by Gene Wolfe
“I know.” He grinned at me, and I saw the folding fangs that reached nearly to his chin. “You could kill me with this. All you’ve got to do is point it and pull the trigger. Isn’t that right?”
“I won’t.”
“Your last chance would be gone.” He grinned again, testing one slender fang against the ball of his thumb, as though making certain that it was sharp enough.
“I know,” I said.
He laughed, a boy’s cheerful, delighted chortle. “Do you know who I am, too?”
“I know what you are. Is that what you mean?”
“But not who?”
By that time I was sure he had come to kill me. I stared down at the leaves.
“I am your best friend, the only friend you have in all the whorl, Horn. Have you any others?” He sat down facing me, with my slug gun across his lap.
There was nothing to say, so I said nothing.
“You hate me and you hate our people. You made that clear when I visited your boat. Why do you hate us so?”
I thought of Sinew, livid and scarcely breathing in the little bed we had made for him; but I said, “I wouldn’t hate you at all if you got me out of this. I would be very grateful to you.”
“Why did you hate me so when you woke up and found me on your boat?”
It was a long time before I spoke, a minute at least; but he seemed prepared to wait all day, and at length I muttered, “You know.”
“I don’t.” He shook his head. “I know why you Blue people dislike us, and it’s regrettable though understandable. I don’t know why you, the particular individual called Horn, hate me as you do.”
I was silent.
“Me. Not my race in general but me; you do, and I can feel it. Why does Horn hate me? I won’t name myself yet. I haven’t quite decided on a name, and there’s plenty of time. But why hate me?”
“I don’t hate you,” I insisted. “I was afraid of you on the sloop because I knew you had come for blood.”
He waited expectantly.
“I know enough about you inhumi to frighten me ten times over. I know how strong you are, and that you can swim better than we can, and fly. I know how clever you are, too.”
“Do you really know how clever we are? Tell me. I’d love to hear it.”
“You speak my language as well as I do, and you could make me believe you were one of us if you wanted to. One of you was our Prolocutor in the Long Sun Whorl.” I hesitated. “Do I have to explain what a Prolocutor is?”
He shook his head. “Go on.”
“He pretended to be a doddering old man, but he saw through everybody and outwitted our Ayuntamiento over and over again. He outwitted the rest of us, too. We never doubted that he was human.”
“I see. He was a cunning foe, who nearly destroyed you.” At certain angles there was a light in the inhumu’s eyes that seemed almost a yellow flame.
“No, he wasn’t my enemy, he was my friend. Or at any rate he was Silk’s friend, and I was Silk’s friend, too.” Exhausted as I was, and sick with pain, I did not consider how unlikely it was that the inhumu had ever heard of Silk.
“Are you saying you hated this man because he befriended your friend?”
“I’ve made it sound too simple.”
“Most things are simple.”
“Patera Quetzal wasn’t a man at all, but we didn’t know it. He was one of you, and he drank blood!”
“I wish that I could talk to him.” The inhumu seemed to speak mostly to himself.
“He’s dead.”
“Oh. Really. You turned on your friend and killed him, when you found out he was one of us?”
I wanted to say that I wished I had, which would have been the plain truth; but I wanted much more-wanted desperately, in fact-to escape the pit. “We didn’t. We didn’t even know until he was dead. He was shot by the Trivigauntis we were fighting and died of his wound.” That was the plain truth as well.
“So you hate him now because he drank your blood and deceived you, and that hatred has been carried over to me? Is that all there is?”
“You drank Babbie’s blood.”
“Your hus? Yes, I did. What else?”
I actually began to tell him, saying, “I have a wife and children-”
“I know. On the isle they call the Lizard, or Lizard Island.”
I suppose I must have gaped.
“You’ve been answering questions for me, so I’ll answer that one for you. When I was on your boat, the siren who was with you said you’d spoken to people on another one. Do you remember that?”
“A siren?” I was bewildered, and in no condition to think. “Do you mean Seawrack?”
“If we accept that name as hers.”
“She’s very good-looking.” I tried to swallow, although my mouth was drier than the palms of my hands. “But she’s not a-a seductress. She’s still very young.”
He smiled. Until then I had forgotten that they could. “Let’s forget I used that word. The young lady with you said you had spoke to another boat.”
“You can’t have learned about us just from that.”
“Certainly I could have. I did. I found the boat, which wasn’t very far from yours, and talked to the men on it. They thought I was one of you, naturally, and I gave them valuable information, which I made up. In return, they told me your name and your wife’s and where you were going, which was the chief thing I wanted to know. There aren’t many towns where a man might be named Horn. I went to New Viron, which was the closest. We can fly, you know, a whole lot faster than your little boat can sail. I made more inquiries there, and I had no trouble at all.”
If my face was not grim at that moment, it lied; I was very close to trying to snatch my slug gun from him and kill him. “Did you harm my family?”
“No. I flew over your island and had a look at your house and your paper mill. I’m curious at times, like anybody else. I saw a woman there, standing on the beach and looking out to sea, an older and somewhat plainer woman than the new wife on your boat. I didn’t harm her, and I don’t think she saw me. Is that sufficient?”
I nodded.
“Fine. Take this back, will you?” He passed me my slug gun. “I can’t use it and you can, so you’d better have it.”
Numbly, I accepted it and pushed up the safety.
“You aren’t going to shoot me?” He raised his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.
“No. No, I’m not.”
“You’re remembering something. I sense it. Want to tell me what it is?”
“Nothing to the point.” My head ached, and the hope that had given me new life for a minute or two had guttered out. Should I put the muzzle into my mouth? That might be the best way.
“Tell me, please.”
Perhaps it was the shock of hearing one of these monsters say please; whatever the reason, I did. “I was recalling what a woman named Chenille once told Nettle about a man, a starving convict, named Gelada. He was in the tunnels. There are horrible tunnels running underground all through the Long Sun Whorl, where I used to live.”
“Gelada was in them,” the inhumu prompted me.
“He wanted to escape. Anybody would. He had a bow, but Auk, the man who was with Chenille, said he wouldn’t shoot them, because they were Gelada’s only chance. Without them, he would never get out.”
“I said that. I said all that earlier, and you ought to have listened. If I were to get you out, it would be terribly dangerous for me, wouldn’t it? Unless I disposed of that slug gun and your knife first.” His face was that of a reptile, although his forehead was higher; his voice was a young man’s-was my son’s.
“No,” I told him. I was almost too despondent to argue. “If you freed me, I would never hurt you. Never, not for any reason.”
He stood up. “I’m going, but I’ll leave you this to think about. We could kill you, all of you. We’re stronger, as you said, and we can fly. Our race is older than yours, and has learned things that you can’t ev
en dream of. Since you hate us, and kill us when you can, why don’t we do it?”
“You want our blood, I suppose.”
“Exactly. You are our cattle.”
I had expected him to fly, but he swarmed up the smooth stone side of the pit as a squirrel climbs a tree, making it look so easy that for a moment I almost imagined that I could do it myself. My thumb was on the safety; but without him I could not escape. Nor could I escape the memory of a time when Sinew was not yet born, and Hoof and Hide not even thought of, when Nettle and I had worked frantically to free someone else’s cow from a quagmire in the vain hope that her owner would give her to us if we succeeded.
Then he was gone; and I, using the slug gun for a crutch, got to my feet and was so foolish as to try to climb out as he had, struggling in that way until I was utterly exhausted and never getting half as high as my own head.
* * *
Last night I stopped writing because I could not bring myself to describe the rest of that day, or the night that followed it, or the day that followed that, the day on which I licked dew from the sides of the pit, lying on my belly at first, then kneeling, then standing-and at last, when the Short Sun peeped over the rim and the dew was almost gone, wiping the stone above my head with fingers that I thrust into my mouth the moment they felt damp. Altogether I got two mouthfuls of water, at most. No more than that, certainly, and very likely it was less.
Earlier I had prayed, then cursed every god in my heart when the rescuer they sent had proved to be Krait. On that day I did not pray, or curse, or any such thing.
This is what I least wished to write about last night, but I am going to try to write it down this evening. Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished.
I was standing in Nettle’s kitchen. She was making soup, and I watched her add a whole plateful of chopped meat to her kettle and shake the fire. She turned and saw me, and we kissed and embraced. I explained to her that I was not really in her kitchen at all, that I lay at the bottom of a pit in a ruin of the Vanished People on an island far away, and that I was dying of thirst.
“Oh,” Nettle said, “I’ll get you some water.”
She went to the millstream and brought back a dipper of clean, cool water for me; but I could not drink. “Come with me,” I told her. “I’ll show you where I am, and when you give me your water there I’ll be able to drink it.” I took her hand (yes, Nettle my darling, I took your hard, hardworking little hand in mine) and tried to lead her back to the pit in which I lay. She stared at me then as if I were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget that scream.
And I lay in the pit, as before. The Short Sun was burning gold.
It had crossed the pit and vanished on the other side an hour or two before, when the inhumu returned. He stood with his toes grasping the edge and looked down at me, and I saw that he was wearing one of my tunics and a pair of my old trousers, the trousers loose and rolled up to the knee, and the tunic even looser, so that it hung on him as his father’s coat does on a child who plays at being grown. “Horn!” he called. And again, “Horn!”
I managed to sit up and to nod.
“Look, Horn, I’ve brought you a bottle of water.” He held it up. “I carried an empty one, and filled it to the top at a spring I’ve discovered not far from here. Wasn’t that clever of me?”
I tried to speak, to beg him for the water; but I could not. I nodded again.
“You’d promise me anything for this, wouldn’t you?” He leaped into the pit with it. “I’ll trade you this bottle for your slug gun. Will you trade?”
I must have nodded, because the bottle was in my hands, although he held it too. I put it to my lips and drank and drank; I would not have believed that I could drink an entire bottle of that size without ever taking it from my mouth, but that was how I drank that one.
“You feel better now,” the inhumu said. It was a statement, not a question.
I found that I could speak again, although the voice did not seem mine. “Yes. Thank you. I do.”
“I know. I’ve been in exactly the same position myself. I not only got you that bottle of water, Horn, but I brought you a coil of rope. It’s small, but I think it may be strong enough. It’s very hard to carry anything when you fly. It keeps pulling you down, and you’ve got to hold it with your feet.” He held up one foot in a way that very few human beings could have imitated, and I saw that his toes were as long as my fingers, and tipped with claws.
“Thank you,” I repeated. “Thank you very much.”
“I’ll get you out, or my rope and I will. But you’ll have to help us, and I’ve got to get your promise first. Your solemn oath.”
I nodded and tried to smile.
“A question.” He leveled a forefinger longer than mine; it, too, was claw-tipped. “Are you a logical, unemotional sort of man, would you say? Are you willing to follow reason wherever it takes you?”
Halting and stammering, I tried to say that I made an effort to be, and thought that I was.
“Then let’s go back. Not to the boat, we don’t have to back up that far. The other day I wanted to know why you hated me, and you explained that it was because I wanted to drink your blood, and because one of us had deceived you into thinking he was one of you up there. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.” I could not imagine what he was getting at.
“You drove me from your boat, despite the fact that I didn’t try to deceive you. If I would not drink your blood-I will pledge myself not to-would you still drive me away?”
My thirst had been quenched, but I was weak and sick. “If I could.”
“Why?”
“One of you nearly killed my son.”
His head wagged. “That wasn’t me. Haven’t you any better reason?”
“Because you drank Babbie’s blood, and would glut yourself on Seawrack’s if you could.”
“I pledge myself not to drink theirs either. I warn you, I won’t go any further. I have to eat, just as you do. Now, if I get you out, will you let me remain on board?”
Quite certain that he would never rescue me, I said that I would.
“You have a good reputation in your town. Are you a man of your word? Is your word sacred to you, even when it’s given to me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You lack conviction. Listen to me. You are going to Pajarocu.”
My eyes must have opened a little wider at that.
“The men on the other boat told me. You’re going to Pajarocu. Acknowledge it.”
“We are trying to get to Pajarocu.”
“That’s better. You’re going to board a lander there, and fly up to the great ship.”
I nodded, and seeing that a nod would not be sufficient, said, “We’re hoping to fly back up to the Whorl, as you say. I certainly am, and I’ll take Seawrack if she wants to go and they’ll allow me to.”
The inhumu pointed to himself, his wrist backbent in a fashion that no human being could have managed. “I want to go with you. Will you help me, if I help you get out of this place?”
“Yes,” I said again.
He smiled wryly, swaying as Patera Quetzal used to. “You don’t mean it.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You’ll have to give a better pledge than that. Listen to me, Horn. I’ll do everything I can to help you get there before the lander takes off. You think I’ll obstruct you. I won’t. I’ll help all I can. We’re strong, you say. Won’t I be a strong friend to you? You praised our cunning. It will be at your service. Don’t say you don’t; trust me. You must trust me, or die.”
“I trust you,” I said, and I meant it; that is the measure of a man’s desire to live-of mine, at least. An inhumu had demanded that I trust him if I wanted to live, and trust him I d
id.
“Better. Will you let me go with you and help you? Will you pledge yourself to reveal my nature to no one?”
“Yes, if you’ll get me out.”
“You still don’t mean it. Do you believe in gods? Who are they?”
I rattled off the names of the Nine.
“Which means the most to you? Name him!”
“Great Pas.”
“You’re holding something back. Do you think you can trick me because I can trick you? You’re wrong, and you’d better learn that from the beginning. Which means most to you?”
It was the end of my resistance. “The Outsider. And Pas.”
The inhumu smiled. “I like you, Horn. I really do. I’m growing fond of you. Now listen to this. I swear to you by Pas, by the Outsider, and by my own god that I will not feed upon either you or Seawrack, as you call her. Neither will I take the blood of your pet hus, ever again. I further swear that there will be no trickery or double-dealing in the keeping of this oath I give, no sophistry. I will keep the spirit as well as the letter. Is that satisfactory?”
I nodded.
“Then I’ll be wasting my time with the rest, but I’m going to waste it. I further swear that as long as I’m on your boat I’ll never deceive you into thinking that I’m one of you, or try to. What more do you want me to say?”
“Nothing,” I told him.
“I’ll continue just the same. Listen to me, Horn. What does it matter to you whether I prey on your kind here or there? Is their blood more precious aboard the void ship?”
“No.”
“Correct. It doesn’t matter in the least. I’ll have an easier time of it up there with less competition, that’s all. And there’ll be one fewer of us down here preying upon your friends and family.” He was silent for a few seconds, gauging my reaction. “Suppose I leave you where you are. Who will prey upon your family then, Horn? That nice woman I saw, and whatever children the two of you have back home on Lizard Island? No doubt you’ve thought about it?”
I shook my head.
“Why, I will. I’ll leave you in here, but I won’t just leave you here and forget you. I’ll go back there bringing word of you, and you won’t be there to protect them. Do I have to speak more clearly tian that? I will if I must.”