Lois Bujold - Legacy

“Ordinary? It looks as if it could eat a man in two bites!”

“They’re a danger along the shores of the channels. They lie in the water like logs, but they can move fast when they want. They clamp onto their prey and drag it down into the water to drown, and rip it up later, after it rots a bit.” He bent and ran his fingers along the shiny hide. “I should think your papa and Whit could both get a pair of boots out of this one, and belts and something for your mama as well.”

“Dag,” said Fawn curiously, “have you ever seen the sea?”

“Oh, yeah, couple of times. The south shore, that is, around the mouth of the Gray River. I’ve not seen the eastern sea.”

“What’s it like?”

He sat back, squatting, fingers still caressing the swamp-lizard skin, and a meditative look came over his face. “First time was almost thirty years ago. Never forget it. West of the Gray, between the river and the Levels, the land is flat and mostly treeless. All mounted patrols in that wide-sky country. Our company commander had us all spread out, half a mile or more apart, in one long line—that sweep must have been fifty miles across. We rode straight south, day after day. Spring it was, the air all soft and blue, and new green coming up all around, and flowers everywhere. Best patrolling I ever did in my life. We even found one sessile, and did for it without hardly pausing. The rest was just riding along in the sunshine, dangling our feet out of the stirrups, scanning the ground, just barely keeping touch with the patrollers to the right and left. End of the week, the color of the sky changed, got all silvery and light, and we came up over these sand dunes, and there it was…” His voice trailed off. He swallowed. “The rollers were foaming in over the sand, grumbling and grumbling, never stopping. I never knew there were so many shades of blue and gray and green. The sea was as wide and flat as the Levels, but alive. You could feel with your groundsense how alive it was, as if it was the mother of the whole wide green world. I sat and stared…We all dismounted and took off our boots, and got silly for a while, running in and out of that salty water, warm as milk.”

“And then what happened?” Fawn asked, almost holding her breath.

Dag shrugged. “Camped for the night on the beach, turned the line around and shifted it fifty miles, and rode back north. It turned cold and rained on the way back, though, and we found nothing for our pains.” He added after a moment, “Wood washed up on the beach burns with the most beautiful strange colors. Never saw anything like.”

His words were simple and plain, as his words usually were; Fawn scarcely knew why she felt as though she were eavesdropping on a man at prayers, or why water blurred her eyes.

“Dag…” she said. “What’s beyond the sea?”

His brows twitched up. “No one’s sure.”

“Could there be other lands?”

“Oh, that. Yes. Or there were, once. The oldest maps show other continents, three of them. The original charts are long gone, so it’s anyone’s guess how accurate the copies are. But if any ships have gone to see what’s still there, they haven’t come back that I ever heard. People have different theories. Some say the gods have interdicted us, and that anyone who ventures out too far is destroyed by holy curses. Some guess the other lands got blighted, and are now all dead from shore to shore, and no one’s there anymore. I’m not too fond of that picture. But you’d think, if there were other folks across the seas, and they had ships, some might have got blown off course sometime in the last thousand years, and I’ve never heard tell of any such. Maybe the people over there have interdicted us, till our task is done and all’s safe again. That would be sensible.”

He paused, gazing into some time or distance Fawn could not see, and continued, “Legend has it there is, or once was, another enclave of survivors on our continent, to the west of the Levels and the great mountains that were supposed to be beyond them. Maybe we’ll find out if that’s true someday, if anyone, us or them, ever tries to sail all around the shore of this land. Wouldn’t need such grand ships for hugging the coast.”

“With silver sails,” Fawn put in.

He smiled. “I think that’s got to happen sometime. Don’t know if I’ll live to see it. If…”

“If?”

“If we can keep the malices down long enough for folks to get ahead. The river men are bold enough to try, but it would risk a lot of resources, as well as lives. You’d need a rich man, a prince or a great lord, to fund such a voyage, and they’re extinct.”

“Or a bunch of well-off men,” Fawn suggested. “Or a whole big bunch of quite ordinary men.”

“And one fast-talking lunatic to coax the money out of their pockets. Well, maybe.” He smiled thoughtfully, considering this vision, but then shook his head and rose. Fawn carefully rerolled the astonishing swamp-lizard skin.

Dag went back inside to cadge paper, ink, and quills from the clerk, then they both sat at the nearest trestle table in the dappled shade to write their letters to West Blue. Fawn didn’t miss West Blue—she’d longed to get away, and she hadn’t changed her mind on that—but she couldn’t say her feet were planted in their new soil yet. Given the way Lakewalkers kept moving around, maybe home would never be a place. It would be Dag. She watched him across the table, scribbling with his quill clutched in his right fingers and holding down the paper, lifting in the warm breeze, with his hook. She bent her head to her own task.

Dear Mama, Papa, and Aunt Nattie. We got here day before yesterday. Had it only been two days? I am fine. The lake is very… She brushed the quill over her chin, and decided she really ought to say more than wet. She wrote large, instead. We met up with Dag’s aunt Mari again. She has a nice…Fawn scratched out the start of cabin and wrote tent. Dag’s arm is getting better. And onward in that vein, till she’d filled half the page with unexceptionable remarks. Too much blank space left. She decided to describe Sarri’s children, and their campsite, which filled the rest with enough cheery word pictures to grow cramped toward the end. There.

So much left out. Patroller headquarters, and Fairbolt Crow’s peg-board. Dar, the unnerving bone shack, Dag’s angry mama, the futility of the sharing knife after all this journey. Dag’s dark, nervy mood. The threat of swimming lessons. Naked swimming lessons, at that. Some things were best left out.

Dag, finishing, handed his letter across for her to read. It was very polite and plain, almost like an inventory, making clear which gifts were for which family members. Both horses and the packsaddle were to be Mama’s, as well as some of the fine furs. The mud-man skin for the twins was blandly described, entirely without comment. Fawn grinned as she pictured the three alarming hides being unpacked at West Blue.

Dag stepped inside and returned the quills and ink to the clerk, coming out with the letters folded and sealed just in time to greet a girl who rode up, bareback, on a tall, elegant, dappled gray mare. A dark foal about four months old pranced after, flicking his fuzzy ears; he had the most beautifully shaped head and deepest liquid eyes Fawn had ever seen on a colt, and she spent the time while Dag and the girl organized the packsaddle trying to make up to him. He flirted with her in turn, yielding at last to ear scratching just there. Fawn couldn’t imagine her mother riding that mare, nor any of her family; maybe the dappled beauty could be broken to harness and pull the light cart to the village, though. That would turn a few heads.

A man dressed as a patroller came riding from the direction of the headquarters building. He turned out to be a courier on his way south, apparently a trusted comrade; exactly what old favor Dag was calling in was not clear to Fawn, but however dubiously he greeted the farmer bride or raised his brows at Dag, he had undertaken to deliver the bride-gifts. He stopped with them long enough to get a clear description of the Bluefield farm and how to find it, and then he was off, with the silvery mare following meekly on a lead and the colt capering and scampering. The horse girl, trudging back to Mare Island, looked after them with a downright heartbroken expression.