“You’re a child,” Ael mused. “I wondered why Zerd valued you. Yet you’ve much to learn. I will teach you. You’ve found yourself freedom, a fine mount, and done much on your own. You hate the military and government of this country as much as we do. Do you hate the Northern military too? No one shall give you back. Among us you are safe, with the lawlessness we maintain strictly. Postpone whatever reason it is you want to reach the coast. We’ll get there. I’ll teach you the two arts—love, and war.” The bandit chief reached up his coruscated arm for me to take and so dismount.

I kneed Urns, who at once lolloped into motion, up over the rim and on into the night.

Two days later we reached the coast. The river became more impetuous as I became more cautious—then the surge and boom and surge was clearly heard, resolved from the low sibilant pounding it had lately been in my ears—then finally I saw a horizon of shimmering flatness. Blue, grey, silver—a cloud of spume, battering the rocks between which our foaming river thrust itself. I was seeing again the sea. I have not seen the sea since my childhood.

For years, and years (seventeen years) I watched the sea in its numberless moods. I watched it blue and flat; I watched it mauve and crawling, slightly wrinkled, like an ancient crocodile; I watched it crawl away and leave a wavy-ribbed stretch of purple ooze, dotted, pitted with debris unidentifiable through distance; I watched its smile lilt glittering under the glittering sun; I watched it, a robust sighing wraith, under a mezzanine sky of wheeling, mewing, sun-touched birds, under rose or green or crimson or gold sunset, under twilight, under eclipsing dusk, under black night and night drowning stars in the intent mirror-eye of its darling; I watched it huge and gusty, white and blue, uproarious with winds; I watched it foaming on beaches overhung by trees, beaches which climbed swiftly to become mountainous slopes; occasionally I saw tiny figures race along the white shores, or into the sucking, swift blue laced with white aureoles and high-flung, quivering mists of foam—they dragged in wriggling-silver-glinting-heavy nets, but I could not see more than their tininess, and I thought them females. I was not so placed that it was possible for me to see any harbour, any boats, or ships of trade. The city’s bay was behind the nearest mountain. I watched the sea grey, shiny under drizzle; grey, churning under heavy rain; I watched it black, rising and howling, its foam rearing high and whirling its funnels, lashed by storms. But always I was high above it, safe, untouched, its virile smell, the details of its action far below me and totally inaccessible.