The Deep Gods (5 page)

But one other activity puzzled the others immensely, though they politely pretended not to notice what seemed to be Daniel’s lunacy. For several days, while the others continued to gather stores and complete the rigging, Daniel went up into the valley beyond the city. Usually Ammi went with him; watching and helping, she contained her growing curiosity for three of the trips,
then
finally gave in.

“First it was the yellow stuff that smelled badly,” she said. “Then the white salt that is not salt, which smelled worse.
Now the burned wood, which is no use to anyone.
Daniel, what is this we are doing?”

They were in a courtyard, in the empty part of the city; skin bags of the substances Daniel had gathered lay piled up while he carefully weighed some of the stuff with a crude balance he had rigged up. He grinned at Ammi, continuing to pour yellow sulphur into the pan.

“It is called sulphur,” he told her. “The other stuff is called nitrate.” He sniffed at a pinch of it. “At least, I hope
it’s
nitrate,” he amended. “And charcoal…”

As he spoke he was carefully packing clay into the mouth of a small jar; out of the clay, the tubular spine of a seagull’s feather protruded. He balanced the thing in his hand, looking at it.

“Don’t be disappointed if this doesn’t work, Ammi,” Daniel said. “It’s something I remembered, a mixture that was once used in my world… for a number of things, till we found easier ways.” He grinned wryly at her. “The better ways would take tools I don’t have, and knowledge I don’t have, too. I’m not even sure I’ve got the proportions right, here. But
it’s
worth trying.”

He put the jar down and went to the little fire that burned against one wall of the courtyard. Thrusting in a stick, he brought it back and touched the fire to the protruding quill. Ammi had come closer to see what he did; he grasped her roughly and pushed her back, away.

“What…” Ammi cried out, and then the jar exploded.

Their ears rang with the blast; thick, foul smoke filled the courtyard, and Ammi coughed, staggering back against Daniel. Daniel grinned broadly, his own ears so deafened that he could not hear his own voice when he spoke.

“I got it right!” he said. “Damn it, I got it right, the first time!”

For another day or two, Daniel and Ammi filled clay jars and stoppered them; he continued to mix, in careful lots, until he used up all his ingredients. He had been extremely lucky, he knew; both in finding enough saltpeter, of relatively high purity, and in mixing the ancient formula correctly. It was probably the worst gunpowder ever made since Black Berthold went out of business, Daniel thought. But it might make a great deal of difference, out there. It had been a long time since the first Eloran tribes had sailed away north; they might now be aliens, unable to recognize their late-coming relatives.

Weapons were needed, Daniel felt. The others did not seem to understand that idea, and the clay bombs were a complete mystery to all of them. They knew of bows; when Daniel made one, the others followed suit quickly, though they could not quite see of what use the bows and arrows might be.

“When there were many birds, we used such things,” Galta said, twanging his bow string thoughtfully. “It makes a pretty sound, doesn’t it?”

“In other lands, there may be many birds again,” his woman, Lali, told him. “Galta, make the sound once more. I like it.”

Daniel, fitting a point to a heavy spear, looked up.

“There was a musical instrument, called a harp,” he said abstractedly. “I think people made it out of a kind of bow, but with more strings…”

He had never noticed it till now, he thought suddenly. The people of Alvanir made no music; they sang, sometimes, and thumped occasionally on anything handy, for rhythm, but he had seen no real instruments. Maybe the sea folk music was enough, he thought; it would be hard to do as well.

But Galta had gotten the harp idea into his head now; nothing would do but to try it. His first effort was not too successful, but with a little advice from Daniel, his second was much better. It had nine strings, which he continually retuned with all the experimental zeal of a true musician. He invented tunes and played to his woman’s particular pleasure. However, he got hardly any work done, less and less as he became more fascinated by his harp.

But Daniel knew better than to protest. Galta’s repetitive strumming sometimes brought him close to a vocal cry of complaint; but all the others thought Galta’s music was wonderful. And the black-hulled boat was nearly ready to go now, anyway.

The harp was strung with gut; possibly, Daniel thought the damp air at sea might disable it for a while. There was hope in the notion, anyway.

A day or two before they were ready to go, however, Daniel made another mistake; to amuse Ammi, he blew a note or two on a hollow bone. Before he realized it, he had added another instrument to the list. Listening to the initial efforts at harmony, he groaned quietly and resolved to try not to do it again. He walked away down the beach, out of earshot, kicking at a rock and thinking hard.

Then, a few yards out, he saw the dark head lift out of the water, and a high whistle sounded. He stared at the creature for a moment, then, as it tweeted again, impatiently, he went into the water toward it.

He felt the familiar buzzing as he came nearer; and now, waist-deep, he heard the dolphin speak.

“You man, why?” it asked; in an oddly human way, it sounded arrogant. “Why you take so long, I’m asking? You must come, please. You have your boat.”

He chuckled. “I’d intended to sail tomorrow,” he told the creature. “But what does it matter to you?”

“You are to speak with the Morra-ayar, man,” it said. “We must guide you. Land folk cannot find a way on the sea.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he told the dolphin. “I’m a very clever land creature. I can read the sky and tell where I am, and I have another thing that tells me, too.” The dolphin uttered a whistle.

“Land creatures don’t have a direction thing in their heads, as we do,” the dolphin said, but he sounded unsure. “Have you a thing in your head?” it demanded after a moment.

Daniel had managed to make a crude compass, in which he had very little real faith, but he was not prepared to back down before a dolphin.

“Yes,” he said firmly.

“Maybe you are indeed a new kind of land creature,” the dolphin said with deep interest. He emitted a bubbling grunt. “But we must go with you. The Morra-ayar told us to.”

“Go where?” Daniel demanded. “I’m not sure I want…”

“We will show you,” the dolphin said. “It is… ah, how can anybody explain such things to a land creature?” He blew another bubble. “There is a big land, the way you are looking now. Do you understand?”

“Africa,” Daniel said, recalling the crude map. It had to be Africa, if the beast meant the direction as he described it.

“I do not know its name,” the dolphin said. “The sea where the Morra-ayar
dwell
is beyond that land, on that side.” He lifted his nose from the water, to point. “Far, for you, but you will be safe; we shall come with you. But hurry, please. We are tired of staying here waiting.”

He flipped around and shot into deeper water, with a great splash. Daniel stared after him angrily.

Damn it, he thought, he’s ordering me about as if I were a slave.
Or a pet animal, in a way.

So the Morra-ayar apparently lived in the Indian Ocean, if it could be called that. For all Daniel knew, India might not exist; the maps showed a much smaller area there. He grunted, remembering the theories he’d once heard: that man came from Asia, or possibly India, in the beginning. Well, this was certainly the beginning, in a way.

He walked back to the beached boat; approaching, he heard Galta still plunking away, and the occasional notes of a pipe. The others were sitting in the shadow of the black hull, listening with evident delight, and sometimes adding a verse to Galta’s rhymes. Daniel grinned a little sourly and went on toward them.

“Once,” Ammi told him, later, “there were many things, like the harp Galta made. I saw pictures of such things.”

They were curled together, under the skins, beside the dying fire on the beach. None of them wished to go far from the boat now; it was as if they were already away, somehow. All they owned that could be taken along was already aboard; in the dawn, they would launch the boat and go.

“No one made music of their own, though, in my life,” she added thoughtfully. “You are wise, Daniel.”

He could not think of an answer just then.

“We go a different way from Gannat’s people, and all the others,” Ammi said, staring into the darkness. “Daniel, do you think there will be other people, like us, where we go?”

“Probably,” he grunted. That, he thought, was why he had made weapons to bring along. But it would be best not to talk of that.

“Many people went out of Eloran, in the first years of winter,” Ammi said. “There were ships, then…” She yawned. “At first, a few came back to bring other people out. Later, there were none. But I suppose there are many out there…”

Then she slept. The fire died, and after a long time, Daniel slept too.

In the dawn, the boat was pushed down into the water, the oars unshipped, and the black hull moved out toward the sea gate. Before the boat was halfway to the strait, the water stirred on either side, behind and ahead; dolphin heads came up and vanished. The convoy was there, Daniel thought.

Behind, the ancient city began to fade in the fog while the two women watched silently. Their eyes were bright and wide, but they held the steering line steady while the men rowed.

The wind was less than it had been on their first trip; now it set from their port quarter, making it necessary to take a course slightly westerly. The dolphins around the ship rose again and again, whistling; it was clear that they did not entirely approve of the direction. But when Daniel was satisfied by the sail’s set, he went to the thwarts and leaned over, calling out.

He was almost certain that the bottle-nosed face below was that of the dolphin to whom he had already spoken twice. Its arrogant tone was familiar, too.

“Man, you said you have a thing in your head,” the dolphin croaked. His voice was not as clear in open air. “You go the wrong way!”

“This boat sails on the wind,” Daniel told him. “We must go a little the wrong way, to go at all.”

It took a little more shouting before the dolphin was convinced. Even then, Daniel was not sure that the creature liked the idea of going out of the direct line; but the dolphin liked talking above water even less. At last he had blown an indignant spray and vanished; the boat sailed on.

But in the days that passed, the dolphin convoy remained always with them. Sometimes they would rise and leap in great arching curves around the boat, as though showing how much better they traveled than did the slow land people. And at other times some of them slid along the side, when Galta played his harp; their own organ tones came, humming through the wooden sides of the ship. Apparently they liked Galta’s music, and the sound of the pipe, as well.

Daniel showed the others how he measured their progress; a primitive log-line, cast over the side, with knots to count as the float slid aft, gave him a crude notion of their speed. It was necessary, at first, to inform the dolphins of the fact that the log line was not a fishing line; two or three of them came up to tell the foolish land folk that they had forgotten bait and hook

He had made a cross staff, too, from remembered drawings of the instrument that had guided medieval ships; at night, he indicated to the others such stars as he knew. They already had some idea of the matter, but the cross staff pleased them immensely. Banar, in particular, learned to use it at once and played with it constantly, sighting various stars.

When land was sighted, at last, on their starboard, Daniel felt a secret pleasure at his skill. He, alone of all those aboard, had doubted the accuracy of their course. For all he knew, they might have been heading for Australia, if that island existed.

But he was surer now; the land to the west had to be Africa. He bore closer in, studying the shore, but nowhere did it resemble the coast as he recalled it.

It could be anywhere, he realized, from Durban to Capetown… though neither city would exist for thousands of years. Still, there ought to be some resemblance, and there wasn’t. There had been low, rolling hills; lightly forested and often
bare
. But these were steep and crowned with dense tropical growth. And the days were growing warmer, too, so warm as to make the others uncomfortable. None of them had ever experienced such heat.

But what troubled Daniel about the heat was the feeling that he could not be as far to the north, and as near the equator, as that. It was queer. But the cross staff told him that he was in the latitude of what would be South Africa. He cursed, and continued to calculate without success.

Watching the thick green of the shore, he saw what he had been seeking—at last, a glittering thread of water, a creek. The water tank was nearly empty.

To the disapproving snorts of the dolphins, the black boat turned shoreward, toward the gap in the trees where the creek met the sea. The oars came out; the boat steered cautiously, slowly inshore and in between the huge trees. Ahead, a broad creek opened, flooding down in a brown torrent.

Rowing up the stream, Daniel cast a bucket in from time to time and tasted the water. It grew fresher as they went on; it would not be too far before they reached the point at which they could fill the tanks.

The trees that hung densely on either side were definitely tropical, he was sure. Bright birds flashed in the green shade, shrieking; once, something large and unseen crashed among the bushes with an immense snort. The others were fascinated; all day they called out to each other, pointing out new wonders. When the water was fresh enough, the boat was moored to a tree, and, as the tanks were filling up, Lali discovered that fruit hung directly over the bow.

It was a brownish green object, which Daniel called a banana, though it did not look much like the ones he himself had known. It was sampled cautiously; it was very good.