had done the job for me. The line went slack.
By that time the first stars were out. I ought to have finished bailing and recoiled the line, I suppose, and no doubt done other things as well-gotten out our little tin lantern and lit it.
But I did not. I sat in the stern instead, where I was accustomed to sit, with my trembling hands resting on the tiller; and tried to catch my breath, and felt the hammering of my heart, and tasted the sweet-salt tang of the sea. Spat, and spat again, too tired and shaken to get up and break out a fresh bottle of water.
Green rose larger and brighter than any star, a flying whorl of visible width, where the stars are but twinkling points of light. I watched it climb above the dim white cliffs and swaying incense willows, and wondered whether Silk had seen it, at the bottom of the grave in his dream (where it would have been a fit ornament) and forgotten it when he awakened-or perhaps had only forgotten to tell me about it. Even if it had been there, he would not have known what a horror he saw.
After an hour or more had passed, it occurred to me that if the leatherskin had arrived a few minutes later it would almost certainly have killed me. By the last rays of the Short Sun I had scarcely escaped it.
In the dark…
The thought re-energized me, although I cannot explain why it should. I lit the lantern and ran it up the mast, found the bailer and resumed work, wearily scooping up water as black as ink and flinging it over the side. When I was a boy, we had pumps to raise the water from our wells; none but very backward country people and the poorest of the poor dropped buckets down their wells and hauled them up again; I thought as I worked how much easier a similar device would make it to empty a boat half filled with water, and resolved to build one when I could, and thought about how such a thing might be constructed-a tube of copper or waxwood, a plunger that would first draw the water up, and then, the positions of the valves being reversed by the motion of the handle, force it out another opening and back into the sea.
I longed for paper, pen, and ink. There was plenty of paper in the cargo chests, but I would not have dared to open them for fear it would get wet; and I had no ink and nothing with which to make my drawings, anyway.
Bailing is easy at first, when the water is high. It grows more difficult (as I suppose everyone knows) as it progresses. When my own bailer was scraping wood, I heard a soft and almost stealthy sound that seemed to have returned from the distant past, a whisper of sound that I associated with some similar labor long, long ago, with youth, and with the acrid smell of yellow dust. I left off bailing, straightened up to rest my back, listened, and heard, in addition to that remembered and practically inaudible rusding sigh, the faint creaking of the mast.
The swell was running a trifle higher now, I thought, and rocking us; but the sloop felt as steady under my feet as any floor. The faint rusding returned, perhaps minutely louder, and this time I knew it for what it was-or rather, for what it had been: the sound my father made turning over the pages of his ledger while I swept the floor of his shop. Day was done, palaestra was over, and the shop was about to close. Time to enter the sales, so many few of this and many fewer of that, which would have to be reordered at the end of the month or perhaps at the end of the year. Time to tote up the bits in the cash box and calculate that the total would not quite cover the cost of dinner tonight for Horn (who was helping around the shop so very unwillingly), the rest of the sprats, and the wife.
I spoke aloud to no one, saying, “Time to close,” and went aft to where the pages of Silk’s book were turning themselves, page after water-spotted page, upon one of the chests, in the faintest possible breeze.
Time to close.
So it was, and I thought about that then, I believe for the first time ever. My
By that time the first stars were out. I ought to have finished bailing and recoiled the line, I suppose, and no doubt done other things as well-gotten out our little tin lantern and lit it.
But I did not. I sat in the stern instead, where I was accustomed to sit, with my trembling hands resting on the tiller; and tried to catch my breath, and felt the hammering of my heart, and tasted the sweet-salt tang of the sea. Spat, and spat again, too tired and shaken to get up and break out a fresh bottle of water.
Green rose larger and brighter than any star, a flying whorl of visible width, where the stars are but twinkling points of light. I watched it climb above the dim white cliffs and swaying incense willows, and wondered whether Silk had seen it, at the bottom of the grave in his dream (where it would have been a fit ornament) and forgotten it when he awakened-or perhaps had only forgotten to tell me about it. Even if it had been there, he would not have known what a horror he saw.
After an hour or more had passed, it occurred to me that if the leatherskin had arrived a few minutes later it would almost certainly have killed me. By the last rays of the Short Sun I had scarcely escaped it.
In the dark…
The thought re-energized me, although I cannot explain why it should. I lit the lantern and ran it up the mast, found the bailer and resumed work, wearily scooping up water as black as ink and flinging it over the side. When I was a boy, we had pumps to raise the water from our wells; none but very backward country people and the poorest of the poor dropped buckets down their wells and hauled them up again; I thought as I worked how much easier a similar device would make it to empty a boat half filled with water, and resolved to build one when I could, and thought about how such a thing might be constructed-a tube of copper or waxwood, a plunger that would first draw the water up, and then, the positions of the valves being reversed by the motion of the handle, force it out another opening and back into the sea.
I longed for paper, pen, and ink. There was plenty of paper in the cargo chests, but I would not have dared to open them for fear it would get wet; and I had no ink and nothing with which to make my drawings, anyway.
Bailing is easy at first, when the water is high. It grows more difficult (as I suppose everyone knows) as it progresses. When my own bailer was scraping wood, I heard a soft and almost stealthy sound that seemed to have returned from the distant past, a whisper of sound that I associated with some similar labor long, long ago, with youth, and with the acrid smell of yellow dust. I left off bailing, straightened up to rest my back, listened, and heard, in addition to that remembered and practically inaudible rusding sigh, the faint creaking of the mast.
The swell was running a trifle higher now, I thought, and rocking us; but the sloop felt as steady under my feet as any floor. The faint rusding returned, perhaps minutely louder, and this time I knew it for what it was-or rather, for what it had been: the sound my father made turning over the pages of his ledger while I swept the floor of his shop. Day was done, palaestra was over, and the shop was about to close. Time to enter the sales, so many few of this and many fewer of that, which would have to be reordered at the end of the month or perhaps at the end of the year. Time to tote up the bits in the cash box and calculate that the total would not quite cover the cost of dinner tonight for Horn (who was helping around the shop so very unwillingly), the rest of the sprats, and the wife.
I spoke aloud to no one, saying, “Time to close,” and went aft to where the pages of Silk’s book were turning themselves, page after water-spotted page, upon one of the chests, in the faintest possible breeze.
Time to close.
So it was, and I thought about that then, I believe for the first time ever. My
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