On Blue's waters

There is a musical instrument, one that is in fact little more than a toy, that we in Viron used to call Molpe’s dulcimer. Strings are arranged in a certain way and drawn tight above a chamber of thin wood that swells the sound when they are strummed by the wind. Horn made several for his young siblings before we went into the tunnels; when I made them, I dreamed of making a better one someday, one constructed with all the knowledge and care that a great craftsman would bring to the task, a fitting tribute to Molpe. I have never built it, as you will have guessed already. I have the craft now, perhaps; but I have never had the musical knowledge the task would require, and I never will.

If I had built it, it might have sounded something like that, because I would have made it sound as much like a human voice as I could; and if I were the great craftsman I once dreamed of becoming, I would have come very near-and yet not near enough.

That is how it was with the Mother’s voice. It was lovely and uncanny, like Molpe’s dulcimer; and although it was not in truth very remote as well as I could judge, there was that in it that sounded very far away indeed. I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express.

No, not even if I could whisper them aloud to you of the future, and certainly not as I am constrained to speak to you now with Oreb’s laboring black wingfeather.

Nor with a quill from any other bird that ever flew.

Nothing more happened that night, or at least nothing more worth recounting in detail. Certainly Babbie and I listened for hours, and when I think back upon that time it seems to me that we must have listened half the night. Sometime before dawn it ceased, not fading away but simply ending, as if the singer had come to the conclusion of her song and stopped. The light airs that had been moving us ever more slowly through the weed died out altogether at about the same time, leaving the sloop turning lazily this way and that without enough way to make her answer the helm. I sat up with Babbie until shadeup, as I had planned, then stretched myself out for most of the morning under the foredeck. Babbie slept too (or so I would guess), but slept so lightly that the sloop could hardly have been said to have been unwatched.

When I woke, I saw that we were much nearer the low green island than I had imagined. If we got a good wind, I decided, we would sail on in search of Pajarocu; but if Molpe permitted us only the light and vagrant airs I more than half expected, I would steer for the island, and tie up there until we had sailing weather.

It was noon before we reached it, pushed along at times by faint breezes that never lasted long, and handicapped almost as often by others. I jumped from the sloop to make her fast, and found myself on a moist and resilient turf that was not grass, and that stretched its bright green carpet not merely to the edge of the salt sea, but beyond the edge, extending some considerable distance underneath the water, where it had been crushed and torn by our prow. Nowhere was there a tree, a stump, or a stone-or anything else that I could tie the sloop to. I sharpened a couple of sticks of the green firewood we had gotten the day before, drove them deeply into the soft turf with a third, and moored to them.

While I was sharpening my stakes and pounding them in, I argued with myself about Babbie. He was clearly eager to get off the sloop after having been confined there for several weeks, and though I had planned to leave him to guard it, I could see for a league at least in every direction, and could see nothing for him to protect it from. Determined to be prudent no matter how great the temptation, I sternly ordered him to stay where he was, fetched my slug gun, and set off by myself, walking inland for a half hour or so. Finding no fresh water and seeing nothing save a few distant trees of no great size, I returned to the sloop and pulled up my stakes (which was alarmingly easy), and sailed along that strange shore until midafternoon.

Sailed, I just wrote, and I will not cross it out. But I might almost have said we drifted. In three or four hours, we may have traveled half a league, although I doubt it. “At this rate we’ll die of thirst ten years before we sight the western land,” I told Babbie, and tied up again at a point where the green plain seemed slightly more variegated, having hills and dales of the size loved by children, and a tree or bush here and there. I moored the sloop as before, but when I left it this time I let Babbie come with me.