On Blue's waters

By the time we had relocated her it was probably about mid-afternoon, and the fog had lifted somewhat. It parted, and I glimpsed her sitting upon a rock thrust up from the sea like the horn of some drowned monster. She was naked (more so than when she had first come on board, since she no longer had her gold) and her legs, which were very long, as I may have said, seemed almost to coil about her.

“She is going back to what she was,” the inhumu told me when I would listen to him again. “While she was with you, she was becoming one of you. That was why the Mother gave her to you, I think.” While we sailed out of the bay, I had told him how Seawrack came to be with me.

I echoed him. “You think?”

“Yes, I do, which is more than I can say for you. Do you imagine that now that she’s coming back to you she’ll sing for you the way she did out there?”

I had not considered that, and it must have showed in my stricken expression.

“You’re right. She probably won’t sing a note, even if you beg.”

Having seen her small, white hand upon the gunwale, I put a finger to my lips-at which he smiled.

We helped her aboard and she stared at the inhumu (whose name I had never learned, thinking of him up until then only as “the inhumu”). I told her (as he and I had agreed I should) that he was a boy who had been left behind on the island by some boat’s crew, and that he had helped me out of the pit. It was difficult for me to lie like that, because as I spoke I could see very plainly that he was not a boy or a human being of any kind. Looking at her instead should have helped but did not, only making me that much more conscious of the purity and innocence of her face.

“Don’t you want to see me?” she asked.

I told her that I could not look into her eyes without falling in love with her. Forgive me, Nettle!

The inhumu offered her his hand, and I felt certain she would feel his claws, but they had vanished. “I’m Krait,” he said. It was the first time I heard the name.

She had turned from him before he had finished speaking, stroking my cheek with her fingers. “You were dead.”

I shook my head.

“Yes, you were. I saw you down there.” She trembled ever so slightly. “Dead things are food.”

“Sometimes,” Krait amended.

She ignored him. “Where are my clothes?”

They were not on the sloop, and I had no more tunics to spare, but we contrived a sailcloth skirt for her, as I had before, while she stared vacantly out at the broken fog and the tossing water. “You must hold on to her now if you want to keep her,” Krait told me.

“Can you sail?”

“No. But you must do what I tell you, or she’ll be over the side in half an hour.” He pointed to the little space under the foredeck where she and I had slept. “Lie with her. Talk to her, embrace her, and try to get her to sing for you. I won’t watch, I promise.”

I trimmed the sails and tied the tiller, warning him that if he did not want to see us drowned he would have to call me at any change in wind or weather, and persuaded Seawrack to rest with me for an hour or so.

She agreed, I believe, mostly so that we could talk in private. “I don’t like that boy,” she told me.

“He got me out of the pit after you and Babbie had abandoned me.” Now that she was back with me and safe, I had discovered that I was angry with her.

“You were dead,” she said again. “I saw you. Dead people are to eat.”

Anxious to change the subject, I asked her to sing, as Krait had suggested.

“The boy would come in then. I don’t want him in here with us.”

“Neither do I. Sing only to me, very softly, but not like you used to when we were alone. The way you sang out there.”

“He would still hear me.” She shuddered. “His feet are twisted.”

“You think he’s a boy?” (I was incredulous, feeling very much as I did a few days ago when I realized that the wallowers had in fact been deceived by the wicker figure.)

She giggled. “I don’t think he’s a boy that way. He’s old enough. You couldn’t keep him out.”

“He would come to you in here, if you sang?”

“Oh, yes!” The only hand that she possessed slipped into mine.

Aching for her, I asked, “What would I do, Seawrack? I’m in here with you already.”

“Mother told me to stay with you.”

I nodded. I could hear Babbie rattling up and down on the foredeck above our heads like a whole squad of troopers, half mad with nervousness and suppressed aggression; and now I wonder whether he saw Krait as an inhumu or a boy, and whether he made any distinction between the two. “Out there,” I told Seawrack, “you thought I no longer liked to look at you. The truth is that I don’t like to look at him.”

“At the boy?”

“At Krait,” I said. “I’m afraid I’ll stare, and that wouldn’t be polite.”

“Stare at his feet?”

“That’s right. That must be why he walks so badly. But what does he look like, the rest of him?”

“You know.”

“Men and women often see the same people very differently,” I explained, thinking that it had never been truer than it was for the two of us that afternoon. “I’d like to know how he seems to you.”

“You’re jealous!” She laughed, delighted.