“Yes.”
“So am I.” That was a statement, too.
It did not fail to occur to them that if they were capable of smelling the dragon-Devils, the dragon-Devils might be equally capable of smelling them. The thing, then, was to keep the wind in their favor… but this was a figure of speech: they could not of course keep the wind, they had to keep with the wind. At the moment there was none discernable, and this gave them time to reflect on the other part of the equation, which was the matter of where the Devils, thick or thin, might now be.
“Maybe along the beach-coast,” Duro suggested. There they had seen them yesterday, after all. Lors pointed out that it was no mere disinterested desire to find the creatures which alone had brought them, all there, upon the trail.
“There’s a way down to the beach not far from here, at Goat Rock,” he said. “And that’s all the way, either up or down, from here on south, until you get to the caves… which is quite a ways.”
Duro didn’t see what he meant. “It’s no ways at all; we can walk it in an hour…”
“And suppose we get caught half-way? How long would it take us to run? We can’t sprout wings and fly, you know. And I wouldn’t want to have to try swimming, either.”
The point was conceded. Here and there, almost automatically, one or the other of them pointed out clumps of hair frayed against a tree; but no move was made or intended to pursue these signs of game. It was not venison that they were after now, descending the forest trails — indeed, none of them was quite sure what they were after. A sight of the strange creatures, to be sure… a safe sight, certainly. But then what? And after then, what? Such questions were equally unspoken and unanswered. Now and then, warily crossing open terrain, they felt the sun hot upon their heads and shoulders; but in short moments they were back in the shade once more. It soon became obvious that Lors was not intending to make for the beach by the nearest way, if at all. Duro and Tom-small said nothing; they followed. Few signs of life were observed, but now, so close to noon, when most live things favored rest and shade, was never a propitious time of day for such observations. Now and then a faint taste of the sea came on the light and intermittent breeze, or the familiar smell of sap and grass and rotting leaves; once, a stronger scent, a musky one, of some male creature’s harboring or staling. But these were of only negative significance. The wind — such wind as there was — was still toward them, and it carried no warning on it.
There was no river in the land worthy of the name, but there was a point within sighting from their route where within a short distance a number of streams joined to make what was called, as it ran coursing through the savannah, the Spate. Such was its noise that they were long in hearing the other one, and did not recognize it when they did. They slowed their gait, they moved more cautiously, they frowned in concentration… Logs, perhaps, thudding against each other or against rocks… logs perhaps escaped from woodcutters in the farther uplands, or perhaps intended by them to be thus moved downward… or trees, it might be, dislodged by the undercutting of some distant embankment by the eternal action of the streams…
Such notions did not long bemuse them, for, the Spate and the savannah coming suddenly and alike into sight, they saw far off and below down the gentle incline three huge black hulks pointing blunt snouts at the silent skies.
They rested there as the three points of a wide-based triangle and it seemed in that second that each one was an eyeless face from which protruded a long and rippling tongue. One rooted up rocks and earth and licked them along, one sucked up water, and one conveyed the mixture into a single black cube from which, it seemed, the rhythmic thudding came. It seemed to them that things moved in the open side of this cube, tall things, thin things, things with other things in their great claw-hands… it seemed… shock and the distance made semblance uncertain. The wind shifted.
The rank and alien odor struck them like a blow, so benumbing them that they looked all around ahead for the source before it occurred to them that it was against the crawling hairs of their napes and the backs of their heads that the breeze now blew. And therefore the dragon was behind them—
To cock and load and aim and fire a crossbow while lying on one’s back is probably not the most difficult thing in the world, but neither does it rank among the easiest. The dead and heavy tree limb still dangling from the breach in the branch was just within bow-shot. Lors’s bolt split the flap of bark; almost the instant the small sound of this reached them they saw the bulk of withered wood fall and saw the dust spiraling in the beam of sunlight, and then they heard the sound of the crash. Hard upon this, forgetful of harsh spikes of grass or roots or stones against their flesh as they embraced the ground, they heard another sound: a hiss, louder than the hiss of the largest serpent they could conjure fantasy of. They heard it so short a time that they might almost have imagined that they had imagined it, but even as the sound vanished in their ears they felt along the whole supine lengths of them the ground shudder (they felt it, did not hear it), saw the great green-black form move so delicately diagonally toward the place where the limb had fallen from the tree that although they could not see they could imagine with dreadful detail and probable truth how the grained webbing between each great toe would fold in as the foot was silently lifted and then expand as each great foot was silently, swiftly set down again.
Oblivious of pain or anything else but flight — instant flight! — they crawled upon their bellies backwards and sideways and vanished into the concealing covert of the thickets. Thorns tore at them and took toll, bushes resisted parting, but they pressed onward and away.
The Devil-dragon must have found the crossbow bolt — they afterward agreed on this — must, in that moment of sight, have understood everything: that there was nothing there of itself to draw a shot and even if there had been they would not have ventured to shoot at it so close to the alien encampment, and that therefore the bolt had been loosed for no other reason than to part the heavy branch and use the noise of its fall to draw away pursuit. Upon understanding came rage — at least rage; perhaps more — a signal, an alarm, an appeal—
— From behind came the hiss again, this time not cut short, and, after the air had ceased to quiver from the hiss, came a great burst of guttural sound, the coughing of a giant; and then noise for which no words existed for them. Roaring? Bellowing? Thundering? They had no need for names or words. They responded by the shrinking of their cullions and the swelling of their hearts and the cold sweat upon their skins. And by pressing on, writhing, sliding, ever away. Long after the noise behind them ceased they still had not dared rise up to run like men: and perhaps they owed to this that they were still live men.
And they did not rise to their feet until Duro saw before him the tumbled, fissured mass of rock like half-melted honeycomb, which he knew ran on and on and on, if not forever, at least for long enough for him to breath deep and know he would draw at least a several few breaths safely thereafter:
The caves!
IV
The raft as such had ceased to exist by the time Liam was well enough to come on deck, half-expecting to see it bobbing behind. A pile of its timbers were stacked nearly about; a few more were in the process of being split into planks; a few piles of such planks were pointed out to him, as well as a bin of fragments from which an old woman was feeding a fire-box well bedded in sand.
“You seem to have made good use of it,” Liam said. “ ‘Waste not, want not,’ ” graybeard Gaspar intoned. “A saying of our wise ancients, as true today as the first day it was uttered. I am sure it relieves you to know that you, have already payed your own way.”