11

A soft rain fell and the air was more thickly humid than Sharina had ever felt it at home, even in the depths of August. The sun was a red blur near the western horizon. Huge tree ferns grew wherever the soil was bare, and runners with leaves sprouting from the joints crawled across the stone structures as well.

The double line of men on the drag ropes stretched into the forest. A detachment of Blood Eagles, fully armed and tense, marched at the head of the column, but the sailors themselves seemed calm, even cheerful. Men joked with their fellows on the other rope. Glad to be alive, Sharina supposed. She certainly was.

"Your mother won't help you today," called one of the ship's officers, his thumbs hooked in his wide leather belt.

"Pull!" roared the rowers, still over a hundred of them despite deaths and injuries in the storm. They leaned into beaching tackle made fast to the sternpost and dragged the trireme another pace up the ramp.

The sailors could relax, because their task was over for the moment: they'd brought the vessel safe to harbor. The duties of the soldiers guarding the procurator had just begun.

Your father won't help you today/Pull! 

"This is made for warships, isn't it?" Sharina said to Nonnus beside her. The smooth stone ramp was a hundred yards across, wide enough for dozens of triremes. It enabled ships to be drawn from the water for storage or repair. There were several similar constructions dimly visible around the harbor. "This is a real port, not just a beach where people pull their boats up at night."

"It's a real port," Nonnus agreed without emotion. Like the soldiers he was alert, though in his case it was more the alertness of a hunter than of someone who thinks he may be prey. "They've nothing better than this in Valles. Nothing this good."

He drew his toe deeply across the sloping surface. Leaf mold humped up to either side of the trough. Beneath was the base layer of pinkish-gray gneiss, polished to a dull sheen. Every structure Sharina could see—the roofed shelters, the bollards for holding ships once they'd been drawn to safety, the ramp itself—

was of the same dense, millstone-hard material.

Your sister won't help you today/Pull! 

"I'd have thought there'd be mud all over everything if it just came up from the sea," Sharina said, hoping she didn't sound nervous. "This is just forest litter like you'd find in the woods back home."

There was nothing as frightening here as what she'd faced in the storm; but during the storm, she'd given up hope. Hope was dangerous because if you hoped, then you had something to lose.

"I would have expected mud too," the hermit said dryly. "But these trees didn't grow under the sea either. Whatever's going on isn't as simple as the sea bottom flexing."

A salamander barked at the humans from the heart of a plant whose spiked leaves formed a cup. The beast's skin was gray with stripes of indigo and blue; its outstretched tongue was blue as well. It looked like nothing Sharina had ever seen before, but it was scarcely a foot long and certainly no threat in itself.

Your brother won't help you today/Pull! 

Kizuta, now the trireme's acting captain, stood on the poop, where he oversaw the proceedings. "That's high enough!" he shouted. "Tie her off with double lashings. I don't trust this calm weather to stay!"

Sharina walked slowly away from the ship, knowing that the hermit would follow. "You think we're here because of what Meder did, don't you?" she asked in a low voice. She didn't intend to go far, but she wanted Nonnus to be able to give his honest opinion of the situation out of possible earshot of anyone else.

Asera had disembarked, like most of the crew and passengers. She stood beside one of the open-fronted shelters with her arms wrapped tightly around her body in a sign of nervousness. Wainer was at her side, holding a drawn sword and trying to look in all directions at once. Nine more Blood Eagles, carrying spears and sweating in their full armor, formed a rank between the procurator and the jungle beyond.

The mist softened the outlines even of objects only fifty feet away. Leaf mold covered horizontal surfaces, but the vertical edges of structures on shore were all the same polished pinkish-gray color.

Nonnus looked back toward the looming trireme. Meder was still aboard, hunched in the bow behind a screen to shield his actions from others. He had a fire going in a small jug; occasionally a puff of colored smoke rose into the low clouds.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't think Meder raised the storm. Maybe he didn't have anything to do with Tegma either."

The island climbed from the shore, though it was hard to be sure of the exact slope because of fog and the thick vegetation. Paths paved with gneiss blocks led into the forest from the harbor. They were edged with low curbs rather than railings.

Most of the sailors were free to explore now that they'd pulled the vessel to a dry berth. Their footprints scarred the dark litter and their voices drifted from among the trees, mingled with those of Tegma's wildlife.

There was no sign of the people who had built these remarkable structures.

"I don't think Meder knows whether he's responsible for this or not," Sharina said. Until she forced herself to speak the words, she'd been keeping the fear only half-formed at the back of her mind. "I don't think he understands all of what he's doing. I don't think he understands half of what he's doing."

"Tenoctris said the same thing," Nonnus said mildly. "I wish she was here now. But then, I wish a lot of things."

He squatted at the top of the docking facility, his javelin in his right hand. His left index finger poked into the leaf litter with the care of a surgeon working in a victim's chest. A worm twisted away in blind terror, vanishing again into the mold like rain on sand. The subsoil only a few inches beneath the surface was a dense yellow clay.

Sailors were clearing the long, shallow shelters. They had no front wall, only square-sided pillars to support roofs so low that most of the men had to duck to keep from hitting their heads. They provided cover from the rain because there was no wind to blow droplets onto those inside.

Another party of sailors brought ashore the men injured too badly to walk by themselves. There were several dead as well, rowers who'd been brained or had their chests crushed by oars flailing during the storm. Men with mattocks dragged them into the forest. The yellow clay would be difficult to dig; a layer of leaf litter would probably suffice to cover the corpses. Had the trireme not been in port, seawolves would have formed the burial detail.

"Let's look at these trees," Nonnus said. Glancing aside to make sure Sharina was following, he walked toward a stand of smaller growth. Though the plants were jointed like grasses, the inside was a pulpy solid when the hermit severed a six-inch stem with two quick strokes of his Pewle knife.

The rain had stopped or at least paused. Sailors returned from the forest with a salamander the size of a fox that they'd killed with their sheath knives. Some of the group split a fallen branch to reach the dry wood inside; another sharpened a sapling to use for a spit.

The local wildlife was easy to catch and perfectly edible so far as the crew and Sharina were concerned. She wondered if Asera and the wizard would feel the same way about the writhing amphibians.

Nonnus paced thirty feet along the trunk to where the tree narrowed into a dozen ropy branches, then lopped the top off as well. He eyed the remainder of the stand, looking for an exact match.

"Wainer!" a soldier called, running down from the forest. His feet skidded on the fallen debris when he tried to stop. One of the men guarding Asera caught him to keep him from falling flat.

"We've found a city!" the man said. "A whole city up on top of the hill, and there's no one there!"

Wainer and Asera stepped closer to the messenger. All three talked with animation, but too quietly for Sharina to hear from where she stood.

"Nonnus," she said, lowering her own voice although no one was close by. "What do you think is going to happen?"

He shrugged and gave her a wry smile. "I don't suppose we were brought here for any reason that would please me to learn, child," he said. "But better here than the bottom of the Inner Sea or a lizard's belly. Alive is better than dead."

The hermit notched another tree, then pushed it over with a powerful thrust of his shoulders.

"That should take care of the outriggers," he said. "Now, let's go see if we can borrow a proper axe to fell a tree big enough for our dugout's hull."