On Blue's waters

I see that before I left for Skany, that glorious, corrupt town, I wrote of how Seawrack and I slept in the cubby of the sloop, with Babbie sleeping too at our feet, or at least at times pretending to sleep so that he could be in our company; and I said that we did not sleep long.

Nor did we. I remember lying like that, then turning on my back so that both my ears might listen. I wrote about the song of the wind, too; but I am not certain that I had ever really heard it until that night, although I thought I had. To hear the song of the wind truly, as I heard it that night, I think that you must hear it as I did, lying on your back in a rocking, pitching boat upon the wide, wide sea, with a woman younger than yourself asleep beside you.

The wind was a woman, too. Sometimes it was a woman like General Mint, a small woman with a neat, pure, honest little face, a woman in flowing black astride the tallest white stallion anyone ever saw, singing as she rode like a flame before a thousand wild troopers who rode as she did or ran like wolves, firing and reloading as they came and halting only to die.

And sometimes the wind was a woman like the tall, proud women of Trivigaunte, galloping along Sun Street with their heads up and their lances leveled, women singing to their wonderful horses, horses that had always to be held back and never had to be urged forward. And sometimes the wind was a singing woman like the one beside me, a sea woman who sings like her Mother, a woman that no one ever completely understands, with silver-blue combers in her eyes.

As I listened, the wind seemed to me more and more to be all three women and a million more, spurred onward-faster, always faster-by the rumbling voice of Pas. Beneath me, the sloop was lifted by giant’s hand, and rolled so far that Seawrack was tumbled onto me and clutching me in fear while Babbie squealed at the tiller. Outside the shelter of the foredeck, I was drenched to the skin in an instant. It was pitch dark except when the lightning flashed, and the sloop was laid over on her beam ends and in danger of being dismasted. I meant to cut her moorings before they pulled her under, but there was no need. The stakes I had pushed into the damp softness of that mossy shore had pulled free, and we were being driven before the storm like a child’s lost boat or a stick of driftwood, half foundering. I put out the little jib, hoping to steady her and keep her stern to the waves, but had hardly set it before it was carried away.

I will not write about everything that took place that night, because most of it would be of interest only to sailors, who are not apt to be found so far inland as this. I rigged a sea anchor that tamed the diabolical pandemonium of boat and storm to mere insanity; and Seawrack and I bailed and bailed until I thought my arms would fall off of my shoulders; but the sloop never foundered or sunk, or lost a stick. I have never been prouder of something that I myself have made, not even my mill.

What I want to tell whoever may read this is that in the flashes of lightning, which for whole hours were so frequent as to provide a hectic illumination that was nearly constant, I saw the green plain part for us, ripped in two by the fury of the waves, and seeing it so-lifted by great waves at one moment, then crashing down upon the sea again at the next-I knew it for what it was.

At that place in the middle of the sea, the bottom is not leagues removed from the surface; but is, as Seawrack confirmed for me, not more than two or three chains distant from it. Great herbs (I do not know what else to call them) grow there that are not trees, nor grasses, nor ferns, but share the natures of all three. Their tangled branches, lying upon the surface, are draped with the smooth green life over which Babbie and I wandered. It may be that it covers them as orchids cover our trees here in Gaon, or as strangling lianas cover the cannibal trees of Green. Or it may be that they cover themselves with it as the trees of land cover themselves with leaves and fruit. I do not know. But I know that it is so, because I saw it that night. I saw what I had once thought islands torn like banana leaves, and tossed like flotsam by the waves.

Something climbed into our sloop that night that was neither a beast nor a man, and was not a thing of the sea nor a thing of the land, nor even a thing of the air like the inhumi. I hesitated to write of it, because I know that it will not be believed; after thinking it over, I understand that I must. How many travelers’ tales, although full of wise advice and the soundest information, have been cast aside because among their thousands of lines there were two or three that their readers could not be brought to believe?