On Blue's waters

“I wasn’t any good at it, because I couldn’t ever see the pictures. I knew the things everybody knows, what an enlarged heart means, and all those commonplace indicants. But I couldn’t see things in the entrails the way my dear sib could, and Patera, too. Now I can. Isn’t that strange? Now that I’m blind, I have ulterior vision. I can’t see the entrails till I touch them. But when I do, I see the pictures.”

Silk, I knew, had prophesied in that way; but I also knew that he had not had great faith in such prophesies. He had been both fascinated by and skeptical of the entire procedure. Bearing all that in mind, I asked whether she would be willing to prophesy for me, provided I could supply a good big fish for a victim.

“Why, yes, Horn. I’m very flattered.”

She paused, thinking. “We must have another fire for your sacrifice, however. A fire here outside. I built a little altar of stones, too. It’s what I use when the men who come in boats want me to do it.”

She began to walk slowly, searching left and right with the white wand she carried; and for a moment I saw her, and the rock itself and Mucor, as strangers must have-as the “men in boats” she talked about no doubt saw them: a place and two women so uncanny that I was amazed that anybody had the courage to consult them.

There is no point in recounting here how I caught a fish and carried it up that steep and weary path in a bucket, or how we built a small fire for it on the altar, lighting it from the one inside, before which Mucor sat motionless while the young hus munched her apple.

I loaned Maytera the long hunting knife Sinew had given me, and held my fish steady for her. She cut its throat neatly (not through the gills as one commonly kills fish, but as if it had been a rabbit); turning, she raised her thin arms to the point at which the Sacred Window would have stood, had we possessed one, and uttered the ancient formula.

(Or perhaps I should say that the empty northern sky was her Window. Is not the sky the only Sacred Window we have here, in which we strive to trace the will of gods who may not yet have deserted us?)

“Accept, all you gods, the sacrifice of this fine shambass. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…”

As she pronounced these words, I was beset by a sensation so extraordinary that I hesitate to write about it, knowing that I will not be believed.

No, my dearest wife, not even by you.

I saw nothing and heard nothing, yet it seemed to me that the face of the Outsider had appeared, filling the whole sky and indeed overflowing it, a face too large to be seen-that I was seeing him in the only way that a human being can see him, which is to say in the way that a flea sees a man. Call it nonsense if you like; I have often called it nonsense myself. But is it really so impossible that the god of lonely, outcast things should have favored those two, exiled as they were to their sea-girt, naked rock? Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble? Whether or not there was truth in the presence that I sensed then, I fell to my knees.

Turning back to the altar and me, Maytera Marble laid my fish open with a single swift cut that made me fear for my thumb. I took back the knife, and her old-woman’s fingers probed the abdominal cavity in a way that left me feeling they had eyes in their tips I could not see.

“One side’s for the giver, that’s you, Horn, and the augur. That’s me. The other’s for the congregation and the city. I don’t suppose-”

Abruptly she fell silent, half crouching with her head thrown back, her blind eye and empty, aching socket staring at nothing, or perhaps at the declining sun.

“I see long journeys, fear, hunger and cold, and feverish heat. Then darkness. Then more darkness and a great wind. Wealth and command. I see you, Horn, riding upon a beast with three horns.”

(She actually said this.)

“Darkness also for me. Darkness and love, darkness until I look up and see very far, and then there will be light and love.”

After that she was silent for what seemed to me a very long time. My knees hurt, and with my free hand I tried to brush away the small stones that gouged them.

“The city searches the sky for a sign, but no sign shall it have but the sign from the fish’s belly.”

Now I must get to bed, and there is really nothing more to record. Although Maytera urged me to spend the night in their hut, I slept on the sloop, very tired but troubled all night by dreams in which I sailed on and on, braving storm after storm, without ever sighting land.

It is very late. My palace is asleep, but I cannot sleep. Earlier I was yawning over this account. If I write a little bit more, perhaps it will make me sleepy again.

Darling, you will want to know about Maytera’s prophecy, and what Mucor said when at last she returned to us from her search for Silk.