Watson, Ian - Black Current 01

by The Book Of The River (v1. 1)

  Hasso pursed his lips; he seemed more amused than offended.

  So Capsi proceeded to give me the guided tour of their eyrie and citadel—carved into cell rooms, kitchen, refectory, store rooms and such, and culminating in the "map room" where was filed or displayed every iota of information, supposition or hearsay that they had ever gleaned about the west bank all the way from Ajelobo to Umdala, a labour of goodness knows how many years. A hundred? Two hundred? More? I saw panoramas and sketches and even maps of the immediate hinter-land, though the maps themselves must have been beset with flaws due to foreshortening, given the perspectives they were drawn from.

  Such dusty patience. Such dedicated . . . waiting. Capsi confessed to me offhandedly that he, and they, rather regretted that he had not brought his own pen-and-ink panorama of the shore opposite Pecawar with him from home. But when I offered to collect it from our house and drop it in at Verrino next time I was passing by, he didn't seem quite as glad of my offer as I should have expected. Perhaps he had already promised his colleagues something better?

  Then, the tour at an end (if I had indeed seen everything: the place was a bit of a maze), Capsi escorted me back down those ankle-aching stairs to real life and bustle, and a bottle of wine and spicy lamb couscous with minted yoghurt.

  If he had further schemes in mind for me, he didn't go into them. Though what they might be, I was hard put to imagine—so much so that I was almost on the point of asking him outright.

  Two days later, in the afternoon, just after I'd come back to my little rooftop room after a visit to the quaymistress's office enquiring of a boat with an empty berth to carry me back to Pecawar in another week or so, Capsi burst in upon me, panting with exertion, his face flushed.

  "They're at it again," he panted. "Crowd outside the town. Bonfire piled up. Come on!" Strangely, he seemed glad. Almost radiant.

  I wondered briefly if this was a trick; but obviously something that happened six months ago can always repeat itself six months later. I raced with him.

  It only took us about twenty minutes—with Capsi ducking up and down short-cuts that would have lost me—to snake through the town and out to the Spire, and spiral our way up till, almost heart-burst, we emerged on to the platform.

  As soon as we entered the observatory, which was crowded, a path opened for me to Big Eye, where Hasso jumped out of his seat to make room. I was shaking and panting so much from the sprint that I let him steady my shoulders as I sat there.

  I peered: at a tiny crowd on a greensward, half of the people robed in black; and an empty cart, and a bonfire burning. With a stake set in the centre of the flames, and something fastened to the stake.

  I watched a long while, till the crowd began to troop back towards the wretched village, dragging the cart along with them, leaving a smoking ruin behind.

  Then I ran out, around to the guard-rail. Sure enough, away to the west hung a tiny faint smudge.

  I returned; the observers, young and old, all watched me expectantly.

  "What do you want me to do?" I asked them.

  Capsi answered quietly, "We want to send an observer over. To find out."

  "Over there? But that's impossible. The black current's in the way. You haven't learnt to fly, by any chance?"

  "Our ancestors must have known how to fly," remarked the old imp, whose name I knew now as Yosef. "A lost skill, eh? Perhaps deliberately so. Still, I've had a few ideas on the subject. . . ."

  I quoted the preface to The Book of the River at him. "Man is of the shore, woman is of the water, only birds are of the sky. . . ."

  He stared at me fixedly. "Yes, precisely. So there's no point in my entertaining such thoughts, is there, boatwoman? Or we would threaten the balance of the applecart. Something that no self-respecting guild would ever allow. . . ."

  "River society works," said I. "And nicely, too. Obviously things don't work very well over there."

  "Oh, I wasn't suggesting that this particular applecart is in any danger of overturning. None whatever! I've ruled out any fancy, speculative notions of flying. It's a somewhat visible thing to attempt. Meanwhile, girls like you are burning over there. Twice now, in that one miserable little town."

  What I'd seen had been far away, tiny and silent; yet just for a moment I felt an intuition of the fear, the awful fear, and the agony, and was nearly sick from it. Flames licking round my feet, crisping my skin to pig's crackling then burning through to the bone, while I screamed and screamed. . . .

  "Somebody has to cross the river and report back," said Capsi. "You do see that, don't you?"

  "Men can only sail the river once. Cross, and report back? That's twice. You aren't suggesting that / make the crossing? It's ridiculous: the current's in the way, in any case."

  "No, Yaleen, I wasn't suggesting you. Obviously a man is safer over there than a woman. It's me who'll go. Just once. One way. And I'll report back by heliograph."

  "But how could you get through the current? It's madness—and death. That isn't just some rumour that we women put around!"

  "Oh, it's true, and no denying," said old Yosef. "The river has a mind of its own, and senses things, and reacts to them. Or rather, let's say that the black current acts this way. So it's a creature: a very long creature that lives in the river, anchored to the Precipice Mountains at one end like a tapeworm, floating all the way along it and spilling out into the sea at its other end. And it can smell what happens in the water. It can scent one man's odour and remember it, and distinguish it from half a million others; and it can put thoughts into his brain, of despair and death, if it smells him twice. Whereas women it favours. No doubt because they pose no threat to it."

  His speculations seemed dangerously close to some of the secrets of my initiation ceremony; though plainly the black current couldn't be a creature such as he envisaged—not if it was possible to scoop out parts of it and bottle these in phials. It had to be of a different nature, and much larger than their concept of it: larger than our whole country, and perhaps much more powerful, in its apparently quiescent, unrevealing way, than any of them supposed.

  I said nothing at all to confirm or deny to what extent the guild might have reached the same conclusions—which of course had precious little to do with the business of everyday life.

  "So," I said simply, "there's no way through. However crazy you are."

  "Not through," replied Capsi. "Under."

  "Under?"

  Old Yosef stuck his oar in again. "Based on the reasonable presumption that the black current doesn't extend all the way to the bottom. Why should it, when it floats? There must be clear water beneath. Maybe the current is only a few spans thick."

  "Ah, I see. And it's only a hundred spans wide. So Capsi is just going to hold his breath for five or ten minutes, plunge into water infested with stingers, and . . . It's preposterous. Since when, Capsi, could you swim like a fish?"

  "I've been practising," he said defensively. "Down at the Verrino baths."

  "And is that also where you've been practising holding your breath, till you turn blue?"

  "You misunderstand/7 said Yosef. "Come, and we'll show you how."

  Down below, we entered a stone chamber with mullion windows cut in the rock wall facing east. I'd certainly not been admitted here two days before, during Capsi's guided tour.

  A long wooden table was piled with curious gear: a large glass globe, a leather suit, boots with lead weights attached and flipperlike protuberances, various flexible tubes sewn out of river-snake skin, bladders, thick glass bottles, satchels—and unmistakably, a dismantled heliograph. So these Observers had mastered our river code, presumably.

  "That," announced Capsi proudly, "is my diving suit. Enough air can be bottled under pressure to let me breathe inside the glass helmet for nearly twenty minutes. The helmet and other glass parts are by a special commission from the grindery. The weights and the gear I'm carrying slung about me will counteract the buoyancy of all the air. And here," and he picked up
what was plainly a lamp, though of curious design, "is my underwater light supply, if I have to dive deep and need light, fuelled with magnesium."

  "It'll explode."

  "No, it won't," Yosef assured me. "Been tested."

  "Then I float up, discard the bowl, and my head is protected from stingers by this leather cap and wire mask."

  I turned to Yosef, who had obviously dreamed up all this apparatus. "You seem to have thought of everything—except for one little detail: what Capsi is going to do for the whole of the rest of his life over there."

  My brother grinned at me wolfishly. "Explore, that's what. I'd say that there's quite enough terra incognita to occupy a lifetime. And I'll report back, of course. At intervals."

  "So where do I come into all this?" As though I hadn't already guessed.

  "You have access to boats, sister dear. You know the ropes and the routines. We only need a very small craft. Sufficient for me and one other helper, who'll surrender his once-in-a-lifetime chance on the river to assist."

  "And I suppose that brave volunteer is Hasso?"

  Capsi nodded, unabashed.

  "I'm not sure if I can handle even a cutter or a sloop on my own. . . ." But I thought that I could. Whether I should was quite another matter.

  "We were on the verge of appealing to your better nature," explained Yosef, in an old wise way. "But now—you have seen what you have seen."

  Yes. The bonfire. The burning woman. The smoke rising up.

  Unsure whether I was championing my sex, or betraying it, I too nodded.

  After this, events achieved a momentum of their own. The very next midnight, starlit and clear, saw me—or rather failed to see me, since I had "borrowed" the little cutter discreetly, though with my heart in my mouth—rocking far out upon the river on dark water, within a stone's throw of the deeper darkness of the current.

  Masked and helmeted in his preposterous fishbowl, his suit hung with gear, Capsi was assisted over the side by Hasso. And my brother sank.

  We didn't hang around; we were drifting closer to the current. I set sail, grabbed the tiller and we fled back to the shore, where I let Hasso off somewhere upstream of the quay before sneaking the cutter back to its berth. Without being noticed. Though I expected at any moment that somebody would stroll up on deck for a breath of air, or reel back from a very late night on the town.

  Returning to my room, I tried to sleep but couldn't. By earliest dawn I was toiling up the hundreds of steps of the Spire.

  Almost all of the observers were up on the platform, spread out along the guard-rail, keeping silent vigil upon the western shore— with two men even watching the southerly stretch, though it seemed unlikely that Capsi could have forged upstream against the flow. With the exception of Big Eye, all of the telescopes, even the ancient ones, had been pressed into service—brought out into the open, mounted on swivel tripods; though no one was using these to scan just at the moment. One's ordinary field of view, including peripheral vision, was more likely to catch the tiny blink of reflected light when it came; if indeed it ever came. Hasso and Yosef were inside the observatory; so I stayed outdoors.

  An hour went by—and meanwhile the sun rose behind us.

  Then suddenly, when I was really beginning to fret, a man cried out and pointed—quite far to the north.

  Other observers hastily swung telescopes about and clapped an eye to them; but even at that distance I could spell out the winks of the helio-mirror.

  "S-A-F-E. Safe, " I called out.

  The rest of the brief message was: Tired. Must sleep, then move south. "Tired" was no doubt a considerable understatement.

  No sun-signal was sent in acknowledgement, not merely because the sun was at our backs, but in case anyone on the opposite shore might see it, and be able to interpret. However a smoky billowing fire was lit briefly in a brazier; and after a couple of minutes, quenched.

  Since it seemed ridiculous, after that, to keep returning to my room down in the town I accepted Yosef's offer of a little bedchamber in the Spire; and by midday I had stored some of my gear at the quaymistress's office and humped the bare essentials aloft, declining Hasso's assistance.

  Yet once ensconced up top, I had nothing to do, and within a few hours I was feeling bored and restless.

  And anxious? Where was the use of anxiety for someone whom I could never see again—except maybe briefly through Big Eye?

  I ought to have been feeling intensely curious about what Capsi would report, as pre-arranged, at dawn the next day. Yet when it was a question of why women were being burned alive, "curiosity" hardly seemed the right description of my feelings. I . . . dreaded to know the answer. And as to the facts of life on the west bank, well of course I felt some superficial curiosity—but how much of it could Capsi satisfy effectively within the first few days? I was leaving. Soon. And I had no wish to sail away and yet remain in mental thrall to these observers forever more, impelled to dash back constantly to hear the latest. If I acted in that style, why, Capsi would have made me a slave of his for life, on a chain as long as the river!

  Selfish little Yaleen? No, not really. Only sensible, I'd have said. . . .

  Sensible? Hardly! I soon began fretting that by taking up temporary residence on the Spire I might have identified myself too visibly with the observer men, prompting some busybody in Verrino to ask the question: why?

  I realize now that I was in a very confused emotional state, about what I'd done and what Capsi had undertaken. I wished to flee, but had to stay—and vice versa! By six o'clock I found myself hesitating at the top of the stairs, craving a drink in town and ordinary chatter around me. I had to pull myself up sharpish and retrace my steps to my room, because actually I was almost ready to keel over in exhaustion and tumble all the way down into town.

  So back to my chamber I crept. Then, without my quite knowing how it happened, Hasso was standing by my bedside—where I lay fully dressed.

  "No!" I cried, blinking at him.

  And he chuckled, indicating the faint grey light beyond the mul- lion.

  "Dawn's breaking, Yaleen."

  "What?"

  "I thought I'd best come and fetch you—just in case you slept right through. I'm sure you'd never have forgiven me for that."

  When the light of the heliograph blinked out, half an hour later, it came from almost opposite Verrino. But we could be fairly sure that no one else would see it. It was very low, and we were high; and besides, who else would be looking out for a signal light from that direction?

  Today's message was longer.

  Went inland. Avoided contact. Hid near town. All females wear black, confirmed. Town is shabby, poor, dirt-agric. Plus pigs, chickens, goats. Mining activity south side hills, thus reason for location. Male and female workers. Overheard passers-by on track. Same language, few strange words, accent thick but imitable. Diving suit worked a dream. Black current fifteen spans deep approx. Same time tomorrow. End.

  So there was nothing to do till then. Unless I wished to pore over panoramas and grub through records of past observations and hearsay from Ajelobo to Umdala; which I did not.

  I could just as easily have stayed in town, and climbed up every day before dawn!

  Perhaps. Perhaps that mightn't have been quite so easy in poor light. . . .

  After a breakfast of black bread, raw fish and pickles in the refectory I decided that I should certainly spend the day in town, and slipped quietly away.

  Not quietly enough, however. Hasso caught up with me halfway down the spiralling steps.

  "Yaleen, would you let me treat you to lunch? Please."

  "Lunch," I pointed out, "is four or five hours away."

  "Well, I don't mind waiting, if you don't."

  "Did they send you along to keep an eye on me?"

  "Of course not. What possible harm could you intend us? And what harm could you possibly do, without harming yourself into the bargain?"

  "You've lost me my brother," said I. "You've lost him f
or my parents. Forever."

  "I think, Yaleen, that you and they lost him a long time ago. But don't think of him as vanished. Don't count on his not being hailed as a hero, one of these days."

  "A hero—of what?"

  "Of the knowledge of why things are as they are."

  "And of how to alter them?"

  Hasso remained silent.

  "He'll be so alone," I went on. "Utter strangers, different customs, always having to sneak around and pretend. . . ."

  "Not necessarily. He is a man, after all. Who's to say that they won't welcome him over there? just as soon as he's checked out the lie of the land. And as to loneliness, maybe he was always alienated . . . But you know, where one man can cross, another man can cross too."

  "Is that what it's really all about, then? Emigration?"

  "Oh, come off it! Diving suits don't exactly come cheap or easily. Will you stop pulling such gloomy faces? We should be celebrating. For the first time in history something new has happened. We even know the depth of the black current now. I'll bet that's something your own guild doesn't know."

  "No comment, Hasso."

  "No comment asked for, either. Let's stop fencing, shall we? I like you, Yaleen. Those few little queries I raised a year ago were very much the second thing on my mind then. If not the tenth! And it was you, I'll remind you, who came looking. . . ."

  "Hmm."

  And presently we did continue on down the stairs together. Though both down in the town itself and later on when we returned up the Spire, I was careful not to seem to be sailing in the direction of his personal harbour. However, by then the real truth was that I hadn't drunk any Safe recently.

  The next day again dawned bright, as usual at this time of the year; though perhaps it would cloud over later.

  And the light winked from the same location.

  The message went:

  Made contact. Woman alone gathering wood. Pretended am traveller from afar. Asked reason for black patch outside town. River worshippers burnt recently. Mother caught bathing nude in river. Burnt. Later daughter went mad. Questioned. Burnt too. Who by? Brotherhood. Query? Sons of Adam. Why? Incomprehension. Repeated query. River quote Satan unquote. Satan query? Woman alarmed. Tried to flee. Overtook. Tell her am Son of Adam. On mission. Keep mouth shut. Same time tomorrow. End.