A wave-crest came across the bulwarks and wetted the edge of Lalette’s dress a little, so that she moved against the supporting arm. Said she (wondering why he had told her this tale); “But she must have known that he only made it up about the sea-witches.”
“That could be, could be, now. Could be that she was angry with him for saying so much to a coronetted man like that Ensign Glaverth. But I think more like that just all of us want a new bed-partner now and again, and she could not bear it that he thought of it before her.”
15
CHARALKIS; THE DOOR CLOSES
Brog leaned back and lifted up his cup. “As human people age,” he said, “the most important part of the body does gradually move northward from organ to organ, beginning with the feet, on which you will notice a baby’s attention always fixed, and ending with old men who do nothing but sit still and let thoughts go through their heads. Now I have myself reached the comfortable age of the stomach, for which I give thanks.”
“Yaw,” said the first mate through a mouthful of food. “Ye’d put Ser Tegval lower down.”
“A wee lower, yes.” Brog looked at Lalette. “But do not trouble you; in my capacity, I am charged with the duty of bringing all cargo to port as safe as it left.”
A smile twisted his face into the cartography of a river-furrowed mountain chain, and he swivelled round to look hard at Blenau Tegval. The first mate gulped once and said; “Saving always captain’s orders, ser cargo-overseer. Captain has rights on a ship at sea.”
Lalette stood up, her body swaying with the slow drift of the slung lamp overhead, and asked permission to leave, having learned that it should be asked. The laugh began before she reached the deck, Brog’s dry snicker beating time to the first mate’s guffaw. She had so little lost her resentment at their remarks and the suggestion that she was spied upon that when Tegval tapped on her door in the break of twilight as usual, she cried through the wood for him to begone. But the horror of lonely hours took her before she had more than issued the words; she leaped up, opening the door and calling that she must consult him, he was to come in. This was a mistake, too; there immediately arose the question of what she was to consult on; and after a blank word or two, she could do no better than ask what the Prophet’s book meant by denying reason?—when it seemed to her that only a reasonable person would read it at all.
“Ah, no,” said the third mate, sitting down and taking her hand in his (which she did not mind). “It is the failure of human reason and human love that drives us to the higher love.”
(Though she thought this might be true in her own case, and could even look forward with a little exaltation to the new life in Mancherei, she was unwilling to break the talk by admitting it, so) she said; “But Blenau, how can this higher love make up to us for sorrow?”