"Well, as you know, they have wanted to sail closer to shore, because the sight of so much water terrifies them. And yesterday they came to me and promised that, if I would take the ship in closer, I might lie with any or all of them as my reward. So I steered a little nearer the coast, and then that polluted mist came up, and I lost my way."
"Why in the name of the Dog didn't you take soundings and anchor when you found it was shoaling?"
"Because I was futtering one of the girls, sir, and a man does not think of such things at such a time. Now will you please slay me?"
I drew a long breath. "By the Mouse God, you deserve it! But I shall have to deny myself that pleasure. We must either repair the ship and sail on; or, if that prove impossible, we must get back to Gades. In any case, I shall need every able man. Now take some hands below to see what can be done about hauling cargo out of the water in the hold."
Dawn showed us beached on an offshore island—actually, a big sand bar, several stadia long and separated by a narrow channel from the Moorish coast. This coast was low and level here; with a row of hills rising a few furlongs inland. We had evidently struck at high tide, for the entire hull was now out of water.
Since there was no chance that the ship would float away with the rising tide, we all climbed down the ladder and stood on the sand. I called the shipwrights and made a circuit of the ship to inspect the damage. I was puzzled by the speed with which we had filled, since so stoutly built a ship should have been able to withstand grounding with no worse effect than springing a few seams.
"Here you are, Captain," said my head shipwright, a Gaditanian named Spurius Kalba. "That's what holed her."
The Tyria had run, not merely upon a sandy beach, but also upon a ledge of rock that protruded from the sand like a boulder. There was not another such rock in sight in either direction along this beach. With leagues of soft sand to choose from, Mandonius had to put my ship upon the one real rock in the entire region. The rock had split several garboard strakes to kindling and had cracked the keel right through.
"What are our chances of repairing her?" I asked Spurius Kalba.
"None, Captain," he replied. "If this were the Bay of Gades, and we had plenty of men and an Archimedean winch to haul her out on a shipway, we could cut out all that broken wood and mortise in new timbers. But here we have no ship-way, no winch, and no spare timbers."
"Let's try the long boats," I said. "Could we get everybody into them to row back to Zelis?"
We unhitched the boats and shoved them into deeper water. We found that we could crowd our nearly forty persons into them. But then they were heavily laden, with little freeboard, and so would fill and sink at the first real blow. Moreover, we could not carry food and water enough for the journey.
We unloaded the longboats and hauled them up on the beach. The hysterical excitement of the first few hours after the grounding had died down. Sailors and passengers stood or sat, watching me with expressions of doglike expectancy, as if I were a god who could solve our problem with a snap of my fingers. While the cook got breakfast, I discussed schemes with Kalba. Others joined in from time to time.
"I say we should walk it," said Mentor. "Each of us can carry enough food and water to get him to the nearest town—"
"Ha!" barked Mandonius. "Do you know where we are, Doctor?"
"No. Where?"
"Near the mouth of the Lixus. The Lixites are the world's worst robbers. If we tried to walk the coast, a horde of them would swoop upon us the first day out and cut all our throats for the sake of our possessions."
"But if we had no possessions except food and water—"
"They'd slaughter us first and ask questions afterwards. Believe me, sir, I know these knaves." The mate turned to me. "If I may suggest it, Captain, you had better serve out arms and post watches right now, before they get wind of our presence."
I took Mandonius' advice about reorganizing the party. Some brought supplies ashore whilst others put up a camp. Setting up the camp and digging a ditch around it for a fortification took the rest of the day.
I also sent sailors off in the longboats to explore. Late in the day they returned. One reported a dry stream bed, a league to the northeast, which would probably run water with the first autumnal rain. The other announced the mouth of a big river—undoubtedly the Lixus—three leagues to the southwest.
Over dinner, I resumed my discussion with Spurius Kalba but seemed to get no nearer to finding a way out of our predicament. "At least," said I, "we have plenty of time to make up our minds. There's food for months."
"And plenty of firewood to cook it with," said Kalba, jerking a thumb towards the bulk of the Tyria looming above us.
"You're thinking of breaking her up?"
"Not exactly, sir; but those broken timbers in the bottom, at least, will never be good for anything else."
"You give me an idea," I said. "Suppose we did break up the ship. Could you build a slipway from some of the timbers, and a smaller ship from the rest?"
He stared at me popeyed. "Why, Captain, if that isn't the damnedest—begging your pardon, sir—the damnedest idea anybody ever—well, I suppose we could, now that I think. Let's see. If we planned a seventy-footer ..."
He jumped up and strode off into the dusk, muttering numbers. I followed him. He paced off a rectangle, thirty by eighty feet, on the sand, and marked its outline with a piece of driftwood.
"Now," he said, "we should need wood for a frame of this size, good and solid, and wood for props to brace the hull. We shouldn't need to prop up the shoreward end of the frame, because the natural slope of the beach takes care of that ..."
The next ten-day, Kalba and I spent in designing the new ship while the rest of the crew plowed up a plot of the sand bar and planted our wheat. About the third day after our stranding, a party of Lixhes—lean, brown men in goatskins— appeared on the mainland opposite our island. Although they bore spears and had quivers full of light javelins slung on their backs, they did not look like a war party. They had their families, their asses, and their flocks of sheep and goats with them.
"If we were few, they might attack," said Mandonius. "As it is, they may decide to make friends."
The Lixites approached the channel sundering the island from the mainland. After long hesitation, one man, smiling nervously, laid aside his arms and splashed through the shallows to the island. Nobody could understand him until I awoke a sleeping sailor who spoke Moorish. After listening to the Lixite, he said, "He speaks Moorish, Captain, but a dialect. I can understand about half of it."
We bought three sheep and a jarful of goat's milk in return for some of my trade goods. I said, "Ask him whence the Lixus River comes."
"He says," translated the sailor, "that it flows from the southeast, then from the northeast, and finally rises in the Dyris Mountains. That's what the Moors call the Atlas."
When we had drawn and erased a hundred sketches of the new ship on my waxed tablets and argued every little point from a hundred angles, I gave the word to the shipwrights. I told my people that, until we were at sea again, Spurius Kalba was their boss, under me, and anybody who did not wish to turn a hand to shipbuilding was welcome to start for Tingis afoot. Despite some grumbling, nobody challenged my order.
Luckily, we had shipped plenty of tools. Extra tools were given to the handier sailors, while those who showed less skill were reserved for simpler tasks, such as lowering timbers from the deck of the Tyria and dragging them to the shipway.
All day, the camp rang with the sound of saw and hammer, as the men knocked out pegs and pulled out nails. The music girls, who were a little light for such rough work, I put to cleaning up the camp, carrying water, and entertaining us in the evening with their musical specialties.