Innocents Aboard

by Gene Wolfe

  “Have arms!” the bird reiterated testily. “Girl wet.”

  “I don’t,” the young man protested, “and I haven’t forgotten Lily. I will never forget her.”

  “Have arms!” Then something that it had no intention of saying: “Your hook.”

  “You mean this?” Wondering, the young man examined the cruel steel hook on the end of his pole; rendered bold by hunger, the bird took flight and snatched the red slice of beef he had hung on the twig.

  “I wonder where he is now,” the young man whispered to himself. “Several. Bushdog. Marten. I wonder where they all are right now.”

  He turned away from the pool; and the bird (mindful of the sandwich still in his pocket) followed him, carrying its slice of half-raw beef in its beak, and pausing from time to time to tear at it.

  It had begun to rain. In the hitherto silent pool where Lily waited beneath the water with the exemplary patience of the dead, the first big drops tore the water like shot. Thunder rumbled in the distance. By the time the young man and the bird reached the raw, new streets and hastily erected houses, it was raining hard, solid sheets of pounding silver rain that turned the streets to oozing mire—sheets that were whisked away by the wind at the very moment they arrived, replaced within a second or so by new sheets from elsewhere, more beautiful and more violent than their predecessors.

  They went from house to house, the bird seeking shelter under each low, overhanging roof only to fly frantically to the next as the young man moved on. When the young man himself stood beneath the eaves at a door or window, the bird perched upon his shoulder, bedraggled and dripping, nursing vague hopes of food and fire, and did its best to explain things: “Bad man. Go where? Bad man!”

  “There’s one,” the young man whispered, pointing. Through the twenty-second window (or perhaps the forty-third) could be seen three men and a woman seated around a rough table on which stood three dark bottles and five cheap wineglasses among scattered playing cards.

  “That’s Marten. That’s Locust and Lacewing with him. They’re brothers. I think the woman’s Gillyflower.”

  The bird only shook itself, spreading its sable wings and fluffing out its feathers in an effort to become, if not dry, at least some trifle less wet.

  “Lacewing has a slug gun. See there in the corner? They’ll all have knives, even Gillyflower. If I were to gaff Marten now, they’d come out and kill me, and—” A flash that might have revealed his tense features to those inside, if anyone had been looking toward the window, was followed by a peal of thunder that swept aside his final words.

  “I was going to kill myself,” the young man’s tones were unnaturally flat, “once I’d found Lily’s body and seen that it had a proper burial.”

  “Bad, bad.”

  “Yes, it is—was.” A smile tugged on his lips, became a broad grin. “I’d be killing the wrong person, wouldn’t I? But I’m going to kill both Marten and myself tonight. You’d better get out of the way before Lacewing starts shooting, birdie.”

  The steel hook crashed through the window. There was just time enough for Marten to jerk his head around, half turning in his chair, before the sharp point caught him in the back of the neck.

  It did not sever his spine, or either jugular vein; there was no terrifying gush of blood as there is when those (they are in fact arteries) are cut; but it stabbed through the thick muscles there, his gullet, and his windpipe, and emerged from the front of his throat after having destroyed his larynx.

  He was jerked from his seat and pulled irresistibly toward the window. For what seemed almost an eternity, and was perhaps a full half second in reality, he braced both his hands against the wall.

  “Hook good!” the black bird exclaimed, its head bobbing.

  Marten’s own head and neck emerged, the latter bleeding copiously now. After them came his shoulders, softer and more pliable than would have seemed possible before the hook. His knife was in his right hand, making it appear that he had hoped—perhaps even intended—to stab the young man with it when he emerged.

  Nothing of the kind remained within his power. The young man braced his feet as well as he could in the liquefying street, and stiffened his body against the lead slug that he expected from the window or the front door, and heaved with all his might, drawing the dying Marten out beyond the overhanging thatch into the pounding rain, until his body tumbled through the window to a deafening drumroll of thunder and sprawled twitching in the mud. Scarlet streams of blood trickled from its open mouth only to be washed away at once by a silver flood.

  “And now,” the young man told the black bird beneath the eaves, “now they will come out and kill me, and I will be with her.”

  No one came out of the front door, and the young man was unable to nerve himself sufficiently to look through the shattered window again.

  At length he knelt in the mud and took the knife from Marten’s flaccid hand. “This killed her,” he told the bird. “I’m going to throw it into that pond.” He paused, gnawing at his lower lip while his imagination showed him the knife plunging through the water until chance drove its long, keen blade into Lily’s throat.

  “But not till I have her out of there.”

  “Knife good,” announced the bird, who had not in the least intended to do so. On its own, it urged nonviolence: “No cut!”

  The young man gave no attention to either remark, and perhaps did not hear them. With a small pocketknife, he cut the dead Marten’s belt. He himself wore none; but he thrust the knife into the sheath he had taken from Marten’s, and put knife and sheath into the waistband of his soaking trousers behind his right hip.

  When he had freed his hook, he straightened up. For a second or two he stood waiting, staring at the shattered window, which had gone dark. “They’re not coming,” he told the bird, and laughed softly. “They’re more afraid of me than I am of them, for the present anyway.”

  He set off up the rain-swept street, walking slowly with long strides, each of which ended ankle-deep in mud and water. “We’re hunting Serval now,” he muttered when he had left the house with the shattered window behind, thinking that the bird had accompanied him. “We were always hunting Serval, really.”

  Having gulped Marten’s right eye, the bird was in the process of extracting the left, and paid scant attention.

  It overtook the young man outside a tavern, plunging from chimneyheight to thump down wetly on his shoulder. The three drunken men whose presence in the doorway had prevented him from entering gathered around to look at the bird, and he was able to step through them, entering an atmosphere of warmth and smoke, redolent of beer.

  The bird, seeing the blaze at the farther end of the room and discovering with unfeigned delight that it was no longer rained upon, exclaimed, “Good place!” and flew straight to the hearth, landing there in a small cloud of ash and spreading its wings to dry with much satisfaction.

  The man behind the bar laughed aloud (as did half his patrons) and poured the young man a small beer. “Just to get you started.”

  The young man ignored it. His eyes were on a burly man, younger even than he, at the table in the middle of the room. Softly he said, “Bad evening, Bushdog.”

  Noisy as the room was, it seemed that Bushdog had heard him; for a second or two he glared, while the young man looked back at him as a cat watches a mousehole.

  The black bird’s voice sounded from the chimneypiece, “Bad man! Cut girl!”; and Bushdog shouted, “Get that out of here,” and threw his glass at the bird.

  It smashed against the stones of the chimney, showering the bird with broken glass. For a heartbeat, the room was noisy no longer. Then the young man picked up the small beer he had been given a moment before and threw it at Bushdog.

  “Get out!” It was Kob, and as he spoke he motioned to a pair of big men nursing beers at a table in the back. They rose as one.

  Resting the hooked gaff against his shoulder, the young man raised both his hands. “You don’t have to throw
me out. I agree completely. I am leaving.” As he went out the door, the bird flew to his shoulder.

  Together, they waited in the rain, he leaning on the pole, the black bird perched dismally upon the hook that had killed Marten. “No fair,” something in the bird that was not the bird muttered urgently to the young, man, and the bird repeated it again and again: “No fair! No fair!”

  From within the tavern came a snarl of angry voices, followed by the double smack of two blows struck so quickly they might almost have been one.

  “Here. Take it. You’ll need it.” The object was a slug gun, thrust at the young man by somebody as damp as he who had stepped from a shadow.

  “Moonrat? Is that you?”

  The light spilling from the tavern’s doorway was blocked by the bulky bodies of Bushdog and another man who shoved Bushdog out and slammed the door; holding a finger to his lips, Moonrat retreated down the street.

  The young man thrust his pole into the mud and leveled the slug gun he had been given, and the bird flew to the shelter of the eaves, perching upon a windowsill from which it repeated, “Watch out! No fair!”

  The young man’s index finger had located the trigger. He had never fired a slug gun, and was not particularly eager to begin.

  Slowly, Bushdog put up his hands. “You going to take me in, Starling?”

  The young man shook his head. “You killed Lily yesterday, and I—”

  “I didn’t! It was Serval, Pas’s my witness.”

  “Am going to kill you tonight.” There was supposed to be a safety catch somewhere that had to be released with the thumb; he recalled that from a conversation years ago, and his thumb groped for the button, or lever, or whatever that catch was.

  “Perhaps it was Serval. I don’t know or care. If it was, you helped him, which is enough for me.” He tried to tighten his finger on the trigger, and discovered that he could not.

  “They’ll get you.” Bushdog’s voice was thick with brandy. “They’ll get you, and you’ll get a slug in the belly, just like me.”

  The young man hesitated. Was there a cartridge ready to fire? Slug guns, he knew, were often carried without one—only the magazine was loaded. You were supposed to move the handle in front to make the gun ready. He tried, tugging it with his left hand; it would not budge.

  “You can’t just kill me in cold blood.”

  He swallowed. “All right, I won’t. I won’t, if you do as I tell you. You’ve got a knife. Get it out.”

  “No fair,” the bird muttered from the eaves. And again, “No fair!”

  “So you can shoot me soon as I’ve got it in my hand?”

  “No,” the young man said. “Get it out. I won’t shoot you unless you attack me.”

  Rain heavier than any he had yet seen lashed the street, rain so hard that for an instant he lost sight of Bushdog altogether. Because of that, perhaps, he was suddenly aware that the window of the tavern was full of faces, as a bowl or a basket may be full of cherries.

  “I got it.” Bushdog displayed his knife.

  “Throw it away.”

  Bushdog shook his head.

  His thumb had found the safety. He pushed it, unable to hear the click in the pounding rain, and unsure of what he had done. “Throw it away.” He struggled to keep his uncertainty out of his voice. “Or this will be over very, very soon. Now!” His finger tightened on the trigger, but there was no shot. He had applied the safety, in that case—assuming that there was a cartridge in line with the barrel.

  As Bushdog’s knife flew off into the blind night, the young man returned the safety to its original position. “I’m taking out mine,” he said. “I’ve got to take my hand away from the trigger to do it, so if you think you can rush me, now’s the time.”

  Bushdog shook his head again. “In this shaggy mud?” He spat in the young man’s direction, but his spittle was drowned by the rain almost before it left his lips.

  He was swaying a little, the young man noticed; probably swaying quite a lot, in fact, for it to be visible in such small light as spilled through the tavern’s window. The young man wondered vaguely whether that would make it better or worse as he pulled Marten’s knife from the sheath, displayed it, and flung it behind him.

  “No fair!” the bird croaked urgently.

  “He’s right, it isn’t—not as long as I’ve got this.” The young man held up the slug gun. “So I’m going to lean it against the wall. I won’t try to get it—or my gaff—if you don’t. Do I have your word?”

  For a moment Bushdog stared. He nodded.

  “I’ve killed your friend Marten already tonight. Did you know that?”

  Bushdog said nothing.

  “I gave him no chance at all, which is to say I gave him the same chance that you and he and Serval gave Lily. I feel bad about that, so I’m giving you more chance than I should—”

  “No fair! Shoot! Shoot!” the bird urged.

  “To make up for that. I’m going to fight you on even terms, and I warn you that if I beat you I’m going to kill you. If you beat me, I expect you to kill me as well. But of course that’s up to you.”

  “I got it.”

  Pointing his slug gun at the ground between them, the young man pulled the trigger. The booming report was louder than he had expected. The gun jumped in his grasp like a live thing, and a geyser of mud leaped into the air. Stepping to his left, he propped the gun next to the window.

  Bushdog was on him in an instant, knocking him off his feet, big hands closing on his throat.

  Something in him exploded, and he was on top of Bushdog, hammering Bushdog’s face with his fists, driving it down into the water and the liquid mud. As if that moment had never been, Bushdog was astride him, biting at some dark thing that was abruptly a knife. It plunged toward him; with a convulsive effort, he wrenched away.

  There was a wild cry as the black bird struck furiously at Bushdog’s face, vanishing as quickly as it had come. At once the knife was gone, and both Bushdog’s hands were at the socket of his right eye. He roared with pain and shouted for help before the muddy water filled his nose and mouth and his solid, muscular body ceased to struggle, stiffened … . And relaxed.

  “Good,” the bird croaked, and returned to the eaves. “Good, good!”

  It is, the young man thought. (He would have wiped his mouth if he could, but both his hands were still locked around Bushdog’s throat, although Bushdog was limp and unresisting.) It shouldn’t be good to take the life of another human being, the young man told himself, yet it is. I’ll never feel rain, or hear thunder, without thinking about this and being glad.

  Moonrat caught up with the young man as he was scouring the town for Serval. “Starling! Starling! Wait up!” Moonrat was running, his feet splashing mud and water. “How’s that gun I gave you, Starling? It work all right for you?”

  “It was fine,” the young man told him. “I haven’t put a fresh cartridge into place—is that how you say it?”

  “Into the chamber.”

  “Into the chamber, then. I haven’t done that, because I thought it was safer this way. But I will.”

  “You’re right. Wait till you’re ready to shoot. Is Bushdog dead?”

  From the young man’s shoulder, the black bird muttered, “Bad man,” and “Watch out.”

  “Yes,” the young man said. His voice was flat.

  “Good! That’s wonderful, Starling.”

  “But Serval’s really the one, isn’t he? The one who put Marten and Bushdog up to it. I’ve seen him around town pretty often—more than I liked, in fact. But I have no idea where he lives.”

  “I thought you were going there.” Moonrat glanced at the houses on the left side of the street.

  “No. I was just hoping to find someone who would tell me where he might be.”

  “Well, you’ve found him.” Moonrat edged closer. “Listen, Starling …”

  “Yes?”

  “I—I want to help you. I mean, I already did. I loaned you my slug gun.”r />
  The young man, who had it slung behind his right shoulder, unslung it and offered it to its owner. “Do you want it back? Here it is.”

  “No, you keep it.” Moonrat backed away. “You may need it worse than I do. I’ve got my knife.”

  The bird muttered, “Watch out.”

  “Are you joining me?” The young man hesitated, torn between caution and hope. “In a way you already have. I realize that. You told me what Serval’s been saying and gave me this. But are you willing to help me kill him?”

  “That’s it. That’s it exactly.” Moonrat moved to his left until he stood beneath the overhanging roof of a lightless house. “Won’t you come over here, so we don’t have to stand in the rain?”

  “If you like.” The young man joined him. “It doesn’t bother me. Not tonight. It’s as though I had a fire in me. The bird complains about it, though.”

  “Good bird.” It shook itself, and aired out its feathers as all birds do when they wish to be warmer.

  “Can I ask you something?” Hesitantly, Moonrat took the young man by the sleeve.

  “If I may ask a question of my own in return.”

  “I—I’ve been following you. Not ever since I gave you my gun, I went away then. I didn’t want him to see me. But I started back when I heard the shot.”

  “I understand.”

  “You were gone by then, and your bird was pecking at Bushdog’s … . At his face. So I was sure you were going to Serval’s, so I ran down the street to catch up to you. Maybe you didn’t hear me, because of the storm.”

  “I didn’t,” the young man said.

  “Then your bird flew past and lit on your shoulder, and a girl was with you, walking beside you. The—your bird had brought her. That was what it seemed like.”

  “Lily’s ghost?” The young man was silent, pensive.

  “I don’t think so.” Moonrat’s voice quavered. “I’ve seen Lily, you know? Around town sometimes with you. It didn’t look like her. Not—not at all like Lily.”