12

With a pair of Serian sailors apiece pulling three of the sweeps and Cashel alone on the fourth, the Golden Dragon nosed slowly onto the beach. The westering sun cast the ship's shadow far across the landscape of sand and tamarisk bushes.

"Hooray!" Mellie cried from Cashel's shoulder, bouncing from her toes into a handstand and back again. "Oh! it's so good to be back on land again, isn't it?"

Cashel grinned as he drew in the sweep, careful not to jab the sailors doing the same thing on the other side of the ship's waist. Strictly speaking Mellie stood on his shoulder and he stood on the deck of the Golden Dragon. Personally, he didn't care that the ship's flat bottom was aground on sand instead of gliding through shallow water.

"Well, I'm not a watersprite!" Mellie said as tartly as if she was reading Cashel's mind. "Ooh, come along, Cashel!"

She dropped from his shoulder to his waist, catching herself by one hand on his leather belt, and trickled like a breeze down his hairy right leg on her way to the ground.

"Hey, wait for me!" Cashel called. Sometimes he forgot that other people couldn't see the sprite the way he did, but it probably didn't matter a lot. The Serians treated him as though he were a member of a different species anyway. The fact that he talked to himself or the empty air didn't make him any stranger in their eyes.

The Highlanders could see Mellie, and they acted as though Cashel were a bigger version of themselves besides. That was even more disturbing when Cashel let himself think about it.

The Highlanders had all scrambled off the ship, many of them while the square prow still slid through the surf. The little men capered and chortled in their joy: Mellie wasn't the only person aboard the Golden Dragon who was glad to be on firm ground again. One of the Highlanders gave a fluting call and pointed; the whole dozen vanished up one of the weathered draws into the scrub.

The Highlanders were the reason the Golden Dragon had made landfall here, one of the hundreds of uninhabited islets dotting the Inner Sea. Because the Serian vessel had been driven from port without time to load properly, it was short of the fresh vegetables and meat that to the Highlanders were the only imaginable foods. The Serian crewmen were on three-quarter rations of oatcakes and onions supplemented by the occasional fish, adequate until the Golden Dragon docked at a real port, but the Highlanders would starve unless something was done promptly.

Food was always a concern on a long voyage even when it wasn't a matter of life or death. Sail-driven merchant vessels could be becalmed for over a month, creeping along by the crews' backbreaking labor with sweeps meant only for maneuvering in harbor. Over the centuries, prudent captains had landed goats on most of the islets with a modicum of vegetation and pools to collect rainwater. The hardy little animals provided occasional meals for seawolves and a source of fresh meat for sailors willing to hunt them.

"Willing" wasn't the word to describe the Highlanders. Cashel doubted they'd even bother to cook the first goat or two they caught.

The sweeps fit into slotted racks on either rail. Cashel set his in place and stepped back, leaving it to the sailors manning the other starboard sweep to tie them both down in the fashion their tradition thought proper. Knots were as culturally individual as hairstyles; Cashel knew the Serians would quietly redo his work as soon as he turned his back.

He bent and scooped Mellie from the bridge of his instep, planting her on his shoulder again despite her squawks of complaint. "Masters?" he called to Jen and Frasa on the quarterdeck. "May I go ashore too?"

One of the brothers—Cashel still couldn't tell them apart at any distance—

turned from a discussion with the captain and bowed low. "Of course, Master Cashel," he replied.

"You'd think that you were the one who'd spent the last thousand years learning how to stay alive on this plane," Mellie grumbled as Cashel picked up his quarterstaff and strode for the bow.

"There's likely rats here," he said, unperturbed by the complaints. "And we know there's Highlanders. I'm not going to let something happen to you when you're my responsibility."

Sailors hopped over the side and splashed up on shore. They'd build brush shelters for the night and heat their oatcakes, but unlike Mellie and the Highlanders they felt no great concern as to whether or not they were on land. The Serians—and this was true of Frasa and Jen as surely as it was of the common sailors—lived in self-contained units. It made little difference to them whether they were enclosed by a ship's hull or the walls of a trading compound.

A quartet of sailors staggered up the beach under the iron weight of the main anchor while other sailors payed out the cable behind them. They'd set it forty feet inland to keep the Golden Dragon from drifting away in the night. More sailors were lowering the bower anchor from the stern to prevent abnormal wind or waves from driving the vessel too hard aground to float off on the morning tide.

Jen and Frasa were convinced that there was no risk to this landfall, but Cashel kept remembering the storm that had raked Barca's Hamlet and driven the trireme to them. Well, he hadn't been asked his opinion; and the Highlanders needed meat, true enough.

Mellie sniffed and sat cross-legged, facing back over Cashel's shoulder. "There's no rats," she said. "I'd smell them. And the Highlanders won't bother me now because they think I'm your pet."

She turned her head and stuck her tongue out at him. "I guess that's what you think too," she added.

Cashel thrust one end of his staff down into the sand; the surf-washed upper few inches gave, but the packed lime substrate just below was firm. Instead of jumping down as the Highlanders and sailors had done, he lowered himself gently, supported by the quarterstaff and the bow railing. A man of Cashel's weight and strength learned early not to move hastily; and anyhow, he wasn't a hasty man.

Cashel hadn't minded life on shipboard but he found it surprisingly pleasant to be among greenery, even if it was mostly the minute, bitter-tasting leaves of tamarisks. He wondered how goats survived with no better fodder, and what their flesh tasted like if they did. He didn't suppose the Highlanders were finicky eaters.

Mellie hopped to the ground as soon as Cashel strode beyond the upper line of the surf. She scampered up a bush and plucked one of the tiny pink flowers to stick behind her ear: on the sprite, it looked like the bloom of a poinsettia.

"Oh!" she called, leaping to the ground again. "It feels so good!"

The gully was less a watercourse than a trough the wind had worn, though it probably channeled the runoff when storms swept across the little island. Shrubs stood on pedestals of coral sand which their roots bound, but between those miniature plateaus the wind scoured twisting passages.

Cashel paused at the gully's head to check the bare ground for the footprints of goats—or, of much greater concern, rats. Mellie might say she'd smell rats if they were present, but he was the one who—

He looked up just in time to see the sprite vanish up the gully, turning cartwheels every few strides. Her laughter trailed back around the bend twenty feet away; then the sound was gone too.

"Mellie!" Cashel shouted. He raised his staff vertically so that he could move without it catching in the tough branches and broke into a trot. He hoped that when he turned the angle he'd find the sprite waiting for him with her tongue sticking out in mockery.

He rounded the corner. Mellie wasn't there. To Cashel's amazement, a hut made of huge fossilized bones squatted in the middle of a wide spot in the gully. An old man wearing only a breechclout squatted at a fire of tamarisk stems in front of the hut; he was heating dark liquid in a chipped stoneware bowl.

"Oh!" Cashel said, skidding to a halt. He hadn't expected to meet even a goat. A human with a permanent though crude dwelling was more than a surprise.

"Good day, sir!" the old man said. He stood up spryly. "Very good to see you! Very! Won't you have some tea with me?"

"I . . ." Cashel said. He lowered his staff, embarrassed that he must have looked as though he was ready to smash something flat with the weapon. "Ah, no, I'm looking for a—"

He paused, realizing that the old man might have seen the Highlanders but Mellie would have been invisible to him.

"A friend," he finished lamely. He stepped to where the hut squeezed close to the gully wall, tight for a human but a broad thoroughfare for the sprite.

"The little red-haired girl?" the old man said. He held his right thumb and index finger up in a close approximation of Mellie's height. "Why yes, she came by. I hoped she'd stay for a moment and talk, but she ran into the bushes there."

He pointed generally to the side. The gully's wall, textured by a net of rootlets, was about four feet high; the tamarisks waved another eight or ten feet in the air. Cashel frowned at the tangle of scrub.

"I'm sure she'll be back here any time, good sir," the old man said politely. "Why don't you wait with me and we'll have tea while we talk?"

Cashel frowned at the thicket, as featureless as the sea itself. He could force his way through the tamarisks if he wanted to, but he certainly couldn't find the sprite among them if she wanted to hide. Was she that upset at his attempt to keep her close?

"Mellie!" he called. "I'm sorry, Mellie. Come back and don't scare me this way!"

Silence answered.

Cashel turned, feeling as though the clear sky were crushing him down. He didn't know what to do.

"Poor boy," the old man said. "But she'll be back soon, I'm sure. Come sit with me, please."

With a smile that seemed both sad and desperate he added, "I haven't talked with anyone for a very long time. I came here to be alone, but I'm afraid I succeeded better than I'd intended."

"I—" Cashel began. He thought about what it would be like to live for years on this barren islet with no company except the occasional hunting party of sailors. The old fellow looked to be a cultured man.

"Well, I guess I can sit with you a moment," he said. "But I won't have anything, thank you. Till my friend comes back anyway."

"Perhaps later," the old man said, lifting the bowl off the fire by its thickened rim. He seemed tense though as friendly as a little puppy. Gesturing toward the hut with his free hand, he added, "Would you care to see my dwelling?"

The hut was like nothing in Cashel's experience. The walls were made of petrified thighbones, each of them the diameter of a fruit tree's trunk. Ribs of similarly huge size formed the roof. The gaps were chinked with seaweed, but Cashel couldn't imagine the place being either dry or comfortable in bad weather. He'd slept in drystone sheep byres himself, but there he'd had the sheep to keep him warm.

"I'm a hermit, you see, though I know it sounds pretentious to say so," the old man chirruped. When Cashel hesitated, the old man scooted inside himself as if to prove that there was nothing sinister about his dwelling. "I decided to find a barren island like this to study, meditate, and purify myself in absolute privacy."

He shook his head and tittered, a sound that had as much madness as humor in it. "Oh, my goodness, how well I succeeded! Absolute privacy! Oh, yes!"

Cashel squatted to look into the hut without blocking the light. He was uncomfortable; maybe it was just worry over Mellie, because he could feel the sincerity of the hermit's friendliness. He was a weird old man, sure, but not a lot different from Tenoctris, Cashel suspected.

Besides, the hermit was utterly harmless. Cashel could have broken him in half with one hand, not that he could imagine a circumstance that would make him want to do that.

The hermit had laid a bed of seaweed and tamarisk branches against one wall. An iron cooking pot, somewhat larger than the pottery vessel now on the fire, rested upside down against the other wall. Beside it was a dovetailed wooden box of about a half-bushel's capacity, its lid resting askew. Cashel could see that the interior was a series of vertical pigeonholes, each holding a parchment scroll that had been used so much that the varnish was gone from the roller tips. Though worn, the books were obviously kept with love.

There were no manufactured articles in the hut apart from the two pots and the book safe: not a knife, not a lamp; not even piece of cloth. The hermit's breechclout was inexpertly woven from fibrous tamarisk bark, obviously by the wearer himself.

Cashel leaned his staff against the front of the hut. He eyed the doorway, then knelt and turned his torso sideways in order to fit. The opening was high enough or nearly so, but it was very narrow.

He looked around again, certain that there must be more than what he was seeing. "Do you live on goats, then?" he asked. Though there was no sign of bones or butchering; no smell, either, and that you couldn't hide.

"I'm a vegetarian," the old man said. "I—and I don't mean to preach, good sir, please don't take what I'm saying as disapproval of whatever philosophy you may hold. But for me it wouldn't be right to preserve my life by taking the life of another creature."

He smiled in embarrassment. "It was part of the purification, you see. I live on the sea's bounty: the currents carry weed of many varieties onto the beach here, as regularly as the sun rises. I like to think that Nature herself aids those who live in harmony with her."

"Ah," Cashel said in soft-voiced amazement. He looked around the hut again, wondering how the old man had managed to move anything as heavy as these petrified bones. "I couldn't . . . I mean, I don't eat off gold plates myself. But this . . ."

The hermit smiled shyly. "I don't miss it," he said. "The food; the, well, 'comforts' people would call them. I have my studies."

He nodded toward the books Cashel squatted beside. "I've achieved many of the purposes for which I came here," he went on. "I'll admit, though, that I've been lonely at times. Very lonely, I'm afraid."

Cashel heard the desperation in the poor man's voice. "How long have you been here, sir?" he asked.

They hadn't exchanged names. Cashel wasn't sure how he'd respond if the old man asked his name; perhaps understanding that, he hadn't asked. There was power in being able to call something, someone, by the right name.

Cashel wished Mellie was with him. He missed her, missed her more even than he'd have expected to; but especially he missed her advice on the situation. Mellie would understand the things that Cashel felt pressing down on him.

"A long time," the hermit said. His soft voice trembled; he forced a smile. "Longer than I can say for sure. At first I wasn't interested in time, and after a while . . . I'm afraid I can't even guess."

Cashel had heard a widow weeping over the grave of her only child. The old man's words were even sadder, even lonelier.

"You know . . ." Cashel said. Did he sound suspicious? "My friend that I'm looking for, most people don't see her."

The hermit smiled at the implied question. "You're puzzled that I do?" he said. "Really, good sir, it's scarcely more amazing that you do see her than it would be if I didn't. I've given a long life over to the study of such matters, while you . . . ?"

He let his voice trail off delicately.

Cashel managed to chuckle. "I've studied sheep," he admitted. "And woodcutting and a few other things. But no, I can't even read—though I've a friend who does."

He blushed, aware as he spoke the words that bragging to this man that Garric could read was about as silly a statement as had ever come out of his mouth. "I don't know how it is that I see Mellie," he added. "I just did."

He looked directly at the old man. "I know a lady who's a wizard," he said. "I guess you're one too, sir?"

The old man smiled. "More of a philospher, I would say," he replied. "But there's a point where all knowledge joins, I admit."

Cashel felt the pressure growing. The thick stone walls seemed strangely insubstantial but the world beyond the doorway—the sand, the rustling tamarisks—squeezed in on him. The air itself thickened, changing the quality of the light.

"I've got to go find Mellie," he said hoarsely. He felt as if he were buried in wet sand. He could move but it weighed him down.

"Have some tea, please, and I'm sure you'll see your friend again," the hermit said as he leaned toward Cashel with the bowl. The fluid was probably cooked from some form of seaweed; certainly it wasn't tea, but it had a spicy, pleasant odor.

"Please, good sir," the hermit said. "I've been alone for so long. Drink with me."

The old man lifted the bowl to his lips, sipped the dark liquid, and swallowed. His eyes were on Cashel. Cashel started to get up, struggling against a weight as great as the world itself.

"Please . . ." the old man pleaded.

Blue light. A tiny figure of blue light, a bright shadow thrown on the inside of the upturned iron pot.

Mellie!

Cashel snatched the pot away and flung it clanging against the stone ribs of the roof. Mellie leaped onto his hand and danced up his bare arm, caroling her joy.

The pottery bowl lay overturned on the ground; the hermit cringed back. Cashel stood, pressing upward against the roof and sidewall.

"Please—"

Cashel roared, lifting his arms. A blue glare enveloped him. The stones were light as thistle down, light as spiderweb. He thrust his hands to either side, ripping apart the walls of the world that held him. Sunlight and wind and the waxy green leaves of tamarisks locked into focus with Cashel's shouting triumph.

Words drifting in limbo as the blue light faded into the black peace of unconsciousness: . . . so very lonely . . .

The ground on which he lay was in darkness, but only a few stars shone in the purple sky. Cashel heard the Highlanders' happy chatter as they came down the gully toward him. He raised his head.

"Shall I ask them to help you?" Mellie offered. "You must be very tired, Cashel. Even you."

Three Highlanders came around a twist in the passage, moving jauntily despite the fact that each of the little men carried across his shoulders a goat of at least half his own body weight.

They halted in surprise when they saw Cashel lying on the ground. The rate of their chattering increased like that of chicks in the nest when the mother bird appears.

"No, I can . . ." Cashel said as he rolled to plant his hands flat on the ground. Existence rippled like cloth in the wind. He'd never felt so weak before in his life. What had happened to him?

"Cashel, don't—" the sprite said.

"I can," Cashel grunted. Everything closed down to the feel of his palms against the gritty soil. He didn't want to live if he couldn't get up. He wouldn't lie here like a foundered horse.

"I can!" and he pushed his torso up, rising to his knees, lurching back and upright all as part of the same motion. He swayed, towering before the astounded Highlanders.

The world was firm again and Cashel's feet were set firmly on it. He began to laugh in relief. The Highlanders twittered about him like a flock of birds; Mellie trilled merrily, caressing his ear.

"Oh!" she said. "You're so strong, Cashel. The pot was iron!"

There was no sign of the hut. Cashel sobered. He turned, thinking it must be behind him.

The hut wasn't there. Bending over, he could see his own faint footprints despite the twilight, but the gigantic bones and the fire-blackened ground that couldn't have vanished—

Had vanished.

"Was I dreaming?" Cashel said, as much to himself as to the sprite on his shoulder. "There was an old man, a philosopher . . ."

The Highlanders closed around him, touching him with friendly hands and tugging him gently toward the ship. The long-haired goats they carried were still warm.

Cashel spread his arms. The muscles ached but they moved normally. He walked along with the little men, glad of their company and Mellie's.

"I dreamed I tore his hut apart," Cashel murmured. Fires gleamed on the beach; the western horizon was a pall of red flame that threw the Golden Dragon into ungainly silhouette. "I shouldn't have done that."

"If you'd eaten or drunk anything, Cashel," Mellie said, "we could never have left."

The Highlanders trotted toward a group of their fellows who'd already begun grilling their prey with the hides still on. Hair singed with a stench the cooks didn't seem to notice. Frasa and Jen rose in greeting at a fire placed upwind of the Highlanders.

"He was just a lonely old man," Cashel said.

He glanced at Mellie. The sprite stared back at him in wonder and puzzlement.