Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

When I woke, I saw that we were much nearer the low green island than I had imagined. If we got a good wind, I decided, we would sail on in search of Pajarocu; but if Molpe permitted us only the light and vagrant airs I more than half expected, I would steer for the island, and tie up there until we had sailing weather.

It was noon before we reached it, pushed along at times by faint breezes that never lasted long, and handicapped almost as often by others. I jumped from the sloop to make her fast, and found myself on a moist and resilient turf that was not grass, and that stretched its bright green carpet not merely to the edge of the salt sea, but beyond the edge, extending some considerable distance underneath the water, where it had been crushed and torn by our prow. Nowhere was there a tree, a stump, or a stone-or anything else that I could tie the sloop to. I sharpened a couple of sticks of the green firewood we had gotten the day before, drove them deeply into the soft turf with a third, and moored to them.

While I was sharpening my stakes and pounding them in, I argued with myself about Babbie. He was clearly eager to get off the sloop after having been confined there for several weeks, and though I had planned to leave him to guard it, I could see for a league at least in every direction, and could see nothing for him to protect it from. Determined to be prudent no matter how great the temptation, I sternly ordered him to stay where he was, fetched my slug gun, and set off by myself, walking inland for a half hour or so. Finding no fresh water and seeing nothing save a few distant trees of no great size, I returned to the sloop and pulled up my stakes (which was alarmingly easy), and sailed along that strange shore until midafternoon.

Sailed, I just wrote, and I will not cross it out. But I might almost have said we drifted. In three or four hours, we may have traveled half a league, although I doubt it. “At this rate we’ll die of thirst ten years before we sight the western land,” I told Babbie, and tied up again at a point where the green plain seemed slightly more variegated, having hills and dales of the size loved by children, and a tree or bush here and there. I moored the sloop as before, but when I left it this time I let Babbie come with me.

It puzzled me that an island so richly green should be so desolate, too. I do not mean that I did not know what that bright green carpet was. I pulled up some and tasted it; and when I did, and saw it in my hand, a little, weak, torn thing and not the vast spongy expanse over which Babbie and I wandered, I knew it for the green scum I had often seen washed ashore after storms, too salty for cattle, or even goats or any other such animal.

And yet it seemed irrational that so vast a quantity of vegetable matter should go to waste. Pas, who built the Whorl, would have arranged things better, I felt, little knowing that I would soon encounter one of the gods of this whorl of Blue that we call ours in spite of the fact that it existed whole ages before we did, and that it has been only a scant generation since we came to it.

For an hour or more we walked inland, and then, just as I was about to turn back and call for Babbie (who ranged ahead of me, and sometimes ranged so far that he would be lost to sight for several minutes), I saw the silvery sheen of water between two of the gentle, diminutive hills.

At first I thought that I had reached the farther side of the island, and hurried ahead to see if it were true; but as we came nearer, I saw more hills beyond the water, and realized that we had found a little tarn, captive rain nestling between hills for the same reason that similar pools are found in the mountains here, or among the mountains inland of New Viron; then I trotted faster still, hoping that it might be fresh enough to drink.

Before I reached it, I knew that it was not, because Babbie had plunged his muzzle into it and quickly withdrawn it in disgust. I was determined to test it for myself, however, and stubbornly continued to walk, impelled by a vague notion that we human beings might be more tolerant of salt than hus, or failing that, that I might be thirstier than Babbie. Common sense should have sent me back to the sloop; if it had, I would almost certainly have lost Babbie then and there. As it was, we both came very near death.

When I bent to taste the water, I saw something huge move in its depths, as though a great sheet of the green scum had been torn free and was drifting and undulating near the bottom of the tarn. I dipped up a handful of water, and had just brought it toward my mouth when I realized that the undulating thing I had seen was in fact rushing toward me.

I may have shouted a warning to Babbie-I cannot be sure. I know that I backed away hurriedly, brought up the slug gun, and cycled the action to put a cartridge in the chamber.

The thing erupted from the water and seemed almost to fly toward us. I fired, and it sank at once into the shallows. I was left with a not very clear impression of something at once huge and flat. Of black and white, and great staring yellow eyes.

Babbie was clearly terrified. All his bristles stood straight up, making him barrel-sized, humpbacked, and as spiny as a bur. His gait, which was always apt to be lively, had become an eight-legged dance, and he gnashed his tusks without ceasing. Although he had retreated from the tarn until his thrashing tail whisked my knees, he interposed himself between the unknown thing we both feared and me. I was badly frightened, too; and in spite of the assurance I gave myself again and again that I was not as terrified as Babbie, it was he who was trying to protect me.

I must have looked over my shoulder a hundred times as we left the place, seeing nothing. When we reached the crest of the rounded ridge that would shield the surface of the water from our view once we had crossed, I stopped and turned around for a better view. An appallingly vivid memory of what I saw then has remained with me beyond even death.

For the great, flat creature I had shot at, and had by that time convinced myself that I had killed, was rising from the shallows. It lifted itself tentatively at first, looming above, and then subsiding into, the water. In a few seconds it rose again and left the tarn altogether, running very fast over the soft green vegetation as a bat runs, using its wide leathern wings as legs. It was black above and white beneath, oddly flattened as I have said, and larger than the carpet in the reception hall of the Caldé’s Palace. I fired once as it dashed toward us, and had pumped a fresh cartridge into the chamber before it bowled me over. The wings that wrapped me then were as rough as files, but rippled like flags as they propelled me toward the gaping, white-lipped mouth.

It was Babbie who saved me, charging that monstrous flatfish (or whatever it was) and laying open the tough skin of one wing. I got my arm free then, and was able to draw Sinew’s knife, which I plunged into the creature again and again until it was covered with its own blood.

Here I would like very much to write that I killed it with Sinew’s knife; the truth is that I do not know. A slug is a formidable projectile, so much so that a single shot will often fell a horse or a fourhorn, as I have seen, and when we examined the carcass of the creature from the tarn I found that both my shots had struck it within a hand of its head. I cannot doubt that both did a good deal of damage, although the first clearly did not do enough to prevent the thing’s pursuing us when it had recovered from the initial shock.

Babbie’s efforts must be considered, too. Certainly the wounds he inflicted on it in the space of five or ten seconds would have killed half a dozen men.

Yet, in my heart of hearts, I believe that it was Sinew’s long hunting knife, that in stabbing frantically at the only parts of the creature I could reach I struck some vital organ by chance. I believe that was what happened, I say. I cannot be sure.