by Gene Wolfe
I look at Evensong sleeping, and think again: yellow and pink are the most beautiful of colors. We cooked and ate, and made love among the flowers. I will catch another fish or two for her while she sleeps. We will eat a second time under the stars, and sleep. Rise early and travel on. I wish I could be certain that New Viron is on the coast of the sea to which this Nadi of ours runs. I believe it must be, but I cannot be sure.
-16-
NORTHWEST
Oreb has rejoined me. Somehow that has made it possible for me to sit down here and rub my feet, and write as long as these few sheets last. I will not begin this entry by telling you where I am or how things stand with me. I do not know where I am-or how anything stands with me.
The sun had scarcely set when I felt their wings. I write “felt” because one cannot really hear them. They make no more noise when they fly than owls. Looking up, I saw two, so high that they were in sunlight although the Short Sun’s light had vanished from our isle. “Bad things,” Oreb solemnly declared them. “Things fly.”
“You’re right,” I told him, “they are indeed evil beings. But they’re bringing good news. Hari Mau has fallen upon the enemy.” The inhumi came looking for me, pretty clearly, as soon as the Hannese broke.
“This is very bad.” Evensong shook her head; she may have been frightened-no doubt she was-but her impassive face showed nothing.
“This is very good,” I told her. “It means you can go back home to your parents in Han.”
“No!”
Trying to sound gentle I said, “I married Nettle before you were born, and married half a dozen other women before you were given to me by the Man. You owe me nothing at all. In fact, it is I who owe you, and I owe you a great deal.” I began pulling off my rings.
“I am your only wife!” She shook her little fist.
“You know that isn’t true.”
“Where are the others, Rajan? You cannot show them to me!”
I dropped my rings into her lap, and refused them when she tried to give them back.
After a great deal of shouting, she put them into a pocket in the sleeve of her gown, saying, “Maybe it’s a long way to New Viron and we will need these.”
I agreed, but thought to myself that it was an even longer way from New Viron to her family in Han. When she decided to go back there, as I felt certain she would before long, she might have to buy passage on a dozen boats.
Aloud I said, “Good. Thank you for accepting them. I want you to take these too.” I gave her Choora and my short sword. “We may have to fight before the night is over, and you can fight better than I with those. I have my azoth.” I may have tapped its jewel-studded hilt confidently-the Outsider, at least, knows how hard I tried to-but I felt very weak and ill at that moment.
“I have seen that sword. It has no blade.”
I told her she might see its blade, too, before shadeup; and that she would not enjoy the sight.
“Bad fight,” Oreb croaked.
I knew that he was right; they would wait until they were so many they felt confident of victory and rush us when we least expected it. Since it was not blood but my death they wanted, some might well have needlers and other weapons.
As we embraced beside the fire, Evensong whispered, “You know their secret. You could destroy them.”
“Yes. I couldn’t kill them here and now, if that’s what you mean; but I know how they might be returned to the mere vermin that they once were-mindless, hideous, blood-drinking animals seeking their prey in Green’s jungles.”
I stared into the embers of the fire that we felt we could not let die, remembering the time that Krait had crept out of the nose, how we had embraced and wept (his tears of pale green slime that stained my tunic) while the other passengers slept.
“Father…? Horn…?” His breath still smelled of blood, Tuz’s, as I learned a few minutes later.
I sat up, thinking in confused way that Sinew had become Krait, or Krait Sinew.
“They sleep. I wanted to warn you.”
“Krait? Is that you?”
“Your sentries. I bit one.” Krait’s voice betrayed his uncertainty.
“I understand, and if it was one of the sentries, he deserved it, and worse. But Krait -”
“Ours too. We - we can’t do it, Father. We don’t have the discipline.”
“And you’re ashamed of that, as you should be. Well, neither do we, apparently.”
“He-hold-fire, He-take-bow, and He-sing-spell stand guard for us because we make them. But when it’s quiet and everyone else sleeps-”
One of my sleeping men had stirred. For a while neither Krait nor I dared speak.
“If you could break in suddenly…”
“We’ll try - but Krait, you’re risking your life just to tell me. I’m not sure I could get them to turn you loose again.”
I believe he shrugged; the Short Sun was nearly dead ahead then, and in the near darkness of Number One Freight Bay it was difficult to be sure. “There are only two needlers, and I’ve bent some needles in one.”
Evensong shook my shoulder. “You must tell me.”
“I won’t break my oath. My son confided it to me as he lay dying. If I were to betray him now, I would have to die, too, because I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Then say as much as you can.” She had never asked that before.
“About him? He was an inhumu. We called him Krait, and Seawrack and I called-”
“That is the woman who sings?”
“Yes, though she is not singing now.” I tried to collect my thoughts.
“It was a mere lie at first, Evensong. Something to tell people in Wichote and Pajarocu who wanted to know why Krait was with us. It remained a lie as long as there was no danger to Krait but me, and none to me but Krait. Once the lander took off everything changed, and Krait and I discovered that we merely supposed we had been lying.”
“Hold me.”
I was already, but I held her more tightly. “We were in the freight compartments. They had never been intended for passengers; but they could be pressurized, I suppose because the Crew might have to transport animals at times, and of course the inhumi had to keep us alive or we were of no value. They controlled the forward part of the lander, with three human slaves from Pajarocu who were supposed to be operating it. The slaves had slug guns, and the inhumus had needlers, some of them.”
I waited for her to ask me about Pajarocu, but she did not.
“Krait tried to divert the lander to the Whorl, but he couldn’t-it was already too late. He promised me that Sinew and I would not be drained. On Green they have thousands of human slaves whose blood they take only rarely, as long as the slaves can work and fight for them.”
Evensong trembled in my arms.
“Krait told me why they have to have it as he lay dying. He didn’t intend to give me power over them, you understand. I’m certain he wasn’t thinking of that in his final moments. He was thinking of the thing that linked him to me, and me to him-of the bond of blood between us.”
She said nothing.
“For a long, long time I didn’t realize what he had done either. If I’d understood the power of Krait’s secret while Sinew and I were on Green, things might have gone differently.”
“No cry,” Oreb urged me from my knee.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Perhaps… Perhaps I did realize it. But Krait’s death was so recent then, and I felt that I’d be betraying him. Before I knew it, it was too late.” Under my breath I added, “I still feel I’m betraying him, in a way.”
Evensong murmured, “Tell me. You must tell me, my husband. My only ever lover. You must tell me tonight.”
“Once I watched some men who had a wicker figure of the wallowers they were hunting. Two walked inside it, while two others hid behind it. That’s the kind of thing the inhumi must have done before the Vanished People reached Green-reshaped themselves to look like the animals they hunted, disguised their odor by smearing t
hemselves with the excrement of their prey, and uttered the same cries, moving as their prey did until they were close enough to strike.”
They were uttering our own human cries at that moment, or something like them, talking among themselves in the air, their voices faint, pitched high, and floating. I wondered whether they could hear me.
“If only we cared about each other sufficiently. If only all of us loved all the others enough, they would go back to that. We would still think them horrible creatures, and they would still be dangerous, as the crocodiles in this lower river water are. But they would be no worse.”
“That is the secret, what you said?”
“No. Of course not.”
They were circling above us, I knew, and sometimes they flew so low that I could actually feel the wind from their wings upon my face. I decided that they might well overhear anything we said, and I counseled myself to keep that in mind each time I spoke.
“You must tell me!” Evensong demanded.
“I must not-that is the truth, the fact of our situation. They know that I know; I’ve proved it to them. They also know that you don’t, that you know where the others are buried but do not know the secret they would die to protect. They have to kill me, or feel that they do, even though I’ve sworn never to reveal it.”
She started to protest and I silenced her with a kiss.
When we parted, I said, “They don’t have to kill you, not as things stand. In fact, if they killed you like that, without reason, I would consider myself free to speak out about them.” It was a lie, and may have been the last that I will ever tell, the final lie of so many thousands. I hope so.
For a while we tried to sleep; but I, at least, could only stare up at the flying inhumi I glimpsed at almost every breath between Green’s shining disk and ourselves. After an hour or more I stood up and called out to them (addressing them as Jahlee, Juganu, and so forth) in the hope that we could come to some agreement under which they would spare us. They neither replied nor came to our fire, although I invited them to. There seemed to be about twenty at that time.
Eventually we went back to the boat and lay down in its little hut of plaited straw, leaving our fire to die. Evensong fell asleep almost at once. I prayed, not on my knees as I felt I should (the hut was too low for that) but lying on my back next to her. Every so often I crawled outside with my azoth, looked up the sky, fingered the demon, and crawled back into the hut as before. Tired as I was (and I was very tired, having slept for only an hour that afternoon), I was striving to convince myself that I was protecting us-protecting her-in some unclear way.
That I was not, I was well aware. By not returning to Gaon the moment I discovered she was on board, I had put her into deadly danger; and my presence kept her there.
After a time that seemed long to me, three or four hours I would guess, when I was practically asleep, too, I heard myself calling Babbie.
Certain that I had been dreaming and had spoken aloud in a dream that I could no longer remember, I rubbed my eyes and rolled onto my hands and knees. The inhumi had gone. I had no idea how I knew that, but I knew it with as much certainty as I have ever known anything.
I crawled out of the hut. Our little fire had sunk to a glow so faint that I would not have seen it if I had not known where to look. Oreb was gone, too, and I was afraid that the inhumi had killed him.
Someone on shore called again for Babbie, and I understood that he meant me; it never so much as occurred to me then that I had sometimes been called “Silk” or “Horn.” He who called me seemed quite near, and he called me with more urgency than Seawrack ever has. I searched the shadows under the closest trees for him without result.
I had on my trousers, with Hyacinth’s azoth in the waistband, and I got my tunic as well and the augur’s black robe that Olivine had found in some forgotten closet for me; I left behind stockings, boots, sash, and the jeweled vest. For a moment I considered taking back my dagger and the sword that I am still too weak to use, but the voice from the forest was calling to me and there was no more time to waste upon inessentials. I waded ashore and set off through the forest at a trot. I have the pen case on which I am writing and this rambling account of my failure, with a few other possessions, because they were in the pockets of my robe.
Oreb has been urging me to rise and walk, and in a moment I will. It may be that we are lost. I do not know. I have been trying to go northwest, that being the direction in which I think New Viron must lie, and I believe that I have succeeded pretty well.
* * *
Another halt, and this one must be for the night-a hollow among the roots of (what I will say is) just such a tree as we had on Green. It is what we call a very big tree here, in other words. I will write, I suppose, as long as the light lasts; I have three (no, four) more sheets of paper. The light will not last long, however, and I have no way to start a fire and nothing to cook if I did. The last time I ate was at about this time two days ago with Chota. I am not hungry, but am afraid I may become weaker.
If the inhumi find me here and kill me here, then they find me here and kill me. That is all there is to it.
Good-bye again, Nettle. I have always loved you. Good-bye, Sinew, my son. May the Outsider bless you, as I do. In the years to come, remember your father and forget our last quarrel. Good-bye, Hoof. Good-bye, Hide. Be good boys. Obey your mother until you are grown, and cherish her always.
I found him in the forest, sitting in the dark under the trees. I could not see him. It was too dark to see anything. But I knelt beside him and laid my head upon his knee, and he comforted me.
* * *
It has been four days, I believe, and could be five. I stumbled upon a hovel (I do not know what else to call it) in the forest. Two children are living alone there: they call each other Brother and Sister, and if they have ever had other names they do not know them. They showed me where they had buried their mother.
They took us in and shared what food they had, which was very little. They collect berries and fruits, as Seawrack used to, and Brother hunts with a throwing stick. At first they wanted to kill Oreb; afterward he entertained them.
With their knife-a sharp flint-I cut a likely stick and made a fishing spear like the one that He-pen-sheep’s son had used. Brother took me to the stream from which they got their water, and I was able to spear fish for them. “You must stand very still,” I cautioned him. “Make no noise at all until the fish come near enough, and don’t move a muscle. Then strike like lightning.”
My own lightning days are past, I suppose, if they ever came at all. I missed, and Brother laughed (I was laughing too) and ran away. Sister came and watched wide-eyed, and I speared a fish for her that we both called big, although it was not. A little farther down there was a good big pool, and there I speared another. I let her try after that, and she got two, one of them the largest of the four we caught. Brother had taken a bird almost as big as Oreb, so we had a feast.
In that way whole days flew past. I cut Sister’s long, dark hair and wove a little cord of it, and set a snare along a game trail the boy showed me, recalling the demonstration snare that Sinew made years ago to show Nettle, in which he had caught our cat.
When I left yesterday they followed me, but this morning they are gone. I hope they get home safely, and to tell the truth I was afraid I would draw the inhumi to them, although I have seen none since that terrible night on the Nadi.
Very little paper remains.
* * *
Last night I dreamed that Pig, Hound, and I ran into an abandoned house to get out of the rain. It seemed familiar, and I set off to explore it. I saw a clock-I think the very large one that stood in the corner of my bedroom in Gaon-and the hands were on twelve. I knew that it was noon, not midnight, although the windows were as black as pitch. I turned away, the clock opened, and Olivine stepped out of it. “This is where you lived with… This is where you lived with Hyacinth,” she told me. Then Hyacinth herself was beside me in sunshine. Togethe
r we were chopping nettles from around the hollyhocks. Hyacinth was fourteen or fifteen, and already breathtakingly lovely; but in some fashion I knew that she was terribly ill and would soon die. She smiled at me and I woke. For a long time the only thing I could think of was that Hyacinth was dead.
It has faded now, somewhat; and I am writing this by the first light coming through the leaves.
* * *
I have re-read most of this. Not all, but most. There are many things I ought to have written less about, and a few about which I should have written more. Hari Mau’s smile, how it lights his face, how cheerful he is when everything is bad and getting worse.
Nothing about the first days of the war, before I was wounded. Or not nearly enough.
Nothing about my dream of an angry and vindictive Scylla who talked like Oreb, the dream that woke me screaming and so terrified Brother and Sister: “Window! Window! Window!”
Nothing about the fight on the lander, and how horrible it was. The inhumi had barricaded themselves in the nose, Krait and the rest. We had to fight the ones who still believed-half a dozen. Eight or nine, I think, really. (Some wavered, coming and going.) We tried to reason with them, but won over only two. In the end we had to rush them to prevent them from joining the inhumi, and I led the rush. They were as human as we, and they may have been the best of us.
Brave, certainly. They were extremely brave, and fought with as much courage and determination as any men I have ever seen. They died thinking they were on their way back to the Whorl, and to this moment I envy them that.