On Blue's waters (13 page)

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that our book would be of no use to her, but it occurred to me that the seamen who came to consult Mucor might be induced to read passages to her. I said something to that effect, and she said, “Mucor can read it to me, if she will.”

Surprised yet again, I asked, “Can you read, Mucor?”

“A little.” She seemed almost on the point of smiling. “Grandmother taught me.”

“She would have, naturally.” I was ready to kick myself for not having anticipated something so obvious.

Maytera Marble said, “If she doesn’t know a word, she can spell it out to me so I can tell her.”

The love in her voice touched me; for the space of a breath, I considered what you would want me to do, Nettle; but I know you too well to have much doubt. “You want me to bring you a copy of our book, when I return from the Long Sun Whorl, Maytera? From the
Whorl
?”

Very humbly she said, “If it’s not too much trouble, Horn.” Her hands had left my face to clutch each other. “It-I would appreciate it very much.”

“You won’t have to wait. I have a copy in my boat. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

I had not gone ten steps when I heard the tapping of her stick behind me. I told her that she did not have to come, that I would bring the book up to her.

“No. No, I want to, Horn. I can’t ask you to make that climb again, and-and…”

She was afraid that I might sail away without having given it to her. Perhaps I should have been angry that she had so little confidence in my promise; but the truth was, as I realized even then, that she wanted the book so badly that she could not bear to run even the slightest risk, and wailing for me to return with it would have been agony. I took her free hand, and we descended the precipitous path together.

When we had reached the flat rock upon which the fish had so mysteriously appeared, she asked me about the sloop, how long it was, how wide, how one managed the sails and so on and so forth, all of it, I believe, to postpone the delicious instant when she would actually hold the book in her own hands, pushing the moment back again and again.

I gave her each measurement she asked for, and explained the rudiments of sailing as well as I could, how one trims the sails depending on the angle of the wind to the course, how to navigate by the sun and the stars, how the management of a laden boat differs from that of an empty one, and other matters; and while I was descanting upon all this Mucor appeared, standing upon an outcrop halfway up the cliff so small that it had escaped my notice up to then. I waved to her and she waved in return, but she did not speak.

At last I went aboard, retrieved our book from the cubby, and standing in the stern with one foot on the gunwale presented it to Maytera Marble, a present from both its authors.

It seems foolish now to write that her face, a face composed of hundreds of tiny mechanisms, glowed with happiness. Yet it did. “Horn! Oh, Horn! This-this is the answer to so many, many prayers!”

I smiled, although she could not see it. “All of them yours, I’m sure, Maytera. A good many people have taken the trouble to read it, though.”

“It’s so thick! So heavy!” Reverently she opened it, turning pages to feel the paper. “Are they written on both sides, Horn?”

“Yes, they are, Maytera. And my wife’s handwriting is quite small.”

She nodded solemnly. “I remember dear little Nettle’s hand. She had a very good hand, Horn, even when she was just a child. A neat little hand. It may give my granddaughter trouble at first, but she’ll soon be reading it like print, I feel sure.”

I said that I was, too, and prepared to cast off.

“We’re all in here, Horn? Dear old Maytera Rose, Maytera Mint, and my granddaughter and I? And Patera, and Patera Pike, and you children in the palaestra?”

“There’s a great deal about Patera Silk,” I told her, “but only a little, really, about Patera Pike. I’m afraid most of the other students at the palaestra aren’t even mentioned, but Nettle and I pop up pretty frequently.”

I was on the point of saying good-bye, but now that the moment for it had come I found myself every bit as reluctant as she was. “Do you remember how I followed you to the gate of Blood’s villa? How I wanted to come in with you, but you wouldn’t let me?”

“You were a good, brave boy. I couldn’t risk your life like that, Horn.”

“It’s in there,” I said, and cast off. “I’m leaving now. Remember me in your prayers.”

“I will. Oh, I will!”

I sighed, and put one of my new sweeps into the water with a plop that she surely heard.

“Good-bye, Horn.” She clutched our book to her chest. “You will come back someday? Please?”

“When I’ve got eyes for you,” I told her, and pushed off. The little inlet was so sheltered by its cliffs that there was scarcely any wind; I had to scull the sloop to its mouth before the mainsail began to draw.

I was trimming it when I heard Mucor’s long, shrill whistle and looked up. She was pointing at the sloop and me, her left arm stiffly extended; and because the outcrop on which she stood was a good deal higher than the top of the mast, her rag of gown and long, coarse, black hair were whipped by the wind. Whenever I think of her now, that is the image I recall first: poised upon the outcrop she has reached by the almost invisible crevice behind her, her arm stretched forth and her face the face of General Mint restrained by some subordinate, ordering forward troops she would rather have led in person.

Mucor might, as I have tried to say here, have commanded ten thousand spectral troopers; but at the time I could not see even one. Then some slight sound from the top of the rock reached my ears, and I realized that her gesture had misled me. Like any actual general, she was not pointing to whatever forces she commanded, but to their objective.

At the top of the cliff, I saw a small dark figure that seemed almost a cluster of boys, or two men upon their hands and knees. It vanished, then reappeared as it made a flying leap from the top of the cliff. For a moment I thought its target was the sloop, and at it would strike it and die. It sent up a waterspout five cubits from the tip of the bowsprit, however, and vanished as if it had sunk like a stone.

Back in the inlet, Maytera Marble was shouting, her voice audible but unintelligible, echoing and re-echoing from cliff to cliff. Mucor waved, but disappeared into the crevice too quickly for me to wave in return. Earlier I wrote that she is not tall, but that was misleading. Majesty is not a mere matter of a hand or two over the eight. In twenty years, I myself had matured and even aged; yet subconsciously I had supposed that Mucor was still the preternatural adolescent I remembered.

* * *

Nearly noon, although I am writing by lamplight. Gusts that would lay the sloop on her beam ends rock my cracker-box palace, whistling through every lattice and shutter. Green was bigger than a man’s thumb last night when it rose over the willow in the garden, and I was reminded that my people here call it the Devils’ Lantern. Seeing it, I thought only of the inhumi, and not of the storms and the tides, which I in my folly imagined would mean nothing to us in this inland place. I needed a good lesson, and I am getting it, and the whole unhappy town of Gaon with me. Between gusts, I hear my elephant trumpeting in his stall.

No quantity of preaching or teaching will make the people wholly safe from the inhumi’s sleights and subterfuges. No one knows that better than I. But preaching and teaching may do something, may even save a few lives, and so they are worth doing. It may be at least as valuable, however, to encourage the farmers to plant crops that will not be beaten flat by the storms-yams for example. This is surely the first storm, and not the last.

I see that when I described my departure from Mucor’s Rock 1 never actually mentioned that Babbie came on board, his black snout and little red eyes breaking water just aft of the rudder, and his stubby forepaws clutching the gunwale beside me in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of the leatherskin. Hus can swim like rainbow-frogs, as Sinew and everyone else who has ever hunted them attests, and certainly Babbie could.

Only the leatherskin could have been a less welcome boarder. I ordered him to return to Mucor, and he crouched in the bow and defied me. I grappled with him then, and tried to drop him over the side, but he was as heavy as a stone, and clung to me with all his legs so tightly that the two of us might have been hewn from a single block of flesh; and when, after a long tussle, I was able to tear him loose and push him out of the sloop, he swam under the keel and climbed back on board in far less time than it had taken me to throw him off.

After that, I sat by the tiller frowning at him, while he squatted like a spider on the other side of the mast, glaring at me through close-set crimson eyes that seemed only slightly bigger than the heads of pins. When I ate that night, I flung him a loaf of bread and a couple of apples, reflecting that if I fed him he might be somewhat less likely to charge when my back was to him.

I could have broken out the slug gun, loaded it, and shot him. Or at least, I supposed at the time that I could have, though in point of fact Babbie could have killed me long before I got the first cartridge in the chamber. I am no longer quite sure why I did not, although there were certainly some compelling arguments against it. The first, which I could not help giving considerable weight, was that I might well hole the sloop. If I missed, the slug would undoubtedly smash through her planking, unless the new cartridges were vastly inferior to those made beneath the Long Sun. Hus are notorious for their tough hides and massive bones; and yet it was quite possible that a slug fired at close range might penetrate this small hus and a plank, too.

Hus are difficult to kill as well, and almost always charge if a hunter’s first shot merely wounds them. A fast second shot is often necessary, and although one or two dogs would be enough to track one down, most hunters recommend taking eight or ten to impede the charge. I had none, and the distance would be too short for me to have any hope of getting off a second shot.

There was also a chance at least that this particular hus would be of value to me. A tame hus might always be sold, and while I had him he would, presumably, guard the sloop in my absence. Recalling my old fellow pupil, and the shame I had felt at being forced to borrow three cards from Marrow, I could almost wish that Babbie had been with me earlier.

But the most serious reason was that I would be destroying the gift Mucor had sent me as a gesture of good will. Mucor, whose spirit might be watching us invisibly for all I knew (or could know) would surely take that amiss, and if Silk were to change his mind and choose to reveal his whereabouts once he learned that I was determined to search him out, only Mucor could bring me that information. When I had turned this last reason over in my mind for a few minutes, I acutely regretted having thrown Babbie overboard.

Half joking, I told him, “We may never be friends, Babbie, but we need not be enemies either. You try to be a good beast, and I’ll try to be a good master to you.”

He continued to glare; and his glare said very plainly, You hate me so I hate you.

I filled my washbowl with fresh water then, and gave it to him.

* * *

An inhuma was caught last night, and today I was forced to watch as she was buried alive. There is no trial for these monsters, and understandably so-we burn them in New Viron-but I could not help wishing it were otherwise; I would like to have granted her a death less horrible. As things are, I had to preside over the customary means of extermination. One of the big, flat paving stones was lifted in the marketplace and set aside, and her grave dug where it had lain. Into that grave she was forced, though she pled and fought. Five men with long poles pinned her there until a cartload of gravel could be dumped on top of her. Dirt was shoveled on top of the gravel, and at last the stone was returned to its place and a symbol, too awful to describe, was cut into it so that no one will aig there again.

These people, like people everywhere here, seem to fear that an inhumu may live on even with its head severed. That is not the case, of course; but I cannot help wondering how the superstition originated and became so widespread. Certainly the inhumi have no bones as we understand them. Possibly their skeletons are cartilage, as those of some sea-creatures are. On Green, Geier maintained that the inhumi are akin to slugs and leeches. No one, I believe, took him seriously; yet it is certain that once dead they decay very quickly, though they are difficult to kill and can survive for weeks and even months without the blood that is their only food.

But I can continue this little lecture best by returning to my narrative.

Back in New Viron, Marrow had been told of a trader named Wijzer who knew the way to Pajarocu. We found him on his boat (which was four times the length of mine, and five times the width) and Marrow invited him to his house.

“If what I know a good supper it will buy…” He shrugged “Or you want to see me eat.”

We assured him that it had never occurred to us that he might be an inhumu.

“Strangers you don’t know, I think. Before Pajarocu with a hundred you must speak. Sharp you better be. Sharp they are, those inhumi. Sharp always.”

Marrow grunted agreement.

“Many in Pajarocu I meet. Some I killed. Them you cannot drown. That you know?”

I said I had heard it, but that I did not know whether it was true.

“True it is.” Wijzer paused to inspect a load of melons, then looked around and pointed. “You, Marrow. Your house that way is it? A house bigger than all the rest it is? The whole town you steer?”

Marrow leaned upon his stick. “The town doesn’t always think so.”

“Him sending you are.” Wijzer pointed to me. “To go he wants?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I want to because it is my duty.”

“Careful be. Careful you must be.” He made off through the hay market, pushing others out of his way and leading us as if he knew the route to Marrow’s better than either one of us; he was a big man, not so much tall as broad, with a big, square, sun-reddened face and muscular, short-fingered hands whose backs were thick with reddish hair.