Then he knew what it was.
The ocean, returning in a single wave.
Gull recalled the town where they'd first seen the ocean. His sister had splashed in the surf. Now she stirred it with her hands like a god.
Above them on the slope, barbarians babbled. Towser was gone, fled inland.
"What I tried to tell you!" bleated Morven. "A tidal wave!"
For a second, Gull couldn't move. Then Morven caught his hair and stuffed him into the hole after his sister. In pitch blackness, Gull smacked heads with her. Shifting, he banged Stiggur, made him grunt. "Crowd in, son!"
"I can't! This is all there is!" From the tiny squeak in his ear, Gull knew it was true. This cave was no bigger than a coffin.
Kem crammed in behind him, driving knees into Gull's back. "Move inside, idiot!"
Gull shuffled in the dark, squashing his sister. Kem wriggled against him, so tight the woodcutter felt scar tissue brush his neck. "This is it!"
"It can't be!" Kem grunted as Morven pressed behind.
The sailor wheezed. "Little Missy! Greensleeves! Raise that wall of wood! It's all that'll save you!"
"I-I-" Tearfully, Greensleeves stopped protesting to concentrate.
"No, wait!" From his voice, Gull could tell that Morven was outside the cave. There was no more room. "Morven! You-"
"You," Morven interrupted to Greensleeves, "must conjure one of them walls of wood to block this cave! Tight as a curtain!"
"But-" Gull shouted. He flexed, tried to back out of the hole, but Kem was wedged in the entrance and the sailor leaned on him. "Morven! You have to-"
A rustling stirring chittering answered. Gull smelled the bitter tannin of oak leaves. The blackness got blacker, if that were possible. Kem grunted in pain as bark rasped his spine.
In seconds, Greensleeves's wall of wood sealed them off like a ship's hatch. Cut them off from Morven. Outside.
It was suddenly hard to breathe. And hot. Smells of earth and salt and bodies was strong. "How will we get out?" squeaked Stiggur.
"Will the cliff hold, I want to know," Kem gasped. "That wave might just suck this whole cliff out to sea-"
He shouted the last, for a roar louder than any windstorm was rushing howling pushing driving at them. The temperature plummeted, chilling. Gull supposed a hurricane's worth of fresh air was pushed before that mountainous sea.
Which must strike -the cliff -and Morven -any sec The world dissolved in water.
A wet hell gushed at them, around them, into them.
Gull's lungs were near bursting, but snatching a breath, he sucked water and mud and air in a devil's mix. Water pounded his face, mud filled his ears and eyepits and nose, roots ground at his head and spine. Hands aching, he clung to everyone, felt Greensleeves and Stiggur and Kem struggle as much as he.
Morven would have died right away, he thought. We'll die slowly, gasping like those stranded fish.
Dirt smothered him, water swirled it away, air teased and then vanished. He was shaken like a rat in a barrel, battered on every inch of his body.
How long this went on, he could never recall. But suddenly there was more room. Kern's knees weren't gouging his kidneys. Swirling inside, he thought, the sea was tearing the cliff to flinders, as Kem feared. They'd be snatched into the giant wave in seconds, and drowned.
"Gulllll!!!!" The bodyguard clutched so hard his fingers could have snapped Gull's collarbone. He was being sucked out the entrance.
With more room-too much-Gull reached behind, grabbed leather, hung on. He braced his feet against walls, but they dissolved into mud. Roots under one hand trickled away like sand. Gull reached for Greensleeves to brace her, keep her pinned so she wouldn't be washed out. But he missed her, found a muddy wall disintegrating.
The iron fingers on his collarbone let go.
Rather than pull me out, Gull thought, Kem let himself be sucked away. He's saved us again. I'll never repay that, not if I live a thousand years.
Pounded by new water and mud, Gull reached for Stiggur, jammed the boy's hands against Greensleeves. Maybe the two together Then Gull was toppling. Water gushed down his front, rinsing him clean, drowning him, sucking him into a dragon's maw He grabbed -found nothing -plummeted into a whirling watery waste.
CHAPTER 20
A sharp peck awoke Gull.
He pried open salt-crusty dirt-mucky eyes to find a sea gull backing away, wings flapping. Beady black eyes snapped, the yellow bill clacked a squawk. The bird had tested if he was dead. Indignant, it flew off.
An omen if there ever was one, the woodcutter thought. He hadn't expected to be awakened by his namesake. Not this side of the heavens.
Sun was hot on his face. His head throbbed because he lay upside down on the slope. Prying free of the mud, for he was sunk a foot, he took stock. Bruised, scratched, gouged, he was barefoot, tangle-haired, empty-handed. He'd even lost his leather kilt, had only his leather tunic hanging to mid-thigh.
But considering he should be dead, he had no complaints.
Rubbing crusted eyes with filthy hands, he peered around.
He wasn't far from their cave, only fifty feet above the surf, which tussled and nuzzled the shore gently, as if the tidal wave had never been. Sunlight sparkling on waves made him squint. Sea gulls perched on the monolith lodged at the shoreline. The black stone absorbed heat, kept them warm. It's serving a useful purpose at last, the woodcutter thought groggily.
He wondered where Greensleeves was, surprised to miss the familiar jolt of panic. He'd lost his emotions somewhere. For now, he just existed, hungry and thirsty, like the sea gull that woke him.
He turned, faced the trough and bluff. Things looked different, for rough edges had been smoothed, large boulders plucked away. Their cave hideout was only a scratch. Gull thought of ants in a hill suddenly pissed on. Gods and nature did as they pleased, and people and animals lived or died, helpless.
Gull staggered up the slope toward a soggy brown and white lump. Stiggur, reborn like a potato dug up. The boy gasped and flexed, and mud crackled off.
Leaving him to peer about, he found a blob higher up. His sister, encased in mud. He chipped dirt from her face, nudged her. She murmured sleepily, as always, then woke up fast, like a cat. "Wh-what…?"
Gull cast up and down the smooth mud slope. No one else.
The three limped down to the ocean, and squatting in the lapping waves, swabbed off mud. The salt tang aggravated their burning thirst.
When he arose, Gull saw Kem.
The ex-bodyguard lay facedown in a rock pool. The woodcutter waded out, brushed off crabs, hauled Kem's carcass above the tide line, laid him facedown so gulls wouldn't pick out his eyes. He told the dead man, "I'll return and bury you. I owe you that, at least."
Gull gazed at the blue vastness. Morven would be out there, under the water. The sea had reclaimed him. "Come," he told the survivors. "We'll see what's left up top."
Not a lot, it turned out.
The top of the bluff was swept clean. All signs of bramble walls and stone spears and walls of wood were gone, even the red earth under them. Crashing onto the shore, the tidal wave had sucked most everything seaward in its retreat.
But not everything.
Lying on the grass, as if dropped by a child, lay the pink stone mana vault. Greensleeves idly picked it up.
They walked inland.
Battered salt-poisoned grass stretched half a mile to a forest of beech and oak, the final barrier to the impossible tidal wave.
Now and then they passed dead barbarians. Their blue berry dye and clothes had been sucked off, so they lay scattered, tanned and tattooed, like children playing a game of statues. But none moved, and flies crawled on faces. Gull wondered if they'd died cursing Towser, the man who'd enslaved them.