On Blue's waters

As for me, I did not weep; but I was at least as homesick as she, and when she was calmer I told her about you, Nettle, calling you Hyacinth. She understood very little but sympathized very much. She is a good-hearted girl, and cannot be much over fifteen.

When I had talked her out, and myself as well, I promised that I would send her back to her father and mother. She was horrified, and explained that no matter what she or I said they would believe that I had rejected her, as would all the people of her town; she would be shunned by everyone, and might even be stoned to death. She is mine, it seems-but not mine to set free. I could not help thinking that she and I, who are so different in appearance, age, and gender, are in fact two of a kind.

Together, we released one of the nightingales and watched it fly away, a symbol for both of us of what we wished for ourselves. She wanted me to open the cage of the other, but I told her that I would not, that another night would come on which she would be as she had been tonight; and I said that when that night came we would talk again and set the second bird free.

It is not well to spend one’s symbols improvidently.

As for what I left this lovely table to think about, it was Krait’s remark. He had said the stars were always there, and I (that so much younger I aboard the sloop) had thought he meant merely that they did not vanish in fact when they vanished to sight. It seemed a trivial observation, since I had never supposed they did-everyone has seen the flame of a candle disappear in sunlight and knows that the invisible flame will burn a finger.

Now I think differently, and I feel certain I am right. The black sky that Krait saw was not the night sky, or the day sky either. It was the sky, the only sky there is, without clouds and without any change save for the slow circling of the Short Sun and the other, more distant, stars, and the somewhat quicker rising and setting of Green. The whorl to him and to all the inhumi is the airless starlit plain we saw when poor Mamelta led us to the belly of the Whorl. Small wonder then that the inhumi are so wretched, so cruel, and so hungry for warmth.

When Chandi and I glimpsed Green from our seat in the garden, she told me that her mother had told her once that it was the eye of the Great Inhumu, whose children he sends here. I nodded, and was careful not to mention that I had lived and fought there.

Dreamt that Oreb was back. Very strange. I was in the Sun Street Quarter again, made inexpressibly sad by its devastation. I sent Pig away as I actually did there, with Oreb for a guide; but at the last moment I could not bear to be parted from him and called him back. He returned and lit upon my shoulder, wrapping a slimy tentacle around my neck, he having become Scylla. In Oreb’s voice, she demanded that I take her to the Blue Mainframe. I explained that I could not, that there was no such place, only the Short Sun. While I spoke I watched Pig’s disappearing back and heard the faint tapping of his sword.

I “woke” heartbroken, and found that I had fallen asleep in the jungle, lying beside Krait. I picked up his hand and rubbed the back, feeling that rubbing would somehow restore him to life, but his body was dissolving into fetid liquid already, a liquid that became the filthy water of the sewer I opened there.

- 10- SEAWRACK’S RING

I have been hunting again. Some of the men who captured the wild cattle invited me to go with them, and being curious I made time for it. It was very different from the cattle hunt, a butchery bloody enough to satisfy any number of augurs.

We were after wallowers, the most prized game hereabout, and the most difficult to hunt. A silence of eight or ten had been located not much more than a league from the town, but we had to ride a long way out of the direct route and through difficult country in order to approach them upwind. All the men said that wallowers never remain in a place where they have been hunted, and may move forty leagues or more before they stop again.

I had a slug gun like the rest, and although I had not the least intention of using it when we set out, I realized before long that I would have to if the opportunity arose; otherwise Kilhari, Hari Mau, and the others in our party would feel I had betrayed them.

Kilhari posted us in a wide semicircle well out of sight of the silence (as the herd is called), telling us that when we saw the stalkers approaching it we might edge in a little. I asked him to put me in the worst place, explaining that I had borrowed my gun, was half blind and badly out of practice, and so forth. He posted me last, at one of the tips of the crescent, saying that those were the worst places. They are actually the best, as I suspected at the time and verified this evening.