8

"It's moving!" Meder cried as he leaned into the hawser which the four of them were trying to drag up the slope. Nonnus had reeved the other end through a three-hole block joining the dugout's mast to the ram of the trireme. "Is it moving?"

"Pull!" the hermit said.

The dugout's lower hull groaned as it began to slide down the stone ramp. The vessel's own weight drove moisture from its soggy underside as it pressed against the unyielding gneiss.

"It's moving!" Meder repeated.

Sharina staggered forward, picking up the pace as inertia began to work for instead of against them. She trod on Asera's heels. Nonnus held the head of the rope; Sharina was at the lower end near the water. The nobles were between them. Neither Asera nor the wizard had been any real help on the drag, but Sharina wouldn't have allowed them to stand aside even if Nonnus had been willing. Sometimes the principle of a thing is more important than the thing itself.

Always the principle of a thing is more important than the thing itself.

They'd only crudely shaped the log. Nonnus had been particularly scornful of his own handiwork, but his intention had from the first been for the simplest possible dugout, fitted with twin outriggers for stability and a mast for a sail cut down from the trireme's own canvas. A high degree of finish would improve the vessel's looks, make it sail better, and increase the comfort of its crew; but more work meant more time.

The survivors wanted to leave Tegma's deathly silence as soon as humanly possible.

The dugout was moving briskly. "Sharina, board and cast off!" Nonnus called.

Sharina dropped the rope and jumped lightly onto the dugout as it slid along past her. They didn't have the manpower to launch the vessel by brute force, so Nonnus had rigged the block and tackle to make up for the deficiency. The most seaward point they could reach to attach the tackle was the trireme's bow. Though the warship was solidly ashore, the several feet of water lapping its seaward extremity were enough to float the dugout, overweight though it was.

"Pull as if you're a man!" Nonnus said. Meder must have let go of the rope when Sharina did. "Pull!"

The dugout hit the water with a splash; the bluff bow porpoised and the vessel skewed sideways. Those on shore needed to continue hauling until the vessel was wholly afloat to save untold additional effort.

Sharina hopped over the sail and stood in front of the mast. The tackle ended in a bight attached to another bight on the mast by means of a thigh-thick wooden pin. Removing the pin was the only thing necessary to release the dugout, but that could be done only when the vessel floated free and took the tension off the tackle.

"Ready!" Sharina called. The dugout wallowed and began to swing starboard, away from the tackle's pull to port. Nonnus had taken the end of the port outrigger in his hand and by a combination of lifting and pulling was straightening the vessel's line. The two nobles were still on the rope, pulling with effort but no apparent understanding of the process.

They'd packed the stores under nets in the dugout's belly before they attempted the launch. There'd been some grain aboard the trireme; scarcely a bite for the full complement of hundreds, but a week's supply for the four of them who'd survived the Archan attack and Meder's wizardry. There was a jug of oil, several bunches of root vegetables, and fresh water in plenty: four tarred casks, as much as Nonnus thought the dugout could safely carry.

They had no meat, but the hermit thought he'd be able to catch fish with dough balls. The bodies of creatures killed in the fighting spoiled quickly in the humid warmth, and there was no animal life remaining on the island.

"Cast off, child!" Nonnus shouted. "Board, you two!"

Sharina kicked down at the pin with her right heel. The wood gave but not enough: the ropes or the wood itself must have swelled since Nonnus had determined the fit.

The dugout bobbed as Nonnus lifted himself over the stern in a motion as graceful as a fish leaping. Sharina tugged the hand axe from her sash and whacked the wood hard with the back of the blade. The pin dropped and the tackle slid over the side, drawn by its own weight.

Crying for help, the nobles splashed through the calm water and grabbed the stern. The hermit ignored them as he prepared to spread the sail. Sharina took a pole cut from an oar and set her weight against it, fending the dugout away from the ramp. They'd launched just as the tide turned, but the harbor water was so still that the ebbing current was no real help.

Nonnus gestured. Sharina stepped over the spar and walked backward along the starboard rail with her seated pole, thrusting the dugout seaward without changing her own position relative to the shore. When she reached the stern, she laid down the pole and reached over the side to lift aboard first Asera, then Meder, with smooth, strong pulls.

Though Sharina kept her face blank, she was contemptuous of the nobles' inability to carry out simple physical tasks. They were both in good health and Meder at least was fairly muscular. She thought of her mother fawning over the pair in Barca's Hamlet . . . and her own marvel that folk so fine would notice her.

The dugout's mast had been the trireme's bowsprit; the spar on which Nonnus was raising the sail had been one of the warship's long upper-bank oars. The trireme's mast, split neatly in half, formed the twin outriggers which two more oarshafts bound to the dugout.

It had been easier to cannibalize the warship for the fittings than to shape Tegma's raw vegetation, and the seasoned wood was preferable anyway. The hull was only part of the new vessel which hadn't came from the trireme.

Meder lay panting in the belly of the vessel. "Look at my hands!" he wheezed. His rope burns were worse than Sharina would have expected for the slight help Meder's efforts had been to the process. "I could have launched us without all this tugging and splashing. By using my art!"

"No," said Nonnus as he tied off the sail's lift to a bitt at the base of the mast. "Because I wouldn't have let you."

He walked to the stern, moving with the delicacy of a gull stepping over a swelling wave. "Give me room," he ordered, "but stay back of the mast."

Nonnus took one of the two paddles; Sharina already held the other. They began stroking the dugout forward. Asera and Meder huddled near the mast and spoke in muted voices.

The sail was limp, the air so still that Sharina couldn't feel its motion on her damp skin. Mist already shrouded Tegma's shore, and she thought the sound of waves breaking on the reefs was louder.

She glanced over her shoulder. Nonnus smiled at her in satisfaction. His strokes with the makeshift paddle looked so smooth that only the wake curling behind the blade indicated how extremely powerful they were.

The fog thinned. There was a breeze and it cut like a knife of frozen glass, though Sharina realized that she'd probably have luxuriated in the warmth if she were back on Haft. The days of muggy heat had thrown her body's temperature control awry.

They'd crossed an invisible barrier between worlds. The world in which the risen Tegma existed was behind them. The chill wind came from the world into which Sharina had been born, the real world.

Breakers growled an angry warning. The fog was thinning. Sharina could see foam now, around coral heads like the molars of walruses that grind the hardest shellfish into sand and less than sand. Low vegetation wavered on the rocks, dark against the surf's white warning. The reefs were just as dangerous to a vessel trying to escape as to one thrown against them from the open sea.

Nonnus tucked his paddle under the mesh of a cargo net. Taking two additional turns in the sheet to the port edge of the sail, he adjusted the angle of the canvas to the wind; the bow swung slightly. The dugout was monstrously unhandy in comparison to a Haft fishing boat, but Nonnus wouldn't have risked this escape without the expectation of success.

The sun was just risen; it had been noon an hour before on Tegma, and the blurred red ball had throbbed down through the mist. Here gulls wheeled and called. A large body slid from the reef into the open sea, unseen save for the splash.

The reefs were a solid curving line, foaming as they prepared to receive the dugout and its passengers. Another seawolf dived into the water to wait.

If I looked into the lagoon now, would I see buildings sunk for thousands of years? But the water was gray with foam, opaque more than a few feet below the surface.

Nonnus canted the steering oar. He slacked the starboard sheet and took several more turns around the port bitt. The vessel continued to swing sluggishly. The surf snarled louder as they neared. Meder and Asera looked around in growing agitation; Meder scrabbled at the net covering some of the provisions and his case of magical paraphernalia.

Sharina glared at them stonily, but her own heart was cold. She'd seen the scraps of wreckage thrown up on the strand of Barca's Hamlet, heavy timbers smashed and clawed before being spat out by the reefs of a distant sea.

By the reefs of Tegma.

"There!" the hermit shouted. Gripping the tiller bar in his teeth, he loosed the port sheet and drew the starboard line taut. The dugout's slow turn reversed, bringing the bow again on a direct heading for the reef. A gap showed between two coral heads, but even that spit water high before drying on the surf's ebb stroke.

The breeze freshened. The dugout gained speed, hastening toward the rocks with suicidal enthusiasm. Although the wind was behind them, spray from the waves' impact spattered Sharina's face.

"When I call you," Nonnus said, shouting to be heard over the hammering surf, "run all the way back to me. Now, run!"

The nobles were already up, terrified by the onrushing rocks. Meder hadn't managed to get his case out of the cargo net. He and Asera scrambled over the provisions.

Nonnus hopped onto the stern transom, clinging to the fall supporting the spar as he balanced over the foaming sea. Sharina threw herself into the far stern, the place the hermit had vacated. The steering oar wobbled unnoticed.

The bow rose as the passengers shifted their weight to the stern. Nonnus loosed the fall, dropping the sail with a bang of the spar on the gunwales. The dugout's thick hull struck the reef, scraping over and through the coral on momentum. If the sail had been set, the shock would have snapped the mast off at its base.

The dugout ground to a halt midway over the reef. "Forward!" the hermit shouted. "Into the bow for your lives' sake!"

Sharina leaped over the nobles, another pair of obstructions to her course. Nonnus was already raising the sail again. Sharina hopped over the spar. Asera and Meder, though reacting faster than they might have done, had to wait for the wet canvas to rise out of their way.

Sharina climbed onto the bow and grabbed the forestay. Spray shot high about her. The nobles clambered to her side, hunched over and gripping the gunwale as well as the support rope.

The dugout tilted minusculely downward and began to move again. The mast and the sail's center of force were forward of where the reef gripped the hull.

The dugout slid into open sea. The thick, one-piece vessel was scraped, but it had withstood its battering progress through the reefs as no planked ship could have done.

Sharina heard the waves roar in frustrated anger behind them.