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

Return to the Whorl (The Book of the Short Sun #3) Page 48

Babbie was on deck and looked at me with his little fierce eyes in a way that told me I was supposed to be in the cabin asleep. I have never been sure how much Babbie understands, but he understands a lot. I know he understood that, and you could ask him to bring you almost anything except food and he would go get it if he felt like it. He would even bring Father food, but he would not do that for Hide or me. Babbie has gone away, I think into the woods on the mainland, but Vadsig says Witches Rock.

This is going to be hard to explain, but I will try to do it better than Hide and the others have.

I did not feel asleep at all. (Hide says for him it was like going to sleep, but not for me.) It was more like looking through Father's ring than anything else I have done, but that was not it either. Everything began to change. Our boat was water, and Babbie was a hairy man with thick arms and real big shoulders, and glasses, and a couple of Babbie's eyes (the little ones). The bird was the bird asleep on the mizzen top with its head under its wing and another bird, a bird too fat to fly that was flying around just the same. I kept blinking and blinking, trying to blink them away; but they just got realer.

I felt like I had to hold on to something, and I tried to hold on to the sky. I have no idea why that was what I picked, except that it did not seem like it was changing, and I had tried to hold on to everything else, and everything else was changing anyhow except the sky and the water.

So I tried to hold on to the sky, the beautiful Blue sky with little dots of clouds all around and high thin wispy clouds way up behind them. Just when I thought I had it and Father could not take it away, it got darker and I thought, "Watch out, a big storm coming!" But it was not a storm, it was stars pulling the daylight in. Then the boat rolled under me a little, and I knew it was not our boat.

It had four masts, and it was higher, a lot higher, at the bow and stern than in the middle; but even the middle was about five or six cubits above the water. I had heard of boats with three masts, but I have never heard of one as big as that. It was so big it had a boat as big as ours upside-down forward of the mainmast. It steered with a wheel instead of a tiller, and the man at the wheel was staring at us like his eyes were going to roll right out of his head and yelling, "Captain!"

Father's bird landed at his feet about then, a fat bird that came up to his belt. The funny thing about Father-I know Hide said something about this but I want to say it too, like I did the changing. He looked more like our father there, not really like him, but more than on Blue. He was shorter and thicker, and his hair had some black in it. His face was more like father's, and his eyes were not sky-colored anymore.

There was a man with him I had never seen before, a man with yellow hair and a big hawk nose. His eyes were not sky-colored either. I have seen ice in the winter that was that color when the sunlight hit it, big chunks of ice floating in the sea. This man was looking at his hands, and then he bent down and felt his knees, and hit one, too, pretty hard with the side of his fist. He told Father, "I would never try this!"

Father said, "Yet this is what you are. Try to remember."

About then the captain came running up. He looked sly and he had a big curved sword hanging from the widest belt I ever saw; the blade must have been wider than my hand. He talked in a way I had trouble understanding.

Father told him, "I am sorry to commandeer your boat, but commandeer it I must." He held out his hand, and it was full of big round disks of gold with pictures on them.

The captain opened his mouth, and closed it again.

"Here," Father said, "take it. There will be as much again when we leave you-I hope to repay you in other ways as well."

I told the captain, "You better do what Father tells you."

Babbie said, "Huh! Huh! Huh!" and his eyes made the captain step back.

Father wanted to know who that was, so I said, "It's Babbie, Father."

Then he said, "I didn't intend to take him with us, but the boat will be all right, I'm sure, provided we're not too long."

The fat bird said, "Good boat!" and flew up on the railing to look down at the water. It was a big, thick railing with carving on it, and the place where we stood was ten cubits over the water. It could have been more.

Father had the captain hold out his hands, and put the gold in them, saying, "You must take us out to sea. We will leave you thereor at least, I hope we will."

The captain looked hard at the man at the wheel, but the man at the wheel was pretending he had not heard anything. When the captain saw the man did not look like he was listening, he turned around and ran down some steps into the middle of the boat, and I heard a door slam.

Father asked the fat bird, "Well, Scylla?"

There must be a word for the time when we see something we have seen before turn out to be something else, like when a stick is a snake without moving. My wife knows more words than most people. She knows more than anybody except Father. But she does not know a word for that.

When Father said, "Well, Scylla?" I saw the bird was really a girl old enough to take care of other sprats but not old enough to get married. I do not mean she looked like a girl dressed up like a bird. She looked like a girl that looked exactly like a fat bird but was really a big girl that would be a woman in another year.

"See, see!" the girl said. Then she hopped down onto the deck and spread her wings, and said, "Go sea!" After that the two started pulling apart. (This will not be the way it really was, but as close as I can come.)

The bird was in front, and it started getting smaller till it looked like it had on our boat and back on Lizard. When it got smaller you could see the girl behind it. Then she stood up, a skinny girl with an angry face and straight black hair. She said, "No here. No god. Go sea," and some other things. It scared the bird and it flew away, circling up above the boat.

"Scylla here possessed Oreb," Father told me. "It took me nearly a year to realize what had happened because she exercised no influence-or almost none-once she had brought him back. When I returned to Blue, he went away at once to search for a Window for her, or anything that might function as one. They found none, and she brought him back, earning my gratitude-though she already had it. I grew up in her Sacred City of Viron, after all."

Scylla snapped, "Gyoll? It is? Nessus? It is? Where is?"

Father nodded. "Ask the man at the wheel. He'll tell you, surely."

"Plain man!"

"Exactly," Father said, "and plain men know such things. They must."

The hawk-nosed man muttered, "I don't care where it is." Then he threw back his head and shouted, "I want to stay!" at the dark sky.

"You may not, Juganu," Father told him, "and in fact we're going back right now, all of us." He took my arm and Juganu's, and told Juganu to take Babbie's and me to take Scylla's. She tried to hit me and I caught her wrist. Then we fell, not up or down but to one side, faster and faster, rolling over.

I woke up on deck with Babbie licking my face. I thought at first he had hurt me because it stung, but what really happened was that I had fallen and hit it. I got in my sea anchor then and put out sail.

When Father came up out of the cabin, I said I saw now that we just fell down like that wherever we happened to be, and if he had told me he would have saved me a pretty good bruise.

"I would not," he said. "You would have disobeyed me in any case."

I had a lot of questions, and I knew he was angry, so I thought I would volunteer to cook and made a fire in the sandbox. It was too early, but he knew I did not like to cook (he had done all the cooking) and I wanted to show I would try to help without being told. While I got the fire going, I was planning what I thought we ought to have, keeping in mind what I could cook and get right and make taste good, because I knew I was not as good at it as he was. I knew what we had, and we had not done any fishing, so I decided potatoes, bacon, and onions; and when the fire was going pretty well I went below to fetch them.

Juganu was sitting on my bunk with his head in his hands. I told him to get off and stay out of my way.

He said, "Now that you know, you hate me."

I said, "I knew all along, and I don't." The first part was a lie, because I had not known he was an inhumu until we got him on the boat and Father told me. But it is what I said.

"That place..."

"It's where we real people come from." I thumped my chest. "I guess that's why you're one of us there, and Babbie too."

I had not thought it would bother him, but it did. He said it was what he was in his heart, that the blond man on the deck of the big boat was the real Juganu, the man he was in dreams.

I asked, "Do you really dream you're a human man like me?"

"Yes!"

"I don't believe you." I pushed him out of the way so I could open up the little cupboard where we kept most of the food. I got out potatoes, enough for father and me with some left over for Babbie, and a slab of bacon, onions, lard, and stuff.

I turned around and Juganu said, "Sometimes I do. Sometimes I really do." He followed me up on deck.

Father said I had brought too much, but I explained I had wanted to give some to Babbie and the bird, and Babbie would eat a lot. That was the first time I really thought about the bird and the girl; I was not even sure that they had come back with us. Then the bird flew down out of the rigging somewhere and perched on his shoulder. I looked around for the girl because I thought she would want to eat, too.

"We will not have to feed Scylla," he told me, "though she is surely here. Will you speak with us, Scylla?"

He had turned his head so as to look at his bird, and it said, "Bird talk?"

"Certainly, if you wish to."

"Good bird!"

"She is possessing Oreb, you see. She is in his mind-what there is of it. More accurately, there is an image of her there which she herself placed there; that image was the Scylla we saw on the Red Sun Whorl. You won't have forgotten what your mother and I told you concerning Scylla and Echidna-how they tried to destroy Great Pas, and the vengeance he took. Are you going to boil those potatoes you're peeling?"

I said I had not planned to.

"Do it. Fill a pan with seawater and bring it to a boil. Drop them in for ten minutes before you fry them. They're old-the new crop's not in yet-and that will help." In all the time I knew him, he never looked less like our real father or sounded more like him.

Juganu began to explain the same things to Father that he had to me; but Father cut him off, saying he already knew.

I said, "My sister was an inhuma, Juganu. Her name was Jahlee, and she and Father did that a lot."

He said, "She was a young woman there, you see. Quite an attractive young woman."

Then Juganu thanked Father for taking him there. "It was the high point of my life," he said. He looked just like a little old man with gray skin and no teeth; and I wondered how old he really was, because the blond man with the big hook nose had not looked as old as Father.

Father said, "You mustn't think that it will never happen again. Would you like to go back tonight?"

I used to watch Sinew play tricks on Mother, and Hide and I played some good ones too, but I had never seen anyone look that surprised. "Will you? Oh, Rajan! Rajan, I-I..."

Father put a hand on his shoulder. "We'll go after Hoof and I eat."

"No sea!" the bird objected.

"No, the boat will not have reached the sea yet; but it will be well for me to get a better feel for its speed. It is sailing with the current, of course, so it should make good time."

After that we were all quiet, thinking, except that he told me to use a little celery salt instead of the yellow sea-salt I brought with the pepper. "But only a little. And you should be starting your bacon, and browning the onions. Cut up the onions now. Cubes, not rings."

Then he said, "I should explain to you both why we cannot go to the sea directly, as I did to Scylla several days ago. In order to go to a place we must have with us someone who has been there, or at least been in the area. I don't know why that is so, but that is how it seems to be. I can go to Green-as I have at times-because I have been there in the flesh. I can go to the Red Sun Whorl, too, as we did a few minutes ago, because Jahlee and I went there in the company of Duko Rigoglio of Soldo. He had been a Sleeper on the Whorl, and so had been there in the flesh. I cannot take us to the sea there, because I have never been on it. Scylla has, to be sure; but ultimately Scylla is not among us."

His bird croaked. But it was only bird noise, not a word.

"There is another factor. When we go, we often seem to arrive in a place resembling the one we left. That was why I lured you onto this boat, Juganu. I had promised Scylla that I would take her to the sea of her native whorl if I could. Once I walked along a road that runs beside Gyoll and looked at the boats plying its water, so I hoped that if we left Blue from a boat we would arrive aboard a boat there. So it proved. That it was going downstream was sheer good fortune. Slice your potatoes. Be careful, though. They'll still be hot."

While they were frying I asked him whether we were here or there when we were there, because I had been thinking about the way he had said that the girl had not been with us, not really.

"We are in both places. The philosophers-I am none-tell us that it is impossible for a single object to be in two places at once. We are not indivisible wholes, however."

I said, "Part of us was here, and part there?"

He nodded. "And now that we've been on that boat on the river we should be able to return, though the boat itself will be in a new location. We'll test that supposition tonight."

While we were eating he explained that he had brought us back fast because he had been worried about the boat, especially because Babbie had come and would not be around to take care of things here. "That was a surprise, and a rather unpleasant one," Father told me, "though it was interesting to discover just how human Babbie is." He stopped speaking to study the western horizon.