On Blue's waters

The shaman may have had something to do with that after all, because the western peoples do not make our distinction between the human and the bestial. The shearbear is a person, certainly, and an important one, and Babbie was counted as a sort of son to us, an adopted son or foster child. When I learned this, I smiled to think that it made Krait his brother, and made him Krait’s.

So it was that day, as I dozed in the shade of the foredeck. Another sailor sailed with me, and I felt that I could rest as long as the sea remained calm. If a hand on the tiller was needed, he would provide it, and if it was advisable to take another reef in the mainsail, he would take it.

When I woke, I found that the sun was touching the horizon. The wind had died away to a breath, and the jib, which I was nearly sure I had struck before lying down, had been set again. I let out the last reef in the mainsail (which I had, I thought, double reefed) and trimmed, explaining to Babbie everything that I was doing and why I was doing it as I worked. If he understood any of it, he said nothing.

“You can turn in now, if you want,” I told him, and much to my surprise he lay down under the little foredeck just as I had, though he was up and about again in less than an hour. After that, we stood watch together.

There was nothing much to watch, or at any rate that was how it seemed at the time. The weed was thicker than ever, so that I felt it was actively resisting our passage and had to be pushed aside by the bow like floating ice. I was nodding at the tiller when Babbie began grunting with excitement and with a running leap plunged over the side.

As I have said, he was a faster and a stronger swimmer than any man I have ever known, his multitude of short, powerful limbs being well adapted to it. For ten minutes if not more I watched him swim away, noticing the faint green glow of his wake; then his small, dark head was lost among the gentle swells. After so many days of increasingly less surly companionship, it was a strange and forlorn feeling to find myself alone in the sloop again.

In half an hour he was back, still swimming strongly but not making anything like the progress he had earlier because he was pushing a small tree ahead of him, roots and all. I had hoped to snare driftwood in the form of a broken timber or a few floating sticks; now it seemed that all the gods had chosen to help me at once.

It was too big to bring on board. I lashed it alongside until I could lop off as many branches as would fill our little woodbox. Sinew’s hunting knife was large and heavy enough to chop with after a fashion, although barely. A hatchet (with a pang of nostalgia I recalled the one that Silk had used to repair the roof of our manteion, the hatchet he had left behind at Blood’s) would have been a good deal better. I resolved to add one to the sloop’s equipment at the first opportunity; but however wise, it was a resolution that did me no good while I was leaning over the gunwale to hack away at those springy branches, which were still full of sap and decked with green leaves.

“I hope you weren’t hoping for a fire tonight,” I remarked to Babbie. “This stuff’s going to have to dry for days before it will burn.”

He chewed a twig philosophically.

“For a moment there I thought I saw somebody.” It sounded so silly that I was ashamed to voice the thought, even though there was no one but my little hus to hear it. “A face, very pale, down under the water. It was probably a fish, really, or just a piece of waterlogged wood.”

Babbie appeared skeptical, so I added, “Some trees have white bark. They’re not all brown or black.” Sensing that he still doubted me, I said, “Or green. Some are white. You must have lived in the mountains before somebody caught you, so you must surely have seen snowbirch, and you probably know that underneath the bark of a lot of trees, the wood is whitish or yellow. A log that had been in the water for a long time-”

I broke off my foolish argument because something had begun to sing. It was not Seawrack’s song (which torments me for hours at a time even now), but the Mother’s, a song without words, or at any rate without words that I could understand. “Listen,” I ordered Babbie; but his ears, which usually lay flat against his skull, were up and spread like sails, so that his head appeared twice its normal size.