"Oh, they talk about cannibals, women who drink blood, things neither man nor animal, and cities inhabited only by death. Sailors avoid it, save to curse by." "Do you know anything more than that?" "There's nothing more to know," shrugged Urson. "She said the stories you'd tell would not be one tenth of the truth." "She must have meant that there wasn't even a tenth part of the truth in them. And I'm sure she's right. You just misunderstood." "No, I heard her correctly," Geo assured him. "Then I just don't believe it. There are half a dozen things that don't match up in all this. First, how that little four-armed fellow happened to be at the pier after two months just when she was coming in. And to have the jewel still, not have traded it, or sold it already...." "Maybe," suggested Geo, "he read her mind too, when he first stole it, the same way he read ours." "And if he did, maybe he knows how to work the things. I say let's find out when he comes back. And I wonder who cut his tongue out. Strange one or not, that makes me sick," said the big man. "About that," Geo started. "Don't you remember? He said you knew the man it was." "I know many men," said Urson, "but which one of the many I know is it?" "You really don't know?" Geo asked, quietly. "You say that in a strange way," Urson said, frowning. "I'll say the same thing he said," went on Geo. "What man did you kill?" Urson looked at his hands for a moment, stretched the fingers, turned them over in his lap like meat he was examining. Then, without looking up, he said, "It was a long time ago, friend, but the closeness of it shivers in my eyes. I should have told you, yes. But it comes to me, sometimes, not like a memory, but something I can feel, as hard as metal, taste as sharp as salt, and the wind brings back my voice, his words, so clearly that I shake like a mirror where the figure on the inside pounds his fists on the fists of the man outside, each one trying to break free. "We were reefing sails in a flesh-blistering rain, when it began. His name was Cat. The two of us were the two biggest men aboard, and that we had been put on the reefing team together meant that this was an important job and one to be done well and right. Water washed our eyes, our hands slipped on wet ropes. It was no wonder my cloth suddenly flung away from me in a gust, billowing down in the rain, flapping against half a dozen ropes and breaking two small stays. 'You clumsy thing' bawled the mate from the deck. 'What sort of fish-fingered sailor, are you?' "And through the rain I heard Cat laugh from his own spar. 'That's the way luck goes,' he cried, catching at his own cloth that threatened to pull loose. I pulled mine in and bound her tight. The competition that goes rightly between two fine sailors drove a seed of fury into my flesh that should have bloomed as a curse or a returned jibe, but the rain rained too hard, and the wind was too strong; so I bound my sail with silence.