“Yes, yes!” he cried. “That’s it. The reason, the reasons … Don’t you see the pattern?”
“Only I don’t know what a Salamander is,” she told him.
“Well, it’s like the blue lizards that sing outside your window sometimes,” he explained. “Only it isn’t blue, and it doesn’t sing.”
“Then why should anyone want to remember it?” she grinned. It was an attempt to annoy him, but he was not looking at her, and was talking of something else.
“And the painter,” he was saying, “he was a friend of Cellini, 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 this 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,” said the man in the dark 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.”
As she slid off the rock and started walking beside him, barefooted in the sand, she asked, “That boy—I wasn’t sure, he was all tied up, but he had four arms, didn’t he?”
“He did.”
“You know, I can’t just go around 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 at all.”
And several days later, and several hundred miles away …
I
Waves flung themselves at the blue evening. Low light burned on the wet hulks of ships that slipped by mossy pilings into the docks as water sloshed at the rotten stone embankment of the city.
Gangplanks, chained from wooden pulleys, scraped into place on concrete blocks, and the crew, after the slow captain and the tall mate, descended raffishly along the wooden boards which sagged with the pounding of bare feet. In bawling groups, pairs, or singly they howled into the narrow waterfront streets, into the yellow light from open inn doors, the purple shadowed portals leading to dim rooms full of blue smoke and stench of burnt poppies.
The captain, with eyes the color of sea under fog, touched his sword hilt with his fist and said quietly to the mate, “Well, they’re gone. We better start collecting new sailors for the ten we lost at Aptor. Ten good men, Jordde. I’m sick 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 insane. We’ll do well if we only lose that many.” He was a tall, wire bound man, which made the green tunic he wore look 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 sailor’s stories of magic they tell of her?”
“Why, sir?” asked the mate. “Do you?”
“No, I don’t,” said the captain with a certainty that 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 the mate, Jordde.
“Perhaps,” said the captain.
“And she’s been strange,” continued Jordde, “ever since then. She walks at night. I’ve seen her going by the rails, looking from the sea-fire to the stars, and then 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 gives me chills now, the way the men ran to the rail to see, pointed at it. And it just raised itself up, like a beckoning, a signal, and then sank in a wash of foam and green water.”
“Well,” said the mate, “we have men to get.”
“I wonder if she’ll come ashore?”
“She’ll come if she wants, Captain. Her doing is no concern of yours. Your job is the ship and to do what she says.”
“I have more of a job than that,” and he looked back at his still craft.
The mate touched the captain’s shoulder. “If you’re going to speak things like that, speak them softly, and only to me.”
“I have more of a job than that,” the captain repeated. Then, suddenly, he started away, and the mate was following him down the darkening dockside street.
The dock was still for a moment. Then a barrel toppled from a pile of barrels, and a figure moved like a bird’s shadow across the opening between mounds of cargo set about the pier.
At the same time two men approached down a narrow street filled with the day’s last light. The bigger one threw a great shadow that aped his gesticulating arms behind him on the greenish faces of the buildings. Bare feet like halved hams, shins bound with thongs
