Glawen forced himself to study the bones. It was difficult to estimate :
the number of individuals involved. The lens like quality of the water distorted perception; the bones nonetheless seemed small and delicate.
Glawen seemed to feel the pressure of someone's observation.
He jerked around and studied the shore. Everything appeared as before.. There was no sign of living creature, though a dozen unseen eyes might be watching from behind the thorn bush thickets.
His nerves were playing him tricks: so Glawen assured himself.
Glawen returned to the beach. He stood a moment in contemplation of dock, derrick and pavilion. A new thought entered his mind: what if someone had watched him arrive, then, when he had departed up the beach, had gone aboard his boat and sailed away? The idea caused Glawen's heart to pound; Thurben was not an island where he cared to be marooned, with nothing to eat but land crabs, which were indigestible, and nothing to drink but seawater.
Glawen returned down the beach at a trot, looking over his shoulder every few yards.
The sloop lay serenely to its anchor, precisely as he had left it. His spasm of near-panic drained away. He was alone on the island. Nevertheless, tranquillity had departed; the beach no longer could be considered a somnolent place on which to idle away a few days.
The time was now late afternoon. The breeze had died completely;;
ocean and lagoon lay calm and flat. Glawen decided to make his' departure on the morning breeze. He pulled his dinghy into the water and returned to the sloop. Syrene sank; darkness came to Thurben Island. Glawen prepared and ate his supper, then went up to the cockpit and sat two hours listening to small unidentifiable sounds from the shore. Overhead blazed the constellations; but tonight Glawen paid them no heed; his mind was occupied with more somber speculations.
At last Glawen went below to his bunk. He lay staring into the dark, unable to control the ideas which came wandering into his mind. Finally he fell into a restless slumber, on several occasions starting up to what he imagined to be the bump and scrape of someone climbing aboard the boat.
The night, with all deliberation, went its way. Lorca and Sing rose behind the island and climbed toward the zenith.
Glawen finally fell asleep, so deeply that the coming of day failed to arouse him. Finally, with Syrene almost three hours into the sky, he awoke, edgy and hollow-eyed.
Glawen consumed a breakfast of tea and porridge in the cockpit. A breeze blew from the north, fair for the voyage home whenever he chose to raise the anchor. The deep blue of the sea was accentuated by pillars and domes of bright white cumulus, lifting over the horizon to the south. The world seemed innocent and clean; the circumstances at the north end of the lagoon were so incongruous to this sunny blue and white world as to seem unreal.
Glawen decided to make another quick inspection of dock and pavilion before departure; he might conceivably discover something he had missed the day before. He stepped down into his dinghy and with the impellers at full power, scudded north up the lagoon, with clouds of darting silver falorials following below.
The dinghy arrived at the north pass. The pavilion and dock were as he found them on the day before. Easing the dinghy up to the beach, Glawen jumped ashore with the painter, which he tied to one of the bamboo pilings.
Glawen stood a moment taking stock of the surroundings. As before, he discovered only silence and desolation. He went out to the end of the dock. The surface of the lagoon was ruffled by the breeze, making the bottom difficult to see clearly, but the bones lay scattered as before.
Glawen returned to the shore and examined the pavilion.
Behind a shaded open area at the front were eight compartments, furnished only with heavy floor mats. There were no cooking or sanitary facilities other than an outhouse to the rear of the pavilion.
Glawen decided that he had seen enough; he had not been hallucinating on his first visit. He returned aboard his dinghy and pushed off into the lagoon. As the boat moved away from the dock, Glawen glanced out the pass and saw, about two miles to sea, a pair of lateen sails bellying to the breeze.
The vessel's course, by Glawen's best determination, would bring it to the north pass.
Glawen returned at full speed down the lagoon to his sloop.
Under the circumstances, lacking a weapon, he could not risk confrontation, and instant flight might be necessary. Once out to sea he would be safe. Downwind or on a reach the catamaran could catch him in any kind of a wind; in a calm or upwind, his power unit would push him smartly away from the unpowered catamaran.
Climbing aboard the sloop, Glawen slung binoculars over his shoulder and hoisted himself up the mast. Focusing the binoculars on the arriving vessel, he saw it to be a two-masted catamaran sixty or sixty-five feet long large for a Yip fishing boat and to Glawen's great relief, its course would take it to the north pass. He stood in little risk of detection: against a background of thorn bush and semaphore dendron the slender gray mast of the sloop would be indistinguishable.
Glawen watched until the catamaran disappeared around the curve of the island, then lowered himself to the deck. He stood looking indecisively up the lagoon. Prudence urged that he depart Thurben Island instantly. On the other hand, if he walked cautiously up the beach, keeping to the shade of the thorn bush thickets, he might learn the identity of those aboard the catamaran. If he were discovered, he could retreat instantly, take himself aboard the sloop and sail away. So what would it be? Prudent withdrawal or a scouting expedition up the beach? Had he a handgun, the response would have been automatic. Lacking a weapon of any sort, save a knife from the galley, he deliberated ten seconds.
"I
am a Clattuc," Glawen told himself.
"Blood, nature and tradition all indicate the way I must act."
Without further ado he tucked the galley carving knife, with a sharp six-inch blade, into his belt, took himself ashore in the dinghy and jogged up the beach, keeping close under the overhanging thickets of thorn bush
As he progressed he kept a careful eye focused ahead of him, in case someone from aboard the catamaran also should be exploring the beach. But he saw no one, which relieved him of the need to choose between uncomfortable options.
The masts of the catamaran became visible; a few hundred yards farther the dock and the vessel itself came into view.
Glawen scrambled up the slope at the back of the beach, pushed through a gap in the thorn bush and proceeded behind the fringe of thicket, which now provided him cover.
Presently he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled carefully closer, to within fifty yards of the pavilion.
Here he dropped flat and surveyed the scene through his binoculars.
Four golden-skinned Yips moved back and forth between boat and pavilion. Already they had brought ashore cushions, rugs and wicker chairs, and now set up a long table. They wore only short white kinles and seemed very young, although black hoods concealed their heads and faces.
Six other men, of mature years, sat in the wicker chairs.
They wore loose pale gray robes and, like the Yips, black hoods which concealed their identities. They sat composed and silent: men of substance or even importance, to judge by their postures and the poise of their heads. They made no communication among themselves;
each almost pointedly isolating himself from the others.
Glawen was unable to divine their place of origin. None were Yips; none would seem to be Naturalists from Throy and, almost certainly, none derived from Araminta Station.
The air tingled with imminence. The six gray-robed men sat stiff and still, their hoods creating an atmosphere of eerie unreality. Glawen no longer apprehended danger; the four Yips and six hooded men were preoccupied with their own affairs. Glawen watched fascinated, his mind sheering away from speculation.
