On Blue's waters

- 3-
THE SIBYL AND THE SORCERESS

The Marrow I had known as a boy had been portly in the best sense, a fat man whose bulk promised strength and gave him a certain air of command. He was no longer steady on his legs, and limped along (as Silk once had) with the help of a stick; his face was lined, and such hair as remained to him was white. Yet I could tell him quite truthfully that he had scarcely changed since we had fought the Trivigauntis in the tunnels together. He was fat still, though somewhat less energetic than he had once been; and the air of command had become a settled fact.

He was the same man.

“I don’t need to talk to you,” he said. “I know you, Horn, and know you’ll do your best. That’s all I need to know. But maybe you need to talk to me. If there’s anything I can tell you, I will. If there’s anything you need, I’ll supply it if I can, or get somebody to.”

I told him that I had come largely to buy provisions and get directions, that I had wanted to leave most of the food we had with my family; and I reminded him that he had promised to try to locate someone who had been to Pajarocu and could provide firsthand information regarding the best routes.

“Food’s no problem.” He waved it away. “I’ll give you a barrel of apples, some dried stuff, cornmeal, and leavening powder.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “A ham, too. A case of wine and a cask of pickled pork.”

I doubted that I would need that much, and I told him so.

“Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. How was the voyage down?”

I shrugged. “I lost my harpoon.”

“I’ll get you another one, but it may take a day or two.”

With thoughts of the leatherskin still fresh in my mind, I asked whether he could lend me a slug gun, adding that I could not afford to buy one.

His bushy eyebrows rose. “Not a needier? You had one in the old days. Still got it?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll get you one.” He leaned back, sucking his teeth. “It may take longer, I don’t know. If worst comes to worst, I’ll give you mine. I doubt that I’ll ever need it again.”

“I’d prefer a slug gun. I’ve heard that someone here is making them now, and making cartridges for them.”

He rose with the help of his stick, saying, “I’ve got a couple in the next room. I’ll show them to you.”

It was a far larger house than ours, though not, I believe, so solidly built. The room to which he led me held cabinets, several well-made chairs, and a big table covered with papers. I bent to look at them.

He saw me, and picked up a sheet. “Your stuff. Just about all of it is. The traders have it sometimes, mostly off a lander if you ask me. They’re surprised to find out we’re making our own here in New Viron.” He chuckled. “We means you, this time. I tell them we can make slug guns and mean Gyrfalcon, and we can make paper and mean you.”

He handed me the sheet and took out a key. “We can do a couple of other things that mean a lot more. We can make a paper mill, and make a lathe and a milling machine for metal that are good enough to let us copy a slug gun. But I don’t tell them that. We want sales, not competitors.”

I protested that he made no profit when I sold my paper.

He smiled. “Sometimes you sell it to me.”

“Yes, and I’m extremely grateful to you. You’re a good customer.”

“Then I sell it to them, some of it. I don’t make anything when Gyrfalcon sells his slug guns either, or not directly. But it brings money here, and sooner or later I get my share. So do others. You did your own woodworking, didn’t you, building your mill?”

I had, and said so.

“What about the metal stuff? Did you do that, too?”

“Others made those for us. They had to extend us credit, but we repaid them some time ago.”

The key turned in the lock, and the door of a cabinet swung open. “Then you could make the paper Gyrfalcon and his workmen used when they drew out the parts for this slug gun. One hand scratches the other, Horn.”

“I thought you said they copied the parts of a slug gun someone brought from home.”

“Oh, they did. But it’s better to measure once and draw it up than to keep on measuring. I won’t ask you to tell me which of these was made back in the old place and which here. You could do it pretty easily, and so could any other man who had his wits about him. I want you to take them both in your hands, though. Look them over, and tell me if you think one ought to shoot better than the other, and why.”

I did, opening the action of each first to assure myself that it was unloaded. “The new one’s a little stiff,” I said. “The old one’s smoother and a fraction lighter. But I don’t see why they shouldn’t shoot equally well.”

“They do. They’re both mine, and I’ll consider it an honor to give either one to you, if you want it.” Marrow paused, his face grave. “The town ought to pay you. We can’t, or not nearly enough to make you want to go for the money. The question is, is New Viron going to be richer in a few years, or poorer? And I don’t know. But that’s all it is, not the rubbish about morals and so forth that the old Prolocutor goes on about. We need Silk for the same reason we need better corn, and we’re asking you to bring him here to us for nothing.”

I picked up the newly made slug gun, and told Marrow that I would need a sling of some kind for it.

“Aren’t you going to argue it with me? Your Caldé Silk would have, if you ask me.”

“No,” I told him. “If the parents are poor enough, the children starve. That would be enough for Silk, and it’s enough for me.”

“Well, you’ve the right of it. If they’re poor enough, the parents do, too. That boy of yours would tell me people can hunt, but you think about filling every belly here, year in and year out, by hunting. They’d have to scatter out, and when they were, every family’d have to hunt for itself. No more paper and no more books, no carpentry because they’d be moving camp every few days and tables and so on’s too heavy to carry. Pretty soon they wouldn’t even have pack saddles.”

I said it would not matter, since those who owned horses or mules would eat them after a year or two, and he nodded gloomily and dropped into a chair. “You like that gun?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“It’s yours. Take it out to your boat when you go back. Take that green box on the bottom shelf, too. It’s cartridges from a lander and never been opened. Our new ones work, but they’re not as good.”

I said that I would prefer new cartridges nevertheless, and he indicated a wooden box that held fifty. I told him about the paper I had on the sloop, and offered it to him to offset-in part, at least-the cost of the slug gun and the food he had promised me.

He shook his head. “I’m giving you the gun and the rest of it. The cartridges and harpoon, and the apples and wine and the other stuff. It’s the least I can do. But if you’ll let me have that paper, I’ll give whatever I get for it to your wife. Would you like me to do that? Or I can hold the money for you, until you get back.”

“Give it to Nettle, please. I left her with little enough, and she and Sinew are going to have to buy rags and more wood soon.”

He regarded me from under his brows. “You took your own boat, too, when I was going to let you have one of mine.”

“Sinew will build a new one, I’m sure. He’ll have to, and I believe it will be good that he has something to do besides run our mill, something he can watch grow under his hands. That will be important, at first particularly.”

“You’re deeper than you look. Your book shows it.”

I said that I hoped I was deep enough, and asked whether he had found anyone who had actually been to Pajarocu.

“Not yet, but there’s a new trader in the harbor every few days. You want to wait?”

“For a day or two, at least. I think it would be worth that to have firsthand information.”

“Want to see their letter again? There’s nothing there to tell where it is, not to me, anyhow. But you might see something there I missed, and you hardly looked at it back on your island.”

“I own only the southern part, the southern third or so. No, I don’t want to read it again, or at least not now. Can you have somebody copy the entire thing for me, in a clearer hand? I’d like to have a copy to take with me.”

“No trouble. My clerk can do it.” Again, he looked at me narrowly. “Why does my clerk bother you?”

“It shouldn’t.”

“I know that. What I want to know is why it does.”

“When we were in the tunnels and on the lander, and for years after we landed, I thought…” Words failed me, and I turned away.

“You figured we’d all be free and independent here? Like you?”

Reluctantly, I nodded.

“You got a farm, you and your girl. Your wife. You couldn’t make a go of it. Couldn’t raise enough to feed yourselves, even.”

This is too painful. There is pain enough in the whorl already, should I inflict more on myself?

On Green, I met a man who could not see the inhumi. They were there, but his mind would not accept them. You might say that his sight recoiled in horror from them. In just the same way, my own interior sight refuses to focus upon matters I find agonizing. In Ermine’s I dreamed that I had killed Silk. Is it possible that I actually tried once, firing Nettle’s needier at him when he disappeared into the mist? Or that I did not really give him mine?

(I should have told Sinew that the needier I was leaving with him had been his mother’s. It was the one she had taken from General Saba and given to me outside the entrance to the tunnels, and I have never seen a better one. Later, of course, I did.)

More pain, but this I must put down. For my own sake, I intend to make it as brief as possible-just a paragraph or two, if I can.

When I returned to the sloop, I found that I had been robbed, my cargo chests broken into and my paper gone, with much cordage and a few other things that I had brought from Lizard.

Before I had left to go to Marrow’s, I had asked the owner of the boat tied up beside mine, a man I had attended palaestra with, to watch the sloop for me. He had promised he would. Now I went to speak to him. He could not meet my eyes, and I knew that it was he himself who had robbed me. I fought him and beat him, but I did not get my paper back.

After that, bruised and bleeding, I sought help from Gyrfalcon, Blazingstar, and Eschar, but received none. Eschar was away on one of his boats. Gyrfalcon and Blazingstar were both too busy to see me.

Or so I was told by their clerks.

I received a little help from Calf, who swore that it was all he could give, and none at all from my other brothers; in the end I had to go back to Marrow, explain the situation, and beg to borrow three cards. He agreed, took my bond for the amount plus eight percent, then tore it up as I watched. I owe him a great deal more than the three cards and this too-brief acknowledgment.

When I had refitted I put out, sailing south along the coast, looking for something that had been described to me as a rock with a haystack on it.

While I had talked with Marrow before I was robbed, I had considered how I could learn something that His Cognizance had been unwilling to tell me when we had conferred the day I made port. Eventually I realized that Marrow was more than acute enough to see through any sleight of mine; the only course open to me was to ask him outright, which I did.

“The girl’s still alive,” he said, stroking his chin, “but I haven’t seen or heard tell of the old sibyl in quite a time.”

“Neither have I,” I told him, “but I should have. She was here in town, and I was out on Lizard, mostly, and it always seemed possible I would run across her someday when I brought paper to the market.” Full of self-recriminations I added, “I suppose I imagined that she would live forever, that she would always be here if I wanted her.”

Marrow nodded. “Boys think like that.”

“You’re right. Mine do, at least. When you’re so young that things have changed very little during your lifetime, you suppose that they never will. It’s entirely natural, but it is a bad mistake and wrong even in the moral sense more often than not.”

I waited for his comment, but he made none.

“So now… Well, I’m going to look for Silk, and he’s far away if he’s alive at all. And it seems even more wrong for me to leave without having seen Maggie. She’s no longer a sibyl, by the way.”

“Yes, she is.” Marrow was almost apologetic. “Our Prolocutor’s made her one again.”

“He didn’t tell me that.” (In point of fact, he had flatly refused to tell me anything about her.) “Did you know I talked to him?”

Marrow nodded.

“That was what I wanted to learn, or the principal thing. I wanted to find out what happened to her and Mucor, but he wouldn’t tell me or even say why he wouldn’t. You must know where they are, and he concedes that they’re still alive.”

“I’ve heard talk from the people I do business with, that’s all. I don’t keep track of everybody, no matter what people may think.” Marrow folded both hands on his stick, and regarded me for a long moment before he spoke again. “I doubt I know as much as he does, but she wanted to help out here, teaching the children like she used to. That was why he made her a sibyl again, and she used to mop and dust and cook for him. Only he wouldn’t let the crazy girl in the house.”

I smiled to myself. It would not have been easy to keep Mucor out.

“There was some trouble about her anyhow. About the crazy granddaughter.”

He waited for me to speak, so I nodded. Mucor had often thrown food and dishes at Netde and me when we had cared for her.

“They said she made other people crazy, too. I don’t believe it and never did, but that’s what they said. One day they were gone. If you ask me, the old Prolocutor gave them a shove. He’s never admitted it that I’ve heard of, but I think probably he did. Maybe he gave them a little help moving, too. This is,” Marrow rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, “five years ago. About that. Could be six.”

He rocked back and forth in his big, solidly built chair, one hand on his stick and the other on the finale of the chair arm, where its grip had given the waxed wood a smoother finish as well as a darker tone. “I didn’t put my nose in it, but somebody told me he’d found them a farm way out. To tell you the truth I thought some wild animal’d get the mad girl, the granddaughter, and Maytera’d come back.”

I said, “I take it that didn’t happen. I’m glad.”

“That’s right, you knew them both. I’d forgot. I went to the palaestra in my time, just like you, so I knew Maytera, too, way back then. I never did understand how she could have a granddaughter at all. Adopted, is what everybody says.”

Clearly, Marrow had not read as much of our book as he pretended; I tried to make my nod noncommittal. “Are they still on the farm His Cognizance found for them? I’d like to see them while I’m here.”

Once more, Marrow regarded me narrowly. “Island, just like you. I’m surprised you don’t know.”

When I did not comment, he added. “Just a rock, really. House looks like a haystack. That’s what they say. Up in the air to keep the hay dry, you know how the farmers do, and made of sticks.”

It seemed too bizarre to credit. I asked whether he had seen it himself, and he shook his head. “Driftwood I guess it is, really. Way down south. It’ll take you all day, even with a good wind.”

I slept aboard the sloop, as you may imagine, and so was able to get under way at shadeup. There is no better breakfast than one eaten on a boat with a breeze strong enough to make her heel a trifle. Most of Marrow’s promised provisions had arrived before I finished refitting, and I had purchased a few things in addition; I dined on ham, fresh bread and butter, and apples, drank water mixed with wine, and told myself with perfect truth that I had never eaten a better meal.

He had been surprised that I knew nothing of Maytera Marble (as she was again, apparently) and Mucor, although they lived on an island two days’ sail from mine. The truth, I thought, might well be that I did know something. Boats that put into Tail Bay to trade for paper had spoken sometimes of a witch to the south, a lean hag who camped upon a naked rock and would tell fortunes or compounded charms for food or cloth. When I had heard those tales, lt: had not occurred to me that this witch might be Mucor. I reviewed them as I sailed that day, and found various reasons to think she was-but several more to think that she was not. In the end, I decided to leave the matter open.

Evening came, and I still had not caught sight of the house of sticks that Marrow had described. I was afraid I might pass it in the dark, so I furled my sails and made a sea anchor, and spent the night upon the open water, very grateful for the calm, warm weather.

It was about midmorning of the second day out when I caught sight of the hut, not (as I had supposed it would be) near shore to port, but a half league and more to starboard upon a sheer black rock so lonely that it did not appear to be a separated part of the mainland at all, but the last standing fragment of some earlier continent, a land devoured by the sea not long after the Outsider built this whorl.

Rubbish, surely. Still, I have never been in any other place that felt quite so lonely, unless Seawrack sang.

Three days since I wrote that last. Not because I have been too busy (although I have been busy) and not because I did not wish to write, but because there was no more ink. Ink, it seems, is not made here, or I should say was not. It was an article of trade that you bought in the market when it appeared there if you wanted it, and hoarded against the coming shortage. It had not appeared in the market for a long time, my clerks had very little and most other people-people who wrote, that is to say, or kept accounts-none. Nettle and I had made our own, being unable to find any in New Viron, and I saw no reason why ink should not be made here.

Several trials were needed; but guided as I was by past experience, we soon had this very satisfactory ink. Glue is made here by boiling bones, hoofs, and horns, as I suppose it must be everywhere. We mixed it with the oil pressed from flax seed and soot, and then (it was this that we had to learn) boiled everything again with a little water. It dries a trifle faster, I believe, than the ink you and I made with sap, and so may be a step nearer the inks my father cornpounded in the back of our shop. At any rate it is a good dark black and satisfactory in every other way, as you see.

My father, Smoothbone, made colored inks as well. There is no reason we should not have them, too. It is clearly just a matter of finding the right colored powders to put in instead of soot. I have a bright young man looking into that. My clerks say that they have never seen colored inks in our market here, or in this big pink and blue house we call my palace for that matter. I imagine they would trade very well-which means, I suppose, that I am starting to think like Marrow. Since our positions are somewhat similar, that is not surprising.

Here I am tempted to write about the market in New Viron, and compare it, perhaps, to the one here; but I will save that for some other opening of the pen case.

Now back to the sloop.

There was a tiny inlet on the southeast side of Mucor’s Rock that gave excellent shelter. I tied up there and climbed the steep path to the top carrying a side of bacon and a sack of cornmeal. She did not recognize me, as far as I could judge. To set down the truth, I did not know her either until I looked into her eyes, the same dead, dull eyes that I recalled. The witch had been described to me as being very thin. She was, but not as thin as she had been in the Caldé’s Palace and on the lander afterward-not as thin as the truly skeletal young woman I recalled.

She was said to be tall, too. The truth is that she is not, although her thinness and erect carriage, and her short, ragged skirt, combine to make her appear so.

The Mucor I had known would never have spoken to me first. This one whom I had heard called the witch and the sorceress did, but seemed at first to be recalling an almost forgotten language as she licked her cracked lips. “What… Do… You… Want…?”

I said, “I must speak with you, Mucor.” I showed her the bacon, then patted the sack of cornmeal I was carrying on my shoulder “I brought you these, thinking you might need them. I hope you like them.”

Without another word, she turned and went into the hut, which was larger than I had expected. When I saw that its rough door remained open, I followed her.

The only light came through the open doorway and a god-gate in the middle of the conical roof. For half a minute, perhaps, I stood just inside the door, blinking. A motionless figure in black sat with its back to me, facing the ashes of a small fire that had burned itself out in a circle of blackened stones some time before. Its aged hands clasped a long peeled stick of some light-colored wood. Mucor stood beside it, one hand upon its shoulder, regarding me silently. Beyond them, on the other side of the circle of stones, something stirred; in that near darkness, I heard rather than saw it.

Pointing at the figure in black, I asked, “Is that Maytera Marble?” and her head pivoted until it seemed to regard a place somewhat to my left. The metal face thus revealed was the smooth oval that I recalled so well, yet it appeared somehow misshapen, as if it were diseased.

After a pause that I considered much too long, Mucor said, “This is my grandmother. She knows the future.”

I put down my sack and laid the bacon on it. “Then she should be able to tell me a great many things I want to know. First I have a question for you, however. Do you know who I am?”

“Horn.”

“Yes, I am. Do you remember Nettle?”

Mucor only stared.

“Nettle and I used to bring you your food sometimes when you lived in the Caldé’s Palace.” She did not reply, so I added, “Silk’s palace.”

Maytera Marble whispered, “Horn? Horn?”

“Yes,” I said, and went to her and knelt before her. “It’s me, Maytera.”

“You’re a good, good boy to come to see us, Horn.”

“Thank you.” I found it hard to speak, impossible when I looked at her. “Thank you, Maytera. Maytera, I said I used to take your granddaughter’s food up for you. I want you to know that I’ve brought her some now. It’s only bacon and a sack of cornmeal, but there’s more food on my boat. She can have anything there she wants. Or that you want for her. What about apples? I have a barrel of them, good ones.”

Slowly her metal head bobbed up and down. “The apples. Bring us three apples.”

“I’ll be right back,” I told her.

Mucor’s hand scarcely moved, but it brought me to a halt as I went through the doorway. “You will eat with us?”

“Certainly,” I said, “if you can spare the food.”

“There is a flat rock. Down there. You stepped on it.”

At first I supposed that she intended one of the flat stones that made up the floor of their hut; then I recalled the stone she meant and nodded. “When I tied up the sloop. Is that the one?”

“There will be fish on it. Bring them up, too.”

I told her that I would be happy to, and discovered that it was easy as well as pleasant to step out of that hut and into the sunlight.

The steep path from the more or less level top of the island to the little inlet in which I had moored gave me a good view of it (and indeed of the entire inlet) at one point, and there were no fish on the rock she had indicated. I continued my descent, however, thinking I would bring up the apples with something else in lieu of the fish. When I reached the rock, three fish flopped and struggled there so vigorously that it seemed certain that all three were about to escape. I dove for them and caught two, but the third slipped from between my fingers and vanished with a splash.

A moment afterward, it leaped from the water and back onto the rock, where I was able to catch it. I dropped all three into an empty sack I happened to have on board, and hung it in the water while I got three apples from Marrow’s barrel and tied them up in a scrap of sailcloth. As an afterthought, I put a small bottle of cooking oil into one pocket, and a bottle of drinking water into another.

When I returned to the hut, there was a fire blazing in the circle of stones. After giving Maytera Marble the apples, I filleted the fish with Sinew’s hunting knife, and Mucor and I cooked them in a most satisfactory fashion by impaling fillets wrapped in bacon on sticks of driftwood. I also mixed some of the cornmeal with my oil (I had forgotten to bring salt), made cakes, and put them into the ashes at the edge of the fire to bake.

“How is dear Nettle?” Maytera Marble asked.

I said that she had been well when I left her; and I went on to explain that I had been chosen to return to the Long Sun Whorl and bring Silk here, and that I was about to set out for a foreign town called Pajarocu where there was said to be a lander capable of making the return trip, as none of ours were. I went into considerably more detail than I have here, and she and Mucor listened to all of it in silence.

When I had finished, I said, “You will have guessed already how you can help me, if you will. Mucor, will you locate Silk for me, and tell me where he is?”

There was no reply.

When no one had spoken for some time, I raked one of the cornmeal cakes out of the fire and ate it. Maytera Marble asked what I was eating; that was the first time, I believe, that I realized she had gone blind, although I should have known it an hour before.

I said, “One of the little cakes I made, Maytera. I’ll give your granddaughter one, if she’ll eat it.”

“Give me one,” Maytera Marble said; and I raked out another cake and put it into her hand.

“Here is an apple for you.” She rubbed it against her torn and dirty habit, and groped for me. I thanked her and accepted it.

“Will you put this one in my granddaughter’s lap, please, Horn? She can eat it after she’s found Patera for you.”

I took the second apple, and did as she asked.

She whistled shrilly then, startling me; at the sound, a young hus emerged from the shadows on the other side of the fire, at once greedy and wary. “Babbie, come here!” she called, and whistled again. “Here, Babbie!”

It advanced, the thick, short claws some people call hooves loud on the stone floor, its attention divided between me and the food Maytera Marble held out to it. I found its fierce eyes disconcerting, although I felt reasonably sure it would not charge. After hesitating for some while, it accepted the food, the apple in one stubby-toed forepaw and the cornmeal cake in its mouth, giving me a better look than I wanted at the sharp yellow tusks that were only just beginning to separate its lips.

As it retreated on seven legs to the other side of the fire, Maytera Marble said, “Isn’t Babbie cute? The captain of some foreign boat gave him to my granddaughter.”

I may have made some suitable reply, although I am afraid I only grunted like a hus.

“It’s practically like having a child with us,” Maytera Marble declared. “One of those children one’s heart goes out to, because the gods have refrained from providing it with an acute intellect, for their own good and holy reasons. Babbie tries so very hard to please us and make us happy. You simply can’t imagine.”

That was perfectly true.

“The captain was afraid that ill-intentioned persons might land here and fall upon us while we slept. It’s active mostly at night. From what I have been given to understand, they all are, just like that bird dear Patera Silk had.”

I said that while I had never hunted hus, according to what my son had told me, that was correct.

“So dear little Babbie’s always active for me.” She sighed, the weary hish of a mop cleaning a floor of tiles. “Because it’s always night for me.” Another sigh. “I know that it must be the gods’ will for me, and I try to accept it. But I’ve never wanted to see again quite as much as I do today with you come to visit us, Horn.”

I tried to express my sympathy, embarrassing both myself and her.

“No. No, it’s all right. The gods’ will for me, I’m sure. And yet-and yet…” Her old woman’s hands clasped the white stick as if to break it, then let it fall to wrestle each other in her lap.

I said that in my opinion there were evil gods as well as benevolent ones, and recounted my experience the week before with the leatherskin, ending by saying, “I had prayed for company, Maytera, and for a wind, to whatever gods might hear me. I got both, but I don’t believe the same god can have sent both.”

“I-you know that I’ve become a sibyl again, Horn? You must because you’ve been calling me Maytera.”

I explained that Marrow had told me.

“With my husband and I separated, and no doubt separated permanently-well, you understand, I’m sure.”

I said I did.

“We had begun a child, a daughter.” She sighed again. “It was hard, dreadfully hard, to find parts, or even things we could make them from. We never got far with her, and I don’t suppose she’ll ever be born unless my husband takes a new wife, poor little thing.”

I tried to be sympathetic.

“So there wasn’t any reason not to. I couldn’t have my own child anymore, the child that had been my dream for all those empty years. Since I could not, I thought it might be nice to teach bio children like you again, the way I used to when I was younger. The ordinances of the Chapter let married women become sibyls, His Cognizance said, under special circumstances like mine, provided that the Prolocutor consents. He did, and I took the oath all over again. Very few of us have ever taken it more than once.”

I nodded, I believe. I was paying more attention to Mucor, who sat silently with the apple untouched in her lap.

“Are you listening, Horn?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, of course.”

“I taught there in New Viron for a good many years. And I kept house for His Cognizance, which was a very great honor. People are so intolerant, though.”

“Some are, at least.”

“The Chapter has fought that intolerance for as long as I’ve been alive, and it has achieved a great deal. But I doubt that intolerance will ever be rooted out altogether.”

I agreed.

“There are children, Horn, who are very much like little Babbie. Not verbal, but capable of love, and very grateful for whatever love they may receive. You would think every heart would go out to them, but many don’t.”

I asked her then about Mucor, saying that I had not realized it would take her so long to find Silk.

“She has to travel all the way to the whorl in which we used to live, Horn. It’s a very long way, and even though her spirit flies so fast, it must fly over every bit of it. When she arrives, she’ll have to look for him, and when she finds him, she’ll have to return to us.”

I explained that it was quite possible that Silk was here on Blue, or even on Green.

Maytera Marble shook her head, saying that only made things worse. “Poor little Babbie’s quite upset. He always is, every time she goes away. He understands simple things, but you can’t explain something like that to him.”

Privately, I wished that someone would explain it to me.

“He’s really her pet. Aren’t you, Babbie?” Her hands, the thin old-woman hands she had taken from Maytera Rose’s body, groped for the hus, although he was far beyond her reach. “He loves her, and I really think that she loves him, just as she loves me. But it’s hard, very hard for them both here, because of the water.”

For a moment I thought she meant the sea; then I said, “I assumed you had a spring here, Maytera.”

She shook her head. “Only rainwater from the rocks. It makes little pools and so on, here and there, you know. My dear granddaughter says there are deep crevices, too, where it lingers for a long time. I’ve had no experience with thirst, myself. Oh, ordinary thirst in hot weather. But not severe thirst. I’m told it’s terrible.”

I explained that a spring high up on the Tor gave us the stream that turned my mill, and acknowledged that I had never been thirsty as she meant it either.

“He must have water. Babbie must, just as she must. If it doesn’t rain soon…” She shook her head.

Much too late, I remembered that the uncomfortably large object in my pocket was a bottle of water. I gave it to her, and told her what it was. She thanked me effusively; and I told her there were many more on my boat, and promised to leave a dozen with her.

“You could go down and get them now, couldn’t you, Horn? While my granddaughter’s still away.”

There had been a pathetic eagerness in Maytera Marble’s voice; and when I remembered that the water would not be of the smallest value to her, I was deeply touched. I said that I did not want to miss anything that Mucor said when she came back.

“She will be gone a long, long time, Horn.” This in her old classroom tone. “I doubt that she’s even reached our old whorl yet. There’s plenty of time for you to go down and get it, and I wish you would.”

Stubbornly, I shook my head; and after that, we sat in silence except for a few inconsequential remarks for an hour or more.

At last I stood and told Maytera Marble that I would bring up some water bottles, and made her promise to tell me exactly what Mucor said if she spoke.

It had been morning when I arrived, but the Short Sun was already past the zenith when I left the hut. I discovered that I was tired, although I told myself firmly that I had done very little that day. Slowly, I descended the path again, which was in fact far too steep and dangerous for anyone to go up or down it with much celerity.

At the observation point I have already mentioned, I stopped for a time and studied the flat stone on which I had found our fish. It was sunlit now, although it had been in shadow when I had failed to see them; I told myself that they had certainly been there whether I had seen them or not, then recalled their vigorous leaps. If in fact they had been there when I had looked down at the sloop, they would certainly have escaped before I reached them.

As I continued my descent to the inlet and my sloop, I realized that it actually made no difference whether they had been there when I looked or not. They had certainly not been present when I had tied up. Even if I had somehow failed to see them, I would have kicked them or stepped on them.

Mucor had been in my sight continuously from the time I had encountered her outside her hut, and Maytera Marble from the time I had gone in. Who, then, had left us the fish?

I rinsed the sack that had held the fish, put half a dozen water bottles into it, and spent some time peering down into the calm, clear water of the inlet, without seeing anything worth describing here. One fish had regained the water, as the other two surely would have if I had not caught them in time. It had been forced to leap back onto the rock almost immediately.

By what?

I could not imagine, and I saw nothing.

Maytera Marble was waiting for me outside the hut. I asked whether Mucor had returned, and she shook her head.

“I have the water right here, Maytera.” I swung the sack enough to make the bottles clink. “I’ll put them anywhere you want them.”

“That’s very, very good of you. My granddaughter will be extremely grateful, I’m sure.”

I ventured to say that they could as easily live on the mainland in some remote spot, and that although I felt sure their life there would be hard, they could at least have all the fresh water they wanted.

“We did. Didn’t I tell you? His Cognizance gave us a place like that. We-I-still own it, I suppose.”

I asked whether their neighbors had driven them away, and she shook her head. “We didn’t have any. There were woods and rocks and things on the land side, and the sea the other way. I used to look at it. There was a big tree there that had fallen down but wouldn’t quite lay flat. Do you know what I mean, Horn?”

“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”

“I used to walk up the trunk until I stood quite high in the air, and look out over the sea from there, looking for boats, or just looking at the weather we were about to get. It was a waste of time, but I enjoyed it.”

I tried to say that I did not think she had been wasting her time, but succeeded only in sounding foolish.

“Thank you, Horn. Thank you. That’s very nice of you. Look at the sea, Horn, while you can. Look at it for me, if you won’t do it for yourself.”

I promised I would, and did so as I spoke. The rock offered a fine view in every direction.

“It wasn’t good soil,” Maytera Marble continued. “It was too sandy. I grew a few things there, though. Enough to feed my granddaughter, and a little bit over that I took to town and sold, or gave the palaestra. I had a little vegetable patch in the garden at our manteion. Do you remember? Vegetables and herbs.”

I had forgotten it, but her words brought back the memory very vividly.

“Patera had tomatoes and berry brambles, but I had onions and chives, marjoram and rosemary, and red and yellow peppers. All sorts of things. Little red radishes in spring, and lettuces all summer. I tried to grow the same things on our farm, and succeeded with most of them. But my granddaughter would swim out here and stay for days and days. It worried me.”

Looking east to the mainland, I said, “It would worry me, too. It’s a very long swim, and she can’t be strong.”

“I built a little boat, then. I had to, so I could come out here and get her. I found a hollow log and scraped out all the rotten wood, and made ends for it. They were just big wooden plugs, really, but they kept the water from running in. Sometimes she would not go, and I’d have to stay out here with her till she would. That was why I built this little house. Then a storm came, a terrible one. I thought it was going to blow our little house away. It didn’t, but it broke my boat. I can’t swim, Horn.”

She looked up as she said it in such a way that sunshine struck her face, and I saw that her faceplate was gone. The lumps and furrows that had seemed deformities were a host of mechanisms her faceplate had hidden when I had known her earlier. Trying to ignore them, I said, “I can take you both back to the mainland in my sloop, Maytera. Nettle and I built it to carry our paper to the market in town, and it will carry the three of us easily.”

She shook her head. “She wouldn’t go, Horn, and I won’t leave her out here alone. I only wish-but I don’t worry about falling off anymore. I tap on the stone with my stick, you see.” She demonstrated, rapping the rock between us. “A man who came to consult my granddaughter made it for me, so now I can always find the edge.”

“That’s good.”

“It is. Yes, it is. I was feeling blue when you came, Horn. I feel blue at times, and sometimes it lasts days and days.”

Her free hand groped for me, and I stepped nearer so that she could put it on my shoulder.

“How tall you’ve grown! Why, you’ve taken me out of myself, just by coming to see us. Not that I should ever be blue anyway. I had good eyes for hundreds and hundreds of years. Most people don’t get to see things for anything like that long. Look at all the children who die before they’re grown! Dead at fifteen or twelve or ten, Horn, and I could name a dead child for you for every year between fifteen and birth.”

When she spoke again, the voice was Maytera Rose’s. “My other eyes. I had them less than a hundred years, and Marble ought to have taken them when she took my hands and so many other things. Taken the good one, I mean, for one was blind.

“But I didn’t. I left her eyes, because I never realized my own were wearing out. Her processor, yes. I took that, but not her eye. Horn?”

“Yes, I’m still here, Maytera. Is there some way I can help you?”

“You already have, by bringing us those nice bottles of water for my granddaughter and her pet. That was very, very fine of you, and I will never forget it. But you’re going home, Horn? Isn’t that what you said? Going back to-to the whorl we used to live in?”

I told her that I was going to try to go wherever Silk was and bring him to New Viron, which was what I had sworn to do; and that I thought he was probably in Old Viron, in which case I was going to go there if the people of Pajarocu would allow me on their lander.

“Then I want to ask a very great favor. Will you do me a very great favor, Horn, if you can?” Her free hand left my shoulder and Went to her own face. “My faceplate is gone. I took it off myself, and put it away somewhere. Have I told you?”

I shook my head, forgetting for a moment that she could not see it.

“We were here on this rock, my granddaughter and I, after the storm, and one of my eyes just went out. I told myself that it was all right, that the other one would probably last for years and years yet, and I could take good care of my poor granddaughter with one eye as well as I had with two.”

She sounded so despondent that I said, “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I do. I must. It was only four days, Horn. Four days after my left eye failed, my right eye failed, too. I took them out and reversed them, because I knew there was a chance that one might work then, but it didn’t help. That was when I took my faceplate off, because I felt somehow that it was in the way, that I was trying to look through it. And I couldn’t have. It’s solid metal, aluminum I think. They all are.”

Not knowing what else to say, I said, “Yes.”

“It didn’t help, but I’ve left it off ever since. My poor granddaughter doesn’t complain, and I’m more comfortable without it for some reason.”

As she spoke, she had plucked her right eye from its socket.

“Here, Horn. Take it, please. It’s a bad part, and not of the least use to me anymore.”

Reluctantly, I let her put it into my hand, which she closed around it for me with her own slender fleshlike fingers.

“If I were to tell you what it is, the part number and all that, it would be of very little use to you. But with the actual part, you might be able to find another one, and you’ll recognize it if you come across one.”

I resolved then to make every effort to find two (at which I have failed also) and told her so.

“Thank you, Horn. I know you will. You were always such a good boy. Sometimes it’s very hard to bear, but I shouldn’t feel blue. I really shouldn’t. The gods have given me a-a consolation prize, I suppose you’d call it. I can see into the future now, just as my dear sib Maytera Mint could. Did I tell you?”

I believe I must have said that I had always assumed she could prophesy, as all sibyls could.

“I wasn’t any good at it, because I couldn’t ever see the pictures. I knew the things everybody knows, what an enlarged heart means, and all those commonplace indicants. But I couldn’t see things in the entrails the way my dear sib could, and Patera, too. Now I can. Isn’t that strange? Now that I’m blind, I have ulterior vision. I can’t see the entrails till I touch them. But when I do, I see the pictures.”

Silk, I knew, had prophesied in that way; but I also knew that he had not had great faith in such prophesies. He had been both fascinated by and skeptical of the entire procedure. Bearing all that in mind, I asked whether she would be willing to prophesy for me, provided I could supply a good big fish for a victim.

“Why, yes, Horn. I’m very flattered.”

She paused, thinking. “We must have another fire for your sacrifice, however. A fire here outside. I built a little altar of stones, too. It’s what I use when the men who come in boats want me to do it.”

She began to walk slowly, searching left and right with the white wand she carried; and for a moment I saw her, and the rock itself and Mucor, as strangers must have-as the “men in boats” she talked about no doubt saw them: a place and two women so uncanny that I was amazed that anybody had the courage to consult them.

There is no point in recounting here how I caught a fish and carried it up that steep and weary path in a bucket, or how we built a small fire for it on the altar, lighting it from the one inside, before which Mucor sat motionless while the young hus munched her apple.

I loaned Maytera the long hunting knife Sinew had given me, and held my fish steady for her. She cut its throat neatly (not through the gills as one commonly kills fish, but as if it had been a rabbit); turning, she raised her thin arms to the point at which the Sacred Window would have stood, had we possessed one, and uttered the ancient formula.

(Or perhaps I should say that the empty northern sky was her Window. Is not the sky the only Sacred Window we have here, in which we strive to trace the will of gods who may not yet have deserted us?)

“Accept, all you gods, the sacrifice of this fine shambass. And speak to us, we beg, of the times that are to come. What are we to do? Your lightest word will be treasured. Should you, however, choose otherwise…”

As she pronounced these words, I was beset by a sensation so extraordinary that I hesitate to write about it, knowing that I will not be believed.

No, my dearest wife, not even by you.

I saw nothing and heard nothing, yet it seemed to me that the face of the Outsider had appeared, filling the whole sky and indeed overflowing it, a face too large to be seen-that I was seeing him in the only way that a human being can see him, which is to say in the way that a flea sees a man. Call it nonsense if you like; I have often called it nonsense myself. But is it really so impossible that the god of lonely, outcast things should have favored those two, exiled as they were to their sea-girt, naked rock? Who was, who could be, more broken, exiled, and despairing than Maytera Marble? Whether or not there was truth in the presence that I sensed then, I fell to my knees.

Turning back to the altar and me, Maytera Marble laid my fish open with a single swift cut that made me fear for my thumb. I took back the knife, and her old-woman’s fingers probed the abdominal cavity in a way that left me feeling they had eyes in their tips I could not see.

“One side’s for the giver, that’s you, Horn, and the augur. That’s me. The other’s for the congregation and the city. I don’t suppose-”

Abruptly she fell silent, half crouching with her head thrown back, her blind eye and empty, aching socket staring at nothing, or perhaps at the declining sun.

“I see long journeys, fear, hunger and cold, and feverish heat. Then darkness. Then more darkness and a great wind. Wealth and command. I see you, Horn, riding upon a beast with three horns.”

(She actually said this.)

“Darkness also for me. Darkness and love, darkness until I look up and see very far, and then there will be light and love.”

After that she was silent for what seemed to me a very long time. My knees hurt, and with my free hand I tried to brush away the small stones that gouged them.

“The city searches the sky for a sign, but no sign shall it have but the sign from the fish’s belly.”

Now I must get to bed, and there is really nothing more to record. Although Maytera urged me to spend the night in their hut, I slept on the sloop, very tired but troubled all night by dreams in which I sailed on and on, braving storm after storm, without ever sighting land.

It is very late. My palace is asleep, but I cannot sleep. Earlier I was yawning over this account. If I write a little bit more, perhaps it will make me sleepy again.

Darling, you will want to know about Maytera’s prophecy, and what Mucor said when at last she returned to us from her search for Silk.

You will also want to know the solution to the mystery of the fish. About that, I can really tell nothing. I have certain suspicions, but no evidence to back them up.

Let me say this. An island-our own island of Lizard, for instance-is in fact a sort of mountain thrust out of the sea, as all good sailors know. If the sea were to recede, we would discover that our mill is really situated not at the foot of the Tor but on a mountaintop. An island, that is to say, exists not only in the air but 10 the water that is beneath the air. I have reason to suspect that there were four of us, not three, on the island I have named Mucor’s Rock. (I do not include Babbie.) Mucor, I believe, communicated with that fourth person by means you understand no better-and no worse-than I do. You will recall how she appeared to Silk and others, in the tunnels, on the airship, and even in Silk’s own bedroom. This may have been something of the same kind.

Maytera’s prophecy regarding me was entirely accurate. You may object that save for the part about the beast with three horns-which I will treat separately in a moment-it was very general. So it was; but it was correct as well, as I have said. I did indeed journey long, endure hunger, thirst, cold and heat, and terrible darkness of which you shall read before this record closes-assuming that I will someday finish it for you. Here in Gaon, I have great wealth at my command and my orders are obeyed without question.

On Green I rode a three-horned beast, as Maytera foresaw. Indeed, I was riding it at the time I was wounded fatally. But I shall say no more about that. It would only disturb us both.

As for Mucor’s report, I am yawning again already. I will leave that anticlimax for another day.