On Blue's waters

“I haven’t used it. Someday I may, but I haven’t yet. You say you’re reasonable. You said you tried to be, and you know that I want to find Pajarocu as much as you do. More, if you ask me. Would it make sense for me to hurt her, when I haven’t hurt you or your family? Or your pet hus? I wouldn’t guide you to her after I’d harmed her, would I?”

I was relaxing. The mere fact that he seemed afraid of me made me less fearful of him, although that is always a mistake. “I apologize. Why did you say I’d be surprised when we found her?”

He shook his head. “I won’t tell you, because you wouldn’t believe me. We’d fight again, and it would be bad for both of us. If you want to go now I’ll show you, but we’ll have to untie your boat.”

We did, and got the anchor up; it was not until I had the sloop gliding like a ghost through the damp gray silence that I asked whether he could see to guide us in spite of the fog.

“Yes, I can. We all can, and now you know something that very few others do.” He threw back his head, looking in the general direction of the block at the top of the mast. “What color is the sky, Horn?”

I told him that I could not see it, that I could not so much as see the masthead.

“No wonder you didn’t spot me up there. Look anyway. What color is it?”

“Gray. Fog is always gray, unless there’s sunshine on it. Then it’s white.”

“And when you look up at the sky on a sunny day? What color then?”

“Blue.”

He said nothing, so I added, “It’s a beautiful, clear blue, and the clouds are white, if there are any.”

“The sky I see is always black.”

I believe I must have explained that for us the night sky was black, too, and tried to describe it.

“It’s always black,” he repeated as he went forward and climbed onto the little foredeck, “and the stars are there all the time.”

No doubt my explanation will bore you, whoever you are, unless you are Nettle; but she is the reader I hope for, and so I will explain anyway for her sake. When I leave a break in my text like the one above, sketching the three whorls to separate one bit from the next, it is generally because I have decided to stop and get some sleep.

This was different. I wanted to think, and in a moment I will tell you what I was thinking about. I wiped my pen and laid it down, rose and clasped my hands behind my back. You know, dear wife, how I used to walk the beach deep in thought when we were planning the mill. In the same way I stalked silently around this big pink-and-blue house, which they have given me and expanded for me, and which we call my palace to overawe our neighbors.

All was silent, everyone else having gone to bed. In the stableyard my elephant slept standing, as elephants do and as horses sometimes do also; but slept soundly nonetheless. From the stables I went out into the garden, and listened to the nightingales singing as I stared up at the night sky and at such stars as could sometimes be glimpsed between thick, dark clouds that would have been almost visible to Krait. Two nightingales in gold cages are kept there, as I should explain. (I ought to have written were.)

The weather has been sultry for a week at least, and I found the garden, with its jasmine, plashing fountains, ferns, and statues a very pleasant place. For half an hour or more I sat upon a white stone bench, looking up at the stars through torn and racing clouds, stars (each a whorl like Blue or Green) that must seem to the inhumi like fruit glimpsed over the high wall of a garden.

Trampin’ outwards from the city,
No more lookin’ than was she,
’Twas there I spied a garden pretty
A fountain an’ a apple tree.
These fair young girls live to deceive you,
Sad experience teaches me.

That is not singing as Seawrack understands it, nor as she has made me understand it either; but she has been silent since shadelow, and the old rollicking song marches through my head again. How young we were, Nettle!

Oh, how very young we were!

When I went back inside, I heard Chandi weeping in the women’s quarters. Because I was afraid she would wake the others I made her come out with me, and we sat together on the white stone bench while I did my unskillful best to comfort her. She was homesick, poor child, and I made her tell me her real name and describe her parents and brothers and sisters, the town she comes from, and even her mother’s cook and her father’s workmen. She was born in the Whorl, just as you and I were; but she can remember nothing about it, having left as an infant. I got her to tell me everything she had learned about it from her parents, but there was very little beyond self-glorification: they had lived in a much bigger house there, and everyone had deferred to them. That sort of thing. She knew that the sun had been a line across the sky, but imagined that it rose and set as the Short Sun does here.