His heart still pounded, he retched and coughed up the foul tasting river water, his lungs burned as though filled with toxic gas, the pain from the deep incised scrapes down his back temporarily numbed by the cold. No matter, he was free.
He started to reach for his clothes – only to find them no longer there, his belt hung in forlorn solitude, somehow the sodden clothes had worked free; perhaps the wash from a passing vessel had dislodged them. Or his own frantic thrashing as he reached the surface had knocked them free. He frantically looked around, there, some fifty yards or so downstream, he could see a bundle of floating cloth, far too far away for him to reach in his exhausted state.
He laughed bitterly to himself, he was as n***d as the day he had been born, not even a pair of so
