By evening the sailor was still there, uneaten by the watercreature. Catherine said to herself with grim dissatisfaction, It’s my own fault. I climbed the tree and tied myself to it with my hair. I signaled the boat all night when the sea and the sky had other plans for it. It might now be at the bottom of the ocean had I kept out of it.
I must take command of things again, she told herself. As night fell and the sailor slept, she crept across the fallen tree that bridged the slough over to the other side. At one point on the bridge she looked into the water and saw her creature beside her, dim in the light of the moon. She angrily kicked it with her foot, almost toppling in. On the other side she walked calmly to the sailor and knelt beside him. She listened to him sleep, then she began to roll him from where he slept into the river. She would kneel on his back and hold him under the water with all her weight. When he was dead she would sail him out into the mouth of the sea. She would point him in the direction of the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. His disappearance in the morning would be accepted by the Crowd with the same fatalism as his appearance.
He hadn’t touched the water, however, before she found him sitting up looking at her, one hand around her wrist. He had an amazed smile. With his other hand he reached out to hold her face, at which point with her other hand she hit him so hard his head would have made a complete pivot but for the stubborn intractability of his spinal cord. Given his madness, he thought this fairly hilarious. He laughed as he had when he was pulled from the sea, throwing back his chin. She calmly belted him again. He laughed some more and she did it again and again, each time without a flicker of fury anywhere but in the deep white lava of her eyes. She would have been content to beat him to death, but after she’d struck him five times he stopped laughing. His jaw tightened; he raised his hand to her and someone grabbed it.
The sailor looked up to see her father. The other men of the Crowd stood with him. We rescue this man from the sea, they said in their language, and he tries to violate our young girls. This bitch, said the sailor in his language, tried to fucking drown me. What happened? Catherine’s father asked her. I was trying, she explained, to drown him. I was trying to sail him into the maze’s worst and most confused dead-end passage. The men looked at each other confused and slowly let the sailor go. Catherine’s father looked at the sailor in rage, but it was compromised rage. He looked at his daughter in exasperation but it was compromised exasperation. But why? he said. That he is here, she said to him, is a consequence of what I have done: I bear a responsibility for that consequence. Her father nodded as though he understood her.
Catherine took her face back across the fallen tree to the other side of the water. The men dispersed. The sailor watched and smiled his amazed smile. You touch my daughter, said Catherine’s father in his language, and I’ll make you yearn for the thighs of the sea. The sailor answered back in his language, Some night, huh, captain? Catherine, on the banks of her river, beat at the reflection of her face twenty minutes, splashing in the water until her flock of savage hair lay wet and listless on her back.
From then on, the Crowd regarded Catherine with guilt and dread. Their gratitude for the night she saved the village mixed with contempt for the madness of her sacrifice. When she attempted to drown the sailor, this perception of her madness was only affirmed. When she raged at herself in the water, the issue was placed beyond doubt. That her eyes held their own power inclined the Crowd to believe she was a sorceress. Her father felt uneasy; he sensed a prevalent wish among the Crowd that Catherine had perished at her post high in the tree, for which they would only have had to deal with her martyrdom.
The sailor’s name was Coba. Fully revived some thirty-six hours after his rescue, he sauntered about the village jauntily mixing with the others. He continued telling jokes no one laughed at and conversing in a language no one fully understood, though the common Portuguese of their tongues served as an uncertain basis of communication. He also watched Catherine, and from her spot on the other side of the water she watched him. From his third spot on either side of the water Catherine’s father watched them both. When Coba saw Catherine and her father watching him watching her, he laughed as though it was one of his jokes. He plotted his revenge. From the chest that had washed up with him he pulled a deck of cards.
First he told them stories from the cards. He told stories of sensitive kings and adulterous queens coupling with adulterous jacks. The jokers fulfilled eponymous roles in these small dramas, but the aces might be anyone: a spy in the court, a magician, a sailor washed into port. Then after he’d been with them a week Coba took to playing solitaire across the back of a huge black pod from the reeds of the river. Once the men of the
