After he had recovered enough to sit up and speak, the officer said, “I must have your name! I want you to be a witness when the time comes to put these savages on trial! You saw how they made an unauthorized boarding of one of His Majesty’s ships and how they attacked me, one of his commissioned officers!”

  “If I were you, I’d keep silent about my intentions,” Hadon said. He turned and waded away.

  He helped Lalila and Abeth down off the ship. By then most of the living sailors and refugees were off. Those who could walk were pressed into service to carry their more injured companions. Litters were taken from the ship’s stores or quickly made from planks torn from the vessel. As soon as the sailors were marched away, under guard, the dismantling of the galley started. Hammers, saws and crowbars of bronze ripped up planks; ropes were coiled and carried off; the stores were emptied. In an astonishingly short time, the ship had disappeared. Its wood and metal fittings were transported inland—if such a term could be used for what was after all only a huge raft. The stores and ropes were carried toward a small village at the western end.

  The dead from the ship had been laid out, side by side. Their clothes and rings and weapons were removed and taken away somewhere. The lieutenant was by then up on his feet and protesting vigorously. No one paid him any attention, which was a kindness, relatively speaking. The officer kept demanding that Hadon help him get the ship back. Hadon told him to leave them alone. Couldn’t he see that he was completely at the mercy of the raft people? If the K’ud’em’o wished, they could kill him and throw his body into the sea. If he persisted, Hadon said, he would be endangering his whole crew. Should the Red Sea Otters find it necessary to slay him, then they would have to kill all the witnesses—which also meant that Hadon and his group could be in grave danger, even though they were not naval personnel.

  In fact, Hadon said, glaring at the officer, if he did not cease his useless, indeed dangerous, meddling, Hadon himself might shove him back into the sea. He wasn’t particularly concerned about the possibility of the lieutenant’s sudden demise, but he did not want to get involved in repercussions.

  “You are a traitor!”

  “I am no follower of the blasphemer and traitor, King Minruth,” Hadon said, sneering. He put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Should he behead this stupid fellow and avoid trouble in the future? Not to mention earning the gratitude of the raft people?

  “You are a rebel, a denier of the primacy of Resu!” the officer said.

  “Since I am in my right mind, of course I am,” Hadon said. “As for who is the rebel and who is not, there is no question. You are the rebel and the traitor, and no doubt loathsome Sisisken, great Kho’s eldest daughter, has marked you as an early guest in her house.”

  The officer turned pale. Hadon walked away, going toward a priestess who was administering final rites to the dead. She chanted the song of the dead while daubing the forehead of each corpse with black, blue and red clay, arranging the spots to form the corners of a triangle. Her nubile attendant, whose face and breasts were painted in alternating circles of black and white, swung a censer of burning pine needles over the face of each corpse after the priestess daubed it. Nine times the censer swung while the attendant shouted the name of the victim. Where she had not been able to learn the name from the survivors because of too mutilated features, she gave the name of the first man created by Kho, Qawi.

  The chief, Qasin, stood for a while watching his wife and Queen, the head priestess, work among the dead. Then he nodded, and six muscular men began to throw the bodies into the sea. After the eighth corpse sank, the greasy back of a gruntfish appeared, and the ninth corpse was swallowed by cavernous jaws.

  “Piqabes wastes nothing,” Qasin said, making the ancient sign used now only among old people and primitives. “The fish eat our dead, and we eat the fish.”

  20

  While they followed the chief to the central village, Hadon told the story of his group. He had hesitated at first about revealing their identities, but the attitude of the K’ud”em’o seemed to make it safe. Besides, Hadon felt this would assure the K’ud’em’o that they were not with the sailors.

  The chief was astonished. He had had no news since the raft had been launched from the homeland coast five months ago, and news from Khokarsa reached there three months late.

  Qasin listened carefully, though interrupting frequently with exclamations of horror or rage. It was not, however, the political changes which upset him, since his tribe’s loyalty to the concept of empire was rather tenuous; it was the religious upheaval which drove him into a frenzy.

  They came to the central part of the raft which, Hadon learned, was a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its broadest. Here stood fifty beehive-shaped huts made of bamboo poles and mahogany shingles. They stood on stilts, the ends of which were driven into holes drilled into the logs. Each housed about ten people and several dogs. In bad weather, they also held goats and the pet monkeys and parrots.

  The center hut was the largest. This was the shrine of green-eyed Piqabes, goddess of the sea. Standing before its entrance was a great block of mahogany wood with a stairway of twelve steps cut on each side. On top of this was set an immense upright oblong of granite. A hole had been cut through its upper part, and its interior had been chiseled into a spiral arrangement.

  “The stone of C’ak’oguq’o,” the chief said, seeing Hadon’s questioning expression. “She is our goddess of healing, though you may call her Qawo if you wish. The stone sits before her temple in our chief village,” Qasin continued. “That is, until we have put together our raft and placed our supplies and trading goods on it. Then it is carried with much ceremony to the raft and placed here, before the Temple of Piqabes.”

  Hadon was amazed at the chief’s story. Every two years an enormous number of valuable trees were cut in the highlands of the K’ud’em’o country. These were floated down the main river, through a number of rapids and over many cataracts. Eventually they were brought to the mouth of the river and into a bay protected by a great breakwater of earth built by the tribe. The mouth of the river was at a shallow level at this time, since the tribe had diverted the main flow through an ancient channel.

  The logs were arranged in the quiet area behind the breakwater into a raft three times as long as wide. Great vines held two-thirds of the logs together. The rest were secured by bridges of wood, fitted with underpins driven into holes bored in the logs. After the raft was completed, houses erected on it and the supplies, animals and people moved onto it, the breakwater was destroyed. This was comparatively easy, since the action of the sea had been slowly tearing it down anyway. The river was rediverted into the main channel, which moved the raft seaward and helped crumble the earthen breakwater.

  The river’s pressure slowly pushed the raft out into the Kemu. Here the sea current caught it and ponderously shoved the giant assemblage of logs toward the southeast.

  The raft people lived on their floating wooden island for six months while it moved toward Wethna. Their main food was the fish they caught, but they drank goat milk and ate goat meat; their storehouses provided nuts and berries, okra for soup and emmer wheat and millet flour to bake bread. They also drank wine and the harsh peaty liquor, s’okoko, purchased from the Klemqaba to the south. They kept enough to sell at Wethna after watering it down five to one. The K’ud’em’o were not cheating the Wethnans by this dilution; only the Klemqaba could drink the fiery liquid straight and live to brag of it.

  In addition, the raft tribe sold its logs for a great profit, since mahogany and the other valuable trees did not grow on the Wethnan side of the coast. They also sold or bartered artifacts, carved good-luck godlets, whistles of eagle bone, phallic jadeite statues of their aboriginal deities, fascinating to the Wethnans because of their unfamiliarity. And aphrodisiac and contraceptive powders, fertility charms, bracelets to ward off the evil eye and diseases, ceremonial dildos fringed with the feathers of a kingfisher found only in the K’ud’em’o country.

  “Surely you don’t end your voyage, at the harbor of Wethna?” Hadon said. “The current could not bring you right to its doorstep every time.”

  “It doesn’t,” Qasin said. “The rafts usually end up about fifty to seventy miles either way from Wethna. Then arrangements are made with the merchants of the city to transport the logs and goods on the coastal road. We pay for that, of course.”

  Once everything was sold, the tribe built a number of small ships and rowed back to their mainland. The largest carried the stone of their goddess of healing.

  “Have you ever lost it in a storm or an accident?” Hadon asked.

  “Never. We have been doing this for three hundred years and, though we have been in some terrible storms, always the raft with the stone gets through safely. There is a prophecy among my people, however, that if the stone should be lost, then the two seas will dry up.”

  Having arrived home after a two-month return trip, going against the current and the wind, the voyagers summoned those left behind. From the coast and the hills the tribesmen came down to rejoice with the rafters. The festival ran until all the money was spent, sometimes taking two months or more. During this occasion, all feasted and drank for free. Burials were conducted in drunken hilarity. Marriage ceremonies were held and infants, some of whom had waited for three years, were given their public names.

  “Nothing of any real importance is done except during the festival of the homecoming,” Qasin said. “Until then, the dead are placed in the open on top of a hill. When the festival is to start, their bones are collected, washed and wrapped in palm leaves and brought down to the coast for burial. No one can be married until this time, though of course couples live together and have children. Nor can one be divorced until the festival, though people do separate meanwhile. Nor can property change hands or accused lawbreakers be judged until then.”

  “If, as you say, the judge, the prosecutor, the defendant and his protector are all drunk, then you must have some grave miscarriages of justice,” Hadon commented. “No more than when all are sober,” the chief said.

  “But isn’t it unjust to jail a man for two years while he awaits trial?”

  “We don’t jail the accused until time for the festival,” Qasin said, “unless he is an obvious public menace, in which case we kill him. If he has fled to the hills,“then he is automatically assumed to be guilty.”

  Qasin mounted a platform and ordered a large bronze bell rung. This summoned people from the little settlements at the four corners of the raft. When all were assembled, the chief gave them the news of the terrible schism which had plunged the Empire into a bloody time. There was an uproar which lasted for half an hour. The chief then restored order by having the bell clanged again.

  The injured seamen and refugees, bandaged and smeared with healing salves, limped or were carried in. The priestess chanted over them, and then, one by one, they went through the hole in the stone. If they could not crawl through by themselves, they were dragged through. After each had been slid like the end of a thread through the eye of a needle, he was examined by two doctors, a priestess and priest, who felt the bodies and heads of the injured. They then made signs to twenty young men who stood nearby. The men took some off to a nearby group of huts to convalesce. Others they removed on litters to a hut set some distance westward of the central village.

  Hadon asked the reason for the segregation.

  “You see the spirals on the inside of the hole in the stone?” Qasin asked. “These are magical markings which collect the currents that pass through the body of the earth and the sea. They focus them, amplify them, build them up. The field of force is healing, and anybody who passes through it is healed of whatever ails them. Or, if healthy, then one becomes supercharged with the currents of goodness.” “Goodness?” Hadon asked.

  “Yes,” the chief answered. “To be good is to be healthy and vice versa. A man may be evil and yet seem to have perfect health, but he is not really healthy.”

  “What happens to those who were put in that hut to the west?”

  “They are too far gone to benefit from the healing field in the hole,” Qasin said. “They will be knocked on the head with specially blessed clubs—we don’t want their ghosts haunting this raft—and then thrown into the sea.”

  “But—but—they may survive!” Hadon said.

  “No, they won’t,” Qasin said. “The vicars of C’ak’oguq’o are sensitive to the aura which her stone lips radiate. They can feel the lack of the vital force; they shudder at the cold of dread Sisisken’s hand on the flesh of the unfortunate. It is true that the sick might live for some time. But why drag out their pain and misery? Besides, we don’t have a surplus of food aboard; we really can’t afford to feed all these sailors. So...”

  A few moments later the injured men were dragged out and their skulls shattered with stone axes. The lieutenant ran up to the slaughter and protested loudly. The chief made a sign with one hand and a young man swung his ax down on the head of the officer.

  “We don’t like people who interfere with our traditions,” the chief said.

  “I personally have always believed that a stranger should honor the customs of the people he finds himself among,” Hadon said. But he felt sick when he turned away. Later he told himself that the killing of the officer was the best thing that could have happened. Now he could never report that the long-sought Hadon of Opar and the Witch-from-the-Sea were in Wethna.

  This thought made him wonder about the fate of the sailors who had been spared. He asked Qasin about them.

  “They will be questioned,” Qasin said. “Those who are loyal to Kho, but who had to conceal their true feelings because they were in Minruth’s service, will be allowed to step off the raft when we get to the coast. Those who would lift the Flaming God above his natural rank, who would degrade the White Goddess, Mother of All, will not be with us when we sight the shores of Wethna.”

  Further questioning disclosed that the raft carried no small ships which Hadon and his party could take for a faster voyage to the coast.

  “You will have to remain here for the next two months,” Qasin said. “Unless some ship comes near enough for us to hail and so put you aboard. That is not very likely to happen.”

  “Lalila is two months pregnant now,” Hadon said. “She will be four months along when we get to Wethna. And it is a long and dangerous way to Opar from there. Ordinarily I would not worry about the time, since a galley or a swift sailing ship could get us there in two months. But there are pirates abroad now, and there is no Empire to maintain law. Every city is setting itself up to be independent, and many of the small towns and villages are eager to break away from the rule of the cities. We won’t know what to expect whenever we put in to a port. Besides, from what I have heard, Minruth did leave enough ships and men to shut off the Strait of Keth, which means we’ll have to go overland to Kethna. The peninsula is a wild, rough, dangerous area, mountainous, full of four- and two-legged predators. Five months is really not much time to get from Wethna to Opar under these conditions.”

  “True,” Qasin said. “But why worry? You can do nothing until you get to Wethna. Meanwhile, enjoy yourself. Come to my hut. I will open a jug of s”okoko for us, and you will soon forget your troubles. Let us drift with the raft and enjoy life.” He grinned at Hadon with triangular teeth. He doubtless meant to show friendliness, but the smile still looked sinister.

  21

  Seventy days later, all of Hadon’s party except for Ruseth left Wethna on a merchant sailing ship. Ruseth stayed behind, intending to embark the next day as deckhand on a merchant galley. Since his ship was lost, he considered that he was no longer under orders to take Lalila to Opar. He would return to Khokarsa and try to interest Awineth in building a fleet of fore-and-aft sailing ships. He would say nothing to her, of course, about his part in getting Hadon and Lalila off the island.

  “I’ll go to Dythbeth,” Ruseth had said. “Or I’ll try to get into the city. By now it may have fallen. If Awineth is alive and uncaptured, I’ll find her and talk her into building a new navy. If she is in a position to do so...well, never mind. I’ll see what I can do when I get there. If I get there. The Wethnans say there are so many pirates now that the navy can no longer keep order on the high seas.”

  Hadon wished him luck, but he did not think Ruseth had much likelihood of success.

  For that matter, his own chances were none too good. Neither of the two routes open was easy or free from perils. The regular way into the Sea of Opar was through the Strait of Keth. But this, according to Wethnan reports, was blockaded at its northern end. There were six triremes, four biremes and a number of smaller naval ships at anchor there. In addition, at least two hundred marines were stationed on the top of the cliffs forming the entrance to the strait. Minruth had ordered this fleet to remain on guard there, even though he needed them very much at Khokarsa.

  Minruth knew well how ambitious the ruler of Kethna was. The kings of this city had always been overly independent, often arrogant, because they held the southern end of the strait. No ship could leave the Kemuwopar to carry its trade goods from Opar into the Kemu unless the Kethnan fleet permitted it to do so. And in times of troubles, the Kethnan fleets had ventured out into the Kemu and ravaged Khokarsan shipping and navies. A Kethnan expedition had in fact once raided the shores of Khokarsa itself and come very close to capturing the Emperor.

  There was no communication from Kethna at the moment, but the authorities in Wethna expected the Kethnan fleet to come through the strait some day and attack the Khokarsan fleet. After all, the Kethnans had a much larger fleet available, and they could send an overland expedition against the marines holding the cliff exit.