legs and dragged him hard against the rock wall.
ctopus!' he thought, remembering the line from Taita's stele, 'Her
vagina is an octopus that has swallowed up a king.'
He tried to kick out, but his legs were bound as if by the arms of a sea
monster; some cold, insidious embrace held him captive. 'Taita's
octopus. My oath! He meant it literally. It's got me.'
He was pinned against the wall, crushed, helpless.
Terror seized him, and the rush of it through his blood flushed away the
hallucinations of his oxygen-impoverished brain. He realized what had
happened to him.
'No octopus. This is water pressure.' He had experienced the same
phenomenon once before. On an army training exercise, while diving near
the inlet to the turbines of the generators in Loch Arran, his buddy
diver who was roped to him had drifted into their terrible suction. His
companion had been sucked against the grille of the intake and his body
had been crushed so that the splinters of his ribs had been driven
through the flesh of his chest and had come out through the black
neoprene rubber of his suit like daggers.
Nicholas had narrowly escaped the same fate. The fact that he was a few
feet to one side of his buddy had meant that he escaped the full brunt
of the rush of water into the turbine intake. Nevertheless, one of his
legs was broken, and it had taken the strength of two other army divers
to prise him out of the grip of the current.
This time he was at the limit of his air, and there was no other diver
to assist him. He was being sucked into a narrow opening in the rock,
the mouth of an underwater tunnel, a subaqueous shaft that bored into
the rock wall.
His upper body was free of the baleful influence of the rushing flood,
but his legs were being drawn inexorably into it. He was aware that the
surrounds of the opening were sharply demarcated, as straight and as
square as a lintel hewn by a mason. He was being dragged over and around
this lintel. Spreading out his arms, he resisted with all his strength,
but his hooked fingers slid over the polished, slimy surface of the
rock.
'This is the big one,' he thought. 'This is the one punch that you can't
duck.' He hooked his fingers, and felt his nails tear and break as they
rasped against the rock.
Then suddenly they locked into the last niche in the wall above the
sink-hole which was sucking him under.
Now at least he had an anchor point. With both hands he clung to the
niche, and fought the pull of the water. He fought it with all his
remaining strength and all his heart, but he was near the end of his
store of both. He strained until he felt the muscles in both arms
popping, until the sinews in his neck stood out in steely cords and he
felt something in his head must burst. But he had halted the insidious
slide of his body into the sink-hole.
'One more,' he thought. 'Just one more try.' And he knew that was all he
had left within him. His air was all used up, and so were his courage
and his resolve. His mind swirled, and dark shapes clouded his vision.
