On Blue's waters

“I didn’t worry about her overhearing me. Anyway, she wasn’t thinking about either of us right then. Not even about her skirt. Couldn’t you see that?”

“Just the same-”

“Her thoughts were very far away. You’d say her spirit. We were less to her then than your hus is to you.”

I looked around for Babbie, and found that he was lying at my feet.

“You see? He makes a noise when he walks. He can’t help it. Tappa-taptap behind you. But you don’t even know he’s there.”

“She’s in the water, isn’t she? She went over the side, and now she’s holding on to some part of the boat.” I looked along the waterline as far as I could without rising, but saw only waves.

“No…” Krait’s expression told me nothing about his thoughts; but I sensed that he was troubled, and it made him seem oddly human. “I’d better say it so you understand, and this is as good a chance as I’ll get to do it. Do I look like a boy to you?”

I shook my head.

By a gesture, he indicated his face. “This looks just like a boy’s, though, doesn’t it?”

“If you want me to say so, I will.”

“I don’t. I want you to tell the truth. We always do.” (I feel sure he did not mean that the inhumi always tell the truth, which would itself have been a monstrous lie.)

“All right. You look a lot more human now than you used to, a lot more human than you did when we talked in the pit. But you don’t really look like a boy up close, or like one of us at all.”

His nose and chin receded into his face as I watched, and the ridge over his eyes melted away. All semblance of humanity vanished. “One of the things I promised you then was that I wouldn’t deceive you. The man you hated-”

“Patera Quetzal?”

Krait nodded. “You said you thought he was an old man, and you were angry because he had tricked you. You told me some trooper shot and killed him.”

I nodded.

“Did you see his corpse?”

“Yes.” Something of the revulsion I had felt must have shown on my face. “What difference does that make?”

“Being dead makes a great deal of difference to some of us. Did he look like an old man then?”

I hedged. “We don’t like to look at corpses. I didn’t look for long.”

“Did he, Horn?”

There was something indescribably eerie about sitting there in the stern of the sloop talking to the inhumu about the death of Patera Quetzal twenty years ago. Wisps of fog blew past us like ghosts, and the gossiping tongues of small waves kept up an incessant murmur in which it seemed that I could catch a word or two. “I suppose not,” I told Krait, and heard a wave whisper, Moorgrass. “Nettle-that’s my wife, you saw her-and some other women were going to wash his body. They screamed, and that was how we knew.”

“You looked for yourself after that, didn’t you, Horn? You must have.”

I nodded again.

“He didn’t look like an old man anymore, did he? He couldn’t have.”

I shook my head.

“What did he look like?”

“He looked like you.”

When Krait said nothing, only transfixing me with his hypnotic stare, I added, “He powdered his face, and painted it. Like a woman. We found the powder and rouge in a pocket of his robe.”

“So would I if I had those things, just as I wear this shirt and these pants, which I took from you. The eyes see what the mind expects, Horn. Babbie there, lying still with a green twig in his mouth, could make you think he was a bush, if you were expecting to see a bush.”

“That’s right. It’s why we use tame hus, or dogs, to hunt wild hus.”

Krait grinned; his jaw dropped, and his fangs sprang out. “The young siren you call Seawrack doesn’t see me the way you do. She doesn’t see what you saw when you looked at that dead man.”

I agreed.

“Knowing that, is it so hard for you to believe that at times she doesn’t hear me at all?”

More shaken than I would have liked to admit, I went to the bow, looking down into the water for her on both sides of the boat but seeing nothing. After a time, Krait motioned to me, and reluctantly I went aft again. His voice in my ear was less than a whisper. “If she’s listening, she hears you alone, Father. Only the murmur of your voice. She probably thinks you’re talking to yourself, or to your hus.”

“I hurt her.”

He nodded solemnly. “You intended to, as we both know. As all three of us know, in fact. You intended to, and you succeeded admirably. Given time, she may find some excuse for you. Would you like that?” His fangs had vanished, and his face had resumed its boyish outline.

“How badly?”

“Very badly. She bled quite a lot from-oh, various places. It was difficult for me.”

Unable to think of anything else to say, I asked whether he had found the bandages and salves.

“She knew where they were. I helped her tie the knots, where rags could be of use. Stopping the bleeding was hard. I doubt that you have any idea just how much trouble we had.” He paused, tense; I knew that he was expecting me to attack him. “Do you understand everything I’m telling you?”

“Certainly. You’re speaking the Common Tongue, and you speak it at least as well as I do.”