On Blue's waters

- 11-
THE LAND OF FIRES

With the block and tackle, and Krait and Seawrack to pull the rope with me, and Babbie pushing and lifting the stern with his shoulders, we were able to get the sloop well up onto the beach. When there was no moving it any farther, I stowed the block, fetched my slug gun and some of the silver jewelry, and moored the sloop to dwarfish but sturdy-looking trees at both the bow and the stern.

After that, I climbed the biggest dune I could find to study the wide, flat expanse of sand and dark green, tangled brush. It did not look promising; but I reminded myself that the majestic trees of the island had produced no game at all, while we had shot at a green-buck in the ruins, which had not appeared any more promising than this.

Some minutes passed before it struck me that I was actually standing on what I myself had named Shadelow-that for the first time ever my feet were solidly planted on the unknown western continent upon which Pajarocu and its working lander waited. Behind me to the south lay the sea, and to eastward I could see the sea as well. Far to the north, too, I could just make out the gleam of it, or thought I could. But to the west the land widened, rising so much that I was reminded of home, where the distant lands to north and south bend up around the sun and at last close over one’s head to become the majestic skylands.

At my elbow Krait drawled, “It’s a big country.”

With more conviction than I felt, I told him that we would find Pajarocu in it, and soon.

He shrugged. “I’ll help as much as I can.”

“Then I feel sure you must have found out something of value last night.”

“No.” The wind whipped his loose clothing and he trembled, looking at least as cold as I felt.

“But you fed again. You said so at some length when you came back, and marveled that a place with so few people could provide such good hunting. Didn’t you have a chance to talk to anybody?”

“You’d like it better if I starved.”

I would not be diverted into a quarrel. “You found someone here. Human beings from whom you fed.”

“Not here I didn’t. Up there, farther in.” He pointed westward.

“Didn’t you ask them about Pajarocu? You must have. What did they say?”

He shook his head. “I had no opportunity to ask anybody anything. They were all asleep.”

“Good,” I said.

“Yes, she was.” He grinned, though without displaying his fangs.

Behind us, from the foot of the dune on which we stood, Seawrack called, “Aren’t you going to hunt?”

“In a moment!” I told her. “I’m going to go down the other side!”

“We’ll meet you there!”

I turned back to Krait. “I want you to stay here and protect the sloop. Will you do that?”

“Gladly, if you’ll tell me why you were happy that I hadn’t asked for directions.”

“Because I was warned that people friendly to the town would mislead us if we asked where it was. These people don’t like strangers, even when they’re human.”

Krait grinned again, stroking the chin he had shaped for himself that morning. “And one of us isn’t.”

It was my turn to shrug. “A detail.”

“I agree, Father. We’re every bit as human as you are, whatever that means. Don’t you want to know where the humans I found are?”

“I want to know a good deal more.” I tried to study his face, and turned away from its glittering eyes. If he chose to deceive me, there was nothing I could do about it. “But that will do to start with. Where are they?”

He pointed west again. “See that notch in the mountains?”

I nodded. It was ten leagues at least.

“A little river runs through there, coming pretty well straight toward us. If you look carefully, you can see the sun on it through the trees here and there.”

I tried, but my eyes were not as sharp as his.

“They have a lean-to on the bank, down where the land flattens out and the water slows down.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Can you tell me where the river goes after that?”

He shook his head. “Sinks into the ground, maybe. It’s pretty sandy all around here. But I don’t know, and it might reach the sea. I didn’t follow it.”

“We’re going to hunt here, for greenbucks or whatever we can find that can be shot and eaten. What do you think of our chances?”

He hesitated, scanning the monotonous expanse of thickly spaced bushes and scrubby trees just as I had earlier. “Not much, but I could be wrong.”

“Did you see any game?”

He shook his head again.

“What did you see? I mean here, where we are now.”

“Trees, mostly.” Before I could stop him, he had started down the dune toward the sloop. I watched him for a moment or two, then clambered and slid down the other side, reaching the bottom just in time to meet Seawrack and Babbie, who had walked around the end.

“I was going to climb up there after you,” she said, “but it hurt my feet, and our Babbie sank down in it. Sand that’s full of sharp little rocks belongs under the water. Could you see much from up there?”

“All sorts of things,” I told her, meaning more than the mere geography I had observed. “Some of which I don’t want to talk about. Not yet, at least.”

I scratched my beard. “Seawrack, I plan to hunt due west, which will mean we’ll be walking almost parallel to the shore for a long way, but tend gradually inland. The nearer to the mountains we get, the better the hunting is likely to be. Do you still want to come?”

She nodded, and we set out.

I tried more than once to show her the mountains, but in every place we stopped our view was obstructed by leaves and branches. “It’s going to be horribly easy to lose our way,” I told her. “We’ll have to stop and look at the sun wherever it can be seen. The boy says there’s a river, though, and we can follow that-if we can find it.”

“Did he kill something?”

That called for a flat lie, and I supplied it, saying that in spite of his boasts I thought that he had really eaten raw shellfish.

We started off again, but had not walked far when Seawrack asked whether Krait had met any of the people who had built the fires we had seen the first night. I replied that I believed he had, but that he had been unwilling to tell me anything about them.

“Aren’t you willing to tell me either?” She was following me as we made our way through the tangled trees, but apparently my voice had been all the clue she needed.

“I’m willing, because I’m very worried about you as well as worried about us both. I don’t quite know how to go about it, however, because I don’t actually know anything about this part of the whorl and its people. Everything I might confide is guesswork.”

“Then tell me your guesses.” It was a demand; and Babbie, who had been ranging ahead of us, stopped and looked back at us, ears spread.

I took a deep breath, more than half certain that Seawrack knew more about the fires and their builders than I did. “To start with, I don’t believe they were human beings.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No, I’m not. Krait said he met some people along this river I’d like to find, a good long way from here. According to his account, he must have gotten pretty far inland. Whqever built the fires would have been much nearer.”

“Didn’t he see them?”

“I don’t know,” I told Seawrack. “He didn’t want to say. If you’d like my guess, I think he knew who or what they were and avoided them.” She would have questioned me further if I had allowed it, but I told her that our noise would frighten the game, if there was any, and that she would have to be quiet or wait on the sloop with Krait.

About noon (squinting up at the sun every chance I got kept me very conscious of the passage of time) we struck the little river and stopped to drink. Its water was clean and cold and good. Seawrack asked, “Are we going to follow this now?” and I told her we were.

“You want to find the people the boy found?”

“If I can.” I had stopped drinking and was taking off my boots. “For me the easiest way will probably be to wade through the shallows.”

I waited for her to speak, but she did not.

“Are you going to do that too, instead of swimming?”

She nodded.

“There’ll be less brush for me to deal with.” I had been forced to cut our way with Sinew’s knife in half a dozen places. “And if I try to hike through the brush next to it, I’m liable to lose it every chain or two. The people that Krait met lived alongside it, he said. If I lose it and find it again upstream of their camp, I’ll miss them completely.”

She nodded again. “Maybe they’ll give us something to eat.”

“Exactly. We need food, more clothing and blankets, or even hides. Something to keep us warm. Boots or shoes for you, if we can get them.”

I stood up, and stepped into the river, finding the water that had been so refreshing unpleasantly cold, and pulled off my tunic. “This is something I should have done as soon as you swam out to the sloop,” I said. “Here, take it. Put it on, and please don’t argue with me.”

She began to protest, but fell silent when she saw that she was only making me angry. “Women in New Viron never let strangers look at their breasts,” I explained. “Allowing it would be like sing- ing that song you’re trying to forget. Do you understand?”

In a whisper so soft I could scarcely hear her, she said, “You’re not a stranger.”

“I know, and there are exceptions. This is best, just the same. Put it on.”

“You’ll be cold. I was.”

I told her that I had been getting chilled anyway when I was wearing my tunic, which was not particularly warm. After that, we waded upstream for two or three leagues before the water became so frigid that we had to get out and try to trace the river from one side after all.

Shadelow (I still have no other name by which to call it) is a colder continent than ours, from what I saw of it. Even places we would consider southern are colder than New Viron, and much colder than this town of Gaon. I would think that it must be due to the western winds, or to unfavorable currents in the sea.

It was nearly dark by the time we reached the lean-to Krait had visited. It belonged to a family of four-a husband and wife, a boy of twelve or thirteen, and a plump little girl whom I judged to be eight or nine. The man was away hunting when we arrived, and the boy was spearing fish in the river. His mother called out to him when she saw us, and he came at a run, brandishing his barbed spear. Seawrack and I smiled and tried to show by signs (since the woman seemed not to understand the Common Tongue) that we were friendly.

The girl had been Krait’s victim. She lay on her back beside their fire, deathly pale beneath her deep tan and only occasionally opening her eyes; I do not believe she spoke the whole time we were there. Remembering what Silk had told me about Teasel, and what Teasel herself had told Nettle and me later, I tried to show her mother by signs that she should be kept very warm and given a great deal of water, at last fetching a soft greenbuck skin myself and covering her with it. The boy was-or rather, seemed to be-more intelligent, bringing water in a gourd as soon as I pointed to his sister and pretended to drink from my hand.

Soon the father returned carrying two big gray-and-red birds he had killed with arrows. He proved to speak the Common Tongue fairly well, and asked us many questions about Babbie, having never seen a hus before. When I told him that Babbie could understand what we were saying, he explained (with some difficulty, but very earnestly) that it was true of every animal. “He listen. No talk. Sometimes talk. Long time the shearbear, he talk me.”

It was an animal I had never heard of; I asked him what the shearbear had said.

He shook his head. “No tell.”

“Change blood,” his wife explained, making Seawrack blink with surprise.

That sounded as if it might be significant, so I asked her about it.

“He-pen-sheep cut arm, shearbear cut same.” She crossed her arms to illustrate the mingling of their blood, then pointed upward. Her husband and son pointed upward as well, he with his bow and the boy with his fishing spear. I pointed upward with my slug gun, and they nodded approval, at which Seawrack too pointed upward as the woman had.

They invited us to join their meal, and we accepted eagerly. After we ate, I traded two silver pins for a soft skin smaller than the one with which I had covered their daughter, saying that I was cold.

He-pen-sheep (who was naked to the waist himself) cut a slit in the middle of it for my head and cut away a long, thin strip that he tied around my waist as one would tie a trouser cord, making a rough but warm leather tunic with half sleeves of the skin. “You stay,” he urged me. “She-pick-berry make together for you.”

Neither Seawrack nor I understood “make together,” so he brought out a pair of beautifully made hide boots and pointed out the stitching. Too eagerly, perhaps, I offered them a silver necklace if She-pick-berry would make a pair for Seawrack, since the pair that he had shown us would have been much too large for her. After some discussion we agreed that the boots could be undecorated, and I offered another pin in addition to the necklace.

She-pick-berry then made the boots in something less than an hour, folding and cutting soft leather around Seawrack’s feet, punching holes in it with one of the pins she had gotten from me already, and sewing it quickly with a big bone needle. They were very simple in construction, one piece forming the sides and the sole, another the front and top, and a third the back.

Pretending ignorance, I asked He-pen-sheep what had happened to his daughter.

“Inhumu bite.” He indicated the inner part of his own thigh.

Seawrack told him that an inhumu had bitten Babbie some days ago, although it had not attacked us.

He nodded solemnly. “Afraid Neighbor-man.” When I asked what a Neighbor-man was, he laughed and pointed to the ring Seawrack had given me. “You Neighbor-man.”

“Many Neighbor here,” his wife told Seawrack. She paused to moisten the sinew with which she sewed, running it through her mouth. “Build many fire. Neighbor-man,” she pointed to me, “come, talk Neighbor.”

I indicated the wilderness of sand and scrub through which we had walked for most of the day. “Are there many Neighbors down there?”

Without looking up from her sewing, she nodded emphatically. “Many Neighbor. Many fire.”

Her son displayed both palms. “No kill Neighbor.”

His father laughed again. “He no kill. Change blood Neighbor,” to which he added what seemed to be several sentences in a tongue that I had never heard before.

“Neighbor kill you?” I suggested.

He shook his head. “Kill inhumu.”

By that time the Short Sun had set; She-pick-berry was finishing her sewing by firelight. The ground had begun to rise here; the soil was darker and not so sandy, and the trees much taller. I climbed a likely-looking one, gaining enough height to see that the fires Seawrack and I had watched two nights before had been re-kindled, and were more numerous if anything. It seemed strange that we had not come across the ashes of one at least during our long hike through the scrub. For some time I stood upon a convenient limb, surveying them and speculating, before I climbed down again.

We stretched ourselves upon the ground to sleep in daisy-petal fashion, our feet toward the fire and our heads outward. If I had been warm and comfortable, I might very well have nodded off quickly, and slept the night away in spite of the resolution I had formed while I had stood in the tree. As things were, I shivered, huddled with Seawrack, and reviled myself through chattering teeth for not trading for the greenbuck hide and letting the exsanguinated child freeze for me.

Seawrack, as I ought to mention here, went to sleep at once; but hers was a troubled slumber, in which she trembled and twitched without waking, and sometimes spoke. I could not understand most of what she said, which seemed to me to be in several rather different languages. Once I thought she was cajoling someone or something; and once I overheard her say quite distinctly: “Yes, Mother! I’m coming, Mother!” After a time, it occurred to me that she might begin to sing in her sleep, crooning the song I had heard when she sat naked on the wave-swept rocks; when it did, I got to my feet without waking her, as I had intended all along.

The night was silent, cold, and clear. I made sure of Sinew’s hunting knife and picked up my slug gun, then scanned the sky for Krait-as everyone knows, inhumi are prone to return to places in which they have been successful. He was not to be seen, only the bright stars, very cold and far, and baleful Green low upon the eastern horizon.

The scrub trees of the peninsula had been troublesome by day; now they were nightmarish, raking my face with spiky limbs the moment I ceased to guard it with my hand or the slug gun. Every so often I was obliged to stop and chop my way through some tangle by touch alone; it must have taken me a full two hours to travel half a league.

At one point I stopped and looked behind me, footsore, exhausted, and sorely tempted to return to the fire and lie down again, and was irrationally cheered to find that it was still in sight, although it looked as remote as the stars. Save for Pig, Patera Silk and you, Nettle, I have seldom found a lot to love about my fellow human beings, even when I liked them; but at that moment I must have felt the way that Silk himself habitually did. The chill wind, the twisted, useless little trees, and the impoverished soil I trod were hostile, foreign things scarcely better than Krait and possibly worse. We six had faced them in the day now past and would face them again in the day to come; and it was our glory that we faced them together.

The feeling faded as soon as I turned my eyes away, but it has never disappeared completely. It is good to live as I do here: in a palace, with important work to do and plenty to eat. It is good-but those who live as I do here cannot ever know the feeling I experienced that night in the scrub when I looked back up the slope and saw the lonely scarlet glow that was She-pick-berry’s humble fire. There are worse things for the spirit, Nettle, than fatigue and sore feet, a little hunger and a little cold.

Yesterday Barsat reported finding a house of the Vanished People, as the Neighbors seem to be called on this eastern side of the sea wherever the Common Tongue is spoken. Today he and I rode out to see it, escorted by Hari Mau, Mota, Ram, and Roti. It was a dismal place, roofless, and empty of everything except twigs and dead leaves; but Barsat informed me that it was happy now. Naturally I asked what he meant.

“It didn’t like me,” he said. “As soon as I came in, I had to go back out.”

The others laughed at that, and I asked Barsat why he had gone inside at all, which may not have been an altogether fair question since we had gone in as a matter of course.

“I was hoping to find something I could sell,” he told me frankly. “Was that wrong, Rajan?”

I shook my head.

“They can afford to laugh.” He shot Hari Mau and his three friends a glance compounded of envy and admiration. “We poor men like to laugh too, but we don’t have much to laugh about.”

I began to explain that I was almost as poor as he, that my palace belonged to the town, which could tell me to leave whenever it wished, and so on; but before I could finish, we heard a single clear note sounded in another room. It was as though a bell had been struck.

Going to investigate, I discovered this chalice (at any rate, it is an object that seems more or less like a cup), which appears to be of silver or some shining alloy. It was standing on the only section of clear floor that I saw in the whole place, looking for all the whorl as if it had been set down there a moment before. I picked it up and tried to give it to Barsat. He reached for it but would not take it, although he hunted very industriously through the litter of leaves and twigs for something else.

My point, such as it is, is that I could not feel the happiness of the house, assuming it existed-as I believe it did. Nor could I feel any such emotion in the ruins on the island, the place where I fell into the pit through my eagerness to run down the greenback. Nor did I receive any gift at all there, save Krait’s rescue.

I must have spent three or four hours, if not longer, laboriously picking my way through the scrub. At last I hung my slug gun on the stub of a broken branch and sat down under one of the little trees with my back to the trunk, weary to the bone. Soon I let my eyes close (which they were only too willing to do) and abandoned myself to disappointment. I had hoped to reach the closest of the fires I had seen from my perch in the tree and catch a glimpse of the mysterious “Neighbors” about whom I had thought so much. I had also hoped to kill some animal that would furnish us with food. As I slumped there, I knew that both my hopes had been without foundation; I had exhausted myself and abandoned the comfort of the fire for nothing. I believe that I slept then, for a few minutes at least, and very likely for an hour or more.

A tap on my shoulder woke me. The face that looked into my own was invisible in the darkness, but I took no note of that, thinking that mine must be equally impossible to see. In much of the account I have written, I have set down my own words or the words others spoke to me. It a few cases I have been quite certain (at the time I wrote, if not subsequently) that I recalled them precisely. In most others, I have merely re-created them as you and I re-created so many of the verbal exchanges we put into our book, relying upon my knowledge of the speakers, and of the gist of what they had said. But we have come to a very different matter.

The tall, shadowed figure before me said, “Get up.” To which I replied, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm.” Those are the exact words that he spoke, and the exact words with which I answered him. Everything the Neighbors said to me, and every reply I made, has remained in my memory from that night to this, as fresh as though it had been said only a few seconds ago. I do not know why this should be true, but I know that it is.

As for the reason I answered as I did, I can only say that upon awakening (if I had in fact been sleeping as sleep is generally accounted) I felt in a confused fashion that I had been trespassing, that this flat land with its covering of scrub was his, and that he might be understandably angry at finding I had ventured on it.

“Come with me,” he said, and he helped me to stand up, grasping both my hands while lifting me under the arms. I ought to remember how his hands felt, I am sure-but I do not. My mind was on other things, perhaps.

He strode off through the trees, then turned to me and took my hand again to make certain that I was following him. I trotted after him, and in that way we walked some considerable distance, he always a stride in advance. I am what is ordinarily called a tall man now, and I believe that I must be about as tall as Silk was when you and I were young; but the Neighbor was a good deal taller, and a great deal taller than I was then, taller even than Hammerstone, though far more slender.

I trotted, as I have already written, because I could not keep pace with the Neighbor’s four long legs by walking. But the branches of the twisted trees no longer raked my face, and I am quite certain that there was no place where I was forced to get out Sinew’s knife and cut my way through. If there were anything in the whorl that could have convinced me that the entire episode was a dream, it would be that. It was not a dream however. I knew even then (exactly as I know now) that it was nothing of the kind.

I had hurried after the tall figure of the Neighbor so promptly that I had left my slug gun dangling from the low limb on which I had hung it, but I do not believe I was conscious of that at the time. I would not have been greatly disturbed, I think, if I had been.

By the time we reached their fire, I was panting and sweating despite the cold. There were more shadowy figures seated around it; they wore dark cloaks (or so it seemed to me at the time) and soft-looking hats with wide brims and low crowns. Most were sitting upright, but one lay at full length. He may have been dead; I do not believe he spoke or moved while I was there, and it is conceivable that he was not one of them at all but a fallen log or something of the sort, and that I only imagined that there was a sixth or a seventh who was lying down. If this sounds impossibly vague, you must understand that the fire did not illuminate him, or them, in the way I would have expected.

“Do you know who we are?” the shadowed figure who had come for me asked.

I replied, “My friend He-pen-sheep calls you his Neighbors.”

One of the seated Neighbors inquired, “Who and what do you yourself think we are?”

I said, “I’m from New Viron, a town on the eastern shore of the sea, and I believe that you’re the Vanished People. I mean, I believe that you’re some of the people we call the Vanished People in New Viron.”

Another said, “Then you must tell us who the Vanished People are.” All this was in the Common Tongue.

“You are the people whose whorl this was before our landers came to it,” I said. No one replied, so I continued, fumbling now and then as I tried to find the right words. “The Whorl up there,” I pointed, “that was our whorl. This whorl, which we call Blue now, was your whorl. But we thought something had-had happened to you, because we never see you. Sometimes we find things you made, like that place on the island to the south, though I never did until I found that one. My son Sinew says that he and some other young men found an altar of yours in the forest, a stone table on which you used to sacrifice to the gods of this whorl.”

I waited for one of them to speak.

“Since you haven’t really vanished at all, we’re-I’m very glad that you’ve let me live here with my family. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

They said nothing, and after a while the one who had brought me to their fire indicated by a gesture, a motion of his fingers as if he were drawing words from my mouth, that I should go on talking.

I said, “I’m seeing you here tonight, I realize that, and I’m happy that you gave me this chance to express my gratitude. But I’ve never seen any of you before in twenty years, and most of us think that you’re all dead. I’ll try to tell them that’s a mistake when I get back home.”

As I spoke, I was reminded of Patera Remora’s long, foolish face, and the dark and dusty little sellaria in which we had con- versed, and I said, “I think perhaps our Prolocutor has seen you. He seems to know something, anyway. I hadn’t realized it until now.”

They remained silent.

I said, “We think your gods are still here. To tell the truth, we’re afraid that they are. I’ve encountered one myself, your sea goddess. I don’t know what you call her.” As I spoke I looked from shadowy face to shadowy face. That was when I realized that they were not made even slightly more visible by the fire. The fire was there. I could see its light on my hands and feel its heat on my cheeks. I do not doubt that its light was shining on my face, as firelight always does; but it did not light them.

Lamely I finished, “Seawrack calls her the Mother. I mean the girl-the young lady that I call Seawrack. I mean, she used to.”

The Neighbor to my left said, “That is one of her names.” He had not spoken before.

“We’re here now,” I said, “we human men and women and children who came out of the Whorl.”

All of them nodded.

“And we’re taking your whorl, or trying to. I don’t blame you for being angry with us for that, but our gods are driving us out, and we have no place else to go. Except for me, I mean. I’m trying to get back to the Whorl, but not to stay. To bring back Patera Silk. Would you like me to tell you who Patera Silk is?”

The Neighbor who had awakened me said, “No. Someone you care about.”

I nodded.

“Most of what you have said, we might say. This whorl of yours was ours. We, the remnant of our race, have abandoned it, giving it to no one and making no provision to keep it for ourselves. We found a way to leave and we left, seeking a new and a better home.”

He turned from me, his face lifted to the western stars. “Some of you call the place where we are the Neighbor Whorl. It does not matter what we call it, or what we once called this one. This whorl is yours now. It is called Blue. It belongs to your race.”

I stammered my thanks. I could set down everything I said, but there is really no way to describe how clumsily and haltingly I said it.

“We have brought you here as the representative of your race,” he told me when I had finished. “You, here tonight, must speak for all of you. We have a question to ask. We cannot make you answer it, and if we could we would not. You will oblige us greatly by answering, even so. You say that you are grateful to us.”

“For a whorl? For Blue? It’s a godlike gift, like Pas giving us the Whorl. In a hundred years we couldn’t repay you. Or a thousand. Never.”

“You can. You yourself can repay us tonight, simply by answering. Will you?”

I said, “I’ll try. I will if I can. What is the question?”

He looked around at the others. All those sitting upright nod- ded, I believe, although I cannot be sure. “Let me remind you again,” the Neighbor who had brought me to their fire said, “that you will speak for your entire race. Every man of your blood. Every woman, and every child.”

“I understand.”

“I chose you, and I did so because I hoped to incline your race’s judgment in our favor by choosing someone apt to be well disposed toward us.” By a trifling gesture he indicated the ring that Seawrack had given me before we left the sloop. “If you wish to hold my choosing such a person against us, there is nothing to prevent you.”

I said, “Certainly not.”

“Thank you. Here is our question. Nearly all of us have abandoned this whorl, as I told you. Tonight we give it to you who call yourselves human, as I have also told you. Do you humans, the new possessors, object to our visiting it from time to time, as we are doing tonight?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. Realizing that the words I had used could be understood in a sense opposite to the one that I intended, I added, “We have no objection whatsoever.”

“From this whorl we sprang. You spoke of a hundred years, and of a thousand. There are rocks and rivers, trees and islands here that have been famous among us for many thousands of years. This is one such place. I ask you again, may we visit it, and the others?”

Trying to sound formal, I responded, “Come whenever you wish to, and stay for as long as you wish. Our whorl is your whorl.”

“I ask a third time, and I will not ask again. You must answer for all your human kind. Guests are frequently awkward, embarrassing, and inconvenient. Your ways are not ours, and ours are not yours. They must often seem foreign, barbaric, and irrational to you. May we come?”

I hesitated, suddenly fearful. “Will you come as the inhumi do, to do us harm?”

There was stir among those seated around the fire. I could not be certain whether it was of amusement or disgust. “No,” the Neighbor who had brought me said, “We will not come to do you harm, and we will help you against the inhumi when it lies in our power.” The rest nodded.

I swallowed, although my mouth was as dry as my knees. “You are welcome. I know I’ve said it already, but I don’t know how else to-all I can do is repeat it. You may visit this whorl you have given us whenever you want to, and go back to your own whorl whenever you want to, freely. I say that for every human man and every human woman, and even for our children, as humanity’s representative.”

They relaxed. I know how strange it will be for you to read this, Nettle darling, but they did. It was not anything I saw or heard; I could feel the tension drain away. They seemed a little smaller then, and perhaps they were. I still could not see their faces clearly, but they were not so deeply shadowed as they had been; it was as though they had been wearing veils I could not see, and they had drawn them back.

The Neighbor who had brought me stood up, and I did, too. “You spoke of a companion,” he said, and he sounded almost casual. “Seawrack, you named her. You did not give us your own name, you who have been every being of your kind.”

“My name is Horn.” I offered him my hand.

He took it, and this time I felt his hand and remembered it. It was hard, and seemed to be covered with short, stiff hairs. Beyond that I will not say. “My name is Horn also,” he told me. I felt that I was be- ing paid an immense compliment, and did not know how to reply.

He pointed. He was tall, as I have said, but all his arms were too long even for someone as tall as he was. “Are you going back to your companion? To the fire where she and others lie sleeping?” She-pick-berry’s little fire seemed very near when he pointed it out.

“I was hunting,” I told him, “and I left my slug gun hanging on a tree. I’ll have to get it first.”

“There it is.”

Looking where he pointed, I glimpsed it through the trees, and saw the red reflection of the flames in its polished and oiled steel. It seemed much too near to be mine, but I went to get it anyway, took it down from the broken limb upon which I had hung it, and slung it behind my right shoulder as I usually did. When I turned to wave to him and the others, they were not there.

Nettle, I know that you are going to think it was a dream, not so very different from the dream of you I had when I was in the pit, the dream in which you brought me a dipper of water. It was not. It seemed dreamlike at times, I admit; but I have had a great many dreams, as everyone has, and this was not one of them.

I was lost when I could no longer see the Neighbors’ fire. I knew that to return to He-pen-sheep’s camp all that I had to do was walk uphill. It should have been easy; but again and again I found myself walking across level ground or down a gentle slope, and so toward the sea, when I felt certain that I had set out in the correct direction.

After two or three hours of this mazed wandering I realized that I ought to have been exhausted, but I was noj even slightly tired. I was thirsty and ravenously hungry, so hungry that my teeth seemed as sharp as knives; but I was not fatigued, or footsore in the least.

Just about then I heard a twig snap, and the rattling and rustling of a big animal in the scrub. I had just warning enough to unsling my slug gun and push down the safety when Babbie snuffled, and I felt the familiar, waist-high probing of his soft snout. It was the second time I had nearly shot him, and it struck me as very funny, like one of those stories the men who sell us wood tell, in which some ridiculous situation occurs and recurs. I dropped to one knee, still laughing, rubbed Babbie’s ears, and told him that I was very glad indeed to see him, as I was.

When I looked up, there was something looming above us so enormous and so dark that in that moment it seemed larger than a thunderhead. I remember (I shall never forget) seeing its long curved horns among the massed stars, and feeling that they were actually there, that when the beast moved they would extinguish stars as they might have poked out eyes. In another moment they vanished as it lowered its head to charge. I fired over Babbie’s back, and pumped the action faster than I would have thought possible, the opening and shutting of the bolt a single sound like the slamming of a door, fired again without bringing the butt to my shoulder properly, and was knocked over in literal earnest, knocked sprawling amid the sand and roots. I remember the angry rattle of Babbie’s tusks, and picking up the slug gun again and jerking the trigger without any idea whether it was pointed at the beast, at Babbie, or at my own foot, and wondering why it did not fire, too dazed to realize that I had not chambered a fresh round.

All that lasted only a second or two, I believe. I climbed to my feet and pumped the action again; and then, seeing nothing and hearing nothing except Babbie, pushed on the safety. You will accuse me of exaggeration, dearest Nettle, I know. But I actually tripped over one of the immense horns before I knew that the huge beast lay there. I nearly fell again, and would perhaps have fallen myself if I had not caught myself upon its fallen shoulder.

I had to explore it then with my hands, because it was black and lay in pitch blackness under those closely packed trees, none of which were much above five cubits high but all of which were still in full leaf in spite of the cold. I do not know what they are called, but their leaves are hard, thick, pointed, and deep green, not much longer than the second joint of my forefinger.

It was enormous, that beast, and I was still trying to grasp just how enormous it was when He-pen-sheep and his son burst out of the scrub, howling like a couple of hounds in their exultation. “Breakbull,” they said over and over. “You kill breakbull, Horn.” The son cut off the tail and tied it to my thong belt; it made me feel a complete fool, but that is their custom and I could not have taken it off or even implied that it was unwelcome without offending them. I thought then about what that other Horn had said concerning the customs of his race, and wondered what I had let us in for. Our own differ greatly from one town to the next, as everyone knows. Those of another race (I thought) must be very peculiar indeed. As they are.

At this point I have told you everything of interest. I am going to make the rest very short and so finish writing about all this before I go to bed.

He-pen-sheep and his son skinned the breakbull in the dark with a little not very valuable help from me. I cut off a haunch, and tried to shoulder it without getting too much blood on the slug gun (which I had hung across my back with the butt up), at which I was not very successful. The two of them carried the skin back to their lean-to, and it was so heavy that the son fell once under its weight and was deeply shamed by it. As for me, I brought back ten times more meat than was needed to feed all seven of us. I say seven because Babbie ate at least as much as the hungriest, who was without a doubt your loving husband.

I have been tempted to omit this next observation, and have already pushed my account past it; but whether it fits here or not, I am going to tell you something very strange. On the way back to He-pen-sheep’s camp, he and his son often had a.good deal of difficulty working their huge roll of hide through the tangle of scrub that had obstructed me so often. I, who stood taller than either of them and had the massive haunch (it must have weighed as much as the twins) over my shoulder, should have been at least as inconvenienced by the angular, wind-twisted trees.

But I was not. My face and arms, which were already a mass of scratches from their limbs, were never scratched again. Although the haunch I carried was brushed now and again by leaves, it was never caught, not even momentarily. I cannot explain this. The limbs certainly did not move aside for me. The sky was gray by the time we were finished skinning the breakbull, and I would certainly have seen them if they had, and heard them, too. I can only say that it seemed to me that no matter in which direction I looked, I could see a clear path for me and my burden. And when I went forward, that was what it proved to be.

We reached camp about sunrise. She-pick-berry leaped up shouting and woke her sick daughter and Seawrack, which neither appeared to mind. We ate, and although all of us ate a great deal I am sure I ate the most of all, so much that He-pen-sheep was open in his astonishment and admiration. Even the daughter, who had been so ill the evening before, ate as much as would make a good big serving on one of our big dinner plates back on Lizard.

Afterward, She-pick-berry showed us how she would smoke the rest, making a sort of rack for thin strips of meat out of green twigs. We agreed that He-pen-sheep and his son would help Seawrack and me by bringing as much meat as they could carry to the sloop. In it return, they would receive the hide (which She-pick-berry was already scraping by the time we left their camp) and the remainder of the breakbull.

Escorted by Babbie, we four returned to the carcass, cut loads of meat, and made our way through the scrub to the sea, striking the beach only a short walk from the sloop. Krait was aboard and greeted our arrival with ill-natured sarcasm, twitting Seawrack and me for being as bloody as inhumi and laughing inordinately at his own witticisms. Before we realized that Patera Quetzal had been an inhumu, Nettle, I would have thought that a sense of humor was an exclusively human possession. Associating with Krait made me wish more than once that it were so; he had an overdeveloped sense of humor, and as ugly a one as I have ever met with in all my travels. Since then I have learned that the Neighbors, who treated me with so much solemnity that night, are notorious for theirs.

When He-pen-sheep and his son had helped us get the sloop back into the water, and had waded out to her with the loads of meat that they had brought and washed themselves in the sea, he drew me aside. Indicating Krait with a jerk of his head, he told me, “No like,” and I acknowledged that I did not like him either.

“You beat, Horn?”

I shook my head.

“Big beat,” he advised me. Then, “You talk Neighbor?”

I nodded.

“What say?”

I considered. At no time had the other Horn or any other Neighbor asked me to keep our conversation confidential, or put me under any sort of oath. “We changed blood,” I told He-pen-sheep. “I,” I touched my chest, “for you and all the other men, and for all the women and all the children, too. The Neighbor for all the Neighbors.”

He-pen-sheep stared at me intently.

“Because I spoke for you, I can tell you what we said. We agreed that where men are, Neighbors can come as well.” I waved my arm at the horizon, indicating (I hope) that I intended the whole whorl. “They can visit us in peace and friendship.”

“Big good!” He nodded enthusiastically.

“I think so too,” I told him. “I really do.”

As we hauled up the sails, he and his son waved farewell to us from the beach, and when we had so much sea-room that I could no longer distinguish one from the other, I could still hear them calling, “You kill breakbull, Horn!”

I had thought to end this part of my account with the words you just read, Nettle darling, the final words that I wrote last night; but there is more to tell, and it will fit in here better than anywhere else.

When we left He-pen-sheep and his son on the beach, I supposed that we would never see them again. That was not the case. In justice to them I ought to tell you here, since I neglected to do it last night, that when we had gone back to the breakbull’s carcass I had been much taken with its horns, all four longer than the blades of swords, sharp, black-tipped, elaborately grooved, and cruelly curved. After examining and admiring them, I had asked He-pen-sheep what he was going to do with them, and he had explained to me all of the many uses to which horn can be put, things that I ought to have learned long ago, since I am named for that substance.

Krait, Babbie, and I were more than sufficient to work the sloop under the light airs that were all we were granted even when we were well out to sea, so Seawrack set out to smoke as much of the meat as she could. She had prepared for the task by cutting a good supply of green shoots before we put out, and she trimmed them and fitted them together with her one hand as cleverly as She-pick-berry had with two; but our firewood was soon exhausted. As a result, Krait and I went ashore again before we rounded the point of the big sandspit I have called the Land of Fires and collected more.

(It was then, I believe, when I found myself yet again trying to cut wood with Sinew’s knife, that I resolved once and for all that I would acquire an axe or a hatchet at the first opportunity, or at least a bigger, heavier knife, if no axe or hatchet was available.)

By the time we had gathered as much dry wood as we could find without ranging far inland and loaded it into the sloop, wading out with bundles of it held clear of the water, the Short Sun was slipping away behind the distant peaks, and even Krait (who had done next to nothing) said that he was tired. Seawrack and I were close to exhaustion.

There was no good anchorage along that very exposed stretch of the coast, and no place suited to beaching, but I decided to remain where we were until morning. Since the weather had been good and was not actually threatening even then, I judged the danger to be less than that of sailing an unknown shore by night. I took Krait aside and warned him that He-pen-sheep and his son had been suspicious of him, which I believe he knew already, and suggested that he go elsewhere if he intended to hunt. He pointed out that he could scarcely use hunting to justify his absence to Seawrack as he had before-we had far more meat than we needed. I know how you feel about the inhumi, Nettle; and why you feel as you do. If you were looking over my shoulder as I write this, you would declare in the strongest possible terms that no one ought to crack jokes with such creatures; and certainly the bond that was to grow between Krait and me in the lander had not even begun to form. But I still felt grateful to him for rescuing me, and so I proposed that I tell Seawrack that he was hunting for napkins. He laughed and we separated, leaving me under the impression that he would remain with us on the sloop that night.

I took the first watch, and Seawrack the second. Krait was to take the third; he was to awaken me, of course, for the fourth and last watch of the night.

Here for art’s sake I should insert some account of dreams in which the Vanished People figured, I suppose; or perhaps reveal whispered confidences exchanged with Seawrack. In fact there were no dreams of any kind and no whispers. I roused her with considerable difficulty when it was her watch, and when she returned to lie beside me, leaving Krait on watch, she did not disturb me in the least.

It was Babbie who actually woke us both, squealing with alarm and nuzzling our faces. One of the gusty northwest winds that are so common in that region had set in, and the sloop had dragged her anchor until it found a solid hold in deep water and was about to pull her under. I was able to cut the cable just in time to keep her from swamping.

We had rounded the point of the spit at sunrise, and were heeling sharply under a reefed mainsail and making excellent time when Krait found us. I saw him, lit by the rising sun and carried swiftly along by the wind, at a height that few birds ever reach. Seawrack, I believe, did not.

He was in a quandary, as I realized immediately. If he landed on the sloop, Seawrack would know that he was no ordinary boy at the very least, and would in all likelihood see through his disguise. If he landed on shore and tried to signal us to pick him up, we might not see him-or might, as he would certainly have imagined, pretend not to.

He solved his problem by landing on shore well in advance of us and swimming out to the sloop. I saw him, threw him a rope and hauled him on board, shook him, gave him as violent a tongue-lashing as I am capable of, and followed it by grabbing him by the back of his tunic (which had been one of mine), peeling it off him, and beating him with the rope’s end until my arm ached. When the wind had moderated and we could talk privately, he reproached me for it, reminding me that he had rescued me from the pit and insisting, erroneously in my view, that we had sworn eternal friendship.

“I have been your friend ever since you got me out,” I told him. “Have you been mine?”

He managed to meet my eyes with a defiant stare that I found more familiar than it should have been, but could find nothing to say.

“You very nearly sunk this boat. We saved it, but if Babbie hadn’t roused us it would have gone down. I don’t suppose that Seawrack could drown, but I can.”

He said, “The weather was fine when I left and I would have come back before the end of my watch.”

“I would have died before the end of your watch. I would have been dead, and the sloop sunk, and my mission to the Whorl a total failure. I would be completely justified if I put my knife in you this minute.”

My hand was on it as I spoke, and he took a step backward. There was fear in his eyes. “You’ve hurt me as much as you could already.”

“Not half as much,” I told him, “and I’ve kept my promise even though you’ve broken yours. I threw you that rope; and if I hadn’t punished you severely for what you did, Seawrack would have known that you couldn’t possibly be what you pretend to be.”

He hissed at me. The hiss of an inhumu is at once a more sinister sound and an uglier one than the hissing of any serpent that I have ever heard.

“If one of my own sons had done what you did, I’d treat him exactly the way I treated you,” I told him. “If that isn’t what you want, what is it?” I did not say that at least one of my sons would have exhibited the same poisonous hatred; but I could not suppress the thought.

I put him to work in good earnest after that, something I had not done before, bailing, trimming sail and snugging up the standing rigging, tidying the sail locker, coiling and stowing the rope I had thrown him, and bailing again. I watched him every moment and shouted at him whenever he showed signs of slacking; and when he begged for mercy I started him scraping paint.

It was not long afterward that Seawrack spotted He-pen-sheep and his son standing on the beach with the head of the breakbull held upright between them. We were already some distance past them, but I put up the helm and ran down the wind until we were within hailing distance. He-pen-sheep cupped his hands around his mouth. “You take! Tou kill breakbull, Horn!”

Seawrack glanced at me, her lovely eyes wide. “They want to give you that head.” Standing upon its muzzle, it was nearly as tall as the son, and the spread of its horns exceeded that of my out-stretched arms, as I had found out when we had returned to the carcass.

“You’ll have to take it,” Krait told me, looking up from his scraping; and of course he was right.

Besides, I wanted it. You will not understand, Nettle my dearest darling, although perhaps some others who read this will. It had seemed a grim irony when He-pen-sheep’s son had tied the break-bull’s tail to the belt of the crude leather garment his father had made for me. I had wanted the head-yes, even then-if only to prove to myself that I had actually done what I remembered doing-and the tail seemed only a sort of mockery of that desire, some god’s cruel jest to punish me for my dawning self-satisfaction. You will ask now, and very reasonably, whether I did not want the head of the wallower I shot a few weeks ago as well. I did, but not nearly so acutely; and since no one talked of retaining the heads as trophies, I kept my peace.

When after considerable labor we had the breakbull’s head on board and had waved good-bye once again, Krait took great pleasure in enunciating the obvious. “You can glory in it for a day or three, if the flies don’t get at it. But after that, it will have to go over the side, or we will.”

I muttered something about sawing off the horns, if I could trade for a saw.

“You could have shot them off back there.” He pointed with the scraper. “It would have saved a lot of work.”

Seawrack asked indignantly, “How much work do you think they did, cutting it off and carrying it to the other side, when they couldn’t even be sure that we’d be going this way?” (I had questioned He-pen-sheep about a big river to the north the evening before, but that was surely not the time to mention it.) She turned to me. “Would you settle for the skull with the horns still on it, and no smell?”

I assured her that I would, and gladly.

“Then all we have to do is tow it behind the boat. Not too long a rope, because you don’t want it to go too deep. I’ll show you.”

She did, and I surprised myself and them by lifting the huge thing and carrying it to the stern for her. We balanced it on the gunwale, tied a noose in the rope that Krait had coiled and stowed a couple of hours earlier, tightened it over the horns, and pushed the head overboard. Although we were still making respectable time, it seemed to sink like a stone, and Seawrack had me shorten the rope.

By evening, we were accompanied by a flock (I cannot bring myself to call them a school) of the strangest and most beautiful fish that I have ever seen, each a little bit longer than my hand. They are luminous, as so many fish here are, although I cannot recall any luminous fish in the market in Old Viron. Their heads are scarlet, their bellies an icy white, and their backs, dorsal fins, and tails are blue. All four of their cubit-long pectoral fins (with which they not only glide but fly like birds or insects) are gauzy, and invisible at night. When they flitted around the sloop after shadelow like so many oversized and multicolored fireflies, it really seemed that we were sailing far beneath the waves, with some convenient current swelling our mainsail. Seawrack assured me that they would strip the skull of the last scrape of flesh in a few days, and they did.

And now good night, Nettle my own darling. My night thoughts circle your bed, glowing but invisible, to observe and to protect you. Never doubt that I love you very dearly.