On Blue's waters

by Gene Wolfe

  Krait, Babbie, and I were more than sufficient to work the sloop under the light airs that were all we were granted even when we were well out to sea, so Seawrack set out to smoke as much of the meat as she could. She had prepared for the task by cutting a good supply of green shoots before we put out, and she trimmed them and fitted them together with her one hand as cleverly as She-pick-berry had with two; but our firewood was soon exhausted. As a result, Krait and I went ashore again before we rounded the point of the big sandspit I have called the Land of Fires and collected more.

  (It was then, I believe, when I found myself yet again trying to cut wood with Sinew’s knife, that I resolved once and for all that I would acquire an axe or a hatchet at the first opportunity, or at least a bigger, heavier knife, if no axe or hatchet was available.)

  By the time we had gathered as much dry wood as we could find without ranging far inland and loaded it into the sloop, wading out with bundles of it held clear of the water, the Short Sun was slipping away behind the distant peaks, and even Krait (who had done next to nothing) said that he was tired. Seawrack and I were close to exhaustion.

  There was no good anchorage along that very exposed stretch of the coast, and no place suited to beaching, but I decided to remain where we were until morning. Since the weather had been good and was not actually threatening even then, I judged the danger to be less than that of sailing an unknown shore by night. I took Krait aside and warned him that He-pen-sheep and his son had been suspicious of him, which I believe he knew already, and suggested that he go elsewhere if he intended to hunt. He pointed out that he could scarcely use hunting to justify his absence to Seawrack as he had before-we had far more meat than we needed. I know how you feel about the inhumi, Nettle; and why you feel as you do. If you were looking over my shoulder as I write this, you would declare in the strongest possible terms that no one ought to crack jokes with such creatures; and certainly the bond that was to grow between Krait and me in the lander had not even begun to form. But I still felt grateful to him for rescuing me, and so I proposed that I tell Seawrack that he was hunting for napkins. He laughed and we separated, leaving me under the impression that he would remain with us on the sloop that night.

  I took the first watch, and Seawrack the second. Krait was to take the third; he was to awaken me, of course, for the fourth and last watch of the night.

  Here for art’s sake I should insert some account of dreams in which the Vanished People figured, I suppose; or perhaps reveal whispered confidences exchanged with Seawrack. In fact there were no dreams of any kind and no whispers. I roused her with considerable difficulty when it was her watch, and when she returned to lie beside me, leaving Krait on watch, she did not disturb me in the least.

  It was Babbie who actually woke us both, squealing with alarm and nuzzling our faces. One of the gusty northwest winds that are so common in that region had set in, and the sloop had dragged her anchor until it found a solid hold in deep water and was about to pull her under. I was able to cut the cable just in time to keep her from swamping.

  We had rounded the point of the spit at sunrise, and were heeling sharply under a reefed mainsail and making excellent time when Krait found us. I saw him, lit by the rising sun and carried swiftly along by the wind, at a height that few birds ever reach. Seawrack, I believe, did not.

  He was in a quandary, as I realized immediately. If he landed on the sloop, Seawrack would know that he was no ordinary boy at the very least, and would in all likelihood see through his disguise. If he landed on shore and tried to signal us to pick him up, we might not see him-or might, as he would certainly have imagined, pretend not to.

  He solved his problem by landing on shore well in advance of us and swimming out to the sloop. I saw him, threw him a rope and hauled him on board, shook him, gave him as violent a tongue-lashing as I am capable of, and followed it by grabbing him by the back of his tunic (which had been one of mine), peeling it off him, and beating him with the rope’s end until my arm ached. When the wind had moderated and we could talk privately, he reproached me for it, reminding me that he had rescued me from the pit and insisting, erroneously in my view, that we had sworn eternal friendship.

  “I have been your friend ever since you got me out,” I told him. “Have you been mine?”

  He managed to meet my eyes with a defiant stare that I found more familiar than it should have been, but could find nothing to say.

  “You very nearly sunk this boat. We saved it, but if Babbie hadn’t roused us it would have gone down. I don’t suppose that Seawrack could drown, but I can.”

  He said, “The weather was fine when I left and I would have come back before the end of my watch.”

  “I would have died before the end of your watch. I would have been dead, and the sloop sunk, and my mission to the Whorl a total failure. I would be completely justified if I put my knife in you this minute.”

  My hand was on it as I spoke, and he took a step backward. There was fear in his eyes. “You’ve hurt me as much as you could already.”

  “Not half as much,” I told him, “and I’ve kept my promise even though you’ve broken yours. I threw you that rope; and if I hadn’t punished you severely for what you did, Seawrack would have known that you couldn’t possibly be what you pretend to be.”

  He hissed at me. The hiss of an inhumu is at once a more sinister sound and an uglier one than the hissing of any serpent that I have ever heard.

  “If one of my own sons had done what you did, I’d treat him exactly the way I treated you,” I told him. “If that isn’t what you want, what is it?” I did not say that at least one of my sons would have exhibited the same poisonous hatred; but I could not suppress the thought.

  I put him to work in good earnest after that, something I had not done before, bailing, trimming sail and snugging up the standing rigging, tidying the sail locker, coiling and stowing the rope I had thrown him, and bailing again. I watched him every moment and shouted at him whenever he showed signs of slacking; and when he begged for mercy I started him scraping paint.

  It was not long afterward that Seawrack spotted He-pen-sheep and his son standing on the beach with the head of the breakbull held upright between them. We were already some distance past them, but I put up the helm and ran down the wind until we were within hailing distance. He-pen-sheep cupped his hands around his mouth. “You take! Tou kill breakbull, Horn!”

  Seawrack glanced at me, her lovely eyes wide. “They want to give you that head.” Standing upon its muzzle, it was nearly as tall as the son, and the spread of its horns exceeded that of my out-stretched arms, as I had found out when we had returned to the carcass.

  “You’ll have to take it,” Krait told me, looking up from his scraping; and of course he was right.

  Besides, I wanted it. You will not understand, Nettle my dearest darling, although perhaps some others who read this will. It had seemed a grim irony when He-pen-sheep’s son had tied the break-bull’s tail to the belt of the crude leather garment his father had made for me. I had wanted the head-yes, even then-if only to prove to myself that I had actually done what I remembered doing-and the tail seemed only a sort of mockery of that desire, some god’s cruel jest to punish me for my dawning self-satisfaction. You will ask now, and very reasonably, whether I did not want the head of the wallower I shot a few weeks ago as well. I did, but not nearly so acutely; and since no one talked of retaining the heads as trophies, I kept my peace.

  When after considerable labor we had the breakbull’s head on board and had waved good-bye once again, Krait took great pleasure in enunciating the obvious. “You can glory in it for a day or three, if the flies don’t get at it. But after that, it will have to go over the side, or we will.”

  I muttered something about sawing off the horns, if I could trade for a saw.

  “You could have shot them off back there.” He pointed with the scraper. “It would have saved a lot of work.”

  Seawrack asked indignantly, �
�How much work do you think they did, cutting it off and carrying it to the other side, when they couldn’t even be sure that we’d be going this way?” (I had questioned He-pen-sheep about a big river to the north the evening before, but that was surely not the time to mention it.) She turned to me. “Would you settle for the skull with the horns still on it, and no smell?”

  I assured her that I would, and gladly.

  “Then all we have to do is tow it behind the boat. Not too long a rope, because you don’t want it to go too deep. I’ll show you.”

  She did, and I surprised myself and them by lifting the huge thing and carrying it to the stern for her. We balanced it on the gunwale, tied a noose in the rope that Krait had coiled and stowed a couple of hours earlier, tightened it over the horns, and pushed the head overboard. Although we were still making respectable time, it seemed to sink like a stone, and Seawrack had me shorten the rope.

  By evening, we were accompanied by a flock (I cannot bring myself to call them a school) of the strangest and most beautiful fish that I have ever seen, each a little bit longer than my hand. They are luminous, as so many fish here are, although I cannot recall any luminous fish in the market in Old Viron. Their heads are scarlet, their bellies an icy white, and their backs, dorsal fins, and tails are blue. All four of their cubit-long pectoral fins (with which they not only glide but fly like birds or insects) are gauzy, and invisible at night. When they flitted around the sloop after shadelow like so many oversized and multicolored fireflies, it really seemed that we were sailing far beneath the waves, with some convenient current swelling our mainsail. Seawrack assured me that they would strip the skull of the last scrape of flesh in a few days, and they did.

  And now good night, Nettle my own darling. My night thoughts circle your bed, glowing but invisible, to observe and to protect you. Never doubt that I love you very dearly.

  -12-

  WAR

  I am not sure how long it has been since I wrote all this about the breakbull’s head. I might guess, so many days or so many weeks, but what does it matter? A week of war is a year, a month of war a lifetime.

  I have been wounded. That is why I am back here now, and why I have had the leisure to read so much of this tissue of half-truths. (Of lies I have told to myself.) And it is why I have the leisure to write.

  My wound throbs. A physician has given me a pretty little pot containing some dirty, sticky stuff I am to chew, the dried sap of some plant or other. When I chew it my wound is a drum beaten softly very far away, but I cannot think. Everything flows together, dancing with Seawrack in the swirling waves of my thought and taking on unimaginable colors-the play of candlelight on Pig’s blind face as he ate soup, Babbie rushing upon the devil-fish, Nettle screaming with pain and relief as Hide followed Hoof. If I were to take a pinch from the pink porcelain pot now, the wall of this room would blush for my self-pity.

  I do not believe I have written this by daylight before. Why not say that was why I had not noticed how much falsehood is in it.

  Where to begin?

  Nothing about my travels with Seawrack and Krait today. I have too much to recount that is recent. Let us begin with the war.

  No, let me spit my bile. Then I will begin with the river. With the Nadi, the town of Han upriver, Han’s invasion, and the first fighting.

  Bile: I finished reading this one hour ago, appalled by my own hypocrisy. Particularly sickened by the last few words I wrote before the outbreak of the war. Did I really think that I could lie like that to myself, and make myself believe it? While all the time I was imagining myself Silk, forever thinking of what Silk would do or say? Silk would have been ruthlessly honest with himself, and worse.

  No more. My hand was shaking so badly that I laid down the quill just now, raging against myself. I wanted to get up and retrieve my azoth, to press it against my own breastbone and feel the demon beneath my thumb. Wanted to, I say, but I am too weak to leave my chair. Moti came in with a little brass kettle and mint tea, and I could have killed her, not because I have anything against the sweet child, but as a substitute for myself. I handed her my dagger and told her to stab me between the shoulder blades, because I lacked the courage to drive in the point. Bent my head and shut my eyes. What would I have done if she had obeyed?

  Died.

  My dagger lies on the carpet now not two cubits from this chair, long, straight, and strong. Thick at the back so that it will not bend when I stab someone.

  Someone, I say, and mean someone else.

  Not stab myself. I will not do that. If I need more courage than I have to live, I will pretend to have it and live anyway. I did that on the battlefield. How frightened I was afterward, and how ridiculous I feel now!

  My hands shook. It was all that I could do to keep my voice steady, and perhaps it was not, or not always. I acted the part of a hero. That is to say, I acted as it seemed to me I would have if I had actually possessed dauntless courage. They believed me. What fools we were, all of us, losing battle after battle!

  But O you gods of the Short Sun, what a thing it is! What a thing it is to see frightened men stop and reload, and fight again!

  They were too many for us. All you had to do was listen to the shooting, three and four shots from them for each one of ours.

  Choora. That is the word they use here for this kind of a dagger. I have been trying to think of it. Choora. It sounds like one of my wives, and no doubt it could be a woman’s name as well, a woman slim and straight, with brown cheeks and golden bangles in her ears and nose. Loyally, Choora remained at my side when we charged and when we broke; and if she never drew a single drop of blood, it was my fault and not hers. All hail Princess Choora!

  I traded for the big chopping knives in Pajarocu. Maybe I should have given each a name, but I never did. If Choora is a princess, they were a washerwoman and a maid of all work; but there are times when a sturdy girl who will turn her hand to whatever may be needed is better than a princess with a coral pommel.

  A strange expression-“turn her hand.” Did somebody travel once with a woman who had only one arm? Yes, and it was I. And did he sleep with her, and make gentle love to her as I did in our cozy corner under the little foredeck? Were neither of them ever quite able to forget that he had raped her once?

  I have tried hard to punish myself for that, and certain other things. No more. Let the Outsider punish me; we deceive ourselves when we think that we can measure out justice to ourselves. I wanted to end my guilt. What was just about that? I should feel guilty. I deserve it.

  I should feel a lot more guilty about having had other women while I was (as I still am) wed to poor Nettle. When I read that business about my thoughts flying around her bed, I was sickened.

  Sickened!

  For all our lives I have been a false lover and a false friend. I would beg her to forgive me if I could. If only I could. I do not dream about her anymore.

  Is that bile enough? No, but there will be more later as the occasion demands. As the mood strikes. Let us move on to the river.

  That is what I would have called this half-baked book of mine, if only I had thought of it in time: The River. The title would stand equally for the great river on Shadelow-the river on whose bank we found Pajarocu-and for our own much smaller Nadi. (Another wife, a temptress in a swirling skirt, with flashing eyes and hurrying feet, sensuous and tempestuous, suddenly languid and lazily thrilling; a woman like gold at evening, full of blood and crocodiles.)

  Anyway, it was my fault. No doubt it always is.

  I had set some men to work to tame Nadi’s Lesser Cataracts. First, because I knew we would become richer if we could trade more with the towns nearer the sea, and second because we had men who needed work and could find none except at harvest. To raise the money, I made every foreign merchant who came to our market pay a tax, so much for each man and so much for each beast.

  I also lopped the heads of two men who had collected the tax for me and kept part of the money for themselves.
I was proud then, and talked to myself about “iron justice.” Yes, iron justice, and I killed two men who had been boys in the Whorl when I myself was a boy there. I do not mean I killed them with my own hands; I did not, but they died at my order, and would have lived without it. What else can you call it? Steely justice from the big, curved blade of my executioner’s sword. How does he feel, that hulking, hard-faced man, slaying men who have done him no harm? Chopping off hands? No worse than I, I hope. Better. I would not want an innocent man to feel the way I do.

  I have been away a long time. Will my wives expect me to sleep with them tonight? What will I say to them?

  The work went far faster than I had imagined. Our men dug, they blew rock to rubble with powder from the armory, and soon there was a second Nadi, slower, longer, and narrower, looping around the rapids, a Nadi only just deep enough for small boats; but Nadi herself is taking care of that, and quickly, cutting into the red clay and bearing it off. She is still swift in both her divided selves, but not so swift in her new one that boats cannot be hauled around the rapids with bullocks. The Man of Han asked us to cut another such channel around the Cataracts upriver so that boats that reached Gaon could reach Han also. Our merchants were against it, as was only to be expected.

  So was I. Hari Mau and I made a trip with the surveyors to look at possible routes, and everything was much worse-steeper slopes, and a lot more rock. All of us agreed it would take a long time and might never be suitable for boats of any size, which would have to be hauled along a lengthy ladder of sharp bends. I told the Man of Han that he would have to pay our workers, and that the work would take years. He offered to send men of his own, which we refused.

  * * *

  As you see, I have made the old design. Does it mean that I am going to continue this folly? No doubt. Nettle will never read it, I know. Neither will my sons. Or I should say, neither will the sons I left behind on Lizard Island. [Nettle has read it. So have Hoof and I.-Hide]