Natrium
So primitively armed were these lakeshore
fisherfolk—indeed, far more primitively than the actual
autochthonous primitives I had seen about Thrax—that it was some
time before I understood that they were armed at all. There were
more on board than were needed to steer and make sail, but I
assumed at first that they had come merely as rowers, or to add to
the prestige of their hetman when he brought me to his master at
the castle. In their belts they carried knives of the straight,
narrow-bladed kind fishermen everywhere use, and there was a sheaf
of barb-headed fishing spears stowed forward, but I thought nothing
of that. It was not until one of the islands I had been so eager to
see came into view and I noticed one of the men fingering a club
edged with animal teeth that I realized they had been brought as a
guard, and there was in fact something to guard
against.
The little island itself appeared
unexceptional until one saw that it truly moved. It was low and
very green, with a diminutive hut (built like our boat of reeds and
thatched with the same material) at its highest point. A few
willows grew upon it, and a long narrow boat, again built of reeds,
was tied at the water’s edge. When we were closer, I saw that the
island was of reeds too, but of living ones. Their stems gave it
its characteristic verdescence; their interlaced roots must have
formed its raftlike base. Upon their massed, living tangle, soil
had accumulated or been stored up by the inhabitants. The trees had
sprouted there to trail their roots in the waters of the lake. A
little patch of vegetables flourished.
Because the hetman and all the others
on board except Pia scowled at it, I regarded this tiny land with
favor; and seeing it as I saw it then, a spot of green against the
cold arid seemingly infinite blue of the face of Diuturna and the
deeper, warmer, yet truly infinite blue of the sun-crowned,
starsprinkled sky, it was easy to love it. If I had looked upon
this scene as I might have upon a picture, it would have seemed
more heavily symbolic—the level line of the horizon dividing the
canvas into equal halves, the dot of green with its green trees and
brown hut—than those pictures critics are accustomed to deride for
their symbolism. Yet who could have said what it meant? It is
impossible, I think, that all the symbols we see in natural
landscapes are there only because we see them. No one hesitates to
brand as
mad the solipsists who truly believe that the world exists only
because they observe it and that buildings, mountains, and even
ourselves (to whom they have spoken only a moment before) all
vanish when they turn their heads. Is it not equally mad to believe
that the meaning of the same objects vanishes in the same way? If
Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself unworthy, as I
know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I
locked the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying
that the writing in this book, over which I have labored for so
many watches, will vanish into a blur of vermilion when I close it
for the last time and dispatch it to the eternal library maintained
by old Ultan.
The great question, then, that I
pondered as I watched the floating island with longing eyes and
chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart, is that of
determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are
like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last
letter but one, and a sword in the last.
What message was intended for me in the
little homey hut and its green garden suspended between two
infinities I do not know. But the meaning I read into it was that
of freedom and home, and I felt then a greater desire for freedom,
for the liberty to rove the upper and the lower worlds at will,
carrying with me such comforts as would suffice me, than I had ever
felt before—even when I was a prisoner in the antechamber of the
House Absolute, even when I was client of the torturers in the Old
Citadel.
Then, just at the time when I desired
most to be free and we were as near the island as our course would
take us, two men and a boy of fifteen or so came out of the hut.
For a moment they stood before their door, looking at us as though
they were taking the measure of boat and crew. There were five
villagers on board in addition to the hetman, and it seemed clear
the islanders could do nothing against us, but they put out in
their slender craft, the men paddling after us while the boy rigged
a crude sail of matting.
The hetman, who turned from time to
time to look back at them, was seated beside me with Terminus Est across his lap. It seemed to me that at
every moment he was about to set her aside and go astern to speak
to the man at the tiller, or go forward to talk to the other four
who lounged in the bow. My hands were tied in front of me, and it
would have taken only an instant to draw the blade a thumb’s width
clear of her sheath and cut the cords, but the opportunity did not
come.
A second island hove into view, and we
were joined by another boat, this bearing two men. The odds were
slightly worse now, and the hetman called one of his villagers to
him and went a step or two astern, carrying my sword. They opened a
metal canister that had been concealed under the steersman’s
platform there and took out a weapon of a type I had not seen
before, a bow made by binding two slender bows, each of which
carried its own string, to spacers that held them half a span
apart. The strings were lashed together at their centers as well,
so that the lashings made a sling for some missile.
While I was looking at this curious
contrivance, Pia edged closer.
“They’re watching me,” she whispered. “I can’t untie you now. But
perhaps …” She looked significantly toward the boats that followed
ours.
“Will they attack?”
“Not unless there are more to join
them. They have only fish spears and pachos.” Seeing my look of
incomprehension she added, “Sticks with teeth—one of these men has
one too.”
The villager the hetman had summoned
was taking what appeared to be a wadded rag from the canister. He
unwrapped it on the open lid and disclosed several silver-gray,
oily-looking slugs of metal.
“Bullets of power,” Pia said. She
sounded frightened.
“Do you think more of your people will
come?”
“If we pass more islands. If one or two
follow a landboat, then all do, to share in what there is to be
gotten from it. But we will be in sight of the shore again soon—”
Under her ragged smock, her breasts heaved as the villager wiped
his hand on his coat, picked up one of the silvery slugs, and
fitted it into the sling of the double bow.
“It’s only like a heavy stone—” I
began. He drew the strings to his ear and let fly, sending the slug
whizzing through the space between the slender bows. Pia had been
so frightened that I half expected it to undergo some
transformation as it flew, perhaps becoming one of those spiders I
still half believed I had seen when, drugged, I had been caught in
these fishermen’s nets.
Nothing of the sort occurred. The slug
flew—a shining streak—across the water and splashed into the lake a
dozen paces or so before the bow of the nearer boat.
For the space of a breath, nothing more
happened. Then there was a sharp detonation, a fireball, and a
geyser of steam. Something dark, apparently the missile itself,
still intact and flung up by the explosion it had caused, was
thrown into the air only to fall again, this time between the two
pursuing boats. A new explosion followed, only slightly less
intense than the first, and one of the boats was nearly swamped.
The other veered away. A third explosion came, and a fourth, but
the slug, whatever other powers it might possess, seemed incapable
of tracking the boats the way Hethor’s notules had followed Jonas
and me. Each blast carried it farther off, and after the fourth it
appeared spent. The two pursuing boats fell back out of range, but
I admired their courage in keeping up the chase at
all.
“The bullets of power bring fire from
water,” Pia told me.
I nodded. “So I see.” I was getting my
legs set under me, finding secure footing among the bundles of
reeds.
It is no great trick to swim even when
your hands are bound behind you—Drotte, Roche, Eata and I used to
practice swimming while gripping our own thumbs at the small of the
back, and with my hands tied before me, I knew I could stay afloat
for a long time if necessary; but I was worried about Pia, and told
her to go as far forward as she could.
“But then I will not be able to untie
you.”
“You’ll never be able to while they’re
watching us,” I whispered. “Go
forward. If this boat breaks up, hang onto a bunch of reeds.
They’ll still float. Don’t argue.”
The men in the bow did not stop her,
and she halted only when she had reached the point at which a cable
of woven reeds formed the vessel’s stern. I took a deep breath and
leaped overboard.
If I had wished to I could have dived
with hardly a ripple, but I hugged my knees to my chest instead to
make as great a splash as I could, and thanks to the weight of my
boots I sank far deeper than I would have if I had been stripped
for swimming. It was that point that had worried me; I had seen
when the hetman’s archer had fired his missile that there was a
distinct pause before the explosion. I knew that as well as
drenching both men, I must have wet every slug lying on the oiled
rag—but I could not be certain they would go off before I came to
the surface.
The water was cold and grew colder as I
went down. Opening my eyes, I saw a marvelous cobalt color that
grew darker as it swirled about me. I felt a panicky urge to kick
off my boots; but that would have brought me up quickly, and I
filled my mind instead with the wonder of the color and the thought
of the indestructible corpses I had seen littering the refuse heaps
about the mines of Saltus—corpses sinking forever in the blue gulf
of time.
Slowly I revolved without effort until
I could make out the brown hull of the hetman’s boat suspended
overhead. For a while that spot of brown and I seemed frozen in our
positions; I lay beneath it as dead men lie below a carrion bird
that, filling its wings with the wind, appears to hover only just
below the fixed stars.
Then with bursting lungs I began to
rise.
As if it had been a signal I heard the
first explosion, a dull and distant boom. I swam upward as a frog
does, hearing another explosion and another, each sounding sharper
than the last.
When my head broke water, I saw that
the stern of the hetman’s boat had opened, the reed bundles
spreading like broomstraws. A secondary explosion to my left
deafened me for a moment and dashed my face with spray that stung
like hail. The hetman’s archer was floundering not far from me, but
the hetman himself (still, I was delighted to see, gripping
Terminus Est), Pia, and the others were
clinging to what remained of the bow, and thanks to the buoyancy of
the reeds it yet floated, though the lower end was awash. I tore at
the cords on my wrists with my teeth until two of the islanders
helped me climb into their craft, and one of them cut me
free.