The crystal cave - Mary Stewart [193]
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I lay there breathless, retching, choking on bile, my face to the ground and my left hand driven into the soft tufts of sea-pink, as if it clung to life for me. The beat and crash of the sea shook the cliff, and even this slight tremor seemed to grind pain through my body. It hurt at every point. My side pained as though the ribs were stove in, and the skin had been stripped from the cheek that lay pressed hard into the turf. There was blood in my mouth, and my right hand was a jelly of pain. I could hear someone, some other man a long way off, making small abject sounds of pain.
The blood in my mouth bubbled and oozed down my chin into the ground, and I knew it was I who was groaning. Merlin the son of Ambrosius, the prince, the great enchanter. I shut my mouth on the blood and began to push and claw my way to my feet.
The pain in my hand was cruel, the worst of all; I heard rather than felt the small bones grind where their ends were broken. I felt myself lurching as I got to my knees, and dared not try to stand upright so near the cliff's edge. Below me a master wave struck, thundered, fountained up into the greying light, then fell back to crash into the next rising wave. The cliff trembled. A sea-bird, the first of the day, sailed overhead, crying.
I crawled away from the edge and then stood up.
Brithael was lying near the postern gate, on his belly, as if he had been trying to crawl there. Behind him on the turf was a wake of blood, glossy on the grass like the track of a snail. He was dead. That last desperate stroke had caught the big vein in the groin, and the life had pumped out of him as he tried to crawl for help. Some of the blood that soaked me must be his.
I went on my knees beside him and made sure. Then I rolled him over and over till the slope took him, and he went after his sword into the sea. The blood would have to take care of itself. It was raining again, and with luck the blood would be gone before anyone saw it.
The postern gate stood open still. I reached it somehow and stood, supporting myself with a shoulder against the jamb. There was blood in my eyes, too. I wiped it away with a wet sleeve.
Ralf had gone. The porter also. The torch had burnt low in its socket and the smoky light showed the lodge and stairway empty. The castle was quiet. At the top of the stairway the door stood partly open, and I saw light there and heard voices. Quiet voices, urgent but unalarmed. Uther's party must still be in control; there had been no alarm given.
I shivered in the dawn chill. Somewhere, unheeded, the cloak had dropped from my arm. I didn't trouble to look for it. I let go of the gate and tried standing upright without support. I could do it. I started to make my way down the path towards the bay.
10
There was just light enough to see the way; light enough, too, to see the dreadful cliff and the roaring depths below. But I think I was so occupied with the weakness of my body, with the simple mechanics of keeping that body upright and my good hand working and the injured hand out of trouble, that I never once thought of the sea below or the perilous narrowness of the strip of safe rock. I got past the first stretch quickly, and then clawed my way, half crawling, down the next steep slide across the tufted grasses and the rattling steps of scree. As the path took me lower, the seas came roaring up closer beside me, till I felt the spray of the big waves salt with the salt blood on my face. The tide was full in with morning, the waves still high with the night's wind, shooting icy tongues up the licked rock and bursting beside me with a hollow crash that shook the very bones in my body, and drenched the path down which I crawled and stumbled.
I found him halfway up from the beach, lying face downwards within an inch of the edge. One arm hung over the brink, and at the end of it the limp hand swung to the shocks