On Blue's waters

When the topsail was up, I went to the tiller, steering us a bit wider of the low island I had sighted. There was weed in the water, as there often was off Lizard, long streamers of more or less green leaf kept afloat by bladders about the size of garden peas. Like everyone else who lived near the sea, we had collected this weed on the beach and dried it for tinder; it occurred to me that we had very little left, as well as very little firewood. Tinder without firewood would be useless, but if I kept an eye out, I might snag a few sticks of driftwood as well. I collected a good big wad of seaweed and spread it over the waxed canvas covers of the cargo chests, tossing the tiny crabs that clung to the strands back into the water. Others skittered about the boat and swam in the bilges until Babbie caught and ate them, crushing their shells between his teeth with unmistakable relish and swallowing shell and all.

Watching him, I realized that I had gone astray when I had supposed that he had eaten the creature whose blood I had found on the half-deck. It could not have been small, and he would have had to have eaten it entirely, skin, bones, and all. Yet he was clearly hungry. I threw him an apple, and ate one myself after listening to his quick, loud crunchings and munchings. By that time I had heard what Babbie did to bones more than once, and I felt quite sure that the noise he would have made while devouring an animal of any size would certainly have awakened me.

What had happened, almost certainly, was that something had climbed aboard at the bow, perhaps grasping the bowsprit in some way, as I had when I had climbed back on board after escaping the leatherskin. Babbie had charged and wounded it, and it had fallen back into the sea. The clatter of Babbie’s trotters would not have awakened me because I had become accustomed to hearing him move about the boat while I slept. He had licked up all the blood he could find, just as he later licked up the clotted blood I extracted from the crevices between the planks with the point of Sinew’s knife.

Something had fallen back into the sea, bleeding and badly injured. What had it been? For a moment I thought of the woman I had shot, swimming league upon league after our boat, intent upon revenge. If I were spinning a fireside tale for children here, no doubt it would be so; but I am recounting sober fact, and I knew that any such thing was utterly impossible. The woman I had shot was dead, in all probability; and if she was not dead, it was because she had been rescued by the black boat from which she had fallen.

Had it really come out of the sea at all? The inhumi could fly, and though they possessed no blood of their own, they could and did bleed profusely with the blood of others when they had recently fed, as the inhumu we had called Patera Quetzal had in the tunnels. Babbie would almost certainly attack an inhumu at sight, I decided. But could he have thus caught and bested one? A big male hus might have, but Babbie was no more than half grown.

What, then, had come out of the sea? Another leatherskin? Even a small one would have killed or injured any hus bold enough to attack it, I felt sure; and Babbie seemed quite unhurt. I resolved to nap during the afternoon and stand watch with him after shadelow.

The sloop was no longer rolling as it had been, and by that time was heeling rather less than it had when I had first set the topsail. I shinnied up the mast (something I had not done in some time, and found more difficult than I remembered) and had a look around. The island I had seen to port was distant but plainly visible, a level green plain hardly higher than the sea, dotted here and there with bushes and small, swaying trees.

Looking to starboard, I thought that I could make out another, similar, island there. “If those are parts of the same landmass, we may have found our western continent a lot sooner than we expected,” I told Babbie; but I knew it could not be true.

The weed in the water became thicker and thicker as the day wore on; but there was no driftwood.

Once, when Seawrack and I were on the riverbank, I felt that there were three of us. Haifa dozen speculations raced through my mind, of which the most obvious and convincing were that Mucor was accompanying us without revealing the fact, or that Krait had left the sloop and was shadowing us for some purpose of his own. The most fantastic-I am embarrassed at having to set it down here and confess that at the time I actually came close to giving it serious credence-was that the shaman whose help we had tried to enlist the previous night had put an invisible devil upon our track, something he had boasted of having done to others. After an hour or more of this uneasiness, I realized that the third person I sensed was merely Babbie, whom I had by a species of mental misstep ceased to consider an animal.