Part 33 (1/2)

'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.