On Blue's waters

Together we walked back to the tip of the Tail, where I had given my oath, until we stood at last at the place where soil and stone vanished altogether and the last of the coarse seagroats with them, and there was only sand and shells, with here and there a stick of driftwood cast up by the unresting waves. At last I took out my needier and offered it to him, telling him that there were only fifty-three needles left in it, and that he would be wise not to waste any.

He would not accept it. “You’ll need it yourself, Father, traveling to-to…”

“Pajarocu. It’s a town, but nobody seems to know where it is. Inland, perhaps, though I hope not. They say that they’ve refitted a lander there so they can cross the abyss to the Whorl again, and they’ve invited New Viron to send a passenger.”

“You.”

“I knew Silk better than anybody else.” Honesty compelled me to add, “Except for Maytera Marble, Magnesia as she’s called now.” I offered him my needier again.

“Keep it, I said. You’ll need it.”

“And Maytera Marble is unable to make the journey, they say. She was already very old when we came, twenty years ago.” For a few seconds I tried to frame an argument; then I recalled that no argument of mine had ever changed his mind, and said, “If you don’t take this now, I’m going to throw it into the sea.”

I cocked my arm as though to make good my threat, and he was on me like a snow cat, clawing for the needier. I let him take it, stood up, and brushed off sand. “When it isn’t on my person, I’ve kept it in the mill. Since you boys never go in there unless you’re made to, it seemed safe. It has been. You might want to do the same thing. You wouldn’t want Hoof and Hide to get hold of it.”

He frowned. “That’s good. I will.”

I could have shown him how a needier is loaded and fired, but experience had taught me that trying to teach him anything only made him resentful. Instead, I said, “I may need it, as you say. But I may not, and I’d much rather know that you and your mother and brothers are safe. Besides, a traveler with a weapon like that might be killed for it, as soon as anyone knew he had it.”

Sinew nodded thoughtfully.

“Conjunction in two years. You remember the last one, the storms and the tides. Any logs you’ve got in here then will be a danger to you. And of course there will be-” I searched for a word. “Strangers. Visitors. Very plausible ones, sometimes.”

The reality of conjunction seemed to dawn upon him then. “Don’t go, Father!”

“I must. Not just because I’ve sworn to; I wouldn’t be the first man to break his oath. And certainly not because of Marrow and the others-I’d hurt them far more than they hurt me before it was over-but because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. You and your mother can run the mill as well as I could, and nobody else would have anything like as good a chance of persuading Silk to join us. At supper tonight we agreed that we were sinking into savagery here on Blue, that we’d soon be fighting off the inhumi with the bows and spears we use for hunting now. You may be confident that we could survive as savages and.even regain what we lost, eventually. No doubt-”

The stubborn head shake I had come to know so well.

“I don’t think so either. There were people here before, or something very like people. They had a civilization higher than ours, but something wiped them out. If it wasn’t the inhumi, what was it?”

“That’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about.” There was a pause, perhaps while Sinew collected his thoughts, perhaps only while he moistened his mouth. “You’re trying to bring Pas, all the gods from the Long Sun.”

“No,” I said.

He ignored it, or did not hear it. “That’s good, because gods could help us if they would. But they had gods of their own, the Vanished People who were here first. They might help us, too. There’s a place on Main, way up on Howling Mountain a little before the trees stop. I found it almost a year ago. Maybe I should have told you.”

I see that I said I had three reasons for not accompanying our five visitors as they proposed. The first (as I indicated) was that I wanted to take leave of my family, and get them to agree to my going, insofar as possible. Nettle would agree because she loved me and Sinew because he hated me, I felt sure; and with their support I had hoped to persuade the twins that it was necessary.

The second was that I wanted to sail my own boat in search of Pajarocu, and not the boat Marrow had offered to let me have, however good it might be. I did not intend to disparage his offer, as he may have thought; it was a generous one, and one that would have resulted in a serious loss if I had accepted it. He showed me that boat, the Sealily, when I spoke with him in town, and I would guess that it was nearly as fast as my own, and rather more capacious and seaworthy.