Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  “You forget the diversion. And you forget that we were able—no thanks to you!—to prepare him properly, after all. And most of all, dear husband, you forget that today is the day the true gods walk. As soon as the sun leaves its zenith my master will open the ford. Everything is ready. The ritual is prepared, the ingredients are collected, the place is panting with eagerness for its splendour to come upon it again. We need only to arrive with our chosen sacrifice.”

  Her voice was so exultant I could imagine my uncle shrinking away from it. I was so caught up in visualizing his reaction that it took a moment for it to penetrate that they were talking about killing me.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Magarran Strid

  The Magarran Strid is, they say, the most dangerous stretch of water in all of Northwest Oriole.

  It didn’t look it.

  It looked like a placid brook, actually. There was deep green moss and green ferns growing on the stones of its bank, and the sun shone in long white streaks across its glossy surface. Only the sound of a deep subterranean rumble gave any indication otherwise. Or so I thought, until my uncle tilted his head nervously. “What’s that noise?”

  Lady Flora was out of my line of sight, but I could hear her fond exasperation. “The waterfall down from the lake.”

  Crimson Lake?

  “Come away from the bank, my dear, we don’t want you to slip and fall in!”

  He took a few tentative steps towards the direction her voice was coming from. I kept staring in the direction I’d been planted; my neck was too stiff to make movement easy, anyway, and clearly they all thought me still under the spell. He cast one piteous, guilty look at me, and then disappeared.

  Mr. Hagwood came into my line of sight. He was searching the bank for something, and eventually bent to pick up a small object. He passed upstream out of my line of sight, returning at length with the horse and cart.

  I shuddered unintentionally at the sight of the barrels. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stomach another mouthful of whiskey again. One of those four barrels was the one I’d been transported in. Mr. Hagwood kicked at the grass, picked up a long plank, stowed it on the back of the cart, and led the (truly very patient) horse off downstream. He did not look at me, either with triumph or remorse. He simply walked, humming tunelessly.

  I felt a great disappointment in Harry Hagwood.

  When we’d arrived at this mostly-featureless stretch of the Magarran River gorge, I had been so stiff from my night’s confinement, and so stupefied from the combination of the fumes and my conclusions, that I had not even tried to escape when Hagwood pried the lid off. He and my uncle had man-handled me out of the barrel—not without a great deal of effort on their part and some additional bruising on mine. While I was still sitting on the bank in the same folded position as I’d been inside the barrel, blinking dazedly at the sunlight, they bound my hands and ankles together with thick twine.

  I’d hoped vaguely that they would leave me on the bank, but Lady Flora had other ideas. Along with the barrels, the cart had contained the long plank. It was about ten feet long and a foot wide. This they slid out across the river, taking care to keep it from touching the water, until it rested on a boulder jutting out midstream. Mr. Hagwood then carried me across this makeshift bridge. He set me down, still in my crumpled-up position, and tethered me to a heavy iron ring set in the stone for good measure.

  Watching him pick his way back across the plank, I realized this must be the Strid. The plank wobbled a bit at one point, and he glanced down, and went as grey as he had on seeing my father in the mist.

  I waited a few moments. A few birds sang; no jays called.

  I appeared to be alone, at least within my immediate field of vision.

  Oh, what the hell, I thought, tied I might be at wrists and ankles, and tethered as well, but I had room enough to straighten. The exquisite pain of this process occupied me for a while. Eventually the sensations in my joints receded to ignorable levels.

  Whatever the diversion had been, my father and friends would surely be on their way to rescue me by now.

  I squinted at the sky. I had always assumed, from their name, the reputation of their magic, and from the events at the Ellery Stone, that sacrifices to the Dark Kings were made at midnight. However, Lady Flora’s words had suggested some time after noon.

  The sun was high. I was not familiar enough with the geography of the Forest to know the exact course of the Magarran. It flowed west and north out of the Crosslain Mountains towards its confluence with the Rag at Tenbridge. At this specific point of the forest?

  I would presume it was getting on for noon.

  My hands and feet felt bloated, my fingers like sausages.

  Ignoring that for the moment ... Could I be sure this was the Strid? It might be another stream. There were many of them coming out of the mountains.

  I shuffled around slowly on my boulder until my view of the surface was not quite so sun-dazzled. Still nobody visible on the banks, which was something of a mixed relief.

  The river was about twelve feet wide. My boulder stood in the middle, closer to the eastern (call it eastern) bank, the one we’d come from, by two or three feet. There were a few other boulders that broke the surface here and there, though mine was the driest and most substantial. Not that that was saying much: the limestone was deucedly uncomfortable to sit on, cold and with hard edges.

  The water was beautifully clear. I could see other boulders, all in that fine bright white limestone, ones not big enough to rise above the water, and below them ...

  I very carefully sat up and even more carefully inched myself to a firmer seat on the top of what was not a boulder at all.

  Still waters run deep, went the proverb. The Magarran was not exactly still, but its surface was calm, the only hint of its currents the odd bubble coming up from below.

  Or so it seemed, until the mind realized what the eye was seeing. And then you saw that the boulders were not stones tumbled down from a rock face but the topmost tips of pinnacles that went down until even bright white limestone vanished into darkness.

  I pried a loose flake off my perch. It was white, and clearly visible, for the two heartbeats before it was swept down and away and down.

  I could well believe that no one who fell into the Strid had ever been found again.

  I sat very still as I worked at the knots around my wrists.

  I COULD GROW TO LIKE the grey jays, I thought when half-a-dozen alarm-calls echoed through the woods around me. These were much closer than those from earlier. By the time I had laboriously changed my direction to face the bank opposite the one I’d arrived by the birds were swooping into sight.

  One darted out over the water and perched on my bound hands, which I’d propped up on my bent knees. (I wasn’t sure I was ever going to be able to fully unbend myself.) I looked at it, enjoying the bright dark eye alive with a kind of quizzical interest, the neat grey cap on the back of its head, the white bib and soft cloud-grey plumage.

  A whistle made it flit off again. I could not see the whistler. I weighed the pros and cons of calling out. On the one hand, Red Myrta had been at Morrowlea with me, she might well have the Chancellor with her, and her mother had seemed not totally disinclined to like me.

  On the other hand, they were the source of the whiskey everyone else was smuggling, they had made it clear that they were on the wild lay and behaved accordingly, and their camp was right at the base of the Hanging Hill where sacrifices were made.

  I had not quite decided what to do when Red Myrta and the Chancellor walked out of the trees in front of me.

  “Good morning,” I called, making an ungainly wave with both my hands.

  “Jemis,” said Red Myrta, sighing with a gesture visible across the river. “Of course this where you ended up.”

  THEY DISAPPEARED BACK into the trees. I waited. I did not, truly, have anything else to do. My fingers were beginning to respond more naturally to my efforts to bend them, but wer
e far from dextrous enough to deal with the knots.

  After a while they reappeared. They bore a dead tree with them, trunk stripped of bark and branches and bone-white. After some muted discussion, they slid the tree out across the river awards me.

  I caught it when it reached me and then sat there dumbly with it in my lap.

  “Come on, then!” cried Red Myrta.

  “I can’t.” I would gladly have pretended otherwise, but did not possess the physical faculties.

  “What do you mean, can’t?”

  “I’m tied up.” I repeated the words again when a change in the river’s sound overran them.

  We all looked at the water. For the first glance it appeared no different; then I saw that its former apparent placidity was increasingly disturbed. Eddies and swirls and little whirlpools were forming, chains of bubbles came up in long silver streams from deep, deep down, and now on the surface there was foam. The foam was tinged an odd pinkish colour—and the waterfall was no longer a distant rumble, but a roar.

  Myrta made a very alarmed and consequently alarming gesture at me. “The turn’s starting! Jemis, you have to come now. Here!”

  I tore my gaze from the pink foam just in time to see her filing a sheathed knife at me.

  Red Myrta was always good at throwing games, thank the Lady. Equally thankfully she did not expect me to be as good at catching it: it landed in my lap as neatly as a ball into a basket.

  With the knife I could fumble my hands and feet free. I addressed the tether last, all the while trying not to look at the water now boiling around my rock. Finally the rope fell free.

  I looked at the tree trunk. They had kept hold of the thicker base, and the topmost portion of the tree narrowed to a broken-off stump about the width of three fingers.

  The water changed noise again, yet deeper in pitch and louder in volume. It was quite an extraordinary sound, as if the water was churning stones against each other.

  Myrta shouted something whose sense the water snatched away. It was presumably hurry hurry hurry. It was not a very helpful exhortation. I had never heard anything as urgent as the sound and feel of the water around me. The pinnacle of rock I was perched on was vibrating, almost humming with the force of the water striking it.

  Where was the clear world of mortal danger when one wanted it? The danger was there: where was the clarity?

  I glanced at the tree trunk to see how stable it seemed.

  All the foam, and there was a lot of foam now, was red as blood.

  There.

  Now it all made sense. Now I could see how to get across the red-boiling most dangerous stretch of water in all of Northwest Oriole without adding myself to its tally of innumerable dead. My father had just come home, alive, from a death I thought had happened seven years ago today. I could not leave him alone to face the year ahead!

  I shoved the narrow tip of the tree as far as it would go into the iron loop I had been tethered to. On the far bank Red Myrta and the Chancellor were holding the other end of the trunk, which made it as stable as the situation was going to permit. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on the smooth silvery-grey wood, the black knots where branches once had been, the tiny holes made by insects and the larger ones made by woodpeckers.

  I could not recall when I had looked past the wood to the water, but the crimson foam was surging madly half a foot below me.

  There was no way on earth I would be able to balance upright. I was too stiff to be sure I could even stand upright at the moment. My knees did not want to unbend, my arms barely wanted to move past a circumscribed arc.

  Well, said the inner voice that knew what to do when the world outside was mad with danger, that had given me the insight not to attack the dragon’s jaw where the asbestos palate and rising fire was, that had given me the reactions almost to guess what it would do before it did so. Well: if you cannot straighten, if you cannot balance upright, then use your bent, embrace your limitations, make them your strengths. That is the way of the poet, who takes the constraints of his form and turns them into freedom; that is the way of the warrior who desires to live.

  I tipped myself forward, knees on either side of the trunk, elbows bent close to my sides. Crossed my crossed ankles over the log rather than each other, to keep them from dangling into the mad red foam. Leaned forward slowly, central core muscles screaming murder at having to work so slowly, until my chest rested on the silvery wood and my elbows could cup the log, my sausage hands grip.

  The tree bounced.

  The clarity and the slow-down of all the world around me increased considerably.

  I moved forward without hesitation, without thought, without any fear permitted anywhere near the surface of my mind, any more than the surface of the Strid showed what was going on underneath. No water was visible now, let alone any of the pinnacles below; the water now was one thick cloud of red foam. It looked like the scarf or sock Mrs. Etaris was knitting out of that pouffy scarlet wool.

  Ebraöni, I thought distantly. And was this colour crimson lake?

  Perhaps it was Crimson Lake, the dam on its waters burst to boil into the river.

  But Red Myrta had expected this, had invited her tutor, the Chancellor of Morrowlea, to come witness the Turning of the Waters.

  Did this happen every year?

  —Or only when a priest of the Dark Kings went to open the gate preparatory to human sacrifice?

  The trunk was vibrating with sympathetic motion. I was sweating, the drops falling down red with the spume cast up by the Strid. The sound was phenomenal. I could barely hear myself think: soon stopped trying to, in my mind only the refrain of Crimson Lake, Crimson Lake, Crimson Lake to the inchworm progress across the log.

  I could hear shrieks: the grey jays making their alarm-calls. Was there someone else here? Was I going to roll off the log at the other end and discover myself captured by someone else?

  The air temperature dropped and with it the pressure. I found myself flattened to the log. It was wider here, my progress impeded by a stump of a branch sticking out, but I was so close—maybe three feet from the bank, and safety—

  The noise had changed, I thought dumbly as I tried to raise myself against the downdraft. I could not move, my muscles weak as exhaustion.

  Weak with exhaustion, I thought stupidly, looking down past the log despite myself.

  Down, and down, and down, and—

  The water dropped another dozen feet even while I tried to see what I was seeing. Leaving a scurf of red foam everywhere, coating all those pillars and pinnacles that from the surface seemed mere boulders, the Magarran Strid drained out of its gorge like water out of a bathtub.

  Something deep within me propelled me forward against the downdraft and against the primal fear of depths that the fifty—hundred—hundred and fifty feet now below me inspired.

  I flung myself off the trunk and rolled twice over and over to end up face-down in a pile of wet leaves. I spat one out and hadn’t the energy for any more.

  Someone stepped on my back.

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Turning of the Waters

  I groaned.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Red Myrta said briskly.

  “I’m not going to run anywhere,” I said, or had begun to say when the breath went out of my lungs with an ungainly whoosh. Whoever was standing on my back—for all I had been paying attention, all of Myrta the Hand’s gang and another dragon could have arrived while I was crossing the Strid—appeared to be barefoot. I could distinctly feel toes. They walked, actually walked, up and down my back. I lay there with my face in the cold wet leaves trying to keep my whimpering as inaudible as possible. Everything in my body protested the walker’s attentions; specific muscles in my back quivered, clenched, and released like uncoiling springs. I tried hard not to cry.

  After an interminable while the person gave a bounce and then left me alone. I lay there, face in the cold leaves, breathing shallowly and too rapidly.

  “Come on, then,�
�� Red Myrta said even more briskly. “We have things to do.”

  I rolled over and accepted the hand she held out to me. When she pulled me up, which assistance I needed, the first thing I noticed was that I was able to unfold all the way. The second was that the Chancellor of Morrowlea was sitting on the end of the tree trunk putting her boots back on.

  “Er, thank you,” I said, swinging my arms experimentally. My fingers still felt like sausages, but at least they were tingling with returning circulation now.

  “You have a leaf on your face,” Red Myrta said, not looking away from the gorge opened up before us. “Phew, you stink!

  “I think that was the barrel,” I said awkwardly. I brushed at my face until various bits of leaf-litter rubbed away. The Chancellor seemed entirely unconscious of the depth behind her. She stood up gracefully and came to stand next to me. “You’re very welcome, Jemis. One must say that your physical courage is exemplary.”

  I had only had the Chancellor as a lecturer a few times, but I knew what that meant. I didn’t know if my muscles would stand for a bow, so I made do with an apologetic grimace. “I’m afraid I sometimes have a tendency to act before thinking. I am trying to work on it.”

  “Good.”

  I desperately wanted to ask her if she had learned the walking-on-backs technique from her time in a travelling acrobatic troupe. She looked every inch a princess and the foremost Scholar on lightning and one of the three most important university officials in the world. But ... but I probably never would find out the truth of that particular story. I simply couldn’t bring myself to ask her directly. I stared at the ground, willing my blushes to subside. I did stink, of stale whiskey and sweat and wood.

  As my general embarrassment subsided, I realized that I was behind-hand on too many points. “Chancellor, may I ask if you know what the plan is? What was the diversion that happened back at Dart Hall?”