I was in Deep Darkness. I could see the chief’s boat behind me, as clearly as ever out there in the bright water, and I knew that he’d still be able to see my pale windcatcher in the glow from the water behind me, but that soon even that light would be gone.
So what now? Should I turn in the direction of the wind and go faster? It was tempting, but if the chief expected that of me, then the extra speed would be of no use at all. Should I perhaps continue the line I was on, to the left and rockway of the wind, and hope they’d wrongly guess that I’d turn toward the wind? Or perhaps I should do the thing that would surely seem to them least likely: Turn right and alpway across the wind?
There was no way to know for sure. There were only those three choices, and shades in between them. The men on the other boats knew that as well as I did.
I glanced at my windcatcher, which I could still faintly see in the last of the light from the bright water, and made up my mind. I turned toward the direction of the wind, saw the catcher fill up, and felt myself pulled forward. After that I held the steerpole steady, watching the windcatcher and waiting until the light was so dim I could only just barely make it out. Then I turned right and alpway.
I looked back at the first boat as it came bumping through the strip of waves between the bright water and Deep Darkness. The last time they’d been able to see me, I would have been turning alpway of the wind, and I’d purposely left that turn to the last possible moment in the hope they’d decide I’d been trying to make them think I’d follow the wind, and had only snuck off alpway when I believed I was out of their sight.
Everything depended on their thinking that. Otherwise they could reach me in minutes. I watched the first boat. The windcatcher, the men, and a patch of water around them were all lit up by the orange glow from its firecage. And . . . and, yes—yes!—it was turning alpway!
I watched the second boat and saw it continue straight ahead, then I turned sharply left, back across the wind again, and as far rockway as I could go without losing the wind completely. I would count out five hundred seconds, I told myself, and then, if the firecages still weren’t coming after me, I would turn blueway and let the wind take me straight out across the Pool.
One of the bats squeaked softly in the darkness.
“Be quiet!” I whispered to it. “Do you want to be sent down a metaldig to die?”
They didn’t come after me. For a while I saw the orange lights going back and forth in the distance, but once they’d lost me, they had no way of finding me again.
I turned the boat right until the catcher stopped flapping and filled up properly with air, and then went straight. It was good that I’d shaken off the ringmen, of course, but at the same time, losing them reminded me that I was completely alone. I had no companions in the darkness but the two bats: them and the cold stone inside me. And that was like the opposite of company. It was a hole where company had been.
Water slapped against the side of the boat. The air was icy cold and I grabbed a buckskin to wrap myself in. Starry Swirl was covered over by cloud, and the blackness around me was complete. The boat rose and fell over big, invisible waves in a world I couldn’t see.
I’d been Ringwearer in the bright caves of New Earth. I’d made bark boats in the greeny-yellow lanternlight of Knee Tree Grounds. I’d seen the Veekle that came from Old Earth, lit up by the red flames of burning buckfat. But through all those times, and in the long long times before, stretching back and back to Tommy and Gela and long long before, these waves had always been here, rising and falling, all by themselves, in the darkness.