Wennberg too fell into a machined rhythm, jab-pull back-jab, wait, do-it-again, but out of a different drive-wheel than Karlsson's. Overswarmed with doom and unhealth, Wennberg could think of no way to struggle back hut to move his arms, which happened to have a flat-faced rod of wood at their end.... Melander: "Braaf, can you find in your heart to stroke along with the rest of us?" (Melander within: May the canoe dance as lightly on these waves as it 1ms been. If just they don't rise...) Among the larger men Braaf sat small and hunched with caution. lie was the one of the four of them most in place in this situation, for at basis, this crossing of Kaigani Strait constituted an act of theft. Of stealing survival from a hazard that held every intention of denying it to you. Afloat you exist in balance between unthinkable distances. Above, the sky and the down-push of all its vastnesses. Under, the thickness of ocean with its queer unruly upward law of gravity, buoyancy. In time the greater deep, that of sky, must win this pushing contest in which you are the flake of contention, and you will go down. The game is to scamper landward before this obliteration can happen. None of this could Braaf have declaimed aloud—just as there never was a philosopher who could pocket another man's snuffbox with no itch of conscience—yet Braaf understood the proposition of Kaigani profoundly: it had to do with dodging life's odds, like all else. Braaf then did not stroke mechanically in Karlsson's way nor try to fend strenuously as Wennberg did. Braaf poked his paddle to the water as if using a stick to discourage a very big dog ... Melander: "Neck or nothing, now. Pull ... pull ... pull ... (Melander within: May this storm hold to the compass where it is. But oh God if the bastard shifts, shoves us east into the miles of Hecate ...) So the matter, like most of this coast's matters, came down to perseverance. While Melander urged, Wennberg was grunting dismally and Braaf once in a while shirking, out of sheer habit when he wasn't reminding himself otherwise, and at. the stern Karlsson staying a human piston: all of them trying to put from mind the numbing of their knees and the deepening ache of their arms and shoulders; and across Kaigani Strait the canoe striving steadily southeast, a dark sharp-snouted creature stretched low against the gray wavescape, four broad-hoofed legs striking and striking at the water, running on the sea.
THREE
MELANDER broke awake on the tamest of terrain.
Anywhere in sight, not a sea cliff nor boulder nor so much as a fist-sized stone.
Beach of sand, all tan satin. Waves did not pound at the tideline, simply teased it, shying tiny clouds of spume along the water edge and then lapping away.
The canoe had taken shore here in the dark, Swedes having prevailed—barely—over storm in the wrestle that went 011 all day and across dusk and into the first of night. At last dragging their craft onto whatever this place was, the four men groped together the shelter of sailcloth and collapsed to sleep. Now to find, by this morning's evidence, that Kaigani had flung them through the customary coastal geography to an opposite order of matters. Everything flat, discreet, lullful.
No, not everything meek. It registered now on Melander that the treetops spearing up through mist just to the west of him stood twice the height conceivable for trees to stand.
"On the same ocean as last night, are we?" Karlsson was at his elbow.
"Mother's milk this morning, isn't it?" agreed Melander. "Ever see trees to that height, up to the clouds like steeples?"
Karlsson shook his head.
"Nor I. Has to be a rise of land in that fog. We ought have a look there, aye? Wake Braaf enough to tell him, why don't you, so he and Wennberg won't think we've gone yachting off without them."
The tall man and the slim one pushed the canoe into the placid tidewater, turned the prow toward the middle-air mosaic of mist and timber. They found that they were crossing the mouth of a river, a sixty-foot width of black water so dense and slow it seemed