by Gene Wolfe
And some, dear Nettle, I hope to use to rejoin you. They have almost ceased to watch me, and I am careful to do nothing to arouse their suspicions.
No doubt I have written too much about our hunt, which can be of little interest to you; but I wanted to set down this account while the facts were still fresh in my mind. I had another purpose, too, which I hope to make clear if I have time for a good session tomorrow.
* * *
I meant to tell you how Krait deceived Seawrack tonight. I will, but there is something else I ought to describe first, although it will be hard to represent exactly, and I may fail to make it clear. Put simply, it is that I saw the sea (and afterward the land as well) from that time forward as I do today. If I say that I believe I am seeing these things, and houses, too, and occasionally faces, as a good painter must, will you understand me?
Probably not, because I am not sure I understand it myself. You told me about the beautiful pictures upstairs in the cenoby, and I put them in our book because Maytera Marble had posed for Molpe. Describe that picture again to yourself, and imagine me looking at the sea as the sea would have appeared in it.
As for the rest of you who may read this, whether you are our sons or strangers or both, there is a sharpness of detail born of a consciousness of detail. When we untied the sloop, I saw the unnatural calm of the little bay beneath the fog that veiled it, and when I had steered us out (guided by Krait, who stood upon the mainsail gaff to advise me), every coiling, foaming wave that slapped our hull was as clearly drawn as any of my brothers.
I heard Seawrack long before I saw her. She was singing just as she is singing now, singing as the Mother had, her sweet, clear voice at one with the fog and the waters, so that I knew the sea had been incomplete without her song, that it was fully created, a finished object, only while she sang. Fog muffles sound, so we must have been near her then; I would have taken the sloop nearer still to hear her, although Krait warned me against it; but he slid down the forestay and loosed the jib, so that we swung into the wind with the main flapping like a flag. He told me to call to Seawrack, but I could not. How I wish you could have heard her, Nettle! You have never heard such singing.
We quarreled at that point, the inhumu and I. We were to quarrel almost daily afterward, but that was the first and one of the worst. I was angry at him for untying the jib, and he was angry at me for steering too near the rocks. The upshot of our quarrel was that the sloop was free to sail herself, and the course she chose took her a good league into open water. By the time we had made peace, Krait could no longer see the island or anything else, or so he said.
“I’ll have to fly,” he told me, “and I may have to fly high. Then I’ll come down again and give you an approximate direction.”
I asked whether he could find the sloop again in the fog, and suggested that I might build a fire in the sandbox to guide him, although the truth was that I was hoping to crowd on sail and evade him. He laughed and asked me to turn my back; I did, and when I turned around again he was gone. „»
Babbie snorted with relief, and I felt as he did. Much more, I felt-I knew-the sea and the cold gray sea-fog that wrapped us both. I have said that I saw it as a painter would, and I may even have said that I saw it as a picture; but it was a picture that surrounded and saturated me, and mixed with my spirit. The sea whose spray wet my beard, and the fog I inhaled at every breath, were no longer things apart from myself. If they were pictured, I was pictured, too; and it was the same picture. We lived in and through each other then, in a picture without a frame.
Something had happened to change my perception, and that change remains in force to this moment. How I wish I could make you see our hunt for the wild cattle as I did! The milling herd with rolling eyes, and we riders with our embroidered flags! You will want me to explain, but I have no explanation, although at that time and for a long time after it I felt that it was the inhumu’s presence. I taxed him with it when he returned to the sloop, landing softly behind me and announcing his arrival with a boyish laugh. He denied it, and we quarreled again, although not as bitterly as before. Even then, I knew that his denials were without value.
Since Krait is not present to speak for himself, let me speak for him. I will try to do it with more logic than either of us displayed when I argued with him on the sloop.
First, he did not have that effect on others, as well as I could judge.
Second, it did not benefit him, and in fact he lost by it.
Third, it persisted even in his absence, as I have tried to show.
And fourth and last, I had experienced nothing of the sort when we were with Quetzal in the tunnels.
Yet he was capable of affecting our perception of him, for Seawrack and others saw him as a human being, as the boy he claimed to be, whereas I would sooner have called poor Babbie a child.
Seawrack, as I should explain, swam out to the sloop once she understood that I was on it and that I still wanted her. The inhumu had made me promise I would call to her as loudly as I could the moment I heard her voice; but I did not call then or for some minutes afterward, only telling him to be quiet when he spoke and once striking him with Marrow’s stick.
A time came when she sang no longer, and I recalled my promise and pleaded with her; but by then she was already in the water and swimming toward us. This happened hours after we had sailed out to sea with no one at the helm, because we had first found the mainland (which Krait had mistaken for the island) and only after we had discovered our mistake returned to the island-and we had to sail some distance around it to reach Seawrack again, I still blinded by the fog and in terror of submerged rocks, which the inhumu could no more have seen than I could.
By the time we had relocated her it was probably about mid-afternoon, and the fog had lifted somewhat. It parted, and I glimpsed her sitting upon a rock thrust up from the sea like the horn of some drowned monster. She was naked (more so than when she had first come on board, since she no longer had her gold) and her legs, which were very long, as I may have said, seemed almost to coil about her.
“She is going back to what she was,” the inhumu told me when I would listen to him again. “While she was with you, she was becoming one of you. That was why the Mother gave her to you, I think.” While we sailed out of the bay, I had told him how Seawrack came to be with me.
I echoed him. “You think?”
“Yes, I do, which is more than I can say for you. Do you imagine that now that she’s coming back to you she’ll sing for you the way she did out there?”
I had not considered that, and it must have showed in my stricken expression.
“You’re right. She probably won’t sing a note, even if you beg.”
Having seen her small, white hand upon the gunwale, I put a finger to my lips-at which he smiled.
We helped her aboard and she stared at the inhumu (whose name I had never learned, thinking of him up until then only as “the inhumu”). I told her (as he and I had agreed I should) that he was a boy who had been left behind on the island by some boat’s crew, and that he had helped me out of the pit. It was difficult for me to lie like that, because as I spoke I could see very plainly that he was not a boy or a human being of any kind. Looking at her instead should have helped but did not, only making me that much more conscious of the purity and innocence of her face.
“Don’t you want to see me?” she asked.
I told her that I could not look into her eyes without falling in love with her. Forgive me, Nettle!
The inhumu offered her his hand, and I felt certain she would feel his claws, but they had vanished. “I’m Krait,” he said. It was the first time I heard the name.
She had turned from him before he had finished speaking, stroking my cheek with her fingers. “You were dead.”
I shook my head.
“Yes, you were. I saw you down there.” She trembled ever so slightly. “Dead things are food.”
“Sometimes,” Krait amended.
She ig
nored him. “Where are my clothes?”
They were not on the sloop, and I had no more tunics to spare, but we contrived a sailcloth skirt for her, as I had before, while she stared vacantly out at the broken fog and the tossing water. “You must hold on to her now if you want to keep her,” Krait told me.
“Can you sail?”
“No. But you must do what I tell you, or she’ll be over the side in half an hour.” He pointed to the little space under the foredeck where she and I had slept. “Lie with her. Talk to her, embrace her, and try to get her to sing for you. I won’t watch, I promise.”
I trimmed the sails and tied the tiller, warning him that if he did not want to see us drowned he would have to call me at any change in wind or weather, and persuaded Seawrack to rest with me for an hour or so.
She agreed, I believe, mostly so that we could talk in private. “I don’t like that boy,” she told me.
“He got me out of the pit after you and Babbie had abandoned me.” Now that she was back with me and safe, I had discovered that I was angry with her.
“You were dead,” she said again. “I saw you. Dead people are to eat.”
Anxious to change the subject, I asked her to sing, as Krait had suggested.
“The boy would come in then. I don’t want him in here with us.”
“Neither do I. Sing only to me, very softly, but not like you used to when we were alone. The way you sang out there.”
“He would still hear me.” She shuddered. “His feet are twisted.”
“You think he’s a boy?” (I was incredulous, feeling very much as I did a few days ago when I realized that the wallowers had in fact been deceived by the wicker figure.)
She giggled. “I don’t think he’s a boy that way. He’s old enough. You couldn’t keep him out.”
“He would come to you in here, if you sang?”
“Oh, yes!” The only hand that she possessed slipped into mine.
Aching for her, I asked, “What would I do, Seawrack? I’m in here with you already.”
“Mother told me to stay with you.”
I nodded. I could hear Babbie rattling up and down on the foredeck above our heads like a whole squad of troopers, half mad with nervousness and suppressed aggression; and now I wonder whether he saw Krait as an inhumu or a boy, and whether he made any distinction between the two. “Out there,” I told Seawrack, “you thought I no longer liked to look at you. The truth is that I don’t like to look at him.”
“At the boy?”
“At Krait,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll stare, and that wouldn’t be polite.”
“Stare at his feet?”
“That’s right. That must be why he walks so badly. But what does he look like, the rest of him?”
“You know.”
“Men and women often see the same people very differently,” I explained, thinking that it had never been truer than it was for the two of us that afternoon. “I’d like to know how he seems to you.”
“You’re jealous!” She laughed, delighted.
At that time I still hoped that Seawrack would see Krait for what he was without prompting from me. As seriously as I could, I said, “You don’t belong to me, and I belong to Nettle, my wife. If you want to give yourself to another man, I may advise against it. I will, if I don’t think he’s suitable for you. But don’t ever give yourself to that boy-to Krait, as he’s calling himself.”
“Well, he’s very good-looking.” She was steering my hand to her left breast.
I pulled my hand away. “No doubt he is.”
“Don’t be angry with me.”
I told her I was not angry, that I was only worried about her, which was not entirely true. Up on the foredeck I heard the chatter of Babbie’s tusks; Babbie was angry, at least, and angrier still because he had to behave as though he were not.
“I came as soon as I heard your voice. I should have let you come to me. Then this would be wrecked. Do you remember how you kissed me the first time?”
* * *
It has been a week since I wrote the words that you have just read, a week of heat and terrible, violent storms, and reports of the inhumi from many outlying farms. Not far from town, a woman and her two children were found bloodless by a neighbor child.
So I have been busy, although not too busy to continue the account I began last year and have labored over for so long. The question is not whether I should tell the truth-I know well enough that I should. The question is how much of it must I tell?
(“A close mouth catches nae flies,” Pig would advise me. I wish he were here to do it.)
If Silk were to have intercourse with another woman, he would confess it to Hyacinth, I feel sure; but that is small guidance, because she would not care-or at least, would not care much. How much would he tell her? That is the true question, and a question to which I can give no satisfactory answer. The mere fact? Will the mere fact not make things look worse, much worse, than they really were?
When I began, these were things I planned to omit. I see now that if I omit them, nothing I say should be believed. No doubt I should burn every scrap of this.
* * *
I will not be believed in any case. I know it. Hari Mau and the rest will not even believe that I am who I am, and I have known that I would not be believed ever since I wrote about the leatherskin. I am going to tell the whole truth, as I would at shriving. I will hide nothing and embroider nothing, from this point forward. It will give my poor dear Nettle pain in the unlikely event that she-or anyone-reads what I write; but she will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that she knows the worst.
I had asked Seawrack to sing for me, as you have already read. The truth is that I implored her to, and at last threatened her, and she sang. She sang only a note or two, just a word or two in some tongue never spoken by human beings, and I was upon her. I tore off the clumsy sailcloth skirt and bit and clawed and pummeled her, doing things no man ought ever to do to any woman.
Perverse acts that I would like to believe no other man has performed.
When it was over at last I slept, exhausted; and when I woke we were sailing briskly north-northeast, with a cold coast of deep green foliage to port. I stared at it, then at the inhumu seated at the tiller.
He grinned at me. “You thought I couldn’t do tiiis.”
My jaw hurt, and in fact there was precious little of me anywhere that did not; but I managed to say, “You told me that you couldn’t.”
“Because I don’t know how. I can pull a rope, though, if I’m told which one, and my mother told me that.”
“Is your mother here?” The thought of sharing the sloop with two inhumi made me physically ill. I sat down on one of the chests, my head in my hands.
“She’s dead, I think. I was referring to your second wife, Father. That’s what we’ll have to tell people, you know. She’s not old enough to be my mother, not even as old as I am.” I looked at him sharply, and he put his finger to his lips as I had earlier, grinning still.
“I don’t like your pretending to be my son,” I said, “and I like your pretending to be Seawrack’s even less. Where is she?”
“Her stepson, and I can’t tell you where she is, Father dear, because I promised her I wouldn’t.” The ugly, lipless slit that was Krait’s mouth was no longer grinning. “You promised me something, too. Several things. Don’t forget any of them.”
I got up, went to his seat at the tiller, and sat on the gunwale, so close that our elbows touched. “Can she hear us now, if we keep our voices down?”
“I’m quite sure she can’t hear me, Father. But I’m equally sure that you won’t keep your voice low for more than a minute or two. You never do. It might be better if we didn’t talk at all.”
“You told me to lie down with her, to…”
“Do what you did,” he supplied.
“You said all that while she was standing there with us, while I was wrapping the canvas around her. You didn’t worry about her overhear
ing us then.”
“I didn’t worry about her overhearing me. Anyway, she wasn’t thinking about either of us right then. Not even about her skirt. Couldn’t you see that?”
“Just the same-”
“Her thoughts were very far away. You’d say her spirit. We were less to her then than your hus is to you.”
I looked around for Babbie, and found that he was lying at my feet.
“You see? He makes a noise when he walks. He can’t help it. Tappa-taptap behind you. But you don’t even know he’s there.”
“She’s in the water, isn’t she? She went over the side, and now she’s holding on to some part of the boat.” I looked along the waterline as far as I could without rising, but saw only waves.
“No…” Krait’s expression told me nothing about his thoughts; but I sensed that he was troubled, and it made him seem oddly human. “I’d better say it so you understand, and this is as good a chance as I’ll get to do it. Do I look like a boy to you?”
I shook my head.
By a gesture, he indicated his face. “This looks just like a boy’s, though, doesn’t it?”
“If you want me to say so, I will.”
“I don’t. I want you to tell the truth. We always do.” (I feel sure he did not mean that the inhumi always tell the truth, which would itself have been a monstrous lie.)
“All right. You look a lot more human now than you used to, a lot more human than you did when we talked in the pit. But you don’t really look like a boy up close, or like one of us at all.”
His nose and chin receded into his face as I watched, and the ridge over his eyes melted away. All semblance of humanity vanished. “One of the things I promised you then was that I wouldn’t deceive you. The man you hated-”
“Patera Quetzal?”
Krait nodded. “You said you thought he was an old man, and you were angry because he had tricked you. You told me some trooper shot and killed him.”
I nodded.
“Did you see his corpse?”
“Yes.” Something of the revulsion I had felt must have shown on my face. “What difference does that make?”