“What does the Questioner do?” asked one boy.
“It destroys worlds,” whispered someone else, “if they don’t conform to the edicts.”
None of the boys knew much about the edicts, but most of them supposed Newholme didn’t conform.
“I mean,” said Fentrys, “we’ve got all these things we can’t talk about, but if we conformed, we could talk about anything.”
“So she wipes out Newholme?” asked Mouche skeptically.
“No. Not if we can keep her from finding out.”
This topic was hashed and rehashed until it grew boring and was replaced with newly heard stories about Wilderneers. No one had actually ever seen a Wilderneer, but stories about them nonetheless abounded.
In general, Mouche enjoyed his life. The Consorts-in-Training had, so Madame stressed, a better diet than other men, a more healthy lifestyle, a more certain future, and fewer sexual frustrations than anyone on the planet. The days went by without upheaval in an atmosphere of general kindliness, and the only thing that saddened Mouche were his dreams: often of Duster and sometimes of the sea. Each time he dreamed of the sea, it became wider and darker and bigger, until eventually he dreamed of a sea of stars with himself sailing upon it.
In accordance with Madame’s instructions, Mouche had managed to let go of his father and mother. He had ceased to grieve over the animals and the farm itself. But Duster and the ever widening sea … those things he wept over still.
18—Ornery Bastable, the Castaway
The freckled, red-headed “boy” named Ornery Bastable had been bought onto the freighter Waygood at age seventeen and she had stayed there ever since. Because of her (his) early “mutilation,” a story that Ornery frequently told and by now had considerably embellished, she was allowed to be somewhat reticent about natural functions. She had no beard and her voice was rather high. Nonetheless, she was strong and resourceful, and though she could not participate in all the recreations indulged in by her companions, she was a good shipmate, always eager to offer a hand or stand a watch for a friend. Had Ornery been prettier, the subterfuge might not have worked, but “he” had remained a plain, lean, energetic person who over the years had become an accepted member of the crew.
In general, Ornery had found the life healthful and interesting. So far as recreations went, Ornery enjoyed the society of her fellows, she had found a close lipped and empathetic female Hagger in Naibah with whom she could occasionally be “herself,” and every now and then she traveled up the river from Naibah to pay dutiful visits to Pearla. Though most of her life was relatively routine, it was not without adventure, including, on one occasion, being marooned.
Freighters sailing westward from Gilesmarsh customarily refilled their water barrels a dozen days’ sail down the coast at a sweetwater spring which was separated from the shore by a strip of forest so thick and overgrown as to be impassible except by the laboriously created trail maintained by the shipcrews who watered there. Ornery was part of a work party sent ashore on the duty of chop and fill, but despite the trail being well marked and Ornery herself having traversed it many times, she somehow got herself separated from the rest of the party. She sat down to figure out where she’d gone wrong, and just at that moment the world started to shake.
She was under a tree; a branch whipped off the tree, struck Ornery on the head, and she rolled down into the dirt, dead to the world, in which state she continued until the Waygood sailed away without her.
She wakened along about moonfall, figured out where she’d gone wrong and made an unsteady way to the beach, where she found a note from her mates saying they’d return in eight or ten days, and, “If you want picking up you’d better stay on the sand, but watch out for tidal waves, because there’s more tremors all the time.”
They left her a few rounds of hardbread, as well as a packet of cheese and jerky, so she wasn’t as badly off as she might otherwise have been. She had her belt knife, hatchet, and canteen. There was fruit in the trees. The spring was close enough for drinking water, the rations were sufficient, the knock on the head had left a painful lump but no lasting damage. She hacked herself a few fronds from the nearby trees, built a shelter of sorts high on the beach between two erect pillars of stone that had long served as a landmark for the spring, a space partly screened from the sea by a pile of other pillars, similar though recumbent. She then lay back in her lean-to awaiting rescue, staring at the moons at night and swimming in the sea in the daytime—a delight she almost never had the privacy to indulge in and one she considered almost worth being marooned for.