On Blue's waters

“I know. And now you’re afraid of it, even when you catch fish for us. I see you nerving yourself to go in, to take the plunge as people say.”

“I’m not afraid I’ll drown, Horn. I never, ever will. Sometimes I wish I could.”

Obtuse though I was, I knew what she meant. “You’d die.” I tried to make my voice gentle. “Isn’t that worse than going back to your old life in the sea?”

We watched Krait haul on the painter to bring the sloop nearer shore, then walk out onto the bowsprit, jump down, and vanish among the crowding trees. The sun was sinking behind the mountains already, wrapping the river that had become our whorl in silent purple shadows.

“He’s one, isn’t he?” Seawrack sighed, put away her comb.

“One what?”

“One of the things that hunt through the night, the things I was so frightened of when I slept in Mother.”

Not knowing what to say, I did not reply.

“There was a cave in the rocks that I used to play in. I’ve probably told you.”

I nodded.

“I used to say I was going to sleep in there.” She laughed again, softly. “I was always really brave in the daytime. But when the dark started coming up out of the deep places, I would swim back to Mother as fast as I could and sleep in one of the places where I’d been sleeping ever since I was little. I knew what a lot of the things out there in the dark were, even if I didn’t have names for them, and just this moment it came into my head that Krait is one of those, even if I don’t have any name except Krait.”

I said, “I see,” although I was not sure I did.

“He sleeps all day, more than Babbie, even, and he hardly ever eats anything. Then at night he hunts, and he must eat everything he catches, because he never brings us back anything.”

“Sometimes he does,” I objected.

“That little crabbit.” Contemptuously, she waved the crabbit aside. “He seems like a human person to me, but he doesn’t to you.”

It caught me completely off guard. I did not know what to say.

“He has two hands and two arms, and he walks standing up. He talks more than both of us together when he’s awake. So why don’t you think he’s people?”

I tried to say that I considered Krait fully human, and that he was in fact a human being just as we were-but tried to do it without telling a direct lie, stuttering and stammering and backing away from assertions I had just made.

“No, you don’t,” Seawrack told me.

“Perhaps it’s only that he’s so young. He’s actually quite a bit younger than my son Sinew, and quite frankly, Seawrack, my son Sinew and I have been at each other’s throats more often than I like to remember.” I swallowed, steeling myself to force out all the lies the situation might require. “He looks like Sinew, too-”

A new voice-Sinew’s own-inquired, “Like me? Who does?”

I turned my head so fast that I nearly broke my neck. Sinew was almost alongside, standing perilously erect in one of the little boats made by hollowing out logs that the local people used.

“Krait does,” Seawrack told him. It was as though she had known him all her life.

Sinew looked at her, gulped helplessly, and looked at me, plainly not yet up to speaking to a woman whose eyes, lips, and chin had rocked him like a gale.

I asked whether he wanted to come on board.

“She’s-is it all right?”

“Certainly,” I told him; and I caught the rope of braided hide he threw me and made it fast.

If you had asked me an hour earlier, I would have said that I would be delighted to see any face or hear any voice from Lizard, even his. Now I had both seen and heard him, and my heart sank. Here in this strange and wondrous town of Gaon, I tell myself (and I believe that it is true) that I would be overjoyed to see Sinew again as I saw him that evening on the great cold river that rushes through the hills of the eastern face of Shadelow; but I know that if my feelings were to take me off guard here as they did there, I would call my guards and tell them to take him into the garden and cut off his head in any spot they liked, as long as it was out of sight of my window. If, somehow, he had appeared when Seawrack was ashore looking for the seedy orange fruits she had twice found growing in the clearings left by old fires, I really believe that I might simply have shot him and let the torpid waters carry his corpse out of my sight. What might have happened subsequently on Green, I can scarcely imagine.

As it was, he sprang over the gunwale as I never could and sat down with us, looking at Seawrack with embarrassed admiration.

“This young man is Sinew, my oldest son,” I told her. “He followed me from Lizard Island, apparently, and now he has caught up with me. With us, I ought to have said.”

She smiled at him and nodded; and I added, “Sinew, this is Seawrack.”

Shier than ever, he nodded in return.

“You did follow me, didn’t you? I had asked you-in fact, I had begged you-to stay there and look after your mother.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Gently, Seawrack asked, “How was she when you left, and how were your brothers?”