Orbit 2

“Help me!” she cried. Alyx got up. Shakily she staggered across the cabin and together they leaned their weight on the pile of stuffs jammed into the hole.

“It’s not big,” gasped the girl, “I made it with a sword. Just under the waterline.”

“Stay here,” said Alyx. Leaning against the wall, she made her way to the cold firebox. Two bolts held it to the floor. “No good there,” she said. With the same exasperating slowness, she hauled herself up the ladder and stood uncertainly on the deck. She lowered the sail, cutting her fingers, and dragged it to the stern, pushing all loose gear on top of it. Dropping down through the hatch again, she shifted coils of rope and stores of food to the stern; patiently fumbling, she unbolted the firebox from the floor. The waterspout had lessened. Finally, when Alyx had pushed the metal box end over end against the opposite wall of the cabin, the water demon seemed to lose his exuberance. He drooped and almost died. With a letting-out of breath, Edarra released the mass pressed against the hole: blankets, sacks, shoes, potatoes, all slid to the stem. The water stopped. Alyx, who seemed for the first time to feel a brand against the calf of her left leg and needles in her hand where she had burnt herself unbolting the stove, sat leaning against the wall, too weary to move. She saw the cabin through a milky mist. Ballooning and shrinking above her hung Edarra’s face, dirty with charred wood and sea slime; the girl said: “What shall I do now?”

“Nail boards,” said Alyx slowly.

“Yes, then?” urged the girl.

“Pitch,” said Alyx. “Bail it out.”

“You mean the boat will pitch?” said Edarra, frowning in puzzlement. In answer Alyx shook her head and raised one hand out of the water to point to the storage place on deck, but the air drove the needles deeper into her fingers and distracted her mind. She said, “Fix,” and leaned back against the wall, but as she was sitting against it already, her movement only caused her to turn, with a slow, natural easiness, and slide unconscious into the dirty water that ran tidally this way and that within the blackened, sour-reeking, littered cabin.

Alyx groaned. Behind her eyelids she was reliving one of the small contretemps of her life: lying indoors ill and badly hurt, with the sun rising out of doors, thinking that she was dying and hearing the birds sing. She opened her eyes. The sun shone, the waves sang, there was the little girl watching her. The sun was level with the sea and the first airs of evening stole across the deck.

Alyx tried to say, “What happened?” and managed only to croak. Edarra sat down, all of a flop.

“You’re talking!” she exclaimed with vast relief. Alyx stirred, looking about her, tried to rise and thought better of it. She discovered lumps of bandage on her hand and her leg; she picked at them feebly with her free hand, for they struck her somehow as irrelevant. Then she stopped.

“I’m alive,” she said hoarsely, “for Yp likes to think he looks after me, the bastard.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Edarra, laughing. “My!” She knelt on the deck with her hair streaming behind her like a ship’s figurehead come to life; she said, “I fixed everything. I pulled you up here. I fixed the boat, though I had to hang by my knees. I pitched it.” She exhibited her arms, daubed to the elbow. “Look,” she said. Then she added, with a catch in her voice, “I thought you might die.”

“I might yet,” said Alyx. The sun dipped into the sea. “Long-leggedy thing,” she said in a hoarse whisper, “get me some food.”

“Here.” Edarra rummaged for a moment and held out a piece of bread, part of the ragbag loosened on deck during the late catastrophe. The pick-lock ate, lying back. The sun danced up and down in her eyes, above the deck, below the deck, above the deck. .

“Creature,” said Alyx, “I had a daughter.”

“Where is she?” said Edarra.

Silence.

“Praying,” said Alyx at last. “Damning me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Edarra.

“But you,” said Alyx, “are—” and she stopped blankly. She said “You—”

“Me what?” said Edarra.

“Are here,” said Alyx, and with a bone-cracking yawn, letting the crust fall from her fingers, she fell asleep.

At length the time came (all things must end and Alyx’s bums had already healed to barely visible scars— one looking closely at her could see many such faint marks on her back, her arms, her sides, the bodily record of the last rather difficult seven years) when Alyx, emptying overboard the breakfast scraps, gave a yell so loud and triumphant that she inadvertently lost hold of the garbage bucket and it fell into the sea.

“What is it?” said Edarra, startled. Her friend was gripping the rail with both hands and staring over the sea with a look that Edarra did not understand in the least, for Alyx had been closemouthed on some subjects in the girl’s education.

“I am thinking,” said Alyx.

“Oh!” shrieked Edarra. “Land! Land!” and she capered about the deck, whirling and clapping her hands. “I can change my dress!” she cried. “Just think! We can eat fresh food! Just think!”

“I was not,” said Alyx, “thinking about that.” Edarra came up to her and looked curiously into her eyes, which had gone as deep and as gray as the sea on a gray day; she said, “Well, what are you thinking about?”

“Something not fit for your ears,” said Alyx. The little girl’s eyes narrowed. “Oh,” she said pointedly. Alyx ducked past her for the hatch, but Edarra sprinted ahead and straddled it, arms wide.

“I want to hear it,” she said.

“That’s a foolish attitude,” said Alyx. “You’ll lose your balance.”

“Tell me.”

“Come, get away.”

The girl sprang forward like a red-headed fury, seizing her friend by the hair with both hands. “If it’s not fit for my ears, I want to hear it!” she cried.

Alyx dodged around her and dropped below, to retrieve from storage her severe, decent, formal black clothes, fit for a business call. When she reappeared, tossing the clothes on deck, Edarra had a short sword in her right hand and was guarding the hatch very exuberantly.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Alyx crossly.

“I’ll kill you if you don’t tell me,” remarked Edarra.

“Little one,” said Alyx, “the stain of ideals remains on the imagination long after the ideals themselves vanish. Therefore I will tell you nothing.”

“Raahh!” said Edarra, in her throat.

“It wouldn’t be proper,” added Alyx primly. “If you don’t know about it, so much the better,” and she turned away to sort her clothes. Edarra pinked her in a formal, black shoe.

“Stop it!” snapped Alyx.

“Never!” cried the girl wildly, her eyes flashing. She lunged and feinted and her friend, standing still, wove (with the injured boot) a net of defense as invisible as the cloak that enveloped Aule the Messenger. Edarra, her chest heaving, managed to say, “I’m tired.”

“Then stop,” said Alyx.

Edarra stopped.

“Do I remind you of your little baby girl?” she said.

Alyx said nothing.

“I’m not a little baby girl,” said Edarra. “I’m eighteen now and I know more than you think. Did I ever tell you about my first suitor and the cook and the cat?”

“No,” said Alyx, busy sorting.

“The cook let the cat in,” said Edarra, “though she shouldn’t have, and so when I was sitting on my suitor’s lap and I had one arm around his neck and the other arm on the arm of the chair, he said, ‘Darling, where is your other little hand?”

“Mm hm,” said Alyx.

“It was the cat, walking across his lap! But he could only feel one of my hands so he thought—” but here, seeing that Alyx was not listening, Edarra shouted a word used remarkably seldom in Ourdh and for very good reason. Alyx looked up in surprise. Ten feet away (as far away as she could get), Edarra was lying on the planks, sobbing. Alyx went over to her and knelt down, leaning back on her heels. Above, the first sea birds of the trip — sea birds always live near land — circled and cried in a hard, hungry mew like a herd of aerial cats.