On Blue's waters

“If we could-” In my surprise, I dropped the glass, which shattered at my feet.

“What is it?”

I had been looking down into the valley as I spoke, and thanks to the blue glass I had seen motion. I pointed with my slug gun. “That bush shook. Not the big one, but the little one next to it. There’s some kind of animal down there, a pretty big one.”

“Don’t!”

I had taken a step forward, but Seawrack caught my arm. “Let me tell you what I think. Please?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think it was a-a medicine they poured on the ground, or stone underneath, or anything like that. I think they lasted longer here.”

It was a new thought to me, and I suppose my face must have shown my surprise.

“Out on this little island, so far from all the other land people. For a long time they mended the walls and painted them, and dug up the trees and wild bushes. Ten years, is that what you said?”

“Yes.” Another bush a little farther from us than the first had trembled ever so slightly, a ghost of motion that would have been easy to miss.

“Ten years ago, they gave up. There weren’t enough left to do it anymore, or it was too much work that didn’t make sense. I know you think I’m stupid-”

“I don’t,” I told her. “You’re naive, but that’s something else entirely.”

“You think I’m stupid, but I can think of people, people like us? Two-legged people like you and me and all the people on that boat living here, and there wasn’t anybody else anywhere. We’d mend our boats and the walls we’d built for a while, and then somebody would die, and there’d be more work for everybody who was left. And somebody else would die. And pretty soon we’d stop, but we wouldn’t be dead, not all of us. The last of us wouldn’t die for a long while.”

“All right,” I told her. “If it’s one of the Vanished People, I won’t shoot him. Or her, either. But I’d certainly like to see them.” I did not believe that it was, and in that I was quite correct.

For a few minutes that seemed like an hour I scoured the bushes with Babbie trotting at my heels; then a greenbuck broke cover and darted away, leaping and zigzagging as they do. Babbie was after it at once, squealing with excitement.

I threw my slug gun to my shoulder and was able to get off one quick shot. The greenbuck broke stride and stumbled to its knees, but in less than a breath it had bounded up again, cutting right and running hard. It vanished into brush, and I sprinted after it, all my fatigue forgotten, guided by Babbie’s agitated hunck-hunck-bunck!

Very suddenly I was falling into darkness.

Here and thus baldly I had intended to end both tonight’s labor and this whole section of my narrative. I wiped this new quill of Oreb’s and put it away, shut up the scuffed little pen case I found where my father must have left it in the ashes of our old shop, and locked the drawer that holds this record, a thick sheaf of paper already.

But it cannot be. It cannot be a mere incident like Wijzer’s drawing his map and the rest. Either that fall must be the end of the entire work (which might be wisest) or else it cannot close at all.

So let me say this to whoever may read. With that fall, the best part of my life was over. The pit was its grave.

It must be very late, but I cannot sleep. Somewhere very far away, Seawrack is singing to her waves.

- 9- KRAIT

When I regained consciousness it must have been almost shadelow. I lay on my back for a long while then, occasionally opening my eyes and shutting them again, seeing without thinking at all about anything I saw. The sky darkened, and the stars came out. I remember seeing Green directly above my up-turned face, and later seeing it no longer, but only the innocent stars that had fled before it and returned when it had gone.

It was at about that time that I felt the cold. I knew I was cold and wished that I were not. I may have moved, rubbing myself with my hands or hugging myself and shivering; I cannot be sure. Glittering eyes and sharp faces came and went, but I appealed for no help and received none.

Sunlight warmed me. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that it would be painful to look at the sun. It vanished, and I opened them to see what had become of it, and saw Babbie’s familiar, hairy mask peering at me over the edge of the pit. I closed them again, and the next time I opened them he had gone.

I think it was not long afterward that I came to myself. I sat up, cold, full of pain, and terribly thirsty. It was as if my spirit had gone and left my body unoccupied as it did on Green; but in this case it had returned, and my memories (such as they were) were those of the body and not those of the spirit. It was day again, perhaps midafternoon. I was sitting among earth and fallen leaves in a pit about twelve cubits deep.

(My own height, I should say, was three cubits and two hands at that time-a good deal less than it is now. Looking up at the walls of the pit while there was still light enough for me to do it, I estimated their height as three to four times my own.)