Hoarsely Lawler said, “Just like an old fishnet, is what it looked like. Lying here on the deck, all crumpled up. Those jellyfish may have sent it up here to hunt for them. Struvin kicked at it and it caught him by the leg, and—”
“What? What kind of bullshit is this?” Delagard glanced over the side again, then at Lawler’s hands, then at the smear on the deck. “You’re serious? Something that looked like a net came up out of the sea and caught hold of Gospo?”
Lawler nodded.
“It can’t be. Someone must have pushed him over the side. Who was it? You, Lawler? Kinverson?” Delagard blinked, as if the implausibility of what he had just said was obvious even to him. Then he looked closely at Lawler and Kinverson and said, “A net ? A live net that crawled up out of the sea and caught hold of Gospo?”
Lawler nodded again, just the merest motion of his head. Slowly he opened and closed his hands. The stinging was very gradually abating, but he knew he’d feel it for hours. He was numb all over, stunned, shaken. The whole nightmarish scene was playing itself over and over in his head, Struvin noticing the net, kicking at it, becoming entangled in it, the net beginning to ooze its way up over the railing carrying Struvin with it—
“No,” Delagard muttered. “Jesus, I can’t fucking believe it.” He shook his head and peered down into the quiet waters. “Gospo!” he yelled. “Gospo.” No reply came from below. “Fuck! Five days out to sea, and somebody gone already? Can you imagine it?” He turned away from the rail just as the rest of the ship’s complement began to appear, Leo Martello in the lead, then Father Quillan and Onyos Felk, and the others close behind. Delagard clamped his lips together. His cheeks ballooned. His face was red with amazement and fury and shock. Lawler was surprised by the power of Delagard’s grief. Struvin had died in an ugly way, but there were few good ways to die. And Lawler had never thought Delagard gave a shit for anyone or anything but himself.
The ship-owner turned toward Kinverson and said, “You ever hear of any such thing before?”
“Never. Never ever.”
“A thing that looked like an ordinary net,” Delagard said again. “A dirty old net that jumps up and grabs you. God, what a place this is! What a place!” He kept shaking his head, again and again, as if he could shake Struvin back up out of the water if only he shook it long and hard enough.
Then he swung around toward the priest. “Father Quillan! Give us a prayer, will you?”
The priest looked baffled. “What? What?”
“Haven’t you heard? We’ve had a casualty. Struvin’s gone. Something crawled up on board and hauled him over the side.”
Quillan was silent. He held his palms outward as though indicating that things that crawled up out of the ocean were beyond his level of ecclesiastical responsibility.
“My God, say some words, won’t you? Say something!”
Still Quillan hesitated. A voice from the back of the group whispered uncertainly, “Our father, which art in heaven—hallowed be thy name—”
“No,” the priest said. He might almost have been awakening slowly from sleep. “Not that one.” He moistened his lips and said, looking very self-conscious, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no eviclass="underline" for thou art with me.” Quillan hesitated, moistening his lips, apparently searching for words. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies … Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
Pilya Braun came up to Lawler and took him by the elbows, turning his hands up so that she could see the fiery marks on them. “Come,” she said quietly. “Let’s go below, and you show me which salve to put on them.”
In his little cabin, among his powders and potions, Lawler said, “That’s it. That flask there.”
“This?” Pilya said. She looked suspicious. “This isn’t a salve.”
“I know. Put a few drops of it in a little water and hand it to me, first. Then the salve.”
“What is it? A pain-killer?”
“A pain-killer, yes.”
Pilya busied herself mixing the drug for him. She was about twenty-five, golden-haired, brown-eyed, broad-shouldered, thick-featured, deep-chested, with lustrous olive skin—a good-looking, strong-bodied woman, a hard worker, according to Delagard. Certainly she knew her way around the rigging of a ship. Lawler had never had much to do with her on Sorve, but he had slept with her mother Anya a couple of times twenty years ago, when he had been about as old as Pilya was now and her mother was a sleek thirty-five. It had been a stupid thing to do. Lawler doubted that Pilya knew anything about it. Pilya’s mother was dead now, carried away by a fever from some bad oysters three winters before. Lawler had been a big man with the ladies at the time he was involved with her—it had been soon after the collapse of his one brief ill-starred marriage—but he hadn’t been one for some time now, and he wished Pilya would stop staring at him in that eager, hopeful way, as though he were everything she might need in a man. He wasn’t. But he was too courteous, or too indifferent, to tell her that, he wasn’t sure which.
She offered him the glass, brimming with pink liquid. Lawler’s hands felt like clubs. His fingers were as stiff as wooden rods. She had to help him as he drank. But the numbweed tincture went to work instantly, easing his spirit in its usual comforting way, nibbling away the shock of the sudden monstrous event on deck. Pilya took the empty glass from him and set it down on the shelf opposite his bunk.
Lawler kept his artifacts from Earth on that shelf, his six little fragments of the world that once had been. Pilya paused and peered at them, the coin, the bronze statuette, the potsherd, the map, the gun, the chunk of stone. She touched the statuette delicately with the tip of her finger, as if she expected it to burn her.
“What’s this?”
“A little figure of a god, from a place called Egypt. That was on Earth.”
“Earth? You have things from Earth?”
“Family treasures. That one is four thousand years old.”
“Four thousand years. And this?” She picked up the coin. “What do these words say, on this little piece of white metal?”
” “In God We Trust,” is what it says, on the side that has the woman’s face. And on the other side, where the bird is, it says, “United States of America” up here, and “Quarter Dollar” down below.”
“What does that mean, “Quarter Dollar"?” Pilya asked.
“It was a kind of money, on Earth.”
“And “United States of America"?”
“A place.”
“An island, you mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. Earth didn’t have islands of the kind we have.”
“And this animal, the one with these wings? There isn’t any such animal.”
“There was on Earth,” Lawler said. “It was called an eagle. A kind of bird.”
“What is a bird?”
He hesitated. “Something that flies in the air.”
“Like an air-skimmer,” she said.
“Something like that. I don’t really know.”
Pilya poked thoughtfully at the other artifacts. “Earth,” she said, very quietly. “So there truly was such a place.”
“Of course there was!”
“I have never been sure. Maybe it was only just a story.” She turned to him, grinning coquettishly, and held out the coin. “Will you give this to me, doctor? I like it. I want to have an Earth thing to keep.”
“I can’t do that, Pilya.”
“Please? Would you, please? It’s so beautiful!”
“But it’s been in my family for hundreds of years. I can’t give it away.”