On Blue's waters (33 page)

I took a deep breath, more than half certain that Seawrack knew more about the fires and their builders than I did. “To start with, I don’t believe they were human beings.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No, I’m not. Krait said he met some people along this river I’d like to find, a good long way from here. According to his account, he must have gotten pretty far inland. Whqever built the fires would have been much nearer.”

“Didn’t he see them?”

“I don’t know,” I told Seawrack. “He didn’t want to say. If you’d like my guess, I think he knew who or what they were and avoided them.” She would have questioned me further if I had allowed it, but I told her that our noise would frighten the game, if there was any, and that she would have to be quiet or wait on the sloop with Krait.

About noon (squinting up at the sun every chance I got kept me very conscious of the passage of time) we struck the little river and stopped to drink. Its water was clean and cold and good. Seawrack asked, “Are we going to follow this now?” and I told her we were.

“You want to find the people the boy found?”

“If I can.” I had stopped drinking and was taking off my boots. “For me the easiest way will probably be to wade through the shallows.”

I waited for her to speak, but she did not.

“Are you going to do that too, instead of swimming?”

She nodded.

“There’ll be less brush for me to deal with.” I had been forced to cut our way with Sinew’s knife in half a dozen places. “And if I try to hike through the brush next to it, I’m liable to lose it every chain or two. The people that Krait met lived alongside it, he said. If I lose it and find it again upstream of their camp, I’ll miss them completely.”

She nodded again. “Maybe they’ll give us something to eat.”

“Exactly. We need food, more clothing and blankets, or even hides. Something to keep us warm. Boots or shoes for you, if we can get them.”

I stood up, and stepped into the river, finding the water that had been so refreshing unpleasantly cold, and pulled off my tunic. “This is something I should have done as soon as you swam out to the sloop,” I said. “Here, take it. Put it on, and please don’t argue with me.”

She began to protest, but fell silent when she saw that she was only making me angry. “Women in New Viron never let strangers look at their breasts,” I explained. “Allowing it would be like sing- ing that song you’re trying to forget. Do you understand?”

In a whisper so soft I could scarcely hear her, she said, “You’re not a stranger.”

“I know, and there are exceptions. This is best, just the same. Put it on.”

“You’ll be cold. I was.”

I told her that I had been getting chilled anyway when I was wearing my tunic, which was not particularly warm. After that, we waded upstream for two or three leagues before the water became so frigid that we had to get out and try to trace the river from one side after all.

Shadelow (I still have no other name by which to call it) is a colder continent than ours, from what I saw of it. Even places we would consider southern are colder than New Viron, and much colder than this town of Gaon. I would think that it must be due to the western winds, or to unfavorable currents in the sea.

* * *

It was nearly dark by the time we reached the lean-to Krait had visited. It belonged to a family of four-a husband and wife, a boy of twelve or thirteen, and a plump little girl whom I judged to be eight or nine. The man was away hunting when we arrived, and the boy was spearing fish in the river. His mother called out to him when she saw us, and he came at a run, brandishing his barbed spear. Seawrack and I smiled and tried to show by signs (since the woman seemed not to understand the Common Tongue) that we were friendly.

The girl had been Krait’s victim. She lay on her back beside their fire, deathly pale beneath her deep tan and only occasionally opening her eyes; I do not believe she spoke the whole time we were there. Remembering what Silk had told me about Teasel, and what Teasel herself had told Nettle and me later, I tried to show her mother by signs that she should be kept very warm and given a great deal of water, at last fetching a soft greenbuck skin myself and covering her with it. The boy was-or rather, seemed to be-more intelligent, bringing water in a gourd as soon as I pointed to his sister and pretended to drink from my hand.

Soon the father returned carrying two big gray-and-red birds he had killed with arrows. He proved to speak the Common Tongue fairly well, and asked us many questions about Babbie, having never seen a hus before. When I told him that Babbie could understand what we were saying, he explained (with some difficulty, but very earnestly) that it was true of every animal. “He listen. No talk. Sometimes talk. Long time the shearbear, he talk me.”

It was an animal I had never heard of; I asked him what the shearbear had said.

He shook his head. “No tell.”

“Change blood,” his wife explained, making Seawrack blink with surprise.

That sounded as if it might be significant, so I asked her about it.

“He-pen-sheep cut arm, shearbear cut same.” She crossed her arms to illustrate the mingling of their blood, then pointed upward. Her husband and son pointed upward as well, he with his bow and the boy with his fishing spear. I pointed upward with my slug gun, and they nodded approval, at which Seawrack too pointed upward as the woman had.

They invited us to join their meal, and we accepted eagerly. After we ate, I traded two silver pins for a soft skin smaller than the one with which I had covered their daughter, saying that I was cold.

He-pen-sheep (who was naked to the waist himself) cut a slit in the middle of it for my head and cut away a long, thin strip that he tied around my waist as one would tie a trouser cord, making a rough but warm leather tunic with half sleeves of the skin. “You stay,” he urged me. “She-pick-berry make together for you.”

Neither Seawrack nor I understood “make together,” so he brought out a pair of beautifully made hide boots and pointed out the stitching. Too eagerly, perhaps, I offered them a silver necklace if She-pick-berry would make a pair for Seawrack, since the pair that he had shown us would have been much too large for her. After some discussion we agreed that the boots could be undecorated, and I offered another pin in addition to the necklace.

She-pick-berry then made the boots in something less than an hour, folding and cutting soft leather around Seawrack’s feet, punching holes in it with one of the pins she had gotten from me already, and sewing it quickly with a big bone needle. They were very simple in construction, one piece forming the sides and the sole, another the front and top, and a third the back.

Pretending ignorance, I asked He-pen-sheep what had happened to his daughter.

“Inhumu bite.” He indicated the inner part of his own thigh.

Seawrack told him that an inhumu had bitten Babbie some days ago, although it had not attacked us.

He nodded solemnly. “Afraid Neighbor-man.” When I asked what a Neighbor-man was, he laughed and pointed to the ring Seawrack had given me. “You Neighbor-man.”

“Many Neighbor here,” his wife told Seawrack. She paused to moisten the sinew with which she sewed, running it through her mouth. “Build many fire. Neighbor-man,” she pointed to me, “come, talk Neighbor.”

I indicated the wilderness of sand and scrub through which we had walked for most of the day. “Are there many Neighbors down there?”

Without looking up from her sewing, she nodded emphatically. “Many Neighbor. Many fire.”

Her son displayed both palms. “No kill Neighbor.”

His father laughed again. “He no kill. Change blood Neighbor,” to which he added what seemed to be several sentences in a tongue that I had never heard before.

“Neighbor kill you?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “Kill inhumu.”

By that time the Short Sun had set; She-pick-berry was finishing her sewing by firelight. The ground had begun to rise here; the soil was darker and not so sandy, and the trees much taller. I climbed a likely-looking one, gaining enough height to see that the fires Seawrack and I had watched two nights before had been re-kindled, and were more numerous if anything. It seemed strange that we had not come across the ashes of one at least during our long hike through the scrub. For some time I stood upon a convenient limb, surveying them and speculating, before I climbed down again.

* * *

We stretched ourselves upon the ground to sleep in daisy-petal fashion, our feet toward the fire and our heads outward. If I had been warm and comfortable, I might very well have nodded off quickly, and slept the night away in spite of the resolution I had formed while I had stood in the tree. As things were, I shivered, huddled with Seawrack, and reviled myself through chattering teeth for not trading for the greenbuck hide and letting the exsanguinated child freeze for me.

Seawrack, as I ought to mention here, went to sleep at once; but hers was a troubled slumber, in which she trembled and twitched without waking, and sometimes spoke. I could not understand most of what she said, which seemed to me to be in several rather different languages. Once I thought she was cajoling someone or something; and once I overheard her say quite distinctly: “
Yes, Mother! I’m coming, Mother!
” After a time, it occurred to me that she might begin to sing in her sleep, crooning the song I had heard when she sat naked on the wave-swept rocks; when it did, I got to my feet without waking her, as I had intended all along.

The night was silent, cold, and clear. I made sure of Sinew’s hunting knife and picked up my slug gun, then scanned the sky for Krait-as everyone knows, inhumi are prone to return to places in which they have been successful. He was not to be seen, only the bright stars, very cold and far, and baleful Green low upon the eastern horizon.

The scrub trees of the peninsula had been troublesome by day; now they were nightmarish, raking my face with spiky limbs the moment I ceased to guard it with my hand or the slug gun. Every so often I was obliged to stop and chop my way through some tangle by touch alone; it must have taken me a full two hours to travel half a league.

At one point I stopped and looked behind me, footsore, exhausted, and sorely tempted to return to the fire and lie down again, and was irrationally cheered to find that it was still in sight, although it looked as remote as the stars. Save for Pig, Patera Silk and you, Nettle, I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them; but at that moment I must have felt the way that Silk himself habitually did. The chill wind, the twisted, useless little trees, and the impoverished soil I trod were hostile, foreign things scarcely better than Krait and possibly worse. We six had faced them in the day now past and would face them again in the day to come; and it was our glory that we faced them together.

The feeling faded as soon as I turned my eyes away, but it has never disappeared completely. It is good to live as I do here: in a palace, with important work to do and plenty to eat. It is good-but those who live as I do here cannot ever know the feeling I experienced that night in the scrub when I looked back up the slope and saw the lonely scarlet glow that was She-pick-berry’s humble fire. There are worse things for the spirit, Nettle, than fatigue and sore feet, a little hunger and a little cold.

* * *

Yesterday Barsat reported finding a house of the Vanished People, as the Neighbors seem to be called on this eastern side of the sea wherever the Common Tongue is spoken. Today he and I rode out to see it, escorted by Hari Mau, Mota, Ram, and Roti. It was a dismal place, roofless, and empty of everything except twigs and dead leaves; but Barsat informed me that it was happy now. Naturally I asked what he meant.

“It didn’t like me,” he said. “As soon as I came in, I had to go back out.”

The others laughed at that, and I asked Barsat why he had gone inside at all, which may not have been an altogether fair question since we had gone in as a matter of course.

“I was hoping to find something I could sell,” he told me frankly. “Was that wrong, Rajan?”

I shook my head.

“They can afford to laugh.” He shot Hari Mau and his three friends a glance compounded of envy and admiration. “We poor men like to laugh too, but we don’t have much to laugh about.”

I began to explain that I was almost as poor as he, that my palace belonged to the town, which could tell me to leave whenever it wished, and so on; but before I could finish, we heard a single clear note sounded in another room. It was as though a bell had been struck.

Going to investigate, I discovered this chalice (at any rate, it is an object that seems more or less like a cup), which appears to be of silver or some shining alloy. It was standing on the only section of clear floor that I saw in the whole place, looking for all the whorl as if it had been set down there a moment before. I picked it up and tried to give it to Barsat. He reached for it but would not take it, although he hunted very industriously through the litter of leaves and twigs for something else.

My point, such as it is, is that I could not feel the happiness of the house, assuming it existed-as I believe it did. Nor could I feel any such emotion in the ruins on the island, the place where I fell into the pit through my eagerness to run down the greenback. Nor did I receive any gift at all there, save Krait’s rescue.

* * *

I must have spent three or four hours, if not longer, laboriously picking my way through the scrub. At last I hung my slug gun on the stub of a broken branch and sat down under one of the little trees with my back to the trunk, weary to the bone. Soon I let my eyes close (which they were only too willing to do) and abandoned myself to disappointment. I had hoped to reach the closest of the fires I had seen from my perch in the tree and catch a glimpse of the mysterious “Neighbors” about whom I had thought so much. I had also hoped to kill some animal that would furnish us with food. As I slumped there, I knew that both my hopes had been without foundation; I had exhausted myself and abandoned the comfort of the fire for nothing. I believe that I slept then, for a few minutes at least, and very likely for an hour or more.