Garion struggled to his feet, shaking his head to clear it of the ringing sound and to chase the dancing sparks from before his eyes. The sudden jolt of the ship’s striking the reef had tumbled him headlong into the aft rail, and there was a great, stinging welt across the top of his scalp. The air around him was filled with sounds. There were shouts from the deck and cries for help coming from the water. The ship groaned and shook as she hung on the reef, and the surging waves pounded her splintered bottom on the unseen rocks beneath her keel. Wincing, Garion shook his head again and began to slip and slide his way across the heaving aft deck toward the companionway door. As he reached it, however, Belgarath and Durnik came crashing out. “What’s happened?” the old man demanded.
“We hit a reef,” Garion said. “Is anybody down there hurt?”
“They’re all right—a little tumbled about is all.”
Garion touched the welt on top of his head, wincing at the sharp sting. Then he looked at his fingers, noting that there didn’t seem to be any blood.
“What’s the matter?” Belgarath asked.
“I hit my head.”
“I thought we all decided that you weren’t going to do that any more.”
A deadly, jarring boom came from under their feet and with it the sound of splintering timbers.
“Belgarath,” Durnik said with alarm, “we’re caught on the reef. This surf is going to pound the ship to pieces.”
Belgarath looked around quickly. “Where’s the captain?” he demanded.
Garion turned to look aft. “He was right there at the tiller, Grandfather,” he said. He clambered up the short incline to the aft deck and caught hold of the steersman, who was stumbling forward. “Where’s the captain?” he shouted.
“Lost. He was thrown over the aft rail when we hit the reef.” The steersman’s eyes were filled with shock and fright. “We’re all doomed!” he cried, clinging to Garion.
“Oh, stop that!” Garion snapped. “The captain’s gone, Grandfather,” he shouted over the noise of the storm and the confusion on deck. “He fell over the side.”
Belgarath and Durnik came quickly up the three steps to the aft deck. “We’ll have to take care of it ourselves, then,” the old man said. “How much time do you think we’ve got, Durnik?”
“Not much. There are a lot of timbers breaking down in the hold, and you can hear water pouring in.”
“We have to get her off this reef, then—before the rocks break any more holes in her bottom.”
“The reef’s the only thing that’s keeping us up right now, Belgarath,” the smith objected. “If we lift her off, she’ll sink in minutes.”
“Then we’ll have to beach her. Come along, both of you.” He led them aft and took hold of the tiller bar. He jiggled it back and forth a couple times and then swore. “The rudder’s gone.” He drew in a deep breath to calm himself and then turned to Garion and Durnik. “We’ll do this all at one time and all together,” he told them. “If we start heaving and hauling and bouncing her around, we’ll just tear her up all the more.” He wiped the rain and spray out of his face and peered toward the shore, perhaps a mile distant. He pointed at the up-thrusting headland with the white bluff on one side dropping straight down into the thundering surf. “There’s a beach just to the left of that bluff,” he said. “We’ll try for that. It’s not too well sheltered, and there are a lot of rocks sticking up out of the sand, but it’s the closest.”
Durnik leaned far out over the aft rail and peered down. “She’s been badly broached, Belgarath,” he reported gravely. He squinted across the intervening water toward the beach. “Our only hope is speed. Once she’s clear of the reef, she’ll start to go down. We’re going to have to push her toward the beach as fast as we can—and without a rudder, it’s going to be very hard to control our direction.”
“Do we have any other options?” Belgarath asked him. “Not that I can think of, no.”
“Let’s do it then.” The old man looked at them. “Are we ready?”
Garion and Durnik both nodded, then straightened, concentrating hard as each of them drew in and focused his will. Garion began to tingle all over and clenched himself tightly, holding in the pent-up force. “Now!” Belgarath barked. “Lift!” the three of them said in unison. The battered stern of the ship came sluggishly up out of the churning waves with her shattered timbers shrieking as the hull pulled free of the jagged reef.
“There!” Belgarath snapped, pointing at the half-obscured beach.
Garion thrust, bracing his will astern at the boiling reef. The ship settled sickeningly as she came free, going down rapidly by the stern; then, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed, she surged forward. Even over the sound of the howling wind, he could hear the rushing wash of water along her sides as she raced toward the safety of the beach.
When they hit the currents in the main channel, however, the rudderless ship began to veer and yaw, threatening to swing broadside. “Keep her straight!” Belgarath shouted. The veins were standing out in his forehead, and his jaws were tightly clenched.
Garion labored at it. As long as their broken ship moved fast enough, they could keep the water from pouring in through the shattered stern, but if she went broadside to the waves, the loss of momentum would be fatal. The sea would inexorably drag her under. Garion gripped the bow with the force of his will, holding the ship rigidly on course, even as he continued to drive toward the beach with all his strength.
Three hundred more yards. Sweating and straining, Gar-ion could see the foaming surf seething on the sandy, boulder-strewn beach.
Two hundred yards. He could hear the thunder of the waves.
One hundred yards. He could feel the ponderous, upward-heaving swell of the great wave that rose beneath them and rushed them toward the safety only scant yards away.
And then, even as the prow touched the froth-covered sand, the great swell that had driven them up onto the beach subsided, and there was a dreadful, shocking crash from amidships as they came down onto a submerged boulder lurking beneath the surf. Again Garion was thrown face down on the deck and half stunned by the impact.
The surf still boomed about them, and the snapping and splintering of timbers amidships was deafening, but they were safe. The prow of the stricken vessel was firmly embedded in the wet sand of the beach. As Garion painfully hauled himself to his feet, he felt drained and weak from his efforts. Then the deck beneath his feet gave a peculiar, sickening lurch, and there were more cracking and splintering noises coming from amidships.
“I think we broke the keel when we hit that rock,” Durnik said shakily. His face was gray with exhaustion, and he was shaking visibly. “We’d better get everybody off the ship and onto the beach.”
Belgarath rose from the scuppers. There was a ruddy contusion on his cheek, rain and spray streaming down his face, and a vast anger in his eyes. He was swearing sulfurously. Then his rage suddenly vanished. “The horses!” he exclaimed. “They’re down in the hold! Durnik!”
But the smith was already running forward toward the sprung hatchway amidships. “Get Toth to come and help me!” he shouted back over his shoulder. “We have to get those horses out!”
“Garion!” Belgarath barked. “Let’s get-everybody out of the cabins and onto dry land. I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time before this wreck starts to break apart.”
They started forward, moving carefully on the slanting deck of the broken ship, with the wind-whipped spray and driving rain stinging their faces. They ducked into the slanting aft door and down the companionway. The narrow hall echoed and rang with the noise of cracking timbers coming from amidships.
The aft cabin was a total shambles. The shock of striking the reef and the even worse one that had broken the ship’s back had torn most of the bolted-down furniture loose. Sprung timbers flopped and clattered, and the windows across the stern had all been broken and wrenched from their casings. Spray and rain were splashing in through those gaping holes.
Ce’Nedra and Praia looked frightened as they clung to each other, Urgit held tightly to the keel-post as if expecting yet another crashing impact, and Sadi half-lay in a corner with his arms protectively wrapped around his red leather case. Polgara, however, looked dreadfully angry. She was also wet. The water pouring in through the shattered stern had drenched her clothes and her hair, and her expression was that of one who has been enormously offended. “Exactly what did you do, old man?” she demanded of Belgarath as he and Garion entered through the broken door.
“We hit a reef, Pol,” he replied. “We were taking water, so we had to beach the ship.”
She considered that for a moment, obviously trying to find something wrong with it.
“We can talk about it later,” he said. He looked around. “Is everyone all right? We’ve got to get off this wreck immediately.”
“We’re as well as can be expected, father,” she said. “What’s the problem? I thought you said we were on the beach.”
“We hit a submerged rock and broke the keel. This part of the ship’s still in the water, and about the only thing that’s holding this tub in one piece right now is the pitch in her seams. We’ve got to get forward and off the ship at once.”
She nodded. “I understand, father.” She turned to the others. “Gather up whatever you can carry,” she instructed. “We have to get ashore.”
“I’ll go help Durnik with the horses,” Garion said to Belgarath. “Toth, Eriond, come with me.” He turned toward the door, but paused a moment to look at Ce’Nedra. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
“I think so,” she replied, sounding frightened and rubbing at an ugly bruise on her knee.
“Stay with Aunt Pol,” he instructed curtly and then went out.
The scene in the ship’s hold was even worse than he had expected. Knee-deep water swirled and sloshed in the half-light coming in through the splintered hull. Boxes, bags, and bales floated everywhere, and the top of the sloshing, bilge-smelling water was littered with splinters from the broken timbers. Durnik had herded the wild-eyed horses forward, and they were bunched together in the ship’s bow where the water was the shallowest. “We lost three of them,” he reported, “two with broken necks and one that drowned.”
“Horse?” Eriond asked quickly.
“He’s all right, Eriond,” Durnik assured him. He turned back to Garion. “I’ve been trying to gather up our packs. Everything’s pretty wet, I’m afraid. The food packs were all back in the stern, though. There’s no way to get to them.”
“We can deal with that later,” Garion said. “The main thing now is to get the horses out.”
Durnik squinted at the jagged edges of the two-foot square keel grinding together as the aft end of the ship swung sluggishly in the surging waves. “Too dangerous,” he said shortly. “We’ll have to go out through the bow. I’ll get my axe.”
Garion shook his head. “If the aft end breaks loose, the bow-section’s likely to roll. We could lose another four or five horses if that happens and we might not have too much time left.”
Durnik drew in a deep breath and squared his broad shoulders. His face was not happy.
“I know,” Garion said, putting his hand on his friend’s arm. “I’m tired, too. Let’s do it up forward. There’s no point in breaking out of the hull someplace where we’ll have to jump into deep water.”
It was not quite as difficult as they had expected. The assistance of Toth made a noticeable difference. They selected a space in the ship’s side between a pair of stout ribs and went to work. As Durnik and Garion began carefully to break out the ship’s timbers between those ribs with the force of concentrated will, Toth attacked the same area with a large iron pry bar. The combination of sorcery and the mute’s enormous physical strength quickly opened a low, narrow opening in the ship’s bow.
Silk stood on the beach out of range of the splinters their efforts had sent flying. His cloak was whipping wildly in the wind, and the surf was swirling about his ankles. “Are you all right?” he shouted over the noise of the storm.
“Good enough,” Garion shouted back. “Give us a hand with the horses.”
It eventually took blindfolds. Despite the best efforts of Durnik and Eriond to calm them, the terrified horses could be moved only if they could not see the dangers in the sloshing water surging around their knees. One by one they had to be led and coaxed through the litter lying half-awash in the shattered hold and out into the foaming surf. When the last of their animals was clear and stood flinching on the sand with the driving rain lashing at his flanks, Garion turned back to the sluggishly heaving wreck. “Let’s get the packs out,” he shouted at the others. “Save what you can, but don’t take any chances.”
The Murgo sailors, after leaping from the bow of the ship to the sand, had retreated up the beach and taken dubious shelter on the leeward side of a large, up-thrusting rock. They stood clustered together, sullenly watching the unloading. Garion and the others heaped up the packs above the frothy line that marked the highest point reached by the waves.
“We lost three horses and all the food packs,” Garion reported to Belgarath and Polgara. “I think we got everything else—except what we had to leave behind in the cabins.”
Belgarath squinted upward into the rain. “We can redistribute the packs,” he said, “but we’re going to need food.”
“Is the tide going in or out?” Silk asked as he deposited the last pack on their heap of belongings.
Durnik squinted at the storm-tossed channel leading into the Gorand Sea. “I think it’s just turning.”
“We don’t really have too much of a problem, then,” the little man said. “Let’s find someplace out of the wind and wait for the tide to go out. Then we can come back and ransack the wreck at our leisure. She ought to be completely out of the water at low tide.”
“There’s just one thing wrong with your plan, Prince
Kheldar,” Sadi told him, squinting toward the upper end of the beach. “You’re forgetting those Murgo sailors. They’re stranded on a deserted coast with at least a dozen Malloreon ships cruising up and down the shore line looking for them. Malloreons enjoy killing Murgos almost as much as Alorns do, so those sailors are going to want to get far away from here. It might be wise to get these horses quite some distance away—if we want to keep them.”
“Let’s load the pack horses and get mounted,” Belgarath decided. “I think Sadi’s right. We can come back and pick over what’s left of the ship later.”
They broke down the packs and redistributed the weight to make up for the three lost animals, then began to saddle their mounts.
The sailors, led by a tall, heavy-shouldered Murgo with an evil-looking scar under his left eye, came back down the beach. “Where do you think you’re taking those horses?” he demanded.
“I can’t really see where that’s any of your business,” Sadi replied coolly.
“We’re going to make it our business, aren’t we, mates?”
There was a rumble of agreement from the rain-soaked sailors.
“The horses belong to us,” Sadi told him.
“We don’t care about that. There are enough of us so that we can take anything we want.”
“Why waste time with talk?” one of the sailors behind the scar-faced man shouted.
“Right,” the big Murgo agreed. He drew a short, rusty sword from the sheath at his hip, looked back over his shoulder as he raised it aloft, and shouted, “Follow me!” Then he fell writhing and bellowing in pain to the wet sand, clutching at his broken right arm. Toth, without any change of expression and with an almost negligent side-arm flip, had sent the iron pry bar he still held in one hand spinning through the air with a whirring flutter that ended with a sharp crack as the sword-wielding Murgo’s arm snapped.
The sailors drew back, alarmed by their leader’s sudden collapse. Then a stubble-cheeked fellow in the front rank lifted a heavy boat hook. “Rush them!” he bellowed. “We want those horses and we outnumber them.”
“I think you might want to count again,” Polgara said in a cool voice. Even as Garion stepped forward, drawing his sword out of its sheath, he felt a peculiar shadowy presence to his left. He blinked unbelievingly. As real as if he were actually there, the huge, red-bearded shape of Barak stood at his side.
A clinking sound came from the right, and there, his armor gleaming wet in the rain, stood Mandorallen, and somewhat beyond him, the hawk-faced Hettar. “What thinkest thou, my Lords?” the figure that appeared to be the invincible Baron of Vo Mandor said gaily. “Should we afford these knaves the opportunity to flee, ere we fall upon them and spill out their lifeblood?”
“It seems like the decent thing to do,” the apparition of Barak rumbled its agreement. “What do you think, Hettar?”
“They’re Murgos,” the shade of Hettar said in his quiet, chilling voice as he drew his saber. “Kill them all right here and now. That way we won’t have to waste time chasing them down one by one later.”
“Somehow I knew you were going to look at it that way.” Barak laughed. “All right, my Lords, let’s go to work.” He drew his heavy sword.
The three images, larger actually than they were in life, advanced grimly on the shrinking sailors. In their midst, painfully aware that he was in fact quite alone, Garion moved forward, his huge sword held low. Then, on the far side of the apparition of Barak, he saw Toth advancing with his huge staff. Beyond him, Sadi held a small poisoned dagger. At the opposite end of the line, Durnik and Silk moved into place.
The image of Barak glanced over at Garion. “Now, Gar-ion!” Polgara’s whispered voice came from those bearded lips.
Instantly he understood. He relaxed the restraints he usually kept on the Orb. The great sword he held leaped into flame, spurting blue fire from its tip almost into the faces of the now-terrified Murgos.
“Will all of you who would like to die immediately and save yourselves the inconvenience and discomfort of being chased down and slowly hacked to pieces please step forward?” the red-bearded shadow at Garion’s side roared in tones more grandiose than Barak himself could ever have managed. “We can have you in the arms of your one-eyed God in the blinking of an eye.”
It hung there for a moment; then the sailors fled.
“Oh, Gods!” Garion heard Polgara’s ringing voice coming from behind him. “I’ve wanted to do that for a thousand years!” He turned and saw her, standing with the raging sea and racing black clouds behind her and the wind tearing at her blue cloak. The rain had plastered her hair to her face and neck, but her glorious eyes were triumphant.
“My Pol!” Belgarath exulted, catching her in a rough embrace. “Gods, what a son you’d have made!”
“I’m your daughter, Belgarath,” she replied simply, “but could any son have done better?”
“No, Pol,” he laughed suddenly, crushing her to him and soundly planting a kiss on her rain-wet cheek. “Not one bit.”
They stopped, startled and even a little embarrassed that the enormous love they had each tried to conceal for millennia had finally come out into the open on this storm-swept beach here at the bottom of the world. Almost shyly they looked at each other and then, unable to hold it in, they began to laugh.
Garion turned away, his eyes suddenly brimming.
Urgit was bending over the sailor with the broken arm. “If you wouldn’t mind taking some advice from your king, my man,” he said urbanely, “might I remind you that the sea out there is crawling with Malloreons, and Malloreons take a childlike delight in crucifying every Murgo they come across. Don’t you think it might be prudent for you and your shipmates to remove yourselves from the vicinity of all that scrap lumber?” He looked meaningfully at the wreck.
The sailor cast a sudden, frightened glance at the storm-tossed channel and scrambled to his feet. Cradling his broken arm, he scurried back up the beach to rejoin his frightened mates.
“He shows a remarkable grasp of the situation, doesn’t he?” Urgit said to Silk.
“He does seem uncharacteristically alert,” Silk agreed. He looked at the rest of them. “Why don’t we mount up and get off this beach?” he suggested. “That wreck stands out like a beacon, and our injured friend and his companions might decide to give horse rustling another try.” He looked appraisingly at the hulking images Polgara had conjured up. “Just out of curiosity, Polgara, could those apparitions of yours actually have done any good if it had gotten down to a fight?”
Polgara was still laughing, her lavender eyes alight. “To be perfectly honest with you, my dear Silk,” she replied gaily, “I haven’t got the faintest idea.”
For some reason her answer sent them all off into helpless gales of laughter.