On Blue's waters (11 page)

By what?

I could not imagine, and I saw nothing.

Maytera Marble was waiting for me outside the hut. I asked whether Mucor had returned, and she shook her head.

“I have the water right here, Maytera.” I swung the sack enough to make the bottles clink. “I’ll put them anywhere you want them.”

“That’s very, very good of you. My granddaughter will be extremely grateful, I’m sure.”

I ventured to say that they could as easily live on the mainland in some remote spot, and that although I felt sure their life there would be hard, they could at least have all the fresh water they wanted.

“We did. Didn’t I tell you? His Cognizance gave us a place like that. We-I-still own it, I suppose.”

I asked whether their neighbors had driven them away, and she shook her head. “We didn’t have any. There were woods and rocks and things on the land side, and the sea the other way. I used to look at it. There was a big tree there that had fallen down but wouldn’t quite lay flat. Do you know what I mean, Horn?”

“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”

“I used to walk up the trunk until I stood quite high in the air, and look out over the sea from there, looking for boats, or just looking at the weather we were about to get. It was a waste of time, but I enjoyed it.”

I tried to say that I did not think she had been wasting her time, but succeeded only in sounding foolish.

“Thank you, Horn. Thank you. That’s very nice of you. Look at the sea, Horn, while you can. Look at it for me, if you won’t do it for yourself.”

I promised I would, and did so as I spoke. The rock offered a fine view in every direction.

“It wasn’t good soil,” Maytera Marble continued. “It was too sandy. I grew a few things there, though. Enough to feed my granddaughter, and a little bit over that I took to town and sold, or gave the palaestra. I had a little vegetable patch in the garden at our manteion. Do you remember? Vegetables and herbs.”

I had forgotten it, but her words brought back the memory very vividly.

“Patera had tomatoes and berry brambles, but I had onions and chives, marjoram and rosemary, and red and yellow peppers. All sorts of things. Little red radishes in spring, and lettuces all summer. I tried to grow the same things on our farm, and succeeded with most of them. But my granddaughter would swim out here and stay for days and days. It worried me.”

Looking east to the mainland, I said, “It would worry me, too. It’s a very long swim, and she can’t be strong.”

“I built a little boat, then. I had to, so I could come out here and get her. I found a hollow log and scraped out all the rotten wood, and made ends for it. They were just big wooden plugs, really, but they kept the water from running in. Sometimes she would not go, and I’d have to stay out here with her till she would. That was why I built this little house. Then a storm came, a terrible one. I thought it was going to blow our little house away. It didn’t, but it broke my boat. I can’t swim, Horn.”

She looked up as she said it in such a way that sunshine struck her face, and I saw that her faceplate was gone. The lumps and furrows that had seemed deformities were a host of mechanisms her faceplate had hidden when I had known her earlier. Trying to ignore them, I said, “I can take you both back to the mainland in my sloop, Maytera. Nettle and I built it to carry our paper to the market in town, and it will carry the three of us easily.”

She shook her head. “She wouldn’t go, Horn, and I won’t leave her out here alone. I only wish-but I don’t worry about falling off anymore. I tap on the stone with my stick, you see.” She demonstrated, rapping the rock between us. “A man who came to consult my granddaughter made it for me, so now I can always find the edge.”

“That’s good.”

“It is. Yes, it is. I was feeling blue when you came, Horn. I feel blue at times, and sometimes it lasts days and days.”

Her free hand groped for me, and I stepped nearer so that she could put it on my shoulder.

“How tall you’ve grown! Why, you’ve taken me out of myself, just by coming to see us. Not that I should ever be blue anyway. I had good eyes for hundreds and hundreds of years. Most people don’t get to see things for anything like that long. Look at all the children who die before they’re grown! Dead at fifteen or twelve or ten, Horn, and I could name a dead child for you for every year between fifteen and birth.”

When she spoke again, the voice was Maytera Rose’s. “My other eyes. I had them less than a hundred years, and Marble ought to have taken them when she took my hands and so many other things. Taken the good one, I mean, for one was blind.

“But I didn’t. I left her eyes, because I never realized my own were wearing out. Her processor, yes. I took that, but not her eye. Horn?”

“Yes, I’m still here, Maytera. Is there some way I can help you?”

“You already have, by bringing us those nice bottles of water for my granddaughter and her pet. That was very, very fine of you, and I will never forget it. But you’re going home, Horn? Isn’t that what you said? Going back to-to the whorl we used to live in?”

I told her that I was going to try to go wherever Silk was and bring him to New Viron, which was what I had sworn to do; and that I thought he was probably in Old Viron, in which case I was going to go there if the people of Pajarocu would allow me on their lander.

“Then I want to ask a very great favor. Will you do me a very great favor, Horn, if you can?” Her free hand left my shoulder and Went to her own face. “My faceplate is gone. I took it off myself, and put it away somewhere. Have I told you?”

I shook my head, forgetting for a moment that she could not see it.

“We were here on this rock, my granddaughter and I, after the storm, and one of my eyes just went out. I told myself that it was all right, that the other one would probably last for years and years yet, and I could take good care of my poor granddaughter with one eye as well as I had with two.”

She sounded so despondent that I said, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I do. I must. It was only four days, Horn. Four days after my left eye failed, my right eye failed, too. I took them out and reversed them, because I knew there was a chance that one might work then, but it didn’t help. That was when I took my faceplate off, because I felt somehow that it was in the way, that I was trying to look through it. And I couldn’t have. It’s solid metal, aluminum I think. They all are.”

Not knowing what else to say, I said, “Yes.”

“It didn’t help, but I’ve left it off ever since. My poor granddaughter doesn’t complain, and I’m more comfortable without it for some reason.”

As she spoke, she had plucked her right eye from its socket.

“Here, Horn. Take it, please. It’s a bad part, and not of the least use to me anymore.”

Reluctantly, I let her put it into my hand, which she closed around it for me with her own slender fleshlike fingers.

“If I were to tell you what it is, the part number and all that, it would be of very little use to you. But with the actual part, you might be able to find another one, and you’ll recognize it if you come across one.”

I resolved then to make every effort to find two (at which I have failed also) and told her so.

“Thank you, Horn. I know you will. You were always such a good boy. Sometimes it’s very hard to bear, but I shouldn’t feel blue. I really shouldn’t. The gods have given me a-a consolation prize, I suppose you’d call it. I can see into the future now, just as my dear sib Maytera Mint could. Did I tell you?”

I believe I must have said that I had always assumed she could prophesy, as all sibyls could.

“I wasn’t any good at it, because I couldn’t ever see the pictures. I knew the things everybody knows, what an enlarged heart means, and all those commonplace indicants. But I couldn’t see things in the entrails the way my dear sib could, and Patera, too. Now I can. Isn’t that strange? Now that I’m blind, I have ulterior vision. I can’t see the entrails till I touch them. But when I do, I see the pictures.”

Silk, I knew, had prophesied in that way; but I also knew that he had not had great faith in such prophesies. He had been both fascinated by and skeptical of the entire procedure. Bearing all that in mind, I asked whether she would be willing to prophesy for me, provided I could supply a good big fish for a victim.

“Why, yes, Horn. I’m very flattered.”

She paused, thinking. “We must have another fire for your sacrifice, however. A fire here outside. I built a little altar of stones, too. It’s what I use when the men who come in boats want me to do it.”

She began to walk slowly, searching left and right with the white wand she carried; and for a moment I saw her, and the rock itself and Mucor, as strangers must have-as the “men in boats” she talked about no doubt saw them: a place and two women so uncanny that I was amazed that anybody had the courage to consult them.

There is no point in recounting here how I caught a fish and carried it up that steep and weary path in a bucket, or how we built a small fire for it on the altar, lighting it from the one inside, before which Mucor sat motionless while the young hus munched her apple.

I loaned Maytera the long hunting knife Sinew had given me, and held my fish steady for her. She cut its throat neatly (not through the gills as one commonly kills fish, but as if it had been a rabbit); turning, she raised her thin arms to the point at which the Sacred Window would have stood, had we possessed one, and uttered the ancient formula.

(Or perhaps I should say that the empty northern sky was her Window. Is not the sky the only Sacred Window we have here, in which we strive to trace the will of gods who may not yet have deserted us?)

“Accept, all you gods, the sacrifice of this fine shambass. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…”

As she pronounced these words, I was beset by a sensation so extraordinary that I hesitate to write about it, knowing that I will not be believed.

No, my dearest wife, not even by you.

I saw nothing and heard nothing, yet it seemed to me that the face of the Outsider had appeared, filling the whole sky and indeed overflowing it, a face too large to be seen-that I was seeing him in the only way that a human being can see him, which is to say in the way that a flea sees a man. Call it nonsense if you like; I have often called it nonsense myself. But is it really so impossible that the god of lonely, outcast things should have favored those two, exiled as they were to their sea-girt, naked rock? Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble? Whether or not there was truth in the presence that I sensed then, I fell to my knees.

Turning back to the altar and me, Maytera Marble laid my fish open with a single swift cut that made me fear for my thumb. I took back the knife, and her old-woman’s fingers probed the abdominal cavity in a way that left me feeling they had eyes in their tips I could not see.

“One side’s for the giver, that’s you, Horn, and the augur. That’s me. The other’s for the congregation and the city. I don’t suppose-”

Abruptly she fell silent, half crouching with her head thrown back, her blind eye and empty, aching socket staring at nothing, or perhaps at the declining sun.

“I see long journeys, fear, hunger and cold, and feverish heat. Then darkness. Then more darkness and a great wind. Wealth and command. I see you, Horn, riding upon a beast with three horns.”

(She actually said this.)

“Darkness also for me. Darkness and love, darkness until I look up and see very far, and then there will be light and love.”

After that she was silent for what seemed to me a very long time. My knees hurt, and with my free hand I tried to brush away the small stones that gouged them.

“The city searches the sky for a sign, but no sign shall it have but the sign from the fish’s belly.”

Now I must get to bed, and there is really nothing more to record. Although Maytera urged me to spend the night in their hut, I slept on the sloop, very tired but troubled all night by dreams in which I sailed on and on, braving storm after storm, without ever sighting land.

* * *

It is very late. My palace is asleep, but I cannot sleep. Earlier I was yawning over this account. If I write a little bit more, perhaps it will make me sleepy again.

Darling, you will want to know about Maytera’s prophecy, and what Mucor said when at last she returned to us from her search for Silk.

You will also want to know the solution to the mystery of the fish. About that, I can really tell nothing. I have certain suspicions, but no evidence to back them up.

Let me say this. An island-our own island of Lizard, for instance-is in fact a sort of mountain thrust out of the sea, as all good sailors know. If the sea were to recede, we would discover that our mill is really situated not at the foot of the Tor but on a mountaintop. An island, that is to say, exists not only in the air but 10 the water that is beneath the air. I have reason to suspect that there were four of us, not three, on the island I have named Mucor’s Rock. (I do not include Babbie.) Mucor, I believe, communicated with that fourth person by means you understand no better-and no worse-than I do. You will recall how she appeared to Silk and others, in the tunnels, on the airship, and even in Silk’s own bedroom. This may have been something of the same kind.

Maytera’s prophecy regarding me was entirely accurate. You may object that save for the part about the beast with three horns-which I will treat separately in a moment-it was very general. So it was; but it was correct as well, as I have said. I did indeed journey long, endure hunger, thirst, cold and heat, and terrible darkness of which you shall read before this record closes-assuming that I will someday finish it for you. Here in Gaon, I have great wealth at my command and my orders are obeyed without question.

On Green I rode a three-horned beast, as Maytera foresaw. Indeed, I was riding it at the time I was wounded fatally. But I shall say no more about that. It would only disturb us both.