The Scar

Chapter Twenty-six

That night Bellis roused herself many hours after everyone had gone to sleep.

She removed the sweat-damp sheet that covered her and stood. The air was still warm, even in these dark hours. She picked up Silas’ package from below her pillow, pulled aside the curtain, and walked slow and quiet through the room where Tanner lay wrapped in shadows on his pallet. When she reached the wooden door she leaned her head against it and felt its grain on her skin.

Bellis was afraid.

She peered very carefully through the window and saw a cactus-man guard wandering through the deserted square, from doorway to doorway, checking them idly, moving on. He was some way from her, and she thought she could open the door and run without him seeing or hearing her.

And then?

Bellis could see nothing in the sky. There was no threatening whine, no voracious insectile woman with claw-hands and jutting mouth, hungry for her blood. She put her hand on the bolt and waited-waited to hear or see one of the she-anophelii, for confirmation, so that she could avoid her (easier to hide if you know where it is), and she thought about that leather-and-bone sack she had seen that morning, which had once been a man. She froze, her hand like wire on the door.

“What you doing?”

The words came in a hard whisper from behind her. Bellis spun, her hands gripping her shift. Tanner had sat up and was staring at her from within his dark alcove.

She moved a little, and he stood. She saw the odd encumbrances of tentacles spill from his midriff. He faced her, his stance tense and suspicious. He looked as if he was about to attack her. And yet he whispered, and something in that reassured her.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. He stood in the entranceway to hear her, and his face was as hard and untrusting as she had ever seen it. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered. “I just… I had to…” And her inventiveness fled her: she did not know what she would say she had had to do. Her words dried up.

“What are you doing?” he said. Slow and angry and curious, he spoke to her in Ragamoll.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and shook her head. “I felt…” She held her breath and looked at him again, her eyes steady.

“Can’t open that bolt,” he said.

He was looking at the package in her hands, and with an effort, Bellis did not try to hide it or move her fingers nervously, but kept it in plain view as if it was nothing important.

“What is it, call of nature? Was that what it was? You’ll have to use the pot, lady. You can’t be shamed of things like that here. You saw what happened to William.”

She straightened then and nodded, keeping her face immobile, and walked back to where her bed lay. “Sleep better, won’t you,” said Tanner Sack behind her, and settled himself slowly. At the curtain between the rooms, Bellis turned briefly to look at him. He sat up, obviously waiting and listening, and setting her teeth she pulled the curtain to.

For a few moments there was silence. Then Tanner heard the sound of a tiny little spray, a few grudging drops, and he grinned humorlessly into his sheet. A few feet from him, separated by the curtain, Bellis stood up from the chamberpot, her face set and furious.

Through her humiliated anger, she grasped at something. Began to shape a hope, an idea.

The next day was the Armadans’ last full day on the island.

The scientists put together their reams of paper and their sketches, talking and laughing like children. Even the taciturn Tintinnabulum and his companions seemed buoyed up. All around Bellis schedules and plans were taking shape, and it seemed like the avanc was caught in all but fact.

The Lover flitted into the discussions and out again, a heavy smile on her, her new cut red and shining. Only Uther Doul was impassive-Uther Doul and Bellis herself. Their eyes met, across the room. Motionless, the only still points in the bustling hall, they shared a moment of some superior feeling akin to scorn.

All day, the anophelii came and went, their sedate, monkish manner shaken. They were very sorry to see the newcomers go, realizing they were soon to be bereft of the sudden influx of theories and impressions that they had brought.

Bellis watched Kruach Aum and saw how like a child the old anophelius was. He watched his new companions packing what bags and clothes and books they had brought, and he tried to copy them, though he had nothing. He left the hall and returned a little while later with a bundle of rags and edges of scrap paper that he collected and tied together at the top in a crude imitation of a traveling sack. It made Bellis shiver to watch.

Deep in her own bag, Bellis could feel Silas’ package: the letters, the necklace, the box, the wax, the ring. Tonight, she told herself, and felt panic. Tonight, come what may.

For the rest of the short day she tracked the sun’s passage. In the late afternoon, when the light had become thick and slow and every shape bled shadows, dread overtook her. Because she realized that there was no way she could cross past the swamps and the territories of the murderous mosquito-women.

Bellis looked up in alarm as the door was thrown open.

Captain Sengka stepped forward into the room, flanked by two of his crew.

The three cactacae stood at the entrance, their arms crossed. They were big men, even for their race. Their vegetable muscles bunched around their sashes and loincloths. Light gleamed on their jewelry and on their weapons.

Sengka pointed his massive finger at Kruach Aum. “This anophelius,” he announced, “is going nowhere.”

No one moved. After several still seconds, the Lover stepped forward.

Sengka spoke before she could. “What did you think, Captain?” he said, disgusted. “Captain? Is that what I should fucking call you, woman? What did you think? I’ve turned a blind sun-fucked eye on your presence here, which I did not have to do. I’ve put up with your communication with the natives, which is a breach of security risking a new fucking Malarial Age…” The Lover shook her head impatiently at this hyperbole, but Sengka continued. “I’ve waited patiently for you to get the fuck off this island, and what? You think you can smuggle one of these creatures off-land without my knowledge? You think I’d let you go?

“Your vessels will be searched,” he said decisively. “Any contraband lifted from Machinery Beach, any anophelii books or treatises, any heliotypes of the island will be confiscated.” He indicated Aum again and shook his head incredulously. “Have you read history, woman? You want to take an anophelius out?”

Kruach Aum watched the altercation with wide eyes.

“Captain Sengka,” said the Lover. Bellis had never seen her more alive with presence, more magnificent. “No one would ever criticize your concern for safety, or your commitment to your commission. But you know as well as I that the male anophelius is a harmless herbivore. We have no intention of bringing out any but this one.”

“I will not have it!” Sengka shouted. “Sunshit, this system is absolute, and it’s absolute because we can learn the lessons of history. No anophelii are to leave this island. That is a condition of their being allowed to live. There are no exceptions.”

“I’m tiring of this, Captain.” Bellis could not but admire the Lover’s calm, cold and hard as iron. “Kruach Aum is leaving with us. We have no wish to antagonize Dreer Samher, but we are taking this anophelius.” She turned her back on him and began to walk away.

“My men on Machinery Beach,” he said, and she paused, then turned back to him. He drew a huge pistol and held it loose, dangling down. The Armadans were quite still. “Trained cactacae fighters,” Sengka said. “Defy me and you will not leave this island alive.” So slowly that the motion did not seem threatening, he raised his gun and pointed it at the Lover. “This anophelius… Aum, you said… he is coming with me.”

The guards all around the room were poised on the edge of motion. Their hands fluttered over their swords and bows and pistols. Scabmettlers in cracked armor and huge cactacae, their eyes moved quickly from Sengka to the Lover and back again.

The Lover did not look at any of them. Instead, Bellis saw her catch the eye of Uther Doul.

Doul walked forward, placing himself between the Lover and the gun.

“Captain Sengka,” he said in that beautiful voice. He stood still, the pistol now trained on his head, looking up at the cactus-man, more than a foot taller and vastly more massive than he. He stared into the barrel of the gun as he spoke, as if it were Sengka’s eye. “It falls to me to bid you good-bye.”

The captain looked down and seemed momentarily uncertain. He drew back his free hand then, his biceps knotting enormously under his skin, his meaty fist tensed and ready to swing, bristling with thorns. He was moving slowly, obviously hoping not to hit Doul, but to intimidate him into submission.

Doul reached out with both his hands, as if supplicating. He paused, and there was a sudden snapping motion of such speed that Bellis-who had expected it, who had known that something of the sort would happen-could not possibly follow it. Sengka was reeling back, shocked, holding his throat where Doul had jabbed him with stiff fingers (not hard but like a warning, finding a space between those vicious spines and taking the breath from him). Doul held the gun now, still pointing toward his own skull, trapped between his flat palms like something granted him in prayer. He kept his eyes on Sengka and whispered to him, words that Bellis could not hear.

(Bellis’ heart is slamming. Doul’s actions shatter her. Whether an attack is brutal or muted, the motion itself, its preternatural speed and perfection, makes it seem like an assault on the order of things, as if time and gravity can no more withstand Uther Doul than flesh.)

The two cactacae standing behind Sengka stepped forward, sluggish and outraged. They reached to their belts, drawing weapons, and the gun held in Doul’s frozen applause flickered and faced them, and flickered again and was clenched in his outstretched right hand, pointed directly first at one and then (instantaneously) the other sailor.

(There is no movement. The three cactacae are appalled at this velocity and control that border on thaumaturgy.)

Doul shifted again, the gun leaving his fingers and spinning out of reach. His white sword was in his hand. There were two reports, and Sengka’s crew members yelled in pain, in quick succession, their hands snapping away from their weapons, now clutched in front of them, wrists split.

The sword’s tip was at Sengka’s throat now, and the cactus-man stared at Doul with fear and hatred.

“I hit your men with the flat of my blade, Captain,” said Doul. “Don’t make me show you the edge.”

Sengka and his men backed away, retreating out of his range, through the door and into the last of the daylight. Doul waited by the entrance, his sword extended into the open air.

All around the room a sound was building, a rhythmic muttering, a triumphant, awed bark. Bellis remembered it. She had heard it before.

“Doul!” the men and women of Armada chanted. “Doul! Doul! Doul!”

As they had at the glad’ circus, as if he were a deity, as if he could grant them wishes, as if they were chanting in church. Their adorations were not loud, but they were fervent and grimly joyous, and ceaseless, and in perfect time. They enraged Sengka, who heard in them a taunt.

He glared back at Doul, framed in the doorway.

“Look at you,” he shouted furiously. “You coward, you pig-man, you fucking cheat! What demon did you let fuck you in return for those skills, pig-man? You won’t leave this fucking place.”

He was silent then, suddenly, his voice collapsing, as Uther Doul stepped out of the room, into what the cactacae had thought of as the safety of the open air. The Armadans gasped, but most of them kept chanting.

Bellis was at the door immediately, ready to slam it against any she-anophelii. She saw Doul stalking without hesitation toward Nurjhitt Sengka, his blade held poised. She could hear him speaking.

“I know you’re angry, Captain,” he said softly. “Control yourself, though. There’s no danger in Aum coming with us, and you know that. It’ll be his last contact with this island. You came to forbid it because you felt your authority leaching from you. That was a miscalculation, but so far only two of your men have seen this.”

The three cactacae were ranged a little way around him, their eyes meeting and parting again, wondering if they could rush him. Bellis was shoved aside suddenly as Hedrigall and several other Armadan cactacae and scabmettlers came to stand outside. They did not approach the stand-off.

“You will not stop us leaving, Captain,” Doul went on. “You don’t want to risk war with Armada. And besides, you know as well as I that it’s not my crew or even my boss you want to punish, it’s me. And that…,” he finished softly, “will not happen.”

Bellis heard the sound, then: the high drone of anophelii women approaching. She gasped, and heard others gasp, too. Sengka and his men began to look up shiftily, as if trying to avoid being seen.

Uther Doul’s eyes did not move from Captain Sengka’s face. A scudding shape cut across the sky, and Bellis pinched her mouth closed. The chant of “Doul!” had dwindled, but it continued almost subliminally. No one yelled out to him that he was in danger. They all knew that if they had heard the anophelii, he certainly had.

As the sound of their wings approached, Doul moved closer to the captain, suddenly, till he was staring very close into Sengka’s eyes.

“Do we understand each other, Captain?” he said, and Sengka bellowed and tried to grab Doul and crush him in a thorned bear hug. But Doul’s hands flickered in Sengka’s face then swung down to block his arm, and then Doul was standing a few feet back, and the cactus-man was doubled up and cursing as sap dripped from his smashed nose. Sengka’s crewmen watched with a kind of appalled indecision.

Doul turned his back to them then, and raised his sword to meet the first of the mosquito-women who came for him. Bellis stopped breathing. The she-anophelius was suddenly visible, plummeting through screaming air, a starved shape. The jag erupted from her mouth. She skirted over the earth, irregular and very fast, her arms outstretched, slavering and starving.

For long moments she was the only thing that moved.

Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.

Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius (which Bellis had not even seen) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.

He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.

And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.

“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”

Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.

Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.

“Sunshit!” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.

Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.

Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.

The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.

Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.

And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.

Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Kruach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, was dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.

And, besides, he was waiting for something.

It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.

Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.

He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.

Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.

He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on the Terpsichoria settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.

Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.

Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.

“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.

His mean little smile disappeared instantly.

Tears were pouring from Bellis Coldwine’s eyes, but she did not utter a sob. She was breathing hard, and each deep breath shook and threatened to break, but she was quite silent. Her expression was fierce and controlled, her eyes intense and bloodshot. She looked like something cornered.

Furiously, she wiped her eyes and nose.

Tanner tried to speak, but her glare shook him, and it was only with an effort that he could utter words. “Now, there, now,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by that…”

“What… do you want?” she whispered.

Chastened but not cowed, Tanner looked down at the package in her hands.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” he said. “What’s that? Trying to stow away, are you? Hoping the Samheri’ll take you home?” As he spoke he felt his anger growing again, until he had to struggle to control it. “Want to tell Mayor Rudgutter how badly you was treated on the pirate ship, is that it, miss? Let them know about Armada so’s they can try to hunt us down, and gather me and the likes of me and put us back in the fucking shit below the decks? Slaves for the colonies?”

Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.

“Read it,” she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.

“ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope).

Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.

“ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuck is this?” Bellis watched him.

“This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”

She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.

He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.

“You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”

Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.

“You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then by Jabber I would walk through it.”

Tanner almost winced at her intensity.

“But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.

“I want to go home, Sack. But…” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on the Terpsichoria without that urge. And I know what it would mean… for you, and for the others… for all the Crobuzoner Remade… to be… ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.

“No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”

She hesitated, then looked up at him.

“And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor: There is nothing I can do. I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn well stuck with it.”

“So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.

“Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”

“You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon to fall?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”

A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.

It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.

For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon. Not that he bought any more shoes than anyone else, but he enjoyed walking the short length of the mews, past the tables of leather and canvas, listening to the shouts of the vendors.

There were several small cafes on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.

Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.

But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.

Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.

But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”

Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.

“Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”

“You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”

“Nobody knows,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over-our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”

With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.

“And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? To save it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I do not want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him carefully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”

They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.

Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.

Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.

He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.

He looked at the necklace with its little tag, its name and symbol. There was nothing to link this to Armada. Nothing to tell the Crobuzoner government where to find him. Bellis watched him from her silence. She knew what he was. He could sense the hope in her. He picked up the big ring, examined its intricate inverted seal, troughs for peaks and vice versa. He felt hypnotized by it. It meant more than one thing to him, like New Crobuzon.

The quiet went on while he turned the package over and over in his hands, ran his fingers over the nub of sealing wax, and the ring, and the long letter with its dreadful warning.

There was his Remaking to remember, but that was not all. There were places and people. There was more than one side to New Crobuzon.

Tanner Sack was loyal to Garwater, and he felt the passion of that loyalty inside him, beside a sad affection for New Crobuzon-a kind of melancholic regretful fondness. For the shoe market, and for other things. The two emotions flickered inside him and circled each other like fish.

He thought of his old city all blasted, destroyed.

“It’s true,” he whispered slowly. “It’s a mile or more to Machinery Beach, down the hill past the swamps and all that, where the women live.”

He jerked his head, suddenly indicating the other end of the township, the cleft in the rocks with the waves like oil below.

“But it’s only a few yards from here to the sea.”