On Blue's waters

by Gene Wolfe

  It was too big to bring on board. I lashed it alongside until I could lop off as many branches as would fill our little woodbox. Sinew’s hunting knife was large and heavy enough to chop with after a fashion, although barely. A hatchet (with a pang of nostalgia I recalled the one that Silk had used to repair the roof of our manteion, the hatchet he had left behind at Blood’s) would have been a good deal better. I resolved to add one to the sloop’s equipment at the first opportunity; but however wise, it was a resolution that did me no good while I was leaning over the gunwale to hack away at those springy branches, which were still full of sap and decked with green leaves.

  “I hope you weren’t hoping for a fire tonight,” I remarked to Babbie. “This stuff’s going to have to dry for days before it will burn.”

  He chewed a twig philosophically.

  “For a moment there I thought I saw somebody.” It sounded so silly that I was ashamed to voice the thought, even though there was no one but my little hus to hear it. “A face, very pale, down under the water. It was probably a fish, really, or just a piece of waterlogged wood.”

  Babbie appeared skeptical, so I added, “Some trees have white bark. They’re not all brown or black.” Sensing that he still doubted me, I said, “Or green. Some are white. You must have lived in the mountains before somebody caught you, so you must surely have seen snowbirch, and you probably know that underneath the bark of a lot of trees, the wood is whitish or yellow. A log that had been in the water for a long time-”

  I broke off my foolish argument because something had begun to sing. It was not Seawrack’s song (which torments me for hours at a time even now), but the Mother’s, a song without words, or at any rate without words that I could understand. “Listen,” I ordered Babbie; but his ears, which usually lay flat against his skull, were up and spread like sails, so that his head appeared twice its normal size.

  There is a musical instrument, one that is in fact little more than a toy, that we in Viron used to call Molpe’s dulcimer. Strings are arranged in a certain way and drawn tight above a chamber of thin wood that swells the sound when they are strummed by the wind. Horn made several for his young siblings before we went into the tunnels; when I made them, I dreamed of making a better one someday, one constructed with all the knowledge and care that a great craftsman would bring to the task, a fitting tribute to Molpe. I have never built it, as you will have guessed already. I have the craft now, perhaps; but I have never had the musical knowledge the task would require, and I never will.

  If I had built it, it might have sounded something like that, because I would have made it sound as much like a human voice as I could; and if I were the great craftsman I once dreamed of becoming, I would have come very near-and yet not near enough.

  That is how it was with the Mother’s voice. It was lovely and uncanny, like Molpe’s dulcimer; and although it was not in truth very remote as well as I could judge, there was that in it that sounded very far away indeed. I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express.

  No, not even if I could whisper them aloud to you of the future, and certainly not as I am constrained to speak to you now with Oreb’s laboring black wingfeather.

  Nor with a quill from any other bird that ever flew.

  * * *

  Nothing more happened that night, or at least nothing more worth recounting in detail. Certainly Babbie and I listened for hours, and when I think back upon that time it seems to me that we must have listened half the night. Sometime before dawn it ceased, not fading away but simply ending, as if the singer had come to the conclusion of her song and stopped. The light airs that had been moving us ever more slowly through the weed died out altogether at about the same time, leaving the sloop turning lazily this way and that without enough way to make her answer the helm. I sat up with Babbie until shadeup, as I had planned, then stretched myself out for most of the morning under the foredeck. Babbie slept too (or so I would guess), but slept so lightly that the sloop could hardly have been said to have been unwatched.

  When I woke, I saw that we were much nearer the low green island than I had imagined. If we got a good wind, I decided, we would sail on in search of Pajarocu; but if Molpe permitted us only the light and vagrant airs I more than half expected, I would steer for the island, and tie up there until we had sailing weather.

  It was noon before we reached it, pushed along at times by faint breezes that never lasted long, and handicapped almost as often by others. I jumped from the sloop to make her fast, and found myself on a moist and resilient turf that was not grass, and that stretched its bright green carpet not merely to the edge of the salt sea, but beyond the edge, extending some considerable distance underneath the water, where it had been crushed and torn by our prow. Nowhere was there a tree, a stump, or a stone-or anything else that I could tie the sloop to. I sharpened a couple of sticks of the green firewood we had gotten the day before, drove them deeply into the soft turf with a third, and moored to them.

  While I was sharpening my stakes and pounding them in, I argued with myself about Babbie. He was clearly eager to get off the sloop after having been confined there for several weeks, and though I had planned to leave him to guard it, I could see for a league at least in every direction, and could see nothing for him to protect it from. Determined to be prudent no matter how great the temptation, I sternly ordered him to stay where he was, fetched my slug gun, and set off by myself, walking inland for a half hour or so. Finding no fresh water and seeing nothing save a few distant trees of no great size, I returned to the sloop and pulled up my stakes (which was alarmingly easy), and sailed along that strange shore until midafternoon.

  Sailed, I just wrote, and I will not cross it out. But I might almost have said we drifted. In three or four hours, we may have traveled half a league, although I doubt it. “At this rate we’ll die of thirst ten years before we sight the western land,” I told Babbie, and tied up again at a point where the green plain seemed slightly more variegated, having hills and dales of the size loved by children, and a tree or bush here and there. I moored the sloop as before, but when I left it this time I let Babbie come with me.

  It puzzled me that an island so richly green should be so desolate, too. I do not mean that I did not know what that bright green carpet was. I pulled up some and tasted it; and when I did, and saw it in my hand, a little, weak, torn thing and not the vast spongy expanse over which Babbie and I wandered, I knew it for the green scum I had often seen washed ashore after storms, too salty for cattle, or even goats or any other such animal.

  And yet it seemed irrational that so vast a quantity of vegetable matter should go to waste. Pas, who built the Whorl, would have arranged things better, I felt, little knowing that I would soon encounter one of the gods of this whorl of Blue that we call ours in spite of the fact that it existed whole ages before we did, and that it has been only a scant generation since we came to it.

  For an hour or more we walked inland, and then, just as I was about to turn back and call for Babbie (who ranged ahead of me, and sometimes ranged so far that he would be lost to sight for several minutes), I saw the silvery sheen of water between two of the gentle, diminutive hills.

  At first I thought that I had reached the farther side of the island, and hurried ahead to see if it were true; but as we came nearer, I saw more hills beyond the water, and realized that we had found a little tarn, captive rain nestling between hills for the same reason that similar pools are found in the mountains here, or among the mountains inland of New Viron; then I trotted faster still, hoping that it might be fresh enough to drink.

  Before I reached it, I knew that it was not, because Babbie had plunged his muzzle into it and quickly withdrawn it in disgust. I was determined t
o test it for myself, however, and stubbornly continued to walk, impelled by a vague notion that we human beings might be more tolerant of salt than hus, or failing that, that I might be thirstier than Babbie. Common sense should have sent me back to the sloop; if it had, I would almost certainly have lost Babbie then and there. As it was, we both came very near death.

  When I bent to taste the water, I saw something huge move in its depths, as though a great sheet of the green scum had been torn free and was drifting and undulating near the bottom of the tarn. I dipped up a handful of water, and had just brought it toward my mouth when I realized that the undulating thing I had seen was in fact rushing toward me.

  I may have shouted a warning to Babbie-I cannot be sure. I know that I backed away hurriedly, brought up the slug gun, and cycled the action to put a cartridge in the chamber.

  The thing erupted from the water and seemed almost to fly toward us. I fired, and it sank at once into the shallows. I was left with a not very clear impression of something at once huge and flat. Of black and white, and great staring yellow eyes.

  Babbie was clearly terrified. All his bristles stood straight up, making him barrel-sized, humpbacked, and as spiny as a bur. His gait, which was always apt to be lively, had become an eight-legged dance, and he gnashed his tusks without ceasing. Although he had retreated from the tarn until his thrashing tail whisked my knees, he interposed himself between the unknown thing we both feared and me. I was badly frightened, too; and in spite of the assurance I gave myself again and again that I was not as terrified as Babbie, it was he who was trying to protect me.

  I must have looked over my shoulder a hundred times as we left the place, seeing nothing. When we reached the crest of the rounded ridge that would shield the surface of the water from our view once we had crossed, I stopped and turned around for a better view. An appallingly vivid memory of what I saw then has remained with me beyond even death.

  For the great, flat creature I had shot at, and had by that time convinced myself that I had killed, was rising from the shallows. It lifted itself tentatively at first, looming above, and then subsiding into, the water. In a few seconds it rose again and left the tarn altogether, running very fast over the soft green vegetation as a bat runs, using its wide leathern wings as legs. It was black above and white beneath, oddly flattened as I have said, and larger than the carpet in the reception hall of the Caldé’s Palace. I fired once as it dashed toward us, and had pumped a fresh cartridge into the chamber before it bowled me over. The wings that wrapped me then were as rough as files, but rippled like flags as they propelled me toward the gaping, white-lipped mouth.

  It was Babbie who saved me, charging that monstrous flatfish (or whatever it was) and laying open the tough skin of one wing. I got my arm free then, and was able to draw Sinew’s knife, which I plunged into the creature again and again until it was covered with its own blood.

  Here I would like very much to write that I killed it with Sinew’s knife; the truth is that I do not know. A slug is a formidable projectile, so much so that a single shot will often fell a horse or a fourhorn, as I have seen, and when we examined the carcass of the creature from the tarn I found that both my shots had struck it within a hand of its head. I cannot doubt that both did a good deal of damage, although the first clearly did not do enough to prevent the thing’s pursuing us when it had recovered from the initial shock.

  Babbie’s efforts must be considered, too. Certainly the wounds he inflicted on it in the space of five or ten seconds would have killed half a dozen men.

  Yet, in my heart of hearts, I believe that it was Sinew’s long hunting knife, that in stabbing frantically at the only parts of the creature I could reach I struck some vital organ by chance. I believe that was what happened, I say. I cannot be sure.

  Afterward I examined the knife with care and found that I had dulled its edge somewhat when I had cut the wood, although not nearly as much as I had feared. Since I have not described it in detail until now, I believe, I shall do so here. The blade was a hand and two fingers in length, two fingers wide, and very thick and strong at the back. It was a single-edged knife made for skinning and cutting up game, not a dagger, and had been forged (both blade and grip) from a single billet of steel by a smith in New Viron, who had followed a sketch that my son Sinew had made for him. The minor god Hephaestus, who in Old Viron we reckoned the patron of all who worked with fire, stood invisible behind Gadwall as he worked, I feel certain. I have heard men speak of better blades, but I have never met with one.

  * * *

  I got a bad fright today. I was to sacrifice an elephant in the temple, this at the urging of the priests, who seem to feel that a large and valuable animal will provide better omens than a sheep or goat. Seeing me await it with the sacred sword in my hand, the elephant appeared to understand what we had intended, and broke free from its weeping trainer, trumpeting and flailing its trunks like muscular whips. I stood as still as any statue when it charged, knowing that to move would be to die. It knocked me down and did a great deal of damage before it could be brought under control again, and I find that I am being hailed as a man of superhuman courage; but I trembled and wept like a little child when I was alone.

  So it was after the devil-fish was dead. Perhaps I would have behaved better if another human being had been present, but as it was, my hands shook so violently that I found it very difficult to sheath Sinew’s knife. We like to think (or at any rate I always have) that our arms and legs will not betray us; but in moments like that we learn just how wrong we are. My hands trembled, my knees had lost their strength, and tears I could scarcely blink back threatened to wash the devil-fish’s blood from my face. I tried to joke with Babbie then, to make light of what had happened to us; my teeth chattered so badly, however, that he thought I was angry and stood well clear of me, lagging behind so as to keep me under observation for safety’s sake.

  The most logical thing to do would have been to return to the tarn and wash there. The thought filled me with horror, and I promised myself instead that I would wash in the sea; and so I was covered with blood when we returned to the sloop and found Seawrack waiting on board. It is a testament to her courage that she did not scream at the sight and leap back into the water.

  As for me, I was ready to believe that fear and the fight with the monstrous bat-fish had destroyed my reason. To see her as I saw her then, naked except for her gold and the waist-length mantle of her hair (which was gold too in places, but in others green), you must imagine first the days and nights at sea and the hours-long walk across that featureless green plain, where it seemed that no one and nothing lived in the whole whorl but Babbie and me.

  -6-

  SEAWRACK

  Ambassadors from a distant town arrived today. It is called Skany, or at least that is as close as I can come to the name. Its ambassadors are three gray-bearded men, dignified and grave but not humorless, who rode mules and were accompanied by thirty or forty armed servants on foot. They had been told that Silk was here, “ruling Gaon,” and wished to invite me to rule Skany as well.

  I explained that I did not rule (for I am in reality no more than an advisor to the people here) and that I could not and would not take responsibility for two towns so widely separated.

  They then placed several problems before me, saying that these were cases that had arisen in Skany during the past year, and asked me to judge each and explain the principles on which I made my decisions. In one, both parties might well have been telling the truth as they saw it. It could not possibly be decided by someone who could not question them both, and question witnesses as well, and I said so.

  I will set it down here.

  The people of Skany had been able to leave the Long Sun Whorl only because a wealthy man of their native city had supplied several hundred cards and other valuable parts to repair a lander for them. He did so on the condition that he would be permitted to claim a very extensive tract of land, whose size was agreed upon in advance, to
be selected by him. (He was, I believe, one of the three ambassadors, although at no time did they allude to it.) This was done.

  This man now desires to marry a young woman, hardly more than a girl, whom he had employed as a servant previously. The bride (as I shall call her) is entirely willing. The difficulty is that a certain poor woman has come forward to claim the bride-price, saying that she is the bride’s mother. The bride herself denies this, saying that her father was left behind in the Long Sun Whorl, and that her mother was a woman (whom she names) who perished when their lander took flight. Perhaps I should say here that it is their custom for the groom or his family to buy the bride from her parents; but that when the bride is orphaned she is bought from herself-that is to say, she receives her own bride-price, which becomes her property.

  All this brought Seawrack and the gold she wore to mind vividly; yet her case was in certain respects the very reverse of this one. I had intended to write a great deal about her tonight in any event, and I will do so. The reversals should be obvious enough.

  Her pale gold hair was long, as I have said, and in places dyed a misted green by some microscopic sea-plant that had taken refuge there. I am tempted to say that it was her hair that impelled me to name her as I did, but it would not be entirely true; the truth is that her name, which was no word of the Common Tongue, baffled me, and that Seawrack was near to it in sound and seemed to suit her very well.

  Her face was beautiful, strong, and foreign. By that last, I mean that I had never before seen anyone with her sharp chin, very high cheekbones, and tilted eyes. Her skin was as white as foam in those days, which made her lips a blazing scarlet and her midnight-blue eyes darker than the night. I noticed her nakedness first, as I suppose any man would, and then the length of her legs and the womanly contours of her body, and only then the gold she wore. It was not until she released her hold on the backstay and waved, very shyly and tentatively, with her left hand that I realized that her right arm had been amputated just below the shoulder. “Hello?” Her voice was just above the threshold of audibility. And again: “Hello?”