On Blue's waters (43 page)

I tried to say that I did not think Babbie a person at all, that Babbie was not a human being like Krait and the three of us. I cannot be certain now precisely how I may have put it, although I am quite sure I put it badly. Whatever lies I may have told, and however I phrased them, I made Seawrack angry.

“That’s not what I said! That’s not what I said at all! You’re twisting all the words around. You do it once or twice every day, and I’d do anything, if only I could make you stop it.”

“I apologize,” I told her. “I didn’t intend to. If that isn’t what you meant, what did you mean?”

Sinew began, “Did she really-?”

She cut him off. “What I’m trying to say is, there are two people on this boat you don’t think are people at all, Babbie and Krait. You don’t think they are, but you’re wrong. You’re wrong about both of them.”

Sinew muttered, “He doesn’t think I’m anybody either.”

“Yes, he does!” In the chill starlight, I could see her turn to face him. “You’ve got it exacdy backwards. No wonder you’re his son.”

While Sinew was wrestiing with that, she added, “It’s the other part he doesn’t like, the thingness. You try to be less of a person and more of a thing because you think that’s what he wants, but it’s really the other way.” Her voice softened. “Horn?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Tell me. Tell us both. What does it take to make a person for you?”

I shrugged, although she may not have seen it. “I’m not sure; maybe I’ve never thought enough about it. Maytera Marble is a person, even if she’s a machine. An infant is a person, even if it can’t talk.”

I waited for Seawrack to reply, but she did not.

“A while ago you said that it was talking for you. The sea goddess spoke to you. So she was a person no matter how large she was or how she looked, and I have to agree. Then you said that Babbie is a person. But Babbie can’t talk. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Sinew asked, “Babbie’s the hus?”

“Yes. Mucor gave him to me. I don’t believe you’ve ever seen Mucor, but you must have heard your mother and me mention her many times.”

“She could just sort of be there. Look out of mirrors and things.”

“That’s correct.”

Seawrack said, “She sounds like me. Is she very much like me, Horn?”

“No.”

Sinew asked, “Can she do that stuff?”

I was not quite certain that he was addressing me, but I said, “Do you mean Seawrack? I’m no expert on what Seawrack can do. If she says she can, she can.”

“I can’t,” Seawrack told me, “but Mucor reminds me of me, just the same.”

“In one way, I agree. Both of you have been very good friends to me.”

Again almost whispering, Sinew said, “I’ve been hearing about Mucor ever since I was a sprat, only I thought she was just a story. You know? Way out here, she’s real. When I was in town,” (he meant New Viron) “somebody said you’d been to see the witch. That was her, wasn’t it? You went to see her like you’d go to see Tamarind.”

“Yes.”

“Babbie can talk,” Seawrack insisted. “He talks to me and to you all the time, it’s just that you hardly ever pay attention.”

Babbie stood and shook himself, then lay down again with his broad, bristle-covered back against my legs and his head in my lap. I said, “Can you really speak, Babbie?” and felt his head move in reply.

“You think Krait is a-a monster, like an inhumi. I don’t like him either, he’s not nice, but he’s a person.”

Sinew asked her, “Is Krait the boy that looks like me?”

“Yes, our son.”

I should have made some attempt to straighten that out, but I did not. The hisses and whisperings of water and wind closed around us once more while I sat silent and tense, waiting for Sinew to fly into one of his rages. The back of my neck prickled, and the left side of my face cringed under the regard of his unseen eyes.

“Father?”

“Yes. What is it?”

“About Mucor. Is she listening to us now?”

“I have no way of knowing. I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it.”

“In your book-”

Confident that he had never read it, I remained silent; and eventually he began to explain what we had been talking about to Seawrack. “In the book, every so often Patera Silk would wonder if Mucor was around, so he’d call her. He’d say her name, and if she was there she’d answer some way. Ask him to do it now.”

I was stroking Babbie’s head; Seawrack’s hand found mine there, and its lightest touch thrilled me. “Will you Horn? Do you want to?”

“No,” I said. “If Sinew wants Mucor called, let him call for her himself.”

Sinew was silent.

Seawrack told me, “Babbie’s a person. Whether you know it or not, he is. So am I.”

“I never doubted it.”

“When you go away and leave us, Babbie will go into the trees looking for things to eat.” Her fingers left mine as she pointed. “He talks now, and he picks up things to look at. You said ‘hind legs,’ and he does. He stands up when you tell him to, like to row.”

I nodded. He had been invaluable at the sweeps.

“And he does anyway sometimes when he thinks we’re not paying attention, so he can use his hands. When he goes into the trees, it will be a real person going in there. But he won’t be a real person in there for very long.”

I muttered, “If you and Sinew will wait for me in Wichote as I suggested, he could stay there with you. That would solve everything.”

“With the sea singing down at the end of the water? I never have told you how it was for me when you died.”

I heard Sinew’s indrawn breath.

“I thought he was dead,” she told him. “I was absolutely sure he was, so sure that I didn’t dare to go near his body. I watched for a long, long time, and he lay so still and never moved once. When it got dark I went down to the beach and took off my clothes and threw them into the water, and talked to the little waves. And they came up the beach, up and up, washing my feet and legs. My knees. Pretty soon they were laughing over my head, and I couldn’t drown.”

Sinew choked and coughed.

“Do you like that meat?”

“It’s good,” he assured her politely, “but it takes a lot of chewing.”

“Just bite it off and swallow. That’s the best way.”

None of us spoke much after that, or if we did, I have forgotten what was said.

When we had gone a little farther up the river and anchored in midstream for the night, Sinew called softly, “Mucor? Mucor?” I had never realized until then how much his voice resembled Krait’s. (Perhaps I should have written, how very near Krait’s it came in certain moods.)

Seawrack touched my knee and whispered, “He sounds just like you.”

PAJAROCU!

I
have been away from this untidy stack of manuscript a long while, and tonight I would like to make up for all of my neglect before I pack it away. In another week the rains should end, and they may end even sooner; I have been questioning the farmers in court, and all say they recall years in which the rainy season ended a week early. It is not completely inconceivable that it will end tonight, although the rain beats against my shutters at this moment with such violence that tiny droplets find their way through, a coarse mist that dribbles from the windowsill and wets the carpet. I have had to move my writing table to escape it.

I must be brief. There really is very little time left for all this.

When the rains end, Hari Mau will fall upon the enemy, a general advance by all our troops after a flanking action by the mercenaries. If he wins, we will win the war-and in fact the war will be effectively over. Hari Mau will be a hero, and I have seen enough of the whorl to know that everyone in Gaon will demand he rule. To give him his due, I do not think that he would kill me. I know him well; and there is nothing sneaking or ungrateful, and certainly nothing murderous, in his character. But I will be murdered by his friends, and everyone will be his friend.

(I remember how it was in Viron when we won.)

His friends will expect him to pardon them, and I would guess that they will not be disappointed. If we win, I will die.

If we lose, I will die equally; and in all probability by torture. In Han people die like that often. Why should the Man show me more mercy than he shows his own citizens? Thus I am doomed whether Hari Mau succeeds or fails. Nor is that all.

Our inhumi do as I ask because I have continued to free others, eighteen so far. When the war ends, I will have no use for them, and they will have no reason to wish me alive. With me dead, their precious secret will be safe. (Krait, who loved me and wanted so desperately for me to love him, can never have imagined that he was dooming me.) I have promised over and over to give them the locations of the remaining interments, which are concealed now by booths and the like. When I have done so, I will be as good as dead.

I have sent Evensong to buy a boat for me, telling her that it will be used by a spy whose identity I cannot reveal. When she has come back and the palace is asleep, I will go. I am still too ill to ride far, I fear; but I will be able to manage a small boat, or hope I will.

I will have to. How strange it will seem to be alone on a boat again. As though Green and the whole
Whorl
had never happened. Back on board a boat, and sailing down Nadi to the sea!

There is not time enough for me to re-read the earlier pages properly, but I believe I promised myself (and you, Nettle darling, if the Outsider someday grants my prayer) that I would not end this account before Sinew, Krait, and I went aboard the lander. That I would not end it, in fact, until we flew away from Pajarocu. I may not have time, however, if I continue to trace our way up the rivers.

No, I most certainly will not. Evensong may return from her errand at any minute. She can tell me where it is docked, and I will give her an hour to get to sleep. An hour at most, then I will leave Gaon forever.

So the lander first, and I will work my way backward from that as well as I can.

Krait, Sinew, and I had places on it. So did Seawrack, but Sinew and I had seen to it that she was not on board. We knew by then and had hidden weapons, he his hunting knife and I the two big, broad-bladed knives I had traded two silver pins for there in Pajarocu.

I should say, perhaps, that I had not bought them because I expected a fight on the lander at that time. (I assumed then that we would not board it.) I had gotten them, one for myself and one for Sinew, I thought, because I had resolved to get a knife of that type when I had found the floating tree and had been forced to chop it up with Sinew’s hunting knife. At that time I had not seen the lander, and had only just recovered from the shock of my first sight of Pajarocu, which I had, in my pitiful ignorance, imagined would be a town like New Viron or Three Rivers. They had no guards, and plain, somewhat roughly fitted handles of dark brown wood; their blades were broad, but thin enough to be flexible. I had tied them together, one hanging down my chest and the other down my back, and the rough leather overtunic that He-pens-sheep had made for me hid them very well.

They were taken from me, and I got instead the ancient black-bladed sword with which I cleared the sewer of corpses-but all that is outside the scope of this account, unless I am permitted to continue it on my own paper, in my own mill, on Lizard.

May the Outsider grant it!

Tonight that seems too much to ask even of a god.

How the rain thunders against the roof and walls! Who would have believed that there could be so much water in the whorl?

Sinew had tied his hunting knife to his thigh under his trousers. To tell the truth, I believed that he had my old needier as well. I may as well admit that, which is the truth. I believed he had lied to me about it, as he had lied to me so often about so many other things; but the traveler who had taken our old boat and abandoned him far up the rivers had taken my needier as well. Neither Sinew nor I ever set eyes on him again, but we soon united in wishing that he had boarded the lander with us, and that he had retained his weapon-my needier-as we had urged all the men boarding the lander to do. He was a bad man without a doubt, an opportunistic adventurer more than ready to exploit those he called friends, and to leave them in the lurch the moment it appeared to his advantage; but most of the men on the lander were as bad or worse, and more than a few were much worse.

I must make that clear. Were the inhumi who controlled it monsters? Yes. But so were we.

The rain has stopped. After so many days of rain it seems uncanny, although it does not actually rain without cease during the rainy season. If the season has not ended, it will rain again in an hour or two; if it has, this may be the last rain we will see for months. I have thrown open all the windows, determined to enjoy the respite.

Oreb is back! I got up just now to have another look at the sky, and he landed on my shoulder, scaring me silly. “Bird back!” he said, as if he had been gone for an hour. “Bird back! Good Silk!” and “Home good!”

And, oh, but it
is
good. It is so very good to see him again, and to know that when I go I will not go alone.

After writing that last I got out my old black robe, the robe that Olivine stole for me and that His Cognizance Patera Incus persuaded me to wear when I sacrificed in the Grand Manteion. Will I be wearing it still when I arrive at New Viron to report my failure? It seems likely I will. I have my jeweled vest under it, and am going to keep my rings. They owe me those, at least.

Good luck, Hari Mau!

Good luck, all you good folk of Gaon! You are better than most peoples I have met, hardworking, cheerful, and brave. May Quadrifons of the Crossroads, and all other gods both new and old, smile on you. No doubt they do.

Having written that, I cannot help adding that the very same things might be said with equal justice about the people of Han. They are argumentative and love to shout their displeasure at others (I have seen something of it in Evensong) but that does not mean they are vindictive, and in fact they are the exact reverse, quick to laugh and forgive everything and be friends again. They deserve a far better government than the Man’s.