Gene Wolfe - Return to the Whorl

"Yes. So is Hoof."

Wijzer nodded and seated himself on the gunwale, one hand grasping a stay. He is larger than most men, solid-looking, with a big, red face. "From New Viron you are? Marrow there you know?"

It reminded me irresistibly of what I had just been writing. I said, "Yes, Mysire Advocaat."

The red face became redder still as he squinted for a moment at the sun. "Me you do not know?"

"Of course I-wait. From New Viron, you mean. What a fool I've been! You're the trader who told me about Pajarocu!"

From his perch on the stay, considerably higher than Wijzer's big, freckled hand, Oreb inquired, "Good man?" Babbie (who was asleep at my feet) raised his massive head and winked, his sign of cautious affirmation.

Wijzer looked from one to the other. "Me you remember, Mysire Horn?"

"Certainly, and I should have placed you much sooner. Marrow told me he'd found a trader who might be able to help me, and the three of us ate at Marrow's-it was a very good dinner. He has a good cook."

For a moment Wijzer studied me. "Dead Marrow is."

"I'm sorry to hear it. He didn't die by violence, I hope."

Wijzer shook his head.

"He was a middle-aged man when we came here twenty years ago. Though it is twenty-two years now, I suppose." I called to Hoof, who was in the waist talking to Hide and Vadsig, and asked how long I had been gone.

"Since summer of year before last, Father."

"Nearly two years," I told Wijzer, "though when I look at my sons it seems that it must surely be longer. They were hardly more than children when I left; now they are young men."

"Brave young men they are. Gallant young men."

I agreed.

"At Judge Kenner's, them I see. Killed both will be I think, but they run and shoot, shoot and run, and after them my sailors come. Young lions they are."

I thanked him. "You must have seen them at my trial as well. I saw you in the audience, and they were sitting almost directly behind me."

Wijzer nodded. "Them in we let. Beroep and me. His family we say, so for them everyone aside moves."

"Would you be willing to give me your impressions of my trial? You would be doing me a great favor, Captain."

"Mine, Mysire Horn?" He looked back at the steersman, then out at the choppy gray-green water. "You too saw."

"Yes, but I would like to have someone else's impressions, and you are a shrewd observer."

He laughed. "Not, my wife thinks."

"Men and women frequently differ as to what is important."

"That girl Vadsig you must ask, mysire, or your daughter." He eyed me slyly.

"Perhaps I will, but I would like your impressions. I have found it difficult to write about. The details keep getting in my way."

I smiled, and Wijzer did too.

"In the course of writing all I have-not just what you see here, but much more that is put away with the clothes I bought in Dorp-"

"New clothes you buy, mysire, but old ones you wear. On a boat wise that is."

"I've learned that I have a sort of mania for writing down conversations. If you would tell me now what you remember best about my trial, I will certainly write that, and my account of it will be so much to the good."

He nodded, his eyes again on the waves and the clouds, then shouted at the young man in the stern. "What I best remember you wish to know, Mysire Horn?"

I nodded (eagerly, I hoped). When he said nothing, I ventured, "The Red Sun Whorl is what you remember best, I imagine. The tower and the pits beneath it."

"This you call that rotting town?" Wijzer shook his head. "Not, I remember. To forget I try." He raised an imaginary bottle to his mouth and pretended to drink.

"Man talk!" Oreb insisted.

"What I remember? Those leggy fellows."

"The Vanished People? I had wondered about that. Surely many of you must have thought that they were no more than tall men in masks."

"It may be, mysire, but four arms they had."

"They were not men like us, Captain, I assure you. They were the Neighbors, whom we on this side of the sea generally call the Vanished People."

"Not that men they may be I think. This others may think, I mean. Vanished Men they were, I know. My crew," he shrugged, "me they serve. These, you serve, Mysire Horn?"

"No. They are my friends, not my employers."

"A fair wind they will give?"

"Perhaps they could-I don't know. Certainly I won't ask it. Let us sail with our own wind, Captain." Now it was I, not he, who was looking out to sea; and I could not repress the thought that Seawrack was there beneath the tossing waves.

"Big wet," Oreb pronounced. And, "Bad place!"

"It's a bad place for birds, certainly-or at least a bad place for such birds as are not sea birds; but you'll learn very quickly to patrol its beaches for dead fish."

Wijzer chuckled.

"Is that the moment in my trial you recall most clearly? When the Vanished People came into the courtroom? Tell me about it, please. What you saw and heard and felt?"

"Taal I watched. Three goldcards for him I gave. This you know?"

"Yes and no. Beroep explained that you and he, with Strik and Ziek, all contributed. Taal wanted a great deal to defend me, Beroep said, because it would cost him the judges' favor; but they-you and your friends-were afraid the rebellion would never actually take place."

Wijzer nodded. "Without the rest, not it would. Without the Vanished Men, mysire."

"Perhaps you're right."

"And him." The point of his sea boot did not quite touch Babbie's broad back. "Never so much I laughed."

I confessed that I had not thought it funny at the time, though it seemed so in retrospect.

"Laugh I did and my sides hold, but out with my needler too. Why this is do you think, Mysire Horn?" He was smiling, but his clear blue eyes were serious.

"I imagine it was because you thought one of the legermen might shoot poor Babbie for chasing Judge Hamer around the room like that-it was certainly what I thought myself."

"No, mysire." Wijzer shook his head slowly. "Your daughter it was. A pretty girl she is. Not so pretty as my Cijfer, but beautiful even. Her name I forget."

"Jahlee."

"Jahlee. Yes. Too she laughs. Never laughing like hers I hear, mysire."

Oreb exclaimed, "Bad thing!" and I told him to be quiet.

"To your sons I speak. Good boys they are. Our sister, they say. Our sister. But not my eyes they meet, when this they say. Below sleeping she is?"

"When I last saw her, yes."

"My boat this is." Wijzer thumped the deck with the heel of his boot, "If no one on my boat she harms, nothing I do."

"But if she harms someone, you will be compelled to take steps. I urderstand, Captain."

He turned to go.

"Will you answer one question for me? How did Taal know to call the Vanished People? I hadn't even spoken with him. If the four of you instructed him to do it, how did you know?"

"Not we did, mysire." Wijzer studied me again. "This thing I know, you think? Wrong you are. Not I know."

"Good man!" Oreb assured me.

"I didn't think you did-say rather that I hoped you did, Captain. I hoped it, because I'd like very much to know myself."

"What I think, you I tell. To you they speak?"

I nodded. "Sometimes they do."

"To you alone they speak? This they say?"

He left without waiting for an answer, and after a moment I told Babbie to go below and watch Jahlee, permitting no one to harm or even touch her, to which Oreb muttered, "Good. Good."

Babbie himself simply rose to obey, thick black claws (which seem so blunt when he puts a paw in my lap in supplication, so terrible when he slashes my foes with them) clicking along the deck very much as they used to when the two of us were the sole occupants of my little sloop and there was nothing forward and nothing behind, nothing to port and nothing to starboard but the calm blue sky and the rolling sea.