On Blue's waters (20 page)

Seawrack’s situation differed in that she considered the sea goddess her mother-much more so, I would guess, than the goddess considered Seawrack her daughter. Accepting the gold, I had accepted Seawrack; it was her dowry. The goddess’s song, however, had not been payment but a species of charm (I am using the word very loosely) to soften our hearts and insure Seawrack a more friendly reception next time.

Did it work? I believe that I would have welcomed Seawrack without it, but would I? I was conscious that I was, at least in some sense, betraying Nettle; but what was I to do? Leave a maimed and friendless young woman alone in the middle of the sea?

She was frightened that night, and in pain from her amputation. I held her; and we slept, for the few hours that either of us slept, with my arms around her and her back to my chest.

* * *

Too often I have merely glanced at the last sheet before I began to write, and taken up my narration, as I believed, from the point at which I left it the day before. Or as has sometimes happened, from the week before. Today I have read everything I have written already about Seawrack, growing sicker and sicker as I came to appreciate my own failure. I am going to start over.

Seawrack, as I have said, was waiting for us in the sloop. When I was a boy in Viron and I heard from her own lips how Chenille had wandered naked through the tunnels, I had longed to see her like that. She was, as I tried to make clear in the book Nettle wrote with me, a large and muscular woman, with big shoulders, a sharply denned waist, amply rounded hips, and large breasts. At that time, I had never seen a naked woman, not even Nettle, although I had caressed Nettle’s breasts.

When I saw Seawrack in the sloop, it was as if I were a boy again, shaking in the grip of wonder. Perhaps it was the spell of the sea goddess’s song, although I do not think so. If there was magic in it, the magic was in Seawrack’s body, so tenderly and so sleekly curved, in her face, and most of all in her glance. She was a woman, but did not yet know that she was a woman. She had left childhood behind, but had taken all that is most attractive in children with her. Seeing her as the boy I had been would have, I would have given anything in the whorl to have her love. And I felt certain that I would never have it.

Soon I was to gaze upon the sea goddess of the Vanished People. Perhaps she was Scylla in another form, as Silk once confided to me that Kypris was becoming another form of the Outsider, whose many forms had spoken to Silk that unforgettable noon on the ball court as a crowd speaks, while one whispered to his right ear and another to his left.

Here I am reminded irresistibly of Quadrifons, Olivine’s god, he of the four faces. Is it even possible that he is not a form of the Outsider as well? Considering Olivine, and the life she lived as a species of ghost in the Caldé’s Palace, I do not think so. And if Quadrifons (whose sign of crossroads may well have become Pas’s sign of addition) was in the final reckoning none other than the Outsider-which now seems certain to me-might not the Mother be Scylla as well?

Perhaps.

But I do not really believe it. In a town one cobbler, as the saying goes, and in another town another; but they are not the same cobbler, although they own similar tools, do similar work, and may even be similar in appearance.

This is what I think, not what I know:

Having the sea, as we in Old Viron did not, the Neighbors had also a goddess of the sea. She may have been their water goddess as well, as Scylla is at home; I cannot say.

Perhaps all gods and goddesses are very large; certainly Echidna was when I saw her in our Sacred Window. Our gods, the gods of Old Viron, dwelt in Mainframe. I saw Mainframe in company with Nettle and many others, and even what I saw was a very large place, although I was told that most of it was underground. It may be that our gods did not come among us except by enlightenment and possession because they were too large to do so; even the godlings that they send among the people now are, for the most part, immense. A man may like insects. Some men do. A man who likes them may make them gifts, giving a crumb soaked in honey or some such thing. But although that man may walk, he may not walk with his pets the insects. He is too big for it.

So it is, I believe, with the Mother. She dwells in the sea, and Seawrack spoke of hiding at times within her body as one might speak of taking shelter in the Grand Manteion, the Palace, or some other big building. Possibly the Mother’s worshippers cast their sacrifices into the waves instead of burning them. (I do not know, and offer the suggestion as a mere guess.) What seems certain is that her worshippers were the Vanished People, whom I did not then call the Neighbors; and that they are gone, although not entirely gone.

She waits.

For what I do not know. It may be for her worshippers to return again. Or for us to become her new worshippers, as we well may.

Or perhaps merely for death. She shaped herself, I believe, a woman of the Vanished People so that they would love her. We are here now, and so she shaped for me a woman of my own race-a woman beside whom Chenille would stand like a child-who could sing and speak to me. Beneath it the old sea goddess waited, and was not of our human race, nor of the race of the Vanished People, whom I was to come to know.

I once had a toy, a little wooden man in a blue coat who was moved by strings. When I played with him, I made him walk and bow, and spoke for him. I practiced until I thought myself very clever. One day I saw my mother holding the two sticks that held his strings, and my little wooden man saluting my youngest sister much more cleverly than I could have made him do it, and laughing with his head thrown back, then mourning with his face in his hands. I never spoke of it to my mother, but I was angry and ashamed.

* * *

It has been a long while since I wrote last. How long I am not sure. I went to Skany as its ambassadors asked, and remained there most of the summer. Now I have returned to this fine, airy house my people here have built for me, which they enlarged while I was gone. The west wing was torn to pieces by a storm, they tell me; but they have rebuilt it and made it larger and stronger, so that I walk there among rooms that seem familiar and feel that I have shrunk.

The storms are worse. Green is great in the sky. Like the eye of a devil, people say; but the truth for me is that it is so large that I look up at it and think on other days, and fancy sometimes that I can smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating trees. I never hear the wild song of the wind without recalling other days still, and how we built our house and our mill, Nettle.

You were the dream of my boyhood. You shared my life, and I shared yours, and together we brought forth new lives. Who can say what the end of that may be? Only the Outsider. He is wise, Nettle. So wise. And because he is, he is just.

I hear the wind’s song now at my window. I have opened the shutters. The flame of my lamp flickers and smokes. Through the open window I see Green, which will be gone in an hour as it passes beyond the windowframe. I want to call out to you that the tides are coming; but no doubt they have come already. It may be that the log walls of our house are turning and leaping in the waves as I write. Time is a sea greater than our sea. You knew that long before I went away. I have learned it here. Its tides batter down all walls, and what the tides of time batter down is never rebuilt.

Not larger.

Not smaller.

Never as it was.

* * *

I see that before I left for Skany, that glorious, corrupt town, I wrote of how Seawrack and I slept in the cubby of the sloop, with Babbie sleeping too at our feet, or at least at times pretending to sleep so that he could be in our company; and I said that we did not sleep long.

Nor did we. I remember lying like that, then turning on my back so that both my ears might listen. I wrote about the song of the wind, too; but I am not certain that I had ever really heard it until that night, although I thought I had. To hear the song of the wind truly, as I heard it that night, I think that you must hear it as I did, lying on your back in a rocking, pitching boat upon the wide, wide sea, with a woman younger than yourself asleep beside you.

The wind was a woman, too. Sometimes it was a woman like General Mint, a small woman with a neat, pure, honest little face, a woman in flowing black astride the tallest white stallion anyone ever saw, singing as she rode like a flame before a thousand wild troopers who rode as she did or ran like wolves, firing and reloading as they came and halting only to die.

And sometimes the wind was a woman like the tall, proud women of Trivigaunte, galloping along Sun Street with their heads up and their lances leveled, women singing to their wonderful horses, horses that had always to be held back and never had to be urged forward. And sometimes the wind was a singing woman like the one beside me, a sea woman who sings like her Mother, a woman that no one ever completely understands, with silver-blue combers in her eyes.

As I listened, the wind seemed to me more and more to be all three women and a million more, spurred onward-faster, always faster-by the rumbling voice of Pas. Beneath me, the sloop was lifted by giant’s hand, and rolled so far that Seawrack was tumbled onto me and clutching me in fear while Babbie squealed at the tiller. Outside the shelter of the foredeck, I was drenched to the skin in an instant. It was pitch dark except when the lightning flashed, and the sloop was laid over on her beam ends and in danger of being dismasted. I meant to cut her moorings before they pulled her under, but there was no need. The stakes I had pushed into the damp softness of that mossy shore had pulled free, and we were being driven before the storm like a child’s lost boat or a stick of driftwood, half foundering. I put out the little jib, hoping to steady her and keep her stern to the waves, but had hardly set it before it was carried away.

I will not write about everything that took place that night, because most of it would be of interest only to sailors, who are not apt to be found so far inland as this. I rigged a sea anchor that tamed the diabolical pandemonium of boat and storm to mere insanity; and Seawrack and I bailed and bailed until I thought my arms would fall off of my shoulders; but the sloop never foundered or sunk, or lost a stick. I have never been prouder of something that I myself have made, not even my mill.

What I want to tell whoever may read this is that in the flashes of lightning, which for whole hours were so frequent as to provide a hectic illumination that was nearly constant, I saw the green plain part for us, ripped in two by the fury of the waves, and seeing it so-lifted by great waves at one moment, then crashing down upon the sea again at the next-I knew it for what it was.

At that place in the middle of the sea, the bottom is not leagues removed from the surface; but is, as Seawrack confirmed for me, not more than two or three chains distant from it. Great herbs (I do not know what else to call them) grow there that are not trees, nor grasses, nor ferns, but share the natures of all three. Their tangled branches, lying upon the surface, are draped with the smooth green life over which Babbie and I wandered. It may be that it covers them as orchids cover our trees here in Gaon, or as strangling lianas cover the cannibal trees of Green. Or it may be that they cover themselves with it as the trees of land cover themselves with leaves and fruit. I do not know. But I know that it is so, because I saw it that night. I saw what I had once thought islands torn like banana leaves, and tossed like flotsam by the waves.

Something climbed into our sloop that night that was neither a beast nor a man, and was not a thing of the sea nor a thing of the land, nor even a thing of the air like the inhumi. I hesitated to write of it, because I know that it will not be believed; after thinking it over, I understand that I must. How many travelers’ tales, although full of wise advice and the soundest information, have been cast aside because among their thousands of lines there were two or three that their readers could not be brought to believe?

If you do not believe this, believe at least that I believed that I saw it. And Seawrack also saw it. She confirmed for me that she had, although she did not like to speak of it. Babbie saw it, too, and rushed at it; it laid hold of him as a man might lay hold of a lady’s lapdog, and would, I believe, have thrown him over the side and into the raging water if Seawrack had not prevented it. In appearance it was like a man of many arms and legs, long dead and covered over with crabs and little shellfish and other things; and yet it moved and possessed great strength, although I think it feared the storm as much or more than we. I do not know how such a monstrous thing came to be, but I have thought about it again and again, and at last settled on the explanation that I offer here. If you find a better one, I congratulate you.

Imagine that one of the Vanished People gained great favor with one of his people’s gods, those gods who are said by us to have vanished too. Or who, at least, we think of as having vanished. This god, let us suppose, offered his worshipper a great gift-but only one. Silk, I believe, might say that this worshipper was in truth no favorite of the god’s but merely thought he was. Many times our own gods, the gods of the Long Sun Whorl, punished those they hated with riches, power, and fame that destroyed them.

Offered such a gift, may not this man of the Vanished People have chosen a life without end? The immortal gods have it, or are said to. Given the gift that he had chosen, he may have lived for centuries enjoying food and women and fine days and, in short, everything that pleased him. Perhaps he tired of all of it at last. Or perhaps he merely discovered at length that though he himself could not die, the race that had given him birth was dwindling every year. Or perhaps he simply chose, in the end, to abide with the goddess who had favored him. In any event, he must have cast himself into the sea.

All of which is mere speculation. No doubt I have rendered myself ridiculous even to those who believe me. Remember, please, that those who believe me are not themselves ridiculous-I saw what I saw.