On Blue's waters

“I said that. I said all that earlier, and you ought to have listened. If I were to get you out, it would be terribly dangerous for me, wouldn’t it? Unless I disposed of that slug gun and your knife first.” His face was that of a reptile, although his forehead was higher; his voice was a young man’s-was my son’s.

“No,” I told him. I was almost too despondent to argue. “If you freed me, I would never hurt you. Never, not for any reason.”

He stood up. “I’m going, but I’ll leave you this to think about. We could kill you, all of you. We’re stronger, as you said, and we can fly. Our race is older than yours, and has learned things that you can’t even dream of. Since you hate us, and kill us when you can, why don’t we do it?”

“You want our blood, I suppose.”

“Exactly. You are our cattle.”

I had expected him to fly, but he swarmed up the smooth stone side of the pit as a squirrel climbs a tree, making it look so easy that for a moment I almost imagined that I could do it myself. My thumb was on the safety; but without him I could not escape. Nor could I escape the memory of a time when Sinew was not yet born, and Hoof and Hide not even thought of, when Nettle and I had worked frantically to free someone else’s cow from a quagmire in the vain hope that her owner would give her to us if we succeeded.

Then he was gone; and I, using the slug gun for a crutch, got to my feet and was so foolish as to try to climb out as he had, struggling in that way until I was utterly exhausted and never getting half as high as my own head.

Last night I stopped writing because I could not bring myself to describe the rest of that day, or the night that followed it, or the day that followed that, the day on which I licked dew from the sides of the pit, lying on my belly at first, then kneeling, then standing-and at last, when the Short Sun peeped over the rim and the dew was almost gone, wiping the stone above my head with fingers that I thrust into my mouth the moment they felt damp. Altogether I got two mouthfuls of water, at most. No more than that, certainly, and very likely it was less.

Earlier I had prayed, then cursed every god in my heart when the rescuer they sent had proved to be Krait. On that day I did not pray, or curse, or any such thing.

This is what I least wished to write about last night, but I am going to try to write it down this evening. Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished.

I was standing in Nettle’s kitchen. She was making soup, and I watched her add a whole plateful of chopped meat to her kettle and shake the fire. She turned and saw me, and we kissed and embraced. I explained to her that I was not really in her kitchen at all, that I lay at the bottom of a pit in a ruin of the Vanished People on an island far away, and that I was dying of thirst.

“Oh,” Nettle said, “I’ll get you some water.”

She went to the millstream and brought back a dipper of clean, cool water for me; but I could not drink. “Come with me,” I told her. “I’ll show you where I am, and when you give me your water there I’ll be able to drink it.” I took her hand (yes, Nettle my darling, I took your hard, hardworking little hand in mine) and tried to lead her back to the pit in which I lay. She stared at me then as if I were some horror from the grave, and screamed. I can never forget that scream.

And I lay in the pit, as before. The Short Sun was burning gold.

It had crossed the pit and vanished on the other side an hour or two before, when the inhumu returned. He stood with his toes grasping the edge and looked down at me, and I saw that he was wearing one of my tunics and a pair of my old trousers, the trousers loose and rolled up to the knee, and the tunic even looser, so that it hung on him as his father’s coat does on a child who plays at being grown. “Horn!” he called. And again, “Horn!”

I managed to sit up and to nod.

“Look, Horn, I’ve brought you a bottle of water.” He held it up. “I carried an empty one, and filled it to the top at a spring I’ve discovered not far from here. Wasn’t that clever of me?”

I tried to speak, to beg him for the water; but I could not. I nodded again.

“You’d promise me anything for this, wouldn’t you?” He leaped into the pit with it. “I’ll trade you this bottle for your slug gun. Will you trade?”

I must have nodded, because the bottle was in my hands, although he held it too. I put it to my lips and drank and drank; I would not have believed that I could drink an entire bottle of that size without ever taking it from my mouth, but that was how I drank that one.

“You feel better now,” the inhumu said. It was a statement, not a question.

I found that I could speak again, although the voice did not seem mine. “Yes. Thank you. I do.”