Paul Kearney - The Mark of Ran

Almost, Rol thought he saw something else out at the uttermost reach of his sight. Lights out at sea, a line of them. The wind made his eyes water, and when he rubbed them clear he could see nothing. A couple of low stars perhaps, making their way up the sky from the sea’s brim.

They turned their eyes inland and saw a wide, pale plateau carved with night-blue gullies and pocked with scattered knuckles of weathered stone. It rose steadily, until they could make out the shapes of mountains dark against the stars to the northwest. The Goliad was a vast bowl of desert upland hemmed in by the Goloron and Myconian Mountains on all sides. Beyond those mountains lay Bionar, mightiest and most hated of the realms of men.

“We’ve our work cut out for us, finding water here,” Jude Mochran, one of the sailors, said gruffly. “It’s dry as a corpse’s cough.”

They paralleled the beach. The others tripped over rocks and uttered muffled curses, but Rol could see as easily as if he were abroad in daylight. In the years since leaving Psellos’s Tower he had neglected his exercises and his training had become little more than a memory, but he still had the sight of a cat at night. Unlike the others, he was able to see that many of the jumbled stones that dogged their shins had once been reared up in walls. They were walking through the ruin of some ancient settlement, so old that not two stones of it now stood one atop the other, and the very stones themselves had been rounded by centuries of desert wind, losing their sharply masoned edges.

The wind was stronger out on the headland, which jutted perhaps half a league into the Reach and was no more than four cables wide. There were writhen trees growing here and there in more sheltered places, their branches tilted away from the sea as though in revulsion. Their bark was gray and scaled and the leaves upon them were narrow as the tines of a fork.

Another half hour brought them to the tip of the headland. Below them the boom of the surf was loud as the massed guns of a fleet action, and they could see white flashes of foam in a line to the southwest where a second reef ran alongside the shore. The wrecked ship had been trying to beat along this, fighting for leeway, but the wind had been too determined.

“Rope,” Rol said mechanically. “Who’s brought rope?”

One of the shore party began unwrapping a coil of one-inch cable from around his shoulder. “You’re not going down there?” Creed said.

“I am. Lower me down and I’ll have a look about.”

“Nothing could survive on those rocks.”

“If it were my ship wrecked, my crew cast into the sea, I would hope that fellow mariners would do more than wring their hands over me from a safe distance.”

With the rope tight under his armpits the men lowered Rol down the cliff-face. It was not sheer, and in many places he was able to take his own weight. The thunder of the breakers grew ever louder as he descended. When he had come down some ten fathoms the rope gave out. He untied it and coiled the end about a large boulder, then began scrambling the last few yards with the spray of the waves cool on his face. Elias had been right-there was nothing here, not even a shard of wreckage. The murderous waves had swept the rocks clear of any remnant of a wreck. He had wasted his time.

But now something was moving feebly in the white of the breakers, something huge and glistening. Were it not for his night-sight, Rol would never have seen it. It was not a man. Some great beached fish perhaps. Rol edged closer, until the waves were soaking him and the spray was exploding all about his knees.

Two green lights winked on, watching him. He thought he heard a voice in the tumult of the sea. Startled, he clambered and slithered over the black rocks and wiped seawater out of his eyes. Not a man, but manlike, huger than any man had a right to be.

The thing raised an arm and a white whirling mass of foam broke around it, tearing it from the rock. Rol saw the green lights shut off as it slid into the breakers. He clattered forward, and a club of water smote him about the head and shoulders, flattening him on the stones. He clung there as the wave receded, tasting blood, and when he was able to look up, the thing had hauled itself out of the water again. It was a fathom away, no more, and in its face-it had a face, after all-two great tusks glimmered and the emerald light of the eyes winked on and off as it blinked.

“Give me a goddamned hand, will you?” Its voice was hoarse and cracked, but deep as a well.

Rol reached out an arm and it was at once enveloped by the thing’s huge paw. Then the two of them lowered their heads as another wave broke about them. When it had passed the thing leaped up the rock convulsively, and Rol braced his boots on the stone, pulling with all his might. Its legs pumped and he could hear its talons ticking and scraping on the slick stone. When Rol thought his arm was about to leave its socket, one foot found purchase and the awful grip slackened. The creature boosted itself upward and slapped full length on the slimed stone. They lay side by side and watched a huge breaker come running at them in a slathering fury of white surf. As one, they turned and scrabbled up the rocks to the foot of the cliff. The wave sucked impotently at their feet and withdrew with a rattle of gravel and stone.

The thing Rol had rescued sat panting heavily. There were scraped and broken places all over its huge carcass where the blood shone black in the starlight.

“Thank you,” it said. “I’d held on there long enough.”

“You’re from the ship?”

“Where else?” It shut its perilous eyes and a dry black tongue licked about its tusks.

Light dawned on Rol at last. A night in Ascari, an episode from another life. “I know you. You’re a halftroll. Your name is Gallico.”

The thing’s head snapped round and the light in the eyes intensified. “What in the world-How could you know that?”

“We met once, a long time ago. I had saved your purser from footpads in Ascari. I forget his name.”

“Woodrin. By God, it’s the terrible youth, the one with the Blood in him. You have grown up, my lad-the name, now, the name would be Rol, I think.”

“It would.”

Gallico laughed, a barrel-deep, roaring laugh that rose even above the thunder of the breakers. “Here we are years later, met by chance upon the most desolate coast in the charted waters of the world. If there’s not some kind of fate involved in this, I’ll leave off beer for life. Boy, you are well met and very welcome.”

“Was there anyone else?”

Gallico’s good humor faded. “There were, but they could not hold on. The sea took them. Woodrin was one. He never did learn to swim.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s for later. For now we must get up onto drier land. I feel as though I’ve swallowed half the goddamned Inner Reach. I’m salt-blooded with the stuff. How did you get down?”

“My crew are on the headland with a rope. They’ll haul us up.”

It was approaching the middle of the night by the time they all stood on the clifftop, and when the shore party finally caught sight of the thing they had been sweating and groaning to haul up out of the breakers they stood shocked, like men who go fishing for trout and land a whale. They gave Gallico some of their precious water and Creed, who seemed less daunted by the halftroll than the others, helped bind up the creature’s wounds. Gallico had been scraped raw by barnacles, bloodied by the battering of the rocks, and generally smashed about for several hours as he fought the waves, but he was alert and upright. As soon as he was able, he limped to the brink of the cliff and peered out to sea.

“That’s your ship, down there in the bay?”