On Blue's waters (21 page)

The storm had come out of the northeast, as well as I could judge. It left us out of sight of land, and some considerable distance south of the place at which it had found us, as well as I could judge from the stars on the following night. We had no way of knowing how far west it had driven us, but sailed west-northwest hoping each day to sight land.

Water was a constant concern, although Seawrack required very little. We caught such rain as the good gods provided, taking down the mainsail and rigging it in such a way as to catch a good deal and funnel it (once the sail had been wet enough to clean it of salt) into our bottles. In fair weather, when there was little wind or none, all three of us swam together beside the sloop. I found, not at all to my surprise, that Babbie was a better swimmer than I; but found too, very much to my surprise, that Seawrack was a far better swimmer than Babbie. She could remain under the water so long that it terrified me, although when she realized that I was both concerned and astonished, she pretended she could not. One night when I kissed her, my lips discovered her gill slits, three, closely spaced and nearer the nape of her neck than I would have imagined. I asked her no questions about them, then or later.

At first she said nothing about the goddess she called the Mother. After nearly a week had passed, I happened to mention Chenille, saying that although she had known nothing of boats, she had understood Dace’s perfectly when Scylla possessed her. Seawrack seized upon the concept of divine possession at once and asked many questions about it, only a few of which I could answer. At length I said that she, whose mother was a goddess, should be instructing me.

“She never said she was,” Seawrack told me with perfect seriousness.

“Still, you must have known it.”

Seawrack shook her lovely head. “She was my mother.”

At that point I very nearly asked her whether her mother had not demanded prayers and sacrifices. “We used to give our gods gifts, when I lived inside the
Whorl
,” I said instead, “but that was not because they required such things of us. They were far richer than we were, but they had given us so much that we felt we ought to give them whatever we could in return.”

“Oh, yes.” Seawrack smiled. “I used to bring Mother all sorts of things. Shells, you know. Lots of shells and pretty stones, and sometimes colored sand. Then she would say that my face was the best gift.”

“She loved you.” At that moment, as at so many others, I felt I knew a great deal about love; my heart was melting within me.

Seawrack agreed. “She used to look like a woman for me and hold me in her arms, and I used to think the woman was the real her and make her bring the woman back. She looked like a woman for you too. Remember?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll never forget that.”

“When I was older, she would just wrap herself around me, and that was nice, like when you hold me. But not the same. What do they ask gods for, in the Whorl?”

“Oh, food and peace. Sometimes for a son or daughter.”

“For gold? She said you liked it.”

“We do,” I admitted. “Every human being wants gold-every human being except you. Because they do, gold is a good friend to those who have it. Often it brings them good things without going away itself.”

“Has my gold brought you anything?”

I smiled. “Not yet.”

“It’s old. You say that old things are always tired.”

“Old people.” I had been trying to explain that she was much younger than I, and what that would mean to both of us when we found land, and people besides ourselves. “Not old gold. Gold never gets old in that way.”

“Mine did. It wasn’t bright anymore, and the little worms were building houses on it. Mother had to clean it, pulling it through the sand. I helped.”

“She must have had them a long time. Possibly for as long as you lived with her.” Privately I thought that it must have been a good deal longer than that.

“Can I see it again?”

I got the box out for her, and told her she could wear her gold if she wished, that it was hers, not mine.

She selected a simple bracelet, narrow and not at all heavy, and held it up so that it coruscated in the sunshine. “This is pretty. Do you know who made it?”

“I’ve been wondering about that,” I said, and wondered as I spoke whether she would tell me. “It could have been brought from the Long Sun Whorl on a lander; but I would guess that it is the work of the Vanished People, the people who used to live here on Blue long before we humans came.”

“You’re afraid of them.”

It had been said with such certainty that I knew it would be futile to argue. “Yes. I suppose I am.”

“All of you, I mean. All of us.” She turned the bracelet to and fro, admiring it, then held it in her teeth to slip over her wrist.

“The Long Sun Whorl was our whorl, our place,” I told her. “It was made especially for us, and we were put into it by Pas. This was their whorl. Perhaps it was made for them, but we don’t even know that. They’re bound to resent us, if any of them are still alive; and so are their gods. Their gods must still exist, since gods do not die.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Where I used to live, the greatest of all goddesses tried to kill Pas. Wise people who knew about it thought that she had, although most of us didn’t even know she’d tried. Then Pas came back. He had planted himself, in a way, and grew again. Do you know about seeds, Seawrack?”

“Planting corn. You told me.”

“He re-grew himself from seed, so to speak. That’s what a pure strain of corn does. It produces seed before it dies, and when that seed sprouts, the strain is back for another year, just as it was before.”

“Do you think the Vanished People might have done that?” From her tone, it was a new idea to her.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I have no way of knowing what they may or may not have done.”

“You told me the seed waited for water.”

“Yes, for rain, and warmer weather.”

Babbie ambled over to see what Seawrack and I had in the box, snuffled its rings and chains and snorted in disgust, and returned to his place beside the butt of the bowsprit. I, too, looked away, if only mentally. My eyes saw bracelets and anklets of silver and gold, but I was thinking about Seawrack’s implied question. Assuming that the Vanished People were capable of coming back in some fashion, as Pas had, what might constitute warmth and rain for them?

Would we know, if they returned? Would I? At that time I did not even know what they had looked like, and so far as I knew, no one did. Doubtless they had been capable of making pictures of themselves, since they had certainly been capable of constructing the great building whose ruins we had discovered when we arrived; but any such pictures-if they had ever existed-had been erased by time, on Lizard and in the region around Viron at least. Seawrack, who appeared so fully human, had gills beneath the golden hair that hung below her waist. Were those gills the gift of the goddess, or the badge of the original owners of this whorl we call ours? At that time, I had no way of knowing.

“I think I see another boat.” She rose effortlessly, pointing at a distant sail.

“Then we’d better get these out of sight.” I began to shut the lid.

“Wait.” As swiftly as a bird, her hand dipped into the box. “Look at this, Horn.” Between thumb and forefinger she held a slender silver ring, newly made in New Viron. “I like it. It’s small and light. All that gold made it hard to swim, but this won’t. Will you give it to me?”

“Certainly,” I said. “It’s a great pleasure.” I took it from her and slipped it on her finger.

* * *

In the light airs that were all we had that day, the other boat took hours to reach us. I had ample time to break out my slug gun and load it, and to put a few more cartridges in my pockets.

“Are you going to fight with that?” I had told her about the pirates.

“If I must. I hope I won’t. Sailors are usually friendly. We trade information, and sometimes supplies. I may be able to get us more water.” I hesitated. “If they’re not friendly, I want you to dive into the sea at once. Don’t worry about me, just swim away to-to someplace deep where they won’t be able to find you.”

She promised solemnly that she would, and I knew that she would not.

It was a much larger boat than mine, two-masted and blunt-bowed, with a crew of five. The owner (a stocky, middle-aged man who spoke in a way that recalled Wijzer) hailed us, asking where we were bound.

“Pajarocu!” I told him.

“Riding light you are,” he said, clearly assuming that we were traders too.

Soon his big boat lay beside our small one. Lines from bow and stern united the two, we introduced ourselves, and he invited us aboard. “In these waters not so many boats I see.” He chuckled. “But farther than this I would sail a woman so pretty to see. Whole towns even, not one woman like your wife they got.” One of his crew set up a folding table for us, with four stools.

I asked how far we were from the western continent.

“So many leagues you want? That I cannot tell. On which way bound you are, too, it depends. North by northwest for Pajarocu you must sail.”

“Have you been there?”

He shook his head. “Not, I think. To a place they said, yes, I have been. But to Pajarocu?” He shrugged.

I explained about the letter, and brought my copy from the sloop to show him.

“One it says.” He tapped the paper. “Your wife they let you bring?”

Drawing upon Marrow’s argument, I said, “One, if all the towns they have invited send somebody, and if all the people who are sent arrive in time. We don’t believe either one is likely, and neither does anybody else in New Viron. If there are empty places, and we think there will be, Seawrack can come with me. If there aren’t, she can wait in Pajarocu and take care of our boat.” I tried to sound confident.

The sailor who had set up our table brought a bottle and four small drinking glasses, and sat down with us.

“My son,” Strik announced proudly. “Number two on my boat he is.”

Everyone smiled and shook hands.

“Captain Horn?” the owner’s son asked. “From the town of New Viron you hail?”

I nodded.

So did Strik, who said, “To that not yet we come, Captain Horn. Looking for you somebody is?”

My face must have revealed my surprise.

“Just one fellow it is. Toter’s age he is.” (Toter was his son.)

“Us about Captain Horn he asked. Alone in a little boat he sails.” The corners of Toter’s mouth turned down, and his hands indicated the way in which the little boat was tossed about by the waves.

“When asked he did, Captain Horn we don’t know.” Strik pulled the cork with his teeth and poured out a little water-white liquor for each of us. “This to him we say, and in his little boat off he goes.”

“You’re from the mainland yourselves? The eastern one, I mean. From Main?” I was trying desperately to recall the name of the town from which Wijzer had hailed.

“Ya, from Dorp we come. New Viron we know. A good port it is. Word to you from somebody back there he brings, you think?”

I did not know, and told him so. If I had been compelled to guess, I would have said that Marrow had probably sent someone with a message.

Seawrack asked how long we would have to sail to find drinking water.

“Depends, it does, Merfrow Seawrack. Such weather it is.” Strik spat over the side. “Five days it could be. Ten, also, it could be.”

“It isn’t bad for me.” She gave me a defiant stare. “He makes me drink more than I want to, but the Babbie is always thirsty.”

I explained that Babbie was our hus.

“You suffer too.” She sniffed and tasted Strik’s liquor and put it down. “You pour it into your glass, then back into the bottle when you think I’m not looking.”

I declared that I saw no point in drinking precious water that I did not want.

“A little water I can let you have,” Strik told us, and we both thanked him.

Toter told us, “If for two or three days you and your wife due west will sail, a big island where nobody lives you will find. Good water it has. There last we watered. Not so big as Main it is, but mountains it has. A lookout you should keep, but hard to miss it is.”

“We’ll go there,” Seawrack declared to me, and her tone decided the matter.

* * *

Two days have passed, and now I have re-read this whole section beginning with my encounter with the monstrous flatfish with disgust and incredulity. Nothing that I wanted to say in it was actually said. Seawrack’s beauty and the golden days we spent aboard the sloop before Krait came, the water whorl that with her help I glimpsed, and a thousand things that I wished with all my heart to set down here, remain locked in memory.

No doubt such memories cannot really be expressed, and certainly they cannot be expressed by me. I have found that out.

Let me say this. Once when I was swimming underwater in imitation of her, I saw her swimming toward me, and she was swift and graceful beyond all telling. There are no words for that, as there are none for her beauty. She caught my hand, and we broke the surface, up from the divine radiance of the sea into the blinding glare of the Short Sun, and the droplets on her eyelashes were diamonds.

You that read of all this in a year that I will never see will think me wretched, perhaps-certainly I was wretched enough fighting the inhumi and their slaves on Green, fighting the settlers, and before the end even fighting my own son.

Or possibly you may envy me this big white house that we in Gaon are pleased to call a palace, my gems and gold and racks of arms, and my dozen-odd wives.

But know this: The best and happiest of my hours you know nothing about. I have seen days like gold.

Seawrack sings in my ears still, as she used to sing to me alone in the evenings on our sloop. Sometimes-often-I imagine that I am actually hearing her, her song and the lapping of the little waves. I would think that a memory so often repeated would lose its poignancy, but it is sharper at each return. When I first came here, I used to fall asleep listening to her; now her song keeps me from sleeping, calling to me.

Calling.