Gene Wolfe - On Blue's waters

She will have found another husband by this time, I hope. A good man. She was always a sensible woman. (Which is, now that I come to think of it, what His Cognizance the inhumu used to say of Molybdenum.) I wish both well, and wish him better luck with Hoof and Hide than I had with Sinew.

He was my right hand in the lander, as well as on Green, and he threw me his knife. I see I have not yet written of that.

Before I left he begged me not to go, exactly as I had predicted at dinner. He was shocked, I believe, that I was going to leave that night while Nettle and the twins slept; and to confess the truth, so was I. I had not intended to go until morning.

Have I said how closely Sinew resembled me? Perhaps not. There was something devilish about it. The twins, with their large eyes and too-regular features, resemble Nettle’s mother, or so I have always thought, while Nettle herself resembles her father. But Sinew looks as I did when we left Main and built the mill. We lived in a tent on the beach in those days, and he was only a squalling toddler, although he had already taken her from me to a certain extent. The twins had not been born, or even thought of.

I left that night, not so much when Sinew and I had finished talking as when I was tired of his talking to me. I took little with me; even then I was not under the illusion that I would be welcomed back to the whorl I had left, or provided with any sort of transport. If I had known then how long it would be before I set foot in the whorl in which I was born, I would have taken more, perhaps, although so much was stolen as it was, and I was able to bring precious little beyond my two knives from Pajarocu, and nothing at all from Green, not even Seawrack’s ring.

I brought two changes of clothing, and a warm blanket.

A copy of our book, which I meant to read during calms and the like, not so much to relearn the facts we had set down as to gently persuade my memory to dwell upon our conversations, and the conversations I had with Nettle, Moly, and others about him. You that read will not credit it, but I do not believe I have forgotten anything that Nettle and I put into our book, or that I ever will.

Three bales of our best white paper to trade, and some other valuables I hoped might be exchanged for food.

I had been afraid that Sinew would wake up the rest of the family, that he would wake Nettle, particularly, and that seeing her I would lack the resolution to go. He did not, but stood upon our littie floating wharf and waved (which rather surprised me) and then, when the distance seemed too great to throw anything and score a hit, flung something that missed my head by half a cubit and dropped rattling into the boat.

That, too, surprised me; but nothing could have been more like him than to try to hurt me in some way when I could not defend myself; and it soon occurred to me that he could have drawn my needier and killed me. It was my humiliation he intended; however much he may have wanted to kill me, he would not have dared to shoot. A stone or a shell (I thought) had served his purpose better.

When I had rounded the Tail and could safely tie the sheet, I groped in the bilgewater to find out what his missile had been; there I found his hunting knife, next to his bow his most prized possession, still in the turtle-skin sheath he had made for it. In his own mind at least he had squared accounts, I felt sure; it is onerous to be indebted to someone you hate.

There would be no point in describing my trip down the coast to New Viron in detail. It had been foolhardy of me to leave when I did, but no harm came of it. Until shadeup, I kept the sloop under short sail and dozed at her tiller, not yet having confidence enough to tie it in position and lie down, as I was later to do almost routinely, though from time to time I toyed with the notion of furling both sails and snatching a few hours of real sleep. Mostly I looked at the stars, just as I had before Sinew joined me on the Tail. The Long Sun Whorl in which Nettle and I were born was only a faint gleam when it could be seen at all. For that faint speck I was bound (as I imagined then) in a lander that had somehow been repaired and resurrected. I could not help thinking how much more I would have liked to sail there. Before shadeup, the Long Sun Whorl would touch the sea in the southwest; why should I not sail to meet it? It was an attractive idea, and when I was sleepy enough seemed almost possible.

Once some monstrous, luminous creature four or five times the size of the sloop glided beneath it, for there are fish in the sea that could swallow the great fish that swallowed Silk’s poor friend Mamelta, as everyone knows; but although the loss of boats that fail to return is conventionally laid to them, I think carelessness and weather are the true culprits in almost every instance. I do not deny that they can sink boats much bigger than my old sloop, or that they occasionally do.

At one moment it was night. At the next, day.

That was how it seemed to me. I had slept, leaning on the tiller, and not wakened until the light of our Short Sun struck me full in the face.

There were bottles of water (mixed with a little wine to keep it sweet) in one of the chests, and a box of sand for a fire aft of the mast. I baited a hook with a morsel of dried meat and fished for my breakfast, which was my lunch by the time I caught it. If I had not hung Sinew’s hunting knife on my belt, I would have split and gutted it with the worn little pocketknife that came with me from Old Viron. As it was, I used his, vaguely conscious that he might ask if it had been helpful someday and wanting to tell him that it had been; gestures like that had become a habit, however futile. It was a good knife, made here on Blue by Gadwall the smith from a single bar of steel which supplied the blade, the stubby guard, and the grip. I remember noticing how sharp it was, and realizing that the bulbous pommel might be almost as useful for pounding as the blade for cutting. I have Hyacinth’s azoth now (locked away and well hidden); but I would almost rather have Sinew’s knife back, if he would give it a second time.

Here in landlocked Gaon, people would think it queer that we who came from a city so remote from any sea that we had scarcely heard rumors of them should build our new town on the coast. But Viron had been a lakeshore city in the beginning, and it was Lake Limna that left Viron, and not Viron that had left the lake. When we landed here, it seemed natural to us to direct our lander to the shore of our bay, since we thought the water we saw was potable and might be used for irrigation. We were disappointed, of course. But the sea has given us food in abundance-much more, I believe, than even a large lake could have supplied. Even more important, it has been better than the best road for us, letting us move ourselves and our goods faster and better than pack mules or wagons ever could. Gaon is greatly blessed by its cold, clear River Nadi; but I do not believe New Viron would exchange the sea for it.

When Nettle and I decided to build our mill, after trying farming without much success, it was obvious that we would have to have a location to which logs could be floated. We tramped up and down the coast in search of a suitable spot until at last it occurred to me that we would never find it as long as we searched by land for a place to which logs could be floated by sea. That was when I built our first boat, a sort of pointed box with one ludicrously short mast and a tendency to drift off to leeward that would have been quite funny if it had not been so serious. Eventually Tamarind, whose husband had been a fishmonger and knew something of fishermen and their boats in consequence, showed me how to rig a leeboard that could be dropped when necessary and pulled up for shallows. After that, with a taller mast stepped farther forward, we used that boxy little boat for years.