Read Dai-San - 03 for Free Online Page A

quicken about him, eddying, and then it squirted him forward. In absolute darkness all the air was gone. He groaned inwardly and his eyes bulged. Faster and faster. His lips pulled back from his clenched teeth.
    Shimmering green bloomed before him, so far away above him. It blurred, pulsing on the tide, and with his last ounce of energy, he struck out with his arms, kicking his legs upward, upward, until he climbed, bursting, into sunlight and the sweet air.
    He gasped. A rumbling in his ears. He swallowed. A wave washed over him and he choked.
    Tumbling.
    Shooting his body upward again, the oxygen beginning to circulate in his system. He broke the skin of the sea, heard the thunder, felt the shudder of the breakers. He buoyed himself up and, waiting, launched himself on the rolling crest of a wave, riding it, allowing it to carry the weight of his body, making it do his work.
    And the breakers rolled endlessly in, sounding like the birth of the world: a wild, frenetic explosion of energy that tumbled and twisted him, sucked at him.
    And borne on this gravid, ageless salt tide, with the red sun rising at his back, exhausted and gaunt, he was thrown up onto the pink sand of this foreign beach, a pliant and unconscious bit of flotsam given grudgingly by the cool sea onto the curving, heated shore.

Heart of Stone
    A LL THE WARM MORNING he lay as if dead, while the last edge of the tide washed him in its creamy surf. Seaweed, stranded, strung across his broad back, wreathing him in deep green, half-covering the long scars of another battle.
    Within the wet world of the crashing sea, the fat buzz of flies, the quizzical call of swooping gulls and cormorants.
    Then the slosh of boots in the wet sand, slashing obliquely through the surf, their cruel progress disturbing the natural symmetry of the scene. A shadow fell across his still form. The large figure loomed over him. It was quite still for a moment. Then it bent and a hand plucked the drying seaweed from his back.
    They sat cross-legged on the expanse of pink sand, drying out above the straggling black flotsam ribbon marking the high tide line. A soft breeze brought them the stench of rotting fish and they saw, off to their left, along the sweep of the beach, the blue-green pulsing of a swarm of flies, iridescent, seemingly armor-plated, flashing in the sunlight, rising and settling on the remains of a small fish, swept up by the tide. Their rhythmic movement seemed to set the thing back to grisly life.
    Closer at hand, horseshoe crabs, their black carapaces shining, trundled noiselessly along the sand at the waterline, their stiff tails writing the toil of their lentitudinous passage.
    ‘I was lucky,’ Moichi was saying. ‘The poop acted something like a catapult. I was thrown over the reef into the relatively clear water of the lagoon out there.’ He looked towards the hidden reef. ‘That cursed coral! How I wish you had grown taller.’
    ‘And the others?’ asked Ronin.
    ‘Captain,’ he said, letting the hot sand drift through his fingers, ‘there are no others.’
    The verge came up on them suddenly, a rich, verdant carpet, moist, humid, smelling of loam and minerals and natural decay, a sharp contrast to the salt aridity of the sweeping crescent of pink sand behind them, baking in the afternoon heat.
    He stepped into the jungle and was immediately engulfed by the steamy cool world, so different from anything else he had encountered before. Engulfed in the jade cathedral, a vast tapestry of leaves, vines, branches. Thick gray boles gave way to shooting slender trunks, deep brown trees, thick and gnarled, covered in carpets of moss. Green sunlight, dusty, barred, oblique light, crept cautiously forward without any success. Shadows flitted high above; flash of color.
    Moichi had brought several oval fruit with them from the last rise of the beach. Large and green and glossy, their fibrous husks fell away at the touch of his dirk’s blade. Inside, they found a