Watson, Ian - Black Current 03 Read Online Free

gaps in her knowledge of my adventures, ones which she hadn't
enquired into while we were chewing the fat earlier on; so as not to betray herself . I'd mainly been bringing her up to date on what had happened since Edrick murdered
me.
                 I determined to puzzle out what these
gaps must be and try to plug them as diplomatically as possible during the
course of the next few weeks.
                 The very next day, in between my
stints in the throne room, I began to write The
Book of the Stars.
                 It wasn't easy at first. I admit to a
few false starts. For here was I, writing about how Tam suddenly hove into
sight in Aladalia whilst I was busy writing The
Book of the River; and lo, Tam was about to sail into view once again, this
time ex Aladalia and at my own behest! So events seemed
curiously overlaid, as if I were suffering from double vision. Also, I
was writing about happenings which seemed fairly remote to me, who had spent
two 'extra' years in between on Earth and its Moon; but to Tam and Peli and
everyone else these same happenings were much more recent. I'd looped back
through time; they hadn't.
                 Soon I was quite intoxicated with my
reconstruction of the past. It came as something of a shock when Chanoose
announced one day, "Your Tam's due tomorrow noon ,
aboard the Merry Mandolin."
                 Peli, I hasten to add, had been
allowed to turn up at the temple without prior advertisement. So no doubt
Chanoose said this to get in my good books. Literally! Plain
to see that I'd begun writing something. Chanoose and Donnah were well
aware that I intended to; so if I had tried to conceal what I was up to, I'm
sure this would have roused suspicions. (The copy was what I intended to
conceal; howsoever it got done.) Consequently I tackled the job in a spirit of
brazen privacy. The privacy component was that I kept my finished copy locked
up safely in my scritoire, and made no bones about not letting people kibitz on
my work in progress. The brazen part was that I tore up numerous sheets of spoiled
paper, cursing roundly in my kiddy voice. This display of artistic temperament
deterred enquiries, but more importantly I noted how all such tom scraps
disappeared from the straw trash bucket with an efficiency which I ascribed
not so much to impassioned tidiness on the part of Lana and company, as to a
desire to oversee all of my abortive scribblings. Once I got into my stride—and
was in fact writing smoothly—I catered to this appetite by scrawling a few
extra irrelevant lines especially to tear up.
                 The basket squatted beside my
scritoire like a big hairy ear hoping to eavesdrop; but I wasn't worried that
eyes would pry into the scritoire itself whilst I was otherwise engaged being
priestess. Peli mightn't be able to write but she could certainly perform other
neat marvels with her fingers. In town she had purchased a complicated lock,
cunningly crafted in Guineamoy. This, she substituted skilfully for the lock
in the scritoire lid as supplied, to which I assumed Donnah would have kept a
spare key. I always wore the new key round my neck.
                 If Chanoose was hoping to ingratiate
herself, that was her mistake. Forewarned, I insisted on going to meet Tam
when he docked the next day. And why not, indeed? I
was sick of sitting on my backside in the temple. Sitting at
my scritoire. (I'd found that I genuinely had to turf Peli out while I was composing my narrative, by the
way, so maybe my temperaments weren't all pretence.) Sitting
on my throne. Sitting at the dinner table. And
occasionally sitting out on the verandah, either playing cards with Peli and
Dad, or else with my nose in a romance; before tossing it aside—the romance,
that is!—to get on writing my own romance. I had to get out!
                 Halfway through the next morning's
audience, I rose and quit; went down to my quarters