which reached almost to the ground. Now he had to climb down.
'No sweat!' said Drake, using an ugly vernacular expression meaning 'easy'.
He was swiftly disabused of this notion, for in his weakened condition – he had lost a lot of water to the sun – he found it hard-going. By the time he reached the ground, he was in a state of wet-faced exhaustion.
He still faced the half-league walk back to the vent he had exited from. Half a league? In this spasmodic terrain, rough as a storm-chopped sea, his undulating route would stretch the journey out to nigh on three thousand paces.
With a third of the journey done, he slipped, fell, and ricked an ankle. Broken? Even if it was, he still had to walk on it. With his dirk, he cut himself a hefty stick to lean on. Up. On! He almost swooned from the pain – but continued.A shadow flickered across the ground.The buzzard?
Looking up, Drake saw something far, far above. High through the blue empyrean it flew. A great bulky body and a long, long trailing tail. It was a hundred paces long if it was a fingerlength. As Drake watched, it vanished into cloud.
It was, he decided, a hallucination. Nothing which flew could be so big. Surely. But then, dragons – no, it had not been a dragon. A monster of the Swarms? Impossible. The Swarms were an invention of wizards, part of a bluff to keep the world from the riches of the terror-lands . . .Again a shadow flickered over the ground.Again Drake looked up.
It was a buzzard, that was all. Probably the same one which had been hungering after him the day before. Well, it was right out of luck, for he had no intention of dying. Not today.'Not ever, in fact,' said Drake.
As the purple shadows of evening were spreading across the terror-lands of the Deep South, Drake gained the vent which led into the depths of Ling. He was too tired to be happy. He stumbled to his quarters, drained a bowl of water then fell onto his bed and collapsed.
'Our visitor has returned alive from the Forbidden Tower,' the Watchers reported to the Great One. 'How can that be?'
Drake spent two days in bed, utterly exhausted. His ankle, fortunately, was only badly bruised – but, even so, he knew there was no escape for him on foot.
It was a good few marches to Drangsturm, with no wild water on the way. Even if he met no monsters, thirst would finish him for certain. He remembered the buzzard circling overhead; he shuddered. Even if he reached Drangsturm, he would be on the wrong side of that prodigious flame trench. Did it run right into the sea? If it did, how far would he have to swim to get to safety?
Forget it! He would have to steal a canoe, yes. And, while stealing a canoe, he might as well go for some pearls. What did they really look like, those 'beads without holes'? Men deemed them fabulous wealth, but what made them so special?
Drake's desire to learn about canoes was amply satisfied in the days that followed. On showing himself interested in the sea, he found plenty of tutors eager to learn him all its aspects. (And also to seduce him – though, fearing more torture, he resisted all their blandishments.)They taught him paddling.They tolerated his fondness for collisions.
And then the Ling made a decision which would shortly allow Drake to satisfy his curiosity about pearls.Drake had lately taken to pointing at Ko, and making strange noises which were clearly meant to be questions. Obviously he wanted to go to the island.
'Being pure,' said the Great One, 'he does not want to live as a parasite. He wishes to share our labours.'
Which was how Drake got to be taken to the pearl-fishing grounds at Ko.
'It's all right,' he said with relief, when they got there. 'It's not melting after all. It must've been some trick of the sea making it look so. We can go back now.'
But the smiling Ling still confessed to no Galish. Instead, they set a bushel of pearl-oysters in front of him, and showed him how these were opened.
Soon Drake knew why pearls were so precious: because in days of oyster-opening, in which he was sure he killed more oysters than all the world could have eaten in ninety generations, he found but one small pearl, and even that was misshapen, squashed almost flat. He had plenty of examples to compare it with, because the Ling were indulging in a positive orgy of pearling, diving from dawn to dusk.'I'll try diving,' said Drake. 'It's got to be easier.'
It wasn't. It was exhausting. But, as he got good at it, he relished the fierce pleasures of physical mastery. To be good at something, to be excellent – yes, that was what made life worth living.
Down in the depths of the sea he dived, swimming sinuous through translucent seas where sunlight sieved down through the blue-green fathoms, where fish flickered away into the mists of distance, or dawdled at weightless leisure between floating weed and plump red sponges.
They dived, some days, near an underwater cliff which fell away to cold, cold, black-green depths. Once, Drake swam out above that unfathomable abysm, for the sheer pleasure of terrifying himself. Once was enough.
In waters less deep, he joined the play with the big, lazy black-winged rays, ferocious in appearance but near enough to harmless unless hooked or speared. He broke open sea urchins for the pleasure of moray eels, which fed from his naked hands. When exhausted by the sea, he slept on rock ledges in the leisurely heat of the afternoon sun.
'He spends less and less time bringing up pearl-oysters,' complained his comrades.
'Doubtless he has a religious connection with the sea,' said the Great One. 'He is engaged in her worship. Let him be.''Oh,' said the Ling.
It seemed there was much to learn about this strange, saintly son of Jon Arabin, who looked young and virile, yet refused every offer of the pleasure of the flesh.
What the Ling did not learn – for they were very innocent, and not much good at arithmetic – was that Drake was robbing them blind. He massed a hoard of twenty pearls – a fortune in other parts, if sailors' stories were anything to go by. And he dreamed sweetly about what such wealth could buy him in civilization.
Each evening, as night settled on Island Ko, he sat by a driftwood fire sucking the flesh from the claws of giant crabs, staring into the flames and imagining the soft breasts of women, the sighs of a swooning lover, the hearty laughter of a tavern, the chink of gold in a casino, the generous smiles of flattering faces admiring his silken elegance.
Finally, the pearling on Ko came to an end. The divers shifted back to Ling. And Drake was ready to escape.
He chose a canoe: one small enough to paddle himself. He scavenged a single waterskin, which he filled from the ever-replenished Inner Pool which supplied the whole community of Ling. Food was no problem: there was any amount of dried oyster flesh for the taking.
He had more than a few doubts about the voyage. It was a hell of a long way to paddle.
'But,' said Drake, 'I don't have much bloody option. If I can get back to Stokos, I can likely be king. Or a priest, at least. What's the choice? To stay here and rot, that's what!'
Ling, as far as he could tell, was ignorant of both booze and gambling. And as for sex – he knew well enough that he would be tortured to death if he so much as laid hands on any of the young flesh which delighted in tantalizing him.
So early one morning, while it was still dark, Drake launched his canoe. It was, in fact, Midsummer's Day -the start of the year Khmar 18, and the first anniversary of the Martyrdom of Muck.
Drake was far out in the bay when the dawnlight, diminishing the dark, revealed a ship. A ship oncoming, a stately sight, all sail set to bear her along in the light winds of dawn. Drake stopped paddling, and sat there, hoping. The ship had green sails, yes. And – a dragon figurehead! It was the
'I wonder,' said one of the elders, observing him from the heights, 'why our young guest was out on the waters so early in the morning.'
