The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(23)
More crabs sidle over, curious, their claws clicking. The beach is covered with them. A few dart into the waves to drag fish onto shore. A dozen are stripping the skeleton of what looks like a dolphin thrown up by the storm. One crab, not two feet from Jeryon’s face, looks out to sea, claws upraised. Splatters of meat and bloody sand stain its shell.
Snip. Jeryon stifles a cry. He tries to sit up, but he’s so stiff he has to grab his legs and fold himself into a sitting position. The crab doesn’t notice him until Jeryon grabs its claws and wrenches the large one off.
All clicking ceases. The crabs scuttle back. One clicks tentatively.
The toesnipper is appalled. It snips, its other legs flail and its eyestalks stare at him, daring him to do that again. Off comes the skinny claw. It joins the first in Jeryon’s lap. He presses the toesnipper against the sand with his foot, and makes it watch him suck the meat from its claws. Shards stick to his throat. He chokes them down.
The other crabs develop a sudden interest in the dolphin. The ocean challenger charges the waves. The toesnipper waggles its eyes at them.
Jeryon flips the toesnipper to pry up its bell-shaped apron with his fingers, but it would be easier to pry a brick from a wall. His father told him, “Never mallet a crab,” but his shaking fingers couldn’t lever the blade either. He looks for a rock. The only one he finds within crawling distance is a black boulder poking through the sand, so the crab becomes the mallet. After several blows, the apron shatters and its legs stop flailing. He peels it away, then its carapace, scrapes off the dead man’s fingers, and sucks the meat out. The butter helps him swallow.
It’s gamier than Joslin crabs, but the mustard and roe are tasty, even if his father, who always put the roe in a soup, would mock him for eating it like an owner: raw off a blade.
When the meat hits his stomach, it rebounds with a gush. His throat flames. He hopes the mustard didn’t poison him. He crawls away from the puddle in the sand, and eats the rest of the crab flake by flake.
Refreshed, Jeryon manages to stand and cross the beach to a tree line of oak, bamboo, and pitcher trees. From the latter’s deep vessel-like leaves he drinks the collected rainwater, heeding the poth’s advice to drink slowly, however glorious the water tastes. Thinking of her leads him to look at the stacks. There’s nothing there, and no place for anyone to cling if there were. He doesn’t know what he saw during the storm. He spots bits of wood sticking out of the sand farther up the beach: the remnants of the dinghy. If he were kicked up here, where is the poth? He takes another drink and steadies himself to approach the dolphin carcass.
The crabs battle for the choicest bits, but they won’t give up their meal to him. They envelop it to hide the bones. They’ll snip his hands off if he tries to move them, so Jeryon trudges a ways up the beach and returns with a pointed length of gunwale from his tiller, the broken painter strand still attached. With this he weakly bats the crabs off the bones. When one attacks him, he manages to whack it hard enough to change its mind. The last he flicks off so it lands upside down. Before it can roll over, he stakes it to the beach. While its legs kick at the sky, he examines the carcass.
It’s half-buried in the sand; a rib cage, shoulder blades, and skull scratched and nearly free of flesh. It isn’t the poth’s. It might have been her, though, and Jeryon takes out his elation on the staked crab.
Most of the crabs give him a wide berth now. The few that don’t seem resigned to whatever fate this terrible avenger has for them. One soon finds out.
Jeryon stretches. He’s regaining strength and sensation, the latter mostly agony. He plots a survey of the island. It’s the first act of any prisoner: pacing one’s cell. And he has to find a better source of water. It’s approaching noon, and the water in the leaves of the pitcher trees won’t last much longer in this heat.
As far as he can tell, he’s at the northwest corner of an island surrounded by low cliffs rising from the sea. Thick forest rambles uphill some five hundred feet to ring a flat-topped column of gray rock another two hundred feet high. This beach is the only place he can see where the land ramps up to the island’s interior. If the poth didn’t land here, she’ll have been in more trouble than not having landed at all.
Jeryon pushes himself from tree to tree until he finds a fallen branch he can use as a walking stick. He tosses aside the piece of gunwale.
After such a storm, it isn’t hard to find a stream. Grasses, bright flowers of every hue, and thick bushes race alongside it. It’s so loud it drowns out the constant buzz and whirr of insects, which also drowns out the thought that those insects would make a good source of nutrition should the crabs run out.
He follows the stream a few hundred yards southwest toward the column to where it cuts through a bamboo grove. Using the folds of his shirt to guard the straight edge of the blade, he saws through a wide culm just beneath a node with his blade, then through the internode just beneath the next node. He checks inside the hollow for bugs, rinses it a few times in the stream, fills it to the brink, and drinks heartily. The water is cold and rich and tastes like a new life just begun.
Beyond the bamboo the stream enters a meadow that ends to the north at a cliff overlooking the sea. A single tree in its center guards a broadening of the stream. Jeryon can’t believe his luck. It’s a shega tree. The fruit is his secret vice. He would treat himself to one at the end of every voyage when they were in season, and to a big slice of fresh bread with shega preserves when they weren’t. He figures he’s deserving now.