The white-red throat growled like the storm. The lightning-shot circle squeezed closer to the motionless boat.
“What will you bargain, sea hag?” Hale demanded with shrill courage that calmed his son to hear. Hale was frightened, facing death and a monster more shocking than death; but he was facing them as best he could.
Dennis, safe behind a veil of time and magic, had his father as a model of how a man should act in the final crisis. Hale’s son could do no less than control his feelings now, when he was only a phantom of sense and feelings.
“I will make you king of this shore, fisherman,” the sea hag said. “King of Emath.”
“Dead man on dead rocks, is that what you mean?” Hale cried. “Begone, sea-bitch—the storm will bargain me that.”
“I will make you king in a crystal palace if you bargain with me, fisherman,” said the sea hag. “I will raise a harbor safe in any storm, and all who use the harbor will be yours to command under our bargain. All this… or the rocks and the fish and the birds to peck your bones.”
“You’re toying with me,” Hale said, no longer shouting or angry. He let go of the tiller and stay; the boat was as firm as if were dragged its length onto shore. “Why do you talk of bargains, sea hag? I haven’t anything but my clothes and this boat—and only a half share in the boat.”
The sea hag closed its lips. Its woman-face smiled at Hale with the icy visage of a castle courtesan.
“Give me your firstborn son, King Hale,” said the terrible real mouth.
“I haven’t a wife, I haven’t a son,” said Hale, wringing his hands at the false hope. “I haven’t a son!”
“Give me your firstborn son when he is a year of age, King Hale,” said the sea hag. “And I will give you Emath and your life.”
“You can’t really do that,” Hale said. “You can’t make me king…”
His voice had fallen almost to a whisper. Dennis heard it, and the woman-face smiled again.
The wrack of storm clouds was clearing, blowing away in tatters in every direction. The sun was low in the west. Its light streamed in crimson fingers through the remnants of the storm.
“Bargain with me, King Hale,” said the sea hag.
Hale closed his eyes. His hands gripped one another so harshly that the blunt nails drew blood.
“Have your bargain then!” he shouted to the creature.
“I have your word, King Hale,” said the sea hag. “And when the time comes, I will have our bargain.”
The creature began to sink. The boat trembled as a fresh breeze shook its mast and furled sail.
When the cloud curtain rose, it displayed the shore half a mile to leeward. The rocks of the corniche were dulled by the horizon’s shadow, but sunlight still lit the jungle canopy and the rare bright flowers there.
Hale muttered a thankful curse. He slipped a loop of rope over the tiller preparatory to shaking out enough sail to tack clear of the cliffs.
It was as if neither storm nor sea hag had ever existed. Dennis was suddenly sure that he was a wraith in a time that had never existed: that his father would sail off into a future of fish and—
Water began to surge at the shoreline.
First a rumble, then a double spout that threw mist high into rainbow diffraction. The breeze that had followed the storm now failed, but the boat began to pitch with the violence of the sea roaring in the near distance.
Ropes of glowing rock lifted high enough above the sea that the steam of creation no longer hid the angry glare. The lava was fiercely orange at the moment it appeared, black the instant it cooled below liquescence. As the double headlands rose into a firm barrier against the might of any storm, their sea-washed roots took on the same dull red as the corniche from which they now extended.
A vagrant puff of air blew from the land. It felt hot and smelled of sulphur. Fish floated belly-up on the surface of the sea. Dennis’ father held a shroud reeved through the three-fall block at the masthead, ready to raise the sail; but he hadn’t moved since the shore began to boil into a harbor.