by Gene Wolfe
That word is one of the most ordinary, and I remember that when I was a small boy Maytera Marble used to ridicule people who used it, saying that we ought to bless those whom we greet in the name of the god of the day.
Or if we were too self-conscious for that, to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening, or good day. But I shall never forget seeing Seawrack as she stood in my old sloop, the way in which she waved to me (she was terrified of Babbie, as I quickly discovered), and the delicious music of her voice when she whispered, “Hello?”
As for what I replied, I may have said, “Good afternoon,” or “Hello!” or “Is it going to snow?” Or any other nonsense that you might propose. Most likely, I was too stunned to say anything at all.
“I am one of you,” she told me solemnly, and I thought that she meant one of the crew of our boat and tried to say something gracious about needing help without mentioning her missing arm. There is a saying among the fishermen, “One hand for yourself and one for the boat.” It means that in a rough sea you are to hold on with one hand and do your work with the other, and as I spoke to Seawrack I could not rid my mind of the idiotic thought that she would be unable to do it.
“Do you like me?”
It was said so artlessly and with such childlike seriousness that I knew there could be only one answer. “Yes,” I told her, “I like you very much.”
She smiled. It was as if a child had smiled, and by smiling had rendered her face transparent, so that I could see the woman she would someday be and had always been, the woman who stands behind all women and stands behind even Kypris, Thelxiepeia, and Echidna. If that woman has a name I do not know it; “Seawrack” is as good a name as any.
Remaining where the smooth green shore dipped underwater, because it was plain that she was badly frightened, I asked where she had come from, and she pointed over the side. “Yes,” I said, “I can see you’ve been swimming. Did you swim here from another boat?”
“Down there. Do you want me to show you?” This was said eagerly, so I said I did. She dove, not stepping up onto the gunwale as I would have, but diving across it with liquid ease.
I went aboard then, and Babbie with me, expecting to see her in the water. She was not there, although for ten minutes if not more I walked from one side to the other, and from bow to stern looking for her. She had vanished utterly.
At last I saw my own reflection (which I had been trying to look past before) and realized that I was covered with the batfish’s blood, dry and cracking by this time, and remembered that I had planned to wash myself in the sea as soon as we got back to the sloop.
I had already begun to doubt my sanity. It occurred to me then that the batfish’s blood had somehow poisoned me, or that I had eaten its flesh-I had actually cut some for Babbie-and so poisoned myself. I questioned him then, and from his answers knew that the young woman I had seen had been real. I had seen and spoken to a young woman with one arm who had worn rings and anklets set with gems, a young woman with a fine gold chain about her waist.
“Red earrings, too,” I told him. “Or pink. I caught a glimpse of those through her hair. They may have been coral.” His look said very plainly, Well, I saw no such thing. “A year or two older than Hoof and Hide, I’d say. Rounded and very graceful, but there was muscle there. We saw it when she dove. And she…”
The complete implausibility of what I was saying crashed down on me, and I pulled off my boots and stockings in silence, jumped out of the sloop, and washed myself and my clothes as well.
Returning, I spread everything in the foredeck to dry. “Do you remember the singing we heard? That was her. It had to be, and she’s as beautiful as she is real.” He regarded me sheepishly for a few seconds, then slunk off to the foredeck and his accustomed place in the bow.
I shaved and combed what remained of my hair, and put on fresh underclothes, another tunic, and my best trousers. The ones I had washed in seawater would be stiff and unpleasantly sticky, I knew, unless it rained so that I could rinse them in fresh. Because the air was sullen and still, I thought it might; and I made what small preparations I could, bailing the sloop dry and breaking out the few utensils I had that could be employed to catch rainwater. After that, there was nothing more to do. Neither the vacant plain of green that seemed almost to roll like the sea, nor the oily sea itself, held anything of interest. I reviewed my brief conversation with Seawrack (whom I did not yet call that) trying to decide whether I might have kept her with me if I had spoken differently. For I wanted her to remain with me. I wanted that very badly, as I was forced to admit to myself as I shaved. It was not only that I desired her. (What man can see a beautiful woman naked and not desire her?) Nor was it that I hoped to take her gold; I would have cut off my own arm rather than rob her. It was that I felt certain she needed my help, which I was very eager to provide, and that I had somehow frightened her back to the troubles she had fled.
The men who had commanded the black boat would certainly have robbed me if they could, and would very likely have killed me as well. They would not have killed an attractive young woman, however. Not if I knew anything of criminals and criminal ways. They would have forced her to join them, as they had no doubt forced the woman I had shot and the rest. They had (so I imagined) taken Seawrack’s clothing so she would not escape; but she had escaped, and had first decked herself in their loot when she could find nothing else to wear-unless I was in sober fact a madman.
She had said, “I am one of you.” I should have welcomed her then, and I wished desperately that I had. I had asked about the boat she had come from, and she had said it was “Down there.”
Her boat had sunk after she got here, plainly; and while she had been waiting for us, she had swum underwater to inspect the wreck. When I had said that I wanted to see it, she had assumed that I would go with her, and so had dived into the sea-after which, something had prevented her from surfacing again.
I recalled the batfish with sick horror. It had been in the tarn, not in the sea; but the tarn must have been linked with the sea in some fashion, since its water had been too salt to drink and it could not have supported a creature as large as the devilish thing we found in it for long.
I baited several hooks, tied them to floats, and set them out around the sloop; and after an hour or so of inactivity which by that time I found very welcome, caught some good-sized fish that I gutted and filleted with the same knife that had killed the batfish. Using what little dry wood we had, I built a small fire in the sandbox, rolled my fillets in cornmeal and cooking oil, and fried the first in the little long-handled pan we always kept on the sloop. “Are you going to eat that?”
I did not actually drop the pan, but I must have tilted it enough for the fillet to slide into the fire. “You’re back!” I had practically broken my neck looking around at her; I stood up as I spoke, and that is when it must have happened. “She made me.”
Seawrack was not in the sloop with me, but she had pulled herself up to look over the gunwale. The music of her voice woke Babbie, and I saw again that she was terribly afraid of him. I assured her that he would not harm her, and told him emphatically that he was not to hurt her or do anything that might alarm her.
“Can I…?”
“What is it?” I asked. “You can do anything you like-with me to help, if you’ll let me.”
“Can I have one of the others?”
“These?” I picked up one of the other fillets, and she nodded.
“Absolutely. I’ll cook it for you, too, if you want.” I glanced at the pan and realized that the one I had prepared for myself was burning on the coals. I added, “Not that I’m very good at it.”
She was looking at the one I held and licking her lips, with something utterly wretched in her expression.
“Would you like it now?” I asked. “I know some people enjoy raw fish.”
A new voice said, “Do not give it to her.” It seemed that the words issued from the sea itself.
The top of the
speaker’s head broke the water, and she rose effortlessly until the oily swell reached no higher than her waist. I can never forget that gradual, facile ascension. Like the face of Kypris seen in the glass of General Saba’s airship it remains vivid today, the streaming form of a cowled woman robed in pulsing red, a woman three times my own stature at least, with the setting sun behind her. I knelt and bowed my head.
“Help my daughter into your boat.”
I did as she had commanded, although Seawrack needed scant help from me.
“Prepare that fish as you would for yourself. When it is ready, give it to her.”
I said, “Yes, Great Goddess.”
The goddess (for I was and am quite confident that she was one of the Vanished Gods of Blue) used Seawrack’s name, saying, “You must go to your own people. Your time with me is ended.”
Seawrack nodded meekly.
“Do not return. For my own sake I would have you stay. For yours I tell you go.”
“I understand, Mother.”
“This man may hurt you.”
I swore that I would do nothing of the sort.
“If he does, you must bear it as women do. If you hurt him, it is the same.” Then the goddess spoke to me. “Do not permit her to eat uncooked flesh, or to catch fish with her hands. Do not allow her to do anything that your own women do not do.”
I promised I would not.
“Protect her from your beast, as you would one of your own women.”
Her parting words were for Seawrack. “I have ceased to be for you. You are alone with him.”
More swiftly than she had risen, she slid beneath the swell. For a moment I glimpsed through the water-or thought that I did-something huge and dark on which she stood.
Sometime after that, when I had recovered myself, Seawrack asked, “Are you going to hurt me?”
“No,” I said. “I will never hurt you.” I lied, and meant it with all my heart. As I spoke, Babbie grunted loudly from his place in the bow; I feel sure that he was pledging himself just as I had, but it frightened her.
I squatted and rolled her strip of raw fish in the oily cornmeal, put it in the pan, and held the pan over the fire. “Babbie won’t hurt you,” I said. “I’ll make one of these for him next, and then cook another one for me, so that we can all eat together.”
He was already off the foredeck and edging nearer to the fire.
“Babbie, you are not to hurt…” I tried to pronounce the name the goddess had used, and the young woman who bore it laughed nervously.
“I can’t say that,” I told her. “Is it all right if I call you Seawrack?”
She nodded.
“This is Babbie. He’s a very brave little hus, and he’ll protect you anytime that you need it. So will I. My name is Horn.” She nodded again.
Thinking of the silver jewelry Marrow had given me to trade with, I said, “You must like rings and necklaces. I have some, though they are not as fine as yours. Would you like to see them? You may have any that you like.” “No,” she told me. “You do.”
“I like them?” I flipped her fillet, catching it in the pan. She laughed again. “I know you do. Mother says so, and she gave me these so you would like me.” She took off her necklace and offered it to me, but I assured her that I liked her more than her jewelry. In the end we put her gold in the box with my silver, from which I gave her an ornamented comb. I contrived a sort of skirt for her as well, wrapping her in a scrap of old sailcloth which I fastened with a silver pin.
That evening, while we were watching the slender column of dark smoke rise and admiring the fashion in which the sparks flung up by our green firewood danced upon the air, she put Babbie’s head in her lap, something I would never have thought of doing. As her left hand stroked it, I noticed the dried blood among the folds of skin on the stump that had been her right arm, and understood why she had been so afraid of Babbie, and whose blood had stained the deck at the bow. “It was not you who sang for us,” I told her. “It was the goddess. I thought at first that it must have been you, but I’ve heard her speak now, and that was her voice.”
“To make you like me.”
“I understand. Like the gold. She wanted to find you a new home. Mothers are like that.”
Seawrack shook her head, but I felt certain I had been right in principle.
So it was, I believe, in the case that the ambassadors from Skany described to me. The woman who had perished when their lander left the Whorl had been the bride’s natural mother. The poor woman who called herself the bride’s mother now had adopted her, or at least considered herself to have adopted her, and when she was old enough had found her a new home in the house of a man of wealth and position. Each was speaking what she believed to be the truth, and to settle the affair between them it would be necessary to determine the degree to which a real adoption had taken place. Had there been any attempt to record the adoption with someone in authority? Did the poor woman’s natural children (if she had any) consider the bride their sister? Did the poor woman habitually speak of her as her daughter? And so on.
Seawrack’s situation differed in that she considered the sea goddess her mother-much more so, I would guess, than the goddess considered Seawrack her daughter. Accepting the gold, I had accepted Seawrack; it was her dowry. The goddess’s song, however, had not been payment but a species of charm (I am using the word very loosely) to soften our hearts and insure Seawrack a more friendly reception next time.
Did it work? I believe that I would have welcomed Seawrack without it, but would I? I was conscious that I was, at least in some sense, betraying Nettle; but what was I to do? Leave a maimed and friendless young woman alone in the middle of the sea?
She was frightened that night, and in pain from her amputation. I held her; and we slept, for the few hours that either of us slept, with my arms around her and her back to my chest.
* * *
Too often I have merely glanced at the last sheet before I began to write, and taken up my narration, as I believed, from the point at which I left it the day before. Or as has sometimes happened, from the week before. Today I have read everything I have written already about Seawrack, growing sicker and sicker as I came to appreciate my own failure. I am going to start over.
Seawrack, as I have said, was waiting for us in the sloop. When I was a boy in Viron and I heard from her own lips how Chenille had wandered naked through the tunnels, I had longed to see her like that. She was, as I tried to make clear in the book Nettle wrote with me, a large and muscular woman, with big shoulders, a sharply denned waist, amply rounded hips, and large breasts. At that time, I had never seen a naked woman, not even Nettle, although I had caressed Nettle’s breasts.
When I saw Seawrack in the sloop, it was as if I were a boy again, shaking in the grip of wonder. Perhaps it was the spell of the sea goddess’s song, although I do not think so. If there was magic in it, the magic was in Seawrack’s body, so tenderly and so sleekly curved, in her face, and most of all in her glance. She was a woman, but did not yet know that she was a woman. She had left childhood behind, but had taken all that is most attractive in children with her. Seeing her as the boy I had been would have, I would have given anything in the whorl to have her love. And I felt certain that I would never have it.
Soon I was to gaze upon the sea goddess of the Vanished People. Perhaps she was Scylla in another form, as Silk once confided to me that Kypris was becoming another form of the Outsider, whose many forms had spoken to Silk that unforgettable noon on the ball court as a crowd speaks, while one whispered to his right ear and another to his left.
Here I am reminded irresistibly of Quadrifons, Olivine’s god, he of the four faces. Is it even possible that he is not a form of the Outsider as well? Considering Olivine, and the life she lived as a species of ghost in the Caldé’s Palace, I do not think so. And if Quadrifons (whose sign of crossroads may well have become Pas’s sign of addition) was in the final reckoning none other than the Outsider-which now s
eems certain to me-might not the Mother be Scylla as well?
Perhaps.
But I do not really believe it. In a town one cobbler, as the saying goes, and in another town another; but they are not the same cobbler, although they own similar tools, do similar work, and may even be similar in appearance.
This is what I think, not what I know:
Having the sea, as we in Old Viron did not, the Neighbors had also a goddess of the sea. She may have been their water goddess as well, as Scylla is at home; I cannot say.
Perhaps all gods and goddesses are very large; certainly Echidna was when I saw her in our Sacred Window. Our gods, the gods of Old Viron, dwelt in Mainframe. I saw Mainframe in company with Nettle and many others, and even what I saw was a very large place, although I was told that most of it was underground. It may be that our gods did not come among us except by enlightenment and possession because they were too large to do so; even the godlings that they send among the people now are, for the most part, immense. A man may like insects. Some men do. A man who likes them may make them gifts, giving a crumb soaked in honey or some such thing. But although that man may walk, he may not walk with his pets the insects. He is too big for it.
So it is, I believe, with the Mother. She dwells in the sea, and Seawrack spoke of hiding at times within her body as one might speak of taking shelter in the Grand Manteion, the Palace, or some other big building. Possibly the Mother’s worshippers cast their sacrifices into the waves instead of burning them. (I do not know, and offer the suggestion as a mere guess.) What seems certain is that her worshippers were the Vanished People, whom I did not then call the Neighbors; and that they are gone, although not entirely gone.
