Samphrey closed her mouth. Fear was in her face.
“You asked of me one question, and you have yet had three. That will be enough. The morran was murdered by Vaila, who dishonoured the Code, and you will honour it and that will be the end of the matter.”
Samphrey walked in front of Jed from the
Shamrock's
airlock. Jed saw her trepidation, the faltering of her step, as she met the chasm of the sky without. They had both lived in ships too long.
It appeared Wolff had finished. He threw down the blunt stick he’d been using to aid his digging, and rose. He walked the few paces to the water’s edge and waded in. He bent, washing his hands together and planing his forearms with his palms. Jed did not observe the same fear in him as she did in Samphrey. She knew that same fear must be apparent in her, to Wolff.
A stiff wind blew inland from the sea, the ocean reaching to a horizon of blue patterned with the white crests of many waves. The land rose on the right in a vertical cliff, boulders piled against its tide-harried foot. The waves came in, pounding the stony shore and the foot of the promontory with a rush, and retreating with a rattling sigh of a million smoothened stones settling in the backwash. A shudder of fear ran down Jed’s spine at the vertigo of this raw nature. The
Shamrock’s
senses showed her the empty constellations and depths of the Universe above and below this vast mass of rock. She feared the unroofed immensity of it.
Wolff returned to the shore and lifted up the stained, cloth-wrapped bundle lying by the river’s mouth. He unwrapped Rh’Arrol’s body and waded back into the water, kneeling to wash the dead morran in his arms.
“I don’t know why, in the name of the Pagan Atheist, it is that you do that.”
Wolff glanced over his shoulder, and looked away when he spoke. “Why, because it’s just a morran?”
“Because ultimately you are going to put it in a hole in the ground and cover it with earth so it can decompose and turn into dirt itself.”
“Would you not like to think that others would honour you in death?”
“That would be entirely up to others. I would be beyond caring. Whatever becomes of the mind after death, it does not persist into the world and time we here know.”
“Then I honour Rh’Arrol for myself, because I believe ae was honourable.” Wolff stood and turned. He put Rh’Arrol’s leg back against the morran’s body as best as it would fit, and folded up the limbs inside the sheet so only the blunt muzzle showed. He gathered up the slight burden of the dead morran and rose.
Jed went to him, leaving Samphrey behind, staring at the sky.
“Jed, walk with me. You owe it to Rh’Arrol. I brought it into a situation not of its making, and it died defending you, to whom it owed nothing.”
Jed turned away from the sea. Solemnly and side by side with Samphrey following behind, they made their procession to the site Wolff had chosen. Wolff had to kneel to lower the body into the grave.
He brushed himself off. “Say something to honour Rh’Arrol, and don’t go all condescending and say ae was just a morran.”
Jed glared at him. “What am I to say?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one among us with an education. Say something from the Teachings of the Pagan Atheist. You go on about it enough at other times.”
Jed looked at him. Wolff was an idiot who destroyed any modicum of sanctity the event had held with his facetiousness. At length, she inhaled deeply, released her breath, and said, “Look into your comrade’s soul, and see if his alliance is truly unto your very essence. If it is, he is surely a friend of honour.”
Wolff bowed his head in obeisance. “Is there something to be said, by the Pagan Atheist, at a funeral?”
Jed breathed again. “Beasts of the field,” she said in a low, controlled voice.
“Something proper, fit for a man!” Wolff interrupted.
“If you will not heed until I am finished, there is no point in my saying aught.”
Jed and Wolff stared at each other for a moment before she continued, “Instruments of propagation and products of instinct, live and die unknowing. Our curse and our gift is the ability to evaluate, to compare, to pity and wonder at ourselves and mourn the finite frailty of our own being. That is why our lives can only ever be tragedies.”
The Archer stooped to gather up a handful of the dusty earth, and scattered it upon the sheet that wrapped Rh’Arrol’s body. “Be of Steel and Flame.”
The three of them stood and looked upon the grave for as long as seemed appropriate. Then Wolff knelt and gathered the earth in his hands, and began refilling the hole. In the bottom of the pit, half covered with earth, the morran’s shape beneath the sheet looked even more bony and pathetic than it had in life. Jed turned aside with Samphrey beside her, and the girl kept pace as she walked slowly back down the slope of the shore.
Samphrey did not speak to Jed, but stared out at the ocean, and as they walked on in silence, Jed noticed that the girl’s face had become strained and distorted, and that her eyes began to water.
“You humiliate yourself,” Jed berated her. “Do not think it has gone unnoticed.”
“I am
sorry
!” Samphrey’s voice broke into a sob.
“Because of the circumstances, you will be excused the punishment fitting. Now go and be alone in your disgrace, and do not come into my presence again until you are fit to be seen.”
Jed watched as the child struggled over the loose stones toward an outcrop of bare rock. She went behind it until she was hidden from Jed’s sight. Jed watched via the
Shamrock
as Samphrey sat on the stones. Her head dropped and her shoulders began to tremble.
Samphrey must have been taken from a planet. Perhaps she had lived by the ocean. Her family might have owned an isle, a continent, a whole planet, even. Seeing this place must have triggered the same memories Wolff’s expression had once triggered in Jed.
She would leave Samphrey alone. Jed had no wish to punish another for a crime of which she herself was guilty.
Jed went back up to Rh’Arrol’s grave. Wolff stood before the mound of earth, wiping his hands on a cloth. As Jed approached, he glanced at her, said nothing, and began to walk off along the coast. Jed followed him. They arrived at a place where the stones of the shore were covered over with pale silt, and the mouth of a stream from the higher ground opened into a broad, shallow delta. Wolff splashed into the water and bent to wet his hands and the cloth.
The liquid glittered in the sunlight where it flowed around the ankles of Wolff’s boots and over the contours it had etched into the sand. When he had finished washing his hands, he wrung out his cloth and shook it, sending droplets of water flashing into the sky. He tied the cloth by its corner to his belt and stood upright, arms akimbo, gazing inland along the path of the river.
“What is it you look at?”
“Come here,” said Wolff, and he held out his hand.
Jed stepped into the water to stand beside him. She followed his line of sight. The stream emerged from between stony banks and its course meandered over a barren tract of rock and dust, which merged into the scrubby undergrowth of the plain. Far beyond this the topography reared into dusky, purple-tinged mountains. Airborne dust and distance blurred the landscape into a bruised and indistinct form.
“Where is its source?” he said.
Jed frowned. “Likely no one place. If we were to pursue it up the gradient, we would probably find it dividing upon itself into its tributaries, and beyond them, merely sodden ground.”
Wolff began to move forward into deeper water. He held Jed by the hand, and so she came with him. The noise of the current overcame the sound of the waves upon the pebbles of the shore, and with Jed’s every step the water clung to her shins with a heavy viscosity and a deep sloshing sound.
“Go no farther,” she warned him.
“Why not?”
“Because the water will flood our boots and wet us! And if we fall in it, we will inhale it and drown in it!”
Wolff laughed in a manner that disconcerted Jed. “I think it is harder than you imagine to drown, Archer!”
Jed struggled to suppress her irritation at his patronising tone of voice. “What might you know of it?”
“I fell in the bilge just above the graviton machinery of an old freighter. You don’t just drown instantaneously, and you don’t breathe in water by mistake. Unless the water’s so deep you can’t stand with your head in the air, you’re all right. Oh, it’s unpleasant, but I managed to stay alive until Rogan pulled me out.”
“A pity,” said Jed. Wolff gave her arm a sudden jerk and her foot slid, and a shrill noise escaped her. She stumbled against Wolff, who had started laughing. “You stupid fool!” she shouted, and she could feel the prickling red heat in her face that was more than the climate—the embarrassment that such a ridiculous sound could have issued from her own mouth. “Why are you grinning like that, idiot?”
“Let us discover whence this water originates.”
“Do not waste time! We are pursued by assassins and hunted by those who uphold the Code, and it is your desire to wander in a wilderness?”
“How else might you propose we occupy our time while the ship repairs itself?”
“Planning what we are to do once it is repaired might be a good point of start!”
“Planning? Sitting and fretting, more like! They’re pursuing us! We’ve got three options. Fight, hide or run.”
“It is more complicated than that!”
Wolff uttered a humourless bark of laughter. “No, it’s not. Not unless you count giving them what they want as an option.”
Jed used the
Shamrock’s
surveillance to check what Samphrey was doing, fearing she might have heard her and Wolff. She remained in the shadow of the rock, but had wandered toward the water’s edge and was taking off her boots. For a moment, Jed wondered if the child intended to drown herself, but then she stepped into the shallows, gingerly placing her feet, and stood looking out to the horizon. What if Samphrey did drown herself? As she grew older, the benefits of life over death seemed fewer and fewer.
“What are you doing?” Wolff asked.
“Checking,” Jed replied, and she quickly made a scan of the skies.
“In that case, let us walk and discuss these more complicated options simultaneously, if that’s not beyond us.”
Jed grimaced at Wolff and turned away. His arm suddenly caught her around the waist and pulled her back. Jed beat him upon the shoulders and kicked his knees as he waded upstream with her.
“I’m sorry,” said Wolff politely. “Would you like me to put you down?” He loosed his grip for an instant, and Jed slipped down with a shout and grabbed him about the neck with her arms. The water was up above his knees.
“It gets shallower in a moment,” said Wolff. Sallow reedy strands from the overhanging banks brushed past them, depositing slime in Jed’s hair. She was facing backward over Wolff’s shoulder and could not see ahead. He sloshed several more paces before setting her down. Jed turned and looked about. The stream ran swift over a stony bed, ankle deep where she stood. The ground rose shallowly on either side, the lank reeds giving way to pallid vegetation that looked to be withering in the hot sun. Tortuous branches with blunt bracts trailed and snaked among the stones, and humped thickets of grey thorns clustered together. Along the banks of the stream lay pools of stagnant water scummed over with a reddish substance Jed could only assume was colonies of single-celled organisms. The local sun—a white spectral type A—had been steadily moving away from the zenith as the planet’s rotation turned its surface, and now when Jed looked it was beginning to sink beneath the bulk of the western horizon, and another sun, reddish and turgid, brimmed like molten lead in the cusp of the mountainous crags in the south.
“Well, come on then,” said Wolff, and splashed off upstream.
Jed did not want to follow him, through a combination of perversity and fear, but she also disliked this landscape and feared what organisms it might contain asides from these primitive plants. Her education told her bacteria and vegetative organisms evolved long before animals, but she had no concrete evidence there were no animals here. It was possible that men had artificially seeded the planet as an experiment at some point in the past. She went after him.
The scrubby bushes that clung to the scree became scarcer as they climbed. Moss-like plants grew in tiny crevices where earth had collected, coloured bracts rising on long stalks to dispense wind-borne seeds. Over level, even ground the stream ran quickly over a shallow, rough bed, and where the land became steeper and rougher it cascaded down short drops and meandered around outcrops. Dust hung in the air, irritating Jed’s nose and throat.
Wolff halted halfway up a steep bank, and sat on a boulder, breathing heavily. “Here, sit beside me,” he said.
Jed sat and Wolff drew her close to his side and took in a deep breath, and released it again. Together they gazed upon the ocean.
The air carried a sharp tang, and the horizon ended abruptly ahead, where dark promontories bordered the mouth of the river. A stretch of water, tinged red by the sun’s light, filled the gap in the headland, reaching out to a flat horizon that merged into the sky. Looking upon it, an agoraphobic unease came upon Jed. There were no walls, and no ceiling. There was nothing to protect and contain. She could not sense the frontier where sanctuary ended and darkness began, and she could not look upon it, and turned away.