“It was just a film. We showed it to you so that you would learn.”
“But it was a film of something that really happened!”
“It happened several years ago, several hundred miles away.”
“But it did happen; you used a tight beam to spy on them, and when the image came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and — Why did you show it to me?”
“What have we been teaching you?”
But she couldn’t think: only the picture in her mind, vivid movements, scarlets, bright agony. “He was just a child,” she said. “He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve.”
“You are a child. You aren’t sixteen yet.”
“What was I supposed to learn?”
“Look around. You should see something.”
But it was still too vivid, too red, too bright….
“You should be able to learn it right here on this beach, in the trees back there, in the rocks down here, in the shells around your feet. You do see it; you don’t recognize it.” His voice brightened. “Actually you’re a very fine student. You learn quickly. Do you remember anything from your study of telepathy a month ago?”
“ ‘By a method similar to radio broadcast and reception,’ ” she recited, “ ‘the synapse patterns of conscious thought are read from one cranial cortex and duplicated in another, resulting in a duplication of sensory impressions experienced — ’ But I can’t do it, so it doesn’t help me!”
“What about history, then? You did extremely well in the examination. Does knowing about all the happenings in the world before and after the Great Fire help you?”
“Well. It’s…it’s interesting.”
“The film you saw was, in a way, history. That is, it happened in the past.”
“But it was so…”—her eyes beat before the flashing waves — “horrible!”
“Does history fascinate you only because it’s interesting? Don’t you ever want to know the reason behind some of the things those people do in your books?”
“Yes, I want to know the reasons! I want to know the reason they nailed that man to the oaken cross. I want to know why they did that to him.”
“A good question…Which reminds me: at about the same time they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that the forces of the Universe were to be represented by a circle, half black, half white. To remind themselves, however, that there is no pure force, no single and unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black half and a spot of black paint in the white. Interesting?”
She frowned, wondering at the transition. But he was going on:
“And do you remember the goldsmith, the lover, how he recorded in his autobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the Fabulous Salamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father smacked the boy across the room into a rack of kettles, saying something to the effect that little Cellini was too young to remember the incident unless it was accompanied by pain.”
“I remember the story,” she said. “And I remember Cellini said he wasn’t sure if the smack was the reason he remembered the Salamander — or the Salamander the reason he remembered the smack!”
“Yes, yes!” he cried. “That’s it. The reason, the reasons…” In his excitement, his hood fell back and she saw his face in the late afternoon’s copper light. “Don’t you see the pattern?”
Scored forehead, the webbing at his eyes: she traced the pattern of age there, and let her eyes drop. “Only I don’t know what a Salamander is.”
“It’s like the blue lizards that sing outside your window,” he explained. “Only it isn’t blue and it doesn’t sing.”
“Then why should anyone want to remember it?” She grinned. But he was not looking at her.
“And the painter,” he was saying, “you remember, in Florence. He was painting a picture of La Gioconda. As a matter of fact, he had to take time from the already crumbling picture of the Last Supper of the man who was nailed to the cross of oak to paint her. And he put a smile on her face of which men asked for centuries, ‘What is the reason she smiles so strangely?’ Yes, the reason, don’t you see? Just look around!”
“What about the Great Fire?” she asked. “When they dropped flames from the skies and the harbors boiled; that was reasonless. That was like what they did to that boy.”
“Oh, no,” he said to her. “Not reasonless. True, when the Great Fire came, people all over the earth screamed, ‘Why? Why? How can man do this to man? What is the reason?’ But just look around you, right here! On the beach!”
“I guess I can’t see it yet,” she said. “I can just see what they did to him; and it was awful.”
“Well.” He pulled together his robe. “Perhaps when you stop seeing what they did so vividly, you will start seeing why they did it. I think it’s time for us to go back now.”
She slid off the rock and started walking beside him, barefoot in the sand. “That boy…I wasn’t sure, he was all tied up; but — he had four arms, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
She shuddered again. “You know, I can’t just go around just saying it was awful. I think I’m going to write a poem. Or make something. Or both. I’ve got to get it out of my head.”
“That wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he mumbled as they approached the trees in front of the river. “Not bad at all.”
And several days later, several hundred miles away…
Chapter One
Waves flung themselves at the blue evening. Low light burned on the hulks of wet ships that slipped by mossy pilings into the docks as water sloshed at the rotten stone embankments.
Gangplanks, chained to wooden pulleys, scraped into place on concrete blocks; and the crew, after the slow Captain and the tall Mate, loped raffishly along the boards, which sagged with the pounding of bare feet. In bawling groups, pairs, or singly, they howled into the waterfront streets, by the yellow light from inn doors, the purple portals leading to rooms full of smoke and the stench of burnt poppies, laughter, and the sheen on red lips, to the houses of women.
The Captain, with eyes the color of sea under fog, touched his sword hilt with his fist and said quietly, “Well, they’ve gone. We better start collecting new sailors for the ten we lost at Aptor. Ten good men, Jordde. I get ill when I think of the bone and broken meat they became.”
“Ten for the dead,” sneered the Mate, “and twenty for the living we’ll never see again. Any sailor that would want to continue this trip with us is crazy. We’ll do well if we only lose twenty.” He was a wire-bound man, on whom any clothing looked baggy.
“I’ll never forgive her for ordering us to that monstrous Island,” said the Captain.
“I wouldn’t speak too loudly,” mumbled the Mate. “Yours isn’t to forgive her. Besides, she went with them and was in as much danger as they were. It’s only luck she came back.”
Suddenly the Captain asked, “Do you believe the stories of magic they tell of her?”
“Why, sir?” asked the Mate. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t.” The Captain’s certainty came too quickly. “Still, with three survivors out of thirteen, that she should be among them, with hardly a robe torn…”
“Perhaps they wouldn’t touch a woman,” suggested Jordde.
“Perhaps,” said the Captain.
“And she’s been strange ever since then. She walks at night. I’ve seen her going by the rails, looking from the seafire to the stars and back.”
“Ten good men,” mused the Captain. “Hacked up, torn in bits. I wouldn’t have believed that much barbarity in the world if I hadn’t seen that arm, floating on the water. It even chills me now, the way the men ran to the rail, pointed at it. And it just raised itself up, like a sign, then sank in a wash of foam and green water.”