I recalled how I had played a game, waiting, Power like a trick in my sleeve, on Charpon’s ship. I had rowed then for the sake of the game, amusing myself because I knew that when I chose I could resume instantly my superior role of god-magician. Now I rowed with no hope of this transformation scene to exhalt me. My chained lion of Power. I would unfetter him to heal, to defend myself-indeed, that much had been instinctive. But to unleash my abilities to master others simply because it was convenient to me, because it saved me coins or labor, that I would no longer do. If I feared anything anymore, I think I feared that I might break my own resolve.
The grinding of the oars jarred my flesh against my bones. I had got soft in Bar-Ibithni. This bitter medicine would do me good.
We were leaving one Wilderness for another, for the sea is
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also a desert. Besides, there are deserts of the soul more arid than any bone-bleached waste of the world. I was yet in a Wilderness, would stay in it till the questions of my life had been answered, if they ever were. A great sweep of mental landscape, empty of comfort save for the brief watering places of human companionship, liking, love, where now the wells had run dry. Before me, across the waste, was a faceless goal of white stone: the place of the sorceress, but whether at the desert’s end, or simply at the horizon with another wilderness beyond, I would not see till I had come there.
4
The dream of western gold had tempted Lanko, as I had known it would. For thirteen days of warm, sullen, blowy weather, Gull ran between the outer islands, here coming to dock for taverns, sex, barter, or robbery, now and then fleeing like a scalded cat before the prophecy of Masrian shipping. The isles were broad rocky chunks protruding from the swirl of the ocean, their inland hills bearded with forest where wild sheep galloped. Mostly the men there lived by fishing, and were of the Old Blood. Great pyres were lighted on the uplands, smoking as the ship went by. It was a festival of Ancient Hessek, “Burning the Summer,” to propitiate winter, which brought storm winds, rams, and riotous seas.
Shifts at the oars were split in two sections of six hours each, with two hours between. At night the ship made do with his four tall sails and the shark’s fin at his bow. When in port, the rowers also went ashore to carouse and let loose trouble where they pleased. They shared any booty with the crew, had a ration of salt-meat, fruit, biscuit and wine, and koois after a hard forced shift-when pursued by Masrians, or themselves pursuing some hapless craft. I discovered myself rowing Gull on such a course of sack one night, having been roused from sleep along with others. I thought at first we were escaping the patrols, till the grunted felicitations of the wretches about me set me right. A small merchantman, strayed off course from Tinsen and at anchor by some island, had been spotted by Lanko’s predatory watch.
The Drummer beat like a madman, grinning and yelling
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encouragement the while, and we burst our arms from the sockets. Presently we must have rammed the luckless merchantman. A crash of timbers and men falling from the benches followed, next a berserk scrambling aloft to participate in the prize.
I came out on the deck, and saw the trader-ship leaning in the water, holed in the starboard flank, upper deck ablaze with torches. It was not a Masrian vessel but a Tinsen galley, black as pitch, with a single red and black sail. An iron grappler provided a dangerous causeway for Lanko’s men, who struggled over it and then returned with sacks and casks. The Tinsenese had offered no opposition but cowered in the torchlight, imploring their ancient gods, promising Lanko’s vessel a vengeance plague such as had fallen on Bar-Ibithni the Beloved of Masri.
When we were clear and cruising off down the night, leaving the bright-lit, howling Tinsen trader behind, the crew of the Gull waxed joyous with koois, showing each other ropes of black pearls and figurines of milky jade. The query arose: What need to go to the west now?
I leaned by the rail, watching all this. I knew this ship was my means of passage, yet I did not intend to force Lanko to do anything. The riddle was resolved by Lanko himself, who appeared in a filthy red velvet Masrian kilt and shirt.
“We’ll sail to the westlands, because I have decided it, and because this gentleman, this half-naked Sri gentleman stripped for helping our oars along, promises gold there. Rivers of it, lakes of it, and gemstones growing on the bushes. Don’t you?” he added to me. I said nothing. Lanko looked around and said, “We all remember hanged Jari’s ship that he brought back from there, so low in the water from riches he near sunk?” Getting drunk on their easy piracy and the koois, Lanko’s dogs barked for him, and for me. They began to call my advent beneficial, declaring the Tinsen galley was due to my good fortune rubbed off on them. Lanko, little eyes sharp, offered me a piece of the loot. I declined. He said, “Come, Sri, you don’t travel so light. What of that silver cat’s face in your pack?”
I knew someone had been fumbling there, not he, but they had told him.
I still said nothing. He smiled at my silence, and looked me over.
“Never been in a fight?” he said. Stripped to my breeches as I was, he could see the absence of scars.
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“Not in any fight I lost,” I said.
I could perceive he recalled how I took his knife.
Smiling, he went away.
They caught a big fish on the fourteenth day. Its flesh was saccharine and I did not care for it, but Lanko’s men were delighted, savoring it as a delicacy, and telling me this, too, was lucky.
They had begun to consider themselves now not merely pirates on the run from justice, nor reavers getting out to pillage, but doughty adventurers sailing to uncharted realms. Their talk was all tales and myths, and the recountings of Jari’s men before the law mounted them on ropes. Huge white sharks gamboled in the western seas, that would play with men rather than devour them, and girls with fishtails still conveniently equipped with organs of pleasure. South of west lay cold lands, where ships constructed of ice made war upon each other, ramming and clashing under the huge stars. Northwestward the sea was warmer, yet the mountaintops were capped with snow. One dusk, as the fellow rowers of my shift gnawed and champed their supper on the upper deck, I caught the name “Karrakess.” It was sufficiently like the other to stir me. I asked the man of whom he spoke.
“Oh, some god-lady,” the man said. “She’s worshiped along the coast there.”
“What is she like?”
“Oh”-he made round eyes at me-“ten feet tall, with snake-headed breasts and a vulture’s head.” He burst out in guffaws at my guileless childish interest in goddesses. It was only some name he had picked up from Jari’s crew; he knew nothing.
On the fifteenth day we saw the final island melting behind us under a pall of rain, but the ocean ahead was clear, sparkling like smashed green glass.
I wondered after if in some way, not meaning to, I had yet influenced them psychically. They had grown to such enthusiasm and determination to proceed, even at the year’s turning, when weather was uncertain and inclined to violence, and their wild baying of stories had none of that superstitious glowering under the eyes common to Seemase, Hessek, and mix sailors. And, most peculiar, there was this strange, sudden eulogizing of myself. A fresh wind-then I had sent it. A sunny day-my work. On one occasion the watch spotted a trading ship to the north of us. They were about to abandon
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their course to appropriate this bounty, but a squall blew up and they lost sight of it. Then it was, “The Sri magician’s god has directed us away, for the ship had no treasure aboard.”
Presently, the inevitable occurred. A man with a festering sore in his foot came to me to heal it. I had already put an end to these miracles once, and resumed at Gyest’s prompting. He had shown me that the burden, which the suffering of men would lay on me if I refused them help, was eventually unsupportable. So, I healed the sailor, trying the trick with the bandage as I had with the man in Darg’s camp. Naturally, this one did not obey me, investigated his sore, and found it gone. Soon, I had the whole of the ship’s invalids to attend to. My days, and nights, grew leprous with rotten teeth, galls, skin cancers, and similar honey. My reputation burgeoned, to my disquiet and boredom, and my black shame. It is a common, not illogical supposition on the part of the cured to reckon you have done it out of love for him and for humanity in general. This naive and stupid trust, coupled to my unliking heart, sent me running like a sick and angry cur into some kennel-yard at the bottom of my soul.