by Alex Stewart
“It’s been said before,” Drago lied, and returned his attention to his bap.
Drago began to get bored as the day wore on, despite incremental changes in the landscape along the river banks. As the Rippling Light continued to forge its way upstream, the intensively farmed hinterland surrounding Fairhaven began to give way to patches of moorland and scrub, the fields interspersing them becoming centered on increasingly isolated farmsteads and villages. Smaller craft on local errands, laden with sacks and farm tools, or conveying people between the scattered communities, began to be more common too, sharing the river with the bustling cargo boats. Leaning on the rail, Drago exchanged waves with a few children, but for the most part the adults aboard the little vessels ignored the rest of the river traffic, beyond shouted greetings between neighbors; for them, Drago realized, their tiny patch of the Geltwash was all there was, the bigger boats passing them by of no more significance than the clouds above their heads. Once they passed a crudely made raft, decorated with bunting and crowded with a wedding party, humans, goblins and gnomes in what out here were probably their best clothes singing, drinking, and in a few cases dancing with apparent indifference to the danger of capsizing the whole affair. Drago tried to spot the couple at the center of it all, but gave up after a minute or two, unable even to determine their species among so mixed a crowd. Maybe they weren’t even there at all, having sneaked off on their honeymoon while their families and friends continued to party, or perhaps these were just some of the guests, making their way downstream to the main event at one of the scattered riverside communities the sturdy little boat had already passed.
As the raft moved astern, Drago found his vague sense of dissatisfaction intensifying. Everyone else seemed to have a purpose, a direction in life, and in most cases someone to share it with.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked at last, and Clearspring shrugged.
“I don’t know. Is there?” She looked pointedly at the billowing canvas above their heads, and the bewildering array of ropes attached to it. “Do you know how to take in a sail?”
“Not on something this size,” Drago said. He could handle a dinghy tolerably well if he had to, like pretty much any native of Fairhaven, but generally didn’t; that was what the ferrymen were for.
“And you can’t cook, either, Greel says.” She spat over the side, considered the result, and scowled. “Can you catch fish?”
“I don’t know,” Drago said, “I’ve never tried.”
“Really?” Clearspring looked at him with something like astonishment for a moment, before her expression became once again studiedly neutral. “I thought everyone living by the river knew how to fish.”
“Well, I don’t. Live by the river, I mean.”
“But you live in Fairhaven. The whole city’s by the river.” For a moment he wondered if she was joking with him, but her expression seemed earnest enough. And why would she understand? She’d live on her boat while it was docked in Fairhaven, and had probably never seen anything farther from the waterfront than a street or two.
“Well, it is and it isn’t,” he explained. “And most people just buy their food. If you want fish, you go to the fish market, and if you can’t be bothered to go all that way you just buy it from the stall of someone in your district who could. Much more convenient.” Not to mention the Fisherman’s Guild, who took a dim view of anyone else helping themselves from what they regarded as their personal ocean, and whose displeasure could easily keep one of his less scrupulous competitors gainfully employed if the fishermen didn’t simply take matters into their own fists.
“Take your word for it,” Clearspring said, “but we’re not in Fairhaven now. If you want something to do, get Greel to show you how to cast a line. I’m not paying for my supper if I don’t have to.”
“Fair enough,” Drago said, wandering off to find the deckhand, who was still at the tiller, and seemed happy enough at the chance for a bit of conversation.
“It’s quite simple,” he assured Drago. “All you need is a line and some bait.” He raised his voice. “Hannie! Can you bring the fishing gear over?” He waited while the other deckhand finished whatever she was doing, which, like most things on the riverboat, seemed to involve pulling on or slackening off ropes before tying them in a complicated knot; once that was completed to her satisfaction she wandered over with a long line, into which hooks had been set at intervals, and a bucket which smelled pungent enough to remind Drago of home. “All you do is, you put some of that bait on your hooks.”
“Bait. Right.” Both sailors were looking at him with an air of expectant amusement, although Drago couldn’t really see why. It seemed simple enough. “What is it?”
“Fish guts,” Hannie said, matter-of-factly. So that was it.
“Right. I should have guessed.” He plunged a hand in, grabbing a sticky, slippery fistful, and lifted it out carefully. It looked and smelled pretty disgusting, but he’d seen and smelled a lot worse in his time, often accompanied by loud noises, and he kept his tone mildly curious. “This about right?” He fumbled with the nearest of the hooks, trying to wrap the noisome bundle around it, wary of the sharp, barbed point.
“Too much,” Greel said, his tone equally even, but not quite managing to conceal his surprise. “You just want enough to get them to bite. Piece about the size of your thumb ought to do it.” He held out a battered clasp knife, which Drago took in his free hand, and opened with his teeth. After waiting for the gnome to cut off a piece of offal about the right size, he went on. “Put that on the point of the hook, but watch your fingers.”
“Got it.” Drago followed the instruction. “And the rest the same?”
Greel nodded. Once the remaining hooks were baited, he pointed to the rail. “Now chuck it over the side. Make sure you’ve still got the other end, mind.”
“Right.” Drago complied. “Now what?”
“Now you wait.”
“How long?” Drago asked.
Greel chuckled. “Long as it takes. Couple of hours should do it. Maybe. Or a couple of minutes. You never can tell with fish. But you’ll know when you’ve got one.”
“How?” Drago asked, an instant before feeling a sharp tug on the line. “Oh. Right.”
“Now bring it in slowly,” Greel instructed, watching with interest from his post by the tiller. “And mind your fingers on the hooks.”
“Slowly it is.” Drago hauled the line in, while the two deckhands nodded approval. Something was thrashing in the water, raising splashes which caught the sun in glittering motes, through which he could catch a glimpse of shimmering scales. “Now what?”
“Bring it in to the side,” Hannie said, taking a knife from her belt. “Carefully. If you let the line get too taut it’ll just snap.” Warned in the nick of time, Drago let a little of the line out again, just as the fish on the other end pulled hard in the other direction. It felt a bit like brawling, he thought, sensing the flow of energy between him and an opponent, letting instinct guide his reactions. To his vague surprise, he found he was enjoying himself.
“That’s good,” Greel assured him, as he took up the slack, bringing the struggling fish closer to the boat. The splashing became more pronounced, lapping against the planks of the hull. “Now haul it in.”
Drago leaned back, taking the weight of the fish, which was almost as long as his arm. He’d never seen a living one before, and the speed and vigor with which it thrashed as it left the water took him by surprise. An awful lot of it seemed to be mouth, too, which would have seemed vaguely intimidating if it hadn’t been choked by the metal hook.
“That’s it! Good!” Hannie seemed more animated than he’d ever seen her, even going so far as to throw an encouraging smile in his direction. “Just a little further.” She leaned over the rail, her knife at the ready.
Drago hauled on the line again, feeling the tension building in his lower back, and a growing sense of elation. The fish was entirely out of the water now, almost level
with the rail.
“Got it!” Hannie leaned a little farther, seeming for a second in danger of overbalancing, then stood upright, scooping the fish onto the deck. Drago almost staggered with the sudden lack of tension in the fishing line, then regained his balance in time to see her plunge her knife into the flailing fish, severing its head with one quick twist. She grinned at Drago again. “Nice one.” Another smooth motion with her knife blade, and the fish’s guts joined the head on a quick trip over the side. “Now see if you can get a couple more.”
“Two more coming up,” Drago said, with newfound confidence, and returned the line to the water, where it remained until close to sunset without a trace of another bite.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Can get a bit verbal.”
“Is that it?” Clearspring asked, looking at his day’s catch in a manner Drago thought of as distinctly elf-like. Then she shrugged, in grudging approval. “Not bad for a beginner, though.”
“Not enough to go round either,” Greel said, sounding hopeful and disappointed at the same time. “Especially when one of us is a gnome.” He glanced at Drago. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Drago assured him. His people’s fondness for food was well enough known to have become a standing joke throughout the known world, and if it amused the other races as much as it seemed to, then he had no objection to playing up to their preconceptions. Being underestimated had saved his life on more than one occasion. Besides, he seemed to have won a measure of acceptance from her crew, even if Clearspring remained elvishly aloof, and it wouldn’t be prudent to squander that. “So what’ll we do?”
Clearspring squinted ahead down the darkening river. The sun hadn’t quite disappeared yet, but the shadows were gathering, and night would be falling in earnest soon. Fewer boats were abroad on the river this late in the day, the only ones visible now no more than distant sails scudding for shelter, or looming shapes nestled against the bank, already moored for the night.
She sighed, eyeing the bleak heathland on either side of the water with little sign of enthusiasm. “If you’d caught a couple more I’d be looking for somewhere to tie up for the evening by now. As it is, we’ll have to crack on for a bit. Naught’s Landing’s not far from here, and we ought to make it by dark.”
“Sounds good to me, Skip,” Greel agreed, and Hannie nodded concurrence from her post at the tiller. “Been a while since we put in there.”
“Not long enough,” Clearspring said, “but it can’t be helped.” She dropped the cleaned fish into a nearby chest, on the lid of which a ward of preservation had been carved by someone whose forte had clearly been spell casting rather than woodwork. Then she disappeared into the cabin on the deck.
“What was that all about?” Drago asked. “Is she expecting trouble?”
“Not really.” Greel shrugged. “No more than usual, anyway. But you get boats from the Marches putting in there sometimes. Can get a bit verbal.”
“Sounds interesting,” Drago said, trying to sound as if he didn’t mean it. But he did. If there was a crew from the Marches there, he might hear some news of his quarry. “How soon will we get there?”
“Maybe an hour,” Hannie said. “Give or take.”
In the event, it turned out to be more take than give, and night was falling in earnest before the riverside settlement came into view. Drago was the first to spot it, his dark-adapted eyes giving him a clear advantage in that regard, and he watched from the deck with considerable interest as Clearspring and her crew brought the Rippling Light alongside a crude but sturdy wharf apparently constructed from felled tree trunks, already occupied by a couple of similar boats. A small wood surrounded the settlement, the raw material it provided presumably having been the main attraction for the people who’d decided to live there.
Clearspring nodded when Drago verbalized the thought. “That’s right. Plenty to build with. But that’s not the main reason. It’s the nearest decent-sized piece of woodland to Fairhaven.”
Drago remained puzzled for a moment; buildings in the city tended to be made of brick, and had been since the last big fire leveled most of the right bank about thirty years ago. What lumber was needed, mainly by the boatyards, arrived from the forests a long way upstream, where the supply was essentially inexhaustible. Most of the buildings he could see ashore were made of logs or crudely sawn planks, but he didn’t imagine much of the local timber would be worth exporting.
As Hannie lobbed the mooring lines to a couple of people on the quay, who immediately began hauling the boat in, making the lines fast to bollards that were little more than cursorily finished logs, a faint odor of woodsmoke drifted across the water to his nostrils. The smell seemed to be everywhere, but there surely couldn’t be that many cooking fires in a village as small as this one. Then he understood.
“Charcoal,” he said. Now he knew what he was looking for, he was able to make out the faint wisps of smoke rising above the trees in the distance, fainter threads of darkness against the enclosing sky. Producing something every smithy in Fairhaven depended on.
Clearspring nodded again. “Biggest producer on the lower reaches. Good quality too, I’m told. Not that that makes much difference to me. Cargo’s cargo.” The boat bumped gently against the quayside.
Drago grinned. “And passengers are passengers?”
“Not to me.” Clearspring shook her head. “Passengers are cargo too. Just noisier, mobile and more trouble.”
“I’ll do my best not to be,” Drago said.
Clearspring favored him with a momentary, wintery smile. “Too late. Although, to be fair, a sack of charcoal can’t catch fish.”
“Neither can I, apparently,” Drago said.
“That’s just how it goes. One day you get all you can eat, the next nothing. Bit like life.” She shook herself out of the pensive mood which seemed to have settled on her with the gathering darkness. “And talking of something to eat . . .” She vaulted over the rail with inhuman grace, landing on the echoing planks of the wharf with barely a sound. “Coming?”
“You have to ask?” Drago said, his boots landing beside hers with a noticeably louder thud. Satisfied with the security of the knots holding the vessel fast, Hannie and Greel clambered over the rail to join them. He glanced from one to the other with an air of puzzlement. “Who’s watching the boat?”
“Him.” Clearspring indicated a young human man seated on a barrel at the end of the dock, swathed in a cloak and munching a chicken leg. “And he knows if anything happens to her, or anything goes missing, he takes a swim. Isn’t that right, Roger?”
Startled at being addressed by name, the young man glanced up, his face curdling into a scowl as he recognized his interlocutor. “Oh, it’s you. Wasn’t expecting to see you back so soon.” His tone added or at all, and the clear implication that it would have been his preferred option.
“Not my choice, believe me.” Clearspring spat into the water beside the wharf. “Ran out of daylight and wind.”
“Not like you, running out of wind. Quite long on it, as I recall. ’Specially when you’ve had a few.” He let his cloak fall open a little, revealing a glimpse of a sword. Its hilt was worn, and the leather of its scabbard scuffed; strong indications to Drago that its owner not only knew how to use it, but was willing to if he felt the need. He took a step back, into the shadows, where his face would be harder to see or remember; the man reminded him a little too strongly of a young George Waggoner.
“We’re just after something to eat,” Greel said, keeping his voice low and reasonable, jumping into the conversation an instant before Clearspring could reply. “Then we’re getting our heads down till dawn. After that we’re out of here. Right, Skip?”
“Right.” Clearspring swallowed whatever she was about to say, and moved off, with a final glare at the young man. As they walked off the end of the dock, onto a shoreline of rutted mud, Drago was pretty sure he could hear both Hannie and Greel exhale with releasing tension.
&nbs
p; “Local watch?” he asked.
Hannie shrugged. “Not exactly. But the closest you’ll find out here. You see anyone wearing one of those cloaks, watch your step. They’re there to keep things working smoothly for the locals. Anyone else, not so much.”
“Not so different from the watch, then,” Drago said, and Hannie laughed, although he hadn’t really been joking. The watchmen he knew back in Fairhaven were definitely there to enforce the law, and generally did so regardless of whether felon or victim had been native to the city or not, but the way they went about it tended to treat the relevant statutes as guidelines rather than hard and fast rules.
He glanced back at Roger, now a shapeless mass in the gathering darkness, his outline obscured by the cloak—to anyone but a gnome he’d be almost invisible in the gloom, sitting well back from the line of lanterns delineating the edge of the quay. A faint pale smudge in the distance might have been a boat forging on in the darkness, desperate to get to Fairhaven with a perishable cargo, but it was hard to tell, and none of his business anyway. He had far more important things to think about.
“So,” he said, “where are we going to eat?”
“This way,” Clearspring said, without noticeable enthusiasm. “We’re not exactly spoilt for choice.”
Which Drago didn’t find particularly surprising. A village this size could support only a couple of taverns, if that; transients would sleep on their boats, and all the locals would have homes, so there’d be no need for an inn. But the need for food, and something to drink with it, was universal, and someone was bound to have stepped forward to fulfill it.
The contrast with Fairhaven was marked, and intriguing; the only place he’d ever been outside the city before was the gnomish delving where his relatives lived, almost a day’s coach travel down the post road inland, and the warren of tunnels there was so different from the tangle of streets he’d grown up in that comparisons were almost meaningless. Here, however, he could see buildings, smaller and shabbier than he was used to; other than the sheds around the wharf, only a few of them were more than a single story in height. Judging by their size, the majority of the people living in the houses were human, but he was used to that; what seemed strange, if not downright disconcerting, was the amount of distance between them. A few were even surrounded by fenced-off yards, with neatly weeded beds of vegetables, and in some cases flowers, although he couldn’t see why anyone would waste the space growing those on purpose.
