I woke.

          Cold, I came into myself unwilling but aware that I had

work to do. Hard work. I seemed to come into waking from a

long way away. When at last I was fully conscious I remembered

where I was and what had taken place. I remembered too my

dream which I knew now was no ordinary dream at all.

        The ekimmu were still near at hand, all gathered round. But the torture had stopped. They had not been doing much damage to me while I slept. They’d been waiting for me to come to.

           It was now sunset.

         But no, they’d not been waiting. They were not even looking at me anymore. Not really. The Captain was standing back, defensive, with the rest of his host. A pained look of hatred and frustrated impotence was on his face. I quite liked seeing it there.

        Then something struck my chest. With my ribs broken as they were this made me gasp. Massive tsunamis of pain roared and crashed down throughout my nervous system. I twisted my head round to see a huge raven standing on my chest staring down at me.

        Munin.

        He was looking down at me with his head cocked. His beak opened and he cawed, saying something which I felt I could almost understand. His heavy weight on my broken chest though was almost more than I could take and I started to see spots and gasping for breath I nearly blacked out again.

        Munin seemed to understand this and moved off my chest, hopping lightly onto the stone slab beside my left shoulder. He stood there for a moment, facing my feet, and then I felt his beak working at the barbed wire that bound me. He pulled at it, tugging and yanking until he was able to hook his beak under it. Then, with a strength unworldly he cut the wire as cleanly as any pliers might have done.

        He pulled at the next loop and cut it also, and the last. My left arm and hand were free.

        After this he went down to my legs and cut the barbed wire there too. As he pulled at it I could feel the barbs jabbing into the wounds which they had already formed, opening them up, making me wince.

        Last of all he freed my right arm. I was able to unwind the wire around my neck on my own.

        I moved very slowly, fearing to go too fast. My eye was throbbing dully. I had a headache and felt as if I were trying to balance on a flimsy piece of flotsam in a restless sea: any sudden movement and I would fall over, lose my balance. I brought my right hand experimentally to my left eye and felt at the edge of the raw, weeping socket.

        The ekimmu Captain snarled and hissed. He wanted to come at me, to fight me and break me. But now I had the shield, the diamond shield; and it would deflect him and his kind forever. Munin also stood between us, and he was a force to be reckoned with. Really, he was an emissary of Woden: a part of the All-Father’s power and awareness.

        I slid off the stone slab. I found my bad, discarded where it lay, wet and covered in sand. I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder. The pain in my chest flared up. My breath came in ragged gasps.

        Munin flew over and landed on my left shoulder. I felt his talons dig in and it hurt. I carried him this way, with him guarding me. I walked away from that place, heading back to the beach where my boat should have been.

        The ekimmu had destroyed it. It lay on its side, foundering in the shallows of the low tide. There was no way I could use it to sail away. I waited throughout the night until the tide was at its lowest and then, just as the sky was lightening in the east, I waded out to it and scavenged it for supplies and fetched the inflatable dingy.

        These I brought back to the beach and set down. For some time I didn’t do much, just sat there, bruised and cut and broken. And cold.

        I inflated the dingy and then brought it out to the water. I threw my bag in, my food and my gear. Then I pushed off. Munin flew over me, and began to caw loudly. At first I thought he was warning me of an attack, which I wouldn’t have had the strength to fend off, even if the attack was coming from an army of beetles. But he was actually wanting to guide me.

        “Come here,” I said to him, weakly croaking the words.

        He flew down low. I tied a line to the plastic handle of the dingy and passed the other end of it to him. He took it up in his talons and then flapped his great black wings, going aloft. The line stretched out and he took off. The dingy bobbed and then slowly began to glide over the surface of the water. Munin was towing me.

        I lay back in the dingy, my head resting against the side. I put the wet blankets over me, but kept shivering anyway; and I fell into a fitful slumber, sick and weak but certain that I would be taken care of and led to safety as I left the hidden remnants of Atlantis.