On Blue's waters

As for the rest of you who may read this, whether you are our sons or strangers or both, there is a sharpness of detail born of a consciousness of detail. When we untied the sloop, I saw the unnatural calm of the little bay beneath the fog that veiled it, and when I had steered us out (guided by Krait, who stood upon the mainsail gaff to advise me), every coiling, foaming wave that slapped our hull was as clearly drawn as any of my brothers.

I heard Seawrack long before I saw her. She was singing just as she is singing now, singing as the Mother had, her sweet, clear voice at one with the fog and the waters, so that I knew the sea had been incomplete without her song, that it was fully created, a finished object, only while she sang. Fog muffles sound, so we must have been near her then; I would have taken the sloop nearer still to hear her, although Krait warned me against it; but he slid down the forestay and loosed the jib, so that we swung into the wind with the main flapping like a flag. He told me to call to Seawrack, but I could not. How I wish you could have heard her, Nettle! You have never heard such singing.

We quarreled at that point, the inhumu and I. We were to quarrel almost daily afterward, but that was the first and one of the worst. I was angry at him for untying the jib, and he was angry at me for steering too near the rocks. The upshot of our quarrel was that the sloop was free to sail herself, and the course she chose took her a good league into open water. By the time we had made peace, Krait could no longer see the island or anything else, or so he said.

“I’ll have to fly,” he told me, “and I may have to fly high. Then I’ll come down again and give you an approximate direction.”

I asked whether he could find the sloop again in the fog, and suggested that I might build a fire in the sandbox to guide him, although the truth was that I was hoping to crowd on sail and evade him. He laughed and asked me to turn my back; I did, and when I turned around again he was gone. „»

Babbie snorted with relief, and I felt as he did. Much more, I felt-I knew-the sea and the cold gray sea-fog that wrapped us both. I have said that I saw it as a painter would, and I may even have said that I saw it as a picture; but it was a picture that surrounded and saturated me, and mixed with my spirit. The sea whose spray wet my beard, and the fog I inhaled at every breath, were no longer things apart from myself. If they were pictured, I was pictured, too; and it was the same picture. We lived in and through each other then, in a picture without a frame.

Something had happened to change my perception, and that change remains in force to this moment. How I wish I could make you see our hunt for the wild cattle as I did! The milling herd with rolling eyes, and we riders with our embroidered flags! You will want me to explain, but I have no explanation, although at that time and for a long time after it I felt that it was the inhumu’s presence. I taxed him with it when he returned to the sloop, landing softly behind me and announcing his arrival with a boyish laugh. He denied it, and we quarreled again, although not as bitterly as before. Even then, I knew that his denials were without value.

Since Krait is not present to speak for himself, let me speak for him. I will try to do it with more logic than either of us displayed when I argued with him on the sloop.

First, he did not have that effect on others, as well as I could judge.

Second, it did not benefit him, and in fact he lost by it.

Third, it persisted even in his absence, as I have tried to show.

And fourth and last, I had experienced nothing of the sort when we were with Quetzal in the tunnels.

Yet he was capable of affecting our perception of him, for Seawrack and others saw him as a human being, as the boy he claimed to be, whereas I would sooner have called poor Babbie a child.

Seawrack, as I should explain, swam out to the sloop once she understood that I was on it and that I still wanted her. The inhumu had made me promise I would call to her as loudly as I could the moment I heard her voice; but I did not call then or for some minutes afterward, only telling him to be quiet when he spoke and once striking him with Marrow’s stick.

A time came when she sang no longer, and I recalled my promise and pleaded with her; but by then she was already in the water and swimming toward us. This happened hours after we had sailed out to sea with no one at the helm, because we had first found the mainland (which Krait had mistaken for the island) and only after we had discovered our mistake returned to the island-and we had to sail some distance around it to reach Seawrack again, I still blinded by the fog and in terror of submerged rocks, which the inhumu could no more have seen than I could.