The namirrna, Juliassa Hanorissia, drew lightly on the rein, and her kaabor stopped at the cliff's edge. A cloud had cut off the sun, and the ocean below had turned steel gray. A few sea lokkras soared, watching for fish. The major moon, Great Liilia, was out of sight, but she was full, and the tide would be strong. Just now, Juiiassa knew, it would be ebbing. There'd be more than ample time to ride the beach if she wished, before the high water returned.
Jonkka, her bodyguard, had stopped when she had, a couple of hundred feet behind her as she'd prescribed with her father's approval. She waved cheerily back at him, then touched the kaabor's flanks with her heels, starting it down the trail that angled precariously across the cliff face to the beach.
In brief minutes she arrived at the strip of damp sand, now thirty to a hundred feet wide below the cliff. The sharp smell of stranded floatweed and other beach life stung her nostrils, and swinging down from the saddle, she led the kaabor along the strand, pausing at intervals to examine a shell, a figured, wave-polished stone, a stranded seine-fish dissolving in the sunlight like some poisonous illusion.
She'd gone only a little way, a quarter mile, when she saw the sellsu and cried out inadvertently, for at first she thought it was dead. Since she'd been a child, she'd loved to watch them sporting in the sea, sometimes body surfing, and had tried unsuccessfully to catch the spirit of them on canvas with her paints. But approaching it, where it lay just past a dark rock, she saw the movement of its shallow breathing, and her own eased.
With a word to the kaabor, Juliassa dropped the rein and went to the sellsu, half-knelt, half-bent, and cautiously touched a smooth-furred flank, ready to jump back. A sellsu's tail and flukes were powerful, its arms long and muscular, its teeth sharp for tearing fish. And if she startled it . . .
It made no response to her touch, none at all.
She stepped back, pondering, then knelt and stroked its head and neck, crooning to it. Nothing. After half a minute she turned and waved for her bodyguard. He rode up, expression curious, until he saw the sellsu. His face turned wary then; he'd grown up far from the sea.
"Yes, namirrna?"
"It's alive, but something's wrong with it. It's sick or badly hurt. Help me turn it over."
The guard dismounted, a tall heavy-shouldered man hiding his hesitancy, and the two of them rolled the four-hundred-pound body over. There was no visible wound.
"Jonkka," she said, "ride back to the house quickly, and have the men bring the boat. We'll take it home and I'll nurse it back to health."
Distress flashed briefly behind the soldierly eyes. "Miss, I can't do that. My post is to keep you in my sight, lest harm come to you."
She turned face on then, fists on hips, expression severe, though the top of her head came no higher than his chin. "Then help me drag it into the surf. We'll take it home swimming, holding its head above water. You and I together, because you have to stay with me. Or me alone, if you cannot swim."
His face too turned severe at that. "You do me ill, Juliassa Hanorissia. You know I can scarcely swim; I'm from the Eastern Dale, where water is for drinking and we bathe in a basin. And you know as well that I am charged with your safety."
Her cheeks darkened, and her fierceness faded. "I do know, Jonkka, and I'm sorry. But somehow I must save this sellsu, and I know no other way. I'd ask for your help to load it on Sannshi, but it seems to me it would surely die, riding across a kaabor's back so far. And anyway, how would we tie it on?"
She turned back to the sellsu, the child of the waves, and kneeling again, grabbed the flukes. "Here. At least help me pull it into the shade of this rock. It's said they do not tolerate the sun well for any length of time."
He'd never heard that. He'd heard they raised their young on the beaches. But he bent to it, and with his strength they readily dragged it out of the sun. "Now lend me your helmet," Juliassa said. "Then gather wet floatweed at the water's edge and cover the sellsu with it. To help keep it damp."
His expression was both hesitant and puzzled, but he handed her his helmet and trotted off. As he filled his arms with the long and pungent strands, he paused once to see what the namirrna was doing. She was carrying seawater in his helmet, pouring it on the sellsu. He muttered a prayer and continued to gather. It was the will of Hrum that they do what they properly could.
When they'd spread the weeds over the unmoving body, she looked it over. "Another load should do it," she said, and trotting, he returned to the water's edge. This time he didn't look back until he'd gotten most of a load. When he did, he dropped the weeds and shouted angrily. The namirrna was a hundred yards away, riding his kaabor back along the beach, leading her own by the reins. He strode toward them, calling his mount to come to him, but when it tried, she dug heels in its flanks, using the reins and bit harshly. It yielded to her, and she rode on.
"You do me ill indeed, Juliassa Hanorissia," Jonkka called after her, and she stopped.
"I know," she cried back, "and it grieves me. But this way it's out of your hands, and you can scarcely be blamed for my treachery. It's me that'll be punished. I'll be back as soon as I can, with a boat." Her tone changed then from apology to command. "Meanwhile stay by him."
With that she urged her mount into a trot, and moments later Jonkka watched her start up the cliff trail. With an oath he turned and kicked his helmet some fifteen feet, hurting his toes despite his boots, which brought another curse. After retrieving the helmet, he looked at the second load of floatweed, lying where he'd dropped it. Probably its only purpose had been to occupy his attention while she sneaked off, he told himself. Taking no chance though, he picked it up and strewed it over the sellsu, leaving only head and neck exposed.
She's willful, that namirrna, he thought. And all this for a sellsu that's as good as dead already. As for punishment . . .
By his observation, the amirr's idea of punishment for headstrong children was nothing compared to his own father's. Now there was a man who knew how to punish! Although in all truth, the whippings had been few, if memorable, dealt only on severe provocation. And when they were over, that had been the end of the matter.
He stroked the sellsu's sleek head. "You are a good-lookin' lad," Jonkka. murmured. "And who knows? Maybe you'll come through this after all." Did this fellow truly have the intelligence of a human, he wondered? Or, as some insisted, the soul of a human, resting for a cycle from humanity's labors and responsibilities? He'd even heard from fishermen that the sullsi talked to one another, though their words were strange, beyond human comprehension.
Jonkka chuckled. Maybe the sellsu'd been a soldier, once upon a time. "How'd you like a soldiers' song?" he asked, "to let you know you're among friends. Maybe you'll even wake up and join me." Then, still stroking, he began to sing, but instead of a soldier's song, it was one he'd heard his mother and grandmother sing the younger children to sleep with, and no doubt himself as well, farther back than his memory reached.
It had many verses, and as he was finishing, something caught and drew his eye. Two sullsi lay at the tide's edge, not more than fifty feet from him, where the light surf hissed softly up the sand. They were not moving, not even their heads, but they watched intently. And in his present mood, Jonkka called softly to them.
"Peace, lads, your buddy's sick; either that or hurt inside. My lady's gone to fetch help; she means to nurse him through it."
They neither bolted at his voice nor showed any sign of attacking. Maybe they were smart, Jonkka told himself, for he had his sword still at his belt, and ashore he was much nimbler than they. Cloud blocked the sun again, and he looked up. Cloud indeed! A curving wall of thunderheads now, from that angle seeming vast, hid the sky to south and west, near enough that he could not see their heads, but only their flanks and blue-black undersides. The rains were at hand, he told himself, despite the foreign ship and the serpents' brief flight.
Again he stroked the sellsu's head. "It looks as if I'll not have to fetch more water to keep you wet," he muttered, and wondered where the namirrna was by now. Halfway to the villa or farther, he guessed. She'd not hesitate to run the kaabors hard. The slower part by far would be rowing here around the curve of shore. Men would have to leave other duties to be her boatmen, and they had several miles to come.
Soon enough the rain arrived, with Borrsio's hammer banging and booming, his lightning spears stabbing sea and earth. Like all children of Hrumma, Jonkka'd been raised to love wild storms, but not out in the open like this! He huddled in the lee of the great rock, grateful for even that little shelter, listening between thunders to the cold hard sheets of rain hiss on the sea and slash the streaming stone. When next he peered out toward the two sullsi, they were gone. Back into the sea to keep dry, he thought wryly.
He was shivering by then, skin blue and pebbled. Once he felt the spirit of Borrsio, making him tingle and his hair stand on end. A moment later, the god cast down a great and blinding spear that struck somewhere very close, and the thunder with it burst the air so that Jonkka was knocked flat and for a long moment forgot to breathe. Finally, after further booming and rumbling, the wind changed, and he shifted round the rock, grateful again because, to an ex-herd boy, it meant that the storm had passed half over. When next he thought to look at the sellsu, its eyes were open, looking at him, although it seemed not to have moved. Perhaps the thunders had wakened it, Jonkka thought, or the spirit of Borrsio when it had caused his hair to bristle.
Finally the rain became fitful. The wind stopped, and shortly the sun came forth to raise steams from the sand and rocks. The tide was rising now, had been awhile, and Jonkka began to wonder which would arrive soonest, the surf or the boat. The surf would take some hours yet, he supposed, but he wasn't sure how many; he wasn't that familiar with the sea. Meanwhile, here the high tide mark was on the base of the cliff itself, and perhaps the boatmen had delayed starting till the storm was over, on grounds of safety.
The tide was still twenty feet away when they hallooed him. His clothes were dry by then, even somewhat his boots, which he'd set out on a rock, and twice more he'd poured water over the sellsu, whose eyes had long since closed again, though it still breathed. They loaded it into the boat, which rode perilously low with all the added weight, water splashing over the bow as they launched out through the mild surf. They were hardly two hundred feet from shore when two sullsi came alongside; the same two, Jonkka supposed, that had watched him on the beach. The boatmen eyed them watchfully, and called assurances that only good was meant for their kinsman.
Juliassa left that to the men. Her attention was on the sellsu in the boat, stroking it and crooning, and every little while she poured another helmetful of water on it, till the bottom was three inches awash. Jonkka hoped the sellsu wouldn't wake up in the boat. A four-hundred-pound bull trying to get over the side would surely overturn them, maybe breaking someone's bones in the process.
But quickly enough he forgot about that. The motion of the boat, up, down, sideways, introduced him to seasickness.
At least the boatmen made haste, pulling the oars till the sweat ran, and at length Jonkka could see the villa, well back from the water. What, he wondered, would the namirrna do with the sellsu when they got it there? She had something being prepared for it, he was sure.