The Urth of the New Sun Read Online Free Page A

it, and certainly it did not grasp me. Nevertheless, we remained together—the black cords adhered to my clothing as well as to the flat strips (neither fur nor feathers) of the shaggy creature. A moment after we had tumbled from the carronade, I discovered another property of the cords: stretched, they contracted again to a length less than the first, and with great force. Struggling to free myself, I found myself more tightly bound than ever, a circumstance that Gunnie and Purn found highly amusing.
    Sidero crisscrossed the shaggy creature with fresh cords, then told Gunnie to release me, which she did by cutting me free with her dagger.
    "Thank you," I said.
    "It happens all the time," she said. "I got stuck onto a basket like that once. Don't worry about it."
    Led by Sidero, Purn and Idas were already carrying the creature away. I stood up. "I'm afraid I'm no longer accustomed to being laughed at."
    "One time you were? You don't look it."
    "As an apprentice. Everyone laughed at the younger apprentices, especially the older ones."
    Gunnie shrugged. "Half the things a person does are funny, if you come to think of it. Like sleeping with your mouth open. If you're quartermaster, nobody laughs. But if you're not, your best friend will slip a dust ball into it. Don't try to pull those off." The black cords had clung to the nap of my velvet shirt, and I had been plucking at them. "I should carry a knife," I said.
    "You mean you don't?" She looked at me commiseratingly, her eyes as large, as dark, and as soft as any cow's. "But everybody ought to have a knife."
    "I used to wear a sword," I said. "After a while I gave it up, except for ceremonies. When I left my cabin, I thought my pistol would be more than adequate."
    "For fighting. But how much do you have to do, a man who looks like you do?" She took a backward step and pretended to evaluate my appearance. "I don't think many people would give you trouble."
    The truth was that in her thick-soled sea boots she stood as tall as I did. In any place where men and women bore weight, she would have been as heavy too; there was real muscle on her bones, with a good deal of fat over it.
    I laughed and admitted that a knife would have been useful when Sidero threw me off the platform.
    "Oh, no," she told me. "A knife wouldn't have scratched him." She grinned. "That's what the whoremaster said when the sailor came." I laughed, and she linked her arm through mine. "Anyway, a knife's not mainly for fighting. It's for working, one way or another. How're you going to splice rope without a knife, or open ration boxes? You keep your eyes open as we go along. No telling what you'll find in one of these cargo bays."
    "We're going in the wrong direction," I said.
    "I know another way, and if we went out the way we came in, you'd never find anything. It's too short."
    "What happens if Sidero turns out the lights?"
    "He won't. Once you wake them up they stay bright until there's nobody to watch. Ah, I see something. Look there." I looked, suddenly certain she had noticed a knife during our hunt for the shaggy creature and was merely pretending to have found it now. Only a bone hilt was visible.
    "Go ahead. Nobody'll mind if you take it."
    "That wasn't what I was thinking about," I told her.
    It was a hunting knife, with a narrowed point and a heavy saw-backed blade about two spans long. Just the thing, I thought, for rough work.
    "Get the sheath too. You can't carry it in your hand all day." That was of plain black leather, but it included a pocket that had once held some small tool and recalled the whetstone pocket on the manskin sheath of Terminus Est . I was beginning to like the knife already, and I liked it more when I saw that.
    "Put it on your belt."
    I did as I was told, positioning it on the left where it balanced the weight of my pistol. "I would have expected better stowage on a big vessel like this."
    Gunnie shrugged. "This isn't really cargo. Just odds and ends. Do you know how the