The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (8 page)

“Janus, admittedly, you had a rather bad experience— ”

He made a noise of frustration. “You don’t understand— ”

She broke away from him, stepped into his path to face him; he stopped short, stepped back. “No,” Rowan said to him, “I don’t understand. And you’re doing nothing to help me.
Make
me understand.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“That’s nonsense. Anything known can be communicated.”

He blinked, then smiled. “Known by whom? And by what means? Communicated to whom? And in what fashion?”

The questions were purely rhetorical; he was directly quoting a lesson from their training. The tactic annoyed Rowan. “Janus, I was merely stating the principle, as you know well— ”

“Yes, but you mustn’t state a principle in a way that makes it seem like a description of the immediate circumstance.” He was suddenly enjoying himself. “That’s a form of equivocation. And an invitation to misconstruction. Not to mention manipulative.” He put his arm about her shoulder again. “And now let’s discuss the ethics of the various degrees of manipulation; I can’t recall when I last had a chance to talk on this level.”

But she slipped from his reach. “You’ve changed the subject.”

“Yes. Unsuccessfully.” He sighed. “But there is a truth in there.” They had reached the first wharves of the harbor; he took her hand and led her to a seat on one of a group of water barrels, with her back to the harbor. The last light of the sun made him squint as he studied her face, seeming to search for something. “Rowan,” he said, “I don’t know you.” He put up a hand to forestall her protest. “No, it’s true. As students we spent four years almost living in each others’ pockets, and if you’d asked me at the end of that time, I would have said that I knew you, perhaps better than I knew my own family.

“But I don’t know you now. I don’t know what you’ve done, and I don’t know what the world has done to you.

“You know how dependent understanding is upon context. But the context needed to understand this is
me
: what
I’ve
done, what the world has done to me— the me that was before, the me that was during, and the me I am now. And I can’t make you be me.

“The young woman I knew at Academy . . . I don’t think there’s any way I could make her understand what I feel.” The last full light of the sun slipped away, and she saw him take a moment to note its passing. “Any more than I could convince the Janus of that time, I suppose,” he continued. “And that’s too bad. Because I could have saved myself a lot of . . . unhappiness, if I’d known then what I know now.”

“But what is it that you know now?”

“I’ve told you.” He said it again, now lightly. “I’m a coward. You can’t be a steersman and a coward at the same time, Rowan; it doesn’t work. Trust me.”

There was something peculiar in that voice: it was at odds with his body. Even in the gathering gloom, Rowan could see how tightly he held himself. His stance contradicted his tone. He was trying too hard to convince her. He wished her to believe him and to let the matter pass.

There was more to know here. “Janus, I don’t believe that you’re a coward.”

“All I can do is tell you that it’s so— ”

“But why do you think it’s so? Because you felt fear? Everyone does, at some point, if they’re alive and not living in a cocoon.”

He made a movement as if to turn away; the tension in his body had grown too great to permit him to do so. He said, “I didn’t simply feel fear— ”

“Then, what? I don’t mean to, to trivialize your experience— but when danger comes, we do feel fear. And then the danger passes, if we survive it. But to look back on fear as if it suddenly constituted your very nature— ”

“
Does
it pass?” The words came suddenly, as if by themselves.

She spoke definitely. “It passes. You are not
now
shipwrecked; you are not
now
alone in the wilderness— ”

“That passed.” Something released in him, and he took a step toward her. “And the next one passed.” He spoke close to her face. “And the one that followed, and the one after that— ” He straightened, half turned away, flung out one arm. “And every single thing passes, one by one, but Rowan— ” and he turned back “— Rowan, when I look out of my window every morning,
I am afraid
— can’t you see?

“It didn’t
make
me afraid! It made me discover that I
am
afraid; it made me see the reasons to
be
afraid! It made me see what was always there, that I’d never noticed; and once I’d seen it I couldn’t stop seeing it. It’s always there, Rowan; it’s always right there behind my eyes!” He jabbed his fingers against his own forehead forcefully; and although it was a small gesture, it startled her with its tiny violence. She reached up instinctively to pull his hand away; but he caught her arm suddenly. “No, look!”

He grabbed her shoulders, forced her around roughly. “Look— there, over there.” Two fishers, securing their boat for the night. “That man, pulling the hawser. He could scrape his hand, catch an infection, and lie for days in agony, wishing he would die. And his crewmate, that woman— she could fall in the water, bump her head, and drown, and then where would her children be? She has six, and no husband, no other family. Four boys and two girls, and it takes every waking breath of every day to feed them and house them, and in one stroke of chance she’d be gone and they’d be alone. Would they starve? Perhaps not, perhaps people here wouldn’t let them starve, but— ” His grip on her shoulders was tight, hard, his voice half choked. “—
but can you imagine their pain?
One instant all is fine, and the next . . . the world is in ruins.” He released her abruptly, and she slid off the barrel to stand facing him, the imprint of each of his fingers still felt on her body.

Light from the fishing boat caught his dark eyes; but he was not looking at her or the harbor. His voice was strange, eerily inflectionless. “Every single thing can fall,” he said. “Swiftly or slowly. In pain, or in silence. Nothing lasts, nothing is safe. Safety is imaginary.

“The whole world is arranged against us. And we make our little accommodations, draw a circle around them, and think: well, that’s nice, that works, we can live like this. And we pretend that our little circle is the whole world, or all of the world that matters.” He closed his eyes and reached out slowly, fingers spread, like a blind man. His voice became more human. “And we live in that circle, Rowan, huddled together, holding hands in the firelight, and all these little events— the love affairs, the marriages, the waking and sleeping, and all our daily work— they all seem so large to us in the smallness of our scope. But anything, anything could stop it, steal our breath, break our bodies, give our hearts more pain than we were built to endure.”

And now he did look at her, or in her direction; but in that gaze she felt herself strangely without identity. “Sometimes,” he said, “I think that stupidity is a blessing. Because, what is there to do except live? And we have to live, we want to live, but how can we live without pain, without fear, without so anticipating every disaster that terror turns us to stones?

“So, we act. We act because we have to. We protect each other when we can. We do all we’re able to; and if we’re just stupid enough, we can believe that it’s sufficient. Until . . . until we find out that it isn’t. With luck, we die at that point. But up until then, with just enough stupidity, it is possible to be happy.”

Silence between them. Then: “All this from a shipwreck and being lost in the wilderness?”

“All this,” he replied in hardly more than a whisper, “from dreaming one night that I was drowning and waking up to find it was true; from being trapped in the small darkness, with the cabin tumbling, water falling on me, and on me, every time the ship rolled; from the single, solid
sound
of it, a sound made of— of thunder and shattering wood and screams, and then wind, too, suddenly wind, and the flickering light; from what I saw in that light; from what I felt in the dark; from clutching at a piece of wreckage, hoping to float, and finding it was a human body . . .”

His voice stopped. On the boat, the fishers extinguished the lamp and stepped onto the wharf, their footsteps thumping softly and wearily as they passed by, away into the night.

She hoped Janus was finished speaking. He was not.

“From the hunger,” he said. “From the cold. From the dark. From the voices in the dark.”

And then there was quiet. The steerswoman felt she could not move from the weight of silence; and she found herself trying, as a steerswoman will, to survey the country in which Janus lived.

She almost understood.

Darkness all around, shapes in the darkness: terrible things moving in the dark. Things sensed, not by sight or sound, but by immanence, the knowledge that at any moment one of them might reach out to touch her—

Rowan felt that if she tried very hard, she would be able to see those shapes clearly, but she would first have to do something: make some movement, turn in some specific direction,
twist
.

She could not make herself turn in that direction; it seemed to her that the movement required was one that only a broken body could make.

Eventually she said slowly, “The things you say . . . they’re nothing that I don’t already know.” She was surprised to discover how true this was.

From the shadows: “I know.”

“But you’re wrong about . . . about stupidity being a blessing.” The idea disgusted her; even to entertain it made her feel unclean. “There’s something else. There’s something you’re missing.”

“Of course there is. The world is as it is, Rowan, and there are three ways to exist gladly in it: You can be ignorant, knowing nothing of its nature; you can be stupid, and know of it but never truly understand; . . . or you can be brave.

“I have, in me,” Janus said, “just enough of that daily courage to do what I need to do, and live as I do. To live as a steersman, too . . . it would take too much. It would hurt all the time. I can’t do it.”

“I’m sorry.” Blindly, she reached out to place one hand on his shoulder. The sensation shocked her. He had seemed, for a while, to be only a voice, a voice out of darkness, speaking darkness. But touch made him real.

He was human. He was Janus. He was her old and dear friend, and he was in pain. This much, at least, she could understand.

“I’m sorry I made you speak of it,” she said. “I suppose I can see why you didn’t want to tell anyone, even Ingrud . . .”

And he reached up to clasp the hand that rested on his shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “and I’m sorry I told it to you. You’re too intelligent. Try not to think too much about what I said. I wouldn’t want you to understand it too well. I wouldn’t want you to become like me.”

“I won’t,” she said immediately, without thought; and only noticed after that there was a sort of cruelty implied by the statement.

“Of course you won’t.’’

They sat down together on the barrels, facing the harbor, and remained so for a long time. Lights from the harborside shops cast a hundred gold coins on the water; small waves chuckled against the wharves; rigging rattled quietly in the darkness.

Somewhat later, a portion of what Janus had said returned to Rowan.

“And,” she said without preamble, “I don’t feel particularly brave, myself.”

“Of course not,” he replied, invisible in the dark. “That’s the beauty of it.”

6

T
he steerswoman leaned back in the sunshine. “I’m hiding from the conclave of gossips,” she said.

Brilliant light poured down from the sky, as clean and fresh as new wine. Rowan sat, arms around her knees, leaning up against the aft railing of a small sailboat, which was tethered to a broken piling at the more ramshackle end of the harbor. The ship itself was tidy, but showed years, perhaps decades, of general neglect. The steerswoman decided that her sense of seamanship ought to be affronted, but the day was too fine, too bright and cheery to allow any such feeling to last.

Janus was on hands and knees with a crowbar, prying up one of three deck planks that had worn from sheer age into hazardous nests of splinters. Their replacements stood nearby, good new oak, not yet stained.

Out in the daylight, the previous night’s conversation seemed an unpleasant dream, of the dark and murky sort that were the most disturbing, and the most easily dispersed by sunshine and sea air.

Janus laughed, the old bright laugh, now framed strangely by the gray-peppered beard. His skin, naturally brown, had been darkened near black by sunlight, and he wore a threadbare but clean muslin shirt of bright yellow, green canvas trousers, and gray gloves. Rowan considered the overall effect pleasantly decorative. “ ‘Conclave of gossips,’ ” he said. “That’s a good term.” A nail squealed protest as his prying lifted one plank edge. “They used to have something similar in the town where I grew up, and I always thought it was the most miserable, mundane way of passing time imaginable. Now, I actually enjoy it. Especially in winter, with a fire, and the wind rattling in the dark outside.” The image was near enough to one he had mentioned the previous night that Rowan felt a quick, small shiver that vanished immediately. Janus seemed not to notice. “There are some very good people in this town, Rowan,” he went on. A final tug delivered the plank into his gloved hands. “You just have to learn to appreciate them.” He set it noisily aside and began on the next.