Once I felt it roll over my back, my body protected by the remains of the frame.

Its skin was not rough, abrasive, like that of free-water sharks, but slick, coated with a bacterial slime. It slipped over me, not tearing me from the frame. Though it touched me I could see nothing.

“Where are you?” I heard from the water.

“Here!” I cried. “Here is the raft!” I knelt on the raft. I did not know if I were alone on it or not. “Here!” I cried. “Here! Here!”

“Help!” I heard. “Help!” I heard two men crawl onto the raft. One began screaming. Another man crawled onto the raft and then, insanely, began to wander about. “Stay down!” I cried. “Save yourselves!” he cried. He leaped into the water. “Come back!” I cried. It is my supposition that it was his intention to swim to the dock, more than four pasangs away. He did not turn back, even when I warned him that his direction was false. “Poor fool,” said a voice. “Hassan!” I cried. “It is I,” he said, near me.

“Help!” I heard. I felt for one of the raft poles, found it, and, extending it, thrust it toward the voice. I pulled the man aboard. I tried to save a second man, similarly, but he was taken from the pole, screaming, by the Old One.

I saw lights across the water, another raft, approaching. On its bow, lance raised, I saw T’Zshal.

The two rafts gently struck one another. We boarded the other raft.

“There is another man in the water, somewhere,” I said to T’Zshal. “He swam that way.”

“Fool,” said T’Zshal, “fool.” He looked upon us. “The Old One,” he said, not asking.

The steersman nodded. He had lived.

“Let us go back,” said one of the polemen on T’Zshal’s raft.

T’Zshal regarded us. I and Hassan had survived, and the steersman, and the man I had saved. I did not know if the man who had entered the water had survived or not. I did not think his chances were good.

“Let us return now, swiftly to the docks,” said one of the men on T’Zshal’s raft.

T’Zshal looked out over the dark waters. “The Old One has returned,” he said.

“And he has not forgotten his tricks.”

“Let us return swiftly to the dock,” said a man, insistently.

“A man of mine,” said T’Zshal, “remains in the water.” He indicated with his hand the direction the men were to pole.

They moaned, but did not disobey the kennel master.

T’Zshal himself stood at the bow of the raft, the lance in one hand, in his other a lantern, lifted.

An Ahn later he found the man. “Greetings,” said the fellow. “Greetings,” said T’Zshal, drawing him from the water. “I have been swimming,” said the man.

“Yes,” said T’Zshal. T’Zshal put him on the planks of the raft. The man seemed to have no recollection of the Old One, nor of what he was doing in the water.

He fell asleep.

“Return to the dock,” said T’Zshal.

The heavy raft turned, and began to move toward the docks.

Hassan and I looked at one another. We had decided that we would not kill T’Zshal.

“Tomorrow,” said T’Zshal, “at dusk, I am returning to this area.”

“I shall accompany you,” I said. “And I, too,” said Hassan.

17 What Occurred in the Pit

I think there was no man on the raft that evening who bad not lost at least one comrade, recently or long ago, to the Old One.

“We hunt the Old One,” T’Zshal had said. He bad visited various pits, some open, some sheltered, the warehouses, the refining vats. “We hunt the Old One,” he had said. And they bad followed him. Even in the shadow of Klima’s Keep itself, the squarish, stout, fortresslike building which houses the weaponry, domicile and office of the Salt Master himself did we recruit our crew. On the height of the keep I saw, tight in the bright, hot wind, under the merciless sun, defiant to the pits and desert itself, the Rag of Klima, the whip and scimitar. None bad been ordered; not one upon the raft had, under the uplifted whip coil, nor upon the advice of unsheathed steel, been commanded. Many were older men, sober and mature, many blackened by the sun. Each was slave, but each came not as a slave, but came unbidden, as a man. “We hunt the Old One,” had said T’Zshal. He said this in the pits, the warehouses, among the refining vats. “We hunt the Old One,” he said. And men had followed him.

I think there was no man on the raft that evening who had not lost at least one comrade, recently or long ago, to the Old One.

“Awaken me,” bad said T’Zshal, “when the lelts have gone.”

Far into the pit, distant from the salt docks, we slowed the raft, and steadied it with the long poles, holding it as nearly as we could in place. He who bad been steersman with us yesterday, during the attack of the Old One, held the sweep that governed the movements of that open, sluggish platform which constituted our vessel. Beside he, only Hassan, on the other side, and myself, of yesterday’s crew, accompanied T’Zshal. At the comers of the raft burned four lamps, mounted on poles. Torches, however, stood ready, to be lit from these, and held over the water, should there be need.

“Awaken me when the lelts have gone,” had said T’Zshal. “I will sleep now.”

He had then lain down, behind the frame within which the salt tubs are stored, aft, and had slept. Beside him lay the long lance, some nine feet in length.

“Will you not use poison on the blade?” had asked a man at the salt dock. No one of those who accompanied T’Zshal had asked the question.

“No,” had said T’Zshal.

I wondered if he had once been of the Warriors.

I observed T’Zshal as he slept, the bearded head on one arm. I wondered why it was that none killed him, to become kennel master in his place. How was it, he holding the precarious sovereignty of our kennel, that he dared to sleep among slaves, who might win his kaffiyeh and agal, though they were only rep-cloth, so simply as the dagger, slipped from his sash, might enter his throat? The kennel master, though slave, too, is Ubar, with power of life and death, in the squalor of his domain. How is it, I wondered, that such a man can survive a night, that such a man dare turn his back upon the fierce, envious sleen among whom, with whip, and laughter, he walks. His will, his word, in the kennel decrees law. He may, if he choose, stake out, or whip or slay a man who fails his quota of gathered salt, or strikes a fellow, administering fierce, dread discipline as the whim may seize him, and yet, should he himself be slain, his slayer is not punished, but accedes to his authority and, in his place, becomes master of the kennel. How is it, I wondered, that men survive at Klima, and that they do not die at one another’s throats?

I looked at the heads of the lelts, and, scattered among them, the heads of the pale salamanders, thrust from the dark water, attracted by the movement, or the awareness of the light or heat, of the lamps.

They had been with the raft now for better than an Ahn, appearing some quarter of an Ahn after we had steadied the sluggish vessel in place.

It is difficult to bespeak the darkness of the pit.

T’Zshal slept.

Beside him lay the lance; in his reddish sash was thrust the dagger of his office.

“The lelts remain with us,” said one of the men near me, he, too, with a pole.

I looked upon the lelts, and, among them, here and there, the salamanders. Their blunt, whitish heads protruded from the water, curious, each head oriented toward one or the other of the four lamps on the raft. I knelt down on the raft, and, quickly, scooped, holding it, one of the lelts from the water. It was enclosed in my hand. It struggled briefly, then lay still. The lelt is a small fish, long-bodied for its size, long-finned. It commonly swims slowly, smoothly, conserving energy in the black, saline world encompassing its existence. There is little to eat in that world; it is a liquid desert, almost barren, black, blind and cool. It swims slowly, conserving its energy, not alerting its prey, commonly flatworms and tiny-segmented creatures, predominantly isopods. I turned the lelt, looking at the small, sunken, covered pits in the sides of its head. I wondered if it was capable, somehow, of a dim awareness of the phenomenon of light. Could there be some capacity, some genetic predisposition for the recognition of light, like an ancient, almost lost genetic memory, buried in the tiny, simple, linear brain at the apex of its spinal column? It could not be possible I told myself. The tiny gills, oddly beneath and at the sides of its jaws, closed and opened. There was a minute sound. I lowered my hand and let the lelt slip again into the dark water. It slipped from sight. Then I saw it again, a few feet from the raft. Again its head protruded from the water, again oriented to the same lamp at the corner of the raft.