It was late afternoon by the time he reached the cliffs above the agreed-upon beach. He considered the drop and again wondered how a city-bred lad such as himself could end up considering a descent that would have given a fright to a mountain goat. There was no easy way down, though there certainly was a quick one, he thought dryly.
He traversed the narrow cliff and found nothing useful, then turned and with his eyes retraced his route down to the top of the cliffs. He was likely to spend hours climbing back up to where he thought another way down might be found, and even then there was no guarantee it would provide the right descent. He would probably have to endure another night on the mountainside, and he was now both thirsty and ravenous. He recalled with bitter amusement a confidence trickster he had once encountered in a tavern in Krondor while the man waited to take ship to Elariel in Kesh. He had tried to sell Jim a ‘magic cloak’ which would, he claimed, allow the wearer to leap from the tallest building or wall and gently float down to the ground. A clever enough scam, for if the fool who bought it tried to use it, he’d either be dead or lying a-bed with too many broken bones to attempt hot pursuit and the trickster would be safely away in Great Kesh. But, oh, how he wished it had been true and he had such a cloak now.
He kept looking for inspiration, for he didn’t relish the climb back to the other route. He decided to make one more traverse of the cliff top before he started hiking. He moved northwards until he reached an outcropping of rocks that prevented further progress, glanced down and saw waves crashing into the rocks a hundred feet below him. Not a bad dive, he thought, if the water was deep enough and there weren’t rocks everywhere.
He travelled back southwards, occasionally glancing out to where the three ships waited, wishing he could somehow communicate to them that he was up here. Not that it would prove any more beneficial, unless someone on the crew had developed the ability to fly and could come fetch him to the ship, or at least fly up here with a rope.
A rope? He glanced around. If he had a rope, where would he tie it off? He walked over to a sturdy tree that had been the victim of cliff erosion. It had started leaning forward from the edge of the cliff and had then died as its roots were exposed. But the dried-out trunk was still firmly planted in the rocky soil and when he pushed hard against it he found it unyielding. It would support his weight. If only he had a rope.
He looked down and saw that the tree overhung a gap in the cliff with a ledge about twenty feet below and that the ledge also contained a small growth of trees. He wished he could gauge how high those trees were from his current vantage point. He sprinted along the cliff face, looking back several times, and finally found a bend in the cliff where he could get a good perspective. He could see the trees closest to the edge on that little ledge were in fact about thirty feet below the cliff on which he stood. He rapidly did the mathematics. He could lower himself down until he overhung the trees, and his feet should be not much more than twenty feet above the ledge and only ten feet above the trees.
Gods, he silently mused, what is desperation driving me to?
He realized that once down on the ledge, the chances of climbing back up to where he stood now were practically nil but he blocked it from his mind: he needed to be on that ship as soon as possible. He moved rapidly to where he could climb out on the dead tree, and gauged the most-likely looking tree below to try for. They were all scrubby-looking things, pines or firs of some sort – he really didn’t know or care what they were – and he needed something big enough to grab on to, or at least sturdy enough to slow his fall. He didn’t mind cuts and bruises, but broken bones would consign him to a slow and painful death.
He scrambled around until he was hanging directly over the chosen tree, then he let go. The fall was less than a dozen feet, but if felt like a hundred as he crashed into the top branches. As he expected, he was cut by several of the branches as they broke, but he grabbed hard onto a larger one and his fall was broken. He paused to catch his breath, then climbed down.
Once he stood at the rim of the little ledge, he wondered what madness had overtaken him. It was another thirty or more feet down, to what appeared to be mostly sand, but there were enough rocks poking through it that he couldn’t be sure how deep any of it was. He looked down for anything remotely like a handhold and felt his stomach sink; the face of the cliff here was eroded by the tide and now he was on an overhang. He considered his choices and realized he had none: he had to get down from here, no matter the risk.