Left and aft was the one he was studying. Its legs were short, ending in big splayed fins. Its arms were short too. They pulled its body hard against the handhold. Its body hugged the hull. It twisted to look up at him. It seemed wonderfully agile where the shell didn't bind it.
Its shell was smooth, streamlined-and painted! Painted in unreadable hieroglyphs, in brilliant scarlet and orange and green.
The other riders were painted too. Tim couldn't read the patterns, though they looked more like simplified pictures than an alphabet. But he'd seen those colors before. Where?
Forward left, that one had been injured. Tim could see a healed split along his shell, under paint that turned the crack into a coat of arms. The accident had bent the shell, and bent the Otterfolk's body too.
Tim believed he had known they were sapient the instant he looked into their eyes; but the paints told a more emphatic tale. They were artists.
A creature barred from using fire could never make such paints. Wait, now, that was the red of a speckles can!
Settler magic. The walls of Civic Hall in Spiral Town had murals in those colors, and others too.
The Otterfolk would have used more colors if they'd had them. Somewhere was a source of red and orange and green acrylic paint, and the Otterfolk had access.
Twenty or more sails were chasing him now. Tim wasn't really concerned. Those other boats must be carrying Otterfolk too, to slow them. The handles on a boat weren't placed for fishers' convenience, after all.
The day passed like a dream. This was sensory deprivation: lying in the bottom of a boat, holding the tiller in one position, sometimes finding the will to lift his head, look over the side, check his position. Once he looked just as the left-forward rider reached out, snatched a platyfish from the water, bit off two big bites, and dropped it to be caught by the rider behind him.
Then one of the riders flipped a big Earthlife bass over into the boat. Around midday the rearmost pair dropped off. The boat picked up a little speed, and then he had another pair of riders. Later the front pair dropped away and were replaced.
He was hungry. He was thirsty. He'd eaten and drunk as much as he could hold last night, and it wasn't enough. When Quicksilver blinked out his arms were racked by cramps. He tried steering with his feet and found he could make it work.
That left his agonized hands free to fillet the bass into sashimi.
The fleet came ever closer.
The sun sank, the sky darkened.
In an hour he couldn't tell the land from the sea. He could tell where the wind was. Once, staring into the dark, he perceived the land far too close. He steered hard about, and sensed that the wind was blowing straight at the land. He could keep himself aimed, if Destiny didn't change the rules on him.
Sailing an unfamiliar boat was dangerous enough in daylight. Sailing at night was suicide. Would he even know if the shore was about to smite him? If he'd seen a way, Tim would have surrendered. But the fishers would smash their boats and his if they caught him in the dark.
And in the morning, would they have him surrounded?
Quicksilver peeked above the mountains, a brilliant point against a sky already showing yellow-white.
Sails had come very near, but they hadn't surrounded him yet. With Quicksilver's added light, Tim angled closer to the beach. Closer yet, as the sun itself glared between peaks.
Tim didn't intend to be caught. He'd beach the boat and run when they came close enough.
The waves were tiny, twenty centimeters high, breaking only ten meters from shore. He was sailing only a few meters beyond that point,
and that was very near the beach. He could see an endless reach of sand without a shack or wall or footprint anywhere, nothing but sand and weed and painted shells.
Otterfolk shells. A score in view to left and right, now that he thought to look.
Tim edged the boat closer yet. That wasn't an Otterfolk graveyard, was it? Sharks had bones; chugs had bones; but there weren't any Otterfolk bones on that beach. Just shells painted in acrylic colors, all set on the beach beyond the tide line, like headstones maybe, until one shifted suddenly, and again.
The boat rocked. Damn, he was too close, his centerboard was grinding against sand! He turned hard, and back a bit as the sail tried to go slack. The centerboard wasn't grinding anymore because his four riders had dropped off and the boat was riding higher. He angled for open sea before he thought of the other boats.
They were all turning.
He had some sea room now, and he looked back for the particular shell that had moved.
It covered a hollow. Shapes too small to see crawled out from under the edge.
Otterfolk were riding waves to shore. He saw them clearly for the first time, four limber shapes with short finned limbs and long bodies. He half-recognized the markings. Those had been the riders on his boat.
He worked it out later, thus:
Fishers were too skilled, and a fisher boat was too predictable. Boring. A thief in a boat he didn't know how to use, making mistakes and learning as he went, made for an exciting ride.
Four riders piling on a thief's boat would slow it. Fisher boats chasing it, being less interesting, would carry fewer riders. Of course the thief would be caught.
Otterfolk might choose to ride two at a time to give a thief a longer run; but Tim always believed that the Destiny natives had minds but no language. Negotiation had to be basic.
Threatened, the thief sent a basic message. Tim had threatened to beach his boat on the birthground.
The Otterfolk must respond. Perhaps they fouled the fishers' centerboards or tillers, or clung to the handholds in hordes, until the boats couldn't move.
At the time, Tim couldn't guess why the fishers had abandoned their chase. But sailing near shore now seemed a very dangerous thing.
Otterfolk shed their shells: that was clear. They made nests in sand, and left the shell to shade the emerging young: that was a likely guess. Otterfolk would kill any creature found on that shore: that seemed very likely.
He stayed well out to sea until he was nearly to Baytown.
The sky was red with after-sunset, and Quicksilver burned right at the water. Baytown fisher boats were at sea ahead of him. As he came nearer they all turned toward him.
Tim aimed his boat inland, toward where a dish-shaped crater lay on the beach.
The wind was blowing out to sea. He couldn't aim directly toward shore, but he could approach in a switchback pattern. When the centerboard grounded and heeled over, he went overboard. The lightened boat bobbed up and righted. He swam for shore with boats converging behind him. He crawled out winded, and ran for the crater on rubbery legs.
He paused once, and stooped to lift the rim of a painted shell that would almost cover his chest. His vision grayed and he went to his knees. But the cavity under the shell was empty; the Otterfolk children gone. He heaved himself up and kept running, chest heaving, and half fell over the rim of the fused sand dish.
Arcs of wooden bench lined the inland half of the dish. The wood was ancient and weathered. Soft sand lined the bottom on the sea side, and the slanted rim had been painted with hieroglyphs in yellow, orange, green, scarlet, indigo.
The shell he was holding was very like those he'd found scattered over the mudflats that held towels and soggy clothes for the Baytown fishers. Would he have found paint, if he'd turned one over?
It was too big for his pack. He shoved it up between his shirt and rain tunic, against his chest.
He was burning priceless seconds. Fishers had gone overboard. They were in the water, trying to save his stolen boat by attaching lines: they meant to tow it. A few shouted at him, the words blurred, the tone unfriendly.
The five-color cartoons along the rim of Meetplace were old but still vivid. If he studied them he'd see what those simplified figures represented.
But Baytown women were wading the mudflat in his direction, and Tim thought it best to leave.
