Later, falling asleep on the rocking, rocking raft, he dreamt of thighs, breasts, buttocks, dugs, damp hair, a woman's heat…
He woke to the raft, to the sound of water, to the sound of rafts bumping against rafts; he woke to the damp of a skin of leather against his skin; he woke to a night darker than blindness.
Cold leather.
Cold metal.
What had woken him?
A wave slapped against the side of the raft and spattered his face with spray.
'What is it?' he said. 'Hush,' said Gorn.
Blackwood peered into the darkness. He felt that he had been living in darkness for a lifetime: eating and drinking and dreaming the darkness. Their stomachs were bloated with congealed shadows.
There was another wave. And a smell, a stench like the stink of black mud and rotting vegetation. There was something in the water, and it was huge.
'What is it?'
'Pray to your god if your god can hear you in this place,' said a voice, Miphon's voice. 'Otherwise be silent.'
They were silent.
They listened.
There was a surge of body bulk and a splash. A wave rocked the raft again. Listening, they heard furtive scrabblings and small splashes. They realised those Melski who still survived were coming out of the water.
The raft heaved up.
The ropes securing raft to raft burst. They were thrown up and over to the shock of cold water. Blackwood grappled current in the darkness. He swam, then realised he could as easily be swimming down as up. He was breathless, but let himself float. He began to drift up. So that way was up. He struck out for the surface. Air slapped his face. Breath burst into his lungs. A wave slopped up his nose and a raft clouted him. He grabbed for the raft. Somewhere a scream cried for mother then shrilled into agony.
There was the sound of rending timbers. Then another scream. Snapped off short and bloody. Blackwood hauled himself onto the raft, crawled towards the centre, then bumped full-face into alien skin. He realised there was a Melski on the raft. The next moment, the Melski grappled with him.
His knife was out and in faster than a scream could escape.
He was panting.
There was a rumbling roar from a throat that sounded big as the mouth of a small river. Blackwood lay on the raft, waiting to hear that roar closing with him. But he heard nothing more, nothing but the ripple of water and the small talk of rafts and loose logs discussing their chance encounters in the river flow.
Much later, when Blackwood asked what they had been attacked by, Garash would not say. Miphon said only: 'If there had not been enough of us to more than satisfy its gluttony, we would never have got past it.'
More men died.
Their bodies, weighted with armour to sink them, were thrown overboard. One body woke as it was being searched for valuables; Alish realised that some of his men were now so far gone it might be hard to tell the living from the dead. He checked every corpse himself after that. The last check he did was to bare the chest, make a slit with his knife, then put a finger on the heart to see if there was any movement. He never found any, but at least that way he was sure they were not throwing living men overboard.
A simple burial: a splash, and that was it. No chants, no rites, no songs of remembrance. They could not even see the faces of those who sank away into the darkness.
Finally Alish could no longer bring himself to make the rounds of the remaining rafts. He knew why they were here. They were here because, face to face with Heenmor, Alish had failed to close with the wizard and kill him. Of course, as soon as Alish had stepped forward for the kill, the copper-strike snake would have bitten him – but Heenmor would have died.
Now he was going to die anyway, and, because his courage had faltered at the critical moment, ail the men in his command were going to die as well. Uselessly.
For no purpose. And Heenmor, given time to experiment with the death-stone, would doubtless one day obtain sufficient control of it to destroy the world – and of course Rovac was part of the world the wizard would destroy.
Accepting his death, accepting his failure, Alish sat silently, his mind empty, or slept, dreaming of shadows and glottal rock-swallowing boglands. Hearst talked to him, shook him, abused him, pleaded with him, threatened him, hit him, sang to him, threw water in his face: all to no avail. Alish had given up. He was certain to die before very many more days had passed.
It was about this time that Blackwood started coughing. The rafts drifted on, occasionally bumping and grating against loose logs from those rafts which had been smashed to pieces. Blackwood coughed… and coughed… and slept… and woke coughing. There was phlegm in his throat. When he coughed with his hand to his mouth, his hand came away greasy. He did not know what was wrong with him, but he felt sick.
Now that Alish would no longer make his rounds, Blackwood and Gorn helped Hearst. Blackwood went from raft to raft, coughing. At least he could give men something to swear at. More men died, and the bodies were rolled overboard. Each time Blackwood pushed a body into the water, he remembered the words of Saba Yavendar:
The will may require, but the night has the flesh: To darkness, to darkness.
Darkness, yes, darkness, and the darkness went on for so long that in the end Blackwood began to dream he had been born in it. He thought it would go on forever.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was Blackwood who saw the light first, but he took the distant glimmer for no more than another of the hallucinations that had begun to make his waking moments nightmarish. Then Hearst, who still trusted himself to tell reality when he saw it, named that far-off rumour of day.
'Light,' was all he said.
Light.
Soon they could all see it. It was faint: pallid as the belly of a dead fish. But it was daylight.
As they drew closer, things began to take on shape, then colour. Looking around, they found it hard to recognise their comrades because of their ragged beards and prison pallor.
Then the river shot the rafts down a foaming white-water chute, swept them out into the sun, and left them drifting on the surface of a huge lake hemmed in by high cliffs. The water shimmered with heat-haze. Some cried out in pain, for the sun hurt like the blinding light after the darkness of the womb.
'There's a bird scratching my eyes,' wailed one man, waking from nightmare to nightmare.
Gorn cursed him, and he was silent.
The rafts drifted, idle, silent. The survivors lay face down under the hammer of the sun, sheltering their faces from the blinding light. Then Hearst rolled over; but he kept his hands over his eyes. Red bloodlight filtered through his fingers. Light…
– So we have come through. Yes. And some have said that Morgan Hearst would never lie down till death laid him out, but I'm happy enough to lie here now. Now, yes, and forever if I could…
The sun beat down on his corpse-flesh.
After a while, he opened a narrow slit between his fingers. Slowly he scanned the drifting rafts. He was amazed at the height of the heavens, at the intense blue of the sky, at the ferocity of the sun. His lips cracked apart in a smile.
– Yes, we have come through. And then:
– But look at us! A meal for vultures. Or, at best, a band of half-dead runaway slaves.
Fungus sprouted from the logs in mounds and lugs, white, orange and purple. It sprawled across leather in
