I could smell the sea, gleaming Thassa, in the myths said to be without a farther shore.

I reached down from the rush craft and took a palm of water into my hand and touched my tongue to it. Thassa could not be far beyond.

I took the triangular-bladed tem-wood paddle and moved the small craft, light and narrow, large enough scarcely for one man, ahead. I was formed of pliant, tubular, lengthy Vosk rushes, bound with march vine.

To my right, some two or three feet under the water, I saw the sudden, rolling yellowish flash of the slatted belly of a water tharlarion, turning as it made its swift strike, probably a Vosk carp or marsh turtle. Immediately following I saw the water seem to glitter for a moment, a rain of yellowish streaks beneath the surface, in the wake of water tharlarion, doubtless its swarm of scavengers, tiny water tharlarion, about six inches long, little more than teeth and tail. A brightly plumaged bird sprang from the rushes to my left, screaming and beating its sudden way into the blue sky. In a moment it had darted again downward to be lost in the rushes, the waving spore stalks, the seed pods of various growths of the Gorean tidal marshes. Only one creature in the marshes dares to outline itself against the sky, the predatory UI, the winged tharlarion. It was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead: sometimes I could see no further than the lifted prow of my small craft, as it nosed its way among the ruses and the frequent rence plants.

It was the fourth day of the sixth passage hand, shortly before the Autumnal Equinox, which in the common Gorean calendar begins the moth of Se'Kara. In the calendar of Ko-ro-ba, which, like most Gorean cities, marks years by its Administration of my father, Matthew Cabot. In the calendar of Ar, for those it might interest, it was the first year of the restoration of Marlenus, Ubar of Ubars, but, more usefully for the purposes of consolidating the normal chaos of Gorean chronology, it was the year 10,119 Contasta Ar, that is, from the founding of Ar.