Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

He frowned. “That’s good. I will.”

I could have shown him how a needier is loaded and fired, but experience had taught me that trying to teach him anything only made him resentful. Instead, I said, “I may need it, as you say. But I may not, and I’d much rather know that you and your mother and brothers are safe. Besides, a traveler with a weapon like that might be killed for it, as soon as anyone knew he had it.”

Sinew nodded thoughtfully.

“Conjunction in two years. You remember the last one, the storms and the tides. Any logs you’ve got in here then will be a danger to you. And of course there will be-” I searched for a word. “Strangers. Visitors. Very plausible ones, sometimes.”

The reality of conjunction seemed to dawn upon him then. “Don’t go, Father!”

“I must. Not just because I’ve sworn to; I wouldn’t be the first man to break his oath. And certainly not because of Marrow and the others-I’d hurt them far more than they hurt me before it was over-but because I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t. You and your mother can run the mill as well as I could, and nobody else would have anything like as good a chance of persuading Silk to join us. At supper tonight we agreed that we were sinking into savagery here on Blue, that we’d soon be fighting off the inhumi with the bows and spears we use for hunting now. You may be confident that we could survive as savages and.even regain what we lost, eventually. No doubt-”

The stubborn head shake I had come to know so well.

“I don’t think so either. There were people here before, or something very like people. They had a civilization higher than ours, but something wiped them out. If it wasn’t the inhumi, what was it?”

“That’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about.” There was a pause, perhaps while Sinew collected his thoughts, perhaps only while he moistened his mouth. “You’re trying to bring Pas, all the gods from the Long Sun.”

“No,” I said.

He ignored it, or did not hear it. “That’s good, because gods could help us if they would. But they had gods of their own, the Vanished People who were here first. They might help us, too. There’s a place on Main, way up on Howling Mountain a little before the trees stop. I found it almost a year ago. Maybe I should have told you.”

I see that I said I had three reasons for not accompanying our five visitors as they proposed. The first (as I indicated) was that I wanted to take leave of my family, and get them to agree to my going, insofar as possible. Nettle would agree because she loved me and Sinew because he hated me, I felt sure; and with their support I had hoped to persuade the twins that it was necessary.

The second was that I wanted to sail my own boat in search of Pajarocu, and not the boat Marrow had offered to let me have, however good it might be. I did not intend to disparage his offer, as he may have thought; it was a generous one, and one that would have resulted in a serious loss if I had accepted it. He showed me that boat, the Sealily , when I spoke with him in town, and I would guess that it was nearly as fast as my own, and rather more capacious and seaworthy.

“I’d never been on the water till we came down here,” Marrow told me, “and I haven’t been but twice now. If you’d come by the shop or my booth and told me someday I’d be having boats built for me, I’d have thought you was cracked. I thought Auk the Prophet was cracked when I talked to him up there, and it would have been the same with anybody who said someday I’d want boats. You didn’t put that in your book, about Auk. That I’d thought he was cracked as old eggs. But I did.”

I told Marrow that Auk was, that he had fractured his skull in the tunnels.

“Used to see him at sacrifice,” Marrow said, leaning heavily on his big carved stick. “Old Patera Pike’s manteion. The wife and I used to go now and then because he traded with us, him and the sibyls. Maytera Rose that was, and young Maytera Mint, only they sent Maytera Marble to do their buying. Shrike wouldn’t go, just sent his wife. They traded with him anyhow because she went all the time. Gone now, both of ’em. I guess you remember Pike’s manteion?”

I did. I do. The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man’s hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they failed.

My own bird has flown. Only this lone black feather remains with me, fluttering above this sheet (a sheet that for all I know or all that anyone here knows may have been made in my own mill) spraying the whorl of Blue with the black ink that has done so much good and so much harm. If it had not been for our book, Marrow and the rest would have chosen someone else, beyond argument. As it was, our book- The Book of Silk , or as others would have it, The Book of the Long Sun -spread over this whorl more rapidly than Nettle and I had dared hope. Silk-

“Silk has become an almost mythic figure,” I began to write. The truth is that he has become a mythic figure. I hear rumors of altars and sacrifices. Disciples who have never seen him promulgate his teachings. If it had not been for our book, Hari Mau and the rest would have chosen someone else, or no one.

Heretofore I have written whatever crossed my mind, I fear. In the future, I will attempt to provide you (whoever you may be) with a connected narrative. Let me say at the outset, however, what readers I hope for.

First of all for Nettle, my wife, whom I have loved from boy- hood and will always love.

Second, my sons Hoof and Hide. Should he see it, Sinew will read no further, I suppose, than he must to learn that I am its author; and then, unless he is greatly changed, he will burn it. Burning The Book of Horn will smell foul, but if it is to burn, no whiff has yet reached me. Sinew is on Green in any event, and is unlikely to see it. (For so many years I feared that he would try to murder me, but in the end it was I who would have murdered him. He may burn my book if he chooses.)

Third, our descendants, the sons and daughters of our sons and their children. If a dozen generations have passed, be assured that you are one; after a dozen generations it cannot be otherwise.

How difficult it is to touch the spirits of these people, although I doubt that they are worse than others. Two farmers quarreled over a strip of land. I rode out with them and saw it, and it is of no value save for cutting firewood, and of little for that. Each said he had claimed it since landing, and each said his claim was undisputed until a few months ago. I had each tell me the price he would charge the other to lease it for ten years, then awarded it to the one who would charge the least, and ordered him to lease it, there and then, for the price he had specified. Since the leaseholder’s price had been more than twice as much, he was getting a great bargain, and I told him so. He did not appear to agree.

This is a stopgap at best, however. The whole situation regarding the ownership of land is confused or worse. It must be reformed, and a rational system as secure from corruption as we can make it set in place.

That I intend to do. My principles: that possession long unchallenged need only be recorded, but that unused property is the property of the town. Now to begin.

I have already given more than I should of our conversation at supper. I will say nothing more about it, although when I close my eyes and lean back in this chair it seems that I smell the brown rolls, fresh from the oven, see the honey dyeing with dark gold its earthenware dish, and taste a vanished summer in the wine. I cut our meat that night, and ate as I had for years, yet if I had known then what I know now-if I had let my imagination carry me forward beyond the next few days-I would have clasped my wife to me, embracing her until it was time to go.