Reunion (2 page)

Corwin doubted the creature would be any good to eat. As hungry as he was, not having eaten that morning, Corwin's stomach still turned at the thought. He walked back and forth along the leviathan's length, as he considered what to do. The morning tide was coming in, lapping at the creature's tentacles, making them move with a semblance of life.

Corwin saw something glinting amid the tentacles, something silvery. He had heard stories about where pearls came from. What might a creature this size produce? Corwin knelt down, but he couldn't escape the fear that, should he reach toward it, one of the huge tentacles might wrap around his arm or his head and crush him. He took a deep breath and watched the water. The wavelets came in, the wavelets went out. He mentally timed it so that he could grab the shiny thing while the water receded, so that the tentacles wouldn't be moving. He took a deep breath.

The wavelets went out. He reached in among the rubbery, blubbery tentacles, and his hand closed on the silvery object. Corwin pulled it out quickly and tucked it into his lap before the water came in again. He let his breath out in a relieved sigh. But the relief faded as he realized that the water wasn't coming back in.

Every fiber of his being tingled with fear. He could no longer hear the waves or the rush of the seafoam. There were no more cries from seagulls overhead. All the sounds of the world seemed to have vanished. There was only . . . silence.

Corwin turned his head to gaze at the ocean. It, too, had . . . stopped. And it was no longer the familiar dark green-blue tipped with white of a normal sea. The water had turned a deep blood red. Corwin swallowed hard. “What is this?” he whispered. “What did I do?”

With horror, he stared as the water began to return to the shore. But it didn't flow as the sea normally would. It began to crawl, like a living thing, creeping up the beach. Tendrils extended from the edge of the water, like fingers, feeling their way along the strand, searching. One of the tendrils touched the tip of one of the leviathan's tentacles.

Suddenly a ghastly screech tore through the air, exploding on Corwin's ears, as if an uncountable host of tiny mouths wailed in a horrible, triumphant chorus. The sound drowned out Corwin's own scream as the gruesome bloodtide began to bulge upward toward the sky. Up and up it rose, stretching into the hideous form of a giant, writhing serpent. The head of the thing formed a gigantic, gaping mouth. And eyes. Eyes that looked down and
saw
Corwin.

Willing his legs to action, Corwin jumped away from the leviathan and staggered back on the beach. Gasping in fear, Corwin leaped over the rocks and stumbled through the water, running for his life. He rounded the headland cliff once more and tore back to where he had left his wheelbarrow. He allowed himself one swift glance back over his shoulder.

It was enough. To his horror, the creature was
pursuing
him. But not by crawling on the land. Somehow the scarlet serpent was flying—wriggling through the air, its back end coiling endlessly out of the sea.
If it's made of the sea
, Corwin thought in terror,
then there may truly be no end to it and no safe distance I can run.

With the creature right behind him, Corwin reached the barrow and the anchor rope. Hardly thinking, he unwound the anchor rope from the rock and wrapped it around his palm, holding on with all of his strength. Corwin vaulted into the air as the heavy sack of shells plummeted toward the beach. Its counterweight pulled Corwin up, just in time for his ankles to escape the snapping jaws of the sea serpent.

And then, a stroke of good fortune. The monster moved its head a little to the side, just underneath the falling sack of shells. The sack bashed hard onto the creature's head. The serpent exploded in a spray of red droplets onto the rocks below, no more substantial than a summer rain. The sack struck the ground, bursting and sending shells scattering over the strand.

Corwin leapt for the cypress branch, just barely missing getting his hand rammed through the pulley. Shaking and shivering, he slid down the tree trunk and flattened himself on the ground at the cliff top to catch his breath. Shifting forward, he peered over the edge of the cliff, checking to make sure he was safe. And he nearly screamed again.

The red droplets were crawling over the sand and rock, coming back together, recoalescing into the serpent shape. Again it formed eyes and the huge, gaping mouth. It began to slither up the cliff toward him.

It wasn't killed after all! Isn't there anything I can do?
Corwin wondered, paralyzed with fear.

Just then, a bright glow filled the air. The first beams of the rising sun penetrated the mist, raced across the surface of the sea and struck the cliff. And the creature.

The serpent screamed and arched its back as if stabbed by a sword. Where the sun touched it, the creature melted as if made of ice. Its blood red color faded to green-gray. The creature washed down onto the shore, flowing outward, its body mere seawater once more.

The water flowed back through the rocks, into the sea. The entire ocean regained its natural color and began its rhythmic movement in and out once more, as Corwin's breathing returned to its natural flow. The familiar roar of the waves returned to match the pounding of his heart.

He sat up. All seemed as it was when he had first come to the shore that morning. Except that his sackful of carefully gathered shells now lay smashed and broken among the rocks below.

Corwin groaned. What demon had sent him such a nightmare? Now he had nothing to show for his pains, not a single shell.

He became aware that he was gripping something in his right hand. Corwin looked down. He was still holding the silvery, glittery thing he had found within the leviathan. Somehow he had held onto it throughout his ordeal.

Corwin held it up and examined it. It
was
a shell, but not like any he had ever seen before. It was spiraled, like a coiled horn—opalescent, glimmering with many colors beneath a silvery sheen. Corwin's right hand itched and he shifted the shell to his left hand. Corwin stared down at his palm. There was a fresh welt in the skin, a welt distinctly in the shape of a sun.

How on earth did that happen
? Corwin wondered.

Suddenly he felt a sharp pain in his gut, and the world spun violently around him.

Chapter Two

That red serpent-creature cursed or poisoned me!
Corwin thought in horror as he writhed on the ground. The wave of nausea passed for a moment and the dizziness eased, but Corwin suspected he would feel it again.

I have to get to shelter. I can't be found helpless like this. At any moment some fisherman could come along and find me and make himself rich by turning me in.

It had been old, blind Henwyneb who had told Corwin that soldiers of the king's guard had been circulating through Carmarthen, seeking a young man of slender yet muscular build, with brown hair and gray eyes. Apparently there were even posters put up in the center of town that had been painstakingly drawn by monks. Corwin had been tempted to go look at these drawings to see how closely men who had never seen him had captured his likeness. But fear and common sense had won the argument with curiosity and vanity, and Corwin had stayed away from town.

Why am I so distracted?
Corwin wondered.
I need to find shelter, and soon
. Still clutching the opalescent shell, Corwin grabbed onto the withered cypress tree and pulled himself up. He stood, wavering, and then loped into the shadows of the nearby forest.

No sooner had he gotten among the trees than another wave of nausea struck him. Doubled over, Corwin saw a cluster of holly bushes beneath an ancient oak. He staggered to the oak, slipped into a hollow between the bushes, and curled up tightly upon a bed of leaves. The dizziness overwhelmed him so completely that he prayed he wouldn't have to move again.

If this is just a fever
, Corwin thought hopefully,
then maybe it'll be gone in a day. I've suffered worse. But if it's poison or a curse, then I could die right here. Well, if I die, maybe I'll meet my master Fenwyck in whatever afterlife has let him in. But this pain is so bad! If I'm going to die, then please make it soon.

A violent shudder shook him, and then an uneasy peace stole over him. Visions appeared before his mind's eye.
Oh, no, now is not the time. . . .

But these were not like the visions of prophecy that had visited Corwin before. For these sights were definitely about
him
.

He saw a shoreline that was not the rocky coast he had just left, but felt deeply familiar. And a woman's face. She had honey-brown hair, and gray eyes like his, and it was the most beautiful face he had ever known. Tears flowed from Corwin's eyes. She had been his mother—he knew that in his soul, and yet he had had no waking memory of her. Corwin felt a sudden, painful loneliness and he longed for the woman to be near, to comfort him. The vision faded and he cried out, “No! Don't go, don't go!” A memory smote him of the woman sleeping and himself trying to wake her. But she wouldn't waken.

Corwin began to sob, but he felt the peculiar peacefulness steal over his mind again, as if someone outside himself was trying to calm him.
Could it be my mother's spirit has come down from heaven to ease my suffering?

Before he could seek to learn the answer, more memories swarmed into his mind. This time he was back in the forest, wandering amid brooks and branches, watching deer and foxes and rabbits, almost as if he had been one of them. Indeed, he'd felt as though he were one with them, for he had dined on berries and wild apples and fish as the bears do, and nibbled on mushrooms and dandelion leaves as the rabbits do. He had swum in the forest streams and pools and could often stay under for minutes at a time, staring at the fishes and frolicking with the otters. Other than the loneliness and occasional periods of hunger, those had been pleasant days for Corwin.

And then came Fenwyck. In his mind's eye, Corwin saw Fenwyck (looking quite a bit younger than the last time Corwin had seen him) bending down and saying, “What
am
I going to do with you? You're a little animal, wild as a fox cub.” Fenwyck was wearing the spangled and fringed purple robe “as worn by the high sorcerer-priests of Hamurabia!” as Fenwyck would proclaim.

The old liar. There probably never was a Hamurabia
, Corwin thought, but fondly.

More memories came. Fenwyck walking beside him down some dusty road. “I will call you . . . Corwin,” he was saying. “For Corwin is near the Roman word for raven, and you are as wild and smart as any raven. You pick up words like one, too.” Corwin hadn't minded being named after a bird. That is, until Nag came along.

“D'you like him?” Fenwyck was saying, in a memory from a few years later, pointing at a black bird sitting on his shoulder. “I won him off an old one-eyed man at a game of bones last night. The man must have been daft—when I'd told him he'd lost, he claimed to have no money and gave me the bird instead. And then he laughed as if it had been the biggest jest on me. Well, we'll show him, won't we? We'll make the raven part of our act.”

The bird, which was very dubious-looking, had refused to learn any tricks or mimic any words. But for reasons unclear to Corwin, Fenwyck had kept it anyway, naming it Nag. Sometimes Corwin had thought Fenwyck was fonder of the raven than of him.

Corwin shuddered again, and his memories flashed forward another few years. Fenwyck returning to their hovel drunk and reeking of ale, yelling at Corwin for chores not done or lessons not learned. A stick pulled down from a hook on the wall—stinging blows across Corwin's back and face. He curled up more tightly against these memories and they, too, faded.

Why am I remembering all this
? Corwin wondered.
I've heard that before they die, men see their whole lives pass before their eyes. Does this mean I'm about to die?

But he continued to fall into another vision. A pleasant one, this time. His first county fair! What a wonder that had been. Booths with heavenly smells of baked bread and meat pies and sweet cakes that would make his mouth water. Horses and cattle and pigs and ducks, all traded, bought and sold. Weavers had cloth to sell, and farmers brought their fresh harvest. Barrel makers and blacksmiths, carpenters and tinkers all plied their trade. Minstrels played on lute and flute, and country girls danced to the drum and tambor. To Corwin it had seemed all the wonders of the human world could be found at the fair.

“Quit gawking, boy,” Fenwyck had said, shaking Corwin's shoulder. “And mind the purses that pass by, at about your eye level. Note the ones whose owners are inattentive and haven't closed them fully. Note the ones that hang too loose from their owners' belts. Remember what I've taught you—bump, dip in, grab what's easiest, and get away. Don't be greedy, for that's the downfall of every pickpocket and pinch-purse there ever was.”

Fenwyck, if only you'd followed your own advice
, Corwin thought.

Another year later, and they were standing on a stage of uneven wood planks, Fenwyck holding up his arms and proclaiming, “Behold! Upon this very platform, my lords and ladies, I shall demonstrate the mysteries of the ancients, wonders of far distant lands, secrets even the Romans did not know!”

Corwin would be pushed forward then, to stare out at a crowd of goggling peasants.

“Behold, good citizens, the Wild Boy of Caledonia! Found in the forest, able to speak only the tongues of animals. Said to have been the get of a princess and a demon. Watch as I place this fish into this barrel. The boy will catch it with his teeth, with no need to come up for air!”

Corwin had easily been able to do it, of course. He had always been astonished at the gasps of amazement he heard from the crowd.

“Behold!” Fenwyck would go on, “I will now conjure fire!”

On any bright day, Fenwyck could do this trick. For he had within his sleeve a burning glass—a little round lens. Fenwyck would hold up his arms dramatically and at the right angle and pronounce some impressive-sounding mumbo jumbo. Sure enough, the scrap of paper or cloth on the table in front of him would soon burst into flame. And the crowd would burst into applause.