Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

“The sea will be much wider at this point, if Wijzer’s map is right,” I explained to Babbie, “and I’m sure it would be dangerous even for a boat much larger than ours, with more people on it and ample supplies. But it won’t be nearly as dangerous as going back and falling in with that black boat again, and if we get across it will be much faster.” I nearly added that if he did not like the idea he was free to jump out and swim. He nodded so trustingly that I was ashamed of the impulse.

Perhaps I should be ashamed of having killed the woman who fell from the black boat instead. It is a terrible thing to take the life of another human being, and I had killed no one since Nettle and I (with Marrow, Scleroderma, and many others) had fought Generalissimo Siyuf’s troopers in the tunnels long ago. It is indeed a terrible thing-to reason and to conscience. It is not always felt as a terrible thing, however. I felt more concern for my own life than for hers at the time, and would gleefully have sent the black boat to the bottom if it had been within my power.

The wind died away toward shadelow, but by then we were well out of sight of both the black boat and the coast. I tied the tiller and lay down with the slug gun beside me, resolved to wake up in an hour or two and have a long and careful look at the sea and the weather before I slept again; but when Babbie woke me, grunting and tapping my cheek and lips with the horn-tipped toes of his forelegs, the first light was already in the sky.

I sat up rubbing my eyes, knowing that I was on the sloop, but believing for a few seconds at least that we were bound for New Viron. The wind had picked up considerably (which I thought at the time had been the reason that Babbie had felt it necessary to wake me); but the hard chop of the previous day had been tamed to quick swells that rolled the sloop gently and smoothly, our masthead bowing deeply and politely to starboard, then to port, and then to starboard again, as if it were the honored center of some stately dance.

This was of some importance, because I glimpsed what appeared to be a low island to port. In a calmer sea, I would have climbed the mast for a better look at it, but my weight would have amplified the roll, and if it amplified it to the point that we shipped water the sloop would founder. I stood upon one of the cargo chests instead, a very slight improvement on the foredeck.

“If it’s an island,” I told Babbie, “we might be able to get water and information there, but we’re not so badly off for water yet, and we’d be a lot more likely to find ourselves in trouble.”

He had leaped to the top of another chest, though he was not sure enough of his balance to rear on four hind legs there, as he often did when he could brace a foreleg on the gunwale. He nodded sagely.

“I’m going to put out more sail to steady her,” I told him.

“Then she won’t roll so much.”

I shook out the mainsail and trimmed it, and went forward to break out the triangular gaff-topsail. There were traces of blood on the half-deck there, dark, clotting blood in a crevice where it had survived Babbie’s tongue. What remained was so slight that I doubt that I would have noticed it without the bright morning sun, and the fact that the surface of the foredeck was scarcely two hands’ width from my face as I pulled the gaff-topsail out. On hand and knees on the foredeck, I looked for more blood and found traces of it everywhere-on the deck, on the bow, on the butt of the bowsprit, and even on the forestay.

My first thought was that Babbie had caught a seabird and eaten it; but there should have been feathers in that case, a few blood-smeared feathers at least, and there were none. “Not a bird,” I told him. “Not a fish, either. A fish might jump on board, but there would be scales. Or anyway I’d think there would be. What was it?”

He listened attentively; and I sensed that he understood, though he gave no sign of it.

When the topsail was up, I went to the tiller, steering us a bit wider of the low island I had sighted. There was weed in the water, as there often was off Lizard, long streamers of more or less green leaf kept afloat by bladders about the size of garden peas. Like everyone else who lived near the sea, we had collected this weed on the beach and dried it for tinder; it occurred to me that we had very little left, as well as very little firewood. Tinder without firewood would be useless, but if I kept an eye out, I might snag a few sticks of driftwood as well. I collected a good big wad of seaweed and spread it over the waxed canvas covers of the cargo chests, tossing the tiny crabs that clung to the strands back into the water. Others skittered about the boat and swam in the bilges until Babbie caught and ate them, crushing their shells between his teeth with unmistakable relish and swallowing shell and all.

Watching him, I realized that I had gone astray when I had supposed that he had eaten the creature whose blood I had found on the half-deck. It could not have been small, and he would have had to have eaten it entirely, skin, bones, and all. Yet he was clearly hungry. I threw him an apple, and ate one myself after listening to his quick, loud crunchings and munchings. By that time I had heard what Babbie did to bones more than once, and I felt quite sure that the noise he would have made while devouring an animal of any size would certainly have awakened me.

What had happened, almost certainly, was that something had climbed aboard at the bow, perhaps grasping the bowsprit in some way, as I had when I had climbed back on board after escaping the leatherskin. Babbie had charged and wounded it, and it had fallen back into the sea. The clatter of Babbie’s trotters would not have awakened me because I had become accustomed to hearing him move about the boat while I slept. He had licked up all the blood he could find, just as he later licked up the clotted blood I extracted from the crevices between the planks with the point of Sinew’s knife.

Something had fallen back into the sea, bleeding and badly injured. What had it been? For a moment I thought of the woman I had shot, swimming league upon league after our boat, intent upon revenge. If I were spinning a fireside tale for children here, no doubt it would be so; but I am recounting sober fact, and I knew that any such thing was utterly impossible. The woman I had shot was dead, in all probability; and if she was not dead, it was because she had been rescued by the black boat from which she had fallen.

Had it really come out of the sea at all? The inhumi could fly, and though they possessed no blood of their own, they could and did bleed profusely with the blood of others when they had recently fed, as the inhumu we had called Patera Quetzal had in the tunnels. Babbie would almost certainly attack an inhumu at sight, I decided. But could he have thus caught and bested one? A big male hus might have, but Babbie was no more than half grown.

What, then, had come out of the sea? Another leatherskin? Even a small one would have killed or injured any hus bold enough to attack it, I felt sure; and Babbie seemed quite unhurt. I resolved to nap during the afternoon and stand watch with him after shadelow.

The sloop was no longer rolling as it had been, and by that time was heeling rather less than it had when I had first set the topsail. I shinnied up the mast (something I had not done in some time, and found more difficult than I remembered) and had a look around. The island I had seen to port was distant but plainly visible, a level green plain hardly higher than the sea, dotted here and there with bushes and small, swaying trees.

Looking to starboard, I thought that I could make out another, similar, island there. “If those are parts of the same landmass, we may have found our western continent a lot sooner than we expected,” I told Babbie; but I knew it could not be true.