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“Going now,” Elai said, and set her foot to mount.
“You might fall off,” the star‑man said critically.
Elai just stared, letting the spi
“I think I’d better walk back with you in case,” the star‑man said.
“I’m going after my clothes.” Elai climbed up, after which her head really spun, and she reeled badly when Scar rose up on his four legs at once. She caught her breath and focussed her eyes and started Scar back down the beach, out into the water where the rocks came down.
“Don’t do that,” the star‑man called, panting along after them, but over the rocks. “You’ll get the leg wet.”
She tucked that leg up behind Scar’s collar and gritted her teeth through his lurching about, his more‑than‑casual pace which sent him whipping along in serpentine haste, throwing her constantly to one point of balance and the other. He hated her to lock her legs because of his breathing. She gripped the bony plates with her hands, feeling the sweat break out on her, but eventually he clambered over the rocks to the place where she had left her breeches and her boots and the vest she wore over her halter.
She climbed off and got everything, and shrugged the vest on, wrapped the boots up in the breeches and just sat down a while until she could get her head to stop whirling and her heart to stop pounding. It seemed a very long way home now. There was the Seaward Tower, and the New Tower was closer, but she had no desire to show her face there, Ellai’s daughter, limping in half‑naked and half‑minded and not able to get her breeches on. She hauled herself up again and clutched her bundle to her as she crawled up and over Scar’s shoulder to set herself on his neck. He was patient now, understanding she was in trouble: he came up gently and searched back and forth for the easy ways up the slope, and meanwhile she held onto her clothes and onto him and let the sky and the grass and the distant view of the nearer two Towers pass in a giddy haze.
Suddenly there was a thumping and a panting and the star‑man came jogging to catch up with them from the side, having found her way up off the beach onto the grassy flats.
Scar looked askance at that. Elai tapped her bare toes at him and soothed him with her hand, blinked hazily as the star‑man caught up and strode along with them, jogging sometimes to stay even.
“What do you want?” Elai asked.
“To see you get home. To see you don’t fall off.” This between gasps.
She slowed Scar down. The star‑man plodded along with her pack, breathing hard and coughing.
“My name’s Elai,” Elai said again pointedly.
“You said that.”
“Elai,” she repeated, scowling at the rudeness of this concerned stranger.
“MaGee,” the star‑man said, whether duly reprimanded or only then figuring out what was due. “I really don’t want to make a stir about this, understand. I’ll just see you get where you’re going. What were you doing swimming out there?”
Elai considered sullenly. It was her dream, which she had never talked about to anyone, a private thing which had gone badly, humiliatingly wrong.
“I watched you,” MaGee said. “You chase one of your rafts out? Your river‑in‑the‑sea could just about drown you, hear?”
Elai lifted her head. “There was the seagoer out there. That was what stopped us, not the river.”
“A little outmatched, weren’t you?”
She was not sure, but it sounded insulting. “They’re big.”
“I know they’re big. They have teeth, you know that?”
“Scar has teeth.”
“Not like those.”
“Where did you see one?”
MaGee’s face took on a careful look. “Just say I know, umn? Next boat you lose, you let it go.”
“Boat.”
“Raft.”
“Ship,” Elai concluded, and frowned. “You fly, MaGee?”
MaGee shrugged.
“How do you catch the wind?” Elai asked, suddenly on that track, with a star‑man at hand and answering questions. “How do you get the wind to blow the ships up?”
She thought she might be answered. There was of a sudden such a look in this MaGee’s pale eyes. “Maybe you’ll figure that out someday,” MaGee said, “when you’re grown.”
There was a sullen, nasty silence. Elai gnawed on it, and her leg was hurting again. She ignored it, adding it up in her mind that star‑man medicine was fallible. Like star‑men. “Your ships ever fall down?”
“I never saw one do it,” MaGee said. “I don’t hope to.”
“If my ships had the wind,” Elai said, “they could go anywhere.”
“They’re quite good,” MaGee said. “Who taught you?”
“I taught me.”
“I’ll bet not. I’ll bet someone told you.”
“I don’t tell lies.”
“I guess you don’t,” MaGee said after a moment of looking up at her as she walked along at Scar’s side. “They’re good ships.”
“Your medicine doesn’t work,” Elai said. “It hurts.”
“It’s going to if you keep hanging that leg down like that.”
“I haven’t got anywhere else to put it, have I?”
“I guess you don’t. But it’s going to hurt until you can lie down and get it level.”
“Huh,” Elai said, frowning, because she really wished the star‑man could do something. But she was mollified about the ships. Proud, even. A star‑man called them fine. “How did you know about the river?”
“The word is current. Like in the river. The sea has them. Really strong ones.”
Elai stored that away in her mind. “What makes them?”
MaGee shrugged again. “You do ask questions, don’t you?”
Elai thought about it. “Where do rivers start from, anyway?”
MaGee gri
“Someday,” Elai said, “Scar and I will just go up the Cloud and see.”
MaGee’s grin perished into something quite like belief. “I shouldn’t listen to your questions.”
“Why?”
“Why, why, and what? I’ll get you home, that’s what. And I’ll thank you if you don’t say I helped you.”
“Why? Don’t they like that?”
“Questions and questions.” MaGee hitched the pack up on her shoulder and plodded on, panting with the pace.
“What makes the ships fly?”
“I’m not going to answer your questions.”
“Ah. You know, then.”
MaGee looked up, sharp and quick, the distance to Scar’s back. “You talk to him, do you?”
“Scar?” Elai blinked, patted Scar’s shoulder. “We talk.”
“When you make Patterns on the ground, what do you do?”
Elai shrugged.
“So, there are some things you don’t talk about, aren’t there?”
Elai made the gesture of spirals. “Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on how Scar is and what he wants and what I want.”
“You mean the same thing means different things.”
Elai shrugged, blinked, confused.
“How do you know?” MaGee pursued.
“Tell me how the ships go.”
“How much does Scar understand? Like a man? Like that much?”
“Caliban things. He’s the biggest caliban in the Towers. He’s old. He’s killed Styx‑siders.”
“Is he yours?”
Elai nodded.
“But you don’t trade calibans, do you? You don’t own them.”
“He came to me. When my grandmother died.”
“Why?”
Elai frowned over that. She had never clearly thought that out, or she had, and it hurt her mother that Scar had not gone to her: that was not for saying out loud.
“That’s a very old caliban, isn’t he?” MaGee asked.
“Maybe he is.” Elai patted him again.
“How many years?”
“Where do star‑folk come from?”
MaGee gri
“Do you live at the Base, MaGee?”
“Yes.”
She thought a moment, and finally brought her dearest dream into the light. “Have you been to the mountains out there, the ones you see from the beach?”
“No.”
“Is that very far?”
“Is that what you sail your ships for?”
“Someday I’ll build a big one.”