The Mantooth Part 33

'You saw it, too?'

'No, but I have seen them before.'

She looked him full in the face, perplexed. 'You knew there were other humans, and you never told me? My G.o.d, Kalus, why?'

'Because I was afraid.'

'Afraid of what?' she demanded.

'Afraid that if you knew there were others, you would have less need of me. That you would not love me as much, always wondering.....'

'Oh, Kalus, that's so unfair! How could you think so little of me?' But even as she denied his words, she knew they held a grain of truth.

'I'm sorry,' he said. Finding no other expression, he repeated.

'I'm sorry.'

For a moment she had forgotten him, and the effect her resentment would have. Now she looked at him, at the weary, washed-out face of long ago, and remembered.

'OH.' She came behind and wrapped her arms around his chest and held him tightly. 'It's all right. I understand.'

With little further speech the two worked on the nets until night forced them back into the cave, a small hollow bored into smooth stone twenty feet above the sand. It was neither s.p.a.cious nor comfortable, but Kalus did not intend to remain there long.

Both knew, as later in the dead of night he opened his heart to her, that they must leave the roots of their past and strike out to a new destination. To the Island, where Kalus had often marked the smoke of fires, and where he hoped to find some answer to the questions that unsettled him, not the least of which was the riddle of the Children of the Sea.

Chapter 33

The beauty of the Sea was not lost on him, for all his preoccupation with the Island. Every day it revealed new wonders, and more and more he came to realize that it was not only a home and harbinger of infinite life, but a living, tangible thing unto itself. When Sylviana told him it had been the birthplace of life on Earth he was not surprised. When she remarked that little seemed to have changed, despite the nuclear holocaust, he believed, and felt quietly rea.s.sured.

But he also saw clearly the darker, more savage aspect of the waters, which the poetic (usually from the detached safety of an untroubled s.h.i.+p or peaceful sh.o.r.eline) often seemed to overlook. For if the Valley had been ruthless and produced, with few exceptions, a grim array of thoughtless, thankless creatures, their only creed survival of the fittest, then the Sea was the very creator, and composer of the theme.

Fierce, desperate mating followed by birth in huge numbers, of which not one in a hundred reached adulthood to fight and breed again, seemed the unbroken rule of this world without shelter, where life and death chased each other like madness, and none were immune.

One morning he watched as a pair of tiny animals, some forgotten offshoot of the hermit crab, dueled at the bottom of a small, clear tidal pool for the affections of a waiting female. Not only was their battle as cruel and fierce as any he had ever seen on land, but the speed and nature of their movements was so reminiscent of the small, poisonous spiders of the Carak that he, an immense land animal infinitely safe upon the inaccessible rock, had unconsciously recoiled in fear and disgust.

On another occasion a smallish gray shark, deceived this far north by an alluring current of warm water, became entangled in one of the nets they had strung at the end of a natural jetty. When dragged ash.o.r.e with the meager catch that had lured it, its death struggle had been so ferocious that it haunted Kalus' sleep for weeks afterward. Hopelessly entangled, drowning in a sea of air, it had nonetheless thrashed and snapped for what seemed a eternity, destroying the net and reeking such havoc that the startled fisherman, had he been able, would gladly have thrown it back into the sea. And even when it finally expired, the razor-sharp teeth and leering jaws had presented such a frightening specter that he refused, instinctively, to touch it.

Reluctantly Sylviana had admitted that this behavior, either in killing or being killed, was in no way exceptional among sharks. And far from being the archetype of its race, this relatively small and undeveloped creature could not begin to match the rakish refinements of the Blue, the Tiger, and the ineffable Great White. That they preferred to feed upon the dead and dying, that they usually left substantial, uninjured creatures alone, was robbed of all comforting a.s.surance by the fact that their perceptions were so dim, their mental development so limited, that the actions of a given individual in a given situation could in no way be safely predicted. Like life itself, there was just no telling. From this experience these thriving, thoughtless killers became for him the very symbol of the dark, violent side of nature that had always so terrified and appalled him.

'There must be something more to life,' he said, on the thirteenth night since their arrival. They sat before a driftwood fire in the sand, protected from the wind by the high north wall, a short distance from their cave. With the stars above and the soft murmur of the waves before them, there was peace and sadness enough in his heart to speak of it, and to admit the vague emptiness he found so hard and painful to express. For he knew that she felt an emptiness, too.

'All the birth and dying,' he continued, 'The endless struggle just to survive, and to create new beings to struggle and die when you are gone. It is very hard for me to say this, Sylviana, but there are times when I think Nature is very cruel, and I can see no wisdom in living only by her laws.'

'But aren't you the one who's always saying that the societies of men must have failed because they had forgotten the simple goodness of Nature, ?primal virtue' and all of that? That society had overridden the subtle ways of the Tao, creating its own, alternative order in which Man's will alone was powerful? That there were no natural, softening influences to prevent man's ignorance and violence?' Her words seemed mockery, but there was a reason for them.

She was trying to draw him to the heart of the matter, which could be difficult when he became thoughtful and began to withdraw.

'You know I've said these things, and you know I still believe them. But why couldn't men do both: raise themselves above the endless struggle, and still have the thought and compa.s.sion to put away war and racial hatred, to feed and clothe and give medicine to those who need it? Why does it have to be one or the other?' There was no answer to such a question. Impatiently, she stirred the fire with a stick.

'Aren't you really trying to tell me that you've decided to visit the island at all costs, and that you're afraid of what you might find there?'

'Yes,' he replied dourly, confused.

'Why are you so threatened by the Children? From everything you've told me, they sound even more primitive than the hill-people.' For a moment his eyes flashed, but he knew she meant no insult.

'Because I think there could be some other colony on the Island as well.' Her eyes became suddenly large, and she turned toward him intently. He continued reluctantly.

'I told you I've seen the smoke of campfires, and as many as twelve riders at once making toward the island at sunset. But I've also seen other lights, bright and unnatural, and broad beams that split the night..... I don't know what they mean.'

As she heard this her heart beat suddenly faster. It was all too fantastic. Old voices and dreams that she had thought dead and in the past, surged recklessly to life inside her.

'We've got to go there! We've got to find out.'

'Yes.' He paused, watching her intently in his turn. 'I'm sorry I couldn't tell you all at once. It was a lot to think about.'

'I understand.' She got up and began to pace restlessly, breathing too deep, unable to control it. 'Oh, Kalus, I feel as if I'm going to burst.'

'I'll be there with you.'

'Yes. YES.' Like a child she ran and wrapped her arms about him.

But later that night, unable to sleep and watching his familiar form beside her in the darkness, she was dismayed by a strange voice that told her she wished she was going alone. Even as he had said, she began to wonder how deep, how true, how honest was their love? And for the first time in many months she felt the terrible uncertainty of the dreamer who has wrapped all hope and affection about the shoulders of a single lover.

IS THIS THE MAN I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE WITH? And as much as she wanted to say yes, she couldn't. Because she didn't know.

In the chill hour of dawn Kalus woke, and in turn looked upon the sleeping figure into whom he had poured his life's blood. To see her lying there beside him, breathing evenly, her face warm and softened like a child's, was all that he had ever asked, or ever could ask, of the Nameless. His love for her in that moment, when he knew, or feared, that her loyalty to him would soon be put to its severest test, was almost unbearable. Thoughts of a life without her he could not begin to face, and he, too, felt a moment of doubt.

'Sometimes if you love someone, you have to let them go.' She hadn't meant the words then, but what if now..... If their love could not stand, in the bright and hard light of day, then the efforts of a lifetime were in vain. For if she, who knew him to the depths of his being---his trials and broken dreams, his personal weakness and indomitable strength---if she found in him nothing to love and cherish and hold on to, then who in all the cold, lonely world ever would?

If he had known the full quotation, or she the effect its partial phrasing would have on him, perhaps they could have talked it out, and both found in these simple but profound words some solace: