The burlap shopping bag brushed Dennis' pants leg awkwardly as he walked. The bag's side-panels were embroidered with the Seal of Emath in blue yarn—a leaping fish with a woman's face, too crude to have features even in better light than that of the village streets at night.
The Seal of Emath was the sea hag—in the false, conventional style that fishermen joked about the creature. Now Dennis understood why.
Dennis hadn't really thought about how he was going to carry the food until he got to the kitchen. The rope-handled shopping bag seemed the best alternative there.
He'd collected bread and three different kinds of sausage—summer sausage, liverwurst, and a hard, spicy pepperoni—because he wasn't sure which was proper. Anyway, it was difficult to make little choices now that his mind was filled with the large one, the decision to leave home forever.
Dennis had also collected the wide-eyed concern of all the kitchen staff, but they'd helped him anyway. An undercook had even curtsied and offered him an apple brought from the far north... which Dennis took to avoid embarrassing her.
He began to crunch it quickly as soon as he left the palace. An apple just didn't seem the thing to carry along on a dangerous trek into the jungle.
Dennis was pretty sure that none of the staff would slip off to tell the king what his son was doing. The way Hale was acting now, the servants were afraid to see him even when they were required to do so.
Dennis tossed the apple core into the gutter.
"The man who uses his provisions wisely, Dennis," said Chester in a tone of cool disapproval, "will never want."
"I didn't ask her for an apple," Dennis snapped back.
Then he said, "I feel foolish walking about with a shopping bag, Chester. I'm sorry."
A group of children were playing around a pool of lantern light in the street, watched by an old woman in a mob cap. "Good evening, your highness!" the woman called, trembling back and forth on her rocking chair as she waved a hand in greeting. "A fine evening to you!"
"Good evening, lady," Dennis responded in a cheerful voice, waving his own free hand as he and Chester passed. The children stared, whispering among themselves in voices that occasionally rose with high-pitched awe.
"I don't know who she is, Chester," Dennis muttered to his companion as darkness covered them again. "I didn't think anybody could recognize me in the dark anyway."
He looked down at the clothing he'd chosen: a cloak, a plain cotton tunic, and drab blue trousers.
Of course, the bag did have the royal seal on it. And—
"It may be that I can be recognized though you are not, Dennis," said Chester, putting words to the thought that had just struck the youth.
Well, it wouldn't matter in the jungle.
They'd had to tramp almost all the way around the harbor, since the Tomb of the Founder was on the landspit opposite the palace. Even now, Dennis wasn't willing to disobey his father by crossing the harbor the easy way—on one of the many water taxis available at the piers.
Wasn't willing, or wasn't able because of the sea hag's magic.
Most of the bars and entertainment areas for seamen were concentrated near the end of the harbor, but one brightly-lit establishment was doing a cheerful business next to the wall separating the village from the graves and solemnities of the cemetery.
A woman sat on the rail of the third-floor roof with her back to the street, singing to an invisible audience and accompanying herself on a one-string lute. As Dennis passed the tavern, the singer paused, stretched, and looked down at him. Her eyes gleamed as her jeweled combs in the light of the sconces at the tavern's entrance; her breasts were deeper shadows within the pink froth of the chemise she wore.
The singer smiled down. Dennis blushed and walked away quickly.
"He who knows how to hold his heart," murmured Chester, "knows the most important thing of all."
"Just leave that, all right?" Dennis said.
For a wonder, Chester said nothing more on the subject.
The cemetery was closed from the remainder of the landspit by a fence and gate. Five years before, Hale had replaced the wooden palings of Dennis' youth with wrought iron. Sections of the fence were already skewed at slight angles from one another, but the gilt spikes on top glittered bravely in the starlight.
The gate was open. Emath was crowded, but there was no need to lock squatters out of the graveyard. King Hale's law forbade anyone sleeping within the fenced area; and King Hale's protector, hidden in the deep sea, supported the law with her own powers.
A high swell rumbled against the land, silhouetting the tombs against a phosphorescent mist. The Founder's Tomb stood out in rough-hewn majesty from the lesser monuments. It had been easy to imagine that this pile of red rock was the creation of the earliest men on Earth, far removed from the crystal refinement of Emath Palace.
I built it, Ramos had said, and your father beside me.
One of the dragons coughed a challenge to the jungle; the sea slapped a wave against the headland again in response.
"Let's go in, Chester," Dennis said quietly. "And leave."
Serdic's black marble mausoleum lay beside the path to the old rock tomb. Dennis kept a tight hold on his emotions as he strode past the entrance, but the tomb didn't give him the thrill of fear that he'd expected—that he'd felt in the wizard's suite of the palace.
None of what was frightening about the Wizard Serdic lay here.
The door of the Founder's Tomb was wooden. Salt air had shrunk the wood and bleached it gray, so that it shone like a patch of the skyglow as Dennis approached. The straps, hinges and latchplate were rusted the same color as the rock, and the black keyhole was the size of the last joint of Dennis' thumb.
The tip of one of Chester's tentacles slipped into the blackness like a beam of starlight. The wards quivered and clicked under the robot's hair-fine manipulation.
The door swung outward against the protest of its hinges. Chester disengaged his tentacle.
When Dennis tried to open the door a few inches further, he found he had to put his shoulders into the effort of overcoming the friction of rust in the hinge pivots. The robot's delicacy and small size could give a false impression of the strength available in his silvery limbs.
The only light within was what came through the open door, and there was so little of it that Dennis couldn't see his own shadow.
"I should have brought a lamp," he muttered.
He remembered that the interior was almost filled by a limestone sarcophagus and that the sword lay across the chest of the reclining figure of the Founder on the stone lid; but he would have to feel his way—
The darkness rustled. Dennis' heart jumped as his face froze. The Founder's Sword slid toward him, held point-up in its scabbard by one of Chester's tentacles.
Dennis took the great weapon in his hands for the first time. King Hale always carried the sword himself through the crowds on a velvet cushion in the Founder's Day procession—from the tomb, around the arc of Emath's perimeter, and to the gate of the palace before returning.
The youth stepped backward into the starlight and slid the blade from its sheath.
It gleamed like a cold gray star itself.
Dennis had been trained in swordsmanship from his earliest childhood. It was part of the education of a prince, and his father had skimped on nothing that would further that ideal. The blade of the Founder's Sword was just under a yard long and heavy for its considerable length.
Dennis wasn't used to a sword of quite this size—but he could handle it. His muscles were trained, and his frame was filling out daily with the growth spurt of his late adolescence.
The sword was perfectly balanced. Despite that, the weapon had a crudeness that surprised Dennis until he thought about it.
The Founder's Sword had been forged out of star-metal, material ripped from the hulls of the ships that brought men here to Earth. Of course the blade wouldn't have the polished correctness of swords hammered out by modern weaponsmiths using mere steel.
This was the weapon of a hero of a bygone age. This was the weapon that Dennis would take into the jungle heart of the continent.
He shot the weapon home in its scabbard with a flourish. At last he was thrilled with his decision instead of just plodding onward, afraid to look at what he was doing.
Seeing his father face the sea hag had made Dennis a man. Buckling the Founder's Sword onto his belt made him a hero—at least in his own mind.
The guard beasts snarled again: at the night, at nothing, or at one another. Dennis' vision of himself at the head of a conquering host, waving his star-metal sword, shivered back down to present reality.
"All right, Chester," he said as though the robot's dallying were slowing him down. "Let's go."
"When worry arises," Chester murmured, "the heart thinks death itself is a release."
Dennis grimaced as he picked up the bag of provisions.
"But troubles end," the robot continued, "and death does not end, Dennis."
They didn't bother to close the tomb door as they set off, side by side, toward the perimeter and the dragons guarding it.