by Gene Wolfe
Evensong has bought me a boat that sounds like it is exactly the sort I need. She smiled proudly as she described it, and even borrowed this quill and a sheet of paper so that she could sketch it for me, small enough for me to handle alone and even row if need be, with a little shelter like a hut at the waist, and a mast that can be taken down, or put up by one man to spread a small sail. It is newly painted, she says; crimson and black, which in Han are thought to be the luckiest colors.
Best of all, she said that she was very tired and asked if I would mind terribly if she slept in the women’s quarters, offering to send Chandi or Moti to me if I wished. I said that I was half asleep already after having waited up for her. When Oreb croaked loudly, “Silk go!” I explained that he wanted me to go to bed.
A line or two more, but only a few.
They collected our weapons, promising to return them to us as soon as we reached the Whorl. I gave up the slug gun Marrow had given me, ignorant of the fact that the inhumi were arming their slaves to subdue the human settlers on Green and supposing that I had seen the last of it. Ironically, everything we had surrendered was loaded into one of the freight bays-exactly as promised.
I should have anticipated that some of us would believe the inhumi, and side with them. They were proud and stupid men, too proud and too stupid to believe that they could have been so badly deceived. Many, I would guess, had believed that the lander could not fly, and had hoped to loot its cards when it failed. When it took off, crushing us into our rough wooden cradles with a speed that seemed liable to persist long after we were dead, they were ripe to believe anything that He-hold-fire told them. The monitor, too, said we were bound for the Whorl.
The inhumi would not let us into the cockpit, as it was called on the Trivigaunti airship. I do not know what it should be called on a lander.
Yes, I do. Silk said Mamelta had called it the nose, and that is what you and I called it when we wrote, Nettle. We on the lander simply said “the front” or “up front.”
There were three inhumi among us, besides Krait. They called themselves the first three travelers to reach Pajarocu, and said that He-hold-fire had put them in charge of us. One was the one I had seen on the other boat, I believe. I demanded to know why they would not let us into the nose one at a time. I should have killed him (it was he I was arguing with) but I hesitated until it was too late. He looked like a man, and I was still not certain I was correct. Krait pretended to side with me, which made me doubt my conclusions. I reproach myself now, as I should.
All this took longer than I have indicated-a day, at least.
Except for Sinew, the others thought I was insane, or most did. They offered to tie my hands, but those who had believed Sinew and me would not allow it.
But I am far past our leaving Blue already, and that was as much as I intended to write. Before I leave Gaon as well, I should explain that Sinew had cut the halyards while Seawrack was ashore picking berries, and returned to Pajarocu in his hollow-log boat, arriving in the nick of time to be taken on the lander, the final passenger to board it. My heart leaped for joy when I saw him and heard the airlock slam shut behind him. I am ashamed of that even now-I thought that he was going to his death and that we all were-but how glad, how very glad, I was to see him!
I feel sure that Seawrack made what repairs she could and that she and Babbie tried to sail the sloop back up the river. They must have arrived much too late, if indeed they arrived at all. She has returned to the sea now, for which I would be the last to blame her.
That is enough. The inhumi struck me, tearing my cheek with claws. Everyone knew after that, and Sinew stabbed him for it. I had forgotten how it was when Patera Quetzal died, although I would have sworn that I remembered everything. He appeared to be a human man still, for some time after his death agony.
The illusion is the last to die. I must bundle up this paper and put it into my bag at once. Good-bye, Nettle. Good-bye to all of you.
-15-
THE LAST SHEETS
After what I wrote last night, what right do I have to take up the quill again? None, to be honest; but it will be two or three pages at most. I am going to write as long as we are in quiet water, but no longer. Evensong wants to trim the little sail and steer, and this is an opportunity for her to learn. (I am pretending not to watch her.)
Yes, she is with me, having deceived me most thoroughly and hidden herself in our little hut until we were well away from Gaon. “Good girl!” proclaims Oreb. “Clever girl,” I tell him.
She knew what I planned when I sent her to buy this boat. I asked how she knew, and she said that if I had really intended it for a spy I would have had the spy buy it. I had no answer for that. She was right.
She bought it after a long search for the owner and a great deal of haggling, then stocked it with a variety of things she felt we might need: blankets and even pillows, wine, a lot of simple food, and cookware. We have no box of sand in which to build a fire, but as long as we remain on the Nadi we should be able to land some- where.
“Good boat,” proclaims Oreb every few minutes. It is, small and slender (almost too slender) and quick to answer the helm, a boat for fast travel, not for freight; but we have no need to carry fifty or a hundred thick bales of paper. Babbie, Seawrack, Krait, Sinew, and I would sink it; but we are but three, and Oreb takes up very little room.
What Nettle will make of Evensong-or make of me for bringing her home with me-I cannot conceive; and yet I am very glad that she is here. I have told her several times (too many, she says) that I am not the ruler of New Viron. She said she always wanted to be a farmer’s wife. I explained that I am no farmer, that I tried farming and failed at it, that my wife and I have built a mill where we make paper. And she told me that was even nicer.
What more can I do or say?
All this reminds me of what Seawrack told Smew-that she was my travel wife. It shocked him as nothing else did; so I was glad that she had said it, even though I was terrified that he would repeat it to Netde. Outsider, you great and mysterious god behind all the gods, grant that he does someday. It will mean that he has come home.
Are the gods merely farther from us here? Or is it the Vanished Gods-those of the Vanished People-who rule here, as Sinew theorized?
Or are diere no gods here on Blue at all, as so many of us are beginning to assume? Sinew may merely have been trying to discomfit me; it was something he did almost as much as Krait, and rather more skillfully. Even so, he may have been correct. Silk once said that the Outsider was so far from us that he was always both behind and beyond us.
Or at least, that is the sort of thing Silk would have said; I cannot remember his actually saying it, although he may have.
In Gaon, they love racing their horses above all other amusements, and I watched them race whenever it seemed to be expected I would. The harrowed course they gallop along is shaped like an egg, so that we distinguished spectators who had the best view of the start had the best view of the finish, as well. For a short race they gallop around the egg once, but for a longer race, it may be two, three, four, or even five times. Imagine then an eternal race, in which we run on such a track, observed by gods. The god we see before us is not the god nearest us. The god nearest us is the one we have only just left behind.
And whether we realize it or not, it is he to whom we run.
Perhaps Silk would mean something like that.
I have been looking at the sky. I don’t think I have ever seen a clearer, brighter blue since I came to Gaon. By the favor of the Outsider, Green and the stars (and the Whorl, too) are covered by this lovely cerulean impalpability during the day, so that we cannot see outside.
So that we can go about our daily business and not be afraid.
Where Pas used rock, the Outsider uses this and lets us look out on clear nights; and that is the difference between them.
We have lines, hooks, long cane poles, sinkers and bobbers, and even a landing net. It appears that the previous ow
ner used this boat for fishing, mostiy. I have baited my hook with a scrap I pulled from the meat Evensong bought, and we shall see.
“May Scintillating Scylla and all the gods smile upon you, my daughter,” I told Evensong a moment ago. It is Scylsday; and I am an augur of Viron once more, at least in appearance, having left off my headcloth and shortened my hair with Choora. I never went to the schola, but I heard so much about it as a boy that at times I feel I did, for a year or three at least, long, long ago.
My father wanted me to help him in his shop, and to keep it when he died. I intended to do anything in the whorl except that- yet something very much like it came to pass, just as he wished. Some god favored him.
I made Sinew help me in the mill as my father made me help him, and Sinew resisted and resented me in exactly the same way. The time will come, Sinew, when it will all come back to you, the gears and shafts and hammers, and the paddles churning in the big tank of slurry, and you will be very glad indeed that you knew them once.
My father stayed behind to fight for General Mint. I would never have believed that he had a drop of courage, going to his little shop on Sun Street day after day, always hoping to clear enough to feed his family and to keep his resentful eldest son in the palaestra.
His ungrateful, purblind oldest son. What my father did required no courage at all. So I believed.
Yet he went off to war, balder than I have ever been but smiling, with his new slug gun and his stiff canvas bandoleer of cartridges; war must have seemed very easy after all he had been through. When our roads crossed again before Hari Mau and his friends carried me off to Gaon, I did not even recognize him. Then Quadrifons whispered, “Those are the years you see. Look past them.”
And I knew him at once. I wanted to say, “Where you were, I have been, Father,” but I knew he would reply, “Where I am, you will quickly be, Son,” whether his lips uttered those words or not. Knowing it, I lacked the courage to speak.
Wijzer warned me.
Work hard, Sinew. Work well and wisely. Live free if you can, and live so that you will not be ashamed, as I am at times, to look back on what you have done.
Your grandfather was no hero. He was the kind of man who slept in the rain with Hari Mau and me on the marches of Han, too wet, too tired, and too hungry for heroics. No hero, but when our trumpets rang and the Hannese kettledrums thundered I saw men like him firing and chambering a fresh round and firing again, out in front of the flag.
He has married a second time, and begun a new family. I have small half brothers I have never seen.
Caught one! A good one, I believe. I have run a long string through its gills and put it back into the water just as we do on Lizard.
Just as I did on the sloop with the bluebilly Seawrack chivvied until it jumped aboard.
We have passed beyond the tilled fields of Gaon, which means that I can stop worrying about being recognized; I saw the last cart drawn by the last carabao some time back. Nadi is gentler here, although not yet stagnant or sullen. She is like a woman who sings at her work.
Evensong keeps us to the middle, or wherever the current is strongest, leaning her slight weight this way or that against the steering oar. “Good boat,” Oreb repeats; and then “Fish heads?” The banks are lined with trees so tall that I cannot catch sight of the summits of the mountains, trees that might almost be the savage trees of Green, although it may be only that the summits are lost in mist. Just before the fish bit, I saw something better, a felwolf that had come to the river to drink.
This is such a beautiful whorl that my poor gray quill falls silent from shame when I try to write about it.
This quill is exactly like the ones I used to tie in bundles of thirteen for my father, binding each bundle tightly but not too tightly and knotting the soft blue twine. I wish I had seen the bundle before Evensong cut it for me and put the quills into the old pen case I brought here.
We sold pen cases like this one, too, of course. I remember going into the little shed of a manufactory where they were made with my father and watching two women there smearing the leather and the pressboard cases with glue, and the waxed wooden forms they were put into until the glue dried. We could have brown or black, the man who employed those women told us, or any other color that we wanted, even white. But we had better keep in mind that the pen case would soon be stained with ink. It was best, he said, to choose a dark color, so that the ink stains would not show.
My father ordered black (like the one I am writing on), yellow, and pink. I thought he was being very foolish, but the yellow and pink ones sold first, bought by the mothers of little girls at our palaestra.
Why do we wage war, when this whorl is so wide? I believe it is because rulers such as I was in Gaon live in towns. There are so many people: a great number. So many farms: a smaller number, but still very great. People and houses, and animals that are in fact slaves, although we do not call them slaves.
(Marrow did not call his clerk a slave either; nor were the men who carried his apples and flour to my sloop called slaves.)
Buying and selling. Selling and buying, and never looking at the trees of the forest, or the side of the mountains. If we were wise, we would give the rulers of all the towns a stick and a knife apiece, and tell them we will be happy to take them back when they have traveled around this whorl, as Oreb did.
I can describe a tree or a felwolf, but not Blue. A poet might describe it perhaps. I cannot.
With nothing better to do than fish and catalogue the slow changes of the river, I have been thinking about my sons-about Krait on the lander, particularly. They caught him and forced open his mouth. I saved him, and thought that I had lost him forever when he joined the other inhumi barricaded in the cockpit. I wish that he were here now, here in this little boat with Evensong and me.
Evensong asks if it will be all right to stop when she sees a clearing. She wants to prepare my fish for us and cook some rice, she says. If I am any judge of women, she really wants to try the pots and pans she bought for us, enough to cook for all the men on Strik’s big boat. In any case, I said she might; it will be hours before she sights the perfect spot, I feel sure, and we will both be hungry.
Babbie was my slave, no doubt. I could have led him to the market and sold him. But he did not object in the least to his slavery, and in that way freed himself by freeing his spirit. He was my slave, but he could have escaped any time when we were on the river, simply by jumping into the water and swimming to shore. For that matter he could have escaped even more easily on any of the many occasions when I left him to guard the sloop. He never liked being left alone, but he protected the sloop as instructed just the same.
He was my slave, but in his heart we were companions who shared our food and helped each other when we could. I could see farther and better, although he may not have realized that; he could run and swim much faster, and hear better, too. He possessed a more acute nose. I could talk; and despite what Seawrack said, Babbie could only communicate. It did not matter. He was stronger than I, and a great deal braver; and we were there to support each other, not to boast of our superiorities. What would he think of Oreb, I wonder?
And what would Oreb think of him? Good thing? Good hus?
Is this, my Oreb whom I love, my Oreb who has returned to me after more than a year, the true Oreb? Is this really the tame night chough I played with as a boy, waiting in Silk’s sellaria for well-deserved punishment that never came?
“Oreb, why did you come back to me?” I asked him.
“Find Silk.”
“I’m not Patera Silk, Oreb. I’ve told you-and everybody-that over and over.” I ought to have asked him to find Silk for me, but I feel sure he could not unless he discovered some way to return to the Whorl, and I do not want to lose him again. “Where did you go, Oreb?”
“Find god.”
“I see. Passilk? I think that’s what the surgeon called him. Did you find him, and is that why you returned to me?”
�
��Find Silk.”
“You are free, you know. Patera Silk wouldn’t cage you, and I won’t either. All you have to do is fly off into these trees.”
“Fly good!” He flew from my shoulder to Evensong’s and back, a graphic demonstration.
“That’s right,” I told him, “you can fly, and it’s a wonderful accomplishment. You can soar above the clouds on your own, exactly like we did on the Trivigaunti airship. I envy you.”
“Good boat!”
I offered to take over the steering and give Evensong a chance to rest, if she would tend my pole; but she refused. “You won’t stop no matter how pretty the place is, and I’m hungry.”
“You’re never hungry,” I told her. She must be hungry at times, surely, and she was very hungry the first time we spoke with Hari Mau’s Hannese prisoners; but she never talks about how hungry she is, or admits it when I ask. Set a roast fowl before her, and she will accept a wing, clean the bones until they shine, and announce herself satisfied.
How green everything is after the rains!
We have stopped here to cook our fish and rice, and have decided to travel no farther today. We left Gaon before shadeup, and are not likely to find another place as pleasant as this if we travel on. It is a tiny island now, an isle I will call it, although I feel sure it must have been part of the riverbank before the rains. The river must cover it from time to time and drown any trees that try to take root on it; there is only this soft green grass, spangled with little flowers of every imaginable color that bloom the moment the rainy season ends and set seed in a wink.
I have been studying them, my nose four fingers from the soft, rich soil that nourishes them. To say that they are simply purple and blue would be quite false; they are every shade of both and more besides, some as blue as the sky, and some as purple as evening flowing over the sea. And red as well (various tinctures of red, I ought to say), yellow, orange, white, off-white, and even a dusky russet. Pink and yellow are the most attractive of all colors; the women who bought those pen cases were right.