Orbit 2

(In those days craft were high, square and slow, like barrels or boxes put out to sea; but everything is relative, and as they crept up on each other, throwing fits every now and again when headed into the wind, creaking and straining at every joist, ships bore skippers who remembered craft braced with twisted rope from stem to stern, craft manned exclusively by rowers, above all craft that invariably — or usually — sank, and they enjoyed the keen sensation of modernity. while standing on a deck large enough for a party of ten to dine on comfortably and steering by use of a rudder that no longer required a pole for leverage or broke a man’s wrist. Things were getting better. With great skill a man could sail as fast as other men could run. Still, in this infancy of the world, one ship wallowed after another; like cunning sloths one feebly stole up on another; and when they closed — without fire (do you want us to burn ourselves up?)— the toothless, ineffectual creatures clung together, sawing dully at each other’s grappling ropes, until the fellows over there got over here or the fellows over here got over there and then — on a slippery floor humped like the back of an elephant and just about as small, amid rails, boxes, pots, peaks, tar, slants, steps, ropes, coils, masts, falls, chests, sails and God knows what — they hacked at each other until most of them died. That they did very efficiently.

And the sea was full of robbers.)

Left alone, she moved passively with the motion of the ship; then she picked up very slowly and looked into very slowly the hand mirror he had taken for her out of his chest, brass-backed and decorated with metal rosewreaths, the kind of object she had never in her life seen before. There she was, oddly tilted, looking out of the mirror, and behind her the room as if seen from above, as if one could climb down into the mirror to those odd objects, bright and reversed, as if one could fall into the mirror, become tiny, clamber away, and looking back see one’s own enormous eyes staring out of a window set high in the wall. Women do not always look in mirrors to admire themselves, popular belief.to the contrary. Sometimes they look only to slip off their rings and their bracelets, to pluck off their earrings, to unfasten their necklaces, to drop their brilliant gowns, to take the color off their faces until the bones stand out like spears and to wipe the hues from around their eyes until they can look and look at merely naked human faces, at eyes no longer brilliant and aqueous like the eyes of angels or goddesses but hard and small as human eyes are, little control points that are always a little disquieting, always a little peculiar, because they are not meant to be looked at but to look, and then — with a shudder, a shiver — to recover themselves and once again to shimmer, to glow. But some don’t care. This one stumbled away, dropped the mirror, fell over the table (she passed her hand over her eyes) and grasped — more by feeling than by sight — the handle of the sword he had given her, thirty or forty — or was it seventy? — years before. The blade had not yet the ironical motto it was to bear some years later: Good Manners Are Not Enough, but she lifted it high all the same, and grasping with her left hand the bronze chain Blackbeard used to fasten his treasure chest, broke the lock of the door in one blow.

Such was the strength of iron in the old days.

There is talent and then there is the other thing. Blackbeard had never seen the other thing. He found her after the battle was over with her foot planted on the back of a dead enemy, trying to free the sword he had given her. She did so in one jerky pull and rolled the man overboard with her foot without bothering about him further; she was looking at an ornamented dagger in her left hand, a beautiful weapon with a jeweled handle and a slender blade engraved with scrolls and leaves. She admired it very much. She held it out to him, saying, “Isn’t that a beauty?” There was a long gash on her left arm, the result of trying to stop a downward blow with nothing but the bronze chain wrapped around her knuckles. The chain was gone; she had only used it as long as it had surprise value and had lost it somewhere, somehow (she did not quite remember how). He took the dagger and she sat down suddenly on the deck, dropping the sword and running both hands over her hair to smooth it again and again, unaware that her palms left long red streaks. The deck looked as if a tribe of monkeys had been painting on it or as if everyone — living and dead — had smeared himself ritually with red paint. The sun was coming up. He sat down next to her, too winded to speak. With the intent watchfulness (but this will be a millennium or two later) of someone focusing the lens of a microscope, with the noble, arrogant carriage of a tennis star, she looked first around the deck — and then at him — and then straight up into the blue sky.

“So,” she said, and shut her eyes.

He put his arm around her; he wiped her face. He stroked the nape of her neck and then her shoulder, but now his woman began to laugh, more and more, leaning against him and laughing and laughing until she was convulsed and he thought she had gone out of her mind. “What the devil!” he cried, almost weeping, “what the devil!” She stopped at that place in the scale where a woman’s laughter turns into a shriek; her shoulders shook spasmodically but soon she controlled that too. He thought she might be hysterical so he said, “Are you frightened? You won’t have to go through this again.”

“No?” she said.

“Never.”

“Well,” she said, “perhaps I will all the same,” and in pure good humor she put her arms about his neck. There were tears in her eyes — perhaps they were tears of laughter — and in the light of the rising sun the deck showed ever more ruddy and grotesque. What a mess, she thought. She said, “It’s all right; don’t you worry,” which was, all in all and in the light of things, a fairly kind goodbye.

“Why the devil,” she said with sudden interest, “don’t doctors cut up the bodies of dead people in the schools to find out how they’re put together?”

But he didn’t know.

Six weeks later she arrived — alone — at that queen among cities, that moon among stars, that noble, despicable, profound, simpleminded and altogether exasperating capital of the world: Ourdh. Some of us know it. She materialized so quietly and expertly out of the dark that the gatekeeper found himself looking into her face without the slightest warning: a young, gray-eyed countrywoman, silent, shadowy, self-assured. She was hugely amused. “My name,” she said, “is Alyx.”

“Never heard of it,” said the gatekeeper, a little annoyed.

“Good heavens,” said Alyx, “not yet,” and vanished through the gate before he could admit her, with the curious slight smile one sees on the lips of very old statues: inexpressive, simple, classic.

She was to become a classic, in time.

But that’s another story.

This is the tale of a voyage that is of interest only as it concerns the doings of one small, gray-eyed woman. Small women exist in plenty — so do those with gray eyes — but this woman was among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise. There is no surprise in that (or should not be) for it is common knowledge that Woman was created fully a quarter of an hour before Man, and has kept that advantage to this very day. Indeed, legend has it that the first man, Leh, was fashioned from the sixth finger of the left hand of the first woman, Loh, and that is why women have only five fingers on the left hand. The lady with whom we concern ourselves in this story had all her six fingers, and what is more, they all worked.