Reap the East Wind Read Free

monster’s feet... He heaved himself upright and tottered forward, fell on his face half in and half out of the moisture in the depression. He gulped the algae-thick, stagnant water till his belly ached.
    Only minutes later he heaved it up again.
    He waited, and drank more, though sparingly this time. Then he splashed across the pool into a shadow that looked like it would persist all day. He collapsed into a fetal ball and slept.
    He dreamed strange and powerful dreams.
    The woman in white came. She examined his hurts. Where her fingers touched the pain went away. He looked on himself and found that he had healed. He tried to mask his nakedness with his hands. She smiled gently and went to stand between the monster’s paws. She stared at the moon lifting out of the sea, limning the fortress riding the spine of the island off the coast.
    Ethrian joined her. He gazed upon the desert, and saw it as it might have been. Lush, rich, peopled by an industrious, pious race... But there were fires burning on the island. There were ships upon the sea. They were so numerous their sails masked the waves. And there were columns of smoke on the land, and dragons in the sky. Fell wraiths bestrode the thunderous lizards, raining destruction from the firmament. The armies of Nawami fought, were defeated, and fell back to reform their companies. The woman in white summoned dread sorceries with which to lend them aid. Even that was not enough.
    Then the stone beast spoke. It opened its mouth and said a Word. The Word called forth thunder and doom. Skull-faced wraiths plummeted from the sky. Dragons screamed and clawed their ears. The invaders fled to their ships.
    They did not remain gone. A Power dwelt on the island in the east. Ethrian could feel it, could sense its name. Nahaman the Odite. A woman of great evil and great Power, possessed by hatred, obsessed with a need to destroy Nawami.
    Nahaman rallied her armies and struck again. They rolled across the land and descended from the clouds. Neither the witchery of the woman in white nor the Word of the stone beast could shatter the countless waves of them. Each time they came, their attack crested a little nearer the stone beast’s mountain.
    Ethrian soon realized he was seeing generations of struggle condensed into a night, an age of warfare reduced to its high points.
    The hordes of the Odite did come to the mountain. They destroyed everything they could, and silenced the stone beast’s mouth.
    Nahaman came ashore. With the aid of her skull-faced wraiths she smote the land barren. The woman in white and the monster of stone could do naught but watch. The beast’s mouth was his Power and her life. Nawami’s sole preservation, in the beast’s wan power, lay between those great rock paws.
    Nahaman and the survivors of her host withdrew to the island, and thence overseas, and darkened the shores of Nawami no more.
    Ethrian was puzzled. All that drama and violence, just to sail away? What was it all about?
    The woman in white became older. He felt her despair.
    Long had she lived. Long had the mouth of the stone beast preserved her youth and beauty. Now she aged. She withered. She became a crone. She begged for death. The beast would not let her die. Her body became old dry sticks. Even that faded away, till she was no more than an aching spirit fluttering the slopes of the beast’s mountain.
    Ethrian wakened to the light of dawn. He had slept the clock around. He smelled sweet water. He scrambled to the pool.
    Not till he had slaked his thirst did he notice that his hands no longer ached. They remained raw, but seemed on their way to a miraculous healing.
    He stood and examined himself. His feet, too, were improving rapidly. His knees were better. Even the sting of the sunburn had disappeared.
    He whirled around, suddenly frightened.
    Near where he had slept lay a pair of sandals, a neatly folded toga, and a leaf on which stood a stack of seedcakes.
    Fear and hunger warred within him.