On Blue's waters

“If I must. I hope I won’t. Sailors are usually friendly. We trade information, and sometimes supplies. I may be able to get us more water.” I hesitated. “If they’re not friendly, I want you to dive into the sea at once. Don’t worry about me, just swim away to-to someplace deep where they won’t be able to find you.”

She promised solemnly that she would, and I knew that she would not.

It was a much larger boat than mine, two-masted and blunt-bowed, with a crew of five. The owner (a stocky, middle-aged man who spoke in a way that recalled Wijzer) hailed us, asking where we were bound.

“Pajarocu!” I told him.

“Riding light you are,” he said, clearly assuming that we were traders too.

Soon his big boat lay beside our small one. Lines from bow and stern united the two, we introduced ourselves, and he invited us aboard. “In these waters not so many boats I see.” He chuckled. “But farther than this I would sail a woman so pretty to see. Whole towns even, not one woman like your wife they got.” One of his crew set up a folding table for us, with four stools.

I asked how far we were from the western continent.

“So many leagues you want? That I cannot tell. On which way bound you are, too, it depends. North by northwest for Pajarocu you must sail.”

“Have you been there?”

He shook his head. “Not, I think. To a place they said, yes, I have been. But to Pajarocu?” He shrugged.

I explained about the letter, and brought my copy from the sloop to show him.

“One it says.” He tapped the paper. “Your wife they let you bring?”

Drawing upon Marrow’s argument, I said, “One, if all the towns they have invited send somebody, and if all the people who are sent arrive in time. We don’t believe either one is likely, and neither does anybody else in New Viron. If there are empty places, and we think there will be, Seawrack can come with me. If there aren’t, she can wait in Pajarocu and take care of our boat.” I tried to sound confident.

The sailor who had set up our table brought a bottle and four small drinking glasses, and sat down with us.

“My son,” Strik announced proudly. “Number two on my boat he is.”

Everyone smiled and shook hands.

“Captain Horn?” the owner’s son asked. “From the town of New Viron you hail?”

I nodded.

So did Strik, who said, “To that not yet we come, Captain Horn. Looking for you somebody is?”

My face must have revealed my surprise.

“Just one fellow it is. Toter’s age he is.” (Toter was his son.)

“Us about Captain Horn he asked. Alone in a little boat he sails.” The corners of Toter’s mouth turned down, and his hands indicated the way in which the little boat was tossed about by the waves.

“When asked he did, Captain Horn we don’t know.” Strik pulled the cork with his teeth and poured out a little water-white liquor for each of us. “This to him we say, and in his little boat off he goes.”

“You’re from the mainland yourselves? The eastern one, I mean. From Main?” I was trying desperately to recall the name of the town from which Wijzer had hailed.

“Ya, from Dorp we come. New Viron we know. A good port it is. Word to you from somebody back there he brings, you think?”

I did not know, and told him so. If I had been compelled to guess, I would have said that Marrow had probably sent someone with a message.

Seawrack asked how long we would have to sail to find drinking water.

“Depends, it does, Merfrow Seawrack. Such weather it is.” Strik spat over the side. “Five days it could be. Ten, also, it could be.”

“It isn’t bad for me.” She gave me a defiant stare. “He makes me drink more than I want to, but the Babbie is always thirsty.”

I explained that Babbie was our hus.

“You suffer too.” She sniffed and tasted Strik’s liquor and put it down. “You pour it into your glass, then back into the bottle when you think I’m not looking.”

I declared that I saw no point in drinking precious water that I did not want.

“A little water I can let you have,” Strik told us, and we both thanked him.

Toter told us, “If for two or three days you and your wife due west will sail, a big island where nobody lives you will find. Good water it has. There last we watered. Not so big as Main it is, but mountains it has. A lookout you should keep, but hard to miss it is.”

“We’ll go there,” Seawrack declared to me, and her tone decided the matter.

Two days have passed, and now I have re-read this whole section beginning with my encounter with the monstrous flatfish with disgust and incredulity. Nothing that I wanted to say in it was actually said. Seawrack’s beauty and the golden days we spent aboard the sloop before Krait came, the water whorl that with her help I glimpsed, and a thousand things that I wished with all my heart to set down here, remain locked in memory.

No doubt such memories cannot really be expressed, and certainly they cannot be expressed by me. I have found that out.