On Blue's waters

“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.