Moljar was up again now, hacking at the thick tough surface of one end of the raft. "Yes. Watch that bat wing. Don't let it slide away. It is what we must have to reach Anghore."
"What are you doing now? And what's the wing for?"
He answered carelessly, "I'm going to make us a sail from the wing. It is almost a perfect sail of its kind. I figure the gyro brought us halfway across the sea. Maybe we have a third of the way to go. I have a compass and I saw what direction we were following before we crashed. With a fair wind, and luck, we should reach shore within a day."
She stared with no attempt, now, to conceal her admiration for the barbarian. "For a half-breed," she said, "you've got a brain."
Moljar said nothing. He had finished digging the hole in the surface of the raft. He next cut long strips of leather from his tunic for rigging. The twenty-foot-high leading edge of the bat's wing, a high curving spar, he stepped deeply in the hole, like a mast. Soon they were moving through the fantastic sea before a slight, lethargic breeze.
Their blaster protected them many times from the countless varieties of sea and air creatures that constantly attacked them. Moljar devised a sea-anchor by cutting off one of the air sacks from beneath the raft, and tying it to one end of a long leather rope. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, he threw out the sea-anchor.
There was little difference between night and day, except that the phosphorescence dimmed and was replaced by a grayer, more sickly light. And the high, gracefully-curved membrane of the bat's ribbed wing arched above them like the bizarre rigging of the junks that ply the Martian canals between the ruins of Phreer and Sumph-Logan. Black, with veins of dried blood, it caught the wind and tautened like the black sails of ancient pirate craft.
But though they could fight the monsters that flew and swam about them they could not fight the sea itself. The sea is cunning. It can bide its time, and spring with more violence than the greatest beast. The wind was its ally.
It was late the following afternoon that Mahra's hypersensitive nerves detected the distant pounding of the surf against high crags. They both visualized the dark mountains of Maghrone where the dull spires and minarets of Anghore towered up from its granite sea wall thousands of feet into the mist.
The thunderous surf grew in volume to a steady roaring as their makeshift craft bore them shoreward.