Nonplussed as she was, thinking her distracted or mistaken, I showed her.
Hwenit peered and stared as if at some fresh ailment.
The baby roared like a terrible little machine.
“You are a magician,” Hwenit said. “You are a healer.” Jealously she whispered, “You are more powerful than the priest who taught me.”
Qwef s boat, a skiff, had a place for a single pair of oars, a primitive sailless craft, but the first water vessel I had ever seen. It took the sea with a rolling yet dependable motion, breasting over the waves that from the shore had seemed azure, and now revealed themselves as brownish-gray with caverns of marble greenness beneath.
Qwef managed the oars, at which I later took a turn, “having been instructed, This was an easy enough task once I had the knack of it, and truth to tell, I was glad of something to do. The sight of so much liquid earthquake all about unnerved me.
My mind was racing, too, out of rhythm with everything. I had been thankful to be off, as if I could leave bewilderment and unease behind me on shore. But like the changeable sea, the quality of the inner debate had altered, become ambient. Splinters of white foam-something of a wind had got up, after all, when we were about a mile out-broke from the wave crests. Flashes of scenes and events dashed off the surface of my thought like the foam, and under these, the hollow green sea caverns of a menacing disquiet.
Nor did it help that my black witch had come with us.
She sat sulkily among the pile of tent, tackle, and provisions, with which Peyuan and his people had packed the skiff amidships, and to which she had added a copper cook pan, rugs, and other minutiae of living, while her demonaic cat- stuffed into the large wicker cage like some unlikely bird, that it should not escape in terror and fall into the sea-set up a persistent, resentful, and panic-stricken wailing. Hwenit said she had visited the island before in the boats of the men to gather certain herbs that grew there. Probably this was true enough, though the reason for her traveling now was plainly in order to impress upon Qwef that she companioned me.
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Qwef was a good-looking youth, somewhat younger than she, with the same carved aquilinity of feature that seemed common to the whole tribe. He spoke to her politely, as to me, and said she was welcome to share the journey, though he was constrained at her presence, and she did her best to set him boiling, darting him mad blue looks, telling him how poorly he handled his own boat, turning his every observation into a jest or nonsense. It was a trick a few krarl women had tried on me when I was around sixteen, as he was, and got the flat of my hand as a reward.
At a point when we were exchanging the oars, she began to fiddle with her cat’s cage, saying she would let the beast out. I told her the cat would then surely drown, and the boat would be upset, and Hwenit remarked in a honey moan how intelligent I was, and that she would obey me in all things. This trick misfired for, catching each other’s eyes and aware of what she was at, both Qwef and I burst out laughing.
As the wind continued, she screeched that I should subdue it with my magician’s powers, and I informed her that I would put her to sleep with an oar if we had any more chat from her.
In any case, the wind did no more than rock the boat and shear the caps from the waves. We sighted the island at length, and soon ground on its seaweed beach.
Qwef and I pulled the craft above the tide-line, into the lee of long rocks, white-faced with the droppings of birds, and vivid green elsewhere from sea lichens. The wind flapped like Idle wings among the tops of the great bare trees with mossy trunks that edged the beach fifty yards away.
Gray gulls mewed, causing the red cat to growl in its cage.
“The wind will drop by daybreak,” Qwef said. “I will return to the mainland then.” He stood looking at Hwenit, as she walked ahead toward the trees, and if ever I saw a man engaged by a woman, it was he.
I said, “She will have you if you ask her.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I cannot ask her.”
“Why, man, do you take her gibes for earnest?”
“No,” he said, quiet as the sea had suddenly grown. “Certainly my father sees no wrong in it-it is not our way to make iron rules, like chains, and hang them on men and women. And yet, to me it seems-unlawful.”
I did not understand him, and told him so. The girl was
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Willing-urgent, even-Qwef s father gave him blessing, and was Peyuan ungenerous?
“But that is my problem,” he said, laughing a little. “My father and Peyuan are one man. He wed Hadlin after his white girl’s death, to obtain a mother for Hwenit, mostly, though he grew to love Hadlin after. And Hadlin bore me. I am Peyuan’s son. Hwenit and I are brother and sister.”
Everywhere laws are different. Among the Dagkta, a man who lies with his sister is flogged and the girl branded between her breasts. Most communities frown on incest. In some, death is the wage it earns, and though the black folk were openhearted toward the fact of love, wherever it took root, I saw hi Qwef s eyes, side by side with his desire, a cold revulsion. To lie with the fruit of the seed that also fruited you; limb by limb with that which one’s father’s limbs had fashioned. The answering coldness stirred in my own groin at the dream of it. The oldest cringing in the world.
Behind us all, a dull maroon sunset began to sink upon the Invisible mainland.
PART III
The Island
1
I lay in the tent on the island. I dreamed this:
I was flying. As in the tunnel, I imagined myself blackwinged. The beat of wings lifted me from one shore to another. I came back to the mainland, moving high over the ocean, seeing its blackness break below me into white gold on the headlands, finding the white skeleton of a city in a bay.
This was the curiosity of the dream:
Equipped with the wings of power, I knew myself yet for what I was born to. A tribal savage dressed for the summer wars, and on my body the scars of those wars, the scars I had never kept. It was as if I had been thrust back into a mold that had been expected to form me, rather than the actual clay of which I was made. And I thought in the dream, This is how she reckoned I should grow, the bitch who bore me. A human warrior of the krarls, with no birthright but battle and battle-death. Or worse, wolfs death at the hands of the city men who hunted me.
The grim glowing rain stretched up, and seemed to try to pull me into it, but I beat away, grinning, for even in the dream I was too strong to succumb to its rotten tugging.
And then I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black krarl shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my loving mother.
I shouted at her.
“Your son, Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you have made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor, or in Ezlann. I might have been a king
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with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?”
It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.
She hung in the air, and said to me, cold as silver ice, “This has no ability to kill me.”
But she was wrong. Sorceress though she was, the knife pierced her breast, and she fell away down the night with a cry, and died into the darkness.
I woke from this dream with a purpose as transparent as glass before me, cool, in possession of my waking senses, and bitter calm.