On Blue's waters

- 8-
THE END

It was a circular valley entirely free of the mature trees that had formed the forest of the mountain slopes, and filled instead with the bushes, vines, and saplings that had been absent there, green, lush, and saturated with an atmosphere of newness that I really cannot describe but was immediately conscious of. After hours of climbing through the airless antiquity of the forest, it was as though we had been awakened from the deepest of sleeps with a bucket of cold water.

Seawrack cried, “Oh! Look! Look!” and pressed herself against me. From her voice, she felt wonder and even awe; but she shook with fear, and at that moment, I was ignorant of the cause of all three.

“The walls, Horn. Their walls. Don’t you see them?”

I blinked and looked, then blinked again before I was able to make out one curving line of masonry practically submerged in the rising tide of leaves.

“I know places in the sea where there are walls like those,” Seawrack told me. Her voice was hushed. “ ‘Underwater’ is what you say.”

I started down, followed reluctantly by Seawrack and even more reluctantly by Babbie. “Human beings, people like you and me, people from the Whorl, can’t have built this. It’s too old.”

“No…”

“It was the Vanished People. It had to be. There’s a place near New Viron, but I don’t think it’s as old as this. And Sinew says he found an altar in the forest. I told you about that.” Answered only by silence, I glanced over my shoulder at Seawrack and received a fear-filled nod.

“Sinew’s altar was probably in a chapel of some kind originally, a shrine or something like that. This was a lot bigger, whatever it was.” I stopped walking, having nearly tripped over a line of crumbling glass not much higher than my ankle.

“You wanted to go back.” The fear had reached her voice. “So do I. Let’s go back right now.”

“In a minute.” The glass was deep blue, but seemed more transparent than the clearest glass from Three Rivers. I picked up a piece, feeling absurdly that it would show me the place as it had been hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years ago. It did not, but the valley I saw through that fragment of blue glass appeared more brightly sunlit than the one my naked eyes beheld.

“There’s nothing left here,” Seawrack murmured. “These are old, ruined, broken things nobody wants anymore, not even the trees.”

“Something kept trees from growing here for a long while,” I told her. “Some chemical they put in the ground, or maybe just a very solid, thick pavement underneath this soil. It can’t have been many years since it gave out. Look at these young trees. I can’t see even one that seems to be ten years old.” Silently, she shook her head.

“I’ve been trying to guess how this blue glass works. It’s as if it sees more light from the Short Sun than we do and shows it to us. Here, look.”

“I don’t want to.” Seawrack shook her lovely head again, stubbornly this time. “I don’t want to look at their trees, and I don’t want to look through their glass. Babbie and I and going back to your boat.”

“If we could-” In my surprise, I dropped the glass, which shattered at my feet.

“What is it?”

I had been looking down into the valley as I spoke, and thanks to the blue glass I had seen motion. I pointed with my slug gun. “That bush shook. Not the big one, but the little one next to it. There’s some kind of animal down there, a pretty big one.”

“Don’t!”

I had taken a step forward, but Seawrack caught my arm. “Let me tell you what I think. Please?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think it was a-a medicine they poured on the ground, or stone underneath, or anything like that. I think they lasted longer here.”

It was a new thought to me, and I suppose my face must have shown my surprise.

“Out on this little island, so far from all the other land people. For a long time they mended the walls and painted them, and dug up the trees and wild bushes. Ten years, is that what you said?”

“Yes.” Another bush a little farther from us than the first had trembled ever so slightly, a ghost of motion that would have been easy to miss.

“Ten years ago, they gave up. There weren’t enough left to do it anymore, or it was too much work that didn’t make sense. I know you think I’m stupid-”

“I don’t,” I told her. “You’re naive, but that’s something else entirely.”

“You think I’m stupid, but I can think of people, people like us? Two-legged people like you and me and all the people on that boat living here, and there wasn’t anybody else anywhere. We’d mend our boats and the walls we’d built for a while, and then somebody would die, and there’d be more work for everybody who was left. And somebody else would die. And pretty soon we’d stop, but we wouldn’t be dead, not all of us. The last of us wouldn’t die for a long while.”

“All right,” I told her. “If it’s one of the Vanished People, I won’t shoot him. Or her, either. But I’d certainly like to see them.” I did not believe that it was, and in that I was quite correct.

For a few minutes that seemed like an hour I scoured the bushes with Babbie trotting at my heels; then a greenbuck broke cover and darted away, leaping and zigzagging as they do. Babbie was after it at once, squealing with excitement.

I threw my slug gun to my shoulder and was able to get off one quick shot. The greenbuck broke stride and stumbled to its knees, but in less than a breath it had bounded up again, cutting right and running hard. It vanished into brush, and I sprinted after it, all my fatigue forgotten, guided by Babbie’s agitated hunck-hunck-bunck!

Very suddenly I was falling into darkness.

Here and thus baldly I had intended to end both tonight’s labor and this whole section of my narrative. I wiped this new quill of Oreb’s and put it away, shut up the scuffed little pen case I found where my father must have left it in the ashes of our old shop, and locked the drawer that holds this record, a thick sheaf of paper already.

But it cannot be. It cannot be a mere incident like Wijzer’s drawing his map and the rest. Either that fall must be the end of the entire work (which might be wisest) or else it cannot close at all.

So let me say this to whoever may read. With that fall, the best part of my life was over. The pit was its grave.

It must be very late, but I cannot sleep. Somewhere very far away, Seawrack is singing to her waves.