The warm breeze lifted Carse’s tawny hair, blew his cloak against him. A cloud drifted over the sun and somewhere a bird screamed harshly. He did not move.
He was looking at an ocean.
It stretched out to the horizon ahead, a vast restlessness of water, milky-white and pale with a shimmering phosphorescence even in daylight.
“Mirage,” he said again stubbornly, his reeling mind clinging with the desperation of fear to that one shred of explanation. “It has to be. Because this is still Mars.”
Still Mars, still the same planet. The same high hills up into which Penkawr had led him by night.
Or were they the same? Before, the foxhole entrance to the Tomb of Rhiannon had been in a steep cliff-face. Now he stood on the grassy slope of a great hill.
And there were rolling green hills and dark forest down there below him, where before had been only desert. Green hills, green wood and a bright river that ran down a gorge to what had been dead sea-bottom but was now—sea.
Carse’s numbed gaze swept along the great coast of the distant shoreline. And down on that far sunlight coast he saw the glitter of a white city and knew that it was Jekkara.
Jekkara, bright and strong between the verdant hills and the mighty ocean, that ocean that had not been seen upon Mars for nearly a million years.
Matthew Carse knew then that it was no mirage. He sat and hid his face in his hands. His body was shaken by deep tremors and his nails bit into his own flesh until blood trickled down his cheeks.