L Warren Douglas The Veil of Years 3 Isle Beyond Time

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

being the depth of his cynical nature, as she imagined it), he considered
himself doomed already, and was resigned to it. She showed the others how to
tie the sail down at the rail by bunching the material over a knotted cord and
tying it there with strips torn from their clothing, then securing it to the
boat with a loop between rib and rail.
The boatman, ignoring the useless tiller, held their empty water keg in the
Page 82
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
bilge until it was half full, pushed the end of the sheet rope into the
bunghole, then drove the plug in tightly. He then scrambled forward over the
spread sail and tossed the barrel overboard at the bow, securing the loose end
of the rope.
"What did he do that for?" asked Lovi.
"It's a sea anchor. With luck, it will keep our bow into the wind when the
squall hits. With a bit more luck, if the tide carries us northward faster
than the wind blows us east, we'll clear the point. With a bit more luck . .
."
"Enough!" snapped ibn Saul. "What must we do now?"
The boatman pointed forward at the darkness under the makeshift tarpaulin.
"Take the bucket with you, and try not to knock it over when you have filled
it with your last several meals."
He then turned to Pierrette. "You too."
She shook her head, and pointedly looped a bight of a mooring line through the
braided sash that held up her trousers, and secured it beneath a limber, a
notch in one of the boat's ribs that allowed water in the bilge to flow freely
back and forth. The boatman nodded, and then did the same for himself. They
might drown, but they would do so with the boat, not washed overboard to die
alone in the storm-tossed sea.
The wall of black clouds, reaching from the crests of the waves halfway up the
sky, was almost upon them. The Isle of the Dead was somewhere within them,
already lashed by the rain and waves the wind drove across that low land. As
the first gusts struck the boat, it turned obediently into them, pivoting on
the cord attached to the half-sunken keg.
Pierrette's glances darted between the cloud-wall and the shore astern: their
lives depended now on the relative forces that commanded their frail nutshell
of a boat. Try as she might, she could not discern their motion relative to
the mainland shore, to the deadly rocks of Raz Point. Though the boat pointed
west, the tidal race was driving them north, the wind pushing them east. If
the wind were the stronger, they would be pounded and shattered on the rocks.
If the tide prevailed, there was a chance they would get past them if, of
course, they were not driven broadside against one of the hundreds of jagged
black crags that jutted from the water, the spine of the dragon she had seen
from the headland so long ago that
it seemed like another life entirely.
* * *
The wind and rain struck them like a volley of rocks from the slings of an
army, and Pierrette could see nothing, could hardly keep her eyes open enough
to squint. She might as well have gone below with the others, for all the
benefit her vantage gave her now, but being under cover in a small boat in a
heavy sea was enough to make even the most seasoned sailor terribly ill, so
she squinted and shivered, but did not have to add vomiting to her discomfort.
She had no sense of direction, except that she believed the wind was still
coming out of the west. The horizon was no farther away than the crest of each
approaching wave. Those crests were higher than any but the worst storm-driven
billows of the Mediterranean, because this ocean was no bowl surrounded by
land, and the storms that marched across it had an endless expanse in which to
build up strength, to pile wave atop wave until . . .
How far did the ocean extend? Did it stretch all the way around the world
until it reached some shore on the far side of India, where even Alexander had
never gone? Despite her misery and the peril of rocks she would never see
before they smashed the boat and killed her, she could not stop wondering.
Were there many islands in that great sea, far beyond Minho's elusive land?
Were they so isolated, so foreign, that even their magics would be
incomprehensible to her? If so, were they immune to the malaise of the
Black Time that would someday extinguish the last vestiges of magic from her
own world?
Page 83
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Conversation was impossible while the storm beat about her, lashing her face
with wind-flung spray, but thinking was still possible, and Pierrette had much
to think about. Had the nine
Gallicenae and all the people she had spoken with been an illusion? She now
accepted that ibn Saul had been at least partly right the town had been a
necropolis, indeed, and its inhabitants dead. That was what the one man had [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

pobieranie @ do ÂściÂągnięcia @ ebook @ download @ pdf