On Blue's waters

He solved his problem by landing on shore well in advance of us and swimming out to the sloop. I saw him, threw him a rope and hauled him on board, shook him, gave him as violent a tongue-lashing as I am capable of, and followed it by grabbing him by the back of his tunic (which had been one of mine), peeling it off him, and beating him with the rope’s end until my arm ached. When the wind had moderated and we could talk privately, he reproached me for it, reminding me that he had rescued me from the pit and insisting, erroneously in my view, that we had sworn eternal friendship.

“I have been your friend ever since you got me out,” I told him. “Have you been mine?”

He managed to meet my eyes with a defiant stare that I found more familiar than it should have been, but could find nothing to say.

“You very nearly sunk this boat. We saved it, but if Babbie hadn’t roused us it would have gone down. I don’t suppose that Seawrack could drown, but I can.”

He said, “The weather was fine when I left and I would have come back before the end of my watch.”

“I would have died before the end of your watch. I would have been dead, and the sloop sunk, and my mission to the Whorl a total failure. I would be completely justified if I put my knife in you this minute.”

My hand was on it as I spoke, and he took a step backward. There was fear in his eyes. “You’ve hurt me as much as you could already.”

“Not half as much,” I told him, “and I’ve kept my promise even though you’ve broken yours. I threw you that rope; and if I hadn’t punished you severely for what you did, Seawrack would have known that you couldn’t possibly be what you pretend to be.”

He hissed at me. The hiss of an inhumu is at once a more sinister sound and an uglier one than the hissing of any serpent that I have ever heard.

“If one of my own sons had done what you did, I’d treat him exactly the way I treated you,” I told him. “If that isn’t what you want, what is it?” I did not say that at least one of my sons would have exhibited the same poisonous hatred; but I could not suppress the thought.

I put him to work in good earnest after that, something I had not done before, bailing, trimming sail and snugging up the standing rigging, tidying the sail locker, coiling and stowing the rope I had thrown him, and bailing again. I watched him every moment and shouted at him whenever he showed signs of slacking; and when he begged for mercy I started him scraping paint.

It was not long afterward that Seawrack spotted He-pen-sheep and his son standing on the beach with the head of the breakbull held upright between them. We were already some distance past them, but I put up the helm and ran down the wind until we were within hailing distance. He-pen-sheep cupped his hands around his mouth. “You take! Tou kill breakbull, Horn!”

Seawrack glanced at me, her lovely eyes wide. “They want to give you that head.” Standing upon its muzzle, it was nearly as tall as the son, and the spread of its horns exceeded that of my out-stretched arms, as I had found out when we had returned to the carcass.

“You’ll have to take it,” Krait told me, looking up from his scraping; and of course he was right.

Besides, I wanted it. You will not understand, Nettle my dearest darling, although perhaps some others who read this will. It had seemed a grim irony when He-pen-sheep’s son had tied the break-bull’s tail to the belt of the crude leather garment his father had made for me. I had wanted the head-yes, even then-if only to prove to myself that I had actually done what I remembered doing-and the tail seemed only a sort of mockery of that desire, some god’s cruel jest to punish me for my dawning self-satisfaction. You will ask now, and very reasonably, whether I did not want the head of the wallower I shot a few weeks ago as well. I did, but not nearly so acutely; and since no one talked of retaining the heads as trophies, I kept my peace.

When after considerable labor we had the breakbull’s head on board and had waved good-bye once again, Krait took great pleasure in enunciating the obvious. “You can glory in it for a day or three, if the flies don’t get at it. But after that, it will have to go over the side, or we will.”

I muttered something about sawing off the horns, if I could trade for a saw.

“You could have shot them off back there.” He pointed with the scraper. “It would have saved a lot of work.”

Seawrack asked indignantly, “How much work do you think they did, cutting it off and carrying it to the other side, when they couldn’t even be sure that we’d be going this way?” (I had questioned He-pen-sheep about a big river to the north the evening before, but that was surely not the time to mention it.) She turned to me. “Would you settle for the skull with the horns still on it, and no smell?”

I assured her that I would, and gladly.

“Then all we have to do is tow it behind the boat. Not too long a rope, because you don’t want it to go too deep. I’ll show you.”