The journey was a haze of brown and green, of sometime drafts of skin-stale water. At times he walked, hardly knowing anything but to follow the man in front of him. Toward the last, as their way began to descend to the sea and the day cooled, he began to take note of his surroundings again. Losing the contents of his stomach a second time, beside the trail, made him weak, but he was free of the nausea and his head was clearer afterward. He drank telise, the kindly seaman who offered it bidding him keep the flask; it only occurred to him later that using something a sick human had used would be repugnant to the man. It did not matter; he was touched that the man had given it up for his sake.
He shook off their offered help thereafter. He had his legs again, though they shook under him, and he was self-possessed enough to remember his ship and the equipment they had abandoned. He had been too dazed and the nemet, the nemet with their distrust of machines, had abandoned everything.
“We have to go back,” he told Kta, trying to reason with him.
“No,” said the nemet. “No. No more lives of my men. We are already racing the chance that other tribes may be alerted by now.”
It was the end of the matter.
And toward evening, with the coast before them and Tavi lying offshore, most welcome of sights, there came a seaman racing up across the sand, stumbling and hard-breathing.
He saw Kta and his eyes widened, and he sketched a staggering bow before his lord and gasped out his message.
“Methi’s ship,” he said, “upcoast. Lookout saw them from the point there. They are searching every inlet on this shore -almost-almost we would have had to pull away, but without enough rowers. Thank heaven you made it, sir.”
“Let us hurry,” said Kta, and they began to plunge down the sandy slope to the beach itself.
“My lord,” hissed the seaman. “I think the ship is Edrif. The sail is green.”
“Edrif.” Kta gazed toward the point with fury in every line of him. “Yeknis take them! Kurt, Tefur’s Edrif, do you hear?” “I hear,” Kurt echoed. The longing for revenge churned inside him, when a few moments before he would never have looked to fight again. He shivered in the cold sea wind, wrapped his borrowed dan about him and followed Kta downslope as fast as his trembling legs would take him.
“We have not crew enough to take him now,” Kta muttered beneath his breath. “Would that we did! We would send that son of Yr’s abominations down to Kalyt’s green halls-amusement for Kalyt’s scaly daughters. Light of heaven! If I had the whole of us this moment…”
He did not, and fell silent with a grimness that had the pain of tears behind it. Kurt heard the nemet’s voice shake, and feared for him before the witness of the men.
XVI
Tavi’s dark blue sail billowed out and filled with the night wind, and Val t’Ran called out a hoarse order to the rowers to hold oars. The rhythm of wood and water cadenced to a halt, forty oars poised level over the water. Then with a direction from Val they came inboard with a single grate of wood, locked into place by the sweating rowers who rested at the benches.
Somewhere Edrif still prowled the coast, but the Sufaki vessel had the disadvantage of having to seek, and the lower coast was rough, with many inlets that were possible for Tavi, a sleek, shallow-drafted longship, while Edrif, greater in oarage, must keep to slightly deeper waters.
Now Tavi caught the wind, with the water sloughing rapidly under her hull. On her starboard side rose a great jagged spire against the night sky, sea-worn rock, warning of other rocks hi the black waters. The waves lapped audibly at the crag, but they skimmed past and skirted one on the left by a similarly scant margin.
These were waters Kta knew. The crew stayed at the benches, ready but unfrightened by the closeness of the channel they ran.
“Get below,” Kta told Kurt. “You have been on your feet too long. I do not want to have to pull you a second time out of the sea. Get back from the rail.”