Mort

more heat and enjoys a gentle maritime climate.
    In fact Krull, with a large part of what for want of a better word must be called its coastline sticking out over the Edge, was a fortunate island. The only native Krullians who did not appreciate this were those who didn’t look where they were going or who walked in their sleep and, because of natural selection, there weren’t very many of them any more. All societies have their share of dropouts, but on Krull they never had a chance to drop back in again.
    Terpsic Mims was not a dropout. He was an angler. There is a difference; angling is more expensive. But Terpsic was happy. He was watching a feather on a cork bob gently on the gentle, reed-lined waters of the Hakrull river and his mind was very nearly a blank. The only thing that could have disturbed his mood was actually catching a fish, because catching fish was the one thing about angling that he really dreaded. They were cold and slimy and panicky and got on his nerves, and Terpsic’s nerves weren’t very good.
    So long as he caught nothing Terpsic Mims was one of the Disc’s happiest anglers, because the Hakrull river was five miles from his home and therefore five miles from Mrs. Gwladys Mims, with whom he had enjoyed six happy months of married life. That had been some twenty years previously.
    Terpsic did not pay undue heed when another angler took up station further along the bank. Of course, some fishermen might have objected to this breach of etiquette, but in Terpsic’s book anything that reduced his chance of actually catching any of the damned things was all right by him. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that the newcomer was fly-fishing, an interesting pastime which Terpsic had rejected because one spent altogether far too much time at home making the equipment.
    He had never seen fly-fishing like this before. There were wet flies, and there were dry flies, but this fly augured into the water with a saw-toothed whine and dragged the fish out backwards.
    Terpsic watched in horrified fascination as the indistinct figure behind the willow trees cast and cast again. The water boiled as the river’s entire piscine population fought to get out of the way of the buzzing terror and, unfortunately, a large and maddened pike took Terpsic’s hook out of sheer confusion.
    One moment he was standing on the bank, and the next he was in a green, clanging gloom, bubbling his breath away and watching his life flash before his eyes and, even in the moment of drowning, dreading the thought of watching the bit between the day of his wedding and the present. It occurred to him that Gwladys would soon be a widow, which cheered him up a little bit. In fact Terpsic had always tried to look on the bright side, and it struck him, as he sank gratefully into the silt, that from this point on his whole life could only improve….
    And a hand grabbed his hair and dragged him to the surface, which was suddenly full of pain. Ghastly blue and black blotches swam in front of his eyes. His lungs were on fire. His throat was a pipe of agony.
    Hands—cold hands, freezing hands, hands that felt like a glove full of dice—towed him through the water and threw him down on to the bank where, after some game attempts to get on with drowning, he was eventually bullied back into what passed for his life.
    Terpsic didn’t often get angry, because Gwladys didn’t hold with it. But he felt cheated. He’d been born without being consulted, he’d been married because Gwladys and her father had seen to it, and the only major human achievement that was uniquely his had been rudely snatched away from him. A few seconds ago it had all been so simple. Now it was all complicated again.
    Not that he wanted to die, of course. The gods were very firm on the subject of suicide. He just hadn’t wanted to be rescued.
    Through red eyes in a mask of slime and duckweed he peered at the blurred form above him, and shouted, “Why did you have to save me?”
    The answer worried him. He thought about it as he squelched all the way home. It sat at the back of his mind while Gwladys complained about the state of his clothes. It squirreled around in his head as he sat and sneezed guiltily by the fire, because being ill was another thing Gwladys didn’t hold with. As he lay shivering in bed it settled in his dreams like an iceberg. In the midst of his fever he muttered, “What did he mean, ‘ FOR LATER ’?”

Torches flared in the city of Sto