On Blue's waters

I made use of every foothold, and tried to remember how Silk had climbed Blood’s wall, and Blood’s house, too; but nothing seemed to help. In the end Krait helped me, his hand grasping my own and his clawed feet braced against the side of a little depression he had made for them. His hand was small, smooth, cold, and strong; unpleasantly soft.

Then there came a moment when I stood at the rim of the pit I had come to know so well, staring down at its stones and bones, its fallen leaves and broken strands of vine.

“What about the rope?” he said. “Shall we take it with us?”

I shook my head.

“We may need it. I got it from your boat.”

So the sloop was safe. Just knowing that made me feel a little bit stronger. “Leave it,” I told him. “Somebody else may fall in.”

Together we made the long walk back to the sloop. “You can fly,” I said once when we stopped to rest. “Why don’t you? I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“You’re afraid I don’t trust you.”

I denied it.

“You’re right. It would be foolish of me to doubt you now that you’re out of that hole and have my slug gun and your knife. You could kill me easily, and take the key from my pocket.”

I nodded, although I was thinking that it would not be half so easy as he implied.

“I’m going to become one of you, and in fact I already have. I did it when I borrowed your clothes. So now I have to act like one of you and walk, even though walking’s hard for me.” He smiled bitterly. “Do I look like a real boy to you?”

I shook my head.

“You see, I’m keeping my promise. I’ll look like a boy to the young woman you call Seawrack, however, and to everyone we meet, unless they’re… Well, you know. So I can’t fly. I can’t because you can’t. Do you enjoy paradoxes?”

I told him that Silk had liked them more than I did.

“He was wiser than you are, exactly as you say. I’ll pester you with dozens before we part, Horn. Here’s one. Those who cling to life lose it; those who fling their lives away save them. Do you like that?”

I said, “I might if I understood it.”

“Paradoxes explain everything,” he told me. “Since they do, they can’t be explained.”

That was a second paradox, of course. Or rather, it was a great truth embodied in a paradox, the truth being that a thing cannot be employed to prove itself. We had a fortune-teller at court a few |i days ago. He had come partly, as he said, because he wanted permission to ply his trade in our town; and partly, or so I would guess, because he hoped to gain notoriety here.

He volunteered to read my future in the stars. I declined, pointing out that it was midday and that even if he went outside he would not be able to see them. He insisted that he knew their positions even when he could not, unrolling a score of big charts, and launching into a convoluted recitation that nobody understood.

I cut him off, ruling that he did not need my permission to tell fortunes, or anyone’s, as long as he behaved himself. I added that he was free to take fees from, anyone foolish enough to give him | their money.

He retired to the back of the room, and I soon forgot about H him; but after an hour or two he came forward again, announcing If loudly that he had completed his prediction for me. (It was the I usual mixture of flattery and menace-I would lead three towns not my own to victory, would be tried for my life, would return as a stranger to my sons’ native place, find new love, and so on and so forth. I will not put myself to the trouble of recording the entire rigmarole.) When he had finished, I asked how I-or anyone whose future he foretold-might know that his prophecies were valid; and he solemnly declared that the stars themselves confirmed them.

Everybody laughed. But there is rarely a day on which I do not hear proofs of the same kind advanced with confidence. Somebody testifies, and his testimony being doubted, swears that it is true. A dozen heads nod sagely. Yes, since he declares it true, it must be.

That is easy enough; but what about Krait’s first paradox? Now I think that he meant that I had doomed myself by my own anxiety to leave the pit. Given courage enough to refuse the help of an inhumu, I might have been rescued by someone else or freed myself by my own efforts, and so might have returned eventually to my home, which I feel certain that I shall never see again.

That I will never see more, even if the storms and waves have spared it.

I had intended to continue my narrative tonight-or rather to resume it, telling how the inhumu and I made our way down the mountainside to the sloop, how we went in search of Seawrack, and so forth. I would then be very near the point at which she gave me the ring. |j|

But I will not have much time tonight, and I am going to use it to write about something that happened today instead. In a way it bears upon everything that I had intended to write, and I will get to that soon enough.