If he survived...

It seemed that many, many hours had passed. The sun had, indeed, moved westward, but it was not yet in his eyes. The grey hills had grown only slightly darker... . He was too tired to go on. His stubbornness had burned away.

He was ready to sink into the deep. He was too tired to be afraid.

Something brushed his leg.

He was no longer too tired. He kicked in panic and tried to swim away.

A dorsal fin slid across his field of vision. Another something touched him.

He began to flail and gasp.

One of the sea beasts flung itself into the air. It arced gracefully and plunged into the brine.

Ethrian was not reassured. He was an inland child. He did not know a dolphin from a shark. Of sharks he had heard from his father's friend, Bragi Ragnarson. His godfather had told cruel, grim stories of the great killers ravening amongst the crews of ships wrecked in fell sea-battles.

His struggles earned him nothing but a belly full of salt water.

The dolphins surrounded him. They bore him up and carried him to the desert shore. With his last spark of energy he dragged himself across the rocky beach into the shadow of a cliff. He collapsed, puked seawater till his guts ached, fell asleep.

Something wakened him. The time was deep night. The moon was high and full. He listened. He had thought he heard a voice calling, but now there was nothing.

He looked down at the beach. Something was moving there, making little clacky sounds... He saw them. Crabs. Scores of them. They seemed to be staring at him, waving their claws like soldiers' salutes. One by one, they scuttled closer.

He drew away, frightened. They meant to eat him! He sprang to his feet and stumbled away. The crabs became agitated. They could not keep his pace.

He seated himself a hundred yards away. Stones had torn his feet and barked his shins.

Again, faintly, he thought he heard someone calling. He could distinguish neither direction nor words.

He stumbled a little farther, then collapsed and slept again.

He had strange dreams. A beautiful woman in white came and spoke to him, but he could not understand her, nor did he remember her when he wakened.

Daylight was almost gone. He was hungry and thirsty. His whole body ached. His sunburned skin had blistered. He tried drinking from the sea. His stomach refused the brine. For a time he lay on the sand in an agony of heaving.

He rose and surveyed the land by twilight. It was utterly without life. There were no plants. No cliff swallows wheeled against the gathering darkness. No sundown insects hummed the air. Even the rocks were barren of lichens. The only living things he had seen were the crabs, which had come from the sea.

A touch of cunning came upon him. He settled himself near the water, watching the waves charge toward his toes, peter out, and slide away.

He used a stone to smash several crabs when they came. He ripped out salty flesh and ate till his stomach again rebelled.

He retreated from the water and slept a few hours more.

The moon was up when he wakened. He thought he heard voices. He crawled out to the sand, where he could stand and walk without further injuring his feet. Searching the line of cliffs, he thought, for an instant, that he saw a woman in white staring out to sea, her arms lifted as if in supplication. Her clothing whipped around her, yet the air was completely still.

She disappeared when he moved to a better vantage.

He considered his predicament. He had to get off the beach and find food and water. Especially water. And something useful as clothing, else the sun would cook him alive.

He could see no way up the cliffs.

He started walking along the strand.

Exhaustion overcame him soon after dawn. He crawled into a shadow and slept among jagged rocks. His tongue felt like a ball of wool.

The tide came in. The sea pounded the rocks, thundering, hurling white spray thirty feet into the air. And again Ethrian dreamed.

Again a woman in white came. Again he could understand nothing she said.

And again he wakened after dark, and ambushed crabs, and thought of walking on down the beach in search of a break in the cliffs.

The tide was out, yet seemed to be in. The crash of breakers seemed far, far away. Over them, he heard the faintest creaking, then clanking and shouting. He settled on a boulder, waited to see what was happening.

Suddenly, he saw what looked like a fleet of a thousand ships out on the white-capped sea. Boats plunged through the surf like raging black horses, scraped on sand and shingle, discharged lean, dark-bearded men in alien armor. Shorter, fairer men in armor equally strange met them on the beach. Their swords flashed and sang.

A voice called out above the roar of battle. Ethrian looked up. A woman in white stood upon the clifftop, her arms outstretched. Blue fire crackled among her fingers.

Blue witchfire played over the white-winged vessels upon the sea. Leviathans surfaced and flung themselves at the ships. Sharks and porpoises swam to the woman's song, ignoring one another as they attacked the swarthy invaders.

Then ruby bolts flashed from the ships, pounding the cliffs. Great walls of stone fell on the combatants on the beach...

Winged things arced across the moon, their mouths trailing tongues of fire. Creatures bigger than men rode their scaly backs, vast black cloaks trailing behind them. In their hands they bore spears of light which they hurled at the woman in white.

She spun webs of blue and cast them into the firmament. They fluttered toward the winged lizards like merry moths, wrapped themselves about the dragons, and brought them tumbling to earth.

One thing Ethrian noted through the flash and flame: The land was alive. Riotously alive. It could not be the desert that held him captive on its shore.

The vision began to fade. He looked this way and that, trying to make sense of it. It was gone before he could grasp anything more.

He looked toward where the woman had stood. There was a gap where the red bolts had bayoneted the cliffs. A gap where, earlier, he thought there had been nothing but solid cliffline.

He crept that way, unsure, cautious. The moon was high now. He could see the tumbled stone well.

It was not a fresh fall. Ages had gnawed at the boulders in the slide.

A voice seemed to call from the desert beyond.

He froze.

It was another of the ghost voices. He shrugged. He had no time for mysteries. His great task was to survive. To do that he had to get off this shore.

The climb was an epic of pain. And he found nothing above but moon-silvered desert vistas. More land utterly without life. Yet... yet he heard the voices. Wordless voices. They called.

What was this land? What forgotten spirits haunted its barrens? Gingerly, he limped in the direction whence the voices seemed to come.

His feet were swollen, raw, and festering. His tongue was fat and dry. His sunburn blisters were breaking. He ached in every sinew and joint. A throbbing pain beat from temple to temple.

But he was stubborn. He went on. And, in time, the descending moon outlined something atop the nearest mountain.

The more he studied it, the more it looked like some gargantuan figure carved from the mountain itself. It was a great sphinxlike creature, facing eastward.

Something crackled beneath his foot. He stooped. It was a twig with a few dry leaves attached. It had been tumbled along by the wind. It was acacia, though he did not recognize it, never having seen the tree.

His heart leapt. Where trees grew there must be water. He limped faster, moving like a man dancing on coals.

Dawn came. He was stumbling and falling more than walking. His hands and knees were raw. The great stone beast loomed high ahead, up just a few hundred yards of slope.