A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [89]
“Now look, I need your help. You know who the Elder Brothers are.”
The gray gnome nodded and grinned, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. The purple fellows were suddenly all attention.
“Well, somewhere around here they have a city, somewhere away from the shore, most like. I need to know where it is.”
With a scatter of sand they all disappeared, leaving her to hope they’d understood her.
Sticking to the hard-packed sand at the water’s edge, Jill headed down the beach, keeping the cliffs to her left— going south, she finally decided, once the sun had moved enough for her to judge that it was setting, not rising. It was a long time before she could see the specks wheeling and diving that Dallandra had noticed, and longer still before those specks did indeed resolve themselves into white birds. At that point she realized as well that the land was sloping ever so gently down, and that the cliffs rose lower and lower, finally petering out ahead in a last curve of broken hill. She could also see a brownish surge of water heading out from land and flowing across the ocean. So Dallandra had found her a river, indeed, and Jill was glad of it. In the blazing heat she wanted a swim in fresh water as badly as she was beginning to need the shade of the trees that bordered it.
Unfortunately, when she reached the shallows of the estuary, she found crocodiles, piled on a tumble of gray rocks or flopped onto each other as they lazed on the mud among stands of water reeds. Although Jill started to count them, she gave up after fifty. While the creatures blinked and drowsed in the afternoon sun, little brown birds walked among and over them without the crocodiles even noticing, but Jill had no desire to try the trick herself. She got one of her water bottles out of her pack and had a long swallow—warm, tasting of leather, but at least it was wet. If, as seemed likely, the river got deeper and ran faster upstream, she’d be able to find a safer spot to drink later.
By then the sun was sinking off in the west, and with the cooler air of evening came swarms of insects, rising like a mist from the riverbanks. Deep in the jungle ahead birds began to call back and forth. With a yawn and a grunt, a few of the crocodiles scrambled out of the pack and flopped into the river. Birds screeched a warning and flew. Jill decided that she’d be better off with a good stretch of dry land between her and them. Rather than face the night jungle she hurried back to the beach and went back the way she’d come for some hundreds of yards. Well above the current waterline she found the bleached-gray trunk of an entire tree, its roots all twisted with dead kelp, and a long scatter of smaller pieces of driftwood, plenty of bone-dry fuel for a fire. Crocodiles, she assumed, would dislike fire as much as other wild animals did. She swung her pack free of her aching shoulders, set it down in the shade of the trunk, and set about making camp.
As she was gathering small chunks and sticks, she discovered her first concrete bit of evidence that Evandar had indeed found her the right island. Lying half-buried in the sand was a broken plank, cut and curved in such a way that it could only have come from a ship. It might, of course, have been nothing more than wrack from some Bardek merchanter, carried hundreds and hundreds of miles by the currents, but she preferred to doubt it. In the last of the day’s light she scurried round, searching for more driftwood, scrabbling like a mole in the sand, until at last, just as the twilight was growing thick and gray, she unearthed a flat panel of wood that must have once formed the side of a chest or back of a bench. It seemed to be the splintered half of a big oblong, and it was carved with designs that no Bardekian would have drawn.
Once she got a fire going with less interesting driftwood, Jill studied her discovery by firelight streaked blue from