by Gene Wolfe
[Needless to say, we are making the greatest efforts to preserve this record, both by the care we take in printing and conserving individual copies and by disseminating it.-Hoof and Hide, Daisy and Vadsig.]
I wish that one of the first people to settle the Long Sun Whorl had left us a record of it. Perhaps one did, a record preserved now in some skyland city far from Viron. That book, or a copy of it, may have been brought here already if it exists, as I sincerely hope it does.
Many in and around our town were very happy to have Scleroderma’s short account of our departure, and overjoyed to have the one that Nettle and I wrote. It sounds boastful, I know; but it is true. They gave us cards, and even exchanged things they themselves had made or grown-things that had cost them many days of hard work-for a single copy. Yet to the best of my knowledge (and I believe I would surely have heard) none of them began an account of the founding of New Viron, the land raffle, and the rest of it. After considering this at some length, I have decided to salt this account of mine with facts that Nettle and my sons already know, but that may be of interest or value to future generations. Even today, who here in Gaon would know of the high wall that surrounds Patera Remora’s manteion and manse, for example, if I failed to mention it?
When I recall our sail up the coast, which seemed so idyllic as far as I have yet described it, I am struck by the speed with which so many new towns have sprung up here on Blue. The people on each lander have tended to settle near the place where they landed, since their lander could not be moved again once they had pillaged it, and it still constituted an essential source of supplies. In addition to which, they had no horses or boats, and would have had to walk to their new destination. Thus we built New Viron within an hour’s walk of the lander in which we arrived, and I am sure the people on other landers acted much as we did, save for those who landed too near us and have been forced into servitude by their captors; like us, they would have had little choice.
We were lucky, perhaps. There was no lake or river where we settled to provide fresh water, but there were a couple of well-diggers among us, and a ten-cubit well there provided better and purer water in abundance. To the west we have a fine harbor and a sea full of fish, and on the lower slopes of the eastern mountains, more timber than a hundred cities the size of Viron could ever need. The mountains themselves are already providing us with iron, silver and lead, as I believe I have mentioned before.
Most cannot have been so fortunate. Gaon has little access to the sea; ten leagues from where I sit, the River Nadi reaches us from the Highlands of Han in a succession of rapids and falls we call the Cataracts. Downstream are the Lesser Cataracts, then tropical forests and swamps, as well as a seemingly endless string of foreign towns, many of them hostile to us and some hostile to everyone. In theory, it might be possible to sail from here to the sea; but no one has ever done so, and it seems likely no one ever will.
Still, we have fresh water and fish from our river, timber, three kinds of useful cane, reeds for matting and the like, and a rich, black, alluvial soil that yields two generous crops per year. Even quite near town, the jungle swarms with game, and there are wild fruits for the picking. It seemed a poor place to me when I arrived, but no one needs warm and solid houses with big stone fireplaces here. Metals are imported and costly, which in the long run may prove the gods’ blessing.
The gods (I should say) are very naturally those we knew in the Whorl. Echidna gets more sacrifices than all the rest together, but is generally shown as a loving mother holding the blind Tartaros on her lap while her other children swarm around her vying for her attention. A snake or two peeps from her hair, and her image in the temple has a snake coiled around each ankle. (Our people are not in the least afraid of snakes, as I ought to have explained. They seem to think them almost supernatural, if not actually minor gods, and set out bowls of milk laced with palm wine for them. Even a mother-goddess with a roving collection of pet snakes seems entirely normal. I have not been told of a single case of snakebite while I have been here.)
* * *
In my last session I intended to write about the settling of Blue, but I see that I wandered from the topic to describe this town of Gaon.
I nearly wrote “this city,” but Gaon is nothing like the size of Viron or the foreign cities I saw from General Saba’s airship. Viron had more than half a million people. While I have no way of knowing exactly how many we have in Gaon, I doubt that there are a tenth that many.
The pirate boat came from no town, but from a little freshwater inlet where drooping limbs had concealed it from me until it put out. I shall never forget how it looked then, so black against the warm green of the trees and the cool blue and silver sea. Hull and masts and yards had all been painted black, and its sails were so dark a brown that they were nearly black, too. When I think back upon it here at my bedroom writing table, now that I am no longer afraid of it, I realize that its owners must have expected someone to hunt it, and wanted it to vanish from sight the moment the sun went down. It was half the sloops’ beam, or a trifle less, and must have been more than twice our length, with two masts carrying three-cornered sails so big that a good gust should have laid it over at once. There were eight or nine on board, I think, mostly women. One in the bow shouted for me to haul down. I got out the slug gun Marrow had given me instead, loaded it, and put extra cartridges in my pocket.
“Haul down!” she shouted again, and I asked what she wanted.
Her answer was a shot.
I put the slug gun to my shoulder. I have seldom fired one, but I tried very hard then to recall everything that I had ever heard about them-Sinew’s advice, and that of a hundred others-how to hold the slug gun and aim, and how to shoot well and swiftly. I still recall my trepidation as I pushed off the safety catch, laid the front sight on the pirate boat, and squeezed the trigger.
The report was an angry thunder, and the slug gun seemed to convulse in my hands, nearly knocking me off my feet; but my first shot was as ineffectual as theirs, as well as I could judge. Before I could fire a second time, Babbie was beside me gnashing his tusks.
The sound of the shot had awakened my intelligence as well as Babbie, however; I put down my slug gun and turned the sloop into the wind until we were sailing as near it as I dared, and trimmed sail while trying my best to ignore the shots aimed at me. When I looked back at the long black craft pursuing us, I saw that I had been right. She could not hold our course, which was nearly straight out to sea.
The sloop was pitching violently, and dipping her bowsprit into the waves that had been lifting her by the stern when the wind was quartering. I returned to the slug gun nonetheless, and after two or three more shots learned to fire at the highest point of each pitch, just before the stern dropped from under me. Before I had to reload, I had the satisfaction of seeing the woman who had been shooting at me tumble headlong into the sea.
“We’re going to Pajarocu!” I told Babbie while I reloaded my gun with the cartridges from my pockets, and he nodded to show that he had understood.
My intuition had outrun my reason. But as I fired again, I realized it had been right. With one of their comrades dead, the crew of the black boat would certainly try to keep us in sight until shadelow, and during the night to position themselves between the mainland and us, assuming that we were bound to some northern port and would turn northeast as soon as we believed we were no longer observed. If we did, and they were lucky, they would have us in sight at shadeup.
“The sea will be much wider at this point, if Wijzer’s map is right,” I explained to Babbie, “and I’m sure it would be dangerous even for a boat much larger than ours, with more people on it and ample supplies. But it won’t be nearly as dangerous as going back and falling in with that black boat again, and if we get across it will be much faster.” I nearly added that if he did not like the idea he was free to jump out and swim. He nodded so trustingly that I was ashamed of the impulse.
Perhaps I should be ashamed of hav
ing killed the woman who fell from the black boat instead. It is a terrible thing to take the life of another human being, and I had killed no one since Nettle and I (with Marrow, Scleroderma, and many others) had fought Generalissimo Siyuf’s troopers in the tunnels long ago. It is indeed a terrible thing-to reason and to conscience. It is not always felt as a terrible thing, however. I felt more concern for my own life than for hers at the time, and would gleefully have sent the black boat to the bottom if it had been within my power.
The wind died away toward shadelow, but by then we were well out of sight of both the black boat and the coast. I tied the tiller and lay down with the slug gun beside me, resolved to wake up in an hour or two and have a long and careful look at the sea and the weather before I slept again; but when Babbie woke me, grunting and tapping my cheek and lips with the horn-tipped toes of his forelegs, the first light was already in the sky.
I sat up rubbing my eyes, knowing that I was on the sloop, but believing for a few seconds at least that we were bound for New Viron. The wind had picked up considerably (which I thought at the time had been the reason that Babbie had felt it necessary to wake me); but the hard chop of the previous day had been tamed to quick swells that rolled the sloop gently and smoothly, our masthead bowing deeply and politely to starboard, then to port, and then to starboard again, as if it were the honored center of some stately dance.
This was of some importance, because I glimpsed what appeared to be a low island to port. In a calmer sea, I would have climbed the mast for a better look at it, but my weight would have amplified the roll, and if it amplified it to the point that we shipped water the sloop would founder. I stood upon one of the cargo chests instead, a very slight improvement on the foredeck.
“If it’s an island,” I told Babbie, “we might be able to get water and information there, but we’re not so badly off for water yet, and we’d be a lot more likely to find ourselves in trouble.”
He had leaped to the top of another chest, though he was not sure enough of his balance to rear on four hind legs there, as he often did when he could brace a foreleg on the gunwale. He nodded sagely.
“I’m going to put out more sail to steady her,” I told him.
“Then she won’t roll so much.”
I shook out the mainsail and trimmed it, and went forward to break out the triangular gaff-topsail. There were traces of blood on the half-deck there, dark, clotting blood in a crevice where it had survived Babbie’s tongue. What remained was so slight that I doubt that I would have noticed it without the bright morning sun, and the fact that the surface of the foredeck was scarcely two hands’ width from my face as I pulled the gaff-topsail out. On hand and knees on the foredeck, I looked for more blood and found traces of it everywhere-on the deck, on the bow, on the butt of the bowsprit, and even on the forestay.
My first thought was that Babbie had caught a seabird and eaten it; but there should have been feathers in that case, a few blood-smeared feathers at least, and there were none. “Not a bird,” I told him. “Not a fish, either. A fish might jump on board, but there would be scales. Or anyway I’d think there would be. What was it?”
He listened attentively; and I sensed that he understood, though he gave no sign of it.
When the topsail was up, I went to the tiller, steering us a bit wider of the low island I had sighted. There was weed in the water, as there often was off Lizard, long streamers of more or less green leaf kept afloat by bladders about the size of garden peas. Like everyone else who lived near the sea, we had collected this weed on the beach and dried it for tinder; it occurred to me that we had very little left, as well as very little firewood. Tinder without firewood would be useless, but if I kept an eye out, I might snag a few sticks of driftwood as well. I collected a good big wad of seaweed and spread it over the waxed canvas covers of the cargo chests, tossing the tiny crabs that clung to the strands back into the water. Others skittered about the boat and swam in the bilges until Babbie caught and ate them, crushing their shells between his teeth with unmistakable relish and swallowing shell and all.
Watching him, I realized that I had gone astray when I had supposed that he had eaten the creature whose blood I had found on the half-deck. It could not have been small, and he would have had to have eaten it entirely, skin, bones, and all. Yet he was clearly hungry. I threw him an apple, and ate one myself after listening to his quick, loud crunchings and munchings. By that time I had heard what Babbie did to bones more than once, and I felt quite sure that the noise he would have made while devouring an animal of any size would certainly have awakened me.
What had happened, almost certainly, was that something had climbed aboard at the bow, perhaps grasping the bowsprit in some way, as I had when I had climbed back on board after escaping the leatherskin. Babbie had charged and wounded it, and it had fallen back into the sea. The clatter of Babbie’s trotters would not have awakened me because I had become accustomed to hearing him move about the boat while I slept. He had licked up all the blood he could find, just as he later licked up the clotted blood I extracted from the crevices between the planks with the point of Sinew’s knife.
Something had fallen back into the sea, bleeding and badly injured. What had it been? For a moment I thought of the woman I had shot, swimming league upon league after our boat, intent upon revenge. If I were spinning a fireside tale for children here, no doubt it would be so; but I am recounting sober fact, and I knew that any such thing was utterly impossible. The woman I had shot was dead, in all probability; and if she was not dead, it was because she had been rescued by the black boat from which she had fallen.
Had it really come out of the sea at all? The inhumi could fly, and though they possessed no blood of their own, they could and did bleed profusely with the blood of others when they had recently fed, as the inhumu we had called Patera Quetzal had in the tunnels. Babbie would almost certainly attack an inhumu at sight, I decided. But could he have thus caught and bested one? A big male hus might have, but Babbie was no more than half grown.
What, then, had come out of the sea? Another leatherskin? Even a small one would have killed or injured any hus bold enough to attack it, I felt sure; and Babbie seemed quite unhurt. I resolved to nap during the afternoon and stand watch with him after shadelow.
The sloop was no longer rolling as it had been, and by that time was heeling rather less than it had when I had first set the topsail. I shinnied up the mast (something I had not done in some time, and found more difficult than I remembered) and had a look around. The island I had seen to port was distant but plainly visible, a level green plain hardly higher than the sea, dotted here and there with bushes and small, swaying trees.
Looking to starboard, I thought that I could make out another, similar, island there. “If those are parts of the same landmass, we may have found our western continent a lot sooner than we expected,” I told Babbie; but I knew it could not be true.
The weed in the water became thicker and thicker as the day wore on; but there was no driftwood.
* * *
Once, when Seawrack and I were on the riverbank, I felt that there were three of us. Haifa dozen speculations raced through my mind, of which the most obvious and convincing were that Mucor was accompanying us without revealing the fact, or that Krait had left the sloop and was shadowing us for some purpose of his own. The most fantastic-I am embarrassed at having to set it down here and confess that at the time I actually came close to giving it serious credence-was that the shaman whose help we had tried to enlist the previous night had put an invisible devil upon our track, something he had boasted of having done to others. After an hour or more of this uneasiness, I realized that the third person I sensed was merely Babbie, whom I had by a species of mental misstep ceased to consider an animal.
The shaman may have had something to do with that after all, because the western peoples do not make our distinction between the human and the bestial. The shearbear is a person, certainly, and an important one,
and Babbie was counted as a sort of son to us, an adopted son or foster child. When I learned this, I smiled to think that it made Krait his brother, and made him Krait’s.
So it was that day, as I dozed in the shade of the foredeck. Another sailor sailed with me, and I felt that I could rest as long as the sea remained calm. If a hand on the tiller was needed, he would provide it, and if it was advisable to take another reef in the mainsail, he would take it.
When I woke, I found that the sun was touching the horizon. The wind had died away to a breath, and the jib, which I was nearly sure I had struck before lying down, had been set again. I let out the last reef in the mainsail (which I had, I thought, double reefed) and trimmed, explaining to Babbie everything that I was doing and why I was doing it as I worked. If he understood any of it, he said nothing.
“You can turn in now, if you want,” I told him, and much to my surprise he lay down under the little foredeck just as I had, though he was up and about again in less than an hour. After that, we stood watch together.
There was nothing much to watch, or at any rate that was how it seemed at the time. The weed was thicker than ever, so that I felt it was actively resisting our passage and had to be pushed aside by the bow like floating ice. I was nodding at the tiller when Babbie began grunting with excitement and with a running leap plunged over the side.
As I have said, he was a faster and a stronger swimmer than any man I have ever known, his multitude of short, powerful limbs being well adapted to it. For ten minutes if not more I watched him swim away, noticing the faint green glow of his wake; then his small, dark head was lost among the gentle swells. After so many days of increasingly less surly companionship, it was a strange and forlorn feeling to find myself alone in the sloop again.
In half an hour he was back, still swimming strongly but not making anything like the progress he had earlier because he was pushing a small tree ahead of him, roots and all. I had hoped to snare driftwood in the form of a broken timber or a few floating sticks; now it seemed that all the gods had chosen to help me at once.