On Blue's waters

“There’s a great deal about Patera Silk,” I told her, “but only a little, really, about Patera Pike. I’m afraid most of the other students at the palaestra aren’t even mentioned, but Nettle and I pop up pretty frequently.”

I was on the point of saying good-bye, but now that the moment for it had come I found myself every bit as reluctant as she was. “Do you remember how I followed you to the gate of Blood’s villa? How I wanted to come in with you, but you wouldn’t let me?”

“You were a good, brave boy. I couldn’t risk your life like that, Horn.”

“It’s in there,” I said, and cast off. “I’m leaving now. Remember me in your prayers.”

“I will. Oh, I will!”

I sighed, and put one of my new sweeps into the water with a plop that she surely heard.

“Good-bye, Horn.” She clutched our book to her chest. “You will come back someday? Please?”

“When I’ve got eyes for you,” I told her, and pushed off. The little inlet was so sheltered by its cliffs that there was scarcely any wind; I had to scull the sloop to its mouth before the mainsail began to draw.

I was trimming it when I heard Mucor’s long, shrill whistle and looked up. She was pointing at the sloop and me, her left arm stiffly extended; and because the outcrop on which she stood was a good deal higher than the top of the mast, her rag of gown and long, coarse, black hair were whipped by the wind. Whenever I think of her now, that is the image I recall first: poised upon the outcrop she has reached by the almost invisible crevice behind her, her arm stretched forth and her face the face of General Mint restrained by some subordinate, ordering forward troops she would rather have led in person.

Mucor might, as I have tried to say here, have commanded ten thousand spectral troopers; but at the time I could not see even one. Then some slight sound from the top of the rock reached my ears, and I realized that her gesture had misled me. Like any actual general, she was not pointing to whatever forces she commanded, but to their objective.

At the top of the cliff, I saw a small dark figure that seemed almost a cluster of boys, or two men upon their hands and knees. It vanished, then reappeared as it made a flying leap from the top of the cliff. For a moment I thought its target was the sloop, and at it would strike it and die. It sent up a waterspout five cubits from the tip of the bowsprit, however, and vanished as if it had sunk like a stone.

Back in the inlet, Maytera Marble was shouting, her voice audible but unintelligible, echoing and re-echoing from cliff to cliff. Mucor waved, but disappeared into the crevice too quickly for me to wave in return. Earlier I wrote that she is not tall, but that was misleading. Majesty is not a mere matter of a hand or two over the eight. In twenty years, I myself had matured and even aged; yet subconsciously I had supposed that Mucor was still the preternatural adolescent I remembered.

Nearly noon, although I am writing by lamplight. Gusts that would lay the sloop on her beam ends rock my cracker-box palace, whistling through every lattice and shutter. Green was bigger than a man’s thumb last night when it rose over the willow in the garden, and I was reminded that my people here call it the Devils’ Lantern. Seeing it, I thought only of the inhumi, and not of the storms and the tides, which I in my folly imagined would mean nothing to us in this inland place. I needed a good lesson, and I am getting it, and the whole unhappy town of Gaon with me. Between gusts, I hear my elephant trumpeting in his stall.

No quantity of preaching or teaching will make the people wholly safe from the inhumi’s sleights and subterfuges. No one knows that better than I. But preaching and teaching may do something, may even save a few lives, and so they are worth doing. It may be at least as valuable, however, to encourage the farmers to plant crops that will not be beaten flat by the storms-yams for example. This is surely the first storm, and not the last.

I see that when I described my departure from Mucor’s Rock 1 never actually mentioned that Babbie came on board, his black snout and little red eyes breaking water just aft of the rudder, and his stubby forepaws clutching the gunwale beside me in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of the leatherskin. Hus can swim like rainbow-frogs, as Sinew and everyone else who has ever hunted them attests, and certainly Babbie could.

Only the leatherskin could have been a less welcome boarder. I ordered him to return to Mucor, and he crouched in the bow and defied me. I grappled with him then, and tried to drop him over the side, but he was as heavy as a stone, and clung to me with all his legs so tightly that the two of us might have been hewn from a single block of flesh; and when, after a long tussle, I was able to tear him loose and push him out of the sloop, he swam under the keel and climbed back on board in far less time than it had taken me to throw him off.