The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

The grailstones had spouted their energy.

“No breakfast for us,” Burton said.

He raised his head abruptly.

“The grails? Did anyone get the grails?”

Monat said, “No, they were lost with the boat.” His face twisted with grief, and he wept. “Owenone must have drowned!”

They looked at each other in the firelight. Their faces were still pale from their ordeal; even so, they lost a shade of color.

Some of them groaned. Burton cursed. He too felt grief for Owenone, but he and his crew were beggars, dependent upon the charity of others. It was better to be dead than without a grail, and in the old days those who had lost theirs could, and often did, commit suicide. The next day they would wake up, far from their friends and mates, but at least with their own source of food and luxuries.

“Well,” Frigate said, “we can eat fish and acorn bread.”

“For the rest of our lives?”Burton,said, sneering. “Which may be forever for all we know.”

“Just trying to look on the bright side of things,” the American said. “Though even that is pretty dim.”

“Why don’t we deal with things as they come up?” Alice said. “For the moment, I’d like my ribs seen to, and I’m sure poor Loghu would like her broken bone set and splinted.”

The man who had conducted them there arranged for treatment of the injured. After this was done and the pains of his patients had been eased with pieces of dreamgum, he went outside. Burton, Kazz, and Monat followed him inside. By then the sun was burning away the fog. Within a few minutes it would all be gone.

The scene was appalling. The entire V-shaped prow of the raft had broken up when its point had ridden up onto the beach and its port side had smashed into a corner of the spire. The docks and the boats of the Ganopo were smashed, buried somewhere in the pile of logs on the beach. The main part of the raft had also slid for at least 13 meters onto the shore. Several hundreds of the raftspeople were standing at the edge of the wreck, talking animatedly but doing nothing constructive.

To the left, logs were jammed against the sheer wall of the spire by the current. There was no sign of the Hadji II, or of Owenone. Burton’s hope that he might be able to retrieve at least a few grails was not going to be realized.

He looked around the raft. Even-though it had lost its forepart, it was still immense. It had to be at least 660 feet or 201 meters long with a breadth at its widest of 122 meters. Its stem was also V shaped.

In the center was the large, round, black object he had seen floating above the mists. It was the head of an idol 30 feet or over 9 meters tall. Black, squat, and ugly, it dominated the raft. It was sitting cross-legged, and its spine bore lizardlike crests. The head was a demon’s, its blue eyes glaring, its wide, snarling mouth displaying many great white sharkfish teeth.

These, Burton assumed, had been removed from a dragonfish and set within the scarlet gums.

In the middle of its huge paunch was a round hole. Inside this was a stone hearth on which a small pile of wood blazed. Its smoke rose within the body and curled out of the batlike ears of the idol.

Forward, near the edge of the raft, the watch tower lay on its side, its supports broken off at the base by the force of the collision. A body still lay near it.

There were some large buildings here and there with many smaller ones among them. A few of the smaller ones had collapsed, and one of the big constructions leaned crazily.

He counted ten tall masts with square-rigged sails and twenty shorter ones with fore-and-aft rigs. All of the sails were furled.

Alongside the edges were a number of racks holding boats of various sizes.

Behind the idol was the largest building of all. He supposed that this was the house of the chief or perhaps a temple. Or both.