He knew that she was right, but still he was not ready to give up.
She began to move away from him, toward the south, and he thought that
she had gone mad and was wandering. Then he saw that she was peering
with awful intensity at the line of the scarp that formed this wall
of the Belly of Stones. It rose into a great ridge, serrated like the
backbone of a whale, and some three miles away a long dorsal fin of
reddish rock curved out into the desert.
Berild made a little sobbing noise in her throat. She began to plod
toward the distant promontory.
Stark caught up with her. He tried to stop her, but she would not be
stopped, turning a feral glare upon him.
She croaked, "Water!" and pointed.
He was sure now that she was mad. He told her so, forcing the painful
words out of his throat, reminding her of Sinharat and that she was
going away from any possible help.
She said again, quite sanely, "Too far. Two--three days without water."
She pointed. "Monastery--old well--a chance...."
Stark decided that he had little to lose by trusting her. He nodded and
went with her toward the curve of rock.
The three miles might have been three hundred. At last they came up
under the ragged cliffs--and there was nothing there but sand.
Stark looked at the woman. A great rage and a deep sense of futility
came over him. They were indeed lost.
But Berild had gone a few steps farther. With a hoarse cry, she bent
over what had seemed merely a slab of stone fallen from the cliff, and
Stark saw that it was a carven pillar, half buried. Now he was able to
make out the mounded shape of a ruin, of which only the foundations and
a few broken columns were left.
For a long while Berild stood by the pillar, her eyes closed. Stark got
the uncanny feeling that she was visualizing the place as it had been,
though the wall must have been dust a thousand years ago. Presently she
moved. He followed her, and it was strange to see her, on the naked
sand, treading the arbitrary patterns of vanished corridors.
She came to a halt, in a broad flat space that might once have been a
central courtyard. There she fell on her knees and began to dig.
Stark got down beside her. They scrabbled like a pair of dogs in the
yielding sand. Stark's nails slipped across something hard, and there
was a yellow glint through the dusty ochre. Within a few minutes they
had bared a golden cover six feet across, very massive and wonderfully
carved with the symbols of some lost god of the sea.
Stark struggled to lift the thing away. He could not move it. Then
Berild pressed a hidden spring and the cover slid back of itself.
Beneath it, sweet and cold, protected through all these ages, water
stirred gently against mossy stones.
* * * * *
An hour later, Stark and Berild lay sleeping, soaked to the skin, their
very hair dripping with the blessed dampness.
That night, when the low moons roved over the desert, they sat by the
well, drowsy with an animal sense of rest and repletion. And Stark
looked at the woman and said,
"I know you now."
"What do you know, wild man?"