Delaram held something behind her back. “I have a special present for you. I worked hard finding this.” She brought forth a riq, an instrument like a tambourine. “This was Kirim’s. He lent it out during your wedding and never got it back. You should have it.”
Memories returned. She remembered him playing it as she danced. Joy returned, bringing ecstatic memories. She was in love again and she danced through that love until the world swam about and she fell down in delight, breathless and amorous.
Maran threw her arms around Delaram. “You are so good to me. How do you do these things? You are too perfect. I’ll miss you the most.”
All too quickly done with her goodbyes, Maran walked into the morning amid the cacophony of bird calls. Her feet crunched along the gravel street, seemingly loudly on the empty street. There were some shouts along the dock, but mostly, there were people working quietly in the crisp-cool air.
Passing along the docks, Maran waved to the people there. She waved to Osei who waved back. Seeing that he prepared to leave, Maran walked southward.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Gusseisen hobbling over towards her. Maran readied an excuse in her head, expecting the Ironmonger to order her home, no matter what she said. To her relief, Osei saw the Ironmonger as well. He called out. “Lord Gusseisen, will you check my paperwork?”
His attention grabbed, Gusseisen turned away, leaving Maran to continue her morning stroll.
Maran walked down river until she was below the point and well shielded from town. Before her lapped the Osteras, the mountain river that flowed from the deep Hadean Mountains and fed Jura City. From here, the water looked beautiful, even harmless. Yet, it was water and that much of it made her quake in her own fear. How could she plunge into that? The concept overwhelmed her. She couldn't do this. This was crazy. She needed to find another way. When Osei came around the bend, she would wave him away.
Fortunately, Maran had to wait. She pretended that this trial did not exist, so she stood there, her bag by her feet, idly thumbing Kirim’s riq, thankful that the terrible moment hadn't come. Given that time, her courage slowly re-emerged. The drifter women always did the laundry down in the river, and they were never harmed. Maran had slipped in the water before to no ill consequences. Kirim had carried her out using the excuse to remove her sodden clothes.
Water wasn't so bad.
Not yet ready to plunge, Maran could disrobe. She could do that small step, stripping down to her frock and placing most of her clothes into the oilskin bag. She even took off her bonnet and cap, figuring that Osei was not a proper dwarf, so she wouldn't feel embarrassed at showing her hair. Maran shook out her wavy black hair, wrapped her coat around herself, and waited.
To keep herself occupied, Maran watched the tadpoles. They darted among the rocks, little black motes.
After a gentle wait, Osei’s boat swung around the point. At first, the boat appeared too far away, certain to overshoot, leaving Maran where she stood. That filled her with secret glee. However, an unseen current pushed the boat inward, sending the vessel into a beautiful curve, gently lining it up along the shoreline.
Osei let go his tiller, taking up a rope and tossing it out into the water. “Come!” he motioned.
With the moment at hand and her courage reborn, Maran put her bag on her head, then rushing into the cold waters. In a handful of steps, the riverbed dropped, plunging her deep. Panic pounced upon her as she flailed. Somewhere in that flailing, her hand found the rope and she grabbed. A second after that, Osei pulled her from the water, his muscular arms hauling her away from her doom. One last pull and Maran fell face down on the deck, breathing as one saved from execution. The terror was over.
Osei’s wide chocolate face bent down, grinned from ear to ear. “Welcome aboard my home, my friend. Bravely done. Brave indeed.” He laughed like the singing sea.
Maran rolled over onto her back, dripping all over the deck. “If I have to do that again, I’d rather face old Iron Pants.”
Osei laughed at her. “Lie there all you need. When you are ready, undress. We need to get your frock dry before it gets cold tonight. Take advantage of the sun. Now clear the walkways, because I need them to pole my boat.”
Osei spoke as he walked along the boards, poling this way and that way, getting the boat back to mid-river current. “We have some traveling to do. We will pass Arad later today. If I time things correctly, we pass Langurud tomorrow night. Better that our betters be asleep, eh? After that, we should arrive in Jura City.”
“This all seems so easy.”
“It is easy. We could make it harder. Would you like to jump into the water again?”
She shook her head no.
After taking off her fro, Maran wrapped her coat about herself. With no work to do, she watched Osei move about his boat with the same mastery with which her grandmother moved about her kitchen. His skill hid the complexity of his actions.
Their boat passed many other boats as they traveled, for the pole boats were the primary transports taking food to the city. Each of those boats had a larger crew.
“Osei, why do those boats have so many people but yours doesn’t?”
Osei laughed, as if every laugh were a gift. “They are not me. I was born in the sea. It is in my blood. The water is to me as the land is to you. Why do you need two legs to walk when most beasts need four? It is the way that you were born. You have no choice. You are what you are.
“Those people up there? There have no sea in their blood. They are two-legged creatures of the land. They blame their boats, saying that the boats are hard to handle. But if you really knew the boat, and the boat knew you, only one man would be needed. You would push where you needed to push and nudge where you needed to nudge, and the boat would respond. Simple.”
That begged a question to Maran. “What else can you do with water?”
For a moment, Osei stopped poling. “My little friend, in all the years that I have worked this river, no dwarf has ever asked me that question. That is a very insightful question, so I will answer it.
“Among my father’s people, the Rhakotians, water is women’s work. As children, boys learn such water work from the women, but when they are twelve, they learn the warrior’s dances and warrior’s work. You know how young men are. We want to be men: not boys, and certainly not women. Proud, I abandoned all things water. I was a warrior. I fought many other warriors and showed my prowess. I won honors. I won my place as a bodyguard to my king, and I knew then that I was a man. How foolish I was. I believed that bravery had to do with fighting. I was wrong.
“War came, and I was among the first captured. Not knowing what else to do with us, your people brought us here and threw us into the Pit. We lived in an old mess cabin, sleeping on the tables while the guards slept in the cooks’ house. After that, more prisoners came every day, first by the squad, then by the company. We all shared the same mess and the same lousy trickles of water that came down the cliffs. As more and more men were added, getting a fair share of water got harder and harder. We had to fight to survive. We killed for that water.
“There’s a lake at the bottom of the Pit. It's the broadest and deepest body of polluted water that I have ever seen. In sunlight, it's bright purple and opaque as ale. Some men tried drinking that water. First, they got the shakes. If they continued, their skin cracked and their insides cracked and they bled to death. Some went without water, and with swollen tongues in their mouth, they eventually went mad.
“When I was so thirsty that my tongue swelled in my mouth, where madness seems certain, and death came sniffing around my soul, I found myself quite eager to do women’s work. Unlike all those people there, I knew how to make clean water, so I did. Never before had I held such power in my hands. I determined the fortune of thousands. With water, simple water, I achieved a power over life and death. I could choose who lived and who died. Is there anything more terrible than that?
“Fortunately, that situation did not last. I t
hank the shining gods that you Loam helped us. Better to toil in unending labor than rot in that abyss. Somewhere in there, I left the Red Lady behind, forswearing her butcherous ways, and embraced the White Lady. Somewhere, I left those false notions of manhood behind, and it was then that I truly became a man. I chose water, primal water, as my work, which existed before the world came to be and is the foundation of all things.”
“Why are you still here?” Maran asked, genuinely curious.
“I should like to go home. The winters here are far too cold for me. I dream of returning home, climbing the palm trees, fishing on the gulf, marrying many wives, and fathering many children. That would satisfy me. But who could live peacefully in the Rendland, the land of the Red Lady of War? Who could live peacefully in a land of bloodletters, where betraying your kind is an acceptable sacrifice to the goddess? That is not the land that I grew up in. That is not a land that I wish to live in. Should I return alone to my land, I would surely be sacrificed by my enemies, and I must confess that I do not have the courage to walk into my own sacrifice.”
Maran sat with Osei’s answer for a while, thinking about his words and his situation.
“Why are you helping me? Really helping, I mean, and not what you told my father-in-law.”
“You see through me, woman. Well, no matter. I will speak the truth. I despise your rulers as much as you do. They enslaved me. They owe me silver for my work. Always they say that they will pay me soon, and always the pay does not come. Since they don't do as they say, then I will not do as they say. I choose disobedience. Call me a Transgressor, if you will.”
“But, why do you keep working if they owe you money?”
“They still give me my rations, and that is worth something.” Osei poled for a bit. “Now you must answer me a question, my friend. Will you answer it?”
“I’ll try. Let me hear the question.”
“Your people are pacifists. Why is it that you train all your young to fight?”
“I should think that obvious. You’ve sworn the Vow. You understand.”
“I don’t want to hear what I understand. I want to hear what YOU understand. How does this sit in your mind?”
“It is all choice. For a choice to be meaningful, you must have a meaningful choice. If I cannot fight, then choosing pacifism is easy because I have no viable alternative; I must be ineffective. If I am trained to fight, and I can exercise my grievances through violence, then I have a meaningful choice: I can act through violence or act through peace. I can choose my mode of engagement.”
“Yes, I know that. What is your interpretation of that question? Go beyond the teachings.”
“Conceivably, a moral choice may require violence. I do not know what that may be like, or what situation would call for that, but when that day comes, my people are ready to support those who follow the light. If the Gods of the Alliance call again, we will take up arms.”
Osei waved his hand. “Thank you. I am done. I have asked you too many questions. Grab a pole. Help me push the boat along. All the walking will warm you up and dry your clothes out.”
Happy to get work, Maran threw herself into poling. If nothing else, the task helped her forget that she was on the water. She never feared falling in, for she had good mountain feet. It was no different than standing on the edge of a cliff. In fact, she felt safer as her bare feet touched wood instead of stone. Her sense of wood was so strong that, if she wanted to, she could run full speed along the deck in a rainstorm and never fear slipping. There were limits to this, of course. If you tilted the boat far enough, or if she were careless enough, she would fall off. As neither of those things was likely, Maran didn't feel concerned.
Later in the day, Osei sat Maran at the tiller. At first, she found controlling the canal boat rather easy. Maran expected a lecture on how to turn the boat, or how a large boat turned with certain characteristics. Instead, Osei completely ignored turning and pointed at the water.
“A ripple here. A wave there. Before you flows all the secrets of the river. Learn to read them, and you too can stand at the tiller. But it is not enough to know the river that you see. You must also know the river that you cannot see. When you act now, you act in knowledge of the river around the bend. A novice pilot would avoid that rock up there by a larger margin, but then he would run aground on a sandbank around the bend. To make this turn with a full cargo, we actually need to get close to that rock, heave the boat about, aiming for that cliff. If we do that, then we’ll swing clear of the next sandbank. A river man knows the turns and hazards of his river like an old husband knows the quirks of his old wife. He can pilot in the day, the night, and in the rain or fog. He knows the names of each feature, each turn, each snag, and each hazard. This river is a wily trickster and is not to be trusted.”
When night came, they anchored the boat and slept in the small tent on the stern. The rocking boat and laps of water brought on odd dreams. Maran awoke in the morning convinced that the turtles would eat her face off.
The day that followed passed much the same. The lights of Langurud passed by in the early evening as Osei sang his river song. No one came out to challenge them. They passed beyond the last checkpoint and into the dwarven heartland.
Irontown
When Maran awoke in the morning, she saw Mount Jura towering above her.
“We are almost to the canal,” explained Osei. “Traffic gets more complex here.”
The boat passed under a many-arched bridge. One layer of arches stood upon another layer of arches, and those stood on ever larger arches. “That is the Charyastos Highway,” Osei noted. “It is the greatest road in all the world.”
In the ancient past, Emperor Thule ordered three great roads built, all beginning from Charyastos. One went west to the strange cities of Uma. One went south, opening many closed lands. The final road went north, to Jura City, then westward to Fort Resolute.
Dwarves built those roads. In the dwarven tongue, the highways were called the Farsund Ways, the “traveler” ways. Traveling dwarves from all over the ancient world worked on that highway, growing them into their own caste, the Farsund dwarves, the travelers. The term soon encompassed an entire pillar of dwarven society: all dwarves without workshops, traveling the world wherever their jobs might lay.
In Jura City, the Charyastos highway, the canals, and the Osteras river all met up in one place: the great furnaces of Irontown. The water there turned brown, not only from the mud upstream, but also from the effluence of the outer city. Everyone and everything seemed to dump their waste into the water. In places, the water may as well have been sludge. If anything could live in the water, Maran would be amazed.
The size of Ironmonger forges staggered Maran. She had heard of the big buildings, but these were far larger than she had ever imagined. Everything about them was vast. Building after building, one connected to the other, stretching further than Maran understood. Some places she could identify, like the coke ovens, but others simply befuddled her. The biggest building of all was the steel furnace, belching out coal smoke like some rampant dragon. Maran was not alone in that observation, for the smokestack builders had put a dragon head on the smokestack’s peak. The rampant dragon was the sign of the Ironmongers. Their motto was “Iron Kills Dragons.”
“That is the Forge of Ten Iron Rods,” Osei commented. “There is the best steelworks in the world. That long building there is the most secret. They spike trespassers to their wall. See.” Osei pointed out a skeleton dangling from the brickwork. “They caught him in the winter trying to steal their secrets. One spike through the eye socket.”
Maran grimaced at that.
“That octagonal building over there is the guildhall. It houses their entire workforce..”
Downriver from the great ironworks were the warehouses. Osei made waving motions toward the shore. A man there made motions back. Osei seemed to know what these motions meant, responding by turning his boat towards the tangled mass of piers. When he was close en
ough, he tossed a coil of rope onto the docks, the men tying up the boat.
Maran was here. She had made it to Irontown, only one step away from Jura City.
“Thanks for everything, Osei. I'd love to hear more, but I need to move before someone notices me.”
“Where are you going to stay, my little friend?” Osei asked.
“Somewhere near here, I guess.”
“This is a not a good place. Not at all. But most places are worse, so it will do. It’s standing room only in that town. You'll see more people than you ever thought possible. Fortunately, I can help you. You want to find Miss Altyn Tag’s house. She lives at 27 Groppekunta Street. Don’t be fooled by the address. That is a better place than most, and Altyn is a better woman than most. She will treat you fairly and look after you. Listen to her. That is your favor to me. Tell her that Osei sent you.”
Maran waved thanks, then hustled down the docks, seeking a place with less exposure. She moved around the teamed horses and massive wagons standing ready for their loads.
Osei had been truthful. Maran found the streets stunningly crowded. Drifters moved everywhere, stood in line everywhere, and idled everywhere. They hung out of windows, sat on doorsteps, and milled in the streets. Only the Horsebreaker wagons could push them aside, like water streaming around a boat.
It was one thing to hear about all the refugees streaming into town, but actually experiencing the sheer numbers stunned her to her very bones. According to the Ironmongers, the Loam had to feed another thousand people every week. If that was true, the city was growing by fifty thousand a year. Last year, King Oro estimated that one hundred thousand refugees arrived, each one desperately hoping for some better life.
Maran expected to walk about the streets quietly, drawing little attention to herself. Instead, every drifted noted her as she passed by. Repeatedly, Maran heard the question, “What the hell kind of dwarf is that?” Nobody seemed to know. One person eventually identified her as a farmer.
“Those farmers are a privileged lot,” someone cursed, “Better than any other dwarf. They get as much food as they want.” That hurt Maran. The Loam did not get all the food that they wanted.
Weeds Among Stone (Jura City Book 1) Page 4