by Gene Wolfe
“One of the things that hunt through the night, the things I was so frightened of when I slept in Mother.”
Not knowing what to say, I did not reply.
“There was a cave in the rocks that I used to play in. I’ve probably told you.”
I nodded.
“I used to say I was going to sleep in there.” She laughed again, softly. “I was always really brave in the daytime. But when the dark started coming up out of the deep places, I would swim back to Mother as fast as I could and sleep in one of the places where I’d been sleeping ever since I was little. I knew what a lot of the things out there in the dark were, even if I didn’t have names for them, and just this moment it came into my head that Krait is one of those, even if I don’t have any name except Krait.”
I said, “I see,” although I was not sure I did.
“He sleeps all day, more than Babbie, even, and he hardly ever eats anything. Then at night he hunts, and he must eat everything he catches, because he never brings us back anything.”
“Sometimes he does,” I objected.
“That little crabbit.” Contemptuously, she waved the crabbit aside. “He seems like a human person to me, but he doesn’t to you.”
It caught me completely off guard. I did not know what to say.
“He has two hands and two arms, and he walks standing up. He talks more than both of us together when he’s awake. So why don’t you think he’s people?”
I tried to say that I considered Krait fully human, and that he was in fact a human being just as we were-but tried to do it without telling a direct lie, stuttering and stammering and backing away from assertions I had just made.
“No, you don’t,” Seawrack told me.
“Perhaps it’s only that he’s so young. He’s actually quite a bit younger than my son Sinew, and quite frankly, Seawrack, my son Sinew and I have been at each other’s throats more often than I like to remember.” I swallowed, steeling myself to force out all the lies the situation might require. “He looks like Sinew, too-”
A new voice-Sinew’s own-inquired, “Like me? Who does?”
I turned my head so fast that I nearly broke my neck. Sinew was almost alongside, standing perilously erect in one of the little boats made by hollowing out logs that the local people used.
“Krait does,” Seawrack told him. It was as though she had known him all her life.
Sinew looked at her, gulped helplessly, and looked at me, plainly not yet up to speaking to a woman whose eyes, lips, and chin had rocked him like a gale.
I asked whether he wanted to come on board.
“She’s-is it all right?”
“Certainly,” I told him; and I caught the rope of braided hide he threw me and made it fast.
If you had asked me an hour earlier, I would have said that I would be delighted to see any face or hear any voice from Lizard, even his. Now I had both seen and heard him, and my heart sank. Here in this strange and wondrous town of Gaon, I tell myself (and I believe that it is true) that I would be overjoyed to see Sinew again as I saw him that evening on the great cold river that rushes through the hills of the eastern face of Shadelow; but I know that if my feelings were to take me off guard here as they did there, I would call my guards and tell them to take him into the garden and cut off his head in any spot they liked, as long as it was out of sight of my window. If, somehow, he had appeared when Seawrack was ashore looking for the seedy orange fruits she had twice found growing in the clearings left by old fires, I really believe that I might simply have shot him and let the torpid waters carry his corpse out of my sight. What might have happened subsequently on Green, I can scarcely imagine.
As it was, he sprang over the gunwale as I never could and sat down with us, looking at Seawrack with embarrassed admiration.
“This young man is Sinew, my oldest son,” I told her. “He followed me from Lizard Island, apparently, and now he has caught up with me. With us, I ought to have said.”
She smiled at him and nodded; and I added, “Sinew, this is Seawrack.”
Shier than ever, he nodded in return.
“You did follow me, didn’t you? I had asked you-in fact, I had begged you-to stay there and look after your mother.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Gently, Seawrack asked, “How was she when you left, and how were your brothers?”
“It wasn’t that long after you,” he told me. For a few seconds he paused to gawk at the mossy leather stretched tight by Seawrack’s breasts. “Mother was fine then, and the sprats were fine too.”
Seawrack smiled. “Did you take good care of her while you were there, Sinew?”
“No.” He had summoned up the courage to speak to her directly. “She took care of me, like she always does. See, my father-hey! What are you doing?”
I was taking his hunting knife from the belt of my hide over-tunic, sheath and all. “Returning this to you.” I held it out; and when he did not accept it, I tossed it into his lap.
“I can’t give your needier back.” He eyed me, clearly expecting me to explode.
“That’s all right.”
“I had it. I should have left it at home with Mother, only I didn’t. I took it with me in the old boat, and it was a really good thing to have, too. I used it a lot before I lost it.”
He turned to Seawrack. “Father wanted me to take care of the family, and for a couple of days I tried, only there wasn’t anything to do. He thought I’d take the paper to town in the little boat, our old one that wasn’t much bigger than my old skin boat. Only it leaked and wouldn’t hold near enough, and as soon as everybody found out he’d gone away and left my mother there, Daisy’s mother came over and said they’d take Mother and our paper in their fishing boat anytime she wanted to go. This new boat here is like a fishing boat, that’s what we copied it from when me and Father built it, only we put in these big boxes, too, to keep the paper dry. He keeps rope and stuff in one, though.”
“I know,” Seawrack said.
“Real fishermen keep theirs up front under that little deck that they stand on when they’ve got to fool with the forestay or the jib.”
“That’s where we sleep now, Sinew, your father and I.” Seawrack’s tone thrilled me as much as it must have pained him; even tonight I thrill to the memory of it.
He stared, his mouth gaping. His hands fumbled with his knife, and for a moment I believed that he might actually try to stab me with it.
As if she spoke to a child, she asked, “Do you want to come with us? Where will you sleep tonight?”
“Yeah. In my boat, I guess. That’s where I’ve been sleeping. I’ll get in it and tie it on in back.” He looked to me. “Is that all right?”
I nodded.
“Only if you’ve got a blanket or anything that would be great. I brought some, but I lost them.”
I was about to say that we had brought only one, and had slept for most of the voyage under sailcloth and our clothing, but Seawrack explained that we had bought blankets in Wichote and rose to get him one. I suggested that he might want some sailcloth as well, in case of rain.
“All right.” For a second or two he fingered his reclaimed hunting knife. “We could trade for some furs with people around here, if you’ve got anything to trade.”
I nodded and said that I should have thought of that when we put in at Wichote.
“They’d skin you there.”
(My irony had been wasted.)
“Only out here and farther west you can get good furs cheap because they don’t want to have to load them in their boats and take them down the river to sell.”
He accepted the blanket that would be his from that moment forward. “After we bring back Silk I’m going to build a real big boat and just go back and forth trading. I’ll buy slug guns and stuff like that back home and sell them for furs all up and down the river, and then go back for more.”
It recalled what the traveler had said, and I asked him whether he had been farther west t
han we were now.
“Oh, sure. I’ve been to Pajarocu. I hung around there about a week waiting for you, then I started back down looking for you.”
Seawrack said admiringly, “You’re very brave to travel alone here in that little boat.”
“Thanks.” He smiled, and for a moment I actually liked him. “See, a little boat like mine is what you need out here, so you can get way over to one side and paddle. My father’s probably hanging on to this big one ’cause we’re going to have to have it to bring Silk back to New Viron in. We’ll have to have something that can make it across. That’s right, isn’t it, Father?”
Back to Seawrack before I had a chance to reply. “This one will do it. It’ll be fast, too, when we’re going back down, bringing Silk back. We’ll need it because the lander’s coming right straight back to Pajarocu, when it comes back.” He waited for one of us to challenge him.
“You bet it is. They’re not going to let a thing like that get away from them. Would you? There’s quite a few towns over on the other side that’ve got landers that work. That’s what I heard. Only they won’t let anybody but their own people get anywhere around them. Just try it and you’ll get shot. Some won’t even own up that they’ve got them.”
I cleared my throat. “I’ve been thinking. I want to propose a plan to both of you.”
Sinew held up his knife, inspecting its blade by the last light of the day that was now past. “You nicked the edge,” he said, and inspected the place with a thumbnail.
“I know. I’ve been cutting wood with it. I had to.” I expected him to enlarge upon his complaint; but he did not.
Seawrack had been studying his face. “You don’t look very much like your father.”
“Everybody says I do.”
She shook her head, and he smiled.
I asked them, “May I tell you what I propose? The plan I mentioned?”
“Sure.” Sinew sheathed his knife.
“As you said, we’ll need this boat when the lander returns. As you also said, it’s not well suited to river travel. Seawrack and I have seen that for ourselves. So has Krait.”
I waited for his agreement, and got it.
“Seawrack and I haven’t talked very much about the hazards involved in flying back to the Whorl on a lander jury-rigged by somebody in Pajarocu. Neither did you and I before I left, and I don’t like to talk about it even now. I don’t enjoy sounding as if I were boasting about the dangers I’ll face. I don’t even like to think about them, and I’d gladly make them less-if I could.”
“It looks pretty good, that lander,” Sinew assured me. “I’ve seen it.”
I nodded. “I’m very glad to hear that. But before I continue, I ought to ask you something. What happened to our old boat, the one you set out in?”
He shrugged. “I traded it for the one I’ve got now and some other stuff.”
“May I ask what the other stuff was?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s gone now.”
“What was it?”
“I said it doesn’t matter!”
“He’s hungry,” Seawrack interposed. “Would you like a piece of smoked meat, Sinew?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
This time I waited until he was chewing it. “I have to go on that lander. I promised I would, and I intend to. Krait wants to go, too. He’s told me why, and he has an excellent reason; but he made me promise not to reveal it. Neither of you have any reason at all.”
They objected, but I silenced them. “As I said, it will be very dangerous. It’s quite possible that the lander will explode, or catch fire, or crash when it tries to take off. Even if it flies away safely and crosses the abyss between the whorls, landing in the Whorl is liable to be very difficult. Krait’s been concerned about you, Seawrack. I doubt that he’s told you, but he has been.”
She shook her head.
“He’d been assuming that you’d come with us if there was a place for you on it. He mentioned it to me not long ago, and I said just what I’m saying now, that it’s too dangerous to subject you to. I told him that I intended to leave you in Pajarocu until I came back.”
Seawrack shook her head again, this time violently, and Sinew said, “Me, too? I won’t.”
“Krait had objections as well. He pointed out that she would be an attractive young woman alone and friendless in a strange town. I had to admit that he was right.” I rilled my lungs with air, conscious of what failure to persuade them now would mean.
“So here’s the new plan I would like to propose. When Krait returns in the morning, we’ll go back to Wichote. We’ll be sailing with the current then, and it shouldn’t take more than two or three days.”
Sinew’s nod was guarded.
“When we get there, Krait and I will trade for another little boat like the one you have. He and I will take those two boats to Pajarocu. You and Seawrack will wait for us in Wichote, on this one.”
“No.” Seawrack sounded as firm as I was ever to hear her, and that was very firm indeed.
“You won’t be alone there, either of you. Furthermore, you’ll have this boat to live on, together. And if I’m not back within a month or so…” I shrugged.
In so low a tone that I scarcely heard him, Sinew said, “I knew you didn’t want me as soon as I saw you. Only I didn’t think you’d give her up to get rid of me.”
“I’m not trying to get rid of you. Can’t you get it through your head that I may never come back? That I may die? I’d like to arrange things so that neither of you dies with me.” It was so dark by that time that it was difficult for me to see their faces; I looked from one to the other, hoping for support.
Seawrack said, “Sinew’s been to Pajarocu. He can take us to it.”
Sinew nodded.
I said, “If you found it, so can Krait and I.”
There was a long silence after that. Sinew took advantage of it to get himself another strip of smoked meat, and I am going to take advantage of it now to get a little sleep before Jahlee and Evensong come.
* * *
Heavy rain from midnight on, which gave us good cover. I did not go out or even get up this morning, although my wound seems better-breakfast in bed from a tray, and so forth. Hari Mau talked with me as I lay in bed, stamping up and down the room and more than ready to fall upon the Hannese that very moment. He had ridden half the morning with a rain-soaked, bloodstained bandage where his white headcloth ought to be, and is planning a major attack as soon as the rainy season ends. Our enemies are weaker than they look, he says, and I pray to the Outsider and any other god who may read this that he is correct. He swears that if I could talk with his new prisoners I would agree.
He has gone now, and I have gotten up to write this in my nightclothes, more than half ashamed.
We could have built a fire in the box or lit the lantern that night on the sloop, but we did not. The darkness and the overpowering presences of the forest and the swiftly sinister river created an atmosphere that I cannot possibly convey with ink on paper. The people of Shadelow believe that each of their rivers has a minor god of its own who lives in and under it and governs it, a god whose essence it is. Also that the forests hold minor gods and goddesses as numerous as their animals, gods and goddesses for the most part malign and unappeasable. When Seawrack spoke to Sinew and me that night in the dark, it almost seemed to me that we had one with us on the sloop. What it must have seemed to Sinew, who did not know her as I did, is far beyond my ability to express.
“You said it was good that I can’t drown,” she began. “Do you remember that?”
I did.
“I said I wished I could.” There was an odd, rough sound, loud in the silence; after a moment I realized that she was scratching Babbie’s ears. “You thought it was foolish of me, wanting to drown. But I don’t want to drown. I’ve seen a lot more drowned people than you have, probably. I’ve seen what the sea does to them, and watched Mother eat them, and eaten them myself.”
For the space
of a score of breaths no voices were heard but the wind’s and the river’s.
“What I’d like is to be able to, because you can. You think I can wait for you in that town where the river comes to the sea. Do you think Babbie will wait, too? Do you think he can live in the forest until you come back, and then come back to you?”
“No, I don’t,” I said, “although Babbie has surprised me before.”
“You don’t think he’s a real person. To you he’s just like Krait, and Krait’s not a real person either.”
I tried to say that I did not think Babbie a person at all, that Babbie was not a human being like Krait and the three of us. I cannot be certain now precisely how I may have put it, although I am quite sure I put it badly. Whatever lies I may have told, and however I phrased them, I made Seawrack angry.
“That’s not what I said! That’s not what I said at all! You’re twisting all the words around. You do it once or twice every day, and I’d do anything, if only I could make you stop it.”
“I apologize,” I told her. “I didn’t intend to. If that isn’t what you meant, what did you mean?”
Sinew began, “Did she really-?”
She cut him off. “What I’m trying to say is, there are two people on this boat you don’t think are people at all, Babbie and Krait. You don’t think they are, but you’re wrong. You’re wrong about both of them.”
Sinew muttered, “He doesn’t think I’m anybody either.”
“Yes, he does!” In the chill starlight, I could see her turn to face him. “You’ve got it exacdy backwards. No wonder you’re his son.”
While Sinew was wrestiing with that, she added, “It’s the other part he doesn’t like, the thingness. You try to be less of a person and more of a thing because you think that’s what he wants, but it’s really the other way.” Her voice softened. “Horn?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“Tell me. Tell us both. What does it take to make a person for you?”
I shrugged, although she may not have seen it. “I’m not sure; maybe I’ve never thought enough about it. Maytera Marble is a person, even if she’s a machine. An infant is a person, even if it can’t talk.”