Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3)

Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) Page 31

"Yes, Mysire Advocaat. No, Mysire Advocaat."

"No needlers? Us tell you must."

"Three only they are. A slug gun the young man has, mysire."

Taal raised his eyebrows, which are white too and very thick. "One slug gun, mysire? Of it terrified all of you were?"

"No, Mysire Taal."

"Not, should I hope. Nat's testimony you did not hear?"

"No, Mysire Taal. It to hear, me they would not allow."

"Proper that is. Testis oculatus unus plus valet quam auriti decem. With him servants Nat had?"

"Yes, Mysire Taal. Four."

"Weapons they had?"

"Yes, mysire."

"In this court alleged it is that Mysire Horn, old he is and unarmed he was, Mysire Nat to remain with him he forced."

By that time I had practically ceased to hear them. I was watching a picture on one side of the courtroom. It was a large painting, executed in browns and various shades of orange, of robed men seated around a table. It was suspended by a tasseled cord from an ornamental hook in the shape of a leaping collarfish, and it had begun to swing.

Wijzer came forward to speak with me. "Sent to the old whorl for Mysire Silk you were? This Hide says. A good boy he is?"

"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.

I feel like going below myself. I will not-not for a few more minutes at least-because I know that it is as cold there as it is here, and dark, with a hundred vicious drafts in place of this bracing wind. Like the Whorl and its brave, suffering peoples, I cling to my sun as long as I can.

It was the Neighbors who had impressed Wijzer most-Wijzer who is already trying to forget the Red Sun Whorl, and who will have succeeded in convincing himself that it was only a bad dream within a month.

How many of the bad dreams I remember were not really dreams at all? Does it make any difference? We live our lives in our thoughts, or we do not live. A man imagines his wife faithful, and is happy. What difference does it make whether she is or is not, as long as he believes it? Read carefully, my sons!

Doubtless the reality (known only to herself and the gods) is that she is faithful at times and unfaithful at others, like other women.

From this we see why the gods are needed. They see what is real-or if they do not, we imagine they do. Surely the Outsider must, if it is true that Pas and the rest worship him. How do the people with whom we walk in our dreams perceive our waking? The people who speak to us there, and to whom we speak? We die to them; do our corpses remain behind until the companions of our sleep bury them weeping?

Last night I dreamed of finding this pen case in Viron-no doubt the dream was what set me writing again today. Now in reality (as I understand it) I found it between the time I left my old manteion and the time Maytera's daughter called to me from a fifth-floor window. Was it more real when I found it than when I dreamed it? How could it be, when there was no difference between the two? Was it actually where my father's shop once stood that I found it? Or is that merely a part of the dream my waking mind has not yet rejected? It seems a little too pat to be true, yet memory assures me of it now.

How tall they were, the Neighbors! Robed in dignity!

Taal's voice was a brazen trumpet: "Upon the Vanished People, upon those once lords of this whorl, I call. The good character of my client Mysire Horn let them defend!" Everyone must have thought it a mere trick of rhetoric, and certainly there was no one in the courtroom more convinced of it than I. I had spoken with them and explained my predicament, and they had promised to help me if they could; but I had imagined signs and wonders of the sort I hoped for (and to some degree received) from Mora and Fava, not this uncanny spectacle of walking legends mounting the steps to the judge's right and sitting one by one in the little witness chair to deliver their solemn testimony.

"Mysire Windcloud, my life to our law I have devoted, but never one of you in court I have seen. Why have you come?"

"How could I not?"

Hamer snapped, "Questions you may not ask, mysire," which I think very brave of him.

"Why not?"

Taal explained, "Contrary to our law it is, mysire."

"Then I will ask no more until Dorp's law is altered, though Dorp will lose by it. We have come because honor compels us."

"Because accused your friend here stands?"

"Because the people of your town do."

"Who accuses us?"

Hamer rapped on his desk. "To the case before us yourself you must confine, Mysire Taal."

A large picture crashed to the floor, and about half the onlookers sprang to their feet.

Taal asked softly, "That you did, Mysire Windcloud?"

"No."

Judge Hamer leaned toward him, pointing with the mace of office. "Speak you must, mysire! It who did?"

"You." There was something in the single flat word that frightened even the judge, and which I myself found terrifying.

Taal addressed the court. "Mysire Rechtor, what we do here dangerous it is. Question Mysire Windcloud I must, but not you need. With all honor to the court, this I suggest."

I felt the building tremble as he spoke; and Hamer nodded, his face pale.

"My client, Mysire Horn. Him how long have you known?"

"Since I gave him my cup." Windcloud's face turned toward me, and though I could not see his eyes-I have never seen the eyes of any of them-I felt his glance.

"In days and years you cannot say, mysire?"

"No."

"An honest man he is?"

"Too much so."

"You he serves?"

"Yes, he does." That surprised me, I confess; I am still thinking about it.

"A traitor to our breed he is?"

"No." There was amusement in the word, I believe.

"To this case alone address myself I must, mysire. This you understand. That this whorl to us you have given, not relevant it is. About that, not I may ask. About your knowledge of men's characters I may inquire, if Mysire Rechtor permits. A man as here `a man' we say, not you are?"