On Blue's waters (44 page)

Will Hari Mau’s be better? Beyond all question. But if Hari Mau is wise, he will appoint one of them the new Man, some leader whom everyone there respects, a kind and steady man, or even a woman, who has seen life and learned moderation and compassion. I should put that in the letter I am leaving for him, and I will.

Listen to Rajya Mantri, Hari Mau, but make your own decisions. Let him
think
that you confide in him.

Still no Evensong. I have been talking with Oreb, who has flown over this entire whorl-or says he has. When we fall silent I can hear Seawrack, faint and far, her voice keeping time with the beating of the waves.

Pajarocu is a portable town, as Wijzer said. I should say, rather, that it is a portable city, the shadow of the real City of Pajarocu, which must be somewhere in the
Whorl
. There are a few huts and a few tents; but they are not Pajarocu, and are in fact frowned upon. Let me explain what I mean, Nettle.

When you and I, with Marrow, Scleroderma and her husband, and all the rest came here, we looted the lander that had brought us and named the new town we hoped to build after the old city in which we had been born, and thereafter, for the most part, forgot it. (I remember very well how you and I had to rack our brains to recall the names of certain streets while we were writing our book; no doubt you do too.) We spoke of “Our Holy City of Viron,” or at least our augurs did when they blessed us; but save for the fact that it was the center of the Vironese Faith, there was nothing particularly holy about it.

Things are very different with Pajarocu and its people. In the Long Sun Whorl, their city seems to have been not so much a city like Viron as a ceremonial center, the place where they assembled on holy days and feast days. Each of the Nine had his or her lofty manteion of stone, there was a processional road like our own Alameda, a vast public square or plaza for open-air ceremonies, and so on.

So attached to it were and are they that they have refused to duplicate it here on any lesser scale, although duplicating it on its original scale is still far beyond their reach. What they have done instead is to duplicate its
plan
to perfection-without duplicating, or attempting to duplicate, its substance at all.

There are “streets” paved with grass and fern between “buildings” and “manteions” that are no more than clearings in the forest marked in ways that are, to our eyes, almost undetectable. When the adult citizens we sought to question were willing to talk to us, they talked of gateways, walls and statues that did not in fact exist-or at least, that did not exist here on Blue-and described them in as much detail as if they loomed before us, together with colossal images of Hierax, Tartaros, and the rest, called by outlandish sobriquets and the objects of strange, cruel veneration.

But when the streets are too badly fouled or the river rises, this phantom Pajarocu goes elsewhere, which I think an excellent idea. Our own Viron was built on the southern shore of Lake Limna; when the lake retreated, our people clung to the shiprock buildings that Pas had provided when they ought to have clung to the idea that he had provided instead, the idea of a city by the lake. Many (although certainly not all) of Viron’s troubles may ultimately have been due to this single mistaken choice.

Listen to me, Horn and Hide. Listen all you phantom readers. Buildings are temporary, ideas permanent. Rude as they are in so many ways, the people of Pajarocu understand it thoroughly, and in that respect they are wiser than we.

Since I have taken the time to characterize the people of Gaon and Han, let me do the same for the people of Pajarocu. You have seen them already in my words, since you have met He-pen-sheep and She-pick-berry. They are short for the most part and frequently bowlegged, dark and hard-featured, with piercing eyes and long coarse hair that is always black unless the years have done their work or they have shaved their heads, as many young men and boys do.

Seawrack complained that people in Pajarocu were forever talking, but compared with us they are actually rather silent. The adults never laugh unless they are talking to children, which made me think them humorless for a time-the exact reverse of the truth. They are muscular and agile, both the men and the women; and many are extremely thin, so that one sees their muscles as though the skin had been peeled away. There is a disease among them that causes the throat to swell. At first I believed it a disease of women only, because the first few sufferers I saw were all women; but He-hold-fire had it, as did various other men.

No doubt that is enough, and it may be too much; but I am going to add a few more items as they occur to me. In Viron, Nettle, we men wear trousers and you women gowns. In Pajarocu, women often wear trousers like men, and I was told that in the winter they never wear gowns. In good weather-and even in weather that you and I would think quite cool-a man may wear no more than a strip of soft greenbuck skin suspended from a thong, or nothing. Men and women bathe together in the river. I saw this on a day when the weather was warmer than it had been and the Short Sun shone brightly. Seawrack and I joined them, which only one little boy and the many strangers who thronged the town thought odd at all.

Oreb wanted something to eat, which gave me a fine chance to roam through this palace and make certain everyone is asleep. The only person I saw who was not was the sentry before my door. He was surprised at my black robe, I believe, but he showed it only by a slight widening of his eyes. If it were not for my wound, I would climb out the window when I take my departure, although it is hard to imagine that my own sentry will try to stop me.

If Evensong can climb up, I can climb down, surely, weak though I feel. I will leave my door locked, and they will think I am sleeping late. Very likely no one will venture to knock before noon, and by then I will be far away. When this account halts in the middle of a word, you are to understand that Evensong has returned with news of the boat that I sent her to buy.

No, I will have to wait a bit to give her time to get into bed and get to sleep.

“Bad thing!” says Oreb. “Thing fly!” So there are inhumi about, just as in Pajarocu. I do not believe they will attack Evensong, whom they all know. But what a thought! If only we protected one another, they would all be idiots or worse. As it is, they always get enough to keep them going.

I put my head out the window and tried to see them, although I would have been horrified if I had. The azoth is in my sash, next to Princess Choora. (I wonder how she likes her company?) No needier, but that should be more than enough. I am inclined to take my sword as well. I cannot cut firewood on a boat with the azoth-it would sink her at the first attempt. When I’m not using my sword, I can stow it on the boat, provided Evensong finds one for me. How I wish that I had the black-bladed sword the Neighbor gave me now!

I wish that I had been able to choose the boat for myself, too. Evensong’s choice will be too large, almost certainly. Sinew crossed the western sea in a boat that would scarcely carry Nettle and me, with a few bales of paper.

If Evensong does not buy one at all, I will send somebody else tomorrow night. Jahlee? Old Mehman would surely be better. The inhumi do not understand such things, even when they make use of them.

My inhumi have done some good things for us. Cutting loose the barges to break that bridge on the upper river was masterly. The Man saw no risk in moving gravel for his new road by water; but his troopers, who were very hungry already, went hungrier still.

Starting rumors and sending false messages, too. We dug up two of them for that. It was only just.

They are cunning, but like all cunning people they put too much faith in cunning. That was how it was in Pajarocu, when they allowed me to inspect their lander, never dreaming that I was the one man in thousands who would recognize it as Auk’s.

That is just how it has been here, at times. Three dead so far, Jahlee says, but she cannot know of all those whose lives have been lost.

In Pajarocu, I got my first warning from Seawrack. I woke and found her clinging to me and trembling. Whispering, I asked her what was wrong. “They’re hunting the night.” Her teeth were chattering so that she could scarcely speak. A bad dream, I thought, and many times the inhumi had seemed no more than a bad dream to me, so that I half expected Krait to vanish at sunrise. I tried to tell Seawrack that she had spent too many years under the sea, and that the creatures she had feared there could not reach her here.

Then I sat up, crawled out from under the foredeck, and looked around, hoping that she would join me and look too. I saw a man on one of the other boats some distance away; I thought I recognized him as one of those who had shown Seawrack, Sinew, Krait, and me through the lander the day before, and would have hailed him if I had not been afraid of waking others who were sleeping in their boats just as Seawrack and I had been sleeping in ours. He stooped and I heard a scuffle that quickly subsided; I supposed that it had been no more than the noise he had made taking off his boots, and told Seawrack there was nothing to fear.

The next day was the warm and sunny one I mentioned, and was a market day besides. She and I went out to have another look at the invisible town, and bargained for food and a few other things. Returning to the sloop we saw twenty or thirty men, and what appeared to be every woman and child in the town, swimming in the river. After stowing our purchases we joined them. Seawrack’s missing arm and yellow hair attracted a great deal of attention, and the children (who were all good swimmers) were amazed to find that she, with only one arm, could swim much faster than the fastest of them.

One bright-eyed little boy of eight or nine asked whether I were her father. I declared that I was, and he informed me very firmly that foreign women were not permitted to take off their clothes. “Here lady yes.” By pantomime he became a young woman, mincing along with hands on swaying hips, then pulled a nonexistent gown over his head. “You lady, no, no!” Arms folded, scowling.

It reminded me first of Maytera Marble, who had pulled off her habit to put it on Mucor, and afterward of Chenille, who had scandalized Patera Incus by going naked in the tunnels after she had been sunburned during Scylla’s possession. I told the boy that some of our women did, and a little about both of them. He wanted to know where Maytera Marble and Mucor lived, and I did my best to explain that their rock was on the other side of the sea, which he had never seen.

“Big lady too?”

“Chenille? No, she and Auk went to Green. Or at least that’s what we think must have happened, since no one in New Viron-that is my own town here-has gotten word of them. Do you understand what I mean by Green? It’s that big light in the sky at night, and it’s another-”

He had run away.

That was when I knew, the moment at which it came to me. I had recognized the lander earlier, as I have said. It had been one of the Crew’s, and had differed in certain respects from those provided for Cargo, landers like the one in which we had come, being somewhat smaller and much better adapted to carrying large, non-living loads. When we had been in Mainframe I had visited it twice with Silk and Auk, and there was no mistaking it. I had recognized it without understanding what its presence here signified.

But when the boy ran, I knew. I understood everything after that.

We went back to the market, which was smaller and less well organized than the one in Wichote, as well as substantially cheaper. A leather worker there was making a sheath for one of the knives I have described; I offered him a silver pin for the knife and its sheath when he had finished sewing it, and he suggested that I take another quite similar knife, whose sheath he had completed already. In the end I bought them both, as you have read, intending to give one to our son.

A fellow foreigner approached us. “Meeting tonight at the Bush.” I asked what and where the Bush was, and learned that it was an oversized hut near the river in which the local beer was sold and drunk. A man from one of the Northern towns had brought his wife so that she could sail his boat home, and compelled her to keep him company while he waited, as we were all waiting, for Auk’s lander to fly. She had been asleep on her husband’s boat last night while he sat drinking in the Bush, and had been bitten by an inhumu. Tonight we would decide his punishment.

I went that night, bringing Sinew; we stayed only long enough to have a look at the woman, who was indeed pale and weak (as well as bruised), and displayed the marks of an inhumu’s fangs on her arm, and to ask her where her boat had been moored. As we returned to our own, Sinew said, “I thought that didn’t happen here.”

It puzzled me; I knew that as we had come nearer Pajarocu, Krait had flown there nearly every night, and I had certainly assumed that he was feeding there. I asked Sinew who had told him so.

“One of these people, when I was hanging around here before. I told him how I got bitten when I was just a baby, and he said they never did it here. His name is He-bring-skin.”

I had already told Sinew how He-pen-sheep and his son had cut off the breakbull’s head for me. Now I said, “It can’t be true. When Seawrack and I visited He-pen-sheep’s camp, his daughter had been bitten the preceding night. I don’t recall her name, but she was extremely weak. Weaker than that woman back there.”

“Only here in Pajarocu,” Sinew explained impatiently. “They never get bitten here. That’s what he said.”

“But foreigners do.”

“I guess. She did.”

We had reached the sloop by then, and were greeted with a snort of pleasure by Babbie. Seawrack came out with her knife in her hand. I had told her to remain aboard and get some sleep if she could, although I do not believe she had actually slept. She asked whether I had seen the woman.

“Yes, and spoken to her, though not for long. She’ll recover, or at least I believe she will.”

“But you are not happy. Neither is Sinew, I think.”

“You’re right, I’m discouraged.” Like old Patera Remora, I groped for a better word. “Humbled. Silk old me once that we should be particularly grateful for experiences that humble us, that humiliation is absolutely necessary if we’re not to be consumed by pride. He was subjected to a shower of rancid meat scraps shortly after he came to Sun Street. Maybe I’ve told you.”