On Blue's waters (29 page)

Their gradual advance must have taken the better part of another hour. Because I was eager to catch a glimpse of the great beasts about which I had heard so much on the ride out, I advanced, too, pushing my way through the high, rough grass, although not nearly as far as the decoy and the stalkers, and standing on tiptoe from time to time in order to see better over it. The suspense was almost unbearable.

Quite suddenly, both stalkers rose and fired over the back of the wickerwork figure. Up until that time, I had been unable to see the wallowers, but as soon as the crash of the slug guns sounded, a dense patch of saplings and brush seemed almost to explode as twenty or more enormous dark-gray beasts with towering horns dashed from it.

And vanished. It was one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen. At one moment these huge animals, twice the size of an ordinary horse and six times its weight, were charging madly in every direction. At the next they were gone. Several hunters were firing some distance from me, but I saw nothing to shoot at.

I do not remember seeing the young bull rise from the scythe grass, although I suppose I must have-only slamming my slug gun to my shoulder and pulling the trigger, then flying through the air without fear and without pain, and then one of the other hunters (it was Ram, whose name, I fear, makes him sound as though he comes from my own Viron) helping me up. In retrospect it was rather like my hunt in the Land of Fires, but of course I did not think of that until tonight.

Wishing very much that Babbie were with us, I told Ram that we had to track the wallower that had charged me, that I had fired at him from very close range and felt certain I had wounded him. He laughed and pointed, and in a few seconds half a dozen men were gathered around the dead wallower, which had not run ten strides before collapsing. Since two or three hunters often empty their guns to bring one of these animals down, it was an extraordinary shot. As for me, I had torn trousers and have some big bruises here and there, but I am well otherwise.

These hunts are only occasionally successful, and a single kill is considered an achievement. We had two, one killed by the stalkers (who are generally the most experienced hunters and the best shots) and this one by me, so we returned to town as heroes. I will have to refrain from all hunting in the future if I want to keep the reputation I have won.

At any rate, we are having a great feast tonight, with everyone who took part sharing in the meat. I excused myself as soon as the serious drinking began, which is how I have this opportunity to write. The hide, the Y-shaped horn, the bones, and especially the big canine teeth, all of which are valuable, will be sold. I will receive the money from my animal, and since I do not need it I hope to use some of it to benefit the poor.

And some, dear Nettle, I hope to use to rejoin you. They have almost ceased to watch me, and I am careful to do nothing to arouse their suspicions.

No doubt I have written too much about our hunt, which can be of little interest to you; but I wanted to set down this account while the facts were still fresh in my mind. I had another purpose, too, which I hope to make clear if I have time for a good session tomorrow.

* * *

I meant to tell you how Krait deceived Seawrack tonight. I will, but there is something else I ought to describe first, although it will be hard to represent exactly, and I may fail to make it clear. Put simply, it is that I saw the sea (and afterward the land as well) from that time forward as I do today. If I say that I believe I am seeing these things, and houses, too, and occasionally faces, as a good painter must, will you understand me?

Probably not, because I am not sure I understand it myself. You told me about the beautiful pictures upstairs in the cenoby, and I put them in our book because Maytera Marble had posed for Molpe. Describe that picture again to yourself, and imagine me looking at the sea as the sea would have appeared in it.

As for the rest of you who may read this, whether you are our sons or strangers or both, there is a sharpness of detail born of a consciousness of detail. When we untied the sloop, I saw the unnatural calm of the little bay beneath the fog that veiled it, and when I had steered us out (guided by Krait, who stood upon the mainsail gaff to advise me), every coiling, foaming wave that slapped our hull was as clearly drawn as any of my brothers.

I heard Seawrack long before I saw her. She was singing just as she is singing now, singing as the Mother had, her sweet, clear voice at one with the fog and the waters, so that I knew the sea had been incomplete without her song, that it was fully created, a finished object, only while she sang. Fog muffles sound, so we must have been near her then; I would have taken the sloop nearer still to hear her, although Krait warned me against it; but he slid down the forestay and loosed the jib, so that we swung into the wind with the main flapping like a flag. He told me to call to Seawrack, but I could not. How I wish you could have heard her, Nettle! You have never heard such singing.

We quarreled at that point, the inhumu and I. We were to quarrel almost daily afterward, but that was the first and one of the worst. I was angry at him for untying the jib, and he was angry at me for steering too near the rocks. The upshot of our quarrel was that the sloop was free to sail herself, and the course she chose took her a good league into open water. By the time we had made peace, Krait could no longer see the island or anything else, or so he said.

“I’ll have to fly,” he told me, “and I may have to fly high. Then I’ll come down again and give you an approximate direction.”

I asked whether he could find the sloop again in the fog, and suggested that I might build a fire in the sandbox to guide him, although the truth was that I was hoping to crowd on sail and evade him. He laughed and asked me to turn my back; I did, and when I turned around again he was gone. „»

Babbie snorted with relief, and I felt as he did. Much more, I felt-I knew-the sea and the cold gray sea-fog that wrapped us both. I have said that I saw it as a painter would, and I may even have said that I saw it as a picture; but it was a picture that surrounded and saturated me, and mixed with my spirit. The sea whose spray wet my beard, and the fog I inhaled at every breath, were no longer things apart from myself. If they were pictured, I was pictured, too; and it was the same picture. We lived in and through each other then, in a picture without a frame.

Something had happened to change my perception, and that change remains in force to this moment. How I wish I could make you see our hunt for the wild cattle as I did! The milling herd with rolling eyes, and we riders with our embroidered flags! You will want me to explain, but I have no explanation, although at that time and for a long time after it I felt that it was the inhumu’s presence. I taxed him with it when he returned to the sloop, landing softly behind me and announcing his arrival with a boyish laugh. He denied it, and we quarreled again, although not as bitterly as before. Even then, I knew that his denials were without value.

Since Krait is not present to speak for himself, let me speak for him. I will try to do it with more logic than either of us displayed when I argued with him on the sloop.

First, he did not have that effect on others, as well as I could judge.

Second, it did not benefit him, and in fact he lost by it.

Third, it persisted even in his absence, as I have tried to show.

And fourth and last, I had experienced nothing of the sort when we were with Quetzal in the tunnels.

Yet he was capable of affecting our perception of him, for Seawrack and others saw him as a human being, as the boy he claimed to be, whereas I would sooner have called poor Babbie a child.

Seawrack, as I should explain, swam out to the sloop once she understood that I was on it and that I still wanted her. The inhumu had made me promise I would call to her as loudly as I could the moment I heard her voice; but I did not call then or for some minutes afterward, only telling him to be quiet when he spoke and once striking him with Marrow’s stick.

A time came when she sang no longer, and I recalled my promise and pleaded with her; but by then she was already in the water and swimming toward us. This happened hours after we had sailed out to sea with no one at the helm, because we had first found the mainland (which Krait had mistaken for the island) and only after we had discovered our mistake returned to the island-and we had to sail some distance around it to reach Seawrack again, I still blinded by the fog and in terror of submerged rocks, which the inhumu could no more have seen than I could.

By the time we had relocated her it was probably about mid-afternoon, and the fog had lifted somewhat. It parted, and I glimpsed her sitting upon a rock thrust up from the sea like the horn of some drowned monster. She was naked (more so than when she had first come on board, since she no longer had her gold) and her legs, which were very long, as I may have said, seemed almost to coil about her.

“She is going back to what she was,” the inhumu told me when I would listen to him again. “While she was with you, she was becoming one of you. That was why the Mother gave her to you, I think.” While we sailed out of the bay, I had told him how Seawrack came to be with me.

I echoed him. “You think?”

“Yes, I do, which is more than I can say for you. Do you imagine that now that she’s coming back to you she’ll sing for you the way she did out there?”

I had not considered that, and it must have showed in my stricken expression.

“You’re right. She probably won’t sing a note, even if you beg.”

Having seen her small, white hand upon the gunwale, I put a finger to my lips-at which he smiled.

We helped her aboard and she stared at the inhumu (whose name I had never learned, thinking of him up until then only as “the inhumu”). I told her (as he and I had agreed I should) that he was a boy who had been left behind on the island by some boat’s crew, and that he had helped me out of the pit. It was difficult for me to lie like that, because as I spoke I could see very plainly that he was not a boy or a human being of any kind. Looking at her instead should have helped but did not, only making me that much more conscious of the purity and innocence of her face.

“Don’t you want to see me?” she asked.

I told her that I could not look into her eyes without falling in love with her. Forgive me, Nettle!

The inhumu offered her his hand, and I felt certain she would feel his claws, but they had vanished. “I’m Krait,” he said. It was the first time I heard the name.

She had turned from him before he had finished speaking, stroking my cheek with her fingers. “You were dead.”

I shook my head.

“Yes, you were. I saw you down there.” She trembled ever so slightly. “Dead things are food.”

“Sometimes,” Krait amended.

She ignored him. “Where are my clothes?”

They were not on the sloop, and I had no more tunics to spare, but we contrived a sailcloth skirt for her, as I had before, while she stared vacantly out at the broken fog and the tossing water. “You must hold on to her now if you want to keep her,” Krait told me.

“Can you sail?”

“No. But you must do what I tell you, or she’ll be over the side in half an hour.” He pointed to the little space under the foredeck where she and I had slept. “Lie with her. Talk to her, embrace her, and try to get her to sing for you. I won’t watch, I promise.”

I trimmed the sails and tied the tiller, warning him that if he did not want to see us drowned he would have to call me at any change in wind or weather, and persuaded Seawrack to rest with me for an hour or so.

She agreed, I believe, mostly so that we could talk in private. “I don’t like that boy,” she told me.

“He got me out of the pit after you and Babbie had abandoned me.” Now that she was back with me and safe, I had discovered that I was angry with her.

“You were dead,” she said again. “I saw you. Dead people are to eat.”

Anxious to change the subject, I asked her to sing, as Krait had suggested.

“The boy would come in then. I don’t want him in here with us.”

“Neither do I. Sing only to me, very softly, but not like you used to when we were alone. The way you sang out there.”

“He would still hear me.” She shuddered. “His feet are twisted.”

“You think he’s a boy?” (I was incredulous, feeling very much as I did a few days ago when I realized that the wallowers had in fact been deceived by the wicker figure.)

She giggled. “I don’t think he’s a boy that way. He’s old enough. You couldn’t keep him out.”

“He would come to you in here, if you sang?”

“Oh, yes!” The only hand that she possessed slipped into mine.

Aching for her, I asked, “What would I do, Seawrack? I’m in here with you already.”

“Mother told me to stay with you.”

I nodded. I could hear Babbie rattling up and down on the foredeck above our heads like a whole squad of troopers, half mad with nervousness and suppressed aggression; and now I wonder whether he saw Krait as an inhumu or a boy, and whether he made any distinction between the two. “Out there,” I told Seawrack, “you thought I no longer liked to look at you. The truth is that I don’t like to look at him.”

“At the boy?”

“At Krait,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll stare, and that wouldn’t be polite.”

“Stare at his feet?”

“That’s right. That must be why he walks so badly. But what does he look like, the rest of him?”

“You know.”

“Men and women often see the same people very differently,” I explained, thinking that it had never been truer than it was for the two of us that afternoon. “I’d like to know how he seems to you.”

“You’re jealous!” She laughed, delighted.

At that time I still hoped that Seawrack would see Krait for what he was without prompting from me. As seriously as I could, I said, “You don’t belong to me, and I belong to Nettle, my wife. If you want to give yourself to another man, I may advise against it. I will, if I don’t think he’s suitable for you. But don’t ever give yourself to that boy-to Krait, as he’s calling himself.”