All that he knew was that he searched, but of why and for what no trace remained in his mind. The air of the sea-bed rose to meet him, hot and stagnant, as though a ghost of dead ocean lingered where the glaring sun had boiled its reality to vapor. He glanced up, swaying easily in his saddle as his horse crunched through a salt-bar, and saw a faint and perhaps transient ribbing of white cloud to the West; then looked down again to find his eyes, holding a longer memory of sun-blasted monotony than his mind did, startled by a stab of red amid the gray and white seascape. He rode on, and the red expanded, took shape and solidity, became companioned by other solid red shapes; and now he saw that he was approaching a graveyard of rusted iron ships, huge as they were sleek and alien and occupying he could not guess how-many-leagues of the parched sea-floor.
But how had they ever floated and moved, being iron and mastless? He could see their hugeness more and more clearly: they were like cliffs of rusted iron rearing from the sea-floor, stretching out shadow to meet him though he was still two or three arrowsflights distant from them. And how too, in this waterless world, had they rusted? He was in the shadow of one now, riding to it, having to lift his head to keep its railing in view, half-expecting the skeleton of a sailor to appear there, jaw clacking on unlunged air. His hands tightened on the reins a moment, for the thought had struck him that if he entered a graveyard of ships, he rode above a graveyard of sailors too. Would they spring in their hundreds from their sun-sealed mud-graves when he was deep enough into their ambush, jaws clacking, unfleshed fingerbones gripping weapons of iron that were rusted as the ships they had crewed in life?
He looked behind him, but all that moved was the heat-shimmer over dead mud. Aye, sailors’ bones might be buried beneath him, but they would lie there in peace till Ílbamel’s harp twanged the discord of world-dissolution. He looked ahead again, noting that the mud nearer the ship was rippled and meandered with the dried tracks of running water, as though the ship had wept for the lost ocean and its own crippling. He rode on till he was among the water-tracks, then reined up and dismounted, leading his horse forward to the starboard cliff-face of the ship. With his free hand he rapped the red iron, but it barely sounded to the contact, solid as a cliff save that his knuckles were red with rust-flakes when he pulled his hand back. He began to walk to the right, to the stern of the ship, meaning to circle it to where he had first stood, but when he reached the port side he was attracted by another ship lying near it: a squatter, longer ship, sunk deeper in the mud, and with an iron ladder leading up its reduced cliff-face, the shadow of its uprights and rungs lying stretched on the ship-side in the light of the declining sun.
He did not mount again but led his horse across the stretch of dried mud between the two ships, cracked in patterns that seemed related to the interplay of weight between them as they pressed titanically on the sea-floor, and tracked with water that seemed to have flowed from both. When he reached the foot of the ladder, he tugged one rung, two rungs, three with his free hand, then looped the reins over the first rung he had tested and prepared to climb. Iron screeched thinly far above as the ladder accepted his full weight and he paused, waiting to see if it would begin to fall. After half-a-minute he jerked at the ladder, then jerked harder, but only rust-flakes were shaken free. He began to climb, one rung, two, three, and leapt clear without conscious thought as the ladder shuddered under his hands and feet and broke apart, falling from the ship’s side in vicious, jagged lengths of rusted iron. But the length of his fall was not great and he landed softly enough on the mud on the opposite side of the ladder to his horse, which moved sharply out of danger as it heard his cry and saw him leap clear.
He picked himself up, grunting ruefully as he surveyed the mud directly beneath the ladder’s fall, pierced and shattered by fragments of iron as though by a hundred stabbing spears, and walked to untie his horse from the remaining section of ladder, which had broken up only at and above where he climbed. He was lucky it had not waited to do so, luring him higher, so that his fall proved fatal whether at once, by a broken neck or crushed skull, or lingeringly, by a broken limb or two or three. Re-mounting his horse, he rode away from the ship and then turned his horse’s head deeper into the graveyard. He would not risk climbing aboard another ship, but perhaps one had shattered or rolled over on its side, allowing him to see its deck and into its hold.
He rode an hour without finding such a ship, and dismounted as dusk fell to drink and eat from his near-exhausted water-skin and saddle-bag. When had he last filled them? He could not remember, nor when his horse had last been watered and fed. He let it have a mouthful from the water-skin too, then replaced the plug with the thought that tomorrow it would be empty. Having unsaddled and hobbled his horse, he laid down his sleeping furs and himself atop them, but stared upward long at the brightening rash of the stars, streaked ever and again with meteor-tracks, before he closed his eyes and slept. He awoke the next morning with a chilled face and an answer to the rust of the ships, for now he stared upward into swirling white: a fog was covering the sea-bed, condensing out of fugitive moisture. His horse whinnied — it had been that which awoke him, he realized — and he rose to find it licking at the cold leather of its saddle, where the fog was condensing into droplets.
Now he understood the dried tracks of water and led his horse to one of the ships, hearing the fog-dulled air gradually fill with the trickle and plash of fog condensing on its night-cooled sides and flowing downward to the mud. A fat silver snake appeared by his boot, shimmering beneath the fog, and his horse bent its head with a whicker of satisfaction to drink from it. He dragged it on before it had filled its belly, not wishing to risk a colic, and brought it to a ship’s cliff-side, busy with trickling water. Here he loosed the water-skin and held it to one of the trickles to fill. The water would taste of rust but be potable enough, granting him and his horse life amid this sea-bed graveyard.
The water-skin was fat and bulging when he returned it to his horse’s back, and he regretted that he had no other to fill. But the trickles of water down the ship’s side were lessening now: the fog was thinning, glowing brighter with the rising sun, which soon enough scorched it away and set to work greedily on the streams silvering the mud. Within an hour they were gone and when he touched the mud it was hot, dry and hard beneath his fingertips. He led his horse back to its saddle, meaning to ride on and learn the extent of the graveyard of ships. But when he bent to lift the saddle he was surprised to discover a tiny green shoot sprouting beside it, as though some seed, trapped there as he had traveled overland, had been dislodged from it and begun to grow in the droplets of water that had trickled from its leather. Fearing that the sun would be too strong for the shoot where it presently lay, he scooped it up on a handful of mud and carried it into the shade of the ship.
He re-planted it where a fog-stream would nourish its roots and returned to his horse, saddled it, and rode on deeper into the graveyard of ships. The ships towered above him like rusty iron cliffs and now he could hear a constant faint and irregular chime and clatter as their plates, cooled by night and fog, expanded in the fierce morning sun. Within half-an-hour the sound had died away, only to be succeeded, from far behind him, by the thin silvery notes of horns, now rising to a massed crescendo, now fading to a single horn or two. He turned his horse and rode back to investigate the mystery, and saw from afar that one of the ships where he had overnighted was half-whelmed in white-flecked green. And aye, when he was closer he saw that ’twas being whelmed by a bindweed, growing with præternatural speed in the sun, and knew that the weed’s white flowers, regular and perfect as hunting-horns, were blowing the thin and silvery notes he had heard.
He guessed that the growth must have sprung from the shoot he had transplanted, pouring up and over the ship whose shade he borrowed. He heard a faint pattering on the mud around him, and was looking for its source when he clapped his hand to his face, stung there as if by an insect or flying ember. But what he picked from the mane of his horse was no insect or ember but a shining black seed. Now he saw that ripe black seedpods were hanging among the bindweed-flowers; and as he watched he saw one vanish and heard two moments later the mud patter around him with its far-flung seeds. He urged his horse on, spurring it to a canter under the light barrage of seeds, and they came safe beneath the bindweed as it hung from the ship’s side.
He dismounted, hearing the light fop of bursting seed-pods above him and the eager cropping of his horse as it tore at the green and luscious growth. The scent of the white flowers was sweet, coming in waves to the rhythm of their horn-notes, and he plucked one, finding it full of sun-thickened nectar. As he sucked it dry, drops of nectar began to fall from the curtain of green above him, pattering like golden blood on the sea-bed. Already the flung seeds had begun to sprout, raising white horn-flowers that would soon be bursting seed-pods, till the rusted iron cliffs of the whole graveyard of ships were whelmed in nectar-leaking green.