On Blue's waters (31 page)

* * *

On the evening I wrote about before the inhumation, we sat before the fire and said very little. The apple barrel, which had once seemed inexhaustible, was empty at last, and the flour gone. I had used the last of our cornmeal that night. I had two fishing lines out, and from time to time I got up to look at them; but they caught nothing.

Seawrack asked where the boy was, and I told her that he had gone ashore to hunt, which tasted like a lie in my mouth although it was true. My slug gun was still under the foredeck in the place where we slept, and I was afraid she had seen it there and would want to know how he could hunt at night without Babbie and without the gun. Perhaps she thought it, but she never said anything of that sort. What she actually said was “We could sail away without him.”

I shook my head.

“All right.”

“Will you forgive me?” I asked her.

“Because you won’t leave him?” She shrugged, her shoulders (thin shoulders now) rising and slumping again. “I hope we will, sometime, no matter what you say now.”

“To get out of the pit, I had to promise him that we’d take him to Pajarocu with us, and try to get a place for him on the lander.”

“I haven’t promised him anything, and I won’t. Is there any more corn flour?”

“No.”

She got up to look at my fishing lines. “Do women catch fish?”

“Sometimes,” I told her. It had been a very long time since Nettle and I had gone fishing.

“How? Like this?”

“Yes,” I said. “Or with a pole, or a net. Sometimes they spear them, too, just as men do. Men fish more, but there’s nothing wrong with women fishing.”

“If you would tie your knife to your stick for me, I might be able to spear some for us.”

“In the water?” I shook my head. “You’d start to bleed again.”

She made no reply, and she was a step too far from the firelight for me to judge her expression.

“I’ll hunt tomorrow myself,” I promised her. “This time I’ll get something, or Babbie and I will.”

“What are those?”

I had to rise to be certain that she was pointing toward shore.

She said, “Those little lights?” and I went up onto the foredeck for a better view. The weather was calm, although not threateningly so; and we were anchored some distance from the naked coast of the mainland, Krait and I having been unable to find a protected anchorage before shadelow. North along the coast so far that they were practically out of sight were two or three, possibly four, scattered points of reddish light. As I stood there shivering, one vanished-then reappeared.

Behind me Seawrack said, “I thought the boy might have decided to stay there, but there are too many.”

I nodded, and returned to our own fire. To my very great surprise and delight, she sat down beside me. “Are you afraid of them?”

“Of the people who built those fires? Not as much as I ought to be, perhaps. Seawrack, it would be easier for me, a great deal easier, if you were angry with me. If you hated me now.”

She shook her head. “I’d like it if you hated me, Horn. Don’t you understand why I hid?”

“Because I’d attacked you, and you were afraid I would hurt you again, or even kill you.”

She nodded solemnly.

“I’m sorrier than I can say. I’ve been trying and trying to think of some way I can-can at least show you how sorry I really am.”

She touched my hand and fixed me with her extraordinary eyes. “Never leave me.”

I wanted to explain that I was a friend, not a lover. I wanted to, I say, but how could I (or anybody) say that to a woman I had forced that very day? I wanted to tell her, as I had several times before, that I was married, and I wanted to explain all over again what marriage means. I wanted to remind her that I was probably twice her age. I wanted to say all those things, but I knew that I loved her, and all the fine words stuck in my throat.

Later, when we lay side by side under the foredeck, she asked me again, “Don’t you understand why I had to hide from you today?”

I thought that I did, but I had given my answer already; so I asked, “Why?”

“Because I made you and wouldn’t let you.”

“You didn’t make me,” I told her.

“Yes, I did, by singing. The song does that. I’m trying to forget it.”

“Your singing made me want you more than ever, but it didn’t make me do what I did. I surrendered to my own desire when I should have resisted.”

She was quiet so long that I had nearly fallen asleep when she said, “The underwater woman taught me to sing like that. I wish I could forget her, too.”

“Your Mother?” I asked.

“She wasn’t my mother.”

“ ‘The Mother.’ You called her that.”

“She wanted me to. I was on a big boat, and I remember a woman who talked to me, and carried me sometimes. I think that was my mother.”

I nodded; then realizing that Seawrack could not see me said, “So do I.”

“After that, there was only the underwater woman. She doesn’t look like a woman unless she makes part of herself a woman.”

“I understand.”

“She’s another shape, very big. But she is one. She told me to call her Mother, and I did. My real mother drowned, I think, and the underwater woman ate her.”

“The sea goddess. Do you know her name?”

“No. If I ever did, I’ve forgotten it, and I’m glad. I don’t want to remember her anymore, and she doesn’t want me to. I do remember that much about her. Would you like me to sing for you again?”

“No,” I said, and meant it.

“Then I’m going to try to forget the song.”

As I drifted into sleep, I heard (or believed I heard) her say, “…and forget the water and the underwater woman, and the boats underwater with people in them. That was why I wouldn’t eat your fish. I don’t want to eat fish or drowned meat, never any more. Will the boy bring us back something to eat?”

Perhaps I mumbled in reply. At this remove I cannot be sure.

“I don’t think so. He’ll eat, and come back here with nothing.”

Which was precisely correct.

I recall thinking, as I declined from consciousness into the first deep sleep of the night, that Seawrack was forgetting the goddess she had called the Mother because Krait (whom she herself called “the boy”) intended to call her “mother.” That there was a place for only one mother on my sloop, and it was to be Seawrack.

There was a place for only one wife, as well. With the eyes of sleep I saw you, my poor Nettle, fading and fading, sinking into the clear blue water like the hammer I used to keep on board until I lost it over the side and watched it sink, weighed by its iron head but buoyed by its wooden handle, smaller and smaller and dimmer and dimmer as the waters closed around it forever. My love was like a line tied to you then, a cord so thin as to be invisible, playing out cubit after cubit and fathom after fathom until the time arrived when I would haul you up again.

Have I insulted you? I do not blame you. You may blame me, and the more you do the happier I will be. Let me say now, once and for all, that I was not compelled by the song the sea goddess had taught Seawrack. Was I inflamed? Yes, certainly. But not compelled. I could have left. The inhumu would have seen my manhood raised, and witnessed my agony, and would have derided me for both whenever he thought his taunts would tell. But that would have been nothing.

Or I might have clapped my hand over Seawrack’s mouth and forced her to be silent. I would have been ashamed then, since I had threatened to beat her if she would not sing for me; but I have been ashamed many times of many things, and been no worse for it afterward.

For this I was worse, as I am.

I should tell you this too: Chandi has come in pretending to believe I sent for her, and I will have to stop writing this rambling account that has become a letter to you while I persuade her to leave.

* * *

I am not sure when I wrote last. Before the big storm, but when? I ought to date my entries, but what would such dates mean to those who may read them? Every town on this whorl, every city in the old
Whorl
, uses a different system; even the lengths of our years are different. This Great Pas did, to prevent our leaguing against Mainframe; and it divides us still. I will give the day and the month as we reckon them here in Gaon: Dusra Agast. That may mean something to you; but if it does not, not much has been lost.

Conjunction is past. It was as bad as I feared, and worse. (It is still very bad.) Many of the inhumi came, and many have remained. My servants close the shutters at sundown, and when they are asleep I inspect every window in this palace myself to make sure they have done it.

My bedroom has five windows north, six west, and five south. I double-check every one of them before I get into bed, and lock and bolt the only door, for fear of the inhumi and for fear of assassins, too.

An inhumu drinks blood until his veins are full and his flesh is nourished again; thus satisfied, he goes his way, like a tick that falls off when it has drunk its fill; but there are men here where land is free for the working who want land, and more and better land, and others to work it for them, and they always believe that someone else’s land is better. They would crush the small farmers if I let them.

I will not
.

A lean young man with a long curved dagger was shot to death in my garden last night. Awakened by the booming of the slug guns, I went to view his body, and could not help thinking of Silk climbing Blood’s wall with the hatchet in his waistband. Had this young man thought me as bad as Blood? If so, was he right? We have the inhumi to prey on us, yet we prey upon one another.

When I ended my last session with this old quill of Oreb’s, Seawrack and I were on the sloop on the night of the fires. I dreamed that night about shadowy figures creeping from those fires to swim toward us, and climbing aboard bent upon murder. I sat up and found my slug gun, and nearly fired it, too; but there was no one there. I lay down again and muttered an apology to Seawrack for having awakened her.

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

I knew why she had not slept, or thought I did. “You’re frightened and upset, and that’s only natural. I don’t suppose you want to tell me about it; but if you do, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say without getting angry.”

“I’m angry at myself,” she muttered.

“Then your anger is misdirected. You should be angry at me. I am.” For an instant (only an instant) I had heard Silk’s voice issuing from my own mouth. I tried to prolong it, but»could not. “What would you like to tell me?”

“Nothing.”

“Then let me say a few things, and after that you’ll have a few things of your own, I feel sure.” I waited for her to object.

When she did not, I continued, “First, the fault was mine, and mine alone. It wasn’t yours or anybody else’s. There was no reason for me to act as I did, and you resisted as fiercely as you could. You have-”

“I shouldn’t have.” It might have been a child, a small girl, speaking. “I hurt you. I know I did.”

“I hurt you a great deal more.” It was so overwhelmingly true that I found it impossible to go on.

“I deserved it.”

“You did not. You never will. You are entitled to be furiously angry with me. That was the second thing I was going to say, al- though I said it already this afternoon. If you had killed me while I slept, no one could have blamed you.”

“I would have blamed myself.”

“It occurred to me that you might before I fell asleep, and to tell the truth I was hoping you would.”

“No!” She shook her head violently enough for her hair to brush my cheek.

“Here is a third thing. I am a fool on a fool’s errand. I’ve been struggling to hide that from myself ever since I set out. To go to the Long Sun Whorl and bring back the strains of corn we need, and an eye for Maytera Marble, and so forth, is reasonable; but it’s a task for a bold and able man of twenty, not for me. Ten or fifteen years ago, I might have been adequate. Tonight I’m worse than inadequate. I’m thoroughly ridiculous.”

“You went because you were afraid they’d want your wife to go if you wouldn’t,” Seawrack reminded me. “You told me about that.”

“She might have done it, to. She’s brave and practical, with a good level head in a crisis. I won’t list my shortcomings-you know them already. I’ll simply point out that that’s not a description of me.”

“But-”

I raised my voice. “As for bringing Silk here, it’s less than a dream; and I very much doubt that Marrow and the rest even want me to do it. A trader named Wijzer told Marrow that to his face in my hearing, and Wijzer was right. All their talk about bringing Silk to New Viron was nothing more than a trick to get me to go. Or to get Nettle to, if I wouldn’t. A cheap and obvious trick that even Hoof and Hide should have seen through.”

Seawrack turned her head to whisper into my ear, so that I felt the warm caress of her breath. “You were right. I have things to say too. Is that all right?”

“Go ahead.”

“When you’re through. You’re going, in spite of all you’ve said. I know you are.”

I sighed; I could not help it. “I’ve told you I’m a fool, and I promised I would. That doesn’t mean you have to come with me. The lander in Pajarocu will probably explode as soon as they try to get it to go fly. Everybody on it will be killed, and it would be better if you weren’t one of us.”

“Is there more you want to say before we both go to sleep, or is it my turn?”

“I’m practically finished. Fourth and last, you’re not a prisoner on this sloop.” I recalled Sciathan the Flier then, and what Silk had said about him after Auk got him out of the Juzgado, and how Nettle and I had re-created that speech in our book. “You are my guest, a guest who’s been treated very badly. You’re free to leave any time-right now, if you like. Or when we reach Pajarocu or any other town.”

I fell silent, and after a time she murmured, “Are you waiting for me to jump into the sea again, Horn?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not going to yet, and it’s my turn to talk. While you were sleeping I was trying to forget.” I,

“I don’t blame you.”

“Not what you think. I was trying to forget 4he water, and everything I did in it. Every time I remembered something that happened there, I would think of something that’s happened since I’ve been with you, some little thing or something you said, and put it there instead.”