On Blue's waters

As I drifted into sleep, I heard (or believed I heard) her say, “…and forget the water and the underwater woman, and the boats underwater with people in them. That was why I wouldn’t eat your fish. I don’t want to eat fish or drowned meat, never any more. Will the boy bring us back something to eat?”

Perhaps I mumbled in reply. At this remove I cannot be sure.

“I don’t think so. He’ll eat, and come back here with nothing.”

Which was precisely correct.

I recall thinking, as I declined from consciousness into the first deep sleep of the night, that Seawrack was forgetting the goddess she had called the Mother because Krait (whom she herself called “the boy”) intended to call her “mother.” That there was a place for only one mother on my sloop, and it was to be Seawrack.

There was a place for only one wife, as well. With the eyes of sleep I saw you, my poor Nettle, fading and fading, sinking into the clear blue water like the hammer I used to keep on board until I lost it over the side and watched it sink, weighed by its iron head but buoyed by its wooden handle, smaller and smaller and dimmer and dimmer as the waters closed around it forever. My love was like a line tied to you then, a cord so thin as to be invisible, playing out cubit after cubit and fathom after fathom until the time arrived when I would haul you up again.

Have I insulted you? I do not blame you. You may blame me, and the more you do the happier I will be. Let me say now, once and for all, that I was not compelled by the song the sea goddess had taught Seawrack. Was I inflamed? Yes, certainly. But not compelled. I could have left. The inhumu would have seen my manhood raised, and witnessed my agony, and would have derided me for both whenever he thought his taunts would tell. But that would have been nothing.

Or I might have clapped my hand over Seawrack’s mouth and forced her to be silent. I would have been ashamed then, since I had threatened to beat her if she would not sing for me; but I have been ashamed many times of many things, and been no worse for it afterward.

For this I was worse, as I am.

I should tell you this too: Chandi has come in pretending to believe I sent for her, and I will have to stop writing this rambling account that has become a letter to you while I persuade her to leave.

I am not sure when I wrote last. Before the big storm, but when? I ought to date my entries, but what would such dates mean to those who may read them? Every town on this whorl, every city in the old Whorl, uses a different system; even the lengths of our years are different. This Great Pas did, to prevent our leaguing against Mainframe; and it divides us still. I will give the day and the month as we reckon them here in Gaon: Dusra Agast. That may mean something to you; but if it does not, not much has been lost.

Conjunction is past. It was as bad as I feared, and worse. (It is still very bad.) Many of the inhumi came, and many have remained. My servants close the shutters at sundown, and when they are asleep I inspect every window in this palace myself to make sure they have done it.

My bedroom has five windows north, six west, and five south. I double-check every one of them before I get into bed, and lock and bolt the only door, for fear of the inhumi and for fear of assassins, too.

An inhumu drinks blood until his veins are full and his flesh is nourished again; thus satisfied, he goes his way, like a tick that falls off when it has drunk its fill; but there are men here where land is free for the working who want land, and more and better land, and others to work it for them, and they always believe that someone else’s land is better. They would crush the small farmers if I let them.

I will not.

A lean young man with a long curved dagger was shot to death in my garden last night. Awakened by the booming of the slug guns, I went to view his body, and could not help thinking of Silk climbing Blood’s wall with the hatchet in his waistband. Had this young man thought me as bad as Blood? If so, was he right? We have the inhumi to prey on us, yet we prey upon one another.

When I ended my last session with this old quill of Oreb’s, Seawrack and I were on the sloop on the night of the fires. I dreamed that night about shadowy figures creeping from those fires to swim toward us, and climbing aboard bent upon murder. I sat up and found my slug gun, and nearly fired it, too; but there was no one there. I lay down again and muttered an apology to Seawrack for having awakened her.

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

I knew why she had not slept, or thought I did. “You’re frightened and upset, and that’s only natural. I don’t suppose you want to tell me about it; but if you do, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say without getting angry.”

“I’m angry at myself,” she muttered.