by Gene Wolfe
For hus to be tamed and trained, they must be captured very young, as Babbie no doubt was; and when I lived on Lizard I would probably have said that the surprising thing was that he could be trained at all. The truth, as I came slowly to realize during the time I had him, is that he was not. He did not obey me by rote, as my horse does. Instead, he tried to cooperate with me. I was inferior to him in strength and in many other ways, but I possessed powers that must have seemed wholly magical to him. What did he make of the slug gun? What could he make of it? Plainly it is in the best interest of a captive hus to cooperate with his captors, protecting their property, assisting them to hunt (he will share in the bag, after all) and the rest.
All that seems clear. Accepting it, how are the inhumi able to train human beings? How was Krait able to tame me like a hus, although I had not been taken young? In all honesty, I have no satisfactory answer. He offered himself as a valuable friend when he freed me from the pit, and afterward. And he liked me, I believe, in the same way that I liked poor Babbie. Before Krait died, he loved me, and I him. I had become the father of a brilliant, wayward, monstrous son.
It was dark when we reached the sloop. I had tied her to a tree before leaving with Seawrack and Babbie on our hunting expedition, and she seemed almost exactly as I had left her. There was no sign of Seawrack or the inhumu. I shared a good many apples and what remained of the ham with Babbie, and retired for the night.
It was still dark when I woke wet and shivering, or at least it seemed so. Fog had come in, chill and damp, and so thick that I literally could not see the bowsprit from my seat in the stern. I built a fire in our little box of sand, and Babbie and I sat before it, trying to keep as warm and dry as we could.
“I should have brought warmer clothes,” I told him. “I knew perfectly well that I was going to a faraway place, but it never crossed my mind that the climate here was bound to be different.”
He only sniffed the ashes, not quite convinced as yet that I was not cooking fish in them.
When I had gone to sleep, I had planned to search for Seawrack in the morning. This was the morning, presumably, but there was no looking for her in it, nor for anything else. For a while I considered ordering Babbie to find her for me; but I had no reason to think he knew where she was, and if he set off to search the entire island it seemed likely that I would lose him as well. At last I said, “This fog may last all day, Babbie, and I suppose it’s possible it may be foggy tomorrow, too. But it’s bound to lift eventually.”
He glanced up at me, stirring the ashes tentatively with both forefeet.
Taking his silence for agreement, I continued, “As soon as it does, we’ll sail all the way around the island. She probably got lost. Who wouldn’t get lost in this? And the natural thing for her to do would be to walk downhill until she found the sea, and go along the beach.”
A voice that seemed disembodied remarked, “You’ll find her if you do it, but I can take you straight to her if you want me to.” It was a boy’s voice, and I had better make that plain at once; it might have been one of the twins speaking.
I looked around, seeing no one.
“Up here.” With grace that reminded me vividly of a small green snake I had seen once, Krait slid down the backstay and dropped into the stern. Babbie was on his feet immediately, every bristle up.
“Do you want me to, Horn? You’ll be surprised, at what we find. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I had laid the slug gun beside me when I slept, and left it there under the foredeck when I woke up. My hands groped futilely for it, settling for Sinew’s knife.
“What’s this?” He took a quick step backward, but I could not be sure his alarm was real. “I’m offering to do you a favor.”
“Have you killed her?”
He raised both hands, exactly the gesture of a boy trying to fend off a larger and stronger one. “I haven’t! I don’t remember exactly what I promised you when you were down in that hole-”
“You promised you wouldn’t drink my blood, or hers, or Babbie’s. It leaves you any amount of evil, though I didn’t think of that at the time.”
He would not meet my eyes. “It wouldn’t be fair, would it? You’d call me a cheater.”
I was so angry, and so frightened for Seawrack that I demanded he answer my question, although he already had.
“I haven’t hurt here at all. She’s alive, and from what I’ve seen of her, perfectly happy.”
“Then take me to her!”
“This minute? Horn, listen. I promised not to feed on you, but I promised a great deal more. I promised to help you get to Pajarocu, and all that.” He took the key to my house out of his pocket and held it up. “Remember this?”
I nodded.
“I haven’t used it. Someday I may, but I haven’t yet. You say you’re reasonable. You said you tried to be, and you know that I want to find Pajarocu as much as you do. More, if you ask me. Would it make sense for me to hurt her, when I haven’t hurt you or your family? Or your pet hus? I wouldn’t guide you to her after I’d harmed her, would I?”
I was relaxing. The mere fact that he seemed afraid of me made me less fearful of him, although that is always a mistake. “I apologize. Why did you say I’d be surprised when we found her?”
He shook his head. “I won’t tell you, because you wouldn’t believe me. We’d fight again, and it would be bad for both of us. If you want to go now I’ll show you, but we’ll have to untie your boat.”
We did, and got the anchor up; it was not until I had the sloop gliding like a ghost through the damp gray silence that I asked whether he could see to guide us in spite of the fog.
“Yes, I can. We all can, and now you know something that very few others do.” He threw back his head, looking in the general direction of the block at the top of the mast. “What color is the sky, Horn?”
I told him that I could not see it, that I could not so much as see the masthead.
“No wonder you didn’t spot me up there. Look anyway. What color is it?”
“Gray. Fog is always gray, unless there’s sunshine on it. Then it’s white.”
“And when you look up at the sky on a sunny day? What color then?”
“Blue.”
He said nothing, so I added, “It’s a beautiful, clear blue, and the clouds are white, if there are any.”
“The sky I see is always black.”
I believe I must have explained that for us the night sky was black, too, and tried to describe it.
“It’s always black,” he repeated as he went forward and climbed onto the little foredeck, “and the stars are there all the time.”
* * *
No doubt my explanation will bore you, whoever you are, unless you are Nettle; but she is the reader I hope for, and so I will explain anyway for her sake. When I leave a break in my text like the one above, sketching the three whorls to separate one bit from the next, it is generally because I have decided to stop and get some sleep.
This was different. I wanted to think, and in a moment I will tell you what I was thinking about. I wiped my pen and laid it down, rose and clasped my hands behind my back. You know, dear wife, how I used to walk the beach deep in thought when we were planning the mill. In the same way I stalked silently around this big pink-and-blue house, which they have given me and expanded for me, and which we call my palace to overawe our neighbors.
All was silent, everyone else having gone to bed. In the stableyard my elephant slept standing, as elephants do and as horses sometimes do also; but slept soundly nonetheless. From the stables I went out into the garden, and listened to the nightingales singing as I stared up at the night sky and at such stars as could sometimes be glimpsed between thick, dark clouds that would have been almost visible to Krait. Two nightingales in gold cages are kept there, as I should explain. (I ought to have written were.)
The weather has been sultry for a week at least, and I found the garden, with its jasmine, plashing fountains, ferns, and stat
ues a very pleasant place. For half an hour or more I sat upon a white stone bench, looking up at the stars through torn and racing clouds, stars (each a whorl like Blue or Green) that must seem to the inhumi like fruit glimpsed over the high wall of a garden.
Trampin’ outwards from the city,
No more lookin’ than was she,
’Twas there I spied a garden pretty
A fountain an’ a apple tree.
These fair young girls live to deceive you,
Sad experience teaches me.
That is not singing as Seawrack understands it, nor as she has made me understand it either; but she has been silent since shadelow, and the old rollicking song marches through my head again. How young we were, Nettle!
Oh, how very young we were!
When I went back inside, I heard Chandi weeping in the women’s quarters. Because I was afraid she would wake the others I made her come out with me, and we sat together on the white stone bench while I did my unskillful best to comfort her. She was homesick, poor child, and I made her tell me her real name and describe her parents and brothers and sisters, the town she comes from, and even her mother’s cook and her father’s workmen. She was born in the Whorl, just as you and I were; but she can remember nothing about it, having left as an infant. I got her to tell me everything she had learned about it from her parents, but there was very little beyond self-glorification: they had lived in a much bigger house there, and everyone had deferred to them. That sort of thing. She knew that the sun had been a line across the sky, but imagined that it rose and set as the Short Sun does here.
As for me, I did not weep; but I was at least as homesick as she, and when she was calmer I told her about you, Nettle, calling you Hyacinth. She understood very little but sympathized very much. She is a good-hearted girl, and cannot be much over fifteen.
When I had talked her out, and myself as well, I promised that I would send her back to her father and mother. She was horrified, and explained that no matter what she or I said they would believe that I had rejected her, as would all the people of her town; she would be shunned by everyone, and might even be stoned to death. She is mine, it seems-but not mine to set free. I could not help thinking that she and I, who are so different in appearance, age, and gender, are in fact two of a kind.
Together, we released one of the nightingales and watched it fly away, a symbol for both of us of what we wished for ourselves. She wanted me to open the cage of the other, but I told her that I would not, that another night would come on which she would be as she had been tonight; and I said that when that night came we would talk again and set the second bird free.
It is not well to spend one’s symbols improvidently.
As for what I left this lovely table to think about, it was Krait’s remark. He had said the stars were always there, and I (that so much younger I aboard the sloop) had thought he meant merely that they did not vanish in fact when they vanished to sight. It seemed a trivial observation, since I had never supposed they did-everyone has seen the flame of a candle disappear in sunlight and knows that the invisible flame will burn a finger.
Now I think differently, and I feel certain I am right. The black sky that Krait saw was not the night sky, or the day sky either. It was the sky, the only sky there is, without clouds and without any change save for the slow circling of the Short Sun and the other, more distant, stars, and the somewhat quicker rising and setting of Green. The whorl to him and to all the inhumi is the airless starlit plain we saw when poor Mamelta led us to the belly of the Whorl. Small wonder then that the inhumi are so wretched, so cruel, and so hungry for warmth.
When Chandi and I glimpsed Green from our seat in the garden, she told me that her mother had told her once that it was the eye of the Great Inhumu, whose children he sends here. I nodded, and was careful not to mention that I had lived and fought there.
* * *
Dreamt that Oreb was back. Very strange. I was in the Sun Street Quarter again, made inexpressibly sad by its devastation. I sent Pig away as I actually did there, with Oreb for a guide; but at the last moment I could not bear to be parted from him and called him back. He returned and lit upon my shoulder, wrapping a slimy tentacle around my neck, he having become Scylla. In Oreb’s voice, she demanded that I take her to the Blue Mainframe. I explained that I could not, that there was no such place, only the Short Sun. While I spoke I watched Pig’s disappearing back and heard the faint tapping of his sword.
I “woke” heartbroken, and found that I had fallen asleep in the jungle, lying beside Krait. I picked up his hand and rubbed the back, feeling that rubbing would somehow restore him to life, but his body was dissolving into fetid liquid already, a liquid that became the filthy water of the sewer I opened there.
-10-
SEAWRACK’S RING
I have been hunting again. Some of the men who captured the wild cattle invited me to go with them, and being curious I made time for it. It was very different from the cattle hunt, a butchery bloody enough to satisfy any number of augurs.
We were after wallowers, the most prized game hereabout, and the most difficult to hunt. A silence of eight or ten had been located not much more than a league from the town, but we had to ride a long way out of the direct route and through difficult country in order to approach them upwind. All the men said that wallowers never remain in a place where they have been hunted, and may move forty leagues or more before they stop again.
I had a slug gun like the rest, and although I had not the least intention of using it when we set out, I realized before long that I would have to if the opportunity arose; otherwise Kilhari, Hari Mau, and the others in our party would feel I had betrayed them.
Kilhari posted us in a wide semicircle well out of sight of the silence (as the herd is called), telling us that when we saw the stalkers approaching it we might edge in a little. I asked him to put me in the worst place, explaining that I had borrowed my gun, was half blind and badly out of practice, and so forth. He posted me last, at one of the tips of the crescent, saying that those were the worst places. They are actually the best, as I suspected at the time and verified this evening.
After about an hour at my post, I caught sight of the decoys. These were two men in the wickerwork figure of a young wallower covered with hide. They advanced slowly and cautiously through the open, swampy forest, often turning away from the denser growth where the silence was thought to be, so as to give the stalkers hidden behind them better cover. Their part of the hunt is the most dangerous as well as the least glorious, because a real wallower will often charge their false one, and they have no slug guns and would have no chance of firing them if they did. For protection they must depend upon the stalkers behind them.
Their gradual advance must have taken the better part of another hour. Because I was eager to catch a glimpse of the great beasts about which I had heard so much on the ride out, I advanced, too, pushing my way through the high, rough grass, although not nearly as far as the decoy and the stalkers, and standing on tiptoe from time to time in order to see better over it. The suspense was almost unbearable.
Quite suddenly, both stalkers rose and fired over the back of the wickerwork figure. Up until that time, I had been unable to see the wallowers, but as soon as the crash of the slug guns sounded, a dense patch of saplings and brush seemed almost to explode as twenty or more enormous dark-gray beasts with towering horns dashed from it.
And vanished. It was one of the most amazing things that I have ever seen. At one moment these huge animals, twice the size of an ordinary horse and six times its weight, were charging madly in every direction. At the next they were gone. Several hunters were firing some distance from me, but I saw nothing to shoot at.
I do not remember seeing the young bull rise from the scythe grass, although I suppose I must have-only slamming my slug gun to my shoulder and pulling the trigger, then flying through the air without fear and without pain, and then one of the other hunters (it was Ram, whose name,
I fear, makes him sound as though he comes from my own Viron) helping me up. In retrospect it was rather like my hunt in the Land of Fires, but of course I did not think of that until tonight.
Wishing very much that Babbie were with us, I told Ram that we had to track the wallower that had charged me, that I had fired at him from very close range and felt certain I had wounded him. He laughed and pointed, and in a few seconds half a dozen men were gathered around the dead wallower, which had not run ten strides before collapsing. Since two or three hunters often empty their guns to bring one of these animals down, it was an extraordinary shot. As for me, I had torn trousers and have some big bruises here and there, but I am well otherwise.
These hunts are only occasionally successful, and a single kill is considered an achievement. We had two, one killed by the stalkers (who are generally the most experienced hunters and the best shots) and this one by me, so we returned to town as heroes. I will have to refrain from all hunting in the future if I want to keep the reputation I have won.
At any rate, we are having a great feast tonight, with everyone who took part sharing in the meat. I excused myself as soon as the serious drinking began, which is how I have this opportunity to write. The hide, the Y-shaped horn, the bones, and especially the big canine teeth, all of which are valuable, will be sold. I will receive the money from my animal, and since I do not need it I hope to use some of it to benefit the poor.