by Gene Wolfe
“Being dead makes a great deal of difference to some of us. Did he look like an old man then?”
I hedged. “We don’t like to look at corpses. I didn’t look for long.”
“Did he, Horn?”
There was something indescribably eerie about sitting there in the stern of the sloop talking to the inhumu about the death of Patera Quetzal twenty years ago. Wisps of fog blew past us like ghosts, and the gossiping tongues of small waves kept up an incessant murmur in which it seemed that I could catch a word or two. “I suppose not,” I told Krait, and heard a wave whisper, Moorgrass. “Nettle-that’s my wife, you saw her-and some other women were going to wash his body. They screamed, and that was how we knew.”
“You looked for yourself after that, didn’t you, Horn? You must have.”
I nodded again.
“He didn’t look like an old man anymore, did he? He couldn’t have.”
I shook my head.
“What did he look like?”
“He looked like you.”
When Krait said nothing, only transfixing me with his hypnotic stare, I added, “He powdered his face, and painted it. Like a woman. We found the powder and rouge in a pocket of his robe.”
“So would I if I had those things, just as I wear this shirt and these pants, which I took from you. The eyes see what the mind expects, Horn. Babbie there, lying still with a green twig in his mouth, could make you think he was a bush, if you were expecting to see a bush.”
“That’s right. It’s why we use tame hus, or dogs, to hunt wild hus.”
Krait grinned; his jaw dropped, and his fangs sprang out. “The young siren you call Seawrack doesn’t see me the way you do. She doesn’t see what you saw when you looked at that dead man.”
I agreed.
“Knowing that, is it so hard for you to believe that at times she doesn’t hear me at all?”
More shaken than I would have liked to admit, I went to the bow, looking down into the water for her on both sides of the boat but seeing nothing. After a time, Krait motioned to me, and reluctantly I went aft again. His voice in my ear was less than a whisper. “If she’s listening, she hears you alone, Father. Only the murmur of your voice. She probably thinks you’re talking to yourself, or to your hus.”
“I hurt her.”
He nodded solemnly. “You intended to, as we both know. As all three of us know, in fact. You intended to, and you succeeded admirably. Given time, she may find some excuse for you. Would you like that?” His fangs had vanished, and his face had resumed its boyish outline.
“How badly?”
“Very badly. She bled quite a lot from-oh, various places. It was difficult for me.”
Unable to think of anything else to say, I asked whether he had found the bandages and salves.
“She knew where they were. I helped her tie the knots, where rags could be of use. Stopping the bleeding was hard. I doubt that you have any idea just how much trouble we had.” He paused, tense; I knew that he was expecting me to attack him. “Do you understand everything I’m telling you?”
“Certainly. You’re speaking the Common Tongue, and you speak it at least as well as I do.”
He dismissed the Common Tongue with a gesture. “Well, you don’t understand her at all.”
“Men never understand women.”
He laughed, and although I had not been angry with him a moment before there was something in that laugh that made me yearn to kill him.
* * *
I searched the waterline for Seawrack, and failing to find her probed the sea for her with the boat hook, which was absurd. After that, I wanted to return to the rocks where we had found her before, but Krait dissuaded me, giving me his word that she was still on the sloop, but telling me quite frankly that I would be a complete fool to search it for her, since finding her would be far worse than not finding her. Soon after that, he left.
To the best of my memory, it was already dark when she came out. I had long ago concluded that she was in one of the cargo chests, and was not at all surprised to see the lid of the one in which I kept rope and the like (the one on which I had sat) opened from within. I held up the little pan in which I had been cooking a fish and invited her to join me.
She sat down on the other side of the fire. I thanked her for it, since I could see her better there; and she looked surprised.
“Because I’ve been so worried about you,” I told her. “I didn’t know how badly you were hurt, and I thought you had to be getting hungry and thirsty.” I passed her the water bottle.
She drank and said, “Weren’t you hurt, too?”
It touched me as few things ever have. “No. I’m fine. I was exhausted, that’s all.”
She nodded, and drank again.
“You could have killed me while I slept, Seawrack. You could have found my knife and stabbed me to death with it.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“I would have, in your place.” I put our last strip offish on a plate and handed it to her across the fire. “Do you want a fork?”
She said nothing, staring down at her small portion of fried fish, so I got her a fork as well. “That fish is just about all we have left,” I told her. “I should have brought more food.”
“You didn’t know about me.” She looked away from the fillet I had given her with something akin to horror. “I don’t want this. Can I give it to Babbie?”
He rose at the sound of his name and trotted around the box to her.
“Certainly, if you wish.” I watched Babbie devour the morsel of fish.
“I feel a little sick.”
“So do I. Do I have to tell you that I’m terribly, horribly, sorry for what I did to you? That I’ll never do anything like that again?”
“I sang for you,” she said, as if it explained everything.
Somewhere she is singing for me at this moment, singing as she used to before Krait came. I hear her, as I do almost every day, although she must surely be many hundreds of leagues away. I hear her-and when I do not I dream of my home beside the sea. Of it and of you, Nettle my darling, my only dearest, the sweetheart of my youth. But if ever I find my way back to it (as Seawrack has beyond any question found her way back to the waves and the spume, the secret currents, and her black, wave-washed rocks) there will come a stormy midnight when I throw off the blankets, although you and the twins are soundly sleeping. I will put out then in whatever boat I can find, and you will not see me more. Do not mourn me, Nettle. Every man must die, and I know what death I long for.
* * *
We buried alive an inhumu and two inhumas today, taking up three of the big flat paving stones in the marketplace-all that cruel business. One smiled at me, and I thought I saw human teeth. All three looked so human that I felt we were about to consign to the grave a living man and two living women. I insisted that they open their mouths so I could inspect them. The woman who had smiled would not, so hers was pried open with the blades of daggers; there were only blood-drinking fangs, folded against the roof of her mouth.
Inhumi are burned alive in Skany-I am very glad that I had to watch that only once. I have heard of the same thing being done in New Viron, and I admit that I would cheerfully have burned or buried the inhuma that bit Sinew when we were living in the tent. They are vile creatures, exactly as Hari Mau says; but how can they help it, when we are as we are? I wish sometimes that Krait had not told me.
So little, the last time I wrote. Nothing at all about Seawrack and Krait, the sloop, or the western mainland I call Shadelow; and it has been two days. If I continue at this rate, I will be the rest of my life in telling the tale of my failure, simple though it is.
* * *
On the evening I wrote about before the inhumation, we sat before the fire and said very little. The apple barrel, which had once seemed inexhaustible, was empty at last, and the flour gone. I had used the last of our cornmeal that night. I had two fishing lines out, and from time to time I got up to look at
them; but they caught nothing.
Seawrack asked where the boy was, and I told her that he had gone ashore to hunt, which tasted like a lie in my mouth although it was true. My slug gun was still under the foredeck in the place where we slept, and I was afraid she had seen it there and would want to know how he could hunt at night without Babbie and without the gun. Perhaps she thought it, but she never said anything of that sort. What she actually said was “We could sail away without him.”
I shook my head.
“All right.”
“Will you forgive me?” I asked her.
“Because you won’t leave him?” She shrugged, her shoulders (thin shoulders now) rising and slumping again. “I hope we will, sometime, no matter what you say now.”
“To get out of the pit, I had to promise him that we’d take him to Pajarocu with us, and try to get a place for him on the lander.”
“I haven’t promised him anything, and I won’t. Is there any more corn flour?”
“No.”
She got up to look at my fishing lines. “Do women catch fish?”
“Sometimes,” I told her. It had been a very long time since Nettle and I had gone fishing.
“How? Like this?”
“Yes,” I said. “Or with a pole, or a net. Sometimes they spear them, too, just as men do. Men fish more, but there’s nothing wrong with women fishing.”
“If you would tie your knife to your stick for me, I might be able to spear some for us.”
“In the water?” I shook my head. “You’d start to bleed again.”
She made no reply, and she was a step too far from the firelight for me to judge her expression.
“I’ll hunt tomorrow myself,” I promised her. “This time I’ll get something, or Babbie and I will.”
“What are those?”
I had to rise to be certain that she was pointing toward shore.
She said, “Those little lights?” and I went up onto the foredeck for a better view. The weather was calm, although not threateningly so; and we were anchored some distance from the naked coast of the mainland, Krait and I having been unable to find a protected anchorage before shadelow. North along the coast so far that they were practically out of sight were two or three, possibly four, scattered points of reddish light. As I stood there shivering, one vanished-then reappeared.
Behind me Seawrack said, “I thought the boy might have decided to stay there, but there are too many.”
I nodded, and returned to our own fire. To my very great surprise and delight, she sat down beside me. “Are you afraid of them?”
“Of the people who built those fires? Not as much as I ought to be, perhaps. Seawrack, it would be easier for me, a great deal easier, if you were angry with me. If you hated me now.”
She shook her head. “I’d like it if you hated me, Horn. Don’t you understand why I hid?”
“Because I’d attacked you, and you were afraid I would hurt you again, or even kill you.”
She nodded solemnly.
“I’m sorrier than I can say. I’ve been trying and trying to think of some way I can-can at least show you how sorry I really am.”
She touched my hand and fixed me with her extraordinary eyes. “Never leave me.”
I wanted to explain that I was a friend, not a lover. I wanted to, I say, but how could I (or anybody) say that to a woman I had forced that very day? I wanted to tell her, as I had several times before, that I was married, and I wanted to explain all over again what marriage means. I wanted to remind her that I was probably twice her age. I wanted to say all those things, but I knew that I loved her, and all the fine words stuck in my throat.
Later, when we lay side by side under the foredeck, she asked me again, “Don’t you understand why I had to hide from you today?”
I thought that I did, but I had given my answer already; so I asked, “Why?”
“Because I made you and wouldn’t let you.”
“You didn’t make me,” I told her.
“Yes, I did, by singing. The song does that. I’m trying to forget it.”
“Your singing made me want you more than ever, but it didn’t make me do what I did. I surrendered to my own desire when I should have resisted.”
She was quiet so long that I had nearly fallen asleep when she said, “The underwater woman taught me to sing like that. I wish I could forget her, too.”
“Your Mother?” I asked.
“She wasn’t my mother.”
“ ‘The Mother.’ You called her that.”
“She wanted me to. I was on a big boat, and I remember a woman who talked to me, and carried me sometimes. I think that was my mother.”
I nodded; then realizing that Seawrack could not see me said, “So do I.”
“After that, there was only the underwater woman. She doesn’t look like a woman unless she makes part of herself a woman.”
“I understand.”
“She’s another shape, very big. But she is one. She told me to call her Mother, and I did. My real mother drowned, I think, and the underwater woman ate her.”
“The sea goddess. Do you know her name?”
“No. If I ever did, I’ve forgotten it, and I’m glad. I don’t want to remember her anymore, and she doesn’t want me to. I do remember that much about her. Would you like me to sing for you again?”
“No,” I said, and meant it.
“Then I’m going to try to forget the song.”
As I drifted into sleep, I heard (or believed I heard) her say, “…and forget the water and the underwater woman, and the boats underwater with people in them. That was why I wouldn’t eat your fish. I don’t want to eat fish or drowned meat, never any more. Will the boy bring us back something to eat?”
Perhaps I mumbled in reply. At this remove I cannot be sure.
“I don’t think so. He’ll eat, and come back here with nothing.”
Which was precisely correct.
I recall thinking, as I declined from consciousness into the first deep sleep of the night, that Seawrack was forgetting the goddess she had called the Mother because Krait (whom she herself called “the boy”) intended to call her “mother.” That there was a place for only one mother on my sloop, and it was to be Seawrack.
There was a place for only one wife, as well. With the eyes of sleep I saw you, my poor Nettle, fading and fading, sinking into the clear blue water like the hammer I used to keep on board until I lost it over the side and watched it sink, weighed by its iron head but buoyed by its wooden handle, smaller and smaller and dimmer and dimmer as the waters closed around it forever. My love was like a line tied to you then, a cord so thin as to be invisible, playing out cubit after cubit and fathom after fathom until the time arrived when I would haul you up again.
Have I insulted you? I do not blame you. You may blame me, and the more you do the happier I will be. Let me say now, once and for all, that I was not compelled by the song the sea goddess had taught Seawrack. Was I inflamed? Yes, certainly. But not compelled. I could have left. The inhumu would have seen my manhood raised, and witnessed my agony, and would have derided me for both whenever he thought his taunts would tell. But that would have been nothing.
Or I might have clapped my hand over Seawrack’s mouth and forced her to be silent. I would have been ashamed then, since I had threatened to beat her if she would not sing for me; but I have been ashamed many times of many things, and been no worse for it afterward.
For this I was worse, as I am.
I should tell you this too: Chandi has come in pretending to believe I sent for her, and I will have to stop writing this rambling account that has become a letter to you while I persuade her to leave.
* * *
I am not sure when I wrote last. Before the big storm, but when? I ought to date my entries, but what would such dates mean to those who may read them? Every town on this whorl, every city in the old Whorl, uses a different system; even the lengths of our years are different. This Great Pas di
d, to prevent our leaguing against Mainframe; and it divides us still. I will give the day and the month as we reckon them here in Gaon: Dusra Agast. That may mean something to you; but if it does not, not much has been lost.
Conjunction is past. It was as bad as I feared, and worse. (It is still very bad.) Many of the inhumi came, and many have remained. My servants close the shutters at sundown, and when they are asleep I inspect every window in this palace myself to make sure they have done it.
My bedroom has five windows north, six west, and five south. I double-check every one of them before I get into bed, and lock and bolt the only door, for fear of the inhumi and for fear of assassins, too.
An inhumu drinks blood until his veins are full and his flesh is nourished again; thus satisfied, he goes his way, like a tick that falls off when it has drunk its fill; but there are men here where land is free for the working who want land, and more and better land, and others to work it for them, and they always believe that someone else’s land is better. They would crush the small farmers if I let them.
I will not.
A lean young man with a long curved dagger was shot to death in my garden last night. Awakened by the booming of the slug guns, I went to view his body, and could not help thinking of Silk climbing Blood’s wall with the hatchet in his waistband. Had this young man thought me as bad as Blood? If so, was he right? We have the inhumi to prey on us, yet we prey upon one another.
When I ended my last session with this old quill of Oreb’s, Seawrack and I were on the sloop on the night of the fires. I dreamed that night about shadowy figures creeping from those fires to swim toward us, and climbing aboard bent upon murder. I sat up and found my slug gun, and nearly fired it, too; but there was no one there. I lay down again and muttered an apology to Seawrack for having awakened her.
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
I knew why she had not slept, or thought I did. “You’re frightened and upset, and that’s only natural. I don’t suppose you want to tell me about it; but if you do, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say without getting angry.”