We stumbled out onto the beach. It was very wide and gray under the overcast sky. The sea lay a long way out, ink-black, whispering.
Peyuan took my arm, and hurried my flagging body forward.
“Only a little way,” he panted.
“Peyuan-I do not think I can swim-”
And then the sound came in the sand behind us, unexpectedly immediate.
We had the sense to break free of each other, and each run to opposite sides, but one paw glanced across Peyuan’s neck, and he fell and rolled a little way, and was still. I thought of the third warrior I had pushed aside in the tower, and how his skull had snapped from the spine. I could not think how it had come on us so quickly, but I suppose I had dropped behind, and the beach was an open place for it to cross, with no obstacles in the way. Now it spat, and lurched sideways after Peyuan’s body. I found a stone by my foot, and reached, and threw it at the lizard. Its armor deflected the stone, but it turned back, and its eyes fell on me. I did not understand why I had done such a thing. Peyuan was dead-I could not help him. Why had I not left him, and run for the sanctuary of the water?
A shout came from my left, and Fethlin ran back up the beach. The monster turned yet again, once more distracted. Wexl leaped on my right with a high hooting wail. He flung
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sand up at the lizard, and ran around it waving his arms. Stupidly the terrible head swerved to follow him.
It became a grotesque game. Dancing and shrieking we ran, with an energy gouged from our weariness, in circles around the lizard, edging always nearer to the sea, safe while it could not decide which of us to strike at first. But my head swam, and my legs could scarcely carry me. I did not think I should reach the sea.
We made a great deal of noise, and the monster hissed at us venomously; I am not certain when I first became aware of that other sound. High, steady, a throbbing whine almost beyond the pitch of my ears. I thought at first it was only the quick prelude to the faintness which would finish me. And then the Shadow fell over us all.
It lay across the sand, containing us, a vast oval of blackness, and we responded to it with an automatic fear of the unknown thing which beats down from the sky-lands where men cannot go. We drew back, not even daring to look up at whatever hung there, our eyes riveted on its earthbound manifestation. Only the lizard remained unmoved. It started after us, spit flying from its hissing jaws. In that moment, a thin line of white fire struck down and covered it, blinding us. And when we could see again, a pile of smoking stinking stuff lay where the lizard had been, and the sand was black dust.
I had heard them tell stories, in camp and krarl and village, of the gods, and the bolt which a god casts that burns and destroys. I fell to my knees, but my head tilted back on its own, and I looked full at the gliding, thrumming silver thing which hovered a moment more, high above the beach, then dipped sideways and southward, and vanished beyond the far line of cliffs that marked the bay, leaving a thread of golden fire behind it on the darkness.
5
After such a thing has happened, men find they cannot speak to each other of it. It is too alien and too immense to be grasped, it has no place in the world of normal things, therefore they make no place for it. The stuff of legends had touched us, and we said nothing.
We got up, and walked back to where Peyuan’s body was
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lying. Wexl leaned over him, and gently rolled him onto his back. Peyuan’s eyes opened.
“Did you kill the beast?” he asked.
“It is dead,” Fethlin said truthfully.
Peyuan grinned and Wexl helped him up. Peyuan shook sand from himself.
“Now you will not have to swim, Morda.”
I could hardly believe that he was alive. I had seen Giltt die, and Dnarl die. I could hardly believe. I went to him and touched his shoulder, and he grinned all the more.
“Yes, I live.” He laughed, and he hugged me to him. “A miracle, a god-gift.”
We walked back up the beach together, found branches among the trees, now that the need was no longer urgent, and built a fire. There was a warmer feel to the night and no sense of danger, yet Fethlin set his sentries anyway.
The predawn coldness woke me. A gray light was opening over the sea, and against it Peyuan patrolled up and down before the trees, trying to keep himself awake. I rose, and picked my way softly by the fire.
“Peyuan,” I said, “I will take your watch.”
“No, no, I wait to see the sun rise.” He yawned convulsively.
“You took the lizard’s blow that should have fallen on me,” I said. “I at least can take your last hour here.”
After a little arguing, he went to the fire and lay down, and fell instantly asleep.
So I saw the sun come up again over the long sea.
And I thought many things. I thought how rarely, since I had come from the Mountain, had I turned back into my past. Events divided each section of my life, and now the ruins, the lizard, and the great Shadow had divided it yet once more. I could not now return to Qwenex’s people. I must go onward into the unknown places yet again. I turned and looked at the three sleeping warriors, and I thought how Peyuan lived. I wondered then if he had lived because I had at first rejected them, when before always I had welcomed the three guard who came to me, as my protection and my right. I understood what I must do.
The sun was full in the sky, and soon they would wake. There were no dangers on the beach now that the day had come there. So I turned my back, and I ran down toward the sea and lost my footprints in its chilly advancing foam. Southward then. Behind me the tongue of land where I had
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seen the sick redness of the fire in my dream; ahead the far cliffs at the end of the bay.
By noon I was past those far cliffs, and there were no more cities.
The day grew hot, the sky hard and blue. I left the warm sand in the afternoon, having found a way up from the beach. On the headland spreading trees clustered, and waist-high ferns wove around their trunks. It was an uninhabited place, run wild, full of strange bright flowers and the calls of birds. I wandered through it, keeping the sea on my left hand as a guide.
Sunset stained scarlet, purple, green, between the branches, and the trees were thinner. I could see ahead an open place between them, a wide comparatively bare valley set into the woods, and I became aware that the sounds of the woods and the cries of the birds had stopped. I hesitated, listening. All around me was the silence of fear, yet I felt nothing at all. Cautiously I went on, and the quiet seemed to grow more and more intense. Uneasily I stopped again, and listened, and this time I heard a new sound, felt rather than heard, a high thin drumming in the air that made me want to shake my head to clear it.
Step by step now, linking my body to each tree and shadow, I edged to the brink of the valley, and, looking out, I saw what I expected to see there.
Asutoo had spoken to me long ago of the silver sky chariots of the gods, which sometimes rode to earth, and in Ankurum and later in the mountains of Eshkorek, I had looked up and seen the stars which moved, burning, across the dark. But I remembered now the falling star I had seen when I rode to Barak’s camp in the hills-the star with a trail of golden fire, which seemed to come down in the plains beyond. What had passed above us on the beach also issued a trail of flame. Perhaps in my unconscious self I had equated those two consciously unrecognized facts; perhaps I had followed deliberately, with the stupid fascinated curiosity of all breathing things, the fall of this brightest, closest star.
Its silver oval rested in the valley, seeming to pulse and tremble with impossible light, and around it the grass was blackened.
Last sunlight dropped red flakes across the trunks, as I moved out beyond the trees.