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“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 stem. 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.
XXXI
The People of the Lake
PIA AND I spent the night on one of the floating islands, where I, who had entered Thecla so often when she was unchained but a prisoner, now entered Pia when she was still chained but free. She lay upon my chest afterward and wept for joy — not so much the joy she had of me, I think, but the joy of her freedom, though her kinsmen the islanders, who have no metal but that they trade or loot from the people of the shore, had no smith to strike off her shackles.
I have heard it said by men who have known many women that at last they come to see resemblances in love between certain ones, and now for the first time I found this to be true in my own experience, for Pia with her hungry mouth and supple body recalled Dorcas. But it was false too in some degree; Dorcas and Pia were alike in love as the faces of sisters are sometimes alike, but I would never have confused one with the other.
I had been too exhausted when we reached the island to fully appreciate the wonder of it, and night had been nearly upon us. Even now, all I recall is dragging the little boat to shore and going into a hut where one of our rescuers kindled a tiny blaze of driftwood, and I oiled Terminus Est, which the islanders had taken from the captured hetman and returned to me. But when Urth turned her face to the sun again, it was a wondrous thing to stand with one hand on the willow’s graceful trunk and feel the whole of the island rock beneath me!
Our hosts cooked fish for our breakfast; before we had finished them, a boat arrived bearing two more islanders with more fish and root vegetables of a kind I had never tasted before. We roasted these in the ashes and ate them hot. The flavor was more like a chestnut’s than anything else I can think of. Three more boats came, then an island with four trees and bellying, square sails rigged in the branches of each, so that when I saw it from a distance I thought it a flotilla. The captain was an elderly man, the closest thing the islanders had to a chief. His name was Llibio. When Pia introduced me to him, he embraced me as fathers do their sons, something no one had ever done to me previously.
After we separated, all the others, Pia included, drew far enough away to permit us to speak privately if we kept our voices low — some men going into the hut, and the rest (there were now about ten in all) to the farther side of the island.
“I have heard that you are a great fighter, and a slayer of men,” Llibio began.
I told him that I was indeed a slayer of men, but not great.
“That is so. Every man fights backward — to kill others. Yet his victory comes not in the killing of others but in the killing of certain parts of himself.”
To show that I understood him, I said, “You must have killed all the worst parts of your own being. Your people love you.”
“That is also not to be trusted.” He paused, looking out over the water. “We are poor and few, and had the people listened to another in these years…” He shook his head.
“I have traveled far, and I have observed that poor people usually have more wit and more virtue than rich ones.”
He smiled at that. “You are kind. But our people have so much wit and virtue now that they may die. We have never possessed great numbers, and many perished in the winter just past, when much water froze.”
“I had not thought how difficult winter must be for your people, without wool or furs. But I can see, now that you have pointed it out to me, that it must be hard indeed.”
The old man shook his head. “We grease ourselves, which . does much, and the seals give us finer cloaks than the shore people have. But when the ice comes, our islands ca
I thought then of the Claw, which the hetman had taken from me and sent to the castle, and I said, “The land people obey the master of the castle. Perhaps if you made peace with him, he would stop them from attacking you.”
“Once, when I was a young man, these quarrels took two or three lives in a year. Then the builder of the castle came. Do you know the tale?”
I shook my head.
“He came from the south, whence, as I am told, you come as well. He had many things the shore people wanted, such as cloth, and silver, and many well-forged tools. Under his direction they built his castle. Those were the fathers and grandfathers of those who are the shore people now. They used the tools for him, and as he had promised, he permitted them to keep them when the work was done, and he gave them many other things. My mother’s father went to them while they labored, and asked if they did not see that they were setting up a ruler over themselves, since the builder of the castle could do as he chose with them, then retire behind the strong walls they had built for him where no one could reach him. They laughed at my mother’s father and said they were many, which was true, and the builder of the castle only one, which was also true.”