Lalette felt that the arm-pieces of her chair were carved into animals’ heads and now turned her attention toward the center of the room, where a single very weak taper burned on a table of almost eye-level height before a bronze armillary sphere formed in interlaced tracery. A clockwork turned the sphere; its parts flashed dully. In that breathing silence the voice of the elder Pyax spoke out, deep and almost ominous:
“Father, in our darkness, we who have waited long, and long hoped, pray you not to turn your face from the children of your creation and the hope of your glory, but to give us light, light, that we may surround your throne with our praises.”
Someone sobbed in the dim; Lalette’s side-glance caught a glimpse of Gaidu’s face buried in his hands. To her, as the older man went on with his prayer, the scene that might have been moving became painful and ridiculous—grown people playing make-believe like silly children, weeping before a machine that must unfailingly come to the end expected of it—while there were true matters of life and death and love lying unsolved. So watching the dull repeated gleam from the sphere, she swept into reverie till sphere and taper reached the term of their movement in a sharp intake of breath from those around. A tiny runnel of flame slipped across the base beneath the device, its heart seemed to split apart, discharging a bright ball of purest fire, which threw the whole room into color.
At once the people leaped to their feet, and shouting “Light! Light! God sees us!” began embracing and congratulating each other, while servants hurried in to light tall candles. Lalette found herself in the grip of a woman with a haired mole on her chin, whose over-ample contours were laced into a costume from one of the knightly legends. The woman capered up and down as she talked.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she cried in a high voice. “We are so glad to have you come! Ser Pyax never spends less than a hundred scudi on his festival! You are the one who witched Count Cleudi, aren’t you? The other two Pyax boys couldn’t come for the ceremony, but they have no sisters, you know. God never fails as the world turns. You must try some of our Zigraner wine.”
A servant was at Lalette’s side, with the beverage in a huge silver flagon on a huge silver tray, and Gaidu Pyax was offering her one of his paired festival-cups, curiously carved, and so heavy it must be pure gold. “My aunt Zanzanna,” he said. “A dog bit her when she was a baby and never since has she been able to control her tongue.”
“I will bite you and drive you madder than I am,” replied the woman with the mole. Lalette looked around over the top of her cup from wine strongly flavored with resin. Everybody was talking at once and in all directions, disjointedly. The room was a little smaller than it had seemed in the dark, but still large, with heavy hangings worked to tapestry at all the windows and pictures occupying every fingerspace of wall between. The chair where the senior Pyax had sat was jewelled around its top. At one end of the room musicians were setting their instruments in order. Most of the people were approaching middle age and were of a strongly Zigraner cast of countenance, but there was one girl of surprising loveliness, blonde enough to be a Kjermanash. The man with her did not look like one of these people either.
Now the musicians struck up and everybody began dancing, even quite an old woman in a corner who had no partner, but stepped alone through the figures. The groups did not form patterns, but each pair toed it by themselves until they reached the end of the measure, when all formed a circle, partners pledging each other in their festival-cups and crying; “Light! Light!” Gaidu Pyax danced well, swinging Lalette strongly when the step called for it. Food was presently brought in, and from time to time a servant would summon the elder Pyax, whereupon he would go to the door and return with a new guest on his arm, clapping hands to make everyone stop what they were doing, whereupon all shouted “You are welcome!” as before, and there would be more drinking of pledges.
Lalette began to feel quite giddy and happy, no longer minding that all these people seemed to be talking about how terribly expensive everything was, or staring at her across their shoulders, as though she were an actress. She did not think anyone here would betray her to the provosts; the women all seemed to be trying to be kind. The thought of what Dame Leonalda would say if she knew her daughter were in such a place struck Lalette as funny, and she sat down, laughing softly to herself over it, to find Aunt Zanzanna bending over her.
“Would you like to lie down for a while in your room? We have such a nice one for you.”
It was easier to walk with the older woman’s arm around her. The room was up two flights, heavily bowered with hangings, and Lalette thought she noted a scent of musk as she lay down on the rich bed in all her clothes. The musk made her feel sick; when she returned from the cabinet she felt so weak she had to lie down again, but the melody of the volalelle they were dancing down there would not let her alone, it kept going round and round inside her head as she slipped down through drowsing wakefulness to full dream and an uneasy sleep. It must have been nearly day when she woke again, and she felt stiff. The scrape of violins still came from below; for a few minutes she considered returning to the festival, then slipped off her clothes and got into bed.
She woke again to see complete spotted sunlight bright across the wall, wondering for the first sleepy seconds where she was. It was a footstep that had roused her; she turned her head and saw Gaidu Pyax looking down, with spots on his costume.
“The greeting of the morning,” he said. “It is spring.”
“Oh,” was all Lalette could say, pulling the covers close around her neck, and then; “Well, I greet you.”
The smile she had once thought rather pleasant became fixed. “I have come to keep the spring with you.” He laid his hand on the edge of the covers. “You are my partner.”
“No. Not this time. No.”
“It is festival morning. You must.”
“No. What would Rodvard say?”
His laugh had an edge of nastiness. “His head will be on another pillow now. I know him. Why should you not do it as well as he?”
He reached down and began to paw at the bedclothes against her resistance, the scream she tried to give was only a squeak in that heavy-hung and distant room, and then he flung himself on her, catching her wrist to twist it around, crying; “Witch, witch, I will tame you or break all your bones.” She bit at the hand that touched her face, and with her own arm swung a sweeping blow that took him where head and neck join. He was suddenly standing beside the bed again, and she was saying low and furious, through tears:
“If you force me, I will kill myself and you, too. I swear it by the Service.”
Gaidu Pyax’ lips pouted out like a little boy’s, he sank slowly to one knee beside the bed, reaching a hand out gropingly. “Ah, I knew it couldn’t be true,” he said, and lifted toward her a face of wordless misery.
For a long minute she looked at him, all her fierceness and resolution melting in the face of that unhappy desire. (She felt no spark for this boy, only thought: and what if I do, they do not want me, it was all a deceit put upon me, and I can at least heal this one’s hurt); and was just reaching from under the covers to draw him to her and comfort him—
When a flash of lightning wrote in letters of fire across the inside of her mind the wordsWill you go with me now?and though there was no meaning in what they said, she understood that it told the unfaithfulness of her lover.
The hand that had extended to take that of Pyax patted it instead. “I am sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it was my fault. I should have told you. . . . When others do it, I never could. But I thank you for the good festival.”
Back again to the place of masks through streets littered with the sour debris of festival, among which languid sweepers toiled. After what had happened, Lalette did not ask to say farewell to the elder Pyax or Aunt Zanzanna. There was a twitch at the corner of the doorman’s mouth as he let them out; she would not let Gaidu accompany her farther than the market square (for morning had brought back all the anxiety of the price still on her apprehension). He remarked somewhat spitefully that he could understand how she would not wish to have her people see a Zigraner bringing her home.
Laduis answered her knock; he seemed truly happy to see her. The widow was at the cookshop; Lalette changed the mask of Sunimaa for her worn clothes, finishing just as the woman returned. They ate, talking but little, and that much in light terms. Dame Domijaiek sent the boy out, and as his footsteps went down the stair:
“Did you find him?” she asked.
“He is at Sedad Vix.” Her mouth worked a little, and with the calm eyes fixed upon her, she could keep it back no more. “He has been unfaithful to me.”
“I do not understand.”
“In the witch-families we cannot help—”
“Ah. Then it is a knowledge gained through falsity and witchcraft, not through the God of love, and so will lead to no good end.”
“I am unhappy,” was all Lalette could whisper, (not understanding what the woman was trying to say).
“It is because you look on this man as personal to you. Love must share with all.”
(There was something passionately wrong with this, Lalette felt, but rue and the after-lash of last night’s wine and this morning’s experience had left her too low to seek out the flaws.) She began to weep softly.
After a few minutes, the widow said: “Let us reason. If you owe him not less than all love, so he owes as much to you; and by destroying your joy, he has failed his obligation. Do you still love him, not as we must love all, but to yourself, as of the material world?”
(It seemed to Lalette as though there were something big and dark and heavy in her breast where her heart ought to be, and she had no clear thoughts at all any more.) “I did not—ah, I do not know, he is all I have.”
“You have a mother, child.”
“A mother who tried to sell me! And still would, if she could find me.”
“Because she wishes to save you from distresses she herself has felt. That also is done in love, I think.”
“Then I’ll have no love!” cried Lalette, looking up furiously, tear-drops sparkling on her lashes. “I’ll hate and hate and hate.”
A tiny red spot appeared on each of Dame Domijaiek’s cheeks. “I do not think you had better say that again in this house,” she said. “I have an arrangement to make, and will return before evening. Tell Laduis.”
She went out, leaving a Lalette who could hardly bear herself, nor find anything to do, in her mind going over and over the dreadful ground of Rodvard’s treachery and the fact that he was one of the Sons of the New Day. Even if he came to her now, she would not have him, that book was closed by his own hand; and the boy Laduis coming in, she allowed him to draw her out of her megrims, so that when the widow returned, they were almost gay together. But it was almost dawn before sleep touched her.
She came awake with a start, and the sense that something dreadful had happened. It must be late morning; the widow was gone from the other side of the bed and Laduis’ cot was empty and neatly made up. There was—
All at once the whirl at the back of her mind resolved itself into a pattern. There were two things in it, a picture of a strange room where men talked before a fire while a sea beat on a rocky shore, and running through it as though the picture were transparent, an appeal so naked and desperate that it brought her to her feet at once—mind speaking to mind without words to say that the holder of her Blue Star was lying bewitched and near death.
There was no wine; it was horribly hard to trace out the pattern of the counter-witchery in water, even with the help of some dust from the corner, and the effort of the projection left her so weak and shaken that when it was done she collapsed across the bed in the shift that had served her as a night-dress and did not even hear Dame Domijaiek come in.
“So you have done it,” said her voice (and Lalette thought that she had never in her life heard anything so cold).
Lalette raised her head. The older woman was looking at the patterns which still moved faintly, not at her at all. “I ask your pardon,” she said. “It was an emergency; I learned—”
“Nothing you can say will change the fact that you have brought witchery into my house.”
Lalette struggled to her feet. “Well, I will go.”
“Yes,” said the mask-maker, “I think you must go. You have brought on me and my son even worse dangers than you dream of. You must go. When you spoke of hating yesterday, I thought it might come to that, but I foolishly let sympathy overrule my judgment.”
In the room above them, Mme. Kaja struck a chord on her music, and after one false beginning, launched into the bride’s aria from “The Disinherited.” Lalette looked at the floor and there were tears in her eyes. The widow spoke again:
“Yet you were sent to me for help, and help you I will, if you will take it. I think there is only one chance in the world for you, and that is to go to Mancherei and place yourself under the dominion of the Prophet.”
“But I have no money to get there, no money at all, and what could I do there?” said Lalette (now angry with herself for having jeopardized herself and the widow too, in some manner, for the sake of false Rodvard; and willing in her contrition to follow this leading, but not seeing how it could be done).
“Love forever finds a way to draw to itself those who need it. There is a fund for the transportation of those who would go thither; and under the ordinance of the Prophet, there have been established the houses called couvertines of the Myonessae, where there is shelter and gainful employ for such girls as yourself, who need them.”
“I—I do not believe in this religion, and—I am a witch.”
“Few believe in the beginning, but only turn to our doctrine for relief from some condition of the world. It is this witchcraft you must escape.”
Lalette heaved a sigh. (Her head ached now, and what was the use of this struggle to be free and one’s own? The strings tightened, one was drawn back to puppethood.)
“Very well. If you will tell me what to do.”
The conventicle was held at the back of a warehouse; people sat on bales of wool, or leaned against them. Guards against the provosts had been set at the door. One, who was addressed as “Initiate” pronounced a discourse of which Lalette hardly understood a word, it was so abstract. She could hardly keep her eyes open; the descent into doze and the jerk back were agonizing. A desiccated woman who breathed through her nose was seated on the next bale. At the end of the discourse, she took Lalette’s hands in both her own, with a gesture astonishing until one observed that all the people in the gathering were similarly greeting neighbors. To Lalette’s surprise most of them seemed to be well-to-do people with an expression of almost dogged cheerfulness, but there seemed about them something lacking, as though they had bought this good cheer with the sacrifice of some quality.
The thin woman was still talking when a man with an engraved smile touched Lalette’s arm and said that the Initiate would like to see her. The man’s face was calm as though carved in stone; he asked her whether she was married? Had read the First Book of the Prophet? Drank fortified alcohols? Practiced the Art? He looked at her as though his glance would bore straight through when she answered the last honestly that she had done so, but would practice it no more. Then he pronounced a discourse as incomprehensible as that he had given to the company, ending by saying she must be reborn into purest love.
At the close of this he told her that he had looked into her heart and believed her honest, but that she must carefully study the Prophet’s First Book. He gave her a letter for the cargo-overseer of a vessel even then at the wharf; the book, he said, would be furnished to her aboard by the third mate of the vessel. Dame Domijaiek had been her guarantee; love would be her protector. She was kissed on the forehead and they all went out into a spring twilight with drizzles of rain.
At the wharf someone was trying to lead a protesting horse into the ship, among stampings and confused shouts. Lalette huddled in the shadow, as close as she could get to the widow Domijaiek and regarded the masts running up into the grey, with their climbing triangles of rope tracery. A wide plank led through a gap in the bulwarks before them, but now the horse was disposed of, the ship’s people were engaged in some bargle at one end of the vessel; no one paid any attention to the two women who tripped to the deck and stood uncertain. At last a man detached himself from the group with a cheerful farewell and came along the deck toward them, cap on head and munching a piece of bread. He would have passed with a brief stare in the assembling gloom, but the widow halted him with outstretched hand and asked where was the overseer of cargo?
He halted with mouth open and cheek puffed out with food. “By the lazarette,” and before either could put another question, disappeared round a wooden structure that rose from the planking. A few spurts of rain fell. Lalette shivered more snugly into her cloak (wondering whether “witch” might not be written on her forehead to make all shun her save those whom others shunned, as Amorosians and Zigraners). Now the chatter broke up and three or four men together came toward the head of the plank, porters mainly with their iron hooks in their belts. The exception had broad but stooped shoulders, a close grey mat of beard and an unlighted lantern in his hand. To him Dame Domijaiek addressed herself, inquiring where the lazarette might be.
He waved a hand. “Aft of the tri-mast, leftward”; then glanced at Lalette, stepped close and peered at her so directly that she shrank away. “For Ser Brog, mother?” he said, and turned to the older woman. “Looky here, mother, I ha’n’t seen you before along Netznegon dock, eh? You come to see me when you finish with Ser Brog, and maybe we do business, eh? At Casaldo’s.” The porters laughed and one of them bubbled a derisive sound through his lips (Lalette was already repenting her undertaking).
A voice behind a door told them to enter. It belonged to a tall man with white hair, whose black fuzzy eyebrows leaped up a long face when he saw that his visitors were women. He did not rise, but cast a half-regretful glance at the sheet of computations on a leaf let down from the wall before him. The letter he at first held far away as though it were an affiction of proclamation; when he grasped its purport and had seen the signature, he rose, all courtesy. “Aye, hands must wash face,” he said. “I trust you left Ser Kimred well? Will you be having a little wine?”
Dame Domijaiek excused herself, since she must return to her child, but as she embraced Lalette farewell, the girl felt thrust into her hand a little cloth pouch with coins in it, and was suddenly at the edge of weeping. When she turned, Ser Brog had set out a pair of pewter cups and was drawing the cork from a bottle of wine. He bowed her to the single chair, himself taking the edge of the built-in bed, which was so hedged about by cabinets that he must bend.
He said; “So you are seeking a sea-voyage, Demoiselle Issensteg?” (This was the name the letter had given her.) “Are you one of the inland Issenstegs from Veierelden? I hear there have been troubles in that region.”
(Was he trying to draw her into indiscretion, and how much did he really know of her origin and purpose?) She said that she was not of the Veierelden branch and waited. He asked her politely whether she had had a joyous festival and were a good sailor. When she said that she had not been at sea before, his face took on some concern, and he regretted that the captain’s wife, who usually sailed with them, would not do so this voyage. There were no other women aboard. He would provide her with a bell for summoning someone when needed—“not that you will be molested, demoiselle, but I will say the third mate is as strange—as a dog with two heads.”
With this, Ser Brog finished his wine and rose to light her to a duplicate of his own tiny cabin. She decided she had been mistaken about the question, he was only expressing interest in the friend of a friend. It was nice not to have to be afraid. An hour or so later, as she sat curled up on the bed, but not yet disrobed, came a demonstration of how well the Amorosians cared for their own. A knock on the door turned into a porter with a neatly-strapped small trunk, painted with her assumed name. It held an assortment of body-linens, shoes and a dress in her size, new and of good quality.
She was roused by feet beating in rhythm and the sound of distant shouts; a big round spot of light swung slowly from side to side across the door. Last night had shown her a jug and a basin beneath the let-down leaf that formed a writing table, but the water was so cold it gave her goose-pimples. The new dress would need taking in at the shoulders, so after trying it, she returned to the old before stepping toward the deck along a passage that held three more doors like her own. Two men in yokes were pushing and relaxing on opposite sides of a pivoted bar (to steer the ship, she supposed), under the orders of an officer in a green cap. One of the workers was the curl-bearded man who had accosted Dame Domijaiek the evening before. He relaxed one hand to touch his forelock and had the grace to look sheepish. The officer hardly looked at her; he was watching the masts that rose on every side and the small boats about, for they were well out into the Bredafloss, moving steadily downstream, though the sails hung so flat, it seemed they could contain no air at all.
Lalette stepped past the steersmen to watch the slow pageant of river moving by, and heard a step. Ser Brog; he touched his cap and invited her to breakfast, down a flight of steep stairs and along another passage to an apartment at the rear of the ship. A skylight threw dappled gleams across a table laid for five, with food already on it. Another man was standing by; Ser Brog presented the second mate, and as he did so, a big officer with a firm chin and bags under his eyes came in with an air of great hurry and sat down without waiting for the rest. This was the captain, Ser Mülvedo; he bounced half an inch from his seat when his name was mentioned, and fell to eating while the rest were taking their places.
Lalette thought his courtesy somewhat strange to one who wore a badge of good condition, and it was stranger still when a youngish officer entered, to be greeted by the Captain with; “You are tardy. You know the rule of the ship. Take your meal with the crew.”
The young officer went out sourly, but not before Lalette recognized him as the one who had directed her toward the lazarette. The meal went on in silence; when the Captain rose, so did the others, and Ser Brog touched Lalette’s arm to take her to the deck again. The spring air was fine, the stream-bank all tricked out in tender green. Lalette looked (and felt with a thrill of delight that all was really now spring for her, she was free from the old life and everything to win), but Ser Brog was speaking.
“I am sorry to dream,” she said.
“Why, dreams do be what we grow by. I would be saying that you had brought luck and fair weather on our leave-taking—for all but Tegval.”
“The one sent from his breakfast?”
“He.” The cargo-overseer laughed. “Our third mate is an admirable young man, with only one flaw—that he has discovered how admirable he is and does not stint his own admiration.”
(The third mate would give her the book.) Said Lalette, watching a tall unpainted barn without a window that walked slowly past along the shore; “Yet your captain seemed very harsh with him for so light a fault.”
“Oh, that is only the rule of the sea. On a ship one learns early that in this world there is no such thing as following one’s own desire; it is all a pyramid of orders.”
“You are grim.”
“No, I only see things as they are.” Now he began to make remarks which she must have answered, for he smiled and continued (but now her mind had leaped far away, and she was wondering whether she would see Rodvard again ever, or recover her Blue Star? Bound out to sea and away; it was his fault, who had given her unfaithfulness and desertion in exchange for the offered kindness and the abandonment of her mother. And now she wondered why she had embarked on the counter-witchery without even questioning whether she should; she felt a tear behind her eye, and hoped he had come to know what resources of fidelity and good will he had lost in her. No, not again, I’ll never let another have the making of my joy.)
A whistle was blown; men moved along the deck of the ship, and Tegval came toward them with his cap insouciantly on one side to be presented. He had the same look of inner peace as the Amorosians of the conventicle, but mingled with it an air of dash and recklessness.
A frond of white had spread across the sky as they talked. Lalette went to her room in the round covered-house that rose from the deck, and applied herself to the needle. Making the new dress right was a problem, since she had done little but broidery before, and she became so taken with fitting and clipping as not to note the tick of time; then felt drowsy, and lay down to be roused by a knock at the door.
It was Tegval, third mate. “May I lead you to supper?” The ship had no motion when they reached air; here they were in the middle of a brown-blue tide, with flat shores stretching to green-blue on either flank. Tegval helped her graciously down the stair, and was this time prompt enough so that all of them were waiting when Captain Mülvedo came in. This officer was now at ease, cracking his face into a smile for Lalette and trying to converse with her about people a demoiselle of condition might be expected to know. Some of them she did know, but was forced to avoid the issue lest he learn the falsity of her name.
Tegval offered her his arm after the meal, and showed her around the deck as far forward as the tri-mast, his discourse being of the parts of the ship and the beauty of the sea. He would answer little when she asked him about Brog, the Captain and other personalities, and as evening was now beginning to grow shadowy, with a hint of chill, she announced an early return to her cabin. He leaned close as he handed her in the door and said in a low voice that he would knock at the fourth glass of night with a book, then tipped a finger to his lips to prevent questions (and she realized that even on a ship trading to Mancherei, it was not too well to be an Amorosian).
With no desire for sleep, she stretched out on the bed and tried to solve her riddles—how it was that her mind should turn to the seldom-felt nearness of Rodvard. There had been about him the faintest trace of some odor like that of old leather, masculine and comforting. She was a little irritated at herself for feeling the lack of it, and her mind drifted off through other angers till she lay there in the dark, simmering with wordless fury over many things; the ship began to move. The change in circumstance made her conscient of what she was doing; she began to weep for her own troubles, the tears trickling into the hard pillow where her face was buried, thinking that after all Rodvard had perhaps been right to slip away from a witch with so vile a temper.
There was a lamp hanging from a kind of pivoted chandelier. She swung out of the bed to light it, but had to strike more than once to obtain a good spark. By this time there was the queerest feeling in her stomach as though it were turning; she lay down again, not sure whether this was the over-robust supper she had eaten or the veritable malady of the sea. Orderly stampings and the sound of shouts drifted through the cabin’s small window as her illness declared itself more firmly; she was miserable, her mind going round like a rat in a slat trap until a whistle was blown four times and someone knocked at the door.
Tegval, of course, with an overjacket on that swung as he stood balancing to the motion of the ship on widespread feet. “We sail on a fair and rising wind,” said he, in a lilt. “Good fortune. Are you troubled by the sea, demoiselle?”
“I am—ill.” (Hating to confess it.)
“No matter. Give me your hand.”
It was taken in both his in a manner curiously impersonal, the eyes were closed and his lips moved. They opened pale blue. “You will be well,” said he and sat down on the chair which, for the first time, she noted as bolted to the floor. She did not believe him and the swing of the lamp made her dizzy (and now she could feel his personality reaching out toward her with an effort almost physical, and was enough ashamed of her former angers to put into her tone some of the kindness now felt toward the race of man):
“You are most good. I was told you would have a book for me.”
He undid his lacings and produced from beneath the jacket a volume, large, flat and all bound in blue leather with the royal coat of arms of Dossola on it to indicate who was the author. “You should not let it be seen,” he said. “Our cargo-overseer takes the law’s letter so seriously that he would denounce his best friend—which I am not.”
“You may count on me.” Their fingers touched as he handed it to her, no longer impersonal, and she let the contact linger for a brief second, before leafing over the pages. They were printed in heavy-letter with red initials. “What a beautiful book!” she said.
“It is the word of love,” he said. “A true word, a good word—” chopping off suddenly as though there were more it would be imprudent to tell.
“I will read it.” She did not want him to go quite yet and sought for words. “God knows, I need some help in the tangle of my life.”
Said he: “We make a distinction between the god of evil and the God of love, in whose arms we may lie secure from the savagery that infests the world. Ah, inhumanity! Today a plover lit in the rigging, and what must they do but net that bird to be eaten by the captain. I could barely consume my supper for thinking of it.”
Lalette stirred. “I do not understand this feature of your doctrine. One must often go hungry by thinking so, it seems to me. Do we not all live by the death of other beings, and even a plant suffer when it is devoured?”
Tegval stood up. “In true love, as you will learn, all are parts of one body, and must give whatever another needs for sustenance. Read the book and sleep well, demoiselle.”
He was gone, and to Lalette’s surprise, so was her illness.
It was a strange book, cast in the form of a marvellous tale about a young man whose troubles were manifold, and only because he sought at each step to control his actions by reason, as he had been taught; it seemed that reason forever deceived him, because something would arise that was not comprehended in his philosophy, but was born from the natural constitution of an imperfect world. Thus reason always led him into doing evil, from which he would only be rescued by rejecting reason for affection to his fellow-men. Lest the reader should miss any part of the thought, he who had set this down abandoned his romance from time to time to draw a moral, as: “None can turn from vileness to virtue but those unbound by the teaching of the academies that consistency is a virtue.”
Lalette found such interjections an annoyance, but forgave many of them for the beauty of the words, which were like a music; and the great glory of the descriptions of clouds, trees, brilliant night, and all the things that one person may share with all others, but were polluted (said the author) when the one would hold them to himself. Yet the type of the volume made it hard reading, the swing of the lamp made it flicker, so after a time she turned out the light and drifted to sleep.
By morning the ship was leaning through long surges under a grey sky with all her sails booming. It was hard to keep food on the table; at breakfast Captain Mülvedo rallied Lalette hilariously, saying she was so good a sailor he must send her to the masthead to run ropes. Brog smiled at her paternally; the first mate, whose ears moved at the end of a long jaw as he chewed, laughed aloud at the Captain’s light jest, and offered to teach her to direct the steering-yoke. On the deck she felt like a princess (that this adventure would succeed after all, glad that she had done with tortured Rodvard), with her hair blowing round her face and salt spray sweet on her lips. The waters set forth an entrancing portrait of sameness and change; she turned from the rail to see Tegval all jaunty, with his eye fixed bow-ward, balancing lightly.
Said Lalette; “I would be glad to know what witchcraft it was you used to cure me so quickly.”
“No witchcraft, demoiselle,” said he, not turning his head, “but the specific power of love, which wipes out misery in joy. And now no more of this.”
The ship heaved; she would have lost her balance but that he put out a hand to sustain her, and the Captain’s voice bellowed: “Tegval! I will thank you to remember that an officer’s duty is to watch his ship and not the pretty ladies. You will do better in the forward head.”
He had come unobserved upon them; now as the third mate made a croak of assent, he touched his cap to the girl. “No disrespect to you, demoiselle. You know the legend old seamen have, ha, ha, of sea-witches with green hair that speak to the spirit of a ship and witch her to a doom that is yet ecstasy for her crew? Be careful how you handle the people of my ship; for at sea I have the rights of justice and can diet you on bread and water.” He shook a finger and ruffled like a cock, laughing till all the loose muscles of his face pulled in loops.
“But my hair is not green,” said she, falling into the spirit of his words for very joy of the morning (but thinking with the back of her mind—what if he knew I am a witch? and—this one can do nothing for me; why am I here?).
“There was a mate with me once,” he said, “in the oldQuìnadaat the time of the Tritulaccan war, which you are too young to remember, demoiselle.” He ducked his head in a kind of bow to emphasize the compliment. “Yeh, what a time of it we had in those days, always dodging from one port to another, and afraid we’d be caught by a rebel cruiser or one of those Tritulaccans and finish our years pulling an oar under the lash in the galleys of an inshore squadron. A dangerous time and a heavy time; you cannot imagine the laziness of some of these sailors, demoiselle, who will see their own lives sacrificed rather than keep a sharp watch. I do remember now how we were making into the Green Islands in broad daylight, when I found one of them sound asleep, cradled in the capon-beam forward, where he had been set as a lookout—and in the Green Islands, mind you, where armed vessels would lie in among the branches to pounce on you.
“Yet you shall not think it was an exciting life, demoiselle, for the thing no one will ever believe is that in war you go and go, attending death with breakfast and nothing ever happening, so that it is almost a relief to fight for life. This mate now—what was his name? He was always called Rusty for no reason I could ever plumb, since his head was not rusty at all, but dark as yours—well, Rusty, the mate, you could hardly call him handsome, but he was gay and lively and had a good tongue. Always telling stories he was, of things that happened, and the good half of them happened to other people, though he took the name of it. But bless you, nobody minded, he could carry off the tale so well. I call to mind how one night when we were both together at the home of Ser Lipon, that was our factor, Rusty started right in with the story of a polar-bear hunt in the ice beyond Kjermanash that I had no more than finished telling him about the day before, just as though he had been in the center of it.
“I sat with my mouth open, but never saying a word, because it had not happened to me, neither, and beside, the Lipons had a daughter, a pretty little thing named Belella, who seemed as much doting on Rusty as he on her, and it was no part of my game to spoil him, since I was spoken for already, y’ see? So he told the story of the polar-bear hunt and soon enough the two of them were off in an angle of the parlor, and within a week they were married.”
Brog approached, touching his cap. “Your pardon, Captain,” he said. “There is a trouble among those bales of wool. I can find but six marked for your account, whereas by the papers it should be thrice that number.”
Mülvedo frowned. “Ah, pest, I am engaged.” He took Lalette’s arm tight under his own. “See me later, Brog.”
They moved a few steps away, the captain steadying her against the shuddering heave of the sea. “That was his name now, Piansky, though why he should have been called Rusty I never could see. They were married, as I said, after one of those lightning courtships we sailors have to make because we have no time for any others, and they went to live in a big house in Candovaria Square, which the old man had built, and some said it was a cruel waste of money for just the two of them. But I could never follow that, since she was the only daughter, so she would have come into the whole inheritance in time, and she was only getting what would be hers.
“One voyage Rusty missed while they were building their nest, but after that he came back to us, happy as a rabbit, and well he might be with a fine wife, a good home and his fortune made. It was about that time my own wife died; Rusty took me home to be with him while the ship lay over for a new cargo. Dame Belella always had a great deal of wine and a house full of people, different ones always, to whom Rusty must forever be telling some tale of his adventures. She would laugh at the ridiculous parts and look proud over him. They were very gay; at least up to the time of the Tritulaccan war, which I was speaking of.
“I remember going to Rusty’s house after the second or third voyage in that war, and a dangerous running passage it was, too, out with wool to the south and back with goods for the army, but our captain had judged where the Tritulaccans would be, and we never saw a sail of them. That was the passage where we slipped through the Green Islands, as I have said. We reached Rusty’s house late in the evening; the parlor was already full with people sitting drinking round the fire, and Dame Belella stumbled as she got up to embrace him, which shows how much cargo she had taken aboard already, ha, ha. She let him take her place while she sat down on his lap, saying we must be quiet because here was Ensign Glaverth of the Red Shar, who had been on a raid right through the Ragged Mountains, and was just telling about it. I did not think a thing at the time, since this Glaverth was sitting on the floor with his back to a red leather hassock, and besides he was one of those Glaverths from Ainsedel, the family they call the mountain Glaverths, to distinguish them from the ducal branch.
“He was telling how he had requisitioned a bed in a Tritulaccan farmhouse where there was a daughter, and made love to her, so that she told him of an ambush that had been set for the Shar. As I said, I had no hint that Rusty would take it ill till he suddenly interrupted the tale by throwing his cup into the fire and crying that he would have no more of this southern red, which he called hog’s water and traitors’ wine, but wanted the honest fiery beverage of the north.
“Two or three of them laughed and Dame Belella put her finger over his lips, and after that she had called the servitor for fired-wine, she begged this Glaverth to go on with his tale. When he had done and they were all murmuring to ask him questions, Rusty pushed his wife off his lap as though she had been a sack of meal and stood up next to the fireplace, with his own cup in his hand.
“‘You sows of soldiers,’ he said (begging your grace, demoiselle, but he said it so); ‘You sows of soldiers talk of your perils, but they are not real dangers at all, only what you could meet with on a city street and solve with a strong arm or a little straight talk, or’—well, I will not say what else he said, demoiselle, but it was something that made all those in the room to gasp, if you know what I mean, and at least a third of them wearing coronet badges.
“‘Yah!’ Rusty said, ‘Your Tritulaccan wenches! What could they do at the worst but slip a steel splinter in your back, so that you go to Heaven with the Church’s blessing for the glory of old Dossola? But the harridans we seamen must deal with could cost a man his soul and eternal agony. Even now I may be a lost man—a lost man.’ I remember how he said it, putting both hands to his face with a sob, and somebody dropped a cup. They all thought Rusty taken with wine, d’you see, and so did I, but now he began to tell a long tale, with no sign of winishness at all in his voice.
“It was all of our voyage to the south through the Green Islands and I swear to you, demoiselle, had I heard it before I sailed, I would not have sailed at all, so gruesome he made it, with escapes from storm and Tritulaccan raiders and all this only a prelude to telling of a thing he said happened in the Green Islands, where we lay becalmed one night, and he walked the deck. He said then he heard a sound like far-away singing, and the ship began to move without a wind. Going forward, he said, he saw something like pools of green fire in the water; therefore knew the ship was approached of sea-witches who were carrying her on. Would have let go the brow-anchor, he would, but all the men of the deck watch were staring over the side, so little obeying him that they even shook off the hands he laid on them. The song went to his own heart and he knew that the ship and all in it must soon be doomed; therefore, he, Rusty, who still had some part of his wits, conceived the measure of going forward to say they could have him as a willing victim if they would release the rest. This was accepted, he said. One of the demon women clambered to the ship through the rope-hangings and companioned with him all night, then bade him farewell with the word that he must come to her again.
“Demoiselle, I do tell you that never have I heard Rusty give a tale better. But when it was finished, the Ensign Glaverth took Dame Belella’s hand to bid her good night, saying that he would bring his young cousin over to hear some more of Rusty’s tales, and all the others began to go as well. When all were departed, Dame Belella came to sit on the hassock where the Ensign had been, staring into the fire for a while. ‘Will you never become a man?’ she asked her husband when he would have touched her.
“He looked at her a little. ‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ he asked, and was that not a strange question to put?
“‘The wrong thing, yes,’ she said, looking away into the fire, without as much as turning her head. ‘I couldn’t like it any more, even if it were not true, Rusty.’ I remember that, because I did not understand and still do not.
“He did not say anything more at that time, but I noticed that people were not coming to the house so often as before during this stay of ours in port, and while we were on the next voyage, she sold the place and went out in the west to live. So I think perhaps, it was a good fortune to lose my own wife, though a great sorrow at the time, because people do change and grow apart instead of together.”
A wave-crest came across the bulwarks and wetted the edge of Lalette’s dress a little, so that she moved against the supporting arm. Said she (wondering why he had told her this tale); “But she must have known that he only made it up about the sea-witches.”
“That could be, could be, now. Could be that she was angry with him for saying so much to a coronetted man like that Ensign Glaverth. But I think more like that just all of us want a new bed-partner now and again, and she could not bear it that he thought of it before her.”