by Lloyd Kropp
The large flat-bottomed barge was empty now except for the crippled dwarf and his drum, who had fallen asleep together—the drum silent, the old man wheezing and sighing in a dream of peace.
When they got back to The Mary Strattford, Pao was standing at the stern of the ship, waving at them.
“Sutherland! Did you see The Outlanders? Did you see what they were doing?” “Raven and I watched for a while,” he said. “It’s terrible all the things they do,” said Pao. She threw her arms around him, ignoring Raven. “Come inside. I saved you something to eat.”
Peter looked back at Raven, who had already turned away and was walking across a narrow plank to the next boat. “But I sort of enjoy watching The Outlanders,” he said, gently pulling away from her as Raven disappeared.
“It was like The Black Mass,” she said very seriously. “Tabor told me once about The Black Mass.”
“A celebration of evil? I don’t think so. I can’t take them that seriously. It’s true, they’re very grotesque and very cruel, even to each other. But in a strange way, I almost like them.”
“How can you? she demanded. “They’re like—they’re like hatchetmen!”
Peter smiled at Pao’s newly acquired allusion. “Perhaps,” he said.
Pao looked at him and then at the boat where Raven had gone. “I should have said something to Raven,” she said. “Yes. That would have been nice.”
“And—and how can I say it? I like to watch The Outlanders too, but it hurts me to think that I do.” She seemed to look far beyond him, and then turned her head slowly and rested it against his chest and put her arms around him again.
“Why should I feel that way?” she asked. “Why should the truth ever be painful?”
“Why? My God, the world is full of facts that are painful. But you wouldn’t know about that. Your world is so perfect, so spontaneous and complementary to itself. You don’t know anything about pain.”
“You have taught me much about pain already,” she said. “Perhaps even now there are things—things I can see in the future that I cannot believe because they are too painful. But why should that be? I used to think that the whole world was an extension of my desire and that I was an extension of the world’s desire and that all things were a part of one thing.”
“Perhaps that’s true.”
“But there are The Outlanders. And there are other things that may happen that I—I do not wish to happen.”
“What are you afraid of?” said Peter.
“Never mind. I only meant that the shadowgames, the songs and the dances, the torchlight ceremonies, The Long Journey of The Elders, all the things we love here on The Drift make a circle that is perhaps not as large as—that is, a circle that does not admit to certain things that are—really unpleasant.” Pao closed her eyes and turned her head slowly. She seemed very unhappy.
“In The Middle Ages,” he said, “people thought of life as something that moved on a wheel passing between extremes of fortune and misfortune. Like the passing of the seasons.”
“Yes, but there are no seasons on The Drift,” she said. “We do not think of seasons here.”
She trembled and pressed herself against him and kissed him on the mouth. “Let’s go to your boat,” she said.
“Now? At this time in the afternoon? We’ll miss dinner.” But already he could feel himself assenting to the touch of her hands, to the feel of her breasts against him. She was so young, he thought. So lovely and so perfect.
“Seasons and times of day,” she said, trying to smile. “People from land are so concerned with things at the proper time. But love has an appetite that knows no season or time of day. Isn’t that true, Sutherland? Isn’t that true even on land?”
He gathered her black hair in his hands and pulled so that her head fell backward, and then he kissed her on her throat and on her ear and cheek, and finally on her mouth.
“I love you,” he said.
Seventeen
ECHOES AND LOOMINGS
The sun was near its zenith when he woke the next morning. Pao, he remembered, had whispered something in his ear an hour earlier, something he could not remember. She was gone now. Every morning, it seemed, she woke before him and was seldom seen by anyone before the noon meal.
But on his way to The Mary Strattford that morning he saw her walking, six or seven boats above him near Northside. She carried a large bag of something on her back. He waved to her and when she saw him she shifted the weight of it to one hip so that she could wave back with one hand. He called out to her, but she was gone before the sound left his lips.
That afternoon Pao was missing at lunch and Bright seemed unusually quiet. She seemed preoccupied, and when the meal was nearly over she looked up at Peter.
“I’m worried about Rose,” she said in a low voice. “She’s been on The Long Journey for nearly two days now and I don’t think she’s stopped but once for meals. Sutherland, could you go and see if she’ll come up for an hour or so? Tell her I’ve got some hot soup and seabread. She’ll listen to a man more than a woman. I don’t believe she’s heard ten words I’ve said to her in the last ten months.”
“She’ll be all right,” said Michael, who was beating a rhythm in his empty wooden bowl with a spoon and smiling expectantly at his brother. “Nothing can hurt Rose.”
“Rose will die if she doesn’t eat,” said Tabor. “She’s got to eat just like everybody else.”
“Ordinarily I’d ask Tabor,” said Bright. “But he promised The Bluewaters he would supervise the work on one of their ships this afternoon.”
“Is she still up near The Northside Cliff where we brought in the new ship?” asked Peter.
Bright nodded. “I think so. She used to bring The Elders together in different places all over The Drift, but now she almost always goes to the same place for The Long Journey.”
When the meal was over he crossed the five boats that separated The Mary Strattford from The Cliff. From there he could see a circle of seventeen men and women sitting together and holding hands three boats to the southwest. As he drew nearer he could hear the murmur of their low voices repeating vague syllables over and over in a wordless jumble, and then a space of silence. Then slowly it rose again, a tide of sound like the moan of the wind. As he watched, he slowly became aware of the motion of their bodies, a subtle movement that rose and fell with the wave of their voices, a slow leaning to one side and then a leaning forward. It was as if they were blown by a ghostly breeze no one else could feel.
Suddenly Rose looked up and stared at him. The effect was so startling that for a moment Peter could not remember why he had come.
“Bright thinks it’s time for me to eat,” she said, staring at him in that flat, unblinking way that had always made him uncomfortable. “Very well. We must all render unto Caesar.”
“She has some hot soup and seabread,” said Peter, who no longer bothered to wonder how Rose and Pao knew what was in his mind.
“Give me your hand,” she said, extending a white, bony claw with five fingers. Her hand was very smooth and very cold, and for an instant he thought of the cool, rubbery nose of the shark he had reached out to touch during that strange time underwater.
The old woman stared into his eyes. “Plants,” she said. “Plants?” said Peter.
“Plants,” she answered. “You have always shown such a remarkable interest in plants. You and your friend Odysseus.”
Peter nodded. “I remember now,” he said. “You were asking me about flowers one day on The Mary Strattford.”
“Such a remarkable memory,” said the old woman, spitting out the words. “A mind like a filing cabinet. Did you know that the stems and leaves of Sargasso Plants are not really stems and leaves at all?”
“Bright mentioned something about that,” said Peter. “Sargassum is simply a form of algae,” she continued. “A simple plant, really. No sperms, no ova. It simply grows at one end and rots at the other. An open chain of cells that never ends. A ma
ze of rooms that never becomes a house.”
Peter looked at her, wondering what he was expected to say. “It seems to grow everywhere,” he offered.
She sighed. “I suppose I really should not be so contemptuous of you and your kind,” she said. “You have a good brain and a good heart and it’s not your fault you were born in a world where nothing moves.”
Peter smiled. All at once he realized that he was no longer afraid of Rose. More and more she seemed to be a person, no longer a mythological figure in an illusion called The Drift. “Are you saying that Sargasso Plants are like The Drift itself?” he said.
She looked at him sharply, surprised at his question. “They have the form of a complex entity, but they are not complex in function,” she said. “But that is not the important thing. The important thing is that the weeds move with The Drift, The Drift moves with the sea, the sea moves with the spin of all the seas, and all the seas together move with the moving earth which revolves in the circle of the solar system which turns its larger circle in The Milky Way Galaxy. All forms of life and existence are only forms of motion,” she concluded. “To stop moving is to stop living, to stop existing. That is what I taught when I was the teacher of all the children on The Drift.”
“Everything is a form of motion?” said Peter. The idea had never occurred to him before.
“Small moving things divide into smaller moving things,” she said, “until finally there is no matter at all. Nothing but the essence of motion and energy itself.”
“Like an electron,” said Peter, hoping, smiling in his hope, that Rose had never heard of electrons.
“Never mind that!” she snapped furiously, hissing the words through her teeth. “On land you people always move about so as to remain still. On The Drift people remain still so as to move about. Do you understand that? That’s why The Drift is a land of metaphors. A metaphor is an act between two images that never stops moving. In your world,” she added, “there are only dead metaphors. Which is worse than none at all. You have frozen everything into categories that you walk into and examine like tombs.”
Just then Peter had an image of himself standing for years in the middle of a river that was always raging at flood time, trying with all his strength not to be swept away by the violent current. The whole world, it seemed, was awash with motion in that turbulent place, but he, for the sake of responsibility, propriety, efficiency, and other dead metaphors, had tried to remain calm, to ignore the current of his senses, to save himself from the life around him which he had always viewed with so much apprehension and fear.
“What happens to people who try to deny the principle of motion?” he said.
“Today on The Long Journey we all lived on The Island of Arabia,” she said. “I saw white horses with hoofs of silver flashing in the sun. And dark-skinned men with scimitars and hanks of hair.”
“I was asking you about your idea of motion,” said Peter wearily.
“The men in Arabia are very passionate,” she continued. “If I had stayed, I would have had many children. In just two days I built an empire and was raped by a black prince of Ecbatana. But I don’t suppose anything will come of it.”
Peter smiled. “It would be inconvenient if something came of it,” he said. “I mean, with your husband so far away in—is it London?”
But Rose did not answer. It was as if a light had gone out somewhere behind her eyes. Carefully he guided her along the decks of ships, across planks, over bridges that spanned the short spaces of greenish water. In five minute they were within sight of The Mary Strattford.
“I was the teacher of all the children,” she said suddenly. “Did I tell you that? One day I discovered that reality has three parts and so I became the teacher of all the children. I spent years organizing schools all over The Drift. Seven forms and six subjects in each form—two in sense, two in thought, and two in dreams. Every day I would rise at moonset and meditate upon my lessons until morning. Then I would teach two hours at each of the five schools. The Conquistador Blancos called me Doña Rose, The Lady of Learning.”
Her hand trembled for a moment as he guided her from one boat to the next. “Those were proud days for me,” she whispered. She followed him passively, moving like a tower of ivory floating on water. She was, he thought, a senile queen walking to her tomb.
“I never had children of my own,” she said after another long silence. “You see, my husband has been gone for some time now. There was a shipwreck and we were separated. Yes, a shipwreck. I remember it quite clearly now. A spar fell and broke his neck.”
On The Mary Strattford, Bright and Tabor’s two children were playing with silver pieces on a green board, and as Peter and Rose approached, the three of them looked up and smiled. Raven sat some distance away, perched on a rail, staring off into space.
“We need a new rule for this game,” said Michael. “Something to keep my brother from bringing his gold crown in before The Third Circle.”
Rose looked at the children, first at Peter and then at Michael; then her arm stiffened and she pulled away from Peter’s guiding hand. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
“You’re home,” said Bright. “This is The Mary Strattford.”
The old woman exhaled sharply and then walked toward the hatchway. “Sutherland would have made a good pupil,” she said. “But I’m afraid he cannot be one of us for long.” She lifted her long skirts so as to follow Bright down into the galley.
“What did she mean, I wouldn’t be with you for long?”
Michael moved one of the silver pieces of eight and then looked up. “Rose is a smart lady, but she doesn’t always make too much sense,” he said. “Pao says she remembers that when she was a little girl Rose was different. She says Rose used to be the most important person on The Drift.”
“She was always the same stupid old lady,” said Raven from his perch on the rail. “She’s never been anything but an old lady.”
“Don’t be nasty,” said Peter. “Why don’t you sit down and play—whatever it is they’re playing?”
“If you want to play,” said Michael, “we can give you a silver outflank on seventeen.”
“No thanks.”
“We always ask him to play,” said David, “but he never wants to.”
“I hate games,” said Raven.
“Let’s go for a walk then,” said Peter.
Raven hesitated, looking first at the boys and then at Peter.
“No thanks,” he said at last. “I’ll go by myself.”
“Let him do what he wants,” said Michael.
“Don’t worry about him. Come play with us,” said David.
“We need someone to take Bright’s place.”
“Hooray!” said Michael, who hated delays of any kind.
“Sutherland can play for Bright until she comes back!”
But just then Bright returned from the galley. “No,” she said.
“Go after him. Someone should go after him, and you’re the only one he’ll really talk to.”
“Perhaps I should,” said Peter. “Perhaps I can do something for him.” Three ships away, Raven’s slender form was still visible, the tails of his black shirt waving behind him as he ran.
“Wait!” said Peter. But his voice was lost over the long distance, and Raven did not look back. He ran along the rail of a large schooner and peered over the point of the bow, trying to keep Raven’s black shirt in view.
He followed him across the great caravel and the barquentine that he and Pao had explored, it seemed so very long ago, and then on almost to The Bridge at the western edge of The Drift. This was strange territory for Peter, consisting largely of small oriental trading ships and several large Chinese junks.
“Stay away!” cried Raven, still a hundred feet ahead of him. “Stay away or I’ll kill you!”
Then he remembered how Raven had guarded his aluminum dinghy on those long and dark nights, alone with only a long paddle and a knife. Now somehow he f
elt responsible for him, and for a moment it seemed that Raven was someone very close to him. Perhaps someone he had known or imagined a long time ago.
I’m not going to Harrington University, said the Raven in Peter’s mind. I’m not going to wear a blue suit and sit around at all your silly parties at the country club and study medieval history and play the violin and dance the rhumba.
Then what do you want to do? he asked the voice in his mind.
I don’t know, the voice answered. I just want to get away from all this. I want to go home.
But now the real Raven had doubled back along The Southern Edge, past the green and yellow Seafields where he and Reuben and Javitt worked nearly every day. And then for a while he disappeared completely, and Peter followed almost by instinct, listening to the vague thud of footfalls, sensing where the boy had gone almost by smell or by the damp impressions his feet left on the wooden boards. Why do I bother? he asked himself. And with that question he stopped running and looked around him. He was lost now, and Raven was nowhere to be seen.
He climbed halfway up the catwalk of a nearby brig and looked around. Three boats to his left he saw the stage called Twoboats where Pao had done The Dance of The Nine Islands. High and to his right he could barely make out the outline of The Mary Strattford. And below him, only a boat away, he saw Raven walking very slowly, looking behind him every few feet. Suddenly he looked up and saw Peter hanging from the catwalk.