by Gene Wolfe
If Evensong can climb up, I can climb down, surely, weak though I feel. I will leave my door locked, and they will think I am sleeping late. Very likely no one will venture to knock before noon, and by then I will be far away. When this account halts in the middle of a word, you are to understand that Evensong has returned with news of the boat that I sent her to buy.
No, I will have to wait a bit to give her time to get into bed and get to sleep.
“Bad thing!” says Oreb. “Thing fly!” So there are inhumi about, just as in Pajarocu. I do not believe they will attack Evensong, whom they all know. But what a thought! If only we protected one another, they would all be idiots or worse. As it is, they always get enough to keep them going.
I put my head out the window and tried to see them, although I would have been horrified if I had. The azoth is in my sash, next to Princess Choora. (I wonder how she likes her company?) No needier, but that should be more than enough. I am inclined to take my sword as well. I cannot cut firewood on a boat with the azoth-it would sink her at the first attempt. When I’m not using my sword, I can stow it on the boat, provided Evensong finds one for me. How I wish that I had the black-bladed sword the Neighbor gave me now!
I wish that I had been able to choose the boat for myself, too. Evensong’s choice will be too large, almost certainly. Sinew crossed the western sea in a boat that would scarcely carry Nettle and me, with a few bales of paper.
If Evensong does not buy one at all, I will send somebody else tomorrow night. Jahlee? Old Mehman would surely be better. The inhumi do not understand such things, even when they make use of them.
My inhumi have done some good things for us. Cutting loose the barges to break that bridge on the upper river was masterly. The Man saw no risk in moving gravel for his new road by water; but his troopers, who were very hungry already, went hungrier still.
Starting rumors and sending false messages, too. We dug up two of them for that. It was only just.
They are cunning, but like all cunning people they put too much faith in cunning. That was how it was in Pajarocu, when they allowed me to inspect their lander, never dreaming that I was the one man in thousands who would recognize it as Auk’s.
That is just how it has been here, at times. Three dead so far, Jahlee says, but she cannot know of all those whose lives have been lost.
In Pajarocu, I got my first warning from Seawrack. I woke and found her clinging to me and trembling. Whispering, I asked her what was wrong. “They’re hunting the night.” Her teeth were chattering so that she could scarcely speak. A bad dream, I thought, and many times the inhumi had seemed no more than a bad dream to me, so that I half expected Krait to vanish at sunrise. I tried to tell Seawrack that she had spent too many years under the sea, and that the creatures she had feared there could not reach her here.
Then I sat up, crawled out from under the foredeck, and looked around, hoping that she would join me and look too. I saw a man on one of the other boats some distance away; I thought I recognized him as one of those who had shown Seawrack, Sinew, Krait, and me through the lander the day before, and would have hailed him if I had not been afraid of waking others who were sleeping in their boats just as Seawrack and I had been sleeping in ours. He stooped and I heard a scuffle that quickly subsided; I supposed that it had been no more than the noise he had made taking off his boots, and told Seawrack there was nothing to fear.
The next day was the warm and sunny one I mentioned, and was a market day besides. She and I went out to have another look at the invisible town, and bargained for food and a few other things. Returning to the sloop we saw twenty or thirty men, and what appeared to be every woman and child in the town, swimming in the river. After stowing our purchases we joined them. Seawrack’s missing arm and yellow hair attracted a great deal of attention, and the children (who were all good swimmers) were amazed to find that she, with only one arm, could swim much faster than the fastest of them.
One bright-eyed little boy of eight or nine asked whether I were her father. I declared that I was, and he informed me very firmly that foreign women were not permitted to take off their clothes. “Here lady yes.” By pantomime he became a young woman, mincing along with hands on swaying hips, then pulled a nonexistent gown over his head. “You lady, no, no!” Arms folded, scowling.
It reminded me first of Maytera Marble, who had pulled off her habit to put it on Mucor, and afterward of Chenille, who had scandalized Patera Incus by going naked in the tunnels after she had been sunburned during Scylla’s possession. I told the boy that some of our women did, and a little about both of them. He wanted to know where Maytera Marble and Mucor lived, and I did my best to explain that their rock was on the other side of the sea, which he had never seen.
“Big lady too?”
“Chenille? No, she and Auk went to Green. Or at least that’s what we think must have happened, since no one in New Viron-that is my own town here-has gotten word of them. Do you understand what I mean by Green? It’s that big light in the sky at night, and it’s another-”
He had run away.
That was when I knew, the moment at which it came to me. I had recognized the lander earlier, as I have said. It had been one of the Crew’s, and had differed in certain respects from those provided for Cargo, landers like the one in which we had come, being somewhat smaller and much better adapted to carrying large, non-living loads. When we had been in Mainframe I had visited it twice with Silk and Auk, and there was no mistaking it. I had recognized it without understanding what its presence here signified.
But when the boy ran, I knew. I understood everything after that.
We went back to the market, which was smaller and less well organized than the one in Wichote, as well as substantially cheaper. A leather worker there was making a sheath for one of the knives I have described; I offered him a silver pin for the knife and its sheath when he had finished sewing it, and he suggested that I take another quite similar knife, whose sheath he had completed already. In the end I bought them both, as you have read, intending to give one to our son.
A fellow foreigner approached us. “Meeting tonight at the Bush.” I asked what and where the Bush was, and learned that it was an oversized hut near the river in which the local beer was sold and drunk. A man from one of the Northern towns had brought his wife so that she could sail his boat home, and compelled her to keep him company while he waited, as we were all waiting, for Auk’s lander to fly. She had been asleep on her husband’s boat last night while he sat drinking in the Bush, and had been bitten by an inhumu. Tonight we would decide his punishment.
I went that night, bringing Sinew; we stayed only long enough to have a look at the woman, who was indeed pale and weak (as well as bruised), and displayed the marks of an inhumu’s fangs on her arm, and to ask her where her boat had been moored. As we returned to our own, Sinew said, “I thought that didn’t happen here.”
It puzzled me; I knew that as we had come nearer Pajarocu, Krait had flown there nearly every night, and I had certainly assumed that he was feeding there. I asked Sinew who had told him so.
“One of these people, when I was hanging around here before. I told him how I got bitten when I was just a baby, and he said they never did it here. His name is He-bring-skin.”
I had already told Sinew how He-pen-sheep and his son had cut off the breakbull’s head for me. Now I said, “It can’t be true. When Seawrack and I visited He-pen-sheep’s camp, his daughter had been bitten the preceding night. I don’t recall her name, but she was extremely weak. Weaker than that woman back there.”
“Only here in Pajarocu,” Sinew explained impatiently. “They never get bitten here. That’s what he said.”
“But foreigners do.”
“I guess. She did.”
We had reached the sloop by then, and were greeted with a snort of pleasure by Babbie. Seawrack came out with her knife in her hand. I had told her to remain aboard and get some sleep if she could, although I do not believ
e she had actually slept. She asked whether I had seen the woman.
“Yes, and spoken to her, though not for long. She’ll recover, or at least I believe she will.”
“But you are not happy. Neither is Sinew, I think.”
“You’re right, I’m discouraged.” Like old Patera Remora, I groped for a better word. “Humbled. Silk old me once that we should be particularly grateful for experiences that humble us, that humiliation is absolutely necessary if we’re not to be consumed by pride. He was subjected to a shower of rancid meat scraps shortly after he came to Sun Street. Maybe I’ve told you.”
She shook her head; Sinew said, “Sure, Scleroderma did it. You and Mother talked about it a lot.”
“No doubt. Well, I can report that I’m in the gods’ good books, since they’ve provided an unmistakable sign of their favor. I ought to be ecstatic, but I don’t feel particularly ecstatic at the moment.”
Seawrack kissed me. When we parted, I gasped for breath and said, “Thank you. That’s much better.” (I can feel her lips on mine as I write. Seawrack kissed me many times, but in retrospect all her kisses have merged into that one. It may have been the last-I cannot be sure.)
“I don’t see why you’re so down,” Sinew muttered. “We’re here, aren’t we? Pajarocu? This is it. They kept stalling around when I was here before, but now they say they’ll take off any day now.”
“Providential,” I told him bitterly. “It’s almost as if they’d been waiting for us, isn’t it?”
“You think so?” He grunted skeptically, or perhaps I should say thoughtfully. “Why should they?”
“Because there are three of us.”
“Four, with Krait.”
“Exactly. Four, if you count Krait, and three if you don’t. Three of us risking our lives to bring back Silk, when only one of us was sent to do it. That’s bad enough, and I haven’t even begun to deal with that. What depresses me tonight is the quality of the rest, the nature of our companions-to-be. You saw them in there, and you must have seen a good deal of them when you spent a week here earlier. Tell me honestly-what do you think of them?”
Seawrack murmured, “They are not kind. Not like you.”
“You’re wrong about that,” I told her. “I’m one of them, and that’s the most depressing fact of all.” (At that moment, I nearly confessed what I had once done to her in Sinew’s hearing. Whoever has read this knows.)
He said, “What’s the matter with them?” He was challenging me, as he had so often on Lizard.
“They’re drinkers, brawlers, and troublemakers. That man you were with-he said he’d rescued you-the one who took our old boat. What was his name?”
“Yksin. When he was mad at me, he told me it meant alone. He was fixing to go off and leave me then, only I didn’t know it.”
“It’s a good name for him, and it would be a good name for all of them. They’re outcasts who believe that it’s some failing in their fellow townsmen that has made them cast them out.”
A moment later I smiled, and Seawrack said, “You’ve thought of something, what is it?”
It was that forty such men would be quick to seize control of the lander as soon as they suspected that it was not bound for the Whorl. But I did not tell her, then or ever.
Oreb has been pulling my hair. “Go now? Go Silk?” (Or perhaps it is “Go, Silk!” I cannot be sure.) I feel exactly as he does, but Evensong still has not returned. I am going to try to snatch an hour’s sleep.
* * *
The clock just struck. The hour is two, to the minute.
It has always been like this for me. Once I have decided to leave a place (as I decided, for example, to leave the hopeless little farm that had fallen our lot) I cannot wait to be away. No doubt I felt just the same way that night, as I sat before our fire in the sloop with Seawrack and Sinew, trying to put my thoughts in order.
Seawrack asked Sinew whether he was a drinker, a brawler, and a troublemaker, too; I doubt that she had any very clear idea of what those words represented. He grinned and said no to the first and yes to the others, adding, “Ask my father. He knows me.” I did indeed, and that was when I decided not to give him the second knife, although I had gotten it for him, until he had need of it.
Seawrack wanted to know more about the woman who had been bitten; and I, needing desperately to speak to Sinew in private, suggested that he and I might be able to bring her back to our sloop so that Seawrack could talk with her in person, adding that she and Sinew might be able to help her in some way after the lander flew.
“No! We will be on it with you.” She turned to Sinew. “Or will you stay?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t come all this way to get left behind. When I was waiting here, I thought that if they were going to go and Father didn’t come I’d go by myself and bring back Silk if I could. Only they didn’t fly and didn’t fly, and so I went looking for you.”
I stood up. “We’ll argue about this later. Meanwhile, Sinew and I are going back to the Bush and get her. We’ll come back as soon as we can.”
Sinew said, “She’ll be looking after her husband. They’re going to whip him or something.”
I said, “It will be difficult, I know. That’s why I’ll need your help.”
When we were some distance from the sloop, I halted in the shadow of a towering tree. “I can’t make you obey me. I know that.”
He nodded and glanced around suspiciously. “What are you whispering for?”
“Because it’s just possible that Seawrack may have followed us. I doubt it, but I can’t be sure, and it’s very important that she not overhear us-that no one does, especially the inhumi; I have reason to think there may be inhumi about. Do you remember how He-hold-fire told us in the lander than nobody would be permitted to bring slug guns, needlers, or even knives? That no one was to bring so much as a stick?”
“Sure, but I’m hanging on to my knife just the same.”
I hoped that he would not be going at all, but that was not the time to say it. “When he said that, I thought it a prudent precaution. I reminded myself that we would be a week or more on the lander. Clearly it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suppose we might fight among ourselves. Now I know that what they have in mind is something much worse. Listen to me, Sinew. If you’re ever going to listen to anyone in your life, listen now. That lander’s not going back to the Whorl. It’s going to Green.”
I had expected him to ask what led me to think so, but he did not.
“It is controlled by inhumi, and it will go to Green unless I can redirect it with the help of the other men who’ll be on it with me.”
I waited for him to speak; when he remained silent I added, “You know that the inhumi fly here from Green. Maybe you also know that the passage is a very difficult one, and that many of those who try it are killed.”
“Good.”
“No doubt it is, but not for us. Not now. They like human blood; and because they do, they do their best to steer human beings to Green to supply it. Your mother and I have told you many times how Patera Quetzal deceived us. He was an inhumu, and he would have directed our lander to Green if he could, even though he himself was dying.”
“It’s in your book.”
“As I said, the inhumi-other inhumi-control this lander. It must bring them from Green, and it must carry hundreds at a time. Then-”
“They trick us into getting on it and bring back a bunch of us.” Slowly Sinew nodded. “Pretty clever.”
Knowing his skepticism and stubbornness, I had thought that it would be practically impossible to convince him. I was weak with relief.
“There’s a whole lot of inhumi around here, that’s what I think. Maybe I should have said something sooner. I saw a bunch together one time when I was here before.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, three. They didn’t know I was there, so they weren’t bothering to look like people. I watched for a while until one flew away. Then I got away myself and went looking f
or somebody, and I found He-bring-skin and said there’s two inhumi over there, and if you’ll give me a knife I’ll help kill them. That’s when he told me they didn’t bite anybody-that was what he said-in Pajarocu.”
“I see.”
“He said they had a deal. They don’t bother them here, and they don’t bite. Father…?”
“What is it?”
“You’re going on their lander just the same?”
“Yes, I am. Krait and I will board it, as we have planned from the beginning.”
I had promised that I would not betray Krait’s secret and I did not, although I knew by then that Krait was betraying all of us. The memory of the pit, or perhaps only my twisted sense of honor, remained too strong.
“To me this is a high and holy mission,” I told Sinew. “That hasn’t changed. New Viron needs the things I’ve been sent to bring back very badly. Most of all, it needs someone like Silk.”
“You’ll get killed.”
“Not if I can seize control of the lander-and I think I can.” I paused, collecting my thoughts. “If I can, I’ll have it in which to bring Silk back. When we return, I can order it to land at New Viron. What is even more important, the inhumi will no longer be able to use it to come here in relative safety, or to transport human beings to Green.”
He shook his head and repeated that I would be killed.
“Perhaps, but I hope not. I said I couldn’t make you obey me, and I can’t. I know that. All that I can do is beg you to help me keep Seawrack off the lander. Will you do it?”
He swore that he would, and we shook hands; and after that I hugged him as I had when he was a child.
Evensong has returned!
Just a moment ago I heard the sentries at the main entrance challenge her, and her reply. Time presses.
Next day, Sinew and I circulated among the other travelers, telling them that we suspected that the lander might actually be bound for Green, and urging them to bring weapons they could conceal when they boarded. That night, he and I decided that the best plan would be for him to sail some distance down the river with her after telling us about a good place to gather wild berries. I would excuse myself at the last moment, saying (quite truthfully) that I had to bargain in the market for the food we would need on the lander.