Act IV — The Sleeping Water

Page 20 — The Not-Knowing Where

Where he is, I do not know.

I have used the word know once in this story, and I will spend it carefully.

The once was the white. I know how the world took us, because the taking passed through my hands first. The craft opened as the craft opens when it holds the shape of what is happening, and my hands were my part in the white. I know that much. I know the crossing as a man knows the fall that went through his hands.

And I do not know where he is. The where is what the world does not give back.

The where is a place.

I will say that in the plain voice, because the record has to be plain. We keep the edge of it. We do not walk into it. We walk around it, as we walk around a wound in the ground that is not ours. We walked around it on the third day as we walk around it now: Wreckreate to the water's line, Rumzuck to the seam, and me to the fire with the craft. The walking around is what we keep for it.

Wreckreate went to the water on the third morning.

He knelt at the line where the water comes in, and he put both hands in. The water took his hands as the wrong world takes everything — without looking up. He was quiet for a long time. The long is what the reading keeps for the reader. I stood a little back from the line, where my part of the morning is. I was not at the water that morning. I was kept at the fire, because the craft reads what the reader reads after. I watched his back, and I did not put a word to it.

When he looked up, his face was the face of a man who has been reading a letter he does not like.

He did not look at any of us while he said it. He looked at the water.

The current runs east.

If one of us landed on this coast, the current would have put him down-range, east, a day's walk or more. If he did not land on the coast at all, he is in the water, or under it.

He said it the way he says everything — which is to say he had already finished the argument and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up. We caught up with the four of us looking at him.

Smackage said: The ground knows. The ground here is a lid, and a lid has a side it does not cover. The uncovered side is east.

The ogre said it without getting up. His palm was flat on the sand, his head was down. The ground did not give the east as the water did. The water gave the east with the current; the ground gave the east with the lid. The two easts were the same east.

Two readers.

The world has a body, and the two of them are the ones who can feel where it is. The water gave east with the current. The ground gave east with the lid. The two easts were the same east. And under the lid, the bones that the ground has been keeping since the second morning — the something the world was put over — lay in that same east, at the bottom of the where.

The where had a direction.

The direction was what it did not have on the first two days. I have kept a camp in the old world where the where had no direction, and it went on without one. This where has a direction, and the direction is what the water and the ground gave it.

The direction did not come as a finding; it came as a giving. The water gave the east without being asked, and the ground gave the east without being asked, and the two givings went on the same morning, as the two things that are the world's go on the same morning. I have kept watches in the old world where the world gave nothing, and the world's part was not there. This world gives, and the giving is what the direction keeps for us.

A direction is a kind of hope the old world never taught me to distrust.

The old world taught us to distrust the hope. This world has not taught that yet. The distrust was the old world's, kept for us by a world that gave nothing, and I have kept the distrust since, as a thing the old world taught me and the new world has not yet undone. The hope is what the direction keeps for us. The two keepings were the third morning of the new world, and they are what I have kept since.

We keep the where, and the where keeps us, and the keeping goes on.

Uuaellaen is in the water, or under it, or down-range a day's walk or more. We do not count him. We keep the count as we keep everything, and the count is what we do not let go of: the five of us, and the one the world took.