hands. He held it for three racking breaths before he could find the strength to
drag the punt fully aground, further up the tunnel.
The tunnel was unlighted. Even the plankton cast up by the spray illuminated
little more than the surfaces to which it clung. Samlor spent his first several
minutes ashore striking a spark from flint and steel into the tinder he carried
in a wax-plugged tube. At first his fingers seemed as little under his control
as the fibres of the wooden pole they had clutched so fiercely. Conscious
direction returned to them the fine motor control they would need later in the
night.
By the time a spark brightened with yellow flame instead of cooling into
oblivion, Samlor’s mind was at work again as well. His shoulders still ached
while the blood leached fatigue poisons out of his muscles. He had been more
tired than this before, however. The very respite from wave-battering increased
the Cirdonian’s strength.
With the tinder aflame, Samlor lighted the candle of his dark lantern. Then,
carrying a ten-gallon cask under one arm and the lantern in the other hand, he
began to walk up the gently rising tunnel. The lantern’s shutter was open, and
its horn lens threw an oval of light before him.
The tunnel was not spacious, but a man of Samlor’s modest height could walk
safely in it by hunching only a little in his strides. He could not imagine who
had cut the passage through the rock, or why. Scraps – a buckle, a broken knife;
a boot even – suggested that the smugglers used it. Samlor could imagine few