by James Dorr
Then daybreak again and a bend in the river afforded a sand island, topped with scrub bushes that we could tie in behind. Here the watch fished for fresh food the next evening, in twos and threes, from the deck. Cleaning them carefully to purge out the river’s taint.
The next night we spied a boat, larger than ours, tacking upriver with grain loaded in her hold. Her captain told me as we hailed through speaking horns, he a large, brawny man—tempting to one as me! Save, of course, for obligations I carry.
And so I saluted him, as he did me, as we passed through the glow of our mutual running lights, he smiling invitingly as—I could see this!—his eyes passed over my body.
Sadly I shook my head. He was unmarried, he would not have looked at me thus were it otherwise.
Sometimes we widows re-marry ourselves, of course, but for me it is not so to be fated.
Therefore instead we exchanged names and courses, I calling out questions to him of currents, of whether more boats sailed below on the river. It being late in the spring, most vessels had voyaged north already.
He said he had seen only one at some distance. It was in the twilight, the river well misted—and not in night’s clearness.
He could not describe it.
That next morning we could find no place to anchor until nearly noon, and so had to unfurl our full course of awnings, erecting a near city of tents above our deck. Our men stripped to breech clouts under their shade, our few women also. And I at the helm as well, bare to the hips, my hair piled and pinned on my head.
Others, their hair braided, but we who rule the boats cherish ours’ straightness.
Then, a new night falling, finally we came to that which we sought—to our port a slow, meandering stream. A maze of openings, of islets and stooped trees. A bayou that led through a swamp.
And here a city, too, of glowing gases, great membranous plants that inflated, then breathed them out. Huge, floating insects and, underneath, shining fish and serpents also.
We had to breathe lightly—the air was unhealthy.
We had to use lead-lines to measure the channel, then add poles to sail power as we sought the deepest parts. Cutting through marsh-scum.
But finally we broke through, or rather we pushed to a lake of clear water, into a grove of small, twisted cypresses, these growing larger, taller as we plied east. Some rising out of the water itself, their roots stretching, platform-like—as if themselves islands within the bayou—bark heavy and deeply scored, leaves blotting out the sun that rose that morning.
So now we forged onward, unmindful of time keeping. Protected as well by foliage as night’s darkness, cypress and mangrove, green and deep-shadowed, such light as came through to us speckled and mottled. As if we sailed through a cave.
This the fifth day? The sixth? Vapors from river mists confused our minds at times.
Colors surrounded us. Songbirds and flowers—bright crimsons and emeralds—as if we sailed now through a cavern of jewels. The smell of rot filled our lungs.
Birdcalls assailed us.
Then one of the men called out, he stationed at the mainmast’s top, in a basket affixed there for such observations. “To starboard! The tree with a canker halfway up its main trunk. That one, with the shaggy bark.
“Under its topmost branch I see roots dangling!”
I looked up. We all looked. Dim, under the shadows, we saw—yes—the aerial roots of an orchid! We saw, yes, the great limb the flower clung to, the blossom itself still lost in the dark above. But the limb reachable from our boat’s mast tip.
Or almost so, anyway.
I scrambled up the shrouds, two men assisting me. One with a grapple, a stout line attached to it.
Once. Twice. Three times he flung it up, pronged hook and hemp painter. Three times it fell back. And then on the fourth—it held!
I in my breech clout alone, I scrambled up. Hand by hand, hand by foot, hair loose and flowing. Yes, I nearly fell once, it did not matter. A sail-fitter’s knife clenched firmly between my teeth.
For it must be I who pried the bloom from its home, whose memory it gripped instead as I, another line tossed to me from the mast, bagged it and lowered it to the waiting lookout. I, high in the firmament, as if a hawk, or bat, gazing below to the world I belonged in. I, caught in a cloud of green, insects surrounding me, small birds, small lizards. In bright blues and yellows, reds, spangled golds, purples, as bright as the lights of New City itself, as seen from our boats’ decks! I, a riverwoman, become a sky creature!
I nearly fell, so consumed was I by wonder!
Except a voice—“Salanann!”—over and over, broke finally through the racket of screeches and chirpings surrounding me. The heady smell from the flower I’d uprooted, combined with earth and mud smells from the swamp below. Acrid smells also and shrieks as a sharp-billed bird skewered a vast beetle, larger than my hand!
Gasping, I gripped the limb. “I hear you! Yes,” I said. “Have you the orchid safely secured below?”
“Aye,” I heard echoed back.
“Try not to touch it, or let its roots grasp your arms. No more, that is, than you must,” I continued. It had come to me by now that what I saw here—what I felt in my sky-home here—was not just from my sensing, but memories reciprocally gained from the orchid. Albeit fleeting ones.
Mine, though, it would hold fast.
Just as, I soon found out, lowering myself finally back down the grapple-line, shaking its hook free, I found the orchid had made a new home for itself on the deck below, its grasping roots burrowing into a hatch cover, halfway open to air out the main hold. Its aerial roots dangling free into the hold itself.
“So be it,” I murmured. “There are fore and aft hatches—let it have the center one. There is no cargo below for it to displace.”
We had sailed empty, though on our trip back we would fill our decks with more common flowers, and swamp plants that healers use, so that our journey would not be without profit. That is how life is when one sails the river.
These southern flowers, indeed, were rare to those used to the northern ones—those the ones more prized because they keep better, especially in summer. Near-summer as it was. Yet there were towns on the banks of the river as we returned back north, some, granted, in side-inlets, tributaries, but towns nonetheless.
And where there are towns, there are living people. And where living, dying—we sold our flowers.
We sold our roots and herbs, thus to help stave off death for those who had illnesses. For that goes with life too.
We, of the river, may know this above all.
Our hold once more lightened, save for its center hatch, we tacked again by night, anchoring by day’s light, using the winds that blow crosswise from west and north. Westerlies mostly. Making good time, we thought, back to the Tombs to retrieve what we had left there.
When, perhaps still two nights below the southernmost tendrils of the Old City, a dark boat approached us. It was just past dusk with mist still on the river, we had only resumed our sailing out from a rock-littered island surrounded by snags, when it broke into clear air flooded with moonlight.
It was an outlaw boat—one we had met before!
One whose crew we had fought, far to the north of here. With spears and arrows—fish-probes and rat-lances—oars and boat hooks to prevent them from boarding us.
Whose captain’s lance had struck my husband before we escaped from them, causing his death wound.
“Hold off!” I shouted across the water. I brandished a boat hook, gleaming in moonlight as the mist thinned further.
Yet it still bore down on us.
I saw to my crew’s arming, then returned to the helm. Looking at telltales above on the mainmast shrouds, to know at the soonest should there be a shift in wind—something that might let us beat around them, they coming from upstream. To let us outsail them.
When, suddenly, a new boat broke from an inlet, upstream from both of us.
A large boat. A grain boat.
A boat we knew also.
The pirate vessel was nearly upon us when this new craft hailed us: “May we help you, Salanann?”
My bachelor captain, who had so admired me on our journey down-stream—his cargo now sold and risking the summer heat to seek one more loading!
“Aye!” I called back, when the outlaw boat’s skipper saw he was outnumbered. He signed for his helmsman to turn away from us.
And I saw my moment.
“Prepare to jibe!” I called, watching my crew abandon their weapons, taking their stations at the fore and main sheets. I pulled us to starboard.
I crouched as the wind took us, passing across our stern, driving us onto the pirate that now, in desperation, tried to escape us.
I laughed as they, dropping their own weapons in surprise, braced helplessly while our bow pressed, fast, onto them. Ramming their stern as I pulled us hard over!
Our sails whipped across our deck as we heeled around, foresail first—the wind pulling us faster—then the great mainsail as, quickly, I called again, “Ready about!,” thus bringing us all the way into a full circle. So disengaging us.
Back on our upstream course, I looked behind me. We’d sheered her helm clean off, springing her rudderpost—out of control, the pirate was taking on water already when she came up on a snag. Ripping her bottom out.
“Salanann!” I heard to port, as my grain-captain, having gone past to keep wide of our turning, had now come about to sail upriver by our side. At least for that moment, before he would turn back to go on his business.
“Should we try to rescue some?” he called through his speaking horn. Smiling as he did so.
Sadly I smiled back. I shook my head slowly—“It is because of that boat I am a widow.”
He understood me. We are a cruel people, we of the river. Had it even not been for the grudge I held, still we would have turned into the wind, as we did, watching only as the river’s water flooded that other’s hold, sickening and poisoning even those who could swim. Watching silently as river serpents fed, as owls and king-vultures swooped down to claim their share.
Hearing the screams of men. Both men and women.
We said no more of it, exchanging once more our news. Courses and cargoes. He perhaps tarrying as, finally, we parted. Hoping perhaps to salvage the wreck for wood.
While I had my crew set our course back to north, to return to the Tombs.
• • •
She stopped, and here I, the Tombs’ curator, resume Salanann’s story, she graciously giving to me its ending. Of how, in the light of a past-full Lovers’ Moon—it now well into summer—one of the river guards called out warning:
“A boat! A gypsy boat approaches, as if to tie to our quay. But strangely burdened!”
Another took it up: “A heap of something on its deck in its center. Of roots and a flower.”
I called down: “Let it dock.”
I, from the wall, had glimpsed it as well. I already knew it was Salanann’s vessel.
I took more guards with me, in case help was needed, as I raced down the angled stairs to reach the water’s edge, just as the boat’s side scraped up against the pier. I watched as its crew scrambled, lowering its two great gaffs, folding its sails in, as others, on the dock already, made fast its gangplank.
Then, thus attended, Salanann came ashore, her silken robes fluttering. Revealing pale, white flesh, more sallow now than before.
She coughed slightly, but then smiled: “Curator, it is I. You know for what I come.”
I nodded. “Yes.” I had already dispatched a pair of men to fetch the barrel that she had left. They and her crewmembers took it aboard the boat.
She nodded, gesturing for me to join her as she boarded after it.
“You are not well,” I said, as we stood watching as her crew placed the cask onto the hatch cover that her prize clung to, roots shrinking back almost as if it knew to make room for it. Its flower hovering over as if it, too, watched—as if, somehow, it approved.
“Aye,” she answered. “The journey. The bad air. We river folk, as you know, are susceptible to such things.
“But I am not dead yet.”
She took my hand in hers, then pressed both of them onto the skin of her belly.
“I will have a daughter first,” she said, then kissed me on the cheek. “A new life to be started—Barcal’s child and mine. When she is of age, she will come to visit you. She will have been instructed to by those who raise her.
“It is then you will tell her of the love that we had for each other, my husband and me, and what I have done here that it be remembered. That Barcal may drink of this orchid’s knowledge, and so be prepared to greet me when we join next.”
She coughed again, as two of her crew unloaded a chest of brass coins on the pier. “Grave gifts?” I asked her.
She shook her head, no. “It is a donation. It is for the favor you have done me already, and one more I’ll ask you, a keeper of records. When I will die, finally, my men will bring me here, so that you may be witness. I’ll need, then, a canoe—one of the sort that ghouls use will suffice me, or anything that will float. In this you will have placed my body, then let it drift free into the river’s current.”
I nodded. “Of course,” I said.
Then, at her gesture, one of her crew took a boarding axe and broached the barrel’s top, drawing out the brandy Barcal’s corpse was preserved in into a flagon. This he passed around to the other crew members. Then, a second he passed to Salanann.
She drank from it deeply, then offered it to me. “We of the river are not wasteful,” she explained.
Then she had her men stave in the barrel’s sides, freeing her husband’s corpse. Laying it out at full length on the hatch cover, the orchid at its feet.
“To love,” she called out as her crew drank again. Then I. Then she. I reeling by now from the drink’s heavy fumes. She smiled at me, then nodded toward the gangplank.
Her men cast the boat’s lines free as I scrambled back on shore, waving as they heaved the great foresail back up, making its halyards fast. Guiding the boat to the river’s center.
Then, as I watched, they lifted the hatch cover, lowering it carefully over the side, raft-like, into the water. Orchid and corpse now entwined together. As Salanann gave orders to hoist the main gaff, then tacked her boat back and forth, holding its place as the raft drifted downriver. Until, at last, it had disappeared south on its way to the ocean.
And, turning a last time to let her boat’s sails fill, she tacked, herself, to the north.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Indiana writer JAMES DORR’S The Tears of Isis was a 2014 Bram Stoker Award® nominee for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection. Other books include Strange Mistresses: Tales of Wonder and Romance, Darker Loves: Tales of Mystery and Regret, and his all-poetry Vamps (A Retrospective). An Active Member of HWA and SFWA with more than 500 individual appearances from Airships & Automatons and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Xenophilia and Yellow Bat Review, Dorr invites readers to visit his blog at jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com.
