Makemin has plenty to say, not about the island but about the enemy, their tactics, his career. He deputizes me to copy out some of his financial papers—naturally he had no trouble taking them along—into one of the empty ship’s logs, so he’ll have all the information indexed, etc. The work is intolerably dull and draining. When I get the time, I set myself on Nardac, but she plainly avoids me, retires when I come near. She knows my narrator’s star, maybe, and doesn’t want to give her reasons for joining us. Jil Punkinflake made hesitant and breathless overtures to her, but he she spurns. At his approach, Nardac strikes the deck before her with a hand as numb and hard as a knot of wood, and he hops away in alarm.

Her preferred place is in the bow, where she has some shade and calm from the wild air. Once, as I sat waiting for Nikhinoch to give me something unimportant to do, and Thrushchurl was nearby, singing his ditty, I noticed she was looking at him, with no particular expression. With interest. But she sets herself among the idiots, who congregate around her in the prow. They mill and mewl and roll about on the deck with each other like huge, groggy kittens, as the wind dries the spit on their chins. From far away I have seen her lips moving, and I know she tells them things. Such a calm as hers doesn’t need to speak, but she does speak, eerily.

So I eavesdrop, and hear her brief relations rapped out against the ocean’s grain. The stories she tells have nothing to do with history. I provide a sample:

(An unhurried, slow inhalation.)

She was an artist (she says this in a matter-of-fact way, her eyebrows going up and her lips frowning a little). I followed her in that. I invariably begin by saying that she was an artist. I say that, but I mean that backwards. It’s not that she made an art of executing, but that an artist is that, executioner. There’s a kernel, a way of saying what I mean more simply than what I mean, which is that she was no functionary. The task was handed to her, but she did not merely receive that as a, as a task. (Her voice dropped there.)