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19: Parting

As they neared the coast, Tym lowered the hinged mast on her catamaran—let the breakers, suddenly roaring just under them, carry their craft to the beach. Even under a new moon, an erect white sail could catch the eye of a beach wanderer, and that would not do. As she and Gragi lay clinging to the elastic beetle vines webbed between the two pontoons, Tym wondered why she had not thought to bring a dark sail for the night work. Her mind was in pain with this business about Gragi and—ach—too many lapses could be fatal.

Tym watched Gragi bowing headlong into the billows of sea foam, innocent eyes pressed shut, mouth open in a silent scream and filling with white water, draining, and filling again. During the hard sail over the last two days he had been so cooperative, eager, even, to meet a fate which he had no mind to comprehend. Now he leaned emphatically into the surf, vest and leg skins sopping in the wind, a lamb being born into a cruel and foreign terrain.

The pontoons skid-scratched into the sand. Tym pointed past Gragi's nose to the docks east up the beach, and the lights of the pub house. She shoved him out of the cradle and he staggered into the cooling sand. He stood there dumbly, hair glistening even in the moonless dark—looking back at her, expecting her to lead him into this new life. He let out one sharp, barking whine—a sea lion croak.

Tym vaulted into the sand, too, her hands planted on the edge of the webbing, and proceeded to push her catamaran back into the surging sea. Quickly, she told herself. This must be done quickly.

But before she was even hip deep Gragi had splashed his way back to the boat's webbing, his safe nest. Tym cursed and pulled the catamaran once again toward the beach. She wanted Gragi safe in the hands of his fellow Fungus People, but not at the expense of her own life—or her enslavement. This foul island. . ..

On the sand again, Tym dragged the catamaran toward the camouflage of the rolling dunes several yards upland. Gragi caught on and helped, then delighted in the game of kicking at the sand to erase the furrows left by the pontoons.

Tym shed her skins and left them in the boat's webbing. But Gragi, she decided, was too light skinned to be running around bare in the dark. Gragi's eyes lingered on her, and she knew he would follow unquestioningly. Her throat tightened.

A quick survey of the upsloping terrain gave her an obvious destination—the tiered wooden structure halfway up Crown Mountain. It threw light from its many tall windows like a Ligkh High Priest's lantern at a pyre ceremony. She would take Gragi up there and abandon him, where he could never thrash his way back to the waterfront. Given a chance, Tym was sure, Gragi would swim after her to his death. He must be lost away from the sea.

She took his hand and pulled him farther up into the shadowy dunes. Gragi followed with an overjoyed, twitching grin. His grip wrapped her hand powerfully.

 

The scream came just as Big Tom's eyes rested on the clepsydra, the water clock. Its copper filigree pointer had edged its way to 10 P.M., but Big Tom had no confidence in its accuracy these days. Sometimes Moori filled the clepsydra's drip bowl precisely by the sundial in the garden; when it slipped her mind until too late, she would fill it only part way with a cavalier shrug.

The house boy Billister had gotten it right every evening, Big Tom was thinking. And then the scream.

A desperate, tearful howl shattered the night's serenity. Doubtlessly, there was no one in the house that did not think of Big Tom's torture trees in the garden below.

The merchant moved quickly on his stubby legs, his crimson robe flying open behind him. Down the polished staircase past the row of decaying oil portraits; past the pillowed pleasure room with its pull curtains; down another staircase, the showy one that fanned into the foyer. He yanked open the heavy double doors.

On the porch stood a blond young man facing into the night, sobbing, his shoulders quaking like a cantering horseman's.

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Framed