NYATENERI

At first I did not understand that I was moving. That may sound strange, but I was feeling very strange and sick, and the only thing that registered during those first few moments was that I was blind in one eye. There was a red darkness to my left side different from the cool, moony river dark around me on the right. Between that and the throbbing bewilderment in my head, it was some little while before I realized that I was not after all lying motionless while sky and river flowed courteously, distantly over me. My right foot was actually trailing in water, and the vague discomfort in my back turned out to be a knobbly bit of driftwood that floated away when I sat up. I was impossibly aboard the trash raft I had never intended to launch, and it was gently dissolving beneath me, and I was half-blind and could not swim. And if I did not scream my lungs out for Lal, the only reason is that I was even more dazed just then than I was frightened. That state of things changed quite rapidly.

I did not dare to stand, but spent what seemed like the next two weeks wriggling up to a kneeling position. The last thing I remembered had been knotting strands of water-weed to make my driftwood look—at least in a bad light—as though it might possibly hold together if anyone were fool enough to launch it. That had been well over an hour ago, to judge by the moon, and most of the raft was, remarkably, still with me, but fraying. I could feel logs shifting and slipping as the dead branches I had jammed between them to make them fit tightly worked free one by one. Dead-man’s-ringlets are supple and easy to splice into cables, but they have one serious failing. They stretch. I gave the good ship Soukvan’s Coffin a conservative ten minutes, and myself an optimistic five.

What I hated, even more than the thought of drowning, was the idea of dying without ever knowing what had happened to me. Plainly I had been the one ambushed, taken offguard as easily as Rosseth or Tikat would have been, not so much as glimpsing my attacker. For all the pains and numbnesses in my head and body, I could not recall being struck one time. My left eye was one of the few parts of me that did not hurt, no more than it did anything else. It might as well not have been there.

I stayed on my knees, afraid that the slightest movement might hasten the raft’s unraveling. The dreaming river of the afternoon now seemed to lunge under me more hugely with every minute, hurtling me between black banks, faster and faster, on my way to a humiliatingly helpless death, a death not to my liking. Another branch slid free of the dead-man’s-ringlets, and a log I was gripping turned over in my hand. Idiotically, I imagined the Man Who Laughs settling down comfortably to discuss with me the exact moment when the fact of a raft must cease to exist and become only the fact of a passing agreement of sticks. It was just the kind of thing he would have debated all day, jumping to my side from time to time when he got bored with his own arguments and impatient with mine. The fact of water began to dance up through the gap where the branch had been, splashing over my legs.

My left eye seemed to be beginning to distinguish between shapes and shadows, but I could not tell how far I was from either bank, as though it would have made the least difference. Still kneeling, I groped as far as I could reach in every direction, hoping idiotically to find a broken board, something to paddle with, some way of angling the raft toward a shore I could not see. One hand came up against something that felt like a little gilt-paper tube, like the paper whistles they blow in the west country to celebrate Thieves’ Day. It took me the longest instant of my life to understand what it was, but then I understood, and I dropped my arm back until my knuckles rasped on bark, and I threw the tiny thing as far away from me as I could. Still in the air, it melted soundlessly into fire, turning a quarter of the sky to dawn, a white dawn raked bloody from one horizon to another. In that terrible light, in that impossible silence, I saw the tumbling river and the trees on its banks, and the birds asleep on their branches, all blanched and dry of color. I saw night insects burning all around me, thousands of them, flaring up and gone, one filigreed second apiece. And I saw Lal.

Only for that moment; then the little device that a wheezing man at the monastery used to make by the dozen, as needed, fell into the water and went out. The darkness returned and Lal was lost to my one eye, like the sleeping birds. But I could see her still, as I do now, flying down the river after me, sitting crosslegged in the stern of a boat smaller than my raft, a tapered chip of wood with a sail and a rudder, and looking for all the world as though she were clucking calmly to it, shaking the lines a bit to urge it along like a fat old horse. When she saw me, she waved to me.

I would have waved back, but by that time I was using both hands, and my feet as well, in a hopeless, ridiculous attempt to hold what was left of the raft together. It was all drifting to pieces swiftly now, having held together so much longer than it was ever meant to do: all my debris sliding loosely through the water-weeds’ slackening grip. I heard Lal calling to me to abandon the raft and cling to any log until she reached me. Easy for her, born on the water—I would have been calmer in a burning tower, and jumped from it far more lightheartedly than I gave up on the idea of that raft. Absurdly, perhaps, I dallied, to find my bow, but while I fumbled in the darkness, the last few remaining logs skidded away beneath my feet and I went straight down, tearing at the river, biting and kicking it, dancing in it as I sank like a hanged man in air. A humorous picture, I do agree with you. Smile again and I will push your face as deep into your soup bowl as will improve your understanding of what I felt then. I promise to hold you under no longer than I was.

Lal says that I was indeed draped over a log when she fished me out, holding on so tightly that I went round and round with the log as it spun and rolled over in the water. I know nothing of this. I came to myself a second time sprawled face down across the deck of Lal’s toy boat, coughing and puking, while she went on hauling on the lines, at the same time drumming briskly on my back with both feet to make me vomit some more. That much I remember. Lal’s feet are small but memorable, especially the heels.

When I could speak, I said, “This is his boat.” It didn’t deserve an answer, and it didn’t get one. I sat up very slowly, dizzy and shivering, wiping my mouth. Even by moonlight, with only one eye working properly, I saw the way she was sitting, the way she held her body, the cold pallor under the black skin. I asked, “How badly are you hurt?”

“Rib,” she said softly, indicating her left side. “Maybe two.” I could hardly hear her above the noise of the river. The coolly invulnerable Sailor Lal had vanished completely—now that I was safely aboard, she was at last permitting herself her own pain. Her wide eyes had stopped seeing me; in another moment she would surely collapse where she sat, leaving this unlikely craft to the equally dubious charge of Captain Soukyan, who had just recently gone down with his own ship. I took gentle hold of her shoulders and leaned close, asking, “How do you stop this thing? Make it go to land, I mean.”

I had to repeat the question several times before she shook her head violently, as though to clear it, and put my left hand hard on the tiller. “Push,” she whispered; then pressed the lines controlling the little sail into my right hand, managed to mouth the word “Pull,” and sagged into me, so completely unconscious that her dead weight almost took us both into the water. I caught hold of the mast to hold us back.