Refreshed, Jeryon manages to stand and cross the beach to a tree line of oak, bamboo, and pitcher trees. From the latter’s deep vessel-like leaves he drinks the collected rainwater, heeding the poth’s advice to drink slowly, however glorious the water tastes. Thinking of her leads him to look at the stacks. There’s nothing there, and no place for anyone to cling if there were. He doesn’t know what he saw during the storm. He spots bits of wood sticking out of the sand farther up the beach: the remnants of the dinghy. If he were kicked up here, where is the poth? He takes another drink and steadies himself to approach the dolphin carcass.
The crabs battle for the choicest bits, but they won’t give up their meal to him. They envelop it to hide the bones. They’ll snip his hands off if he tries to move them, so Jeryon trudges a ways up the beach and returns with a pointed length of gunwale from his tiller, the broken painter strand still attached. With this he weakly bats the crabs off the bones. When one attacks him, he manages to whack it hard enough to change its mind. The last he flicks off so it lands upside down. Before it can roll over, he stakes it to the beach. While its legs kick at the sky, he examines the carcass.
It’s half-buried in the sand; a rib cage, shoulder blades, and skull scratched and nearly free of flesh. It isn’t the poth’s. It might have been her, though, and Jeryon takes out his elation on the staked crab.
Most of the crabs give him a wide berth now. The few that don’t seem resigned to whatever fate this terrible avenger has for them. One soon finds out.
Jeryon stretches. He’s regaining strength and sensation, the latter mostly agony. He plots a survey of the island. It’s the first act of any prisoner: pacing one’s cell. And he has to find a better source of water. It’s approaching noon, and the water in the leaves of the pitcher trees won’t last much longer in this heat.
As far as he can tell, he’s at the northwest corner of an island surrounded by low cliffs rising from the sea. Thick forest rambles uphill some five hundred feet to ring a flat-topped column of gray rock another two hundred feet high. This beach is the only place he can see where the land ramps up to the island’s interior. If the poth didn’t land here, she’ll have been in more trouble than not having landed at all.
Jeryon pushes himself from tree to tree until he finds a fallen branch he can use as a walking stick. He tosses aside the piece of gunwale.
After such a storm, it isn’t hard to find a stream. Grasses, bright flowers of every hue, and thick bushes race alongside it. It’s so loud it drowns out the constant buzz and whirr of insects, which also drowns out the thought that those insects would make a good source of nutrition should the crabs run out.
He follows the stream a few hundred yards southwest toward the column to where it cuts through a bamboo grove. Using the folds of his shirt to guard the straight edge of the blade, he saws through a wide culm just beneath a node with his blade, then through the internode just beneath the next node. He checks inside the hollow for bugs, rinses it a few times in the stream, fills it to the brink, and drinks heartily. The water is cold and rich and tastes like a new life just begun.
Beyond the bamboo the stream enters a meadow that ends to the north at a cliff overlooking the sea. A single tree in its center guards a broadening of the stream. Jeryon can’t believe his luck. It’s a shega tree. The fruit is his secret vice. He would treat himself to one at the end of every voyage when they were in season, and to a big slice of fresh bread with shega preserves when they weren’t. He figures he’s deserving now.
Most of the fruit aren’t ripe yet, shega won’t be in season for another month, but a few are close enough, and Jeryon picks the biggest he can reach. He slices it in half and sucks from the white pulp a purple jewel of flesh with a seed inside. It may be the best shega he’s ever eaten, and not just because the shega are reserved for shipowners back in Hanosh. He eats another jewel and admires the ocean’s beautiful nothing.
He has water. He has meat and fruit. He has all the materials to build a shelter. He could survive here, day after endless day, until the crabs enjoy their final triumph. There’s no point leaving without the poth. The Trust won’t believe his testimony alone.
He walks toward the cliff. Would it be worth giving the crabs their meal now? The cliff is high enough, fifty or sixty feet. He eats another jewel. Even shega will get boring in time. So will time on the island. Just sunrise and noontime, star-rise and midnight, being awake and being asleep, one after the other after the other. What kind of life is that? Waves pound the cliff. He could live a hundred years and the waves would pound the cliff and the cliff wouldn’t change. He spits the shega seed over the edge. It vanishes from sight long before it reaches the water.
I’ve already vanished from sight, he thinks. He eats another jewel. These are tasty, though. Maybe he’ll wait until the season ends.
To the east he spies a trail through the meadow from the stream to the cliff. It’s much wider than his own, the grasses and underbrush beaten down. He walks along the cliff’s edge to where it meets the trail. He stands as if thunderstruck by what he finds. There, in the dirt: a single footprint, massive, four-toed, and clawed.
2
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