On Blue's waters

At that time I still hoped that Seawrack would see Krait for what he was without prompting from me. As seriously as I could, I said, “You don’t belong to me, and I belong to Nettle, my wife. If you want to give yourself to another man, I may advise against it. I will, if I don’t think he’s suitable for you. But don’t ever give yourself to that boy-to Krait, as he’s calling himself.”

“Well, he’s very good-looking.” She was steering my hand to her left breast.

I pulled my hand away. “No doubt he is.”

“Don’t be angry with me.”

I told her I was not angry, that I was only worried about her, which was not entirely true. Up on the foredeck I heard the chatter of Babbie’s tusks; Babbie was angry, at least, and angrier still because he had to behave as though he were not.

“I came as soon as I heard your voice. I should have let you come to me. Then this would be wrecked. Do you remember how you kissed me the first time?”

It has been a week since I wrote the words that you have just read, a week of heat and terrible, violent storms, and reports of the inhumi from many outlying farms. Not far from town, a woman and her two children were found bloodless by a neighbor child.

So I have been busy, although not too busy to continue the account I began last year and have labored over for so long. The question is not whether I should tell the truth-I know well enough that I should. The question is how much of it must I tell?

(“A close mouth catches nae flies,” Pig would advise me. I wish he were here to do it.)

If Silk were to have intercourse with another woman, he would confess it to Hyacinth, I feel sure; but that is small guidance, because she would not care-or at least, would not care much. How much would he tell her? That is the true question, and a question to which I can give no satisfactory answer. The mere fact? Will the mere fact not make things look worse, much worse, than they really were?

When I began, these were things I planned to omit. I see now that if I omit them, nothing I say should be believed. No doubt I should burn every scrap of this.

I will not be believed in any case. I know it. Hari Mau and the rest will not even believe that I am who I am, and I have known that I would not be believed ever since I wrote about the leatherskin. I am going to tell the whole truth, as I would at shriving. I will hide nothing and embroider nothing, from this point forward. It will give my poor dear Nettle pain in the unlikely event that she-or anyone-reads what I write; but she will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that she knows the worst.

I had asked Seawrack to sing for me, as you have already read. The truth is that I implored her to, and at last threatened her, and she sang. She sang only a note or two, just a word or two in some tongue never spoken by human beings, and I was upon her. I tore off the clumsy sailcloth skirt and bit and clawed and pummeled her, doing things no man ought ever to do to any woman.

Perverse acts that I would like to believe no other man has performed.

When it was over at last I slept, exhausted; and when I woke we were sailing briskly north-northeast, with a cold coast of deep green foliage to port. I stared at it, then at the inhumu seated at the tiller.

He grinned at me. “You thought I couldn’t do tiiis.”

My jaw hurt, and in fact there was precious little of me anywhere that did not; but I managed to say, “You told me that you couldn’t.”

“Because I don’t know how. I can pull a rope, though, if I’m told which one, and my mother told me that.”

“Is your mother here?” The thought of sharing the sloop with two inhumi made me physically ill. I sat down on one of the chests, my head in my hands.

“She’s dead, I think. I was referring to your second wife, Father. That’s what we’ll have to tell people, you know. She’s not old enough to be my mother, not even as old as I am.” I looked at him sharply, and he put his finger to his lips as I had earlier, grinning still.

“I don’t like your pretending to be my son,” I said, “and I like your pretending to be Seawrack’s even less. Where is she?”

“Her stepson, and I can’t tell you where she is, Father dear, because I promised her I wouldn’t.” The ugly, lipless slit that was Krait’s mouth was no longer grinning. “You promised me something, too. Several things. Don’t forget any of them.”

I got up, went to his seat at the tiller, and sat on the gunwale, so close that our elbows touched. “Can she hear us now, if we keep our voices down?”

“I’m quite sure she can’t hear me, Father. But I’m equally sure that you won’t keep your voice low for more than a minute or two. You never do. It might be better if we didn’t talk at all.”

“You told me to lie down with her, to…”

“Do what you did,” he supplied.

“You said all that while she was standing there with us, while I was wrapping the canvas around her. You didn’t worry about her overhearing us then.”