Three of the biggest moons were out when the ship left, one almost at full but the other two at waxing half and new, so the tides weren’t enough to make her move and she felt no tremors. On the third night, however, she wakened to a sound: not a loud sound, not even a threatening sound, but certainly an unfamiliar one. It conveyed, she thought, the sense of an exclamation. Or, maybe, an exclamatory question, as though something very large had asked from the direction of the sea: Who is that person camped on my beach? Or, more accurately, Who is that person camped there on my beach?
Ornery went from there to somewhere else in a panicky skulk that ended with her in the trees, prostrate upon some uncomfortably knobby roots, peering out at the place she had just left. The waxing half moon was low in the sky; the new moon had long since set, but the full moon was just past the zenith, casting enough light for her to see the bulky though sinuous shadow that flowed upward from the water to her left, squirmed across the beach to the stones, fumbled about with them for what seemed a very long time, then went back as it had come. This was accomplished without any noise whatsoever and without any evidence that the shadow knew or cared where Ornery was. Where there had been two pillars standing in the moons’ light, there were now five, each casting a bifurcated shadow like a lopsided arrowhead, pointing away from the place Ornery lay.
Ornery stayed where she was, replaying what she had seen in her head: the shadow coming out of the sea and squirming across the sand. Now that had been one thing, one single thing, she was sure of that. But then, when it had fumbled around with the rocks, some of it had separated itself and moved away from the other part of it, so it must have been more than one thing to start with.
Except for that very distinct impression it was one thing at the beginning!
At the first light of dawn, Ornery crawled back to her shelter. The rations were pressed quite deeply into the sand but otherwise undamaged. The fronds that had sheltered her were scattered and the area smelled like … well, she couldn’t quite say. Not a bad smell. Not a stink, but nonetheless, something quite distinctive and possibly to be avoided. Ornery gathered up her belongings and found a place at the other end of the beach to make her bed. Having done so, she fell asleep, without even thinking about it. She knew it was the only thing to do
Later in the morning she woke with the word “Joggiwagga” moving about in her head. Moon dragon, she said to herself, wondering where she had heard such a thing. Her memory didn’t at that moment stretch as far as the invisible person who had nursed Oram and Ornalia as babies, telling them stories and singing them songs. She had been told to forget that time, and though she had by no means forgotten, she had obediently stopped thinking of it. The word soon evaporated, like dew, and she remained astonished at herself for having slept at all since she had a rather frightening memory of the night’s happening.
When the ship came by on its way back to Gilesmarsh she told her mates about the experience, and they teased her a good deal. Castaways always told stories about hearing things and seeing things and being wakened in the night, or having their things moved about. Ornery accepted this with good grace but without believing a word of it. She’d seen the stone pillars lying in the sand and she’d seen them standing erect, and each of the stones had been far too heavy for her to have raised it herself. Something had set them up, and Ornery had seen the shape—or shapes—of the somethings.
19—The Invisible People
Late in his sixteenth year, Mouche fell prey to a peculiar illness, one with few and subtle outward symptoms, one to which, however inadvertently, he exposed himself.
It began one evening rather late when, in the course of restoring certain volumes of erotic tales to his bookshelf, Mouche jostled a particular carving in an unusual way, and the whole bookshelf rotated on its axis to display a gaping black doorway out of which drifted the sound of music and an enticing odor. The smell made his mouth water even as it made his nose wrinkle, as if he scented something marvelously luscious but, perhaps for that very reason, forbidden.