Innocents Aboard

by Gene Wolfe

  This done, he declared their chastisement at an end; but in order that they might never return to their evil ways, he made them his slaves, to sweep and scrub his palace, hoe and manure his flower beds, catch, cook, and serve his food, and answer his door; and very busy he kept them, that they might have no time for evildoing.

  That they hated him goes without saying. Whispering one to another while they labored, by nod and wink and gesture and secret word, they brewed the First Plot. Thus it was that one cold winter night, while the giant slept, a hundred of their largest, strongest, and most courageous entered his bedchamber with scythes, cleavers, pruning hooks, pickaxes, and suchlike implements. Five stood at each foot to cut the tendon there, and five more at each hand. Forty took their places upon his belly, ready at the signal agreed-upon to plunge their weapons into his vitals. On either side of his neck there waited twenty more, the chiefs and bullies of the whole hundred, to cut the giant’s throat. On them was the greatest reliance placed.

  When each was well positioned, the strongest and slyest of them all gave the signal. His trumpeter put lip to horn and blew a mighty blast; and at the sound, all hundred struck as one. Then were broadaxe and hatchet laid to tendon, and sickle, shears, and saw to artery! Scarlet blood spurted to the ceiling of that high chamber, till every Dwarf was dyed with it, and the sheet, and coverlet, and pillow, too, until the tallest stood knee-deep in the hot reeking rush of it, and those small creatures that dwell in the blood of those who live upon that world of the star called by Arabs Gienah clambered out of it, rosy or pale, and clung to the skirts, and beards, and faces of the Dwarves, murmuring and muttering with soft tongues in an unknown speech, and in that fashion saying many things that no one could know.

  Then the giant waked, and rose roaring. Those Dwarves who were yet in his bedchamber when he slammed shut its great door, he slew. And when day came, he most carefully examined all the rest, blinding any upon whom he discovered the least trace of his blood. And lastly, he declared an end to the stipend he had previously granted to each Dwarf for bread and meat. Thenceforward they were made to beg those who had been their victims in times past for peelings and stale crusts, and were made to work harder than ever, toiling for the giant from the first light of the star that the Arabs call Gienah until the last stall in the market closed.

  That they hated him goes without saying. Year followed year, and in all those years there came not a night in which they did not dream of murder. To their children and their grandchildren they whispered of revenge about the fire, and they painted their doorposts and lintels with certain uncouth signs, red or black, whose signification they themselves well understood.

  At last the giant grew old. His step was no longer so quick as it had been, nor his voice so loud, nor his eyes so keen. He fell ill, and when word of it went abroad, Shee and Sidhe, Fairy and Sprite, Kobold, Nisse, and Centaur, Goblin and Demon trooped to his palace, bringing with them gifts they hoped might bring him pleasure: hams smoked with rare woods, so great in size that no champion of the Trolls could lift one to his shoulder; tuns brimming with wine, ale, and strong beer; salt whales, their tails in their mouths, with pickled melons for eyes; perfumes in crystal and incense in thuribles hollowed from diamonds, and with these many meadows of blossoms: yellow, red, incarnadine, mauve, and celestine. And weapons of hammered steel, chased with gold. The old giant received them in the Great Court and blessed them, smiled upon them, spoke with them for a time, and sent them away. Sadly they returned to their own homes and countries, there to pray for him, and sacrifice, and sing.

  But the Dwarves, seeing how many, and how vast and rich, were the gifts that had been brought him, and seeing, too, that he himself was no longer the great and terrible foe of whom their fathers had spoken, then contrived the Second Plot.

  And when the last Nixie had departed, leaving behind her gift of silver foam, and the giant dozed in his chair, they heaped about it all the wood that they could gather—that which had been meant to feed the palace fires, and furniture, and precious painted carvings, too, the work of the great xyloglyphists of old, whereby might be seen many a figure quaint yet imbued with a curious grace, and even the sticks and stumps of their own huts, with all their thatching and daubed doorposts. And to all this mass, which at last rose higher than the giant’s waist, they put fire in a score of places.

  So terrified were they of the giant, that the first had fled before the last torch was applied. Yet some few stayed behind to watch—a dozen (or so the legend reports) through the crevice of a certain door, half a hundred peering between the petals and leaves of the hills of blossoms, each thinking himself or herself alone.

  Up climbed the smoke, and the flames after it. Burned through, some accidental prop in the mountainous pile of heaped wood broke, and half the whole shifted with a grinding roar, so that a column of sparks vied for a time with all the watching stars.

  At last the giant stirred, and blinked, and closed his great, slow eyes again. Perhaps he heard the twittering of the Dwarves’ distress through the crackling of the flames. Perhaps not. However that may have been, it is certain that he shouted so loudly that the very walls of his palace shook, rose and kicked the fire apart, and with a half-burned brand for a club hunted and slew all he found that night, battering the trees till showers of Dwarves dropped like ripe fruit, and stamping, stamping, stamping, until scarcely one of the fallen Dwarves still drew breath.

  When the kindly light of that star which the Arabs call Gienah returned, however, he took to his bed, and summoned physicians from among the Centaurs, who are famous healers. These buttered his many burns with ointments, peered into his eyes, examined his great tongue as so many merchants might a carpet, and stamped upon his chest in order that each might know for himself, through all his feet, the beating of that mighty heart.

  And when all that had been done, they shook their heads, and spoke brave words of comfort and encouragement, and went away.

  For eight days and eight nights, those Dwarves who yet lived waited outside the giant’s bedchamber door with food and drink, and spoke among themselves of poisons (though none dared to fetch them), and turned back such Peris, Ouphes, and Titans as would have brought the giant comfort if they could. On the ninth day, however, a great Worm, white and blind and thicker through the body than any Dwarf, wriggled from beneath the door of the giant’s bedchamber.

  They entered, first a few pushed forward by the rest, and afterward the whole of them, or rather all that remained alive. This they called the Third Plot. They climbed his sheets, explored the great foul cavern of his open mouth, danced clogs and reels where the Centaurs had stamped, and pierced and slashed his blind eyes again and again with hedge bills and pokers. Then they carved those rude signs that they had aforetime scrawled upon their own doorposts and lintels into the dead giant’s forehead, and nose, and cheeks, slicing away the putrescent flesh with their knives until each sign stood out boldly in sullen, weeping crimson. And when the last had been cut deep, they emptied their bowels and bladders wherever they stood, each boasting of what he had done, and where he had done it, and telling the rest how in years to come Dwarf children yet unborn would learn, when they were come to the age of understanding, what he, their ancestor had once done, and glory in it.

  Thus they were speaking when the thunderous voice came. So mighty it was that it filled every hall and chamber of the palace; and its first word dashed the pictures from the walls so that their crash and smash added to the roar, though they were lost in it.

  Its second word broke all the crockery in the palace and set the shards to sliding like screes of stones, so that they burst open cabinets and cupboards and descended to the floors in avalanches.

  Its third word toppled all the statues along the broad avenue that led up to the Great Gate; its fourth stopped the fountain and snapped off both arms of the marble nymph who blessed the waters; and its fifth cracked the basin itself.

  Its sixth, seventh, and eighth words maddened every c
at in the place, struck dead seventeen bat-winged black rooks of the flock that swept the sky about the Grand Campanile, and set all the bells to ringing.

  Its ninth soured every cask in the cellars, while its tenth word stove them in. Its eleventh stopped the clocks and started the hounds to howling.

  Its twelfth and last (which was an especially big word) knocked the Dwarves off their feet and sent every one of them rolling and somersaulting amongst all their foulnesses while they held their ears and screeched.

  And what that voice said was, “What vermin are these who dare defile the body of a Giant?”

  Oh, my friends! Let us of this star, who are ourselves but Dwarves, heed well the warning.

  But if the great sun move not of himself;

  but is an errand boy in heaven …

  —MELVILLE

  The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun

  In the good days now lost, when cranky, old-fashioned people still wore three-cornered hats and knee breeches, a lanky farm boy with hair like tow walked to New Bedford with all his possessions tied up in a red-and-white kerchief. Reuben was his name. He gawked at the high wooden houses so close together (for he had never seen the like), at the horses and the wagons, and at all the people—hundreds of men and dozens of women all shoulder-to-shoulder and pushing one another up and down the streets. Most of all, he gawked at the towering ships in the harbor; and when, after an hour or so, a big man with a bushy black beard asked whether he was looking for work, he nodded readily, and followed the big man (who was the chief mate) aboard, and signed a paper.

  Next morning the third mate, a man no older than Reuben himself, escorted Reuben to a chandler’s, where he bought two pairs of white duck trousers, three striped shirts, a hammock, a pea-jacket, a seabag, and some other things, the cost of everything to be deducted from his pay. And on the day after that, the ship set sail.

  Of its passage ’round the Horn to the great whaling grounds of the Southeast Pacific, I shall say little, save that it was very hard indeed. There were storms and more storms; nor were they the right sort of storms, which blow one in the direction in which one wishes to go. These were emphatically storms of the wrong sort. They blew the ship back into the Atlantic time after time; and Reuben believed that was what made them storms of the wrong sort until one blew the man who slung his hammock aft of Reuben’s own from the mizzen yard and into the churning waters of the West Scotia Basin. The man who had slung his hammock aft of Reuben’s had been the only man aboard with whom Reuben had forged the beginnings of a friendship, and the emptiness of that hammock, as it swung back and forth with the labored pitching of the ship, weighed heavily against him until it was taken down.

  At last the storms relented. From open boats tossed and rolled in frigid seas, they took two right whales (which are whales of the right sort) and one sperm whale (which is not). There is no more onerous work done at sea than the butchering and rendering of whales. It is without danger and thus without excitement; nor does it involve monotony of the sort that frees the sailor’s mind to go elsewhere. It means working twelve hours a day in a cold, cramped, and reeking factory in which one also lives, and everything—men, clothes, hammocks, blankets, decks, bulkheads, masts, spars, rigging, and sails—gets intolerably greasy.

  One dark day when the ice wind from the south punished the ship worse even than usual, and patches of freezing fog raced like great cold ghosts across the black swell, and the old, gray-bearded captain rubbed his greasy eyeglasses upon the sleeve of his greasy blue greatcoat and cursed, and five minutes afterward rubbed them there again, and cursed again, they were stove by a great sperm whale the color of coffee rich with cream. For a moment only they saw him, his great head dashing aside the waves, and the wrecks of two harpoons behind his eye, and the round, pale scars (like so many bubbles in the coffee) two feet across left by the suckers of giant squid.

  He vanished and struck. The whole ship shivered and rolled.

  In an instant everything seemed to have gone wrong.

  In the next it appeared that everything was as right as it had ever been, foursquare and shipshape, after all; and that the crash and shock and splintered planks had been an evil dream.

  Yet they were stove, nevertheless. The ship was taking green water forward, and all the pumps together could not keep pace with it. They plugged the hole as well as they could with caps and coats and an old foresail, and when, after three days that even the big, black-bearded mate called hellish, they reached calmer waters, they passed lines under the bow, and hauled into place (there in the darkness below the waterline) a great square of doubled sailcloth like a bandage.

  After that they sailed for nearly a month with the pumps going night and day, through waters ever bluer and warmer, until they reached a green island with a white, sloping beach. Whether it lay among those lands first explored by Captain Cook, or on the edge of the Indies, or somewhere east of Africa, Reuben did not know and could not discover. Some mentioned the Friendly Islands; some spoke of the Cocos, some of the Maldives, and still others of Île-de-France or Madagascar. It is probable, indeed, that no one knew except the captain, and perhaps even he did not know.

  Wherever it was, it seemed a kindly sort of place to poor Reuben. There, through long, sunny days and moonlit nights, they lightened the ship as much as possible, until it rode as high in the water as a puffin, and at high tide warped it as near the beach as they could get it, and at low tide rolled it on its side to get at the stove-in planking.

  One day, when the work was nearly done and his watch dismissed, Reuben wandered farther inland than he usually ventured. There was a spring there, he knew, for he had fetched water from it; he thought that he recalled the way, and he longed for a drink from its cool, clear, upwelling pool. But most of all (if the truth be told) he wished to become lost—to be lost and left behind on that island, which was the finest place that he had ever known save his mother’s lap.

  And so of course he was lost, for people who wish to be lost always get their way. He found a spring that might (or might not) have been the one he recalled. He drank from it, and lay down beside it and slept; and when he woke, a large gray monkey had climbed down out of a banyan tree and thrust a long, careful gray hand into his pocket, and was looking at his clasp knife.

  “That’s mine,” Reuben said, sitting up.

  The monkey nodded solemnly, and as much as said, “I know.”

  But here I have to explain all the ways in which this monkey talked, because you think that monkeys do not often do it. Mostly, at first, he talked with his face and eyes and head, looking away or looking up, grinning or pulling down the corners of his mouth. Later he talked with his hands as well, just as I do. And subsequently he came to make actual sounds, grunting like the mate or sighing like the captain, and pushing his lips in or out. All this until eventually—and long before he had finished talking with Reuben—he spoke at least as well as most of the crew and better than some of them.

  “Give it back,” Reuben said.

  “Wait a bit,” replied the monkey, opening and closing the marlinspike, and testing the point with his finger. “That may not be necessary. How much will you take for it? I offer fifteen round, ripe coconuts, delivered here to you immediately upon your agreement.”

  “Don’t want coconuts.” Reuben held out his hand.

  The monkey raised his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t blame you. Neither do I.” Regretfully, he returned the knife to Reuben. “You’re from that big ship in the lagoon, aren’t you? And you’ll be going away in a day or two.”

  “I wish,” Reuben told the monkey, “that I didn’t have to go away.”

  The monkey scratched his head with his left hand, then with his right. His gray arms were long and thin, but very muscular. “Your mother would miss you.”

  “My mother’s dead,” Reuben confessed sadly. “My father, too.”

  “Your sisters and brothers, then.”

  “I have only one brother,” Reuben exp
lained. “While my father was alive, my brother and I helped on the farm. But when my father died, my brother got it and I had to leave.”

  “Your troop, on the ship. Unless you had someone to take your place.”

  “No one would do that,” Reuben said.

  “Don’t be too sure,” the monkey told him. “I would trade this island for your clasp knife, those trousers, your striped shirt, your cap, and your place on the ship.”

  Reuben shook his head in wonder. “This beautiful island is worth a great deal more than our whole ship.”

  “Not to me,” said the monkey. “You see, I have owned this island ever since I was born, and have never seen any other place.”

  Reuben nodded. “That was the way our farm was. When I could live there I didn’t really care about it, so that when my brother told me I had to go, I felt that I’d just as soon do it, because I didn’t want to work for him. But now it seems the dearest spot in all the world, next to this one.”

  Thus it was arranged. The monkey dressed himself in Reuben’s clothes, putting his beautiful, curled tail down the left leg of Reuben’s white duck trousers and the clasp knife into the pocket. And Reuben dressed himself in the monkey’s (who had none). And when they heard some of the crew coming, he hid behind the banyan tree.

  It was a watering party with buckets, for the ship had been mended, and refloated again, and they had come to refill its barrels and butts. Each sailor had two buckets, and when one set a full bucket down to fill another, the monkey picked it up and waited for him to object. He did not, and the monkey became quite friendly with him by the time that they had carried their buckets back to the ship.