But for his trick with the lashing, we should have been fathoms down some while before. Even with it, our bruised and battered carcasses were fair set for death. I had fed on fish, now fish should feed on me. Barely conscious, I clung to existence-the mast; survival reduced to pure stubbornness, abstract motives literally washed away.
After those three hours of hell (I reckoned the duration only later from the positions I had vaguely noted, when I could see them, of the sun), I appeared to myself to be drifting up into another sea, the water grown so level I thought it had congealed, so level it actually nauseated me after the turmoil that had preceded it, and to which I had grown accustomed. Then, lacking the frenzied beating of the sea, my numbness began to wear thin, revealing a hundred bursts of pain of variable intensity.
The hurricane seemed spent, the ocean abruptly flat, the sky pastel and very bright with low sun. The unnatural lull was, however, the vortex, the storm’s eye that travels at its center-merely an interlude, the cat toying with the mouse.
This fact Long-Eye presently told me. Even hi my half-wit state, his fortitude appalled me.
I glanced about, illogically glad of the lull despite its transience. The sun was lying over in the west, on my right hand now.
“If you are in the mood to curse me,” I said, “do it.”
My speech sounded like a drunkard’s, blurred and thick.
“You will act when you are ready, lord,” Long-Eye said imperturbably.
“When I am ready? Don’t you see yet, fool’s slave? I am incapable. Behold, I manumit you. Curse me.”
18
He said, “Mast not enough to save us. Without the lord’s power of will, we should not still be living.”
Apparently he continued to believe I had illimitable abilities, yet did not reproach me for not using them. What he imagined me playing at, I cannot guess.
I rested my face on my arm over the mast. My mind was blank.
Suddenly, between one breath and the next, it reached me. It was like a voice calling, far back in my brain-Here. Look for me here.
All your life you must be ready to change course, open for it. Then, when the signal comes, you are prepared. When I was a boy in the krarl, learning to hunt or to ride and mainly my own teacher, for the environment was hostile to me, I must continually go over the actions of what I did: Now, I set my hand so, and now my foot. One day, a great surprise-I found I had done everything by instinct without thinking it through first: I had learned. Something like this occurred in the storm’s eye, as I have later concluded. At the hour, it was as if a black window broke in me and radiance streamed through it, a revelation, such as men say they have of their gods or their destinies. It is only their own wisdom, maybe, catching up to them at last.
The light was bronze now, and the sides of the waves like jewelsmith’s work, heavy seas of amber and beaten gold.
Something ran molten together in my chest. It was the break healing in my ribs. Dead flesh flaked from my face and hands, which had knit whole beneath. I broke the lashing on my left wrist. Then I did what magicians dream of. I got to my feet, easy as a man rises on a boat’s deck. I stood upright on a floor of choppy brazen gold, and I walked on the ocean.
I analyzed this, after. When it occurred, a sort of aberration came with it, precluding reason. Analysis told me, however, only one fact. Belief is the root of this power. Not to tell yourself you may, but to know you can. I have journeyed far enough since, in the seasons of my life, to understand by now that the skill is not as exclusive as I then supposed it. The sorcerer-gods are only those born knowing the key to the brain’s inner rooms. That is their luck, but beware-the meanest may search out the key, or stumble on it, and become gods also.
Having achieved one miracle, the rest seemed little more than a process of mathematics.
I kept my balance lightly, as a charioteer does, levitating
19
my body without effort, my feet braced on the smooth toiling of rollers. The sky was veiling again; the wind threatened from a different quarter,
I stared at sky, at sea, one with it, master of it.
Power gives wings, and fire. Power is the wine after which all other wine is mud. To control the raging elements becomes explicit and simple. Rope the wind, disperse in fragments the hurricane that bounds the vortex wall. Pressure to pressure, thigh against thigh, the mind wrestling briefly with the insensate motive of the storm. The blows are diverted and the vast forces quenched.
The hurricane died over the sea like a huge, ghostly bird.
Ultimately, the act had been swift, positive. Behind the storm was a green cloud, out of which a quick rain fell. I could see Long-Eye, horizontal on his back, capturing sufficient of this rain in a leather water bottle of his own-the clay pots had been smashed and lost. I watched him with a certain prosaic interest. As I walked on the water.
Gulls flew over, refugees of the storm. The air was charged with ozone and a scent of iodine from floating stirs of ocean weed. Nothing seemed strange in the sunset; the apotheosis was in the man, not the world about him.
Long-Eye lay unprotesting and observed me till I should remember his plight. Gods were selfish, their right and their failing.
In the end, I collected myself and went to him.
I healed his broken limbs, the bruises and wounds at a touch, as before, feeling no virtue go from me. I asked him if he noted anything when I did this, any pain or curious sensation. I was hungry for facts, could not get enough of my talents. He said it was like a tremor of electricity disturbed in an animal’s coat in summer, nothing more. I placed my fingers on his face to renovate the skin; he said it was like spiders running. His legs were stiff and needed massage before he could work them. Once he was able, I unstrapped him from the mast, and told him to get up and follow me.
His face, almost invisible now, for the night was black and the moon unrisen, scarcely altered.
“I am the lord’s slave.”
“If I tell you to do as I do, you shall manage it.”
Left in the water any longer, he would die of it. His devastating trust, his human wits by which he had saved me, were things I prized with a sudden and emotional fervor new to me. I grasped his shoulders.
20
“You know I can equip you to do this.”
“Yours is the cloak that covers me,” he said. It was a ritual phrase out of some primeval and obscure ancestral past.
He let go the mast, the wood was mostly sponge by now, and set his hands out as if to balance himself. By his shoulders, I drew him up to stand, as I did, on that faintly swelling, calm night sea.
Thus we remained, between heaven and ocean, the clouds pouring slowly over above, the waves tilting gently beneath.
Long-Eye began to weep, without shame or restraint. Then he bared his teeth and threw back his head, staring up at the sky, grinning and crying. After a minute, he rubbed his palms over his face, and looked at me. He was again as passive as I had ever seen him, as if he had rubbed expression away with the tears.
I turned, and began to walk due east, the direction the storm had driven us to as if some fate were still in it. He followed me, as I had instructed. His faith never wavered. He fixed his eyes on my back and trod unerringly across the sea.
Now that I had a power beyond any man’s hopes, beyond even my own, I felt neither confusion or excitement.
It was as if a million hands had clasped with mine, a million deep vaults given up their treasure and their secrets. A sense of omnipotent loneliness more absolute than the desert of space, a sense of omnipotent continuance more definite than if an army of my forebears had stretched away from me, each linked to each and culminating in this final existence which was mine.
Yet I was not thinking of my father. Neither did I think of her, the lynx woman, save as a lamp somewhere before me, which, armed with the thunder, I should one day extinguish as she had extinguished his dark light.
I was thinking of what was in me, truly, of my self.