On Blue's waters

For hus to be tamed and trained, they must be captured very young, as Babbie no doubt was; and when I lived on Lizard I would probably have said that the surprising thing was that he could be trained at all. The truth, as I came slowly to realize during the time I had him, is that he was not. He did not obey me by rote, as my horse does. Instead, he tried to cooperate with me. I was inferior to him in strength and in many other ways, but I possessed powers that must have seemed wholly magical to him. What did he make of the slug gun? What could he make of it? Plainly it is in the best interest of a captive hus to cooperate with his captors, protecting their property, assisting them to hunt (he will share in the bag, after all) and the rest.

All that seems clear. Accepting it, how are the inhumi able to train human beings? How was Krait able to tame me like a hus, although I had not been taken young? In all honesty, I have no satisfactory answer. He offered himself as a valuable friend when he freed me from the pit, and afterward. And he liked me, I believe, in the same way that I liked poor Babbie. Before Krait died, he loved me, and I him. I had become the father of a brilliant, wayward, monstrous son.

It was dark when we reached the sloop. I had tied her to a tree before leaving with Seawrack and Babbie on our hunting expedition, and she seemed almost exactly as I had left her. There was no sign of Seawrack or the inhumu. I shared a good many apples and what remained of the ham with Babbie, and retired for the night.

It was still dark when I woke wet and shivering, or at least it seemed so. Fog had come in, chill and damp, and so thick that I literally could not see the bowsprit from my seat in the stern. I built a fire in our little box of sand, and Babbie and I sat before it, trying to keep as warm and dry as we could.

“I should have brought warmer clothes,” I told him. “I knew perfectly well that I was going to a faraway place, but it never crossed my mind that the climate here was bound to be different.”

He only sniffed the ashes, not quite convinced as yet that I was not cooking fish in them.

When I had gone to sleep, I had planned to search for Seawrack in the morning. This was the morning, presumably, but there was no looking for her in it, nor for anything else. For a while I considered ordering Babbie to find her for me; but I had no reason to think he knew where she was, and if he set off to search the entire island it seemed likely that I would lose him as well. At last I said, “This fog may last all day, Babbie, and I suppose it’s possible it may be foggy tomorrow, too. But it’s bound to lift eventually.”

He glanced up at me, stirring the ashes tentatively with both forefeet.

Taking his silence for agreement, I continued, “As soon as it does, we’ll sail all the way around the island. She probably got lost. Who wouldn’t get lost in this? And the natural thing for her to do would be to walk downhill until she found the sea, and go along the beach.”

A voice that seemed disembodied remarked, “You’ll find her if you do it, but I can take you straight to her if you want me to.” It was a boy’s voice, and I had better make that plain at once; it might have been one of the twins speaking.

I looked around, seeing no one.

“Up here.” With grace that reminded me vividly of a small green snake I had seen once, Krait slid down the backstay and dropped into the stern. Babbie was on his feet immediately, every bristle up.

“Do you want me to, Horn? You’ll be surprised, at what we find. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I had laid the slug gun beside me when I slept, and left it there under the foredeck when I woke up. My hands groped futilely for it, settling for Sinew’s knife.

“What’s this?” He took a quick step backward, but I could not be sure his alarm was real. “I’m offering to do you a favor.”

“Have you killed her?”

He raised both hands, exactly the gesture of a boy trying to fend off a larger and stronger one. “I haven’t! I don’t remember exactly what I promised you when you were down in that hole-”

“You promised you wouldn’t drink my blood, or hers, or Babbie’s. It leaves you any amount of evil, though I didn’t think of that at the time.”

He would not meet my eyes. “It wouldn’t be fair, would it? You’d call me a cheater.”

I was so angry, and so frightened for Seawrack that I demanded he answer my question, although he already had.

“I haven’t hurt here at all. She’s alive, and from what I’ve seen of her, perfectly happy.”

“Then take me to her!”

“This minute? Horn, listen. I promised not to feed on you, but I promised a great deal more. I promised to help you get to Pajarocu, and all that.” He took the key to my house out of his pocket and held it up. “Remember this?”

I nodded.