"Aye, laddie. Meant ter call h'on him, but he was nae ter home. Door h'open an' wife dead, layin' h'in a box. Felt a' her. Met h'up wi' him an' H'oreb Wafter. Kenned who he was an' he dinna." Slowly and heavily Pig sank to the grass. "Lucky fer Pig, yer say. Huh. Lucky fer him? Time'll say. Pig dinna ken nae more'n H'oreb there."
He lay back, his sheathed sword clasped to his chest. "Yer best ter call him Horn when he wakes. An' rouse me, will yer?"
In a moment more he was snoring. Hound and Tansy stared at each other, but found nothing to say.
He was in a boat, and there was a monster greater and more terrible than the leatherskin below it, its face showing through the long smooth swell. He opened his old black pen case, dipped a black quill into the little ink bottle and began to write furiously, conscious of how short-how terribly short-a time was left to him.
I am just setting out for Pajarocu, he wrote, knowing nothing of what is about to transpire there, not even knowing that my son Sinew has decided to track me down and go to Green with me, or that mygrand- son, Krait, the son of my daughter Jahlee, will soon join me as a son.
The scratching of the quill slowed and died. He stared at the paper. Who was Krait? He had no daughter, no sons.
To the west, a lonely bird flew over the water, black as it crossed and recrossed the sun; he knew the bird was Oreb, and that Oreb was calling, "Silk? Silk? Silk?" as he flew. The bird was too far, its hoarse voice too faint to be heard. He thought of standing and waving, of calling Oreb to him, of lighting the lantern and running it up the mast for Oreb to see, so that the leatherskin or something else in the water would come to him, would come called by his burning prayer at sunset. He thought of looking over the side at the monstrous face beneath the water, of challenging it to emerge and destroy him if it could. He did none of these things.
The boat rocked, becoming the cradle he had made for Hoof and Hide, a cradle large enough for two, so that Nettle, sitting in the sea, could rock the two together, rocking with her left hand while the right drove the quill: Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could be the same after that. The book that they had never been able to begin begun at last, the book that lay behind his effort to make paper, behind the paper-making that had succeeded where nothing else would succeed, the paper-making that had made him the envy of his brothers and the pride of his mother, the papermaking that had been the salvation of the family.
I am just setting out for Pajarocu. Who was Pajarocu and what had he done? He crossed out the words and rewrote them: It is worthless, this old pen case. It is nothing. You mightgo around the market all day and never find a single spirit who would trade you a fresh egg for it. Yet it holds-
Enough. Yes, enough. I am sick with fancies. That was it. That was good. He reached down to turn the page so that he might begin a new one, but there was no need; the one he had written remained blank.
He stood up and shouted, but he could not recall the bird's name and the bird would not come in any case, could not hear him, remained in his pen case no matter how wildly he shouted or how loudly he waved his arms. Something with tusks and shining eyes was swimming to him, swimming east, always and forever east, in a spearstraight line from Shadelow, its wake marked already by faint phosphorescence.
He shouted until Seawrack rose from the sea to comfort him, smoothing his hair with two smooth, white hands. "It's only a dream, Horn, only a dream. If you need anyone, Hound and I are right here."
He wanted her to stay, to lie in their boat with him and comfort him, but she vanished when he tried to hold her, and it was getting dark and Green rising, a baleful jade eye. There were water bottles in the racks; but the boat was gone and the salt sea with it, the sea that was a river called Gyoll in which corpses floated, savaged by big turtles with beaks like the beaks of parrots, the river that circled with whorl, the river over which the stars never set. He had come to the end of that river, and it was too late.
He sat up. The well-remembered walls of the pit encircled him, walls marked with dank crevices opening on ruinous passages half filled with earth and stones. "It's dirt up here," a voice behind him rasped. He turned and saw Spider sitting behind him on the tumbled column, Spider in conversation with small girls in starched frocks. "It's all dirt," Spider repeated, and added, "I can tell from how it's made."
He asked politely how he could find Hyacinth.
"Down there." The blond girl pointed. "She's down there like Spider and me."
The dark girl nodded. "Down there where you're going, and she can't ever come back. Take a cake for the dog."
Spider nodded, too, saying, "It's dirt down there. I can tell from how it's made." Spider took something green from his pocket and handed it over. It was one of the crawling green lights that lined the tunnels, and it began to crawl across his palm, gleaming in the hot sunshine until he closed his fingers around it. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much."
"Oh, you ain't thanked me yet," Spider told him. "You'll thank me when you're down there."
He knelt and wiggled through the opening and back onto his boat, where the crawling green light he had put upon the ceiling was Green rising in the east, a baleful eye. Pig was seated in the stern, his hand upon the tiller and Oreb on his shoulder. "Good Silk," said Oreb. Pig removed the dirty gray cloth that had covered his eyes; and when it was gone, he, who had supposed that he could see, could actually see.
And Pig's big, bearded face was Silk's.
"This is really very kind of you," he told Hound when he had washed and sipped the mate Tansy made for him, "but won't we be getting a late start?"
"Yes," Hound conceded, "but it doesn't matter much. Usually I start before shadeup, as Tansy will attest, I'm sure, because she always gets up too, even though I tell her not to, and makes breakfast for me."
Tansy laughed. "I go back to bed after he leaves."
"If I have good weather," Hound continued, "and drive the donkeys for all I'm worth, there's a nice old inn in the middle of the city that I stop at. It's not too terribly expensive, and I'm right there to start my buying the next day."
"I understand."
"But even if we left this instant, we couldn't possibly reach the city before shadelow. So we'll camp along the road someplace, or stay at a country inn I know about. It's not as nice as the one I usually stay at, but it will save us a few bits, and if we rough it beside the road, that will cost nothing. Either way, we'll finish the trip tomorrow, and I'll start my trading tomorrow afternoon."
Tansy asked, "Shall I cook something now for you two, or wait till Pig wakes up?"
"Wait," Hound told her. "He'll eat more than Horn and me put together."
"Then I'd like to show Horn our shop. Can I?"
Hound looked at him, shrugging. "Do you want see it? It's very ordinary, except for being so small."
Tansy said, "But it's where we work, so it's not ordinary to us. It's ours, and the others aren't."
Their shop was on the village square, a very short distance from the little house on the edge of the village in which they lived. He stayed respectfully behind them as they mounted its three steep steps and unlocked its door.
"I don't think we'll have any customers this early," Tansy told him, "but if we do, we'll sell them whatever they've come for, and then lock up again when we go. I'll open up for the day after you and Hound and Pig leave."
"You said it was small." He paused to look around at the shiny pots and pans suspended from the ceiling, the barrels of nails and the hammers and saws hung from nails in the walls. "But it's bigger than our house on Lizard, and we raised three children in that house."
"There are rooms up above, too," Tansy told him. "My father used to rent them out. We tried to, but we couldn't find anybody who wanted them."
Hound said, "There are so many empty houses these days. Anybody who wants a house can just move in."
"So we keep the extra stock up there, and there's a bed so Mother can nap when she gets too tired. We should have brought you here last night, then you could have slept in a bed."
"My father had a shop like this in the city. I shouldn't say like this, really, because his wasn't as big. He sold paper and quills and ink, and account books and so forth."
Hound's eyebrows went up. "That might not be a bad idea for us. You can't buy paper here in Endroad. I'll see what a ream goes for in the city."