On Blue's waters

- 10-
SEAWRACK’S RING

I have been hunting again. Some of the men who captured the wild cattle invited me to go with them, and being curious I made time for it. It was very different from the cattle hunt, a butchery bloody enough to satisfy any number of augurs.

We were after wallowers, the most prized game hereabout, and the most difficult to hunt. A silence of eight or ten had been located not much more than a league from the town, but we had to ride a long way out of the direct route and through difficult country in order to approach them upwind. All the men said that wallowers never remain in a place where they have been hunted, and may move forty leagues or more before they stop again.

I had a slug gun like the rest, and although I had not the least intention of using it when we set out, I realized before long that I would have to if the opportunity arose; otherwise Kilhari, Hari Mau, and the others in our party would feel I had betrayed them.

Kilhari posted us in a wide semicircle well out of sight of the silence (as the herd is called), telling us that when we saw the stalkers approaching it we might edge in a little. I asked him to put me in the worst place, explaining that I had borrowed my gun, was half blind and badly out of practice, and so forth. He posted me last, at one of the tips of the crescent, saying that those were the worst places. They are actually the best, as I suspected at the time and verified this evening.

After about an hour at my post, I caught sight of the decoys. These were two men in the wickerwork figure of a young wallower covered with hide. They advanced slowly and cautiously through the open, swampy forest, often turning away from the denser growth where the silence was thought to be, so as to give the stalkers hidden behind them better cover. Their part of the hunt is the most dangerous as well as the least glorious, because a real wallower will often charge their false one, and they have no slug guns and would have no chance of firing them if they did. For protection they must depend upon the stalkers behind them.

Their gradual advance must have taken the better part of another hour. Because I was eager to catch a glimpse of the great beasts about which I had heard so much on the ride out, I advanced, too, pushing my way through the high, rough grass, although not nearly as far as the decoy and the stalkers, and standing on tiptoe from time to time in order to see better over it. The suspense was almost unbearable.

Quite suddenly, both stalkers rose and fired over the back of the wickerwork figure. Up until that time, I had been unable to see the wallowers, but as soon as the crash of the slug guns sounded, a dense patch of saplings and brush seemed almost to explode as twenty or more enormous dark-gray beasts with towering horns dashed from it.

And vanished. It was one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen. At one moment these huge animals, twice the size of an ordinary horse and six times its weight, were charging madly in every direction. At the next they were gone. Several hunters were firing some distance from me, but I saw nothing to shoot at.

I do not remember seeing the young bull rise from the scythe grass, although I suppose I must have-only slamming my slug gun to my shoulder and pulling the trigger, then flying through the air without fear and without pain, and then one of the other hunters (it was Ram, whose name, I fear, makes him sound as though he comes from my own Viron) helping me up. In retrospect it was rather like my hunt in the Land of Fires, but of course I did not think of that until tonight.

Wishing very much that Babbie were with us, I told Ram that we had to track the wallower that had charged me, that I had fired at him from very close range and felt certain I had wounded him. He laughed and pointed, and in a few seconds half a dozen men were gathered around the dead wallower, which had not run ten strides before collapsing. Since two or three hunters often empty their guns to bring one of these animals down, it was an extraordinary shot. As for me, I had torn trousers and have some big bruises here and there, but I am well otherwise.

These hunts are only occasionally successful, and a single kill is considered an achievement. We had two, one killed by the stalkers (who are generally the most experienced hunters and the best shots) and this one by me, so we returned to town as heroes. I will have to refrain from all hunting in the future if I want to keep the reputation I have won.

At any rate, we are having a great feast tonight, with everyone who took part sharing in the meat. I excused myself as soon as the serious drinking began, which is how I have this opportunity to write. The hide, the Y-shaped horn, the bones, and especially the big canine teeth, all of which are valuable, will be sold. I will receive the money from my animal, and since I do not need it I hope to use some of it to benefit the poor.

And some, dear Nettle, I hope to use to rejoin you. They have almost ceased to watch me, and I am careful to do nothing to arouse their suspicions.

No doubt I have written too much about our hunt, which can be of little interest to you; but I wanted to set down this account while the facts were still fresh in my mind. I had another purpose, too, which I hope to make clear if I have time for a good session tomorrow.

I meant to tell you how Krait deceived Seawrack tonight. I will, but there is something else I ought to describe first, although it will be hard to represent exactly, and I may fail to make it clear. Put simply, it is that I saw the sea (and afterward the land as well) from that time forward as I do today. If I say that I believe I am seeing these things, and houses, too, and occasionally faces, as a good painter must, will you understand me?

Probably not, because I am not sure I understand it myself. You told me about the beautiful pictures upstairs in the cenoby, and I put them in our book because Maytera Marble had posed for Molpe. Describe that picture again to yourself, and imagine me looking at the sea as the sea would have appeared in it.

As for the rest of you who may read this, whether you are our sons or strangers or both, there is a sharpness of detail born of a consciousness of detail. When we untied the sloop, I saw the unnatural calm of the little bay beneath the fog that veiled it, and when I had steered us out (guided by Krait, who stood upon the mainsail gaff to advise me), every coiling, foaming wave that slapped our hull was as clearly drawn as any of my brothers.

I heard Seawrack long before I saw her. She was singing just as she is singing now, singing as the Mother had, her sweet, clear voice at one with the fog and the waters, so that I knew the sea had been incomplete without her song, that it was fully created, a finished object, only while she sang. Fog muffles sound, so we must have been near her then; I would have taken the sloop nearer still to hear her, although Krait warned me against it; but he slid down the forestay and loosed the jib, so that we swung into the wind with the main flapping like a flag. He told me to call to Seawrack, but I could not. How I wish you could have heard her, Nettle! You have never heard such singing.

We quarreled at that point, the inhumu and I. We were to quarrel almost daily afterward, but that was the first and one of the worst. I was angry at him for untying the jib, and he was angry at me for steering too near the rocks. The upshot of our quarrel was that the sloop was free to sail herself, and the course she chose took her a good league into open water. By the time we had made peace, Krait could no longer see the island or anything else, or so he said.

“I’ll have to fly,” he told me, “and I may have to fly high. Then I’ll come down again and give you an approximate direction.”

I asked whether he could find the sloop again in the fog, and suggested that I might build a fire in the sandbox to guide him, although the truth was that I was hoping to crowd on sail and evade him. He laughed and asked me to turn my back; I did, and when I turned around again he was gone. „»

Babbie snorted with relief, and I felt as he did. Much more, I felt-I knew-the sea and the cold gray sea-fog that wrapped us both. I have said that I saw it as a painter would, and I may even have said that I saw it as a picture; but it was a picture that surrounded and saturated me, and mixed with my spirit. The sea whose spray wet my beard, and the fog I inhaled at every breath, were no longer things apart from myself. If they were pictured, I was pictured, too; and it was the same picture. We lived in and through each other then, in a picture without a frame.

Something had happened to change my perception, and that change remains in force to this moment. How I wish I could make you see our hunt for the wild cattle as I did! The milling herd with rolling eyes, and we riders with our embroidered flags! You will want me to explain, but I have no explanation, although at that time and for a long time after it I felt that it was the inhumu’s presence. I taxed him with it when he returned to the sloop, landing softly behind me and announcing his arrival with a boyish laugh. He denied it, and we quarreled again, although not as bitterly as before. Even then, I knew that his denials were without value.

Since Krait is not present to speak for himself, let me speak for him. I will try to do it with more logic than either of us displayed when I argued with him on the sloop.

First, he did not have that effect on others, as well as I could judge.

Second, it did not benefit him, and in fact he lost by it.

Third, it persisted even in his absence, as I have tried to show.

And fourth and last, I had experienced nothing of the sort when we were with Quetzal in the tunnels.

Yet he was capable of affecting our perception of him, for Seawrack and others saw him as a human being, as the boy he claimed to be, whereas I would sooner have called poor Babbie a child.

Seawrack, as I should explain, swam out to the sloop once she understood that I was on it and that I still wanted her. The inhumu had made me promise I would call to her as loudly as I could the moment I heard her voice; but I did not call then or for some minutes afterward, only telling him to be quiet when he spoke and once striking him with Marrow’s stick.

A time came when she sang no longer, and I recalled my promise and pleaded with her; but by then she was already in the water and swimming toward us. This happened hours after we had sailed out to sea with no one at the helm, because we had first found the mainland (which Krait had mistaken for the island) and only after we had discovered our mistake returned to the island-and we had to sail some distance around it to reach Seawrack again, I still blinded by the fog and in terror of submerged rocks, which the inhumu could no more have seen than I could.

By the time we had relocated her it was probably about mid-afternoon, and the fog had lifted somewhat. It parted, and I glimpsed her sitting upon a rock thrust up from the sea like the horn of some drowned monster. She was naked (more so than when she had first come on board, since she no longer had her gold) and her legs, which were very long, as I may have said, seemed almost to coil about her.

“She is going back to what she was,” the inhumu told me when I would listen to him again. “While she was with you, she was becoming one of you. That was why the Mother gave her to you, I think.” While we sailed out of the bay, I had told him how Seawrack came to be with me.

I echoed him. “You think?”

“Yes, I do, which is more than I can say for you. Do you imagine that now that she’s coming back to you she’ll sing for you the way she did out there?”

I had not considered that, and it must have showed in my stricken expression.

“You’re right. She probably won’t sing a note, even if you beg.”

Having seen her small, white hand upon the gunwale, I put a finger to my lips-at which he smiled.

We helped her aboard and she stared at the inhumu (whose name I had never learned, thinking of him up until then only as “the inhumu”). I told her (as he and I had agreed I should) that he was a boy who had been left behind on the island by some boat’s crew, and that he had helped me out of the pit. It was difficult for me to lie like that, because as I spoke I could see very plainly that he was not a boy or a human being of any kind. Looking at her instead should have helped but did not, only making me that much more conscious of the purity and innocence of her face.

“Don’t you want to see me?” she asked.

I told her that I could not look into her eyes without falling in love with her. Forgive me, Nettle!

The inhumu offered her his hand, and I felt certain she would feel his claws, but they had vanished. “I’m Krait,” he said. It was the first time I heard the name.

She had turned from him before he had finished speaking, stroking my cheek with her fingers. “You were dead.”

I shook my head.

“Yes, you were. I saw you down there.” She trembled ever so slightly. “Dead things are food.”

“Sometimes,” Krait amended.

She ignored him. “Where are my clothes?”

They were not on the sloop, and I had no more tunics to spare, but we contrived a sailcloth skirt for her, as I had before, while she stared vacantly out at the broken fog and the tossing water. “You must hold on to her now if you want to keep her,” Krait told me.

“Can you sail?”

“No. But you must do what I tell you, or she’ll be over the side in half an hour.” He pointed to the little space under the foredeck where she and I had slept. “Lie with her. Talk to her, embrace her, and try to get her to sing for you. I won’t watch, I promise.”

I trimmed the sails and tied the tiller, warning him that if he did not want to see us drowned he would have to call me at any change in wind or weather, and persuaded Seawrack to rest with me for an hour or so.

She agreed, I believe, mostly so that we could talk in private. “I don’t like that boy,” she told me.

“He got me out of the pit after you and Babbie had abandoned me.” Now that she was back with me and safe, I had discovered that I was angry with her.

“You were dead,” she said again. “I saw you. Dead people are to eat.”

Anxious to change the subject, I asked her to sing, as Krait had suggested.

“The boy would come in then. I don’t want him in here with us.”

“Neither do I. Sing only to me, very softly, but not like you used to when we were alone. The way you sang out there.”

“He would still hear me.” She shuddered. “His feet are twisted.”

“You think he’s a boy?” (I was incredulous, feeling very much as I did a few days ago when I realized that the wallowers had in fact been deceived by the wicker figure.)

She giggled. “I don’t think he’s a boy that way. He’s old enough. You couldn’t keep him out.”

“He would come to you in here, if you sang?”

“Oh, yes!” The only hand that she possessed slipped into mine.

Aching for her, I asked, “What would I do, Seawrack? I’m in here with you already.”

“Mother told me to stay with you.”

I nodded. I could hear Babbie rattling up and down on the foredeck above our heads like a whole squad of troopers, half mad with nervousness and suppressed aggression; and now I wonder whether he saw Krait as an inhumu or a boy, and whether he made any distinction between the two. “Out there,” I told Seawrack, “you thought I no longer liked to look at you. The truth is that I don’t like to look at him.”

“At the boy?”

“At Krait,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll stare, and that wouldn’t be polite.”

“Stare at his feet?”

“That’s right. That must be why he walks so badly. But what does he look like, the rest of him?”

“You know.”

“Men and women often see the same people very differently,” I explained, thinking that it had never been truer than it was for the two of us that afternoon. “I’d like to know how he seems to you.”

“You’re jealous!” She laughed, delighted.

At that time I still hoped that Seawrack would see Krait for what he was without prompting from me. As seriously as I could, I said, “You don’t belong to me, and I belong to Nettle, my wife. If you want to give yourself to another man, I may advise against it. I will, if I don’t think he’s suitable for you. But don’t ever give yourself to that boy-to Krait, as he’s calling himself.”

“Well, he’s very good-looking.” She was steering my hand to her left breast.

I pulled my hand away. “No doubt he is.”

“Don’t be angry with me.”

I told her I was not angry, that I was only worried about her, which was not entirely true. Up on the foredeck I heard the chatter of Babbie’s tusks; Babbie was angry, at least, and angrier still because he had to behave as though he were not.

“I came as soon as I heard your voice. I should have let you come to me. Then this would be wrecked. Do you remember how you kissed me the first time?”

It has been a week since I wrote the words that you have just read, a week of heat and terrible, violent storms, and reports of the inhumi from many outlying farms. Not far from town, a woman and her two children were found bloodless by a neighbor child.

So I have been busy, although not too busy to continue the account I began last year and have labored over for so long. The question is not whether I should tell the truth-I know well enough that I should. The question is how much of it must I tell?

(“A close mouth catches nae flies,” Pig would advise me. I wish he were here to do it.)

If Silk were to have intercourse with another woman, he would confess it to Hyacinth, I feel sure; but that is small guidance, because she would not care-or at least, would not care much. How much would he tell her? That is the true question, and a question to which I can give no satisfactory answer. The mere fact? Will the mere fact not make things look worse, much worse, than they really were?

When I began, these were things I planned to omit. I see now that if I omit them, nothing I say should be believed. No doubt I should burn every scrap of this.

I will not be believed in any case. I know it. Hari Mau and the rest will not even believe that I am who I am, and I have known that I would not be believed ever since I wrote about the leatherskin. I am going to tell the whole truth, as I would at shriving. I will hide nothing and embroider nothing, from this point forward. It will give my poor dear Nettle pain in the unlikely event that she-or anyone-reads what I write; but she will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that she knows the worst.

I had asked Seawrack to sing for me, as you have already read. The truth is that I implored her to, and at last threatened her, and she sang. She sang only a note or two, just a word or two in some tongue never spoken by human beings, and I was upon her. I tore off the clumsy sailcloth skirt and bit and clawed and pummeled her, doing things no man ought ever to do to any woman.

Perverse acts that I would like to believe no other man has performed.

When it was over at last I slept, exhausted; and when I woke we were sailing briskly north-northeast, with a cold coast of deep green foliage to port. I stared at it, then at the inhumu seated at the tiller.

He grinned at me. “You thought I couldn’t do tiiis.”

My jaw hurt, and in fact there was precious little of me anywhere that did not; but I managed to say, “You told me that you couldn’t.”

“Because I don’t know how. I can pull a rope, though, if I’m told which one, and my mother told me that.”

“Is your mother here?” The thought of sharing the sloop with two inhumi made me physically ill. I sat down on one of the chests, my head in my hands.

“She’s dead, I think. I was referring to your second wife, Father. That’s what we’ll have to tell people, you know. She’s not old enough to be my mother, not even as old as I am.” I looked at him sharply, and he put his finger to his lips as I had earlier, grinning still.

“I don’t like your pretending to be my son,” I said, “and I like your pretending to be Seawrack’s even less. Where is she?”

“Her stepson, and I can’t tell you where she is, Father dear, because I promised her I wouldn’t.” The ugly, lipless slit that was Krait’s mouth was no longer grinning. “You promised me something, too. Several things. Don’t forget any of them.”

I got up, went to his seat at the tiller, and sat on the gunwale, so close that our elbows touched. “Can she hear us now, if we keep our voices down?”

“I’m quite sure she can’t hear me, Father. But I’m equally sure that you won’t keep your voice low for more than a minute or two. You never do. It might be better if we didn’t talk at all.”

“You told me to lie down with her, to…”

“Do what you did,” he supplied.

“You said all that while she was standing there with us, while I was wrapping the canvas around her. You didn’t worry about her overhearing us then.”

“I didn’t worry about her overhearing me. Anyway, she wasn’t thinking about either of us right then. Not even about her skirt. Couldn’t you see that?”

“Just the same-”

“Her thoughts were very far away. You’d say her spirit. We were less to her then than your hus is to you.”

I looked around for Babbie, and found that he was lying at my feet.

“You see? He makes a noise when he walks. He can’t help it. Tappa-taptap behind you. But you don’t even know he’s there.”

“She’s in the water, isn’t she? She went over the side, and now she’s holding on to some part of the boat.” I looked along the waterline as far as I could without rising, but saw only waves.

“No…” Krait’s expression told me nothing about his thoughts; but I sensed that he was troubled, and it made him seem oddly human. “I’d better say it so you understand, and this is as good a chance as I’ll get to do it. Do I look like a boy to you?”

I shook my head.

By a gesture, he indicated his face. “This looks just like a boy’s, though, doesn’t it?”

“If you want me to say so, I will.”

“I don’t. I want you to tell the truth. We always do.” (I feel sure he did not mean that the inhumi always tell the truth, which would itself have been a monstrous lie.)

“All right. You look a lot more human now than you used to, a lot more human than you did when we talked in the pit. But you don’t really look like a boy up close, or like one of us at all.”

His nose and chin receded into his face as I watched, and the ridge over his eyes melted away. All semblance of humanity vanished. “One of the things I promised you then was that I wouldn’t deceive you. The man you hated-”

“Patera Quetzal?”

Krait nodded. “You said you thought he was an old man, and you were angry because he had tricked you. You told me some trooper shot and killed him.”

I nodded.

“Did you see his corpse?”

“Yes.” Something of the revulsion I had felt must have shown on my face. “What difference does that make?”

“Being dead makes a great deal of difference to some of us. Did he look like an old man then?”

I hedged. “We don’t like to look at corpses. I didn’t look for long.”

“Did he, Horn?”

There was something indescribably eerie about sitting there in the stern of the sloop talking to the inhumu about the death of Patera Quetzal twenty years ago. Wisps of fog blew past us like ghosts, and the gossiping tongues of small waves kept up an incessant murmur in which it seemed that I could catch a word or two. “I suppose not,” I told Krait, and heard a wave whisper, Moorgrass. “Nettle-that’s my wife, you saw her-and some other women were going to wash his body. They screamed, and that was how we knew.”

“You looked for yourself after that, didn’t you, Horn? You must have.”

I nodded again.

“He didn’t look like an old man anymore, did he? He couldn’t have.”

I shook my head.

“What did he look like?”

“He looked like you.”

When Krait said nothing, only transfixing me with his hypnotic stare, I added, “He powdered his face, and painted it. Like a woman. We found the powder and rouge in a pocket of his robe.”

“So would I if I had those things, just as I wear this shirt and these pants, which I took from you. The eyes see what the mind expects, Horn. Babbie there, lying still with a green twig in his mouth, could make you think he was a bush, if you were expecting to see a bush.”

“That’s right. It’s why we use tame hus, or dogs, to hunt wild hus.”

Krait grinned; his jaw dropped, and his fangs sprang out. “The young siren you call Seawrack doesn’t see me the way you do. She doesn’t see what you saw when you looked at that dead man.”

I agreed.

“Knowing that, is it so hard for you to believe that at times she doesn’t hear me at all?”

More shaken than I would have liked to admit, I went to the bow, looking down into the water for her on both sides of the boat but seeing nothing. After a time, Krait motioned to me, and reluctantly I went aft again. His voice in my ear was less than a whisper. “If she’s listening, she hears you alone, Father. Only the murmur of your voice. She probably thinks you’re talking to yourself, or to your hus.”

“I hurt her.”

He nodded solemnly. “You intended to, as we both know. As all three of us know, in fact. You intended to, and you succeeded admirably. Given time, she may find some excuse for you. Would you like that?” His fangs had vanished, and his face had resumed its boyish outline.

“How badly?”

“Very badly. She bled quite a lot from-oh, various places. It was difficult for me.”

Unable to think of anything else to say, I asked whether he had found the bandages and salves.

“She knew where they were. I helped her tie the knots, where rags could be of use. Stopping the bleeding was hard. I doubt that you have any idea just how much trouble we had.” He paused, tense; I knew that he was expecting me to attack him. “Do you understand everything I’m telling you?”

“Certainly. You’re speaking the Common Tongue, and you speak it at least as well as I do.”

He dismissed the Common Tongue with a gesture. “Well, you don’t understand her at all.”

“Men never understand women.”

He laughed, and although I had not been angry with him a moment before there was something in that laugh that made me yearn to kill him.

I searched the waterline for Seawrack, and failing to find her probed the sea for her with the boat hook, which was absurd. After that, I wanted to return to the rocks where we had found her before, but Krait dissuaded me, giving me his word that she was still on the sloop, but telling me quite frankly that I would be a complete fool to search it for her, since finding her would be far worse than not finding her. Soon after that, he left.

To the best of my memory, it was already dark when she came out. I had long ago concluded that she was in one of the cargo chests, and was not at all surprised to see the lid of the one in which I kept rope and the like (the one on which I had sat) opened from within. I held up the little pan in which I had been cooking a fish and invited her to join me.

She sat down on the other side of the fire. I thanked her for it, since I could see her better there; and she looked surprised.

“Because I’ve been so worried about you,” I told her. “I didn’t know how badly you were hurt, and I thought you had to be getting hungry and thirsty.” I passed her the water bottle.

She drank and said, “Weren’t you hurt, too?”

It touched me as few things ever have. “No. I’m fine. I was exhausted, that’s all.”

She nodded, and drank again.

“You could have killed me while I slept, Seawrack. You could have found my knife and stabbed me to death with it.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I would have, in your place.” I put our last strip offish on a plate and handed it to her across the fire. “Do you want a fork?”

She said nothing, staring down at her small portion of fried fish, so I got her a fork as well. “That fish is just about all we have left,” I told her. “I should have brought more food.”

“You didn’t know about me.” She looked away from the fillet I had given her with something akin to horror. “I don’t want this. Can I give it to Babbie?”

He rose at the sound of his name and trotted around the box to her.

“Certainly, if you wish.” I watched Babbie devour the morsel of fish.

“I feel a little sick.”

“So do I. Do I have to tell you that I’m terribly, horribly, sorry for what I did to you? That I’ll never do anything like that again?”

“I sang for you,” she said, as if it explained everything.

Somewhere she is singing for me at this moment, singing as she used to before Krait came. I hear her, as I do almost every day, although she must surely be many hundreds of leagues away. I hear her-and when I do not I dream of my home beside the sea. Of it and of you, Nettle my darling, my only dearest, the sweetheart of my youth. But if ever I find my way back to it (as Seawrack has beyond any question found her way back to the waves and the spume, the secret currents, and her black, wave-washed rocks) there will come a stormy midnight when I throw off the blankets, although you and the twins are soundly sleeping. I will put out then in whatever boat I can find, and you will not see me more. Do not mourn me, Nettle. Every man must die, and I know what death I long for.

We buried alive an inhumu and two inhumas today, taking up three of the big flat paving stones in the marketplace-all that cruel business. One smiled at me, and I thought I saw human teeth. All three looked so human that I felt we were about to consign to the grave a living man and two living women. I insisted that they open their mouths so I could inspect them. The woman who had smiled would not, so hers was pried open with the blades of daggers; there were only blood-drinking fangs, folded against the roof of her mouth.

Inhumi are burned alive in Skany-I am very glad that I had to watch that only once. I have heard of the same thing being done in New Viron, and I admit that I would cheerfully have burned or buried the inhuma that bit Sinew when we were living in the tent. They are vile creatures, exactly as Hari Mau says; but how can they help it, when we are as we are? I wish sometimes that Krait had not told me.

So little, the last time I wrote. Nothing at all about Seawrack and Krait, the sloop, or the western mainland I call Shadelow; and it has been two days. If I continue at this rate, I will be the rest of my life in telling the tale of my failure, simple though it is.

On the evening I wrote about before the inhumation, we sat before the fire and said very little. The apple barrel, which had once seemed inexhaustible, was empty at last, and the flour gone. I had used the last of our cornmeal that night. I had two fishing lines out, and from time to time I got up to look at them; but they caught nothing.

Seawrack asked where the boy was, and I told her that he had gone ashore to hunt, which tasted like a lie in my mouth although it was true. My slug gun was still under the foredeck in the place where we slept, and I was afraid she had seen it there and would want to know how he could hunt at night without Babbie and without the gun. Perhaps she thought it, but she never said anything of that sort. What she actually said was “We could sail away without him.”

I shook my head.

“All right.”

“Will you forgive me?” I asked her.

“Because you won’t leave him?” She shrugged, her shoulders (thin shoulders now) rising and slumping again. “I hope we will, sometime, no matter what you say now.”

“To get out of the pit, I had to promise him that we’d take him to Pajarocu with us, and try to get a place for him on the lander.”

“I haven’t promised him anything, and I won’t. Is there any more corn flour?”

“No.”

She got up to look at my fishing lines. “Do women catch fish?”

“Sometimes,” I told her. It had been a very long time since Nettle and I had gone fishing.

“How? Like this?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or with a pole, or a net. Sometimes they spear them, too, just as men do. Men fish more, but there’s nothing wrong with women fishing.”

“If you would tie your knife to your stick for me, I might be able to spear some for us.”

“In the water?” I shook my head. “You’d start to bleed again.”

She made no reply, and she was a step too far from the firelight for me to judge her expression.

“I’ll hunt tomorrow myself,” I promised her. “This time I’ll get something, or Babbie and I will.”

“What are those?”

I had to rise to be certain that she was pointing toward shore.

She said, “Those little lights?” and I went up onto the foredeck for a better view. The weather was calm, although not threateningly so; and we were anchored some distance from the naked coast of the mainland, Krait and I having been unable to find a protected anchorage before shadelow. North along the coast so far that they were practically out of sight were two or three, possibly four, scattered points of reddish light. As I stood there shivering, one vanished-then reappeared.

Behind me Seawrack said, “I thought the boy might have decided to stay there, but there are too many.”

I nodded, and returned to our own fire. To my very great surprise and delight, she sat down beside me. “Are you afraid of them?”

“Of the people who built those fires? Not as much as I ought to be, perhaps. Seawrack, it would be easier for me, a great deal easier, if you were angry with me. If you hated me now.”

She shook her head. “I’d like it if you hated me, Horn. Don’t you understand why I hid?”

“Because I’d attacked you, and you were afraid I would hurt you again, or even kill you.”

She nodded solemnly.

“I’m sorrier than I can say. I’ve been trying and trying to think of some way I can-can at least show you how sorry I really am.”

She touched my hand and fixed me with her extraordinary eyes. “Never leave me.”

I wanted to explain that I was a friend, not a lover. I wanted to, I say, but how could I (or anybody) say that to a woman I had forced that very day? I wanted to tell her, as I had several times before, that I was married, and I wanted to explain all over again what marriage means. I wanted to remind her that I was probably twice her age. I wanted to say all those things, but I knew that I loved her, and all the fine words stuck in my throat.

Later, when we lay side by side under the foredeck, she asked me again, “Don’t you understand why I had to hide from you today?”

I thought that I did, but I had given my answer already; so I asked, “Why?”

“Because I made you and wouldn’t let you.”

“You didn’t make me,” I told her.

“Yes, I did, by singing. The song does that. I’m trying to forget it.”

“Your singing made me want you more than ever, but it didn’t make me do what I did. I surrendered to my own desire when I should have resisted.”

She was quiet so long that I had nearly fallen asleep when she said, “The underwater woman taught me to sing like that. I wish I could forget her, too.”

“Your Mother?” I asked.

“She wasn’t my mother.”

“ ‘The Mother.’ You called her that.”

“She wanted me to. I was on a big boat, and I remember a woman who talked to me, and carried me sometimes. I think that was my mother.”

I nodded; then realizing that Seawrack could not see me said, “So do I.”

“After that, there was only the underwater woman. She doesn’t look like a woman unless she makes part of herself a woman.”

“I understand.”

“She’s another shape, very big. But she is one. She told me to call her Mother, and I did. My real mother drowned, I think, and the underwater woman ate her.”

“The sea goddess. Do you know her name?”

“No. If I ever did, I’ve forgotten it, and I’m glad. I don’t want to remember her anymore, and she doesn’t want me to. I do remember that much about her. Would you like me to sing for you again?”

“No,” I said, and meant it.

“Then I’m going to try to forget the song.”

As I drifted into sleep, I heard (or believed I heard) her say, “…and forget the water and the underwater woman, and the boats underwater with people in them. That was why I wouldn’t eat your fish. I don’t want to eat fish or drowned meat, never any more. Will the boy bring us back something to eat?”

Perhaps I mumbled in reply. At this remove I cannot be sure.

“I don’t think so. He’ll eat, and come back here with nothing.”

Which was precisely correct.

I recall thinking, as I declined from consciousness into the first deep sleep of the night, that Seawrack was forgetting the goddess she had called the Mother because Krait (whom she herself called “the boy”) intended to call her “mother.” That there was a place for only one mother on my sloop, and it was to be Seawrack.

There was a place for only one wife, as well. With the eyes of sleep I saw you, my poor Nettle, fading and fading, sinking into the clear blue water like the hammer I used to keep on board until I lost it over the side and watched it sink, weighed by its iron head but buoyed by its wooden handle, smaller and smaller and dimmer and dimmer as the waters closed around it forever. My love was like a line tied to you then, a cord so thin as to be invisible, playing out cubit after cubit and fathom after fathom until the time arrived when I would haul you up again.

Have I insulted you? I do not blame you. You may blame me, and the more you do the happier I will be. Let me say now, once and for all, that I was not compelled by the song the sea goddess had taught Seawrack. Was I inflamed? Yes, certainly. But not compelled. I could have left. The inhumu would have seen my manhood raised, and witnessed my agony, and would have derided me for both whenever he thought his taunts would tell. But that would have been nothing.

Or I might have clapped my hand over Seawrack’s mouth and forced her to be silent. I would have been ashamed then, since I had threatened to beat her if she would not sing for me; but I have been ashamed many times of many things, and been no worse for it afterward.

For this I was worse, as I am.

I should tell you this too: Chandi has come in pretending to believe I sent for her, and I will have to stop writing this rambling account that has become a letter to you while I persuade her to leave.

I am not sure when I wrote last. Before the big storm, but when? I ought to date my entries, but what would such dates mean to those who may read them? Every town on this whorl, every city in the old Whorl, uses a different system; even the lengths of our years are different. This Great Pas did, to prevent our leaguing against Mainframe; and it divides us still. I will give the day and the month as we reckon them here in Gaon: Dusra Agast. That may mean something to you; but if it does not, not much has been lost.

Conjunction is past. It was as bad as I feared, and worse. (It is still very bad.) Many of the inhumi came, and many have remained. My servants close the shutters at sundown, and when they are asleep I inspect every window in this palace myself to make sure they have done it.

My bedroom has five windows north, six west, and five south. I double-check every one of them before I get into bed, and lock and bolt the only door, for fear of the inhumi and for fear of assassins, too.

An inhumu drinks blood until his veins are full and his flesh is nourished again; thus satisfied, he goes his way, like a tick that falls off when it has drunk its fill; but there are men here where land is free for the working who want land, and more and better land, and others to work it for them, and they always believe that someone else’s land is better. They would crush the small farmers if I let them.

I will not.

A lean young man with a long curved dagger was shot to death in my garden last night. Awakened by the booming of the slug guns, I went to view his body, and could not help thinking of Silk climbing Blood’s wall with the hatchet in his waistband. Had this young man thought me as bad as Blood? If so, was he right? We have the inhumi to prey on us, yet we prey upon one another.

When I ended my last session with this old quill of Oreb’s, Seawrack and I were on the sloop on the night of the fires. I dreamed that night about shadowy figures creeping from those fires to swim toward us, and climbing aboard bent upon murder. I sat up and found my slug gun, and nearly fired it, too; but there was no one there. I lay down again and muttered an apology to Seawrack for having awakened her.

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

I knew why she had not slept, or thought I did. “You’re frightened and upset, and that’s only natural. I don’t suppose you want to tell me about it; but if you do, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say without getting angry.”

“I’m angry at myself,” she muttered.

“Then your anger is misdirected. You should be angry at me. I am.” For an instant (only an instant) I had heard Silk’s voice issuing from my own mouth. I tried to prolong it, but»could not. “What would you like to tell me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then let me say a few things, and after that you’ll have a few things of your own, I feel sure.” I waited for her to object.

When she did not, I continued, “First, the fault was mine, and mine alone. It wasn’t yours or anybody else’s. There was no reason for me to act as I did, and you resisted as fiercely as you could. You have-”

“I shouldn’t have.” It might have been a child, a small girl, speaking. “I hurt you. I know I did.”

“I hurt you a great deal more.” It was so overwhelmingly true that I found it impossible to go on.

“I deserved it.”

“You did not. You never will. You are entitled to be furiously angry with me. That was the second thing I was going to say, al- though I said it already this afternoon. If you had killed me while I slept, no one could have blamed you.”

“I would have blamed myself.”

“It occurred to me that you might before I fell asleep, and to tell the truth I was hoping you would.”

“No!” She shook her head violently enough for her hair to brush my cheek.

“Here is a third thing. I am a fool on a fool’s errand. I’ve been struggling to hide that from myself ever since I set out. To go to the Long Sun Whorl and bring back the strains of corn we need, and an eye for Maytera Marble, and so forth, is reasonable; but it’s a task for a bold and able man of twenty, not for me. Ten or fifteen years ago, I might have been adequate. Tonight I’m worse than inadequate. I’m thoroughly ridiculous.”

“You went because you were afraid they’d want your wife to go if you wouldn’t,” Seawrack reminded me. “You told me about that.”

“She might have done it, to. She’s brave and practical, with a good level head in a crisis. I won’t list my shortcomings-you know them already. I’ll simply point out that that’s not a description of me.”

“But-”

I raised my voice. “As for bringing Silk here, it’s less than a dream; and I very much doubt that Marrow and the rest even want me to do it. A trader named Wijzer told Marrow that to his face in my hearing, and Wijzer was right. All their talk about bringing Silk to New Viron was nothing more than a trick to get me to go. Or to get Nettle to, if I wouldn’t. A cheap and obvious trick that even Hoof and Hide should have seen through.”

Seawrack turned her head to whisper into my ear, so that I felt the warm caress of her breath. “You were right. I have things to say too. Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“When you’re through. You’re going, in spite of all you’ve said. I know you are.”

I sighed; I could not help it. “I’ve told you I’m a fool, and I promised I would. That doesn’t mean you have to come with me. The lander in Pajarocu will probably explode as soon as they try to get it to go fly. Everybody on it will be killed, and it would be better if you weren’t one of us.”

“Is there more you want to say before we both go to sleep, or is it my turn?”

“I’m practically finished. Fourth and last, you’re not a prisoner on this sloop.” I recalled Sciathan the Flier then, and what Silk had said about him after Auk got him out of the Juzgado, and how Nettle and I had re-created that speech in our book. “You are my guest, a guest who’s been treated very badly. You’re free to leave any time-right now, if you like. Or when we reach Pajarocu or any other town.”

I fell silent, and after a time she murmured, “Are you waiting for me to jump into the sea again, Horn?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not going to yet, and it’s my turn to talk. While you were sleeping I was trying to forget.” I,

“I don’t blame you.”

“Not what you think. I was trying to forget 4he water, and everything I did in it. Every time I remembered something that happened there, I would think of something that’s happened since I’ve been with you, some little thing or something you said, and put it there instead.”

“Can you do that?” I was incredulous, as I still am.

“Yes!” she said fiercely. “So could you.”

It was not the time to express my doubts.

“That’s the first thing I had to say, what I’ve been doing. I wasn’t angry or afraid, the way that you think I was. I was remembering and forgetting.”

For half a dozen gentle rockings of the sloop, she said nothing more.

“The second thing is that I’m one of you. Like you and the boy, but I don’t like him.”

“A human being.”

“Yes. I am a human woman. Aren’t there women who aren’t? What does the Babbie have?”

“A female hus. Not a woman.”

“Well, a woman is what I am. Like your Nettle, or the Tamarind you talk about sometimes. I am a woman, but I don’t know how to.”

I tried to say that I would help her all I could, but it would be much better if she had an actual woman to emulate. If Nettle were with us, for example.

“I’m learning how from you.”

Possibly there is something adequate that could be said in response to that; but I could not think of it, nor can I now.

“You said you were a fool on a foolish errand.” (This was an accusation.)

“It’s the truth.”

“You’re not a fool, and I can prove it. Then I’m going to swim. You said the people who sent you to bring this good man Silk don’t even want him. Didn’t you just tell me that?”

“Yes. I said it because I know it to be true. I believe I’ve known it ever since I set out, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it to anyone, not even to myself.”

“All right. They really don’t want him. I think they’d say something else if they were here, but I won’t argue about it. They don’t want him.”

Thinking wistfully of Patera Silk, I nodded and grunted my assent.

“But I’m going to ask you just one thing, and you have to answer me. Do you promise?”

I nodded in the dark. “I will if I can. Did you say a moment ago that you were going to swim? Did you mean tonight, Seawrack?”

She ignored my questions. “Here’s how I prove. You have to tell me honestly. Do they need him?”

I opened my mouth to say no, but closed it again without speaking.

“Do they? You promised.”

“I know I did.” I was recalling our dreams for this fair new whorl, and contrasting them with the realities of the past twenty years. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure they do. But Seawrack, you mustn’t swim. Certainly not at night, and not even during the day until you’ve had time to heal.”

She rolled on her side, her back to me. I lay upon my own, feeling the easy motion of the sloop and, whenever I opened my eyes, seeing a scatting of bright, cold stars along the horizon. If she needed to forget a great deal, I needed to remember even more, and to think about it all as honestly as I could. And I did, or tried to at least.

An hour later, perhaps, she murmured, “I’m hungry, Horn.

Will you get us something to eat tomorrow? Not fish.”

“Yes,” I promised. “Certainly. I will if I can.”

I had not realized that Babbie was near us, but he gave a little snuffle of contentment as I spoke, and lay down at my feet.

When I woke at shadeup, he was still there; but Seawrack had gone.

Rain and more rain, all day long. I held court and heard three cases. It is hard to be fair in such foul weather; there is that in me that wants to punish everyone; but I try hard to be fair, and to point out to everyone who appears before me that if only they themselves had been fair, they would not have to come to me for justice. This I say in one fashion to one, and in another to another. Still, I thank the Outsider, and all the lesser gods, that I had no criminal cases today. The impressions of his fingers are on all these quarreling, handsome, mud-colored people; but the light is bad on such days as this, and it can be terribly hard to see them.

Back to the events I have resolved to record.

As well as I can remember I had planned, as I lay there in the dark next to Seawrack, to sail north along the coast the next day until I found a good spot to anchor in, then go ashore and hunt, leaving her to watch the boat. When I woke and found her gone, I realized that I could do no such thing. She had said that she was going for a swim, not that she was leaving me forever. What if she returned, and could not find the sloop?

Krait returned, although Seawrack did not. After a long and no doubt somewhat dishonest account of his adventures ashore (he was full of blood and full of himself as well) I explained the situation. The acrimonious quarrel I had expected followed, and he left again. That was midmorning, perhaps, or a little earlier.

It would be easy-and pleasant as well-to pass over the day that followed in silence. It was not nearly as easy or pleasant to pass it as I did. I had plenty of water, but no food at all. My conscience urged me to pull up the anchor and proceed to Pajarocu-or at least to proceed to search for it; but I could not bring myself to do it. Babbie swam ashore to forage for food, I think finding little or nothing. I remained on the sloop, cold and hungry. My fishing lines caught nothing, and indeed I had no proper bait. (One hook was baited with a knotted scrap of sailcloth, I remember.) I spent hours looking over the side with my new harpoon in my hand. I believe that in the whole time I glimpsed one small fish, which vanished before I could throw.

About shadelow, a fat bluebilly leaped on board. Seawrack was back, and I knew it. I put a line through its gills and put it back into the water, built a fire in my box of sand in record time, pulled the bluebilly back up and cleaned it, and soon had it sizzling in our largest pan.

She climbed in about then, and I thanked her.

“You got nothing with your hunting.” I knew she was tired from the sound of her voice.

I shook my head and ventured to ask how she knew that, though no doubt a glance at my face would have made it plain to anyone.

“If you had shot something you wouldn’t watch the sea with the spear for fish. Where is the Babbie?”

I explained that I had not gone ashore to hunt in spite of my promise, that Krait had declined to remain with the sloop, and that I had not dared leave it in a completely unprotected anchorage with no one on board. “I’ll hunt tomorrow,” I told her, “but you must remain here, and put out to sea if there’s even the slightest chance of bad weather.”

She shrugged, and I knew there would be an argument next day. “I’ll eat a piece of that. Can I? I know I said I wouldn’t, but I will.”

When we had finished our meal, she asked me to hold out my hand. I did, and she slipped a ring on it. The mounting was white gold, I believe-some silvery metal that did not tarnish as plain silver would have. The stone was white and dull, scratched and very old.

“You have given me a ring,” Seawrack said, “and now I am giving you one.” Her little hand-the only one she had-had slipped into mine. “You must wear it, because you might fall in the pit again.”

She kissed me, but would not explain. At the time, I had no idea what that ring was (although I would soon find out), and certainly would never have guessed that it would sornpday save my life in a ruined lander on Green, as it did.

It was left behind, of course, with everything else. I wish that I had it back, if only to help me with Barsat and to remind me of her.