The Farthest Shore (16 page)

Watching for it, Arren slept.

When he woke in the dawn,
Lookfar
had drifted farther from Obehol. A mist hid the shores and all but the peaks of the mountains, and thinned out into a haze above the violet waters of the south, dimming the last stars.

He looked at his companion. Sparrowhawk breathed unevenly, as when pain moves under the surface of sleep not quite breaking it. His face was lined and old in the cold, shadowless light. Arren looking at him saw a man with no power left in him, no wizardry, no strength, not even youth, nothing. He had not saved Sopli, nor
turned away the spear from himself. He had brought them into peril and had not saved them. Now Sopli was dead, and he dying, and Arren would die. Through this man’s fault; and in vain, for nothing.

So Arren looked at him with the clear eyes of despair and saw nothing.

No memory stirred in him of the fountain under the rowan tree, or of the white magelight on the slave-ship in the fog, or of the weary orchards of the House of the Dyers. Nor did any pride or stubbornness of will wake in him. He watched dawn come over the quiet sea, where low, great swells ran colored like pale amethyst, and it was all like a dream, pallid, with no grip or vigor of reality. And at the depths of the dream and of the sea, there was nothing—a gap, a void. There were no depths.

The boat moved forward irregularly and slowly, following the fitful humor of the wind. Behind, the peaks of Obehol shrank black against the rising sun, from which the wind came, bearing the boat away from land, away from the world, out onto the open sea.

CHAPTER 8

T
OWARD THE MIDDLE OF THAT
day Sparrowhawk stirred and asked for water. When he had drunk he asked, “Where are we heading?” For the sail was taut above him, and the boat dipped like a swallow on the long swells.

“West, or north by west.”

“I’m cold,” Sparrowhawk said. The sun blazed down, filling the boat with heat.

Arren said nothing.

“Try to hold west. Wellogy, west of Obehol. Land there. We need water.”

The boy looked forward, over the empty sea.

“What’s the matter, Arren?”

He said nothing.

Sparrowhawk tried to sit up, and failing that, to reach his staff that lay by the gear-box; but it was out of his reach, and when he tried to speak again the words halted on his dry lips. The blood broke out anew under the soaked and crusted bandage, making a
little spider’s thread of crimson on the dark skin of his chest. He drew breath sharply and closed his eyes.

Arren looked at him, but without feeling, and not for long. He went forward and resumed his crouching position in the prow, gazing forward. His mouth was very dry. The east wind that now blew steady over the open sea was as dry as a desert wind. There were only two or three pints of water left in their cask; these were, in Arren’s mind, for Sparrowhawk, not for himself; it never occurred to him to drink from that water. He had set out fishing lines, having learned since they left Lorbanery that raw fish fulfills both thirst and hunger; but there was never anything on the lines. It did not matter. The boat moved on over the desert of water. Over the boat, slowly, yet winning the race in the end by all the width of heaven, the sun moved also from east to west.

Once Arren thought he saw a blue height in the south that might have been land or cloud; the boat had been running somewhat north of west for hours. He did not try to tack and turn, but let her go on. The land might or might not be real; it did not matter. To him all the vast, fiery glory of wind and light and ocean was dim and false.

Darkness came, and light again, and dark, and light, like drumbeats on the tight-stretched canvas of the sky.

He trailed his hand in the water over the side of the boat. For an instant he saw that, vivid: his hand pale greenish beneath the living water. He bent and sucked the wet off his fingers. It was
bitter, burning his lips painfully, but he did it again. Then he was sick, and crouched down vomiting, but only a little bile burned his throat. There was no more water to give Sparrowhawk, and he was afraid to go near him. He lay down, shivering despite the heat. It was all silent, dry, and bright: terribly bright. He hid his eyes from the light.

T
HEY STOOD IN THE BOAT
, three of them, stalk-thin and angular, great-eyed, like strange dark herons or cranes. Their voices were thin, like birds’ voices. He did not understand them. One knelt above him with a dark bladder on his arm and tipped from it into Arren’s mouth: it was water. Arren drank avidly, choked, drank again till he had drained the container. Then he looked about and struggled to his feet, saying, “Where is, where is he?” For in
Lookfar
with him were only the three strange, slender men.

They looked at him uncomprehending.

“The other man,” he croaked, his raw throat and stiff-caked lips unfit to form the words, “my friend—”

One of them understood his distress if not his words, and putting a slight hand on his arm, pointed with the other. “There,” he said, reassuring.

Arren looked. And he saw, ahead of the boat and northward of her, some gathered in close and others strung far out across the sea, rafts—so many rafts that they lay like autumn leaves on a pool. Low to the water, each bore one or two cabins or huts near
the center, and several had masts stepped. Like leaves they floated, rising and falling very softly as the vast swells of the western ocean passed under them.

The lanes of water shone like silver between them, and over them towered great violet and golden rainclouds, darkening the west.

“There,” the man said, pointing to a great raft near
Lookfar
.

“Alive?”

They all looked at him, and at last one understood. “Alive. He is alive.” At this Arren began to weep, a dry sobbing, and one of the men took his wrist in a strong and narrow hand and drew him out of
Lookfar
and onto a raft to which the boat had been made fast. The raft was so great and buoyant that it did not dip even slightly to their weight. The man led Arren across it, while one of the others reached out with a heavy gaff tipped with a curving whaleshark’s tooth and hauled a nearby raft closer, till they could step the gap. There he led Arren to the shelter or cabin, which was open on one side and closed with woven screens on the other three. “Lie down,” he said, and beyond that Arren knew nothing at all.

H
E WAS LYING ON HIS
back, stretched out flat, gazing up at a rough green roof dappled with tiny dots of light. He thought he was in the apple orchards of Semermine, where the princes of Enlad pass their summers, in the hills behind Berila; he
thought he was lying in the thick grass at Semermine, looking up at the sunlight between apple boughs.

After a while he heard the slap and jostle of water in the hollow places underneath the raft, and the thin voices of the raft-people speaking a tongue that was the common Hardic of the Archipelago, but much changed in sounds and rhythms, so that it was hard to understand; and so he knew where he was—out beyond the Archipelago, beyond the Reach, beyond all isles, lost on the open sea. But still he was untroubled, lying as comfortably as if he lay in the grass in the orchards of his home.

He thought after a while that he ought to get up, and did so, finding his body very thin and burnt-looking and his legs shaky but serviceable. He pushed aside the woven hanging that made the walls of the shelter and stepped out into the afternoon. It had rained while he slept. The wood of the raft, great, smooth-shapen, squared logs, fit close and caulked, was dark with wet, and the hair of the thin, half-naked people was black and lank from the rain. But half the sky was clear where the sun stood in the west, and the clouds now rode to the far northeast in heaps of silver.

One of the men came up to Arren warily, stopping some feet from him. He was slight and short, no taller than a boy of twelve; his eyes were long, large, and dark. He carried a spear with a barbed ivory head.

Arren said to him, “I owe my life to you and your people.”

The man nodded.

“Will you take me to my companion?”

Turning away, the raft-man raised his voice in a high, piercing cry like the call of a sea bird. Then he squatted down on his heels as if to wait, and Arren did the same.

The rafts had masts, though the mast of the one they were on was not stepped. On these, sails could be run up, small compared to the breadth of the raft. The sails were of a brown material, not canvas or linen, but a fibrous stuff that looked not woven but beaten together, as felt is made. A raft some quarter mile away let the brown sail down from the crosstree by ropes and slowly worked its way, gaffing and poling off the other rafts between, till it came alongside the one Arren was on. When there was only three feet of water between, the man beside Arren got up and nonchalantly hopped across. Arren did the same and landed awkwardly on all fours; there was no spring left in his knees. He picked himself up and found the little man looking at him, not with amusement, but with approval: Arren’s composure had evidently won his respect.

This raft was larger and higher out of the water than any other, made of logs forty feet in length and four or five feet wide, blackened and smooth with use and weather. Strangely carven statues of wood stood about the several shelters or enclosures on it, and tall poles bearing tufts of sea birds’ feathers stood at the four corners. His guide took him to the smallest of the shelters, and there he saw Sparrowhawk lying asleep.

Arren sat down inside the shelter. His guide went back to
the other raft, and nobody bothered him. After an hour or so a woman brought him food: a kind of cold fish stew with bits of some transparent green stuff in it, salty but good; and a small cup of water, stale, tasting pitchy from the caulking of the barrel. He saw by the way she gave him the water that it was a treasure that she gave him, a thing to be honored. He drank it respectfully and asked for no more, though he could have drunk ten times the cupful.

Sparrowhawk’s shoulder had been skillfully bandaged; he slept deeply and easily. When he woke up, his eyes were clear. He looked at Arren and smiled the sweet, joyous smile that was always startling on his hard face. Arren felt suddenly like weeping again. He put his hand on Sparrowhawk’s hand and said nothing.

One of the raft-folk approached and squatted down in the shade of the large shelter nearby: a kind of temple, it appeared to be, with a square design of great complexity above the doorway, and the doorjambs made of logs carved in the shape of grey whales sounding. This man was short and thin like the others, boylike in frame, but his face was strong-featured and weathered by the years. He wore nothing but a loincloth, but dignity clothed him amply. “He must sleep,” he said, and Arren left Sparrowhawk and came to him.

“You are the chief of this folk,” Arren said, knowing a prince when he saw one.

“I am,” the man said, with a short nod. Arren stood before him,
erect and unmoving. Presently the man’s dark eyes met his briefly: “You are a chief also,” he observed.

“I am,” Arren answered. He would have liked very much to know how the raft-man knew it, but remained impassive. “But I serve my lord, there.”

The chief of the raft-folk said something Arren did not understand at all: certain words changed out of recognition or names he did not know; then he said, “Why came you into Balatran?”

“Seeking—”

But Arren did not know how much to say, nor indeed what to say. All that had happened, and the matter of their quest, seemed very long ago and was confused in his mind. At last he said, “We came to Obehol. They attacked us when we came to land. My lord was hurt.”

“And you?”

“I was not hurt,” Arren said, and the cold self-possession he had learnt in his courtly childhood served him well. “But there was—there was something like a madness. One who was with us drowned himself. There was a fear—” He stopped, and stood silent.

The chief watched him with black, opaque eyes. At last he said, “You come by chance here, then.”

“Yes. Are we still in the South Reach?”