On Blue's waters Read Online Free PDF Page B

perhaps only while he moistened his mouth. “You’re trying to bring Pas, all the gods from the Long Sun.”
    “No,” I said.
    He ignored it, or did not hear it. “That’s good, because gods could help us if they would. But they had gods of their own, the Vanished People who were here first. They might help us, too. There’s a place on Main, way up on Howling Mountain a little before the trees stop. I found it almost a year ago. Maybe I should have told you.”
    * * *
    I see that I said I had three reasons for not accompanying our five visitors as they proposed. The first (as I indicated) was that I wanted to take leave of my family, and get them to agree to my going, insofar as possible. Nettle would agree because she loved me and Sinew because he hated me, I felt sure; and with their support I had hoped to persuade the twins that it was necessary.
    The second was that I wanted to sail my own boat in search of Pajarocu, and not the boat Marrow had offered to let me have, however good it might be. I did not intend to disparage his offer, as he may have thought; it was a generous one, and one that would have resulted in a serious loss if I had accepted it. He showed me that boat, the Sealily , when I spoke with him in town, and I would guess that it was nearly as fast as my own, and rather more capacious and seaworthy.
    “I’d never been on the water till we came down here,” Marrow told me, “and I haven’t been but twice now. If you’d come by the shop or my booth and told me someday I’d be having boats built for me, I’d have thought you was cracked. I thought Auk the Prophet was cracked when I talked to him up there, and it would have been the same with anybody who said someday I’d want boats. You didn’t put that in your book, about Auk. That I’d thought he was cracked as old eggs. But I did.”
    I told Marrow that Auk was, that he had fractured his skull in the tunnels.
    “Used to see him at sacrifice,” Marrow said, leaning heavily on his big carved stick. “Old Patera Pike’s manteion. The wife and I used to go now and then because he traded with us, him and the sibyls. Maytera Rose that was, and young Maytera Mint, only they sent Maytera Marble to do their buying. Shrike wouldn’t go, just sent his wife. They traded with him anyhow because she went all the time. Gone now, both of ’em. I guess you remember Pike’s manteion?”
    I did. I do. The plain shiprock walls, and the painted statue of Lord Pas (from which the paint was peeling) will remain with me until the day I die, always somewhat colored by the wonder I felt as a small boy at seeing a black cock struggling in the old man’s hands after he had cut its throat, its wings beating frantically, beating as if they might live after all, live somehow somewhere, if only they could spray the whole place with blood before they failed.
    My own bird has flown. Only this lone black feather remains with me, fluttering above this sheet (a sheet that for all I know or all that anyone here knows may have been made in my own mill) spraying the whorl of Blue with the black ink that has done so much good and so much harm. If it had not been for our book, Marrow and the rest would have chosen someone else, beyond argument. As it was, our book- The Book of Silk , or as others would have it, The Book of the Long Sun -spread over this whorl more rapidly than Nettle and I had dared hope. Silk-
    “Silk has become an almost mythic figure,” I began to write. The truth is that he has become a mythic figure. I hear rumors of altars and sacrifices. Disciples who have never seen him promulgate his teachings. If it had not been for our book, Hari Mau and the rest would have chosen someone else, or no one.
    * * *
    Heretofore I have written whatever crossed my mind, I fear. In the future, I will attempt to provide you (whoever you may be) with a connected narrative. Let me say at the outset, however, what readers I hope for.
    First of all for Nettle, my wife,