On Blue's waters (16 page)

“A few of you seem to think that since the inhumi cross the abyss at conjunction they must leave before conjunction is past,” I said. “Why should they, when there are so many of us here, so much blood for them? I tell you that though some who have tarried here for years will leave as the whorls conjoin, returning to Green to breed, most will remain. Do you doubt me?”

They were shamefaced, and did not reply.

“There were many here last year, or so you tell me. And many the year before. Are you in greater danger from them now? Surely not! More will come, but we will be on guard against them; and they, being less experienced, will be a lesser threat to us. Will you sleep at your posts when the first is caught and interred alive in the market? The second? The third? I hope not. Nor should you relax when this conjunction is over, as it soon will be.”

Brave words, and they served a dress rehearsal for the speeches I must give in the next few months.

Would it be effective for us to dig up one of the recent inhumations and release him to warn the others? The thought recurs.

If the inhumas’ eggs hatched in our climate, would not our human kind become extinct? What tricks Nature plays! If they are natural creatures at all.

But they surely are. Natural creatures native to Green. Why would the Neighbors create something so malign?

* * *

Last night I intended to continue my narrative, but failed to advance it by even a finger’s width. I will do better this afternoon.

I sailed at shadeup, as I had planned. Much to my surprise, Marrow came down to see me off and present me with two parting gifts, small square heavy boxes. The wind was in the southeast, and a very good wind it was for me, so we shook hands and he embraced me and called me his son, and I untied the mooring lines and raised the mainsail.

Just as Mucor had waited until I was well under way and could not easily return her gift before presenting me with Babbie, and as Sinew had waited before throwing me his precious knife, so Marrow waited before presenting me with his third and final gift. It was his stick, which he flung aboard in imitation of Sinew (I had told him about it) when I was well away from the pier. I shouted thanks, and I believe I picked it up and flourished it, too, though I could not help thinking about Blood’s giving Patera Silk his lion-headed stick.

Was I wrong to think of it? Marrow has his bad side, I am sure; and I am perfectly certain he would be the first to admit it. Blood, who was Maytera Rose’s son, had his good side, too. Silk always insistcd on it, and I have not the least doubt that Silk, who was nearly always right, was right about that as well. The head of a large enterprise-even a criminal enterprise-cannot be wholly bad. If he were, his subordinates could not trust him. Orchid signed the paper he gave her without reading it, and accepted the money he gave her to buy the yellow house, knowing that he would extort as much money from her and her women as he could-but knowing, too, that he would not destroy her.

Marrow’s stick, as I ought to have said somewhat sooner, was of a heavy wood so dark as to be nearly black, and had a silver band below the knob with his name on it. I do not believe that he meant to give it to me until the moment arrived, and I liked him and it all the better for it. I showed Babbie that I had something to beat him with now, and as a joke ordered him to put up the jib; but he only glared, and I hauled it up myself Sometime after that I saw him fingering the halyard, and was amazed.

A little after noon, as I recall, we passed Lizard. Course due north, wind moderate and west by south. I had promised myself that I would stand far out, and I did, and likewise that I would not peer ashore in the hope of catching sight of Nettle or the twins. That promise, as I quickly discovered, was worth very little. I stared, and stood upon the gunwale, and stared some more, and waved. All of it was to no purpose, since I saw no one.

Did anyone see me? The answer must surely be yes. Sinew did, and launched our old boat, which he must have spent the days since my departure in repairing and refitting. I did not see him or it, and nothing that he had said before I left had suggested he might do anything of the kind.

Marrow’s other gifts proved to be a small box of silver jewelry with which to trade, and an even smaller box of silver bars. These last I hid with great care, promising myself that I would not trade them unless I was forced to. I would (as I then thought) find somebody at Pajarocu who would watch the sloop for me while I went for Silk. When the lander returned, Silk and I could sail back to New Viron in it; and I would have the silver bars for my trouble, and to help him if their help were required.

Wijzer had cautioned me against stopping at every port I came to, but his advice had been unnecessary. I was acutely conscious that putting in anywhere would cost me at least a day and might easily cost two or three, and resolved to sail north until resupply was urgent, put in at the nearest town, and turn west. That plan held only until I passed the first. Thereafter it always seemed that something was needed (water particularly) or advisable, and we put in at almost every town along the way. As Babbie came to trust me, the nocturnal nature of all hus asserted itself, so that he drowsed by day but woke at shadelow-a most useful arrangement even when we were not in port. The wind was so steady and so reliably out of the west or the southwest that I generally lashed the tiller and let the sloop sail herself under jib and reefed mainsail. Before I lay down each night, I instructed Babbie to wake me if anything unusual occurred; like Marrow he grunted his assent, but he never actually woke me, to the best of my memory. I have forgotten how many towns we put in at altogether. Five or six in six weeks’ sailing would be about right, I believe.

* * *

A visitor has presented me with a great rarity, a little book called
The Healing Beds
printed more than a hundred years ago in the
Whorl
. It is a treatise on gardening, with special emphasis on herbs, the work of a physician; but although it is pleasant to page through it, studying its quaint hand-colored illustrations and reading snatches of text, it is not of that book I intend to write today, but of its effect on this one.

It has made me acutely aware that this book of mine, which I have intended for my wife and sons, may very well be read long after they-and I-are gone. Even Hoof and Horn [sic], who must just be entering young manhood now, will someday be as old as Marrow and Patera Remora. There is argument about the length of the year here, and how well it agrees with the year we knew in the Long Sun Whorl, but the difference must be slight if there is any; in fifty years, Horn and Hide [sic] may well be dead. In a hundred, their sons and daughters will be gone too. These words, which I pen with so little thought-or hope-or expectation-may possibly endure long beyond that, endure for two centuries or even three, valued increasingly and so preserved with greater care as the whorl they describe fades into history.

Sobering thoughts.

[Needless to say, we are making the greatest efforts to preserve this record, both by the care we take in printing and conserving individual copies and by disseminating it.-Hoof and Hide, Daisy and Vadsig.]

I wish that one of the first people to settle the Long Sun Whorl had left us a record of it. Perhaps one did, a record preserved now in some skyland city far from Viron. That book, or a copy of it, may have been brought here already if it exists, as I sincerely hope it does.

Many in and around our town were very happy to have Scleroderma’s short account of our departure, and overjoyed to have the one that Nettle and I wrote. It sounds boastful, I know; but it is true. They gave us cards, and even exchanged things they themselves had made or grown-things that had cost them many days of hard work-for a single copy. Yet to the best of my knowledge (and I believe I would surely have heard) none of them began an account of the founding of New Viron, the land raffle, and the rest of it. After considering this at some length, I have decided to salt this account of mine with facts that Nettle and my sons already know, but that may be of interest or value to future generations. Even today, who here in Gaon would know of the high wall that surrounds Patera Remora’s manteion and manse, for example, if I failed to mention it?

When I recall our sail up the coast, which seemed so idyllic as far as I have yet described it, I am struck by the speed with which so many new towns have sprung up here on Blue. The people on each lander have tended to settle near the place where they landed, since their lander could not be moved again once they had pillaged it, and it still constituted an essential source of supplies. In addition to which, they had no horses or boats, and would have had to walk to their new destination. Thus we built New Viron within an hour’s walk of the lander in which we arrived, and I am sure the people on other landers acted much as we did, save for those who landed too near us and have been forced into servitude by their captors; like us, they would have had little choice.

We were lucky, perhaps. There was no lake or river where we settled to provide fresh water, but there were a couple of well-diggers among us, and a ten-cubit well there provided better and purer water in abundance. To the west we have a fine harbor and a sea full of fish, and on the lower slopes of the eastern mountains, more timber than a hundred cities the size of Viron could ever need. The mountains themselves are already providing us with iron, silver and lead, as I believe I have mentioned before.

Most cannot have been so fortunate. Gaon has little access to the sea; ten leagues from where I sit, the River Nadi reaches us from the Highlands of Han in a succession of rapids and falls we call the Cataracts. Downstream are the Lesser Cataracts, then tropical forests and swamps, as well as a seemingly endless string of foreign towns, many of them hostile to us and some hostile to everyone. In theory, it might be possible to sail from here to the sea; but no one has ever done so, and it seems likely no one ever will.

Still, we have fresh water and fish from our river, timber, three kinds of useful cane, reeds for matting and the like, and a rich, black, alluvial soil that yields two generous crops per year. Even quite near town, the jungle swarms with game, and there are wild fruits for the picking. It seemed a poor place to me when I arrived, but no one needs warm and solid houses with big stone fireplaces here. Metals are imported and costly, which in the long run may prove the gods’ blessing.

The gods (I should say) are very naturally those we knew in the
Whorl
. Echidna gets more sacrifices than all the rest together, but is generally shown as a loving mother holding the blind Tartaros on her lap while her other children swarm around her vying for her attention. A snake or two peeps from her hair, and her image in the temple has a snake coiled around each ankle. (Our people are not in the least afraid of snakes, as I ought to have explained. They seem to think them almost supernatural, if not actually minor gods, and set out bowls of milk laced with palm wine for them. Even a mother-goddess with a roving collection of pet snakes seems entirely normal. I have not been told of a single case of snakebite while I have been here.)

* * *

In my last session I intended to write about the settling of Blue, but I see that I wandered from the topic to describe this town of Gaon.

I nearly wrote “this city,” but Gaon is nothing like the size of Viron or the foreign cities I saw from General Saba’s airship. Viron had more than half a million people. While I have no way of knowing exactly how many we have in Gaon, I doubt that there are a tenth that many.

The pirate boat came from no town, but from a little freshwater inlet where drooping limbs had concealed it from me until it put out. I shall never forget how it looked then, so black against the warm green of the trees and the cool blue and silver sea. Hull and masts and yards had all been painted black, and its sails were so dark a brown that they were nearly black, too. When I think back upon it here at my bedroom writing table, now that I am no longer afraid of it, I realize that its owners must have expected someone to hunt it, and wanted it to vanish from sight the moment the sun went down. It was half the sloops’ beam, or a trifle less, and must have been more than twice our length, with two masts carrying three-cornered sails so big that a good gust should have laid it over at once. There were eight or nine on board, I think, mostly women. One in the bow shouted for me to haul down. I got out the slug gun Marrow had given me instead, loaded it, and put extra cartridges in my pocket.

“
Haul down!
” she shouted again, and I asked what she wanted.

Her answer was a shot.

I put the slug gun to my shoulder. I have seldom fired one, but I tried very hard then to recall everything that I had ever heard about them-Sinew’s advice, and that of a hundred others-how to hold the slug gun and aim, and how to shoot well and swiftly. I still recall my trepidation as I pushed off the safety catch, laid the front sight on the pirate boat, and squeezed the trigger.

The report was an angry thunder, and the slug gun seemed to convulse in my hands, nearly knocking me off my feet; but my first shot was as ineffectual as theirs, as well as I could judge. Before I could fire a second time, Babbie was beside me gnashing his tusks.

The sound of the shot had awakened my intelligence as well as Babbie, however; I put down my slug gun and turned the sloop into the wind until we were sailing as near it as I dared, and trimmed sail while trying my best to ignore the shots aimed at me. When I looked back at the long black craft pursuing us, I saw that I had been right. She could not hold our course, which was nearly straight out to sea.

The sloop was pitching violently, and dipping her bowsprit into the waves that had been lifting her by the stern when the wind was quartering. I returned to the slug gun nonetheless, and after two or three more shots learned to fire at the highest point of each pitch, just before the stern dropped from under me. Before I had to reload, I had the satisfaction of seeing the woman who had been shooting at me tumble headlong into the sea.