog beaded his tunic and lay clammily on his skin, and the Sea rocked him gently on her salty, sighing breast…

He knows he’s asleep, and he’s furious with the mad Keftian girl for sneaking into his dream. She’s standing on the shore, waving a burning stick and sneering at him.

“Where’s my sister!” he shouts at her.

“She’s gone!” she taunts him in Keftian, which somehow he understands. “You went the wrong way, you’ll never find her now!”

Her arm becomes longer and longer and she jabs the stick at the boat, burning a hole in it. The Sea rushes in. The mad girl howls with laughter. “The Fin People got Issi—and now they’ll get you too!”

Hylas jolted awake.

The fog had cleared and the sky was beginning to grow light. The Sea was still gently rocking him.

Blearily, he sat up. To the east, the Sun was waking: Dawn was bleeding across the sky. To the west…

To the west, the land was gone.

In panic, he turned north—south—east—west.

The land was gone.

Around him there was nothing but Sea.

T
he Sea sounded different at night. Pirra felt as if it was mocking her failure to escape her fate. She’d thought that if she spoiled her face, she would avoid being wed. She was wrong.

Her cheek was a blaze of agony. She kept reliving the moment she’d done it. The smell of burned flesh. The wild boy staring from the dark. And all for nothing.

“Take these,” said Userref. He knelt at the entrance to her tent, holding out strips of fine linen and a small alabaster bowl of green sludge. His cloak was beaded with fog, his scalp and chin shadowed with stubble. His handsome face was stiff with disapproval. Like all Egyptians, he believed beauty was a gift from the gods. To him, what she’d done was blasphemy.

“What’s in the bowl?” she said.

“A salve, Favored One.”

Favored One. He only called her that when he was angry.

Without a word he passed her the bowl, then sat back on his heels. She dipped her finger in the sludge. She touched it to her cheek. Pain flared. She willed herself not to cry.

“You’re doing it wrong,” he muttered. Snatching the bowl, he soaked a strip of linen in the salve, tilted her head sideways, and laid the wet dressing on the burn. She clenched her jaw so hard that it ached.

Userref’s scowl deepened. “You’ll have a scar.”

“That was the point,” she said.

“
Why?
Why do such a thing?”

“I thought no one would want a girl with a ruined face. I thought they’d send me back, and on the way I could escape.”

“
Tcha!
How many times have I told you? You can’t fight your mother! You’ll never win!”

She didn’t reply.

Her mother had shown no emotion at what she’d done. Calmly, she’d appraised her daughter’s face. Then she’d said, “You know that this changes nothing.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Pirra had retorted. “The Lykonians will take one look at me and say no.”

“No, they won’t. They can’t. Keftiu is too strong. You’ll go to Lapithos as agreed. All you’ve achieved is to make yourself into a creature no one wants to look at.”

Userref fastened the dressing in place with a band of clean linen tied under her chin. “There. That’s the best I can do.”

To keep him talking, Pirra asked what was in the salve, and he told her poppy juice and henna and a little
wadju.

That cheered her up a bit. He couldn’t be that angry with her if he’d used some of his
wadju.
It was a special
kind of rock, ground very fine, and to Userref it was very precious, as it was the same fierce green as the face of his god. He used it as powerful medicine, and when he was homesick he smeared a little on his eyelids, to make himself dream of Egypt.

Men’s voices drifted through the fog, and she asked him what was happening. “It’s the Crows coming back,” he said. “They lost the boy in the fog.”

“Who was he anyway, and why were they after him?”

“They say he’s just some goatherd. They say he tried to kill their Chieftain’s son.”

“‘They say’?”

His lip curled. “You know I never believe what strangers say; only Egyptians.”