Watson, Ian - Black Current 01

by The Book Of The River (v1. 1)

  In their first year or two, young riverwomen are encouraged to work a variety of craft, and I was no exception. Besides, I think that subconsciously I chose to hop boats in the way I did so as to delay my return to Verrino (and Pecawar) for quite a while. What I told myself was that I ought to see as much of downriver as I could, while I was still freshly impressionable.

  So I had sailed with that first boat of mine all the way down to cool, misty Umdala, calling en route at Sarjoy, Aladalia, Port First- home, Melonby and Firelight. At Umdala I'd skiffed across the marshes, and I'd wandered the geometrical streets of blockhouses with their steeply pitched roofs, like rows of wedges set to cut whatever weight of snow might settle from the sky in deep winter; and I'd seen the enormous widening of the river where fresh water became salt, a prelude to the angry ocean—with the black current ribboning out and out. And I had wondered whether Umdala was built as it was entirely to defeat white winters, or whether there might not have been another hidden thought in the ancient builders' minds—for this was an outpost city: outpost, not against human enemies, but against what the river became as it broadened out, the unnavigable dire sea.

  I returned on the Sally Argent, still with Hali, as far upstream as the soft green grazing hills of Port Firsthome, where I wondered at the time-worn Obelisk of the Ship—a "ship", as all but shorelubbers know, being something quite distinct from a boat, which plies water and not the star-void.

  At Port Firsthome I hopped off, with a good endorsement on my papers from boatmistress Karil, and signed on the three-mast schooner Speedy Snail, a lumbering heavy-duty boat which only cruised from Aladalia to Firelight and back; and through the summer and autumn I stayed with her till I'd won my ticket. Then, as the winds blowing from the north became quite chilly, it was goodbye to the Speedy Snail and hullo to the caravel Abracadabra and local hauls in the Aladalia region, which distanced me from the worst excesses of deep winter. Not that I was scared of catching cold! Still, I did hail from Pecawar where the desert keeps us dry and where the winter only brings a few ground frosts before dawn. Somehow I didn't yet feel like sailing further south, up Verrino way.

  So for a while artistic Aladalia was my home, with its weavers and jewellers and potters and its orchestra, almost as much as the Abracadabra herself; and I even got involved in something of a relationship (casual but warm: I needed to keep warm) with one Tam; and because this was a sweet experience I think I'll say less about it than about my first time, with Hasso. Just in case I find any little flaws in this affair, too? No. It remained quite innocent of any reference to what went on or didn't go on over the water.

  But came spring, and a letter from my mother, and a concerned note from my father; so from the caravel I hopped to the brig Blue Sunlight bound for Sarjoy and Verrino; and who should be waiting on the quayside as the Blue Sunlight tied up at its destination, but Capsi.

  I waved and waved, and as soon as I was free of my duties I rushed ashore and hugged him.

  "How did you know?"

  He laughed delightedly. "Well, I knew you'd have to pass this way sometime. After all, there aren't two rivers! I simply paid the quaymistress a little retainer to keep an eye on the Guild Register for me."

  "You're lucky, then. I only just joined Blue Sunlight in Aladalia."

  "Lucky, indeed! Fine thing to say about your own guild, Sis. Oops, apologies, Yaleen. But surely you mean 'efficient'? One boat got here ahead of you, with the latest crewlists ex Aladalia. And before Blue Sunlight it was Abracadabra; and before that—"

  "You seem quite efficient too. Obviously you know everything about me." (But he didn't know all, I added inwardly. I was a girl when last we met; but now I was a woman, and a riverwoman too.)

  Arm in arm we strolled up the steep cobbled street to the nearest wine-arbour, to toast our re-encounter.

  "So how's it with you?" I asked him, as we sat on a bench beneath familiar garlands of clemato.

  "Oh, I sits up the Spire, and I stares," said he jocularly.

  "Seen anything amusing?"

  His voice quietened. "There's a little town about two leagues inland over there. Just a little one, but we have Big Eye trained on it. That's our newest telescope, with lenses right at the limits of the grinders' art. You must come up and visit me at work."

  "Must I?"

  "You'd be interested—who wouldn't be?"

  "Maybe I wouldn't. I've seen Aladalia and Port Firsthome and Umdala. Why should I want to squint at a nameless little town? I bet what you see's all wavery and blurred—and so far away."

  "It isn't as blurred as you'd think. We're high up."

  "So what do you see?"

  "People."

  "Surprise, surprise. I expected dragons."

  "Very tiny people, of course."

  "What, dwarfs?"

  "Cut the sarcasm, Sis. This is important."

  "More important than our first meeting in a year?"

  With a perceptible effort he untensed, and chuckled. " 'Course not. Let's drown that year, eh?" And he drained his glass. "I know a marvellous little spot to eat. Afterwards. When we need something to soak it all up. Fancy some spiced sweet-rice and kebabs?"

  And he punched me softly on the shoulder. Somehow though, that particular patch of my flesh seemed sore, from way way back.

  After his first over-anxious little outburst, which had been like a premature ejaculation of something long pent up, Capsi played me carefully; I'll give him all credit for that. He kept off the subject and showed me the town, which I already knew, but hardly as well as he knew it. I'd signed off the Blue Sunlight and taken a small rooftop room for a while, after writing ahead to Mother and Father to announce that I'd be arriving soonish, a letter which I left with the quaymistress to forward by the next upriver boat.

  Credit, yes . . . though there was the genuine happiness to see me, too, and brotherly affection; which rather confused the matter for me emotionally, otherwise I might never have fallen for his suggestions. But my actions seemed correct and brave at the time; and in defence of my own sex, even.

  Indeed, Capsi managed to keep off the topic of his own obsession so well that after a couple of days I relented, and asked him, "Well, what about the tiny people over there?"

  "Tiny, because they're at the range of the Big Eye's powers of resolution."

  "Oh, I know that."

  He frowned. "But on a clear day, when the atmosphere's still, you can tell the men from the women. They're dressed differently: the women all wear black."

  "How can you tell they're women?"

  "Babies. Sometimes they take babies with them, into the fields."

  "Could as easily be the menfolk."

  "Feeding a baby? That's how it looked to our keenest-eyed watcher." He hesitated before naming him: "Hasso."

  "Ah," I said; I was almost prepared for this.

  "He sends you his affectionate apologies, Yaleen."

  I flushed; did my brother know all about that first night? I was angry, ready to walk away; but instead I shrugged, and said, "It seems to me that you people base a whole lot of inference on one man's voyeuring of something leagues away!"

  He waved his hand dismissively. "Maybe, maybe not. The people over there don't go anywhere near the river. They don't sail so much as a plank on it. They don't net any fish. They don't even have a single shack that we know of, anywhere near the water. Why?"

  "Because . . . only women can sail the river—"

  "And no woman is allowed within a league of it. As I said, it's only a little town—so where are their cities, if they have them? Presumably they do. They're inland; right inland, as far away into the habitable zone as they can get."

  "Assuming there are deserts beyond. Same as this side."

  "Fair assumption."

  "So they don't like the river; that was always obvious. What else is new?"

  "What else is new, Yaleen, is that they bum women over there."

  ". . . What?"

  "About six months ago, when Big
Eye was first commissioned—"

  "Only boats are commissioned, brother dear."

  "Well, whatever word. Through Big Eye we saw a crowd gather outside the town. Then a little cart was pulled through the crowd, to what looked like a pile of wood. One of the tiny black figures—we couldn't be sure they were women then—was dragged off the cart . . . and soon the flames crackled and the smoke curled up."

  "Is this true?"

  "I swear on The Book it is."

  "But why should they do anything so cruel?"

  "Because they hate and fear the river. And woman is of the river. And fire is the foe of water."

  I gripped Capsi's wrist. "Water," I said, "quenches fire."

  And this was the beginning of my undoing. Well, perhaps not of my undoing personally; but certainly the start of a fateful sequence of events for my brave if wayward brother.

  The very next day I was toiling up that damned never-ending stone staircase. Capsi climbed behind me; thus at least I could set the pace.

  The stairs wound round the Spire at least thrice before we finally entered an upward tunnel with subsidiary stairways and chambers leading off it, cut in the naked rock; and thus arrived at last back in the open air up on the top stone platform. This was wider than I'd expected from down below: about seventy spans across, with a safety rail around the exposed parts of the rim. On the eastern side a stone wall acted as a windbreak—not that the wind would blow from the east for more than thirty days in the whole year (unless high wind was different from river wind), but up on this exposed eminence a windbreak of any kind was probably better than none. Set on the western edge of the platform, blocking my immediate view of the far shore, was a low observatory building of brick, roofed in slate.

  The platform was an austere, breezy place, strangely blank and untenanted—yet at the same time worn smooth by habitation.

  "Where is everyone? Where do you live?"

  Capsi jerked his thumb below. "Underneath in the rock. There are lots of rooms."

  How weird and contrary to my expectations that Capsi, so high up in the air, should be leading what amounted to a troglodyte life!

  High, yes: far higher than any mast I had ever shinned up. Walking over to the guard-rail I stared downriver, away and away in the direction of Sarjoy, though even so Sarjoy itself must have been quite some distance beyond the horizon. I picked out familiar landmarks on the eastern shore, and at least half a dozen boats which might almost have been motionless (but weren't); and I missed something. My whole body missed it, so that 1 gripped the rail for balance. It was movement that was absent: the slight rocking to and fro that I'd known any other time I had been up a height, upon the river, the gentle tilt back and forth of a masthead.

  Yet the clouds above looked to be as high in the sky as ever; and the river, strangely, seemed wider rather than narrower now that I was seeing its span entire from bank to bank, the way a bird sees it. The river—with the band of the black current dividing it midway like the loading line along a beached hull. . . .

  I scanned the far shore for Capsi's reputed town, somewhere inland amidst the rolling, wooded hills and little valleys, but couldn't pick it out unaided—nor any other landmarks but those of nature. Highways? No, I could see none . . . Unless . . . was that one, far far off, winding inland?

  And directly below me was bustling, hither and thither Verrino: half a league of activity and variety, with its orchards and vineyards beyond, and off to the east some sandy hills hiding the glassworks.

  "What a sad life up here, Capsi!"

  "Sad? What's that got to do with it? Come on, I'll show you Big Eye." He pulled me away from the railing and all its grand vistas, towards the brick building; and it seemed to me that none of the sights were quite real to him unless he spied at them from out of the dark indoors, through a glass like a voyeur.

  A wooden door, studded with rusty iron bolts: he pushed it open, and I was prepared to find myself in gloom reminiscent of the river- aquarium in Gangee.

  But no: it was light and airy. A whole strip of exposed scenery cut a welcome swathe several spans high through the whole length of the westerly wall; for the midriff of this wall was all hinged windows, with most of the panes hoisted up and out to form a canopy, ventilating the observatory and sheltering the instruments from rain, unless a shower was scudding from due west.

  Several ancient telescopes were retired to comers, but three principal instruments poked their barrels through different windows, two of these in use—the westward gazers seated on wooden chairs with straight backs, and cushions as a concession to comfort. There was no doubt at all which of the instmments was Big Eye: it was fully nine spans long, and my arm would hardly have gone around the tube.

  The northern wall was shelved, with what I took to be logbooks filed on it, and sketching material: while the whole south wall was taken up by a huge panorama which quite dwarfed the one that Capsi had made for his bedroom wall back home. Quite what use the panorama was, with the reality in plain view, I thought I would forbear to ask—though doubtless it was easier to examine details (such as individual trees?) upon that great scroll of paper, and measure the distances from place to place. (And doubtless too, trees grew ... so that the panorama must always be inaccurate.)

  The man seated at the smaller instrument glanced round. Dressed in worn brown trousers and a tight jerkin, with his shirtsleeves rolled up for business, he was white-haired with a wrinkled impish face. He simply registered our presence, nodded, then got back to his observations—which struck me as something of a waste of time, since surely his aged eyes were feebler than the young man's next to him, and the telescope he was using was less powerful too.

  The young man next to him . . . Wearing jauntier attire: boots, flared trousers tucked in, and an unforgettable shirt, striped scarlet and black.

  "Hasso," said Capsi; and as though the watcher at Big Eye had awaited this signal, he looked round; and sprang up. Hasso was just as handsome as I remembered.

  "See all sorts of things on the far bank," he remarked merrily and unselfconsciously. "Welcome back, Yaleen."

  "And sometimes," said I, "you have to go fishing for hints. How's your brother?"

  "Oh, he's a townsman at heart. Never comes up here. We just go around together ... on occasion."

  "Okay, okay, I don't mind." (But I did mind, quite a bit.) "That's so much water down the river."

  Fortunately he did not attempt anything as crass as to advance and peck me on the cheek; he simply motioned me politely to his chair, and the vacant eye-piece of Big Eye. I sat down, and shut one eye to stare.

  The telescope was trained on the little town—no more than a large village, really, nestling in the gradients of the land; and for me the weirdest thing of all in looking upon it was that the place was nameless. Nowhere in The Book of the River was its name inscribed; which meant that it did not exist—and yet it did.

  Compared with Verrino, or even the smallest settlement on our shore, even to my unpractised eye it looked impoverished and primitive. Straw thatch? Apparently. Walls of dried mud? Some, perhaps, of wood. There was nothing of architecture or adornment about the settlement, except for one central building of stone, with an onion dome at one end. I felt not so much that I was gazing across a few leagues of space, as back hundreds or even thousands of years through time. Perhaps Capsi was right in his obsession, after all, and here was a more curious sight than any to be seen from Ajelobo to Umdala ... I found myself itching to peel away the hills, step up the power of the telescope and discover what did lie further to the west; yet this wasn't a particularly pleasant sort of itch, not the kind that it's satisfying to scratch.

  "Do you see a black patch, on the green outside the town?" Hasso whispered in my ear, as though the folk I was spying upon might hear him if he spoke too loudly. "That's where they burned her. Alive. In flames."

  I broke off my viewing, not desiring this kind of covert closeness.

  "How do you get all this stuff up here, and
your food and water and everything?" I directed my question at Capsi, though he was hanging back as if he had arranged for Hasso to be here especially to please me; which it didn't. "Up all those wretched stairs?"

  "We hoist heavy supplies. Winch 'em up in buckets."

  "And how do you pay for them?"

  "Oh, donations," he said vaguely. "And some of us work parttime down in Verrino."

  "How many of you are there, anyway?"

  "About twenty. Some young, some old. Come and see—we've nothing to hide. It's that lot over there who are hiding. They're hiding from the river. And they make women wear black. And they bum them."

  "But you're all men up here, aren't you?"

  Hasso chuckled. "We aren't misogynists exactly. . . ." He had the good grace not to add: As you surely noticed. "I hope Capsi passed on my affectionate apologies?"

  "He did. Verbatim. It seems to me that the men over there must be the kingpins, who decide what women do—and you aren't above using women, if it suits you! Could there perhaps be a certain element of envy in your activities up here?"

  "There could be, but there isn't." It was the old imp who spoke up; so he must have been listening, instead of looking. "Sister Yaleen, knowledge is our goal; that's all. The knowledge of what on earth is going on over there, with the whole other half of our human community. They who share this world with us."

  So he already knew my name. Which meant that they had all discussed my coming. I was as much part of a plan now as ever I had been—in a more casual, extempore way—when Hasso lovingly deflowered me that evening a year ago.

  "You feel . . . threatened, perhaps?" said the old fellow gently. "Please don't. It's the women over there who are under threat. Your sisters, not you."

  Yes. But the observers hadn't known of this threat till recently, when they had acquired Big Eye. And yet maybe they had guessed for a long time that the west bank was opposed to everything that our river society stood for. . . .

  "Well, that's Big Eye," said Capsi lightly. "Come on and we'll show you around, below."

  "You can show me around, brother dear. I'm sure Hasso has lots more peeping to attend to."