On Blue's waters (30 page)

“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.