In the Ruins

“Can you speak Wendish? What are you? What are you called?”

“Gnat,” it seemed to say, yet it kept talking in a language he did not understand, although he had heard it before.

“That’s Jinna.”

“It’s too garbled, Your Majesty. I can’t tell.”

“Can you speak Wendish?” he said slowly, because he knew no words of Jinna. He tried out the other languages he could stumble along in. “Can you speak Ungrian? Can you speak the tongue known to the Quman? Can you—”

“Liat’ano,” it said, lifting a hand in pantomime to shade its flat eyes as would a man staring into the bright sun.

“Liathano! Do you speak of my wife, Liath?”

The creature hissed, as in agreement.

“What does this mean, my lord prince?” whispered Fulk. “How can such a monster know our names?”

“I don’t know. How could such a creature have learned to speak Jinna?”

“Jinna!” The creature spoke again at length, but they could only shake their heads. Impatience burned at him like fire as he wondered what this creature knew and what it could tell him. Did Liath live, or was she dead? How did it recognize them?

“Are there any in our party who can speak the language of the Jinna?” asked Fulk.

“Only Liath,” he said bitterly. “That’s why she took those two Jinna servants with her. She was the only one who could understand them.”

“What do we do?”

“Drag it back to the sea. If it can speak, then it is no mute beast but a thinking creature like us.”

“What if it is our enemy? You see its teeth and claws. I heard the stories the ship-master told us—that it eats human flesh.”

“It is at our mercy.” He shook his head. “It gives me hope that my wife still lives. For that reason alone I can’t kill it, or leave it to die, as it surely will, stranded here.”

It was, indeed, no mute beast. He gestured toward the sea. He spoke his own name, and Liath’s, and Fulk’s, and gestured toward the sea again, as the creature stared at them. When they clambered down the crumbling bank and grabbed its arms, it did not fight them. It was heavy, and strange, and difficult to drag although its glistening tail slid easily over most obstacles. In the end, out of breath and sloppy with mud and ash, they got it to what had once been the shoreline. The sea had sucked well out into the bay, but they dared not walk there among slick rocks knowing that the next wave would come soon.

“Go with the Lord and Lady’s grace,” said Sanglant. “There is nothing more we can do for you.”

“Liat’ano,” it said again, and pointed toward the sky and then toward the ground.

“Does she live?” Sanglant asked, knowing that the pain in his heart would never cease, not until he knew what fate had befallen her and their daughter. He had lost so much, as they all had, but he feared there was worse yet to come.

Lying there awkwardly on the ground, it glanced toward the sea, then copied with eerie precision his earlier gesture. It waved toward the forest, suggesting haste, and said a curt word, repeated twice, something like Go. Go. It had the cadence of a warning. Surely it could sense the tides of the sea better than he could. Fulk shifted from one foot to the next, glancing from the creature to the sea and back again.

“Ai, God!” swore Sanglant. “Come, Fulk.”

They left, jogging across the plain. In places the tide had swept the ground clear. Elsewhere, ditches, small ridges, or other obstacles had caught debris in a wide swathe, corpses and branches and here and there a weapon or wagon wheel tangled together and stinking as the hours passed. Nothing moved on that plain. There was still no sign of life among the broken walls of the town. No birds flew, and now and again lightning brightened the clouds, followed by a distant rumbling of thunder.

They heard the water rising before they reached the soldiers waiting for them at the edge of the forest, nervous as they listened and watched the glimmer of the sea. He turned as the rest of the troop hurried away along the road into the cover of the blasted trees. The water rose this time not in any distinguishable wave but as a great swell. He could not see the mer-creature. The light wasn’t strong enough, and the shoreline was, in any case, too far away and the ground too uneven. Like the rest of them, it would survive the tide of destruction, or it would perish.

A dozen men waited at the verge, unwilling to depart without their prince. Without their king.

“She must still be alive,” he said.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Fulk.