We Never Talk About My Brother Page 25

  And in so doing I came to hate the chandail, as I do not think I have ever hated even the ones whose hands and faces still wake me most nights, after so many years. Because at least those are long dead, all of them—someone else got Shavak before I found him, but I missed no others, for all the comfort I had of it—while these images daily and nightly brought back both the joy and the horror and despair of my childhood, and there was no revenging on that, nor ever would be. And the very worst thing was that I, like others, came to desire those visions, even as I loathed and dreaded their coming. As the Captain had said, the chandail were playing with me, in me, and I knew that I would forgive Shavak, and even Unavavia, before I forgave them.

  In the years that followed, I traveled the sea, left the sea, came back to it, left it again... and so it has gone for me until more recently than you might think, to look at me. I’m done with the sea now – or it with me – but somehow in those days, journey as I might, I was never really away from it. Sooner or later, there I’d be, Sailor Lal once more—passenger, pirate or crew, it made no matter. And so, will-I, nil-I, I have had some dealings with the chandail in my time.

  And I would hate them still, bitterly, heartlessly, mercilessly, without compassion, in that way of hating that does no one any good, except for a thing that happened when I was not a sailor, but a plain paid... until I was hired to hunt down an undeniably bad man in Cape Dylee. Yes, I found him, but that is not part of this story. What matters is that, having earned my fee, I was indulging myself somewhat, allowing myself a full night spent wandering the waterfront taverns before I set off for home the next day. Yet for some reason—perhaps because of a nagging doubt that the man was that much worse than I—no amount of ale, wine or that vile but curiously captivating fish sauce the folk there call a liqueur had the least effect on me, much as I wished it. Near sunrise, then, I was as dead sober as I’d been when I walked away down the long wharf, grateful for the kindly absence of the moon. Now, with the tide well on the ebb, I forced myself precisely back over my sandy footprints to see whether or no it had taken the body with it. Always so much simpler for everyone, for that to be the case.

  Well, this time the sea had struck a bargain with me, as it has done once or twice since. The tide had indeed accepted my offering, but left for me, in return, an enormous pulpy mass of tangled—legs? or were they vines? strands of bladder-wrack?—four separate appendages that might almost be arms, each crested along its ropy length with a line of tiny, useless- looking fins; the whole dominated by a bulbous, more or less conical head with no recognizable features, except for the dainty little beak in the center. Not to mention the dizzying aroma, like an entire shoal of dead fish, all by itself. I had never seen a chandail close to before.

  At first I was sure it was dead, because I saw, not only the blood dark on the sand under it, but the short spear half-buried in one of the still, flabby sides. It was a two-pointed stabbing lance, the kind the Cape fishermen use in shallow water—but I could not fathom why anyone with any sense would be hunting so plainly inedible a beast, nor what a chandail could have been doing so near shore. I came slowly closer in spite of the stench, in spite of the fear licking coldly along my nerves; not because of anything that helpless mass could possibly do to me, but out of a sailor’s belief that a chandail can continue its making and sending—its playing—for some while after death. This is completely untrue, of course, and I knew it at the time. But it didn’t matter, standing there with one foot in the sea and that great dead thing washing back and forth against it as the tide began to turn—nothing about it then to make you cry with wonder, I promise you. I wished that it would come to life for a moment, so that I could kill it again, and I bent and tugged the fish-lance out of its body, meaning to stab it once or twice, just for myself. I was a fine hater in those days.

  And then it moved... and it was alive, though only the least bit so. It made a kind of floundering heave, slugging its helmet-shaped head like a horse fighting the reins. It pulled itself almost erect, turned blindly this way and that; then pitched over on its side once more, with the tiny, trusting sigh of a child falling asleep in a familiar place. I had expected a rush of blood to follow my removal of the lance, but there was almost none. The thing lived, that was plain enough, and either I ended it once and for all, or I took responsibility for keeping it alive. It’s not important whether I yet abide by the ancient ethics of my people, I know what they are. Lal says.

  Why did I make the choice I did? As long as it has been, I ask myself that question still. Perhaps my conscience was troubling me over the man I’d killed a few hours before—I have always had the most inconvenient conscience for the life I have lived—but much more likely it had to do with that first curious exchange at the water’s edge. Somewhere in my long-gone child soul, there must have been a buried belief that it is bad dree—bad luck, you would say, bad business—to reject a gift from the sea. Abominate it or not, the wretched creature was mine.

  And I hadn’t any notion of what to do with it. The deep wound in its side had stopped bleeding altogether, but the chandail had shown no other sign of life after that one brief flurry. I stood over it (you don’t ever get inured to the smell, but your nostrils go numb after a time) and wondered what to do. If there’s a physicker in the world understands the innards of a maybe dying chandail, I’ve not met him, no more than I’ve again been that close to a living one: so close that I could see the fringes all along the undersides of the four arms quivering with the tide. They look very like hair, but it is thought that they serve the chandail as eyes in some way. I couldn’t tell whether the motion meant that they were seeing, or not. I couldn’t tell anything.

  “Talk to me,” I said aloud. “Here I am, talk to me.”

  I readied myself, bracing my mind—well I knew how to do it by now—against the shock that always comes with the first explosion of the chandail into their... playroom, as the Captain called it. But nothing happened. There came no apparitions, no impossibly responsive mirages such as I was bitterly accustomed to—only a silence in myself fathoms deeper than the mere absence of sound. Feeling almost as deep a relief, and something somehow absurdly close to guilt, I had begun to move away when there came a picture so tenuous, so frayed and shadowy, that I would never have recognized it as the sending of a chandail. As it was, in the darkness I could barely distinguish the figure of a woman, myself, bending over a huge inert form and lunging a swordcane blade into it, hard, over and over, all the way to the wooden hilt, on and on. The woman even twisted her wrist at the end of the thrust, as I always do.

  Beyond the least doubt, the creature was begging me to kill it.

  And I could not.

  No. Before you even open your mouth, no. Mercy had nothing to do with it. Quite, quite the contrary. I could find no mercy in myself for a suffering chandail, but only cruelty of the purest sort, as I know better than many, and knew at the time. They had, at their whim, made my mind their theater, their sporting arena—very well, here was a chance, long overdue, to make one hurt as I had hurt when the creatures summoned my father from my heart to call me Precious again. And I need do nothing at all to cause this pain, nothing to alert that ever so self-conscious conscience of mine—nothing but to savor the beast’s agony for as long or as little a time as I chose, and then walk away. How much more innocent could raw revenge possibly be?

  But I couldn’t do that, either. And I tried. Lal says.

  I must tell you that it was one of the more interesting discoveries I have ever made. To have spent much of my youth, and all of my adult life, learning to kill more and more efficiently, with less and less pleasure, because pleasure gets in the way, and then to realize that even your taste for retribution has its limits... as I say, it was an interesting moment. I whispered, “I will help you,” feeling the words rake the back of my throat as I dragged them out of myself. “What must I do?”

  No response for another long while, with the chandail’s sides not stirring in the least,
and then the same image over again, exactly: me with my swordcane vigorously putting the thing out of its pain. I said, louder now, “No. No, I’m not going to do that. Tell me how I can make you well.” And all the gods in their idiot secrecy know that I never intended to say any such thing.

  Silence. Night and silence, and the tiny giggles of the waves. The chandail was still alive—of this I was doggedly certain—but I knew enough to know that it could not long survive in the shallows, half out of the water. The first lunatic step, therefore, must be to tow it as far to sea as I could—which, considering that I had neither a boat nor a rope, seemed likely to prove troublesome. Not insurmountably so, however: in a tumbledown shed, located in an isolated corner of the harbor, I came across a derelict but serviceable fishing smack, just small enough to be managed by a lone sailor. I left a good portion of my assassin’s wage atop a heap of ragged nets, skidded the boat down to the water, and warped her around to where I had left my malodorous charge. Having halyards and a tiller to manage was, as always, a dear comfort, and kept me from concerning myself with my own astonishing foolishness. Not altogether, but almost enough.

  The chandail had not moved an inch, as far as I could see; but when I tried to bunch a few of its legs and bend a cable around them, then it suddenly began to struggle, hard enough to make it plain that I had no chance of rigging any sort of towline without the bloody thing’s cooperation, moribund as it undoubtedly was. I splashed furiously away from it, aware that daybreak was near, and disinclined to be caught with someone else’s boat, expensively borrowed or not. The chandail sank back into somnolence, but not before I felt a tremulous suggestion that it would drown if dragged through the water by its legs. Once I had reversed the rope and managed to find a way to snug it safely under the great bloated head, all went so swiftly and smoothly that it took me some while to realize that my old tormentor and I had communicated most matter-of-factly, to our mutual benefit. I found the thought disquieting, and put it out of my mind.

  Away then, and out of the harbor with the sun and the little dawn breeze, sails nearly as limp as the chandail’s sides, and me tacking this way and that, desperate to make a little headway before someone recognized the boat, let alone what I was hauling. But no one did; and by the time the dripping red sun had climbed high enough to grow yellow and small, I was beyond sight of Cape Dylee. Even so, I cracked on as much sail as I could handle, convinced that the chandail’s one hope lay in its deep home, out where such small crafts as mine rarely venture, with good reason. I spied a weak patch in the caulking, and lashed the tiller down while I reinforced it as I could with what I had. Teach you to steal boats you don’t know, I thought. How many more such weaknesses might there be below the waterline?

  The chandail itself seemed none the worse for being employed as a sort of sea anchor to windward. If anything, it appeared even a bit revived by the rush of water through its... gills? Even today, I know exactly nothing about how the chandail breathe, mate and reproduce (I never could be certain whether mine was male or female), nourish themselves—well, fish, I know they eat various small fish—let alone how and when they die, in the normal way of things. I regret that now, but at the time I was much less interested in such affairs than in, first, seeing this one chandail healed and whole, and, second, trying to comprehend why its survival should matter so much to me, when I had loathed the entire species so fiercely for so long. In those days, it annoyed me mightily not to understand myself. I felt it a weakness, a luxury that I could not afford. I feel differently now.

  When the wind dropped, near sunset, I took in sail, threw out an actual anchor, and fixed myself a barebones meal, the boat being well stocked for its size with several days’ worth of salt fish and ship’s biscuits. I sat on a hatch cover to eat, staring down over the stern at the chandail floating passively just to starboard, looking oddly like a flower in the fiery sea, with all its legs spread out around it like grotesque petals. It raised two of its arms rather feebly, in what could have been a shaky salute, but which more likely meant that it was studying me very intently with those eye-hairs on the undersides. I waved and smiled at them. I said to them, “Yes, this is indeed me. Who are you?”

  Nothing, for a long moment; nothing but the fading cries of a few seabirds and the deep whuff of a panyara briefly surfacing a few yards to port. Suddenly a very small girl, no more than perhaps eight or nine years old, was standing beside me: so present, so entirely human, so there, that I actually offered her a biscuit before realizing what she was. The chandail had ransacked my mind for some equivalent of its own identity, and presented with me with—no, not myself at her age; the thing knew better than that—but with a child who had bright blue eyes, a firm little mouth and chin, and a sprightly, self-confident carriage that I must have seen somewhere and somehow remembered. She was barefoot and wore the simple wraparound garment that most folk wear south of Grannach. The chandail pay great attention to detail.

  I asked her name, and she told me. I could not have repeated it then, let alone now, but that was how I learned that the chandail do have individual names, which I had doubted. I said, as I had said before, “How can I help you? What must I do?”

  Her voice was somewhere between a croak and a chime. She said, “Why do you help? You do not want to help. I know.”

  I was some while replying. I said finally, “It is something I have to do. I cannot tell you why. But from this moment, you will stay out of my memories—is that understood? One other creature appearing on this boat—one single vision of anything, anything at all—and I promise you that I will cast off the line and leave you to die here, and never look back. Is that understood?”

  The girl uttered a low, rough chuckle: curiously chilling, coming from that small throat. “Very well,” she said, “and what can you do about this?” She turned abruptly, loosening her single garment, and I saw the purple-lipped gash that took up so much more of her body than it had of the chandail’s great loose bulk. There was no blood, but I know the smell of rotting tissue. I’d have thought salt water would have done the infection some good, as it usually does with humans, but this was looking worse than when I had found the chandail helpless in the harbor. I asked the girl, “What happened to you? Who did this?”

  The child shrugged, as lightly as a much older woman dismissing an importunate lover. “A fisherman. He was angry.” I could picture the rest of it easily enough: some heartbroken deckhand, taunted one time too many by visions of vanished beloveds—as I had so often been—stabbing downward with the one weapon ready to hand, finding flesh and twisting the two-pronged lance as viciously as he could, until the chandail’s flailing struggles snatched it from him. The girl added casually, “There will have been poison on the tines.”

  “Yes,” I said, for I knew of many such attempts, usually futile. I said, “I lived awhile in the South Islands. I have some skill.”

  She did not answer. Her image thinned and flickered—just for a moment, but it made me aware that the chandail was weakening steadily. I looked from her festering wound back to the creature lying so serenely in the darkening water. If it had had an expression I could read, I would have said that it appeared resigned, neither avoiding nor approving its fate. I turned to the child again and asked her, “If I heal you, am I healing...?” I could not quite finish the sentence, and there was no need. The girl nodded. I said, “Well, then.”

  I had only a very few salves and unguents with me, and none that would likely ease an injury such as hers. South Island cures are mostly a matter of the hands, anyway, of something that happens between one’s hands and oneself—or one’s soul, call it what you choose. I have never been able to explain it, nor to teach it to anyone else; and it does not always come when I call, if you understand me. But when it does work, I have seen it make bodies change their minds about being dead. Lal says.

  “I must meditate now,” I said. “We will begin at first light.” The little girl nodded again, and was gone. I sat where I was for a long time,
watching the thready infant moon rise, and the chandail stirring only with the stir of the tide. I thought about the South Islands, and the woman there who taught me the little I know of healing. Lean and bare and twisted as an old winter branch, yet she had a laugh to set butterflies dancing, and a way of being kind that one only noticed long afterward. To this day, I call her into my heart, or at least try to do so, on the rare occasions when I need to summon what I learned from her. She died many years ago, but I still sometimes pretend no one has yet told me.

  The little girl was there precisely at sunrise—no, a bit before, it was, because I remember the sky being a cool, pale, translucent green behind her. She did not speak, but turned and let her dress fall, exposing the chandail’s wound on her slender brown back. The smell was stronger than it had been only a few hours ago. I breathed it in deeply, as you have to do with South Islands healing. You have to take the pain all the way in.

  “This will not hurt,” I told her, “but it will feel very peculiar. And it will take a long time—perhaps all day, perhaps days.”

  The girl laughed again: that deep old laugh that could not belong to her. “I will feel no hurt,” she said, “whatever you do.” At my direction, she stretched out on the hard deck, face down, and I put my hands on the raw, oozing laceration and asked my long-dead teacher to be with me. I stretched my fingers as far as I could, from one edge of the wound to the other, not actually measuring its length and width, but only to let them spy out the battlefield before them. Then I simply waited for the feeling to come: the familiar sensation of near-boiling water flooding through my wrists and forearms and out of my body altogether, leaping all fleshly boundaries to pour itself over and into whatever suffering was calling it. I never felt that I was master of any healing that happened—nor did my teacher, as she often told me. I was merely grateful to be its conduit, its channel. Its riverbed.