The Blue Star

by Fletcher Pratt

IV

She was roused by feet beating in rhythm and the sound of distant shouts; a big round spot of light swung slowly from side to side across the door. Last night had shown her a jug and a basin beneath the let-down leaf that formed a writing table, but the water was so cold it gave her goose-pimples. The new dress would need taking in at the shoulders, so after trying it, she returned to the old before stepping toward the deck along a passage that held three more doors like her own. Two men in yokes were pushing and relaxing on opposite sides of a pivoted bar (to steer the ship, she supposed), under the orders of an officer in a green cap. One of the workers was the curl-bearded man who had accosted Dame Domijaiek the evening before. He relaxed one hand to touch his forelock and had the grace to look sheepish. The officer hardly looked at her; he was watching the masts that rose on every side and the small boats about, for they were well out into the Bredafloss, moving steadily downstream, though the sails hung so flat, it seemed they could contain no air at all.

Lalette stepped past the steersmen to watch the slow pageant of river moving by, and heard a step. Ser Brog; he touched his cap and invited her to breakfast, down a flight of steep stairs and along another passage to an apartment at the rear of the ship. A skylight threw dappled gleams across a table laid for five, with food already on it. Another man was standing by; Ser Brog presented the second mate, and as he did so, a big officer with a firm chin and bags under his eyes came in with an air of great hurry and sat down without waiting for the rest. This was the captain, Ser Mülvedo; he bounced half an inch from his seat when his name was mentioned, and fell to eating while the rest were taking their places.

Lalette thought his courtesy somewhat strange to one who wore a badge of good condition, and it was stranger still when a youngish officer entered, to be greeted by the Captain with; “You are tardy. You know the rule of the ship. Take your meal with the crew.”

The young officer went out sourly, but not before Lalette recognized him as the one who had directed her toward the lazarette. The meal went on in silence; when the Captain rose, so did the others, and Ser Brog touched Lalette’s arm to take her to the deck again. The spring air was fine, the stream-bank all tricked out in tender green. Lalette looked (and felt with a thrill of delight that all was really now spring for her, she was free from the old life and everything to win), but Ser Brog was speaking.

“I am sorry to dream,” she said.

“Why, dreams do be what we grow by. I would be saying that you had brought luck and fair weather on our leave-taking—for all but Tegval.”

“The one sent from his breakfast?”

“He.” The cargo-overseer laughed. “Our third mate is an admirable young man, with only one flaw—that he has discovered how admirable he is and does not stint his own admiration.”

(The third mate would give her the book.) Said Lalette, watching a tall unpainted barn without a window that walked slowly past along the shore; “Yet your captain seemed very harsh with him for so light a fault.”

“Oh, that is only the rule of the sea. On a ship one learns early that in this world there is no such thing as following one’s own desire; it is all a pyramid of orders.”

“You are grim.”

“No, I only see things as they are.” Now he began to make remarks which she must have answered, for he smiled and continued (but now her mind had leaped far away, and she was wondering whether she would see Rodvard again ever, or recover her Blue Star? Bound out to sea and away; it was his fault, who had given her unfaithfulness and desertion in exchange for the offered kindness and the abandonment of her mother. And now she wondered why she had embarked on the counter-witchery without even questioning whether she should; she felt a tear behind her eye, and hoped he had come to know what resources of fidelity and good will he had lost in her. No, not again, I’ll never let another have the making of my joy.)

A whistle was blown; men moved along the deck of the ship, and Tegval came toward them with his cap insouciantly on one side to be presented. He had the same look of inner peace as the Amorosians of the conventicle, but mingled with it an air of dash and recklessness.

14
THE EASTERN SEA; THE CAPTAIN’S STORY

A frond of white had spread across the sky as they talked. Lalette went to her room in the round covered-house that rose from the deck, and applied herself to the needle. Making the new dress right was a problem, since she had done little but broidery before, and she became so taken with fitting and clipping as not to note the tick of time; then felt drowsy, and lay down to be roused by a knock at the door.

It was Tegval, third mate. “May I lead you to supper?” The ship had no motion when they reached air; here they were in the middle of a brown-blue tide, with flat shores stretching to green-blue on either flank. Tegval helped her graciously down the stair, and was this time prompt enough so that all of them were waiting when Captain Mülvedo came in. This officer was now at ease, cracking his face into a smile for Lalette and trying to converse with her about people a demoiselle of condition might be expected to know. Some of them she did know, but was forced to avoid the issue lest he learn the falsity of her name.

Tegval offered her his arm after the meal, and showed her around the deck as far forward as the tri-mast, his discourse being of the parts of the ship and the beauty of the sea. He would answer little when she asked him about Brog, the Captain and other personalities, and as evening was now beginning to grow shadowy, with a hint of chill, she announced an early return to her cabin. He leaned close as he handed her in the door and said in a low voice that he would knock at the fourth glass of night with a book, then tipped a finger to his lips to prevent questions (and she realized that even on a ship trading to Mancherei, it was not too well to be an Amorosian).

With no desire for sleep, she stretched out on the bed and tried to solve her riddles—how it was that her mind should turn to the seldom-felt nearness of Rodvard. There had been about him the faintest trace of some odor like that of old leather, masculine and comforting. She was a little irritated at herself for feeling the lack of it, and her mind drifted off through other angers till she lay there in the dark, simmering with wordless fury over many things; the ship began to move. The change in circumstance made her conscient of what she was doing; she began to weep for her own troubles, the tears trickling into the hard pillow where her face was buried, thinking that after all Rodvard had perhaps been right to slip away from a witch with so vile a temper.

There was a lamp hanging from a kind of pivoted chandelier. She swung out of the bed to light it, but had to strike more than once to obtain a good spark. By this time there was the queerest feeling in her stomach as though it were turning; she lay down again, not sure whether this was the over-robust supper she had eaten or the veritable malady of the sea. Orderly stampings and the sound of shouts drifted through the cabin’s small window as her illness declared itself more firmly; she was miserable, her mind going round like a rat in a slat trap until a whistle was blown four times and someone knocked at the door.

Tegval, of course, with an overjacket on that swung as he stood balancing to the motion of the ship on widespread feet. “We sail on a fair and rising wind,” said he, in a lilt. “Good fortune. Are you troubled by the sea, demoiselle?”

“I am—ill.” (Hating to confess it.)

“No matter. Give me your hand.”

It was taken in both his in a manner curiously impersonal, the eyes were closed and his lips moved. They opened pale blue. “You will be well,” said he and sat down on the chair which, for the first time, she noted as bolted to the floor. She did not believe him and the swing of the lamp made her dizzy (and now she could feel his personality reaching out toward her with an effort almost physical, and was enough ashamed of her former angers to put into her tone some of the kindness now felt toward the race of man):

“You are most good. I was told you would have a book for me.”

He undid his lacings and produced from beneath the jacket a volume, large, flat and all bound in blue leather with the royal coat of arms of Dossola on it to indicate who was the author. “You should not let it be seen,” he said. “Our cargo-overseer takes the law’s letter so seriously that he would denounce his best friend—which I am not.”

“You may count on me.” Their fingers touched as he handed it to her, no longer impersonal, and she let the contact linger for a brief second, before leafing over the pages. They were printed in heavy-letter with red initials. “What a beautiful book!” she said.

“It is the word of love,” he said. “A true word, a good word—” chopping off suddenly as though there were more it would be imprudent to tell.

“I will read it.” She did not want him to go quite yet and sought for words. “God knows, I need some help in the tangle of my life.”

Said he: “We make a distinction between the god of evil and the God of love, in whose arms we may lie secure from the savagery that infests the world. Ah, inhumanity! Today a plover lit in the rigging, and what must they do but net that bird to be eaten by the captain. I could barely consume my supper for thinking of it.”

Lalette stirred. “I do not understand this feature of your doctrine. One must often go hungry by thinking so, it seems to me. Do we not all live by the death of other beings, and even a plant suffer when it is devoured?”

Tegval stood up. “In true love, as you will learn, all are parts of one body, and must give whatever another needs for sustenance. Read the book and sleep well, demoiselle.”

He was gone, and to Lalette’s surprise, so was her illness.