"I served you throughout the war, Rajan." (The end of Father's staff was on his neck, and Father's foot was on his chest.) "How can I serve you now?"

"By going with us to a place where you will be as human as we are." For a minute Father thought about things. "And by coming back. You will be tempted to remain, I warn you; if you do, you will die and it will be by no act of mine."

"Where I…?" The old inhumu gaped at us.

"We will sleep," Father told him, "all of us except Babbie. Hoof will rig a sea anchor for us-"

From the mizzen top, his bird cried, "I go! I come!"

"Yes," Father told it. "You will come with us, Scylla. It's for your sake we're going, after all."

After that, I furled the sails and made a sea anchor from two sweeps.

(My wife was reading over my shoulder when I wrote that last, and says that many people will not know what a sea anchor is or how to make one. The others promised to let me write this by myself, because Hide and Vadsig saw more of the man who said he was our father than I did in Dorp, and Daisy hardly saw him at all, even if she writes better. She writes better than Hide, too, even if Hide will not admit it.

(A sea anchor is the sort of anchor you use when your anchor cable will not reach bottom. A boat is meant to sail, and will sail whenever the wind blows, even under bare poles. You cannot stop it, but a good sea anchor will slow it down so much it might as well be stopped. What I did was to lash together two sweeps crosswise and tie a long line to them in the middle. The longer the line on a sea anchor, the better it holds.)

Then we went to sleep. Babbie was supposed to watch Juganu the inhumu and our boat, too, while we were gone; and Father tied a line around Juganu's neck and to his wrist. I said that if we slept and Juganu did not, he would bleed us till we were dead if we did not wake up, and the line would not help. But Father said he could not, and Juganu swore he would not.

After that we went into the cabin and Father told me to lay down and close my eyes. I did, but as soon as I heard him and Juganu lay down too, and the rattle when he put down his stick, I sat up. He was on his bunk, with Juganu on the floor beside him. I remembered the sword he called Azoth was probably under his tunic, and if Juganu got it he could kill us both. I had never seen him use it, but he had told me what it could do and so had Hide. I took it up on deck and hid it. It was not that I was afraid to go to the Red Sun Whorl, but I was very nervous about it. I cannot explain it more than that.

Babbie was on deck and looked at me with his little fierce eyes in a way that told me I was supposed to be in the cabin asleep. I have never been sure how much Babbie understands, but he understands a lot. I know he understood that, and you could ask him to bring you almost anything except food and he would go get it if he felt like it. He would even bring Father food, but he would not do that for Hide or me. Babbie has gone away, I think into the woods on the mainland, but Vadsig says Witches Rock.

This is going to be hard to explain, but I will try to do it better than Hide and the others have.

I did not feel asleep at all. (Hide says for him it was like going to sleep, but not for me.) It was more like looking through Father's ring than anything else I have done, but that was not it either. Everything began to change. Our boat was water, and Babbie was a hairy man with thick arms and real big shoulders, and glasses, and a couple of Babbie's eyes (the little ones). The bird was the bird asleep on the mizzen top with its head under its wing and another bird, a bird too fat to fly that was flying around just the same. I kept blinking and blinking, trying to blink them away; but they just got realer.

I felt like I had to hold on to something, and I tried to hold on to the sky. I have no idea why that was what I picked, except that it did not seem like it was changing, and I had tried to hold on to everything else, and everything else was changing anyhow except the sky and the water.

So I tried to hold on to the sky, the beautiful Blue sky with little dots of clouds all around and high thin wispy clouds way up behind them. Just when I thought I had it and Father could not take it away, it got darker and I thought, "Watch out, a big storm coming!" But it was not a storm, it was stars pulling the daylight in. Then the boat rolled under me a little, and I knew it was not our boat.

It had four masts, and it was higher, a lot higher, at the bow and stern than in the middle; but even the middle was about five or six cubits above the water. I had heard of boats with three masts, but I have never heard of one as big as that. It was so big it had a boat as big as ours upside-down forward of the mainmast. It steered with a wheel instead of a tiller, and the man at the wheel was staring at us like his eyes were going to roll right out of his head and yelling, "Captain!"

Father's bird landed at his feet about then, a fat bird that came up to his belt. The funny thing about Father-I know Hide said something about this but I want to say it too, like I did the changing. He looked more like our father there, not really like him, but more than on Blue. He was shorter and thicker, and his hair had some black in it. His face was more like father's, and his eyes were not sky-colored anymore.

There was a man with him I had never seen before, a man with yellow hair and a big hawk nose. His eyes were not sky-colored either. I have seen ice in the winter that was that color when the sunlight hit it, big chunks of ice floating in the sea. This man was looking at his hands, and then he bent down and felt his knees, and hit one, too, pretty hard with the side of his fist. He told Father, "I would never try this!"

Father said, "Yet this is what you are. Try to remember."

About then the captain came running up. He looked sly and he had a big curved sword hanging from the widest belt I ever saw; the blade must have been wider than my hand. He talked in a way I had trouble understanding.

Father told him, "I am sorry to commandeer your boat, but commandeer it I must." He held out his hand, and it was full of big round disks of gold with pictures on them.

The captain opened his mouth, and closed it again.

"Here," Father said, "take it. There will be as much again when we leave you-I hope to repay you in other ways as well."

I told the captain, "You better do what Father tells you."

Babbie said, "Huh! Huh! Huh!" and his eyes made the captain step back.

Father wanted to know who that was, so I said, "It's Babbie, Father."

Then he said, "I didn't intend to take him with us, but the boat will be all right, I'm sure, provided we're not too long."

The fat bird said, "Good boat!" and flew up on the railing to look down at the water. It was a big, thick railing with carving on it, and the place where we stood was ten cubits over the water. It could have been more.

Father had the captain hold out his hands, and put the gold in them, saying, "You must take us out to sea. We will leave you thereor at least, I hope we will."

The captain looked hard at the man at the wheel, but the man at the wheel was pretending he had not heard anything. When the captain saw the man did not look like he was listening, he turned around and ran down some steps into the middle of the boat, and I heard a door slam.

Father asked the fat bird, "Well, Scylla?"

There must be a word for the time when we see something we have seen before turn out to be something else, like when a stick is a snake without moving. My wife knows more words than most people. She knows more than anybody except Father. But she does not know a word for that.

When Father said, "Well, Scylla?" I saw the bird was really a girl old enough to take care of other sprats but not old enough to get married. I do not mean she looked like a girl dressed up like a bird. She looked like a girl that looked exactly like a fat bird but was really a big girl that would be a woman in another year.