They went to the house, walking side by side through the dark streets. Inside, in a courtyard full of potted trees and lit by stars, they made love. Dapple pulled some blankets and pillows out of a room, so they weren’t uncomfortable. "I have spent too much of my life sleeping on hard ground," the actor said. "If I can avoid discomfort, I will." Then she set to work with extraordinary skillful hands and a mouth that did not seem to belong to an ordinary woman made of flesh, but rather to some spirit out of ancient stories. The Fulfilling Every Wish Spirit, thought Haik. The Spirit of Almost Unendurable Pleasure.
The potter tried to reciprocate, though she knew it was impossible. No one, certainly not her, could equal Dapple’s skill in love. But the actor made noises that indicated some satisfaction. Finally, they stopped. The actor clasped her hands in back of her head and looked at the stars. "Can you give me a pot?"
"What?" asked Haik.
"I’ve seen your work before this, and I would like a keepsake, something to remember you."
At last the flame felt burning. Haik sat up and looked at the long pale figure next to her. "Is this over? Do we have only this night?"
"I have engagements," Dapple said. "We’ve arranged our passage on a ship that leaves tomorrow. Actors don’t have settled lives, Haik. Nor do we usually have permanent lovers."
As in her dream, Haik felt she was falling. But this time she didn’t wake in her bed, but remained in the Meskh courtyard.
The Goddess was right. She should give up her obsession. No one cared about the objects she found in cliffs. They did care about her pottery, but she could take leave of pots for a while.
"Let me go with you," she said to Dapple.
The actor looked at her. "Are you serious?"
"I have done nothing since I was fifteen, except make pots and collect certain stones I have a fondness for. More than fifteen years! And what do I have to show? Pots and more pots! Stones and more stones! I would like to have an adventure, Dapple."
The actor laughed and said, "I’ve done many foolish things in my life. Now, I’ll do one more. By all means, come on our journey!" Then she pulled Haik down and kissed her. What a golden tongue!
The next morning, Haik went to her ship and gathered her belongings. They fit in one basket. She never traveled with much, except her pots, and they were sold, the money in a heavy belt around her waist.
Next she went to the harbor mistress. Sitting in the woman’s small house, she wrote a letter to her relatives, explaining what had happened and why she wasn’t coming home.
"Are you sure this is a good idea?" the mistress said as Haik rolled the letter and put it in a message tube, then sealed the tube with wax.
"Yes." The letter was to go south on the next ship, Haik told the mistress. She gave the woman half her money to hold, till the Tulwar came to claim it.
"This is a foolish plan," the harbor mistress said.
"Have you never been in love?" Haik asked.
"Not this much in love, I’m glad to say."
Haik had started for the door. Now she stopped. The shutters on the room’s windows were open. Haik was in a beam of light. Her red fur shone like fire. Her eyes were as clear and green as a cresting ocean wave. Hah! thought the harbor mistress.
"I’m thirty-two and have never been in love, until last night," Haik said. "It has come to me recently that the world is a lonely place." She slung her basket on her back and walked toward Dapple’s borrowed house.
A strange woman, thought the harbor mistress.
The actors’ ship left on the afternoon tide, Haik with them, standing on the deck, next to her new love.
At this point, the story needs to describe Dapple. She was forty when Haik met her, the first woman to train as an actor and the first person to assemble an acting company made of women. Her early years had been difficult; but by this time, she was successful and self-confident, a fine actor and even better playwright. Some of her writing has come forward to us, though only in a fragmentary condition. Still, the words shine like diamonds, unscratched by fate.
Dapple was her acting name. Her real name was Helwar Ahl, and her home–which she rarely visited–was Helwar Island, off the northeast corner of the Great Southern Continent. For the most part, she and her company traveled up and down the continent’s eastern coast, going as far south as Ettin, where she had many friends.
They were going south now and could have taken Haik’s letter, though Haik hadn’t known this. In any case, their ship was a fast trader, bound for Hu and not planning to stop on the way. East they went, till the coast was a thin dark line, visible only when the ship crested a wave. The rest of the time, they were alone, except for the peshadithat swam in front of them and the ocean birds that followed.
The birds were familiar to Haik, but she had never seen a live peshabefore. As the animals’ sleek backs broke the water’s surface, they exhaled loudly enough so Haik had no trouble hearing the sound. Wah! Wah!Then they dove, their long tails cutting through the water like knives. They had a second name: blue fish, which came from their hide’s deep ocean color. Neither death nor tanning dimmed the hue, and peshaleather was a famous luxury.
"I had a pair of peshaboots once," said Dapple. "A wealthy matron gave them to me, because they were cracked beyond repair. I used them in plays, till they fell into pieces. You should have seen me as a warrior, strutting around in those boots!"
Years before, a dead peshahad washed up on a beach in Tulwar. They’d all gone to see it: this deep-sea animal their kin had hunted before the Drowning. It had been the size of a large woman, with four flippers and a tail that looked like seaweed, lying limp on the pebbles. The old men of Tulwar cut it up. Most of the women went back to work, but Haik stayed and watched. The flesh had been reddish-purple, like the flesh of land animals; the bones of the skeleton had been large and heavy. As for the famous skin, she’d felt it. Not slimy, like a fish, and with no scales, though there were scaleless fish. She knew that much, though her kin no longer went to sea.
Most interesting of all were the flippers. She begged a hind one from the old men. It was small, the hide not usable, with almost no flesh on the bones. "Take it," her senior male relatives told her. "Though nothing good is likely to come from your curiosity."
Haik carried it to her teacher’s house, into a back room that Rakai never entered. Her fossils were there, along with other objects: a bird skeleton, almost complete; the skulls of various small animals; and shells from Tulwar’s beaches. Laying the flipper on a table, she used a sharp knife to cut it open. Inside, hidden by blue skin and reddish-purple flesh, were five rows of long, narrow, white bones.
She had cleaned them and arranged them on the table as she’d found them in the flipper. The two outer rows were short, the thumb–could she call it that?–barely present, while the three middle rows were long and curved. Clearly, they provided a framework for the flipper. What purpose did the outer rows serve, and why had the Goddess hidden a hand inside a sea animal’s flipper?
"Well," said Dapple after Haik told this story. "What’s the answer to your question?"
"I don’t know," said Haik, afraid to talk about her theories. What did she know for certain? A group of puzzling facts. From these she had derived a terrifying sense of time and change. Did she have the right to frighten other people, as she had been frightened?
Beside them, a peshasurfaced and exhaled, rolling sideways to eye them and grin with sharp white teeth.