Smalltrack was neither a supply freighter nor a pleasure craft. The smell aboard, in spite of a powerful scrubbing, made you instantly aware that it had been a fishing boat for a very long time. Having the Mule aboard didn’t improve matters, since Dross had no respect whatsoever for a human being’s ideas about waste disposal; she added a new fragrance to the prevailing reek of blood and entrails and ancient slime. The captain and the four men of his crew had been on workboats of one kind or another all their lives; if they noticed the smell atall, they paid it little mind. They knew themselves fortunate that it was wintry weather, and no hot sun broiling down to bring everything to a constant simmer and perk. As for their passenger, if she found conditions not to her liking, they didn’t mind that atall.
If pushed, all five would have acknowledged a relish for the idea that Troublesome of Brightwater might not be all that comfortable crossing the Ocean of Storms to Kintucky in their racketydrag old boat. They didn’t precisely want her to suffer, being good-natured men, but they were in mutual accord that she had a trifle discomfort coming to her. If the mechanisms of the universe saw fit to provide that discomfort without any call for their hands meddling in it, why, they found that positively Providential. It spoke to their sense of the fitness of things.
They were Marktwainers—four, including the captain, being Brightwaters by birth, and a single McDaniels finishing up the party—and they were conscious enough that the woman who spent her time silent on an upturned barrel in the stern, looking out over the rough water, was their kinswoman. It comforted Gabriel John McDaniels the 21st that he was just a tad less related to her than the other four, but they all recognized it as a burden to be borne. Relations, like poison plants and balky Mules and the occasional foolfish spoiling a catch, were part of the territory; wasn’t anybody didn’t have kinfolk they’d just as soon not of.
They’d had their instructions from the Grannys:
“You leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone.” Same instructions as for most pesky and viperous things in this world, and they’d proved accurate enough. She sat there on her barrel by the hour, peering through hooded eyes they none of them would of cared to look into directly. If she wanted a drink of water, or something to eat, or a blanket to wrap round her strong thin shoulders, she got it without bothering any of them. If there was anything she wanted that she didn’t have—and likely there was, though it was said she lived a spare and scrimped existence on her lonely mountaintop—she didn’t mention it. And if a line fouled near to her, or a solar collector was wrong in its tilt, she fixed whatever was awry, without fuss and without error and with no assistance from the crew.
“Uncanny, she is,” muttered Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4th, some six hours out to sea. “Just uncanny!” He cleared his throat and stared up at the gray flat lid of the sky as if he was indifferent to the whole thing, just mentioning it in passing. “Can’t say as how I wouldn’t rather of had something else along ... say a serpent, or maybe a Yallerhound.”
Gabriel John McDaniels spat over the side to signify his disgust and demanded to know what Haven McDaniels had come along for, if that was the way he felt about it.
“What’d you expect?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets and setting his feet wide against the roll of the boat. “You expect a fine lady sitting on a tusset? With needlework to her hand, maybe, and a kerchief to her delicate little nose? That is Troublesome of Brightwater back there, just as agreed upon with the Grannys, and exactly as advertised.”
“I know it,” said Haven McDaniels sullenly. “You think I don’t know it?”
“Well, then,” Gabriel John answered him, “there’s no call to comment on it. I strongly misdoubt the Grannys would of offered each of us the sum they did if we’d been taking a Yallerhound to Kintucky. We’re being paid for the hazard of the thing ... and she’s rightly named, is Troublesome! Rightly named, her as could fry your heart in your chest with no more’n her two blue eyes, if she’d a mind to.”
The captain heard that, and it didn’t surprise him. He’d heard the rest, too, but he’d been ignoring it. One of the advantages to captaining so small a boat was that neither crew nor anybody else aboard could keep anything from him. He spoke up sharp and quick.
‘That’s enough of that, Gabriel John McDaniels,” he rapped out. “Days we’ve got ahead of us, this trip. Bad weather and poor food and none of us truly fit ... last thing we need here is superstitious claptrap fouling the air.”
“Now, Captain— “
“I said it was enough. You hear me? I can speak louder, should there be call for to do so. You look to the weather, Gabriel John, and to this leaky woodbucket we travel in so precariously, and leave the tall tales to the tadlings and the Grannys. I’m purely astonished, hearing such stuff from a full-grown man, and him with four years’ full service now on the water.”
Gabriel John McDaniels was not impressed, and he was not about to drop his eyes to the captain. He’d not spent his own childhood roaming the Wilderness Lands of Marktwain with the man, but his daddy had; and many a night he’d seen the two of them with more whiskey in them than had pleased his mother. He held Captain Adam Sheridan Brightwater the 3rd in no awe.
“You’re obliged to take that stand,” he said, speaking right up. “We know that, all of us. But there on that nailbarrel sits the Sister and the Mother and the Greatgrandmother of Evil, the Holy One help us all, and we all of us know that, too! If she so chooses we’ll have storms and leaks; and if she don’t so choose we’ll have an easy journey of it. That’s no tale for tadlings, now—that’s same as saying the sun’s more use to solar collectors than snow is.”
There were two Michael Callaway Brightwaters standing near, one of them a 20th and the other a 37th, something of a nuisance in such close quarters. They hadn’t much use for one another, or for Gabriel John, but they shook their heads like one man now and allowed as how he was absolutely right and the captain could leave off his tales any time.
“We’re not fools,” said the one they called Black Michael—not that his hair was any blacker than Michael Callaway the 37th’s, that was called simply Michael Callaway in the ordinary fashion, but you couldn’t be having them both speak up every time one was wanted. And Michael Callaway nodded, saying:
“We came for the money, same as you, Captain. And what trouble we’ve got on our plates is trouble we bought ourselves. Complaining about it, that’s not seemly; I agree to that. Howsomever, Captain, you’ll do us the favor of telling us no lies, thank you very much.”
The captain stared at the three of them, considering, and at the eloquent back of Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4th, pretending to be fooling with a sail—him that had started all this—and he shrugged his shoulders.
“All right,” he conceded. “I’ll not dispute youall on it. I don’t care for her myself ... they say she was a child once, but I’m hard put to it to believe it. But I’ll not listen to prattle over the matter, either, mind you. As Michael Callaway rightly says, this is our own doing, of our own free will, and talk’ll change nothing. Furthermore and to go on with, such talk heard at the wrong end of the boat might well provoke the lady. You’ll do me the favor of not chancing that. That’s my last word!”
Truth was, he thought as he turned away from them with a set jaw intended to impress them with his firmness of purpose, the sight of her made his blood run colder than the seawater. No woman should stand six feet tall like she did; no woman should fit to a fishingboat like she’d been born on one, when she’d spent her whole life in Castle and in mountain cabin; no woman should have the dark fierce beauty that somehow flamed around her, putting him in mind of the black roses that grew near the edge of Marktwain’s desert in deep summer.
Anybody’d described her to him, and him not knowing, he’d of thought she’d stir his loins. Especially out on this b’damned ocean with no other woman for many a mile and many a long lonely night. Yet when he looked at Troublesome of Brightwater, for all the sweet curve of her breasts and hips and the perfection of her face, he would of sworn he could feel his manhood shriveling in his trousers. He’d as soon of bedded a tall stake of Tinaseeh ironwood.
That didn’t mean he’d tolerate a dauncy and fractious crew, whatever the feelings she raised in him or in them. He’d keep the men too busy to have time left over for mumblings and carry-ons. He wanted to get this fool trip over with—he needed the money the Grannys had come up with, and how they’d done it he couldn’t imagine, but it was none the less a fool trip for all that—and he wanted to find himself back in his own bed, cozy with his own wife, that was a soft round woman more his style. With a voice like the call of an Ozark housedove just as the sun was coming up, and no more like that female in the stern than if they’d been different species altogether.
“You turn to,” he barked over his shoulder at the men, “and I’ll do my share, and we’ll get this out of the way and be home to brag on it before we have time to think.”
Nobody said “if we get home”; they weren’t whiners. They’d been offered a fair sum of money badly needed, and they’d do the job it was offered for. Still, it was a sorry time of year to take to sea in a boat this size and age, Troublesome or no Troublesome. Had the boat been newer, that would of been a help; had it been larger, they couldn’t have handled her with only the five, and that would not have been a good thing. It would cause a certain amount of fuss and feathers to drown five good men, for sure—but if they drowned a daughter of Castle Brightwater they’d set every Granny on Ozark whirling like a gig ... that happen, they’d better hope they all drowned with her. It’d be more comfortable in the long run.
Behind the men, Troublesome chuckled under her breath, and Gabriel John jumped like he’d been pinched.
“Knows what we’re thinking, that one does,” he said flatly.
“And so does the Mule, and that doesn’t bother you.”
“She bothers me,” insisted the man doggedly, “considering what I was thinking just then when she laughed.”
The captain turned back and grabbed Gabriel John’s shoulder in his fist. “That’s one word too many,” he said through his teeth. “One word too many! You guard your thoughts and keep ‘em proper; and you sail this boat and keep your mind on your business. I don’t intend to have to say any of this again.”
As they’d said, there were certain stands he was obliged to take.
It happened that Troublesome did know what they were thinking. But not because of any telepathic powers, such as the Mules had, or the Magicians of Rank. No special powers were required to read those stiff backs with the muscles knotted round the necks—whopping headaches they were going to have, later on!—or the rigid shoulders, or their muttering back of their hands and out of the corners of their mouths. It amused her mightily to think that they could believe she had special skills and still be fretting about their hides; it showed a lack of common sense. After all, if this boat went down, she’d go down with it. Or perhaps it was their souls that they were really worried about, and not their hides; perhaps they thought the wickedness might blow off of her in the seawind and stick to them forever and ever more. She chuckled again, and watched the muscles in their backs twitch to the sound, before she turned her head to look out over the water.
She wasn’t sure of what she’d seen out there, not yet. Might could be it’d been only a trick of the light slanted on the water, such as had ages back made men think dragons swam in the oceans of Old Earth. Might could be it had been the squint of her eye against that light, or her irritation of mind. There was not a single reason to believe that a creature never seen since First Landing—seen then by a group of exhausted people that might have been over given to imagining—should choose to show up a thousand years later and swim alongside her to Kintucky. It was as unlikely a happenstance as had come her way within memory, and she wasn’t going to assume it for gospel too quickly.
First, she’d wait for another sight of that great tail split three ways. And then probably she’d wait for the royal purple of the thing’s flesh to show up clear in the gray of the sea. And when both had happened, assuming they did happen, she’d think it over—and might could be she’d go below and swallow a dose to cure her of her mindfollies.
The Teaching Story had not one word extra to spare on the subject of the creature she half thought she’d seen. The fuel on The Ship had gone bad. Every last thing had been going from bad to worse. The time had come when it was land or die; and then just as they made a desperate plunge toward the planet below them the engines gave up completely and The Ship fell into the Outward Deeps. At which point, as the Grannys taught it:
Even as the water closed over the dying ship and First Granny told the children to stop their caterwauling and prepare to meet their Maker with their mouths shut and their eyes open, a wonderful thing happened. Just a wonderful thing!
Forty of them there were, shaped like the great whales of Earth, but that their tails split three ways instead of two. And their color was the royal purple, the purple of majestic sovereignty.
They met The Ship as it fell, rising up in a circle as it sank toward the bottom. And they bore it up on their backs as easy as a man packs a baby, and laid it out in the shallows, where the Captain and the crew could get The Ship’s door open, and everybody could wade right out of there to safety.
They were the Wise Ones, so named by First Granny; and it may be that they live there still in the Outward Deeps ...
And it may be that they don’t. A thousand years ago, that was, that First Granny had looked into the huge eye of one of them and seen there something she claimed at once for wisdom, and no least sign of them since in all this long time. They could certainly all have died—long, long ago. If ever they were real, that is, and not an illusion born of desperation and nourished on Grannytalk.
No other Teaching Story made mention of them, and no song; not even a scrap of a saying referred to them. It made them most unlikely traveling companions! Why, even the creatures of Old Earth, those left-behind ones that nobody’d seen since before the Ozarkers left their home planet, came up now and again in sayings. Take the groundhog; what a groundhog might be, Troublesome couldn’t have said. There was nothing whatsoever in that computer databanks about them, nor anywhere else. But she knew easy enough from the roles groundhogs took in daily converse that they couldn’t of been any kind of hog— “Quick as a groundhog down a hole!” the Grannys would say. “No bigger’n the ear on a groundhog!”
“Saw its shadow and popped under like a groundhog!” Had to of been little, and quick, and somehow significant; you could figure that out from the scraps. But the creatures of the Outward Deeps? They were mentioned nowhere atall, and what mysterious purpose might bring one to be her escort now ... She sighed. It wasn’t reasonable; but then her ignorance was great.
Troublesome turned her head to the wind and took a deep breath of the salt air to drown out some of the fish stink, and gathered her shawls closer round her, wrinkling her nose as the blown spray spattered her face. It would come up a rain shortly, she was sure, and the men would be blaming her for it. Law, what wouldn’t she give to have had the weather skills they were willing to lay to her account! Now that would of been of some use. Dry fields she could of watered, and high winds taking off the good topsoil she could of tempered, and where the rivers were bringing sullen rot to the roots of growing things she could of driven back the clouds and let the sun see to drying them out. There’d of been a good deal less hunger on Ozark if she’d been able to turn her hand to such work as that.
Instead of which, she thought, reality falling back over her with a thump, she was off on the wildest of goose chases, set her by seven dithering Grannys. Off to see the Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd—
No special wonder her sister had lusted after the man and taken him so willingly to her bed. There was no prettiness to him, no softness anywhere, but he was a man to feast the hungry eyes on, not to mention a few other senses-He gave off a kind of drawing warmth that naturally made you want to shelter in it, male or female—as she herself gave off a cold wind that said, Stand Back! If lust had been one of the emotions known to her she might very well have fancied him her own self; in a kind of abstract fashion, she could see that. But handy though he might be in a bed, the idea that some act of his lay behind Responsible’s sorry condition, or that he could do anything to improve it ... ah, that was only foolishness. Troublesome had no hope for the journey’s end; she traveled to Kintucky for the excellent reason that she’d never been there and might never have a second chance, and because curiosity was one of the emotions she was familiar with.
There were times, in point of fact, when she found herself so curious about the workings of this world that the lack of any source to ask questions of was almost a physical pain. At such times, there being no purpose to such a feeling, she was grateful for the mountain to take out her energies on, and she welcomed the work given her to do though she understood it scarcely atall. She would go at her loom then with a vengeance, making the shuttle fly, singing ballads so old she didn’t know what half the words meant. Unlike her sister, she could sing to pleasure even the demanding ear, and when her audience was only birds and small creatures she didn’t mind doing it. There was nobody on the mountain to wonder at a female singing out. “I go to Troublesome to mourn and weep” when the word was her very name, nor to pity her for the next line all about sleeping unsatisfied, nor to wonder as she changed tunes where Waltzing Hayme might be. She loved the queer ancient songs and valued them far above such frippery as was sung these modem days.
Thinking of it, she very nearly began to sing, and then remembered the five men—it would not do to have them hear her singing and carry the tale of it back to Brightwater. She closed her lips firmly on the riddling song she’d almost let escape, and resolved to close her mind just as tight to the questions running round there. She’d get no answers to them in her lifetime, and might could be it wasn’t meant that humans should have those answers. Might could be, for instance, that they were the proper knowledge of the Wise Ones, kept in trust against a time when they might be needed ...
Granny Hazelbide, commenting to the little girls on the Teaching Story about the saving of the Ozarkers at First Landing, always said the same thing: “First Granny looked right into the eyes of one of them, just right into its eyes! And she said then and there, no hesitating and no pondering on it, ‘They are the Wise Ones,’ and no doubt that is so.”
Perhaps, thought Troublesome. Perhaps. She’d seen eyes to creatures that looked to contain all the secrets of the universe. The feydeer, for example, along the ridges above timberline. They had eyes you could gaze into forever, and they had minds as empty as a shell left behind by its tenant and scoured out by a determined housewife. Rain gave them a fever that became a pneumonia and kept them few in number, but they hadn’t sense enough to go down a few feet on the mountain where they could have stood beneath a tree or under a ledge out of the weather. They just waited, shaking and bedraggled, for the rain to kill them off. It gave the lie to those eyes, for all they looked so knowing.
She had a firm intention, if there was indeed a Wise One keeping this dilapidation of a boat company for some purpose of its own; and it was that intention that kept her here with her eyes fixed to the water, hour after hour. She wanted to look, her own self, “right into” the eye of the sea creature. It would be an eye to remember, if it were no more a gate to wisdom than the feydeer’s! Judging by the tail she thought she’d caught a glimpse of, be the animal truly wise or truly foolish it was as big as this boat. The eyes would be ... how big? The size of her head, with a pupil to match? Might could be. Law, to see that, to give it a look as it rose to dive, and to get a look back! That would be a thing to remember all her days and all her nights, and she had no intention of missing it if it came her way. She had no other chores; she would sit here and watch over the water for that exchange of glances, all the way to Kintucky and all the way back if need be.
The men turned surly eventually, as was to be expected. And after they’d seen Troublesome well onto the land the captain thought it prudent to let them talk it out of their systems while the boat rode at anchor.
They went on awhile about their various disgruntlements, allowing as how they were sorry they ever let the Grannys tempt them to this forsaken place. Allowing as how they’d never before seen a Mule swim the sea with a woman on its back and they called that witchery and they’d like to hear the captain deny them that. And they did a ditty on the short rations—as if they were any shorter than they’d been ashore—and another on the constant drizzling rain that had pursued them all the way and looked likely to pursue them all the way back, and they’d like to hear the captain deny them that!
Adam Sheridan Brightwater was wise in the ways of surly men; he denied nothing, made uninterpretable noises when they drew breath and seemed to expect a response, and let them wear themselves out. Only when they were reduced to muttering that if she hadn’t been a woman, by the Holy One, they’d of gone off and left her and her bedamned Mule to tend for themselves did he add anything to the conversation. Seeing as there was no knowing how long they’d be there waiting for her, he thought it might be better to turn their minds from the idea of abandoning her in the Kintucky forests and heading for home.
“What do you suppose she was looking at back there all that time?” he threw out, rubbing at his beard. “That has got to be the lookingest woman ever I did see ... and nothing to look at but water, water, and still more water. Thought her eyes would drop right out of her head.”
“I don’t know what it was she was staring after,” Gabriel John answered him promptly, “but I know one thing—it never turned up, and she’s given up on it.”
“How do you know that?
“Heard her. This is a mighty small boat, if you hadn’t noticed that already, for keeping secrets on.”
“What’d she say?” demanded Black Michael, and when Gabriel John told them they whistled long and low.
“No woman says that,” declared Haven McDaniels Brightwater.
“She did.” Gabriel John was staunch as staunch. “Right in a string, she said it, three broad words such as I never heard before at one time in the mouth of a man. And I saw her give the gunwales a kick that I doubt did her foot much good. In a right smart temper, she was!”
“We could ask her,” Michael Callaway proposed.
“Ask her? You enjoy being dogbit, Michael Callaway?”
“There’s no dogs on this boat, you damned fool! Mules, but no dogs. Talk sense, why don’t you!”
Black Michael gave him an equally black look and smacked his thigh with the flat of his hand and called him a damned fool.
“You ask her a question,” he said, “shell take your head right off at the armpits! Dogbit’s not a patch on it, I can tell you. Why, I had the uppity gall to ask her highandmightyness could I help her with a jammed hatch, Michael Callaway, and I near lost part of my most valuable anatomy when she flung it back at me ... you’d of thought I’d offered to toss her skirts up and tumble her, tall scrawny gawk that she is, and I meant her only a kindness! Huh! I say leave her alone, as the Grannys directed, and be grateful if she follows suit. Womanbit, that’s what you’ll be otherwise ... or womankicked, or womanstung, or worse!”
Captain Brightwater nodded his agreement with that as a general policy, it being somewhat more than obvious, and the nods went slowly all round.
“Maybe she’ll sight whatever it was on the way back after all,” he said easily. “And maybe that’ll make her pleasanter to be around. We can hope.”
Troublesome, doing her best to keep the branches from whipping Dross into a refusal to go on through the Kintucky Wilderness, was not expecting any such thing. The tail she’d seen again, a time or two, and a flash of purple. Sufficient to prove that the animal was there and as real as she was. But had it meant her to see anything more, had it intended a shared glance, it would have happened by now, and she’d resigned herself to that. She’d not be staring over the water on the trip back, yearning after what she was not to have.
She only hoped they’d make it back to Marktwain, Glad as she was that they hadn’t seen their huge companion, those stalwart sailing men, and determined as she was to let slip no careless word now or later, she was astonished. It seemed to her that they might well have trouble even finding Marktwain again, it being no bigger than a continent. What kind of sailors were they, that an animal the size of their boat could swim alongside them from one side of the ocean to the other, and them never even notice it? Come time to land again, she might have to point them out the coast or they’d sail right on past.
“ gusting,” she said to Dross, who said nothing back, but whuffled at her in a way Troublesome was willing to take for confirmation. “Plain disgusting!”