Return To The Whorl Part 47

"Nettle's husband?"

"Yes, and the father of Sinew, Hoof, and Hide. I am also the father of Krait and Jahlee, neither of whom you know or will ever know--both are dead. If you wish to continue to explore family connections, I am the father-in-law of a woman named Bala. She is Sinew's wife. I am the grandfather of their sons Shauk and Karn, as well."

Gyrfalcon smiled. "The founder of a family. I congratulate you."

The bird seemed to understand Father was being praised, and it called out, "Good Silk!" three or four times.

"Yes, I am." For a few seconds he sat scratching Babbie's ears. "My son Hide will come here soon with my wife and my daughter-in-law to be, Vadsig. They will be married by Patera Remora. My brother Calf and his wife are making arrangements."

"a.s.sisted by you, financially. So I've heard."

"Correct. They know the town, as Hoof and I do not."

I spoke up then even though I should not have, saying I had been learning a good deal about it recently.

"Prowling over it at night with your . . . Father? Sitting in bottle shops. Who are you looking for?"

I said I did not know.

"Who are you looking for, Horn? As calde of our city, I think myself ent.i.tled to ask."

"By name?" He shrugged. He had not eaten a bite till then, but he picked up a sparkle and began to peel it. "For a friend, that's all. I don't know his name. Or hers. I'll learn it when I find the person."

"You have graciously answered all my questions," Gyrfalcon said. He was making fun of Father, but you could tell he admired him too. "Will you tolerate a few more?"

"If you will tolerate one from me. Will you come--or at least consider coming--to my son's wedding? It would be a great honor for him and his wife, and for our entire family. I'm taking advantage of your hospitality, I realize."

Gyrfalcon stared, then laughed. He has a big booming laugh. "You want me me at your son's wedding?" at your son's wedding?"

"Yes," Father said, "I do. I want you there very much, if you will come. All of us will be delighted, I'm sure."

"Let me think now." Still grinning, Gyrfalcon sipped a little wine. "You promised to answer some more questions for me if I would answer that one. I suppose you meant if I would give you an answer you liked."

"Why no. Any answer. And I'm only asking you to consider it. I know how many demands there must be on your time, and in all honesty you are ent.i.tled to ask all the questions you wish."

Gyrfalcon leaned back and surveyed us, looked around at his garden, and came back to us, looking at Father and me like he never saw us before. "Do you think my wine's poisoned?"

"Certainly not. I would have warned my son not to drink it if I did. Does it bother you that I haven't drunk my own?" He drank half his gla.s.s and ate some bread.

"I poison people. That's what they say in town. You must have heard it."

"I heard something of the sort."

"Well, I don't. They can't prove I do, but I can't prove I don't."

"Naturally not."

"Do you still want me to come to your other son's wedding?"

"Of course. We will all be delighted."

"Then I'll come. Let me know when the date is set."

The bird said, "Bird tell!" and I noticed Father jumped a little. Later he explained to me about Scylla.

"I've got a few more questions for you. Here's the first one. Is Silk ever coming?"

"I have no idea. I failed to find him." For a minute I thought Father was going to cry again but he did not. "That was the princ.i.p.al thing I promised I would do. I realize that. I failed, and that is all I have to say. I reached Viron. I talked with its present calde, Calde Bison, and a number of other people--I spoke with my own father, for example. But I was unable to locate Silk, and I left. I offer no excuses."

"You don't know whether Silk's coming?"

"As I said. He may, but I very much doubt it."

I whispered, "Can't you see that if he were here Gyrfalcon would have to kill him?"

"No, I don't--because it isn't true."

Gyrfalcon told me, "You're stirring our stew with your finger, young man. Better stop before you get burned."

Father was smiling. "I've dreaded this hour. Not because of what you and the others might say to me or what New Viron might do to me, but because I knew I would have to admit that I failed, that Silk is not coming. Now I've done it and I can begin to live again."

"Good Silk," said the bird. "Good Silk!"

"Can I ask a couple more questions?"

"Before you decide on my punishment? Yes, certainly."

Gyrfalcon shook his head. "No punishment. I'm not going to give you a dressing down, either. You did your best."

"I did not," Father told him. "I did what I did. I could have remained in Viron and continued to search. I didn't."

"You said you were looking for somebody here, too, but you didn't know his name. What do you want with him?"

"I want him to go on a journey with me."

"I see." Gyrfalcon sucked his teeth at that. "Going far?"

"Yes, very far indeed," Father said.

They had put us on horses for the ride out to Gyrfalcon's house, but we had to walk back. While we walked, I asked Father if he wanted me to come when he went away. It seemed to surprise him, as if it was something he had not thought about, but I saw enough of him to know that he thought about most things way far in advance. "Would you go, if I asked you to?"

I said I would, and Hide and Vadsig could look after Mother.

"We won't be gone long," he told me. I did not understand what he meant till later. I had never gone to the Red Sun Whorl, and when Hide told me he had not made me believe it. Father could not make Juganu believe it, either. Juganu was the inhumu we found, a little old man with a bald head. We had taken him on the boat and put out to sea.

Father said, "You have no reason to worry--far less than we. If this vessel sinks, you can fly."

"Rajan!" Juganu tried to get away, climbing the rigging like two nittimonks and flattening out his arms, but I chased him and caught him and threw him down. Juganu tried to get away, climbing the rigging like two nittimonks and flattening out his arms, but I chased him and caught him and threw him down.

"You need have no fear," Father told him, "we will be your friends if you'll let us."

"I served you faithfully." Juganu moaned. "I swear by our G.o.d."

That was the first I ever heard about the inhumi having their own G.o.d, but Father paid no attention to it. "You tried to kill me when Evensong and I left Gaon, and you will call for others to kill me here as soon as I let you go."

I said we should kill him ourselves when we were finished with him, but Father shook his head. "I killed your sister. Surely that was killing enough for one lifetime. I will not call it murder--murder is something worse--but I will not kill this man, who may be her brother for all I know. After he has helped us, we will free him."

"I served you throughout the war, Rajan." (The end of Father's staff was on his neck, and Father's foot was on his chest.) "How can I serve you now?"

"By going with us to a place where you will be as human as we are." For a minute Father thought about things. "And by coming back. You will be tempted to remain, I warn you; if you do, you will die and it will be by no act of mine."

"Where I . . . ?" The old inhumu gaped at us.

"We will sleep," Father told him, "all of us except Babbie. Hoof will rig a sea anchor for us--"

From the mizzen top, his bird cried, "I go! I come!"

"Yes," Father told it. "You will come with us, Scylla. It's for your sake we're going, after all."

After that, I furled the sails and made a sea anchor from two sweeps.

(My wife was reading over my shoulder when I wrote that last, and says that many people will not know what a sea anchor is or how to make one. The others promised to let me write this by myself, because Hide and Vadsig saw more of the man who said he was our father than I did in Dorp, and Daisy hardly saw him at all, even if she writes better. She writes better than Hide, too, even if Hide will not admit it.

(A sea anchor is the sort of anchor you use when your anchor cable will not reach bottom. A boat is meant to sail, and will sail whenever the wind blows, even under bare poles. You cannot stop it, but a good sea anchor will slow it down so much it might as well be stopped. What I did was to lash together two sweeps crosswise and tie a long line to them in the middle. The longer the line on a sea anchor, the better it holds.) Then we went to sleep. Babbie was supposed to watch Juganu the inhumu and our boat, too, while we were gone; and Father tied a line around Juganu's neck and to his wrist. I said that if we slept and Juganu did not, he would bleed us till we were dead if we did not wake up, and the line would not help. But Father said he could not, and Juganu swore he would not.

After that we went into the cabin and Father told me to lay down and close my eyes. I did, but as soon as I heard him and Juganu lay down too, and the rattle when he put down his stick, I sat up. He was on his bunk, with Juganu on the floor beside him. I remembered the sword he called Azoth was probably under his tunic, and if Juganu got it he could kill us both. I had never seen him use it, but he had told me what it could do and so had Hide. I took it up on deck and hid it. It was not that I was afraid to go to the Red Sun Whorl, but I was very nervous about it. I cannot explain it more than that.

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 gla.s.ses, 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 there--or 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 G.o.d. 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 grat.i.tude--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!" "I want to stay!" at the dark sky. 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 fis.h.i.+ng, 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.