But not that day. And not the next, nor the one after that. South Island healing comes when it comes, caring nothing for mere need. If I had needed more evidence that the chandail was dying, it was there in the little girl’s behavior each day: not so much in her words, which were always terse and calm, but in the way she held herself, in the tension of the muscles I was so vainly kneading, and the increasing chill of her skin. I could do nothing for her but wait; there was no way that I could find by myself into either the chandail’s mystery or my own. Nothing to do but wait, with an unreal child fading under my futile hands, and the creature itself slipping lower and lower at the cable’s end each day. I caught fish, yellow and blue, and patched the hull as best I might, and drank raw red wine, of which there was considerably more on board than there was water. It comes when it comes.
The bruach came first.
There were two of them, which is unusual. Bruach are solitary scavengers—and cannibals, to boot, as likely to turn on each other as on a dead whale or stranded lankash. They are more like eels than like anything else, I suppose, except that they run as much as twenty feet in length, and fear nothing, because nothing but a bruach would eat one. As a rule, they wait for their prey to die on its own, but not always.
The girl saw them first: the two long, swift swirls to left and right of the chandail, and then the sheep-snouted gray heads—sheep with teeth like sharpened little pegs—rearing high to get their bearings and submerging again. She gave one soft cry and vanished between my hands, leaving me clutching foolishly after her. The chandail shivered in the water.
The bruach imitated her in their eerie, twittering voices, as though mocking her fear. I searched frantically for a bow or even a throwing axe, my swordcane being of no practical use just then. The galley finally yielded up a couple of decently-balanced carving knives, and a butcher’s cleaver as well. I have fought for my life with less, although at the time I couldn’t remember when. I scrambled back on deck, and prepared to do battle.
By choice, they go for the belly, gnawing their way in, dining on the fatty organs, and often laying their eggs in the ruins. I leaned over the low railing, gripping my knives, praying for each sheep-head to rise above the waves just once more. When one did, I cocked my arm just so, as an old soldier who was drunkenly kind to a slave child taught me to do, and made sure to follow through from my legs. The head did not come all the way off, but close enough.
The second bruach, distracted by the sudden explosion of near-black blood, romped in the sticky ripples for a few moments, gnawed briefly on its late companion, and then turned its attention back to the chandail. I threw the second carving knife, but missed. The bruach dived deep, beyond my sight, but I knew that it would turn and straighten itself in the darkness, and begin to spin along its whole length, faster and faster, until it came hurtling up under the chandail, hard enough to knock it out of the water, using its leverage to grip and twist and bore through the toughest hide into the helpless body. I hefted the cleaver without much hope of hitting anything, if I should somehow be granted a second chance. It felt like a stove lid in my palm, and the handle was loose.
But as the bruach surged toward the surface, the chandail moved. Just a bit, no further than a slight eddy might have pushed it, but enough so that the bruach missed its mark, as I had mine. The bruach broke water instead of flesh, looked around unhurriedly, making no connection between its partner’s death and me at the rail of the fishing boat—they are dull beasts—and turned to dive for a second strike. But the chandail, rolling halfway onto its side, struck out feebly with a pair of its arms, not stunning or even jarring the bruach, only holding it still for one brief moment, no more than I needed. This head did not come off, but it did make a very satisfying sound when it split. The cleaver was better balanced than I had thought, after all.
The girl did not reappear on board until near sunset. I sat on deck and watched the same yellow and blue fish I had been eating nibbling daintily at the bodies of the two bruach. My right shoulder ached from having hurled the heavy cleaver with all my strength, while my mind ached even more from puzzling over my reason for being where I was, doing what I was doing. After a time the bruach began to sink, and I prayed that others of their kind would not come and discover them, because I had nothing else to throw. I was so distracted that I almost failed to notice the child when she did return.
She was different—not drastically so, but unmistakably. There was at once a greater solidity about her, and a certain new clarity as well; even her eyes seemed to have changed from an indifferent, washed-out blue to something close to the color the sea would be again, when the blood was gone. She said, in that strange voice of hers, half ragged with age and pain, half clear as snow-water, “Thank you. You saved my life.”
I said nothing. She continued, gently and innocently. “And now you are wondering why you should ever have done such a thing.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”
“Because I am your memory,” the little girl said... the chandail said. “I am the secret place where you hide it all—the beautiful room you cannot bear to enter—the cave where the monsters live—the dreams that make you dread sleep. You know this, Lalkhamsin-khamsolal.”
No one had called me by my rightful name for a great many years. I was not even aware of having leaped to my feet, nor of shaking my head until my hair stung my eyes. I do not think I was screaming, but my throat hurt as though I had been. I said, “No. No, you are no part of me. You are parasites, like the bruach—no, worse than the bruach—and I despise you all, make no mistake. If I saved you, it was out of pity, as one or two others have had pity on me in my life. Nothing more. Nothing more.”
The girl remained as serene as though I had soberly agreed with her. She said, “Despise us—hate us, if you will—but consider. What you are is also what you lost—what was taken from you—and if I and mine did not keep the key to that room, would you be fully yourself? Would you even truly exist?”
In her half-smiling child’s mouth, my name sounded foreign and faraway, not connected to me at all. I said only, “You have a wound to treat. Come.”
She laughed then, and lay down for me to try my poor back-country curing one more time. The infection was worse, the stench brought back places I wish I had never seen... but the feeling was there too, at last, rushing down from my shoulders, hurrying so hungrily toward the need that it seemed almost to stumble over itself on the way. The rotted skin sloughed away under my hands as I put them directly on the lesion, and I sensed the chandail’s suffering draining back into me, as it should if the healing is working right. There was pain, but it was happening a long way off, to someone who was at once me and not-me. I cannot say it any more clearly than that. I did nothing—only touched, and closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, the sky was black and starless, with no smallest rag of sunset left. The girl vanished, as she always did, and I went below to my bunk, where I lay awake the rest of the night, brooding over what she had said to me. It was at least a change from the dreams.
In the morning I could see no real difference in the wound, beyond a certain suggestion of knitting around the edges—most likely wishful thinking on my part, for the smell and suppuration were definitely unaffected. I told the girl that South Island healing is unpredictable and rarely instantaneous, that I would not give up until she was well, however long a time it might take. She answered simply, as she lay down, “It will not be long,” and left me to take that how I would.
In the three days that followed, the power that coursed between the chandail and me never faltered; but the undoing of the damage that the fisherman’s two-tined lance had wrought was a wearier business than I had ever dealt with. At times I convinced myself that the wound was smaller and cleaner-looking, and that the creature itself was plainly stronger; at others, it seemed dreadfully obvious that the chandail was not only failing, but that my treatment might very well be hastening its end. Even at my most hopeful, I n
ever dared cut or loosen the cable, our only other connection, for fear that the creature might slip silently down out of sight, as the two dead bruach had done, too weak and damaged to stay afloat on its own. There came to be nothing else in the world but the same sun pouring down on us each day, and my little boat swinging in the same slow half-circle between sea and sky, between the chandail and me. I fished and swam, and drank my red wine in the evenings, and watched the stars flickering through the waves, quick as fish themselves. It was very peaceful, and there was no time.
Of real speech between us—between me and the chandail speaking through her—there was very little. As I have said, the creature seemed utterly unconcerned with its own life or death; and whatever pain it truly suffered, I never knew. But we did actually converse, now and again, through the little girl, and I slowly gained a sense of the cold and fearless arrogance under my hands—and something else, as well: something almost like a teasing desire to be known, to be understood, to be seen by a human being. I remember that once I asked her, “Why do you amuse yourselves with our grief? We have never fished for you, never harmed you in any way—we could not, even if we wanted to. Why do you toy with us as you do?”
She had the grace to look surprised by the question; or it could have been a trick of the light on the water. “But what else are you here for? Of all beings on the earth, your folk alone were created especially for us, for our own particular delight. Have you kept me alive only to make you understand this?”
I did not trust myself to answer her. What she had told me was no more than I had feared, suspected—indeed, known, somewhere in myself where I rarely visited. The Captain had told me truly: the chandail did what they did in perfect simplicity, with neither malice nor pity, quite simply because we belonged to them. What particular delight could they have drawn, after all, from the memories of fish? The nightmares of panyaras or the bruach? The gods I was raised to worship never promised human beings their entire eternal attention, but neither did they advise us that we were to be forever the playthings of creatures with eyes on the underside of their four arms. I spoke no more for the rest of the day.
Then, on the cool, bright morning of the third day, it was she who posed a question. As though we were in the middle of an ordinary chat between friends, she asked suddenly, “And what harm have my people ever done you? Where is the great evil in bringing your memories to life for a little while? Where is our wickedness, that you hate us so?”
I cannot say how long it took me to find words—no, to remember language at all. I said, “You don’t know? You really do not know?”
I will always think that she actually blushed—though, obviously, that couldn’t have been possible. She said, “We have not given it much thought, I admit that. Nor are we likely to—I am speaking honestly to you. I am asking for myself, and no other.” And that was how I learned that the chandail were indeed individuals, with their own desires and curiosities. Few believe me yet, after all this time. Lal says.
I told her why we hated them. I told her, I think, for hours—all the while trying as hard as I knew to transmit healing through her illusory body to the monster likely dying off my starboard bow. She listened in silence, never interrupting once—that would be a human sort of thing, after all—and when I was done at last, she did not speak for some time. Only when I was resting for a little, soaking my hands in seawater—South Island work is painless, but your hands get so hot—did she finally say one word, “Interesting.”
I gawked as dumbly as any astonished yokel. She said, “I have never known a human being. This has been extremely interesting for me.”
I forgot everything I ever knew about healing in that instant. I thought of the first time the chandail had had all their way with me, and I remembered the Captain, and though I directed my words at a little girl, I was speaking directly to the thing she was. “You know nothing of me. You know nothing of us—nothing—and you never will, because you have always been too busy raping our memories, sporting with our hearts, without thought, without even the notion of pity. No, forgive me, I must take that back. The truth is that you know everything about us but what we are—everything but what it is to have those memories, good or bad, cherished or denied... or dreaded. You need a heart to understand that, and a soul, and your kind have neither.” I was shouting into her face, just as though she were real.
And for the smallest moment she responded as though she were, and I had my one true meeting with the chandail. Her tranquil, expressionless blue eyes darkened with anger—or it might have been disbelief, or perhaps even sadness. She said, “You are quite right—we have no hearts, not as you and your kind would understand them. But souls... souls we do possess. Whether your kind would call them so or not.” A truly human voice could never, surely, have conveyed such contempt as I heard in her soft, lilting words.
I did not want to talk to her—to it—anymore. I gestured with my head for her to lie down on the deck again, and she obeyed. The great gash on her back looked far more hideous than it had the first time I had seen it, and no gainsaying that it stank like a slaughterhouse. I understood one thing at least then, very suddenly. I said, “I have been no use at all, have I? All this that I have done—tried to do for you—nothing, from the beginning. You have been dying every minute since that lance went into you, is that not true?”
The girl turned her head slightly to look back at me over her shoulder. “If you were no help, you did me no further hurt either. As I have said, it was interesting, and I was... curious. As I am about death.” Her voice had become a placid mumble; she might have been drowsing in the sun.
I stood with my hands on her, still feeling the heat vainly racing down my arms into the wound, as though the healing were stubbornly refusing to admit its futility. My anger was gone, and every other feeling seemed to have flown with it. I had difficulty, not only in finding something to say, but in remembering what individual words meant. I managed finally to mumble clumsily, “I’ve never known South Island healing to fail.”
“Not on humans, perhaps.” She looked at me as she always had, from somewhere I had never been. She said, “I told you to kill me.”
“It was not in me to do,” I answered. “Killer as I am.”
The child laughed her strange laugh, for the first time in some while. “I am grateful that you could not. I would not have cared to die where you found me, wallowing in the filthy shallows. This is better.”
Neither of us spoke for a long time after that. I went on working mechanically on her injury as though my efforts still mattered, while she continued calmly sunning herself. At last I asked her, “Should I loose the cable? Is that what you wish?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. I can no longer swim, and that is a bad thing for us, a dishonor. Besides, I have,”—she hesitated briefly—“something to do. A gift.”
“Not for me,” I said, as quickly as I have likely ever said anything. “Forgive the discourtesy, but I have had well more than enough of your gifts in my life. If you mean to say farewell, we can simply shake hands, and each say sunlight on your road. No gifts.”
The girl’s smile lifted the corners of her eyes, but not her mouth. She said, “Oh, you will like this one, I assure you. The word of a chandail undoubtedly means little to you, but it has some worth even so. Trust me, Lalkhamsin-khamsolal.”
That was the second time she called me by my name, and the last. I neither nodded agreement nor shook my head. Only waited.
“Shake hands, is it?” she said. She reached out then, but did not take my hand, merely touched it—an instant’s fiery tingle, and she was gone.
And Bismaya was there.
Bismaya....
I had not seen her since a certain afternoon on a riverbank when we were children, but this Bismaya was full-grown, and pregnant, heavily, clumsily so, carrying herself with the weariness of a woman who has long since lost hope of ever not being pregnant. Her plain, broad face was lined and sagging, and her beautiful skin, ric
hly dark and always smoother than mine, had aged to the color of wet slate. I would have known her in any guise, at any distance. I would have known her in my sleep, in the darkest and most dreadful of the dreams into which she sold me, my cousin, my dear deadly playmate. I will know her after death.
The chandail had outdone itself. Unreal as Bismaya had to be, she still paled with the motion of my anchored boat, and swayed slightly as it rocked in the swell. Bismaya had never had any sort of a stomach, even on the wobbly little rafts we used to make with boards and logs and janshi vines. I remember everything about Bismaya.
She was so occupied with being bewildered, frightened and queasy that she did not see me until I spoke her name. Then she turned, stared, and tumbled awkwardly to her knees, whispering two words. “Lal. Please.”
I used to imagine her saying that, begging me for mercy before I tore her to pieces, one slow piece at a time. Gods, how many times had I put myself to sleep with that vision? How many times did I call it up to shut out what was being done to me? And here it was—here she was, helpless on her knees before me—and here I was, dumbstruck, horror-struck, knowing that it could not be happening, not like this. Even the chandail cannot do this.
You see, the sendings of the chandail look and feel absolutely accurate, perfect to the smallest detail strained out of your recollection, your imagining. They can touch you, and you can touch them; they can chatter endlessly of memories only you—and so they—could share; indeed, they often call up people and places and events that you had completely forgotten, for good or ill. What they cannot do is hear what you say to them and respond to it—they cannot listen, not to words, not to eyes or bodies. Bismaya could not possibly have seen what she so plainly saw in my face.
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