than lust it was the sensuality of a dream he felt, for of course it was a dream. His whole body sweetly ached, and the center of joy seemed at his lips rather than anywhere else, his lips that touched her lips, quite closed, not even moist nor very warm.
Light delicious spasms passed through him, one after another, ebbing, flowing, resonant, and ceaseless.
He did not want to change it, did not want it to end. And it did not end.
But eventually, he seemed to drift away from it, back into sleep. And this was so comfortable that, although he regretted the sensation’s loss, he did not mind so much.
When he woke, he heard them laughing at him. Many men, laughing, low voices and higher ones, coarse and rough as if torn from tin throats and voice boxes of rust. “He’s going the same way.”
“So he is too.”
Going the way that they had gone. The three he had seen on the deck, the one above the sail.
It was the ship. The ship had him.
He got up slowly, for he was giddy and chilled. Wrapping one of the blankets about him, he stepped out into the daylight.
The sky was white with hammerheads of black. The sea had a dull yet oily glitter.
He checked his lines. They were empty. No fish had come to the bait, as no birds had come to the mast.
He gazed back over the ship.
She was no longer pale. No, she was rosy now. She had a dainty blush to her, as if of pleasure. Even the sail was like the petal of a rose.
An old man stood on the afterdeck and shook his head and vanished.
Jeluc thought of lying on the bunk, facedown, and his vital juices or their essence draining into the wood. He could not avoid it. Everywhere here he must touch her. He could not lie to sleep in the sea.
He raised his head. No smell of land.
By now, surely, the islands should be in view, up against those clouds there—But there was nothing. Only the water on all sides and below, and the cold sky above, and over that, the void.
During the afternoon, as he watched by the tiller for the land, Jeluc slept.
He found that he lay with his head on her lap, and she was lovely now, prettier than any woman he had ever known. Her hair was honey, and her dress like a rose. Her white skin flushed with health and in her cheeks and lips three flames. Her eyes were dark now, very fine. They shone on him.
She leaned down, and covered his mouth with hers.
Such bliss—
He woke.
He was lying on his back, he had rolled, and the sail tilted over his face. He got up, staggering, and trimmed the sail.
Jeluc attended to the ship.
The sunset came and a ghost slipped round the cabin, hiding its sneering mouth with its hand.
Jeluc tried to cook a meal, but he was clumsy and scorched his fingers. As he sucked them, he thought of her kisses. If kisses were what they were.
No land.
The sun set. It was a dull grim sky, with a hole of whiteness that turned gray, yet the ship flared up.
She was red now, La Dame, her cabin like a live coal, her sides like wine, her sail like blood.
Of course, he could keep awake through the night. He had done so before. And tomorrow he would sight the land.
He paced the deck, and the stars came out, white as ice. Or knives. There was no moon.
He marked the compass, saw to the sail, set fresh meat on the lines that he knew no fish would touch.
Jeluc sang old songs of his campaigns, but hours after he heard himself sing, over and over:
“She the ship
“She the sea
“She the she.”
His grandfather had told him stories of the ocean, of how it was a woman, a female thing, and that the ships that went out upon it were female also, for it would not stand any human male to go about on it unless something were between him and—her. But the sea was jealous too. She did not like women, true human women, to travel on ships. She must be reverenced, and now and then demanded sacrifice.
His grandfather had told him how, once, they had had to throw a man overboard, because he spat into the sea. It seemed he had spat a certain way, or at the wrong season. He had had, too, the temerity to learn to swim, which few