Moljar said nothing. He had finished digging the hole in the surface
of the raft. He next cut long strips of leather from his tunic for
rigging. The twenty-foot-high leading edge of the bat's wing, a high
curving spar, he stepped deeply in the hole, like a mast. Soon they
were moving through the fantastic sea before a slight, lethargic breeze.
Their blaster protected them many times from the countless varieties of
sea and air creatures that constantly attacked them. Moljar devised a
sea-anchor by cutting off one of the air sacks from beneath the raft,
and tying it to one end of a long leather rope. When the wind blew in
the wrong direction, he threw out the sea-anchor.
There was little difference between night and day, except that the
phosphorescence dimmed and was replaced by a grayer, more sickly light.
And the high, gracefully-curved membrane of the bat's ribbed wing
arched above them like the bizarre rigging of the junks that ply the
Martian canals between the ruins of Phreer and Sumph-Logan. Black, with
veins of dried blood, it caught the wind and tautened like the black
sails of ancient pirate craft.
But though they could fight the monsters that flew and swam about them
they could not fight the sea itself. The sea is cunning. It can bide
its time, and spring with more violence than the greatest beast. The
wind was its ally.
It was late the following afternoon that Mahra's hypersensitive nerves
detected the distant pounding of the surf against high crags. They both
visualized the dark mountains of Maghrone where the dull spires and
minarets of Anghore towered up from its granite sea wall thousands of
feet into the mist.
The thunderous surf grew in volume to a steady roaring as their
makeshift craft bore them shoreward.
Then, abruptly, Moljar's nostrils quivered. He leaped to his feet and
his black mane matted and curled as his eyes strained upward. "The
cloud layers," he said. "Look!"
Each cloud layer was moving rapidly in different directions. "A storm!"
cursed Moljar. "The wind and sea will pulp us on the rocks!"
Mahra cowered down, clutching at the floor of the raft. One hand
gripped the bone mast of the bat's wing. She reached up the other, and
Moljar's broad yellow hand closed over it, and held it in a silent bond.
The sound of the descending storm came from afar. It rose higher and
higher, reaching the pitch of a thousand shrieking giants. A colossal
comber bore toward them, lifting up, and up. Their eyes followed its
curling summit, helpless, bold pygmies. A wall of blue, foaming with
white like a mad beast, translucent as they saw it towering up through
the swirling vapor. Then it collapsed over them.
Moljar's hand gripped hers. A vise that all the frenzied pounding of
the ocean could not break. As the tons of water crushed them down,
shattered the raft, hurled it away like chaff, their hands were locked.
Their ears rang. Their minds cried out and were smothered. Coughing,
blinded, they were absorbed by the sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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