Our hosts cooked fish for our breakfast; before we had finished them, a boat arrived bearing two more islanders with more fish and root vegetables of a kind I had never tasted before. We roasted these in the ashes and ate them hot. The flavor was more like a chestnut’s than anything else I can think of. Three more boats came, then an island with four trees and bellying, square sails rigged in the branches of each, so that when I saw it from a distance I thought it a flotilla. The captain was an elderly man, the closest thing the islanders had to a chief. His name was Llibio. When Pia introduced me to him, he embraced me as fathers do their sons, something no one had ever done to me previously.
After we separated, all the others, Pia included, drew far enough away to permit us to speak privately if we kept our voices low — some men going into the hut, and the rest (there were now about ten in all) to the farther side of the island.
“I have heard that you are a great fighter, and a slayer of men,” Llibio began.
I told him that I was indeed a slayer of men, but not great.
“That is so. Every man fights backward — to kill others. Yet his victory comes not in the killing of others but in the killing of certain parts of himself.”
To show that I understood him, I said, “You must have killed all the worst parts of your own being. Your people love you.”
“That is also not to be trusted.” He paused, looking out over the water. “We are poor and few, and had the people listened to another in these years…” He shook his head.
“I have traveled far, and I have observed that poor people usually have more wit and more virtue than rich ones.”
He smiled at that. “You are kind. But our people have so much wit and virtue now that they may die. We have never possessed great numbers, and many perished in the winter just past, when much water froze.”
“I had not thought how difficult winter must be for your people, without wool or furs. But I can see, now that you have pointed it out to me, that it must be hard indeed.”
The old man shook his head. “We grease ourselves, which . does much, and the seals give us finer cloaks than the shore people have. But when the ice comes, our islands cannot move, and the shore people need no boats to reach them, and so can come against us with all their force. Each summer we fight them when they come to take our fish. But each winter they kill us, coming across the ice for slaves.”
I thought then of the Claw, which the hetman had taken from me and sent to the castle, and I said, “The land people obey the master of the castle. Perhaps if you made peace with him, he would stop them from attacking you.”
“Once, when I was a young man, these quarrels took two or three lives in a year. Then the builder of the castle came. Do you know the tale?”
I shook my head.
“He came from the south, whence, as I am told, you come as well. He had many things the shore people wanted, such as cloth, and silver, and many well-forged tools. Under his direction they built his castle. Those were the fathers and grandfathers of those who are the shore people now. They used the tools for him, and as he had promised, he permitted them to keep them when the work was done, and he gave them many other things. My mother’s father went to them while they labored, and asked if they did not see that they were setting up a ruler over themselves, since the builder of the castle could do as he chose with them, then retire behind the strong walls they had built for him where no one could reach him. They laughed at my mother’s father and said they were many, which was true, and the builder of the castle only one, which was also true.”
I asked if he had ever seen the builder, and if so what he looked like.
“Once. He stood on a rock talking to shore people while I passed in my boat. I can tell you he was a little man, a man who would not, had you been there, have reached higher than your shoulder. Not such a man as inspires fear.” Llibio paused again, his dim eyes seeing not the waters of his lake but times long past. “Still, fear came. The outer wall was complete, and the shore people returned to their hunting, their weirs and their herds. Then their greatest man came to us and said we had stolen beasts and children, and that they would destroy us if we did not return them.”
Llibio stared into my face and gripped my hand with his own, which was as hard as wood. Seeing him then, I saw the vanished years as well. They must have seemed grim enough at the time, though the future they had spawned — the future in which I sat with him, my sword across my lap, hearing his story — was grimmer than he could have known at the time. Yet there was joy in those years for him; he had been a strong young man, and though he was not, perhaps, thinking of that, his eyes remembered.
“We told them we did not devour children and had no need of slaves to fish for us, nor any pasturage for beasts. Even then, they must have known it was not we, because they did not come in war against us. But when our islands neared the shore, we heard their women wailing through the night.
“In those times, each day after the full moon was a trading day, when those of us who wished came to the shore for salt and knives. When the next trading day came, we saw that the shore people knew where their children had gone, and their beasts, and whispered it among themselves. Then we asked why they did not go to the castle and carry it by storm, for they were many. But they took our children instead, and men and women of all ages, and chained them outside their doors so that their own people might not be taken — or even marched them to the gates and bound them there.”
I ventured to ask how long this had gone on.
“For many years — since I was a young man, as I told you. Sometimes the shore people fought. More often, they did not. Twice warriors came from the south, sent by the proud people of the tall houses of the southern shore. While they were here, the fighting stopped, but what was said in the castle I do not know. The builder, of whom I told you, was seen by no one once his castle was complete.”
He waited for me to speak. I had the feeling, which I have often had when talking with old people, that the words he said and the words I heard were quite different, that there was in his speech a hoard of hints, clues, and implications as invisible to me as his breath, as though Time were a species of white spirit who stood between us and with his trailing sleeves wiped away before I had heard it the greater part of all that was said. At last I ventured, “Perhaps he is dead.”
“An evil giant dwells there now, but no one has seen him.”
I could hardly repress a smile. “Still, I would think his presence must do a great deal to prevent the shore people from attacking the place.”
“Five years past, and they swarmed over it by night like the fingerlings that crowd a dead man. They burned the castle, and slew those they found there.”
“Do they continue to make war on you by habit, then?”
Llibio shook his head. “After the melting of the ice this year, the people of the castle returned. Their hands were full of gifts — riches, and the strange weapons you turned against the shore people. There are others who come there too, but whether as servants or masters, we of the lake do not know.”
“From the north or the south?”
“From the sky,” he said, and pointed up to where the faint stars hung dimmed by the majesty of the sun; but I thought he meant only that the visitors had come in fliers, and inquired no further.
All day the lake dwellers arrived. Many were in such boats as had followed the hetman’s; but others chose to sail their islands to join Llibio’s, until we were in the midst of a floating continent. I was never asked directly to lead them against the castle. Yet as the day wore on, I came to realize that they wished it, and they to understand that I would so lead them. In books, I think, these things are conventionally done with fiery speeches; reality is sometimes otherwise. They admired my height and my sword, and Pia told them I was the representative of the Autarch, and that I had been sent to free them. Llibio said, “Though it is we who suffer most, the shore people were able to make the castle their own. They are stronger in war than we, but not all they burned has been rebuilt, and they had no leader from the south.” I questioned him and others about the lands near the castle, and told them we should not attack until night made it difficult for sentries on the walls to see our approach. Though I did not say so, I also wanted to wait for darkness to make good shooting impossible; if the master of the castle had given the bullets of power to the hetman, it seemed probable that he had kept much more effective weapons for himself.