Song of the Current

by Sarah Tolcser

  Fee squatted on the cabin roof, her toes splayed out. “Pig man,” she said.

  I looked up sharply.

  Some said the pig man was a god. If you caught him on a lucky day, he would tell you your fate. On the unlucky days, he sat at his stove on the roof of his rickety houseboat, smoking pork until it fell off the ribs. He went slowly up and down the river selling it, as well as bacon and salt pork, because even wherrymen tire of fish. Pa had purchased provisions from him many times, apparently all on unlucky days, because he’d never said or done anything remotely godlike. He was just old. And strange.

  Likely the whole thing was a fish story, but if ever I had needed someone to tell me my fate, this was the day. And even if it wasn’t my lucky day, the pork was delicious.

  I climbed down into Cormorant’s dinghy and rowed across.

  The pig man sat next to his smoker, his face hidden under a floppy-brimmed hat. It was impossible to tell if he had brown skin like my mother’s family or was simply tanned that color from sitting out in the sun all his long life.

  “How be you on this high morning?” the pig man called down as I tied up the dinghy.

  “I’m for Valonikos,” I said, heart skittering nervously. “To deliver a shipment.”

  “Foolish girl. ’Tis your fate that be pulling you down that river.” He glanced at me. “Your fate … and that boy’s.”

  I put my hand on my knife hilt. “What do you know about—” I stopped. Surely it wasn’t wise to say his name. “I mean, what do you know about my fate?”

  “Salt pork today? Got a fine batch of salted smoked pork for the buying.” He winked. “I be thinking your fate is far away from here, Captain Oresteia.”

  I wished he would stop being mysterious. “I’m not a captain,” I said, passing him a handful of coins. “Cormorant is my father’s boat. You know that as well as I do.”

  “You can’t fight it.” He grinned, showing all his white teeth. “Why is it every soul be always thinking he can fight it? Does a fish swim upstream against the tide?”

  I wasn’t a man or a fish, and I was beginning to weary of his knowing leer.

  “It damn well tries,” I told him. “Salt pork, please.” I hesitated. “Is it true, what they say? That you’re a god? Can you speak to the god in the river?”

  He only laughed, bending to measure out the salt pork from his barrel.

  I stifled an irritated sigh and glanced over my shoulder at Cormorant, uncomfortably aware of how vulnerable and shabby she looked. She was no match for the Black Dogs. But we couldn’t just hide here forever. Somehow I had to get to Valonikos, or Pa would be stuck in the lockup and—gods forbid—I’d be stuck with Tarquin.

  I stared into the murky reeds at the edge of the water. If there really was a god at the bottom, I could use his help right about now.

  The pig man watched me with keen black eyes. I had the uncanny feeling he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “She a bigger, deeper god. The one who steers you.” He spat over the side of the boat. “He don’t be fighting her.”

  “I steer myself.” The idea of the gods poking and prodding me about, like a piece on a game board, didn’t sit well with me.

  He flipped the bacon in his frying pan and cackled. “They all say that too.”

  I tried to look dignified as I climbed into the dinghy. “Good day, sir.”

  “Current carry you, Captain,” he called after me, sounding just like any old river man again. It was as if our eerie conversation had never happened.

  As I rowed back to Cormorant, I tried not to think about the pig man’s unsettling words. I was an Oresteia. We belonged to the river. I didn’t want another god messing around in my business.

  Tarquin gave me a hand up from the dinghy. As I clambered onto the stern, I realized I’d been wrong about his hands. They were pale, all right, the hands of a man who had never worked long hours in the sun. But he had rough calluses across the tops of his palms, and he was strong.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t be completely useless after all.

  As I raised the sail, I noticed him watching me. “What are you staring at?” I demanded, freezing with the halyard in my hand.

  He flinched, peeling his gaze off my legs. “In Akhaia the women wear skirts.”

  “Well, bully for them.” My cheeks and ears went suddenly warm.

  “I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing.” He tapped his own knees in a way that made me think he was embarrassed.

  “That’s because you’re staring at my legs.” I bent to tie off the rope, resisting the urge to tug down the hem of my cutoff trousers, which had ridden up. He acted like he’d never seen a girl’s kneecap before. It was nothing exciting. Nothing to stare at.

  We got under way, water bubbling under Cormorant’s bow. I steered her down the dike and out to the river, the dinghy trailing behind us like a duckling paddling after its mother. Long after the smoke from the pig man’s boat had disappeared astern, I sat chewing on my lip.

  “Traveling by wherry is so slow,” Tarquin complained from the seat opposite me. He rubbed his finger along the strip of wooden trim that edged the deck. I wished he wouldn’t—flecks of paint were coming off. “I’m bored. Let me take a turn steering the boat.”

  He’d barely been traveling by wherry for half an hour. Too bad I’d thrown the box overboard, or I might’ve stuffed him back in.

  “What direction is the wind coming from?” I asked.

  “That way.” He waved a hand, incorrectly, off the starboard bow.

  “No, you can’t steer the boat.”

  “What did I say wrong?”

  “The wind is coming from dead aft.” He stared at me blankly. “Aft is behind us,” I said. A five-year-old child knew more than he did. “Why do you think the boom’s so far out? The boom being that big piece of wood attached to the sail.”

  “Which one?” He must have seen the rude face I made, because he added, “I need to know these things, don’t I? To blend in.”

  “The bottom one. The other is the gaff. The point is, a ship can’t sail into the wind. The wind has to push the boat. Turn around.”

  The breeze ruffled his curls as he shaded his eyes to examine the sail.

  “You see? That’s where the wind is coming from.”

  Tarquin seemed to absorb this with a thoughtful look. To my relief, he didn’t ask to sail again. Instead he turned to Fee, who sat with her knobbly frog legs dangling over the side, and studied her. “Is it true that frogmen can breathe underwater?” He directed the question at me.

  I bit back my annoyance. “You know, you can ask her. She understands you just fine.”

  “Oh.” He straightened, addressing Fee this time. “I apologize if I offended you, Miss …?” He paused formally.

  “Just Fee,” she croaked, eyes scrunching up at the edges. Her long tongue snapped out to grab a fly.

  Tarquin jumped back, startled, while I choked down a laugh.

  The river was narrow here, with round hillocks of marsh grass crowding us on both sides. The only sounds were the wind whistling low and mournful through the weeds and the buzzing of insects. Downriver from us, the sails of other wherries floated like black triangles above the fields. The cutter was nowhere in sight.

  Off the port side a fish jumped, sunlight flashing on silver scales. Wavelets lapped the shore, and somewhere a bee hummed.

  Small things. I yearned to know what secret messages Pa heard in them. No matter how hard I listened, I could not decipher anything.

  “What are you thinking about?” Tarquin asked.

  “The pig man,” I lied. “They say he’s a god.”

  He sighed. “Ask yourself what’s more likely. That an old man who sells meat off a houseboat is a god or that he’s an old man who sells meat off a houseboat.”

  I wasn’t convinced the pig man was a god either, but I certainly wasn’t going to sit here and let Tarquin poke fun at him.

  “Well, but he knew about—” I hesitated.
“Look, it’s just something people whisper, is all. The thing about gods is …”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh yes. A girl who lives on a wherry is going to tell me the thing about gods. I’m full of anticipation.”

  “The thing about gods is,” I said, pointedly ignoring him, “they like to be a bit secretive about their business. And for your information, wherrymen are plenty acquainted with gods. There’s one at the bottom of the river. Everyone knows that. All the captains in my family are favored by the river god.”

  Except for me. I squeezed the tiller, fervently hoping he wouldn’t think to ask for particulars. I felt Fee’s keen gaze on me, but she said nothing.

  “Don’t you think a real god has better things to do than skulk at the bottom of the river like a crocodile?” he persisted. “Or cook bacon, for that matter?”

  “No wonder the consulate made you travel in a box,” I snapped. “You’re not very good at diplomacy, are you? I doubt you’ll have a long career as a courier. If you ever make it back.”

  He clenched his hands into fists. “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s an observation.”

  “Well, in Akhaia it’s known that the gods who once walked among us have long since returned to their halls in the sky and under the earth.” He put one boot on the cockpit seat, looking out at the flat land drifting by. “The only people who can speak to them now are the oracles.”

  “In words, maybe,” I scoffed.

  I’d seen the ostentatious temples in Akhaia, decorated with snarling lion heads made of solid gold. I suspected the Akhaian god was nothing like the river god.

  “How else would you speak, other than in words?” Tarquin asked.

  “The god at the bottom of the river speaks to us in the language of small things.”

  He gave a loud sniff to tell me what he thought of that.

  The pig man had said my fate was far from here. I hoped he wasn’t really a god, because that was just nonsense. I was Pa’s first mate on Cormorant, and someday, after he retired, I would become her captain. Perhaps when the pig man had said “you,” he’d meant Tarquin. Your fate … and that boy’s. Those were his exact words.

  Or maybe the pig man wasn’t a god at all, but an eccentric old coot who sat on a houseboat and smoked pork.

  And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d been too unnerved to say to Tarquin.

  He knew about you.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  As a wherryman’s daughter I’m not supposed to admit this, but I think fishing is gods-blastedly dull. That was what I found myself doing the next morning. And I was not happy about it.

  Like other unpleasant things to recently befall me, it was Tarquin’s fault. By the time he dragged himself out of his bunk, Fee and I had been sailing for hours. He lounged on the bench cushions, the wreckage of his morning meal strewn about him. Sticky flatware lay in a lopsided stack on the tablecloth and a string of greasy drips trailed across the cabin floor. I didn’t know one person was capable of making such a mess.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m going to clean up after you.” I glanced at the sideboard. “Where’s the rest of the pork? I left it right here.”

  “Oh. I … ate it for breakfast.”

  “All of it?” I stared in horror. “That was supposed to last for days.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “It was hardly enough for breakfast.”

  “It’s not meant to be the whole meal. It’s a treat. A luxury.”

  He snorted. “It was good, but not that good.”

  I stomped up to the deck. “Thanks to you, lunch is fish. Dinner is also fish. I hope you aren’t stupid enough to ask what’s for breakfast tomorrow.” Opening the basket of fishing supplies, I fixed tackle to a line. “But as I suspect you might be, it’s fish.”

  He followed me. “Look, I didn’t know. Can’t we stop and get more provisions?”

  “Look around you,” I said. “There’s nothing for the next twenty miles.”

  Tall grasses stretched out on all sides. About half a mile ahead, a humpbacked ruin lay covered in green moss—an old manor house, perhaps, or the remains of a bridge. We’d spent last night hidden behind another such ruin, with Cormorant’s mast lowered and the curtains pulled tight to hide our lantern.

  “There’s not another pig boat or something?” he asked.

  I cast the line over the stern. “And after you made fun of the pig man too. This is your fate catching up to you, is what it is.”

  Tarquin leaned out to survey the pile of rounded stones. “I wonder if that ruin dates back to the days when Kynthessa was still part of the Emparchy.”

  “I reckon so.” I twitched the fishing pole. “This is where the patriots held the line, to keep the Emparch’s army from sacking Siscema during the Thirty Years’ War.”

  In those days, the Oresteias were blockade runners for the patriots. I tried to imagine these empty marshes crowded with Akhaian galleys and campfire smoke, the riverlands plunged into war.

  “Patriots,” Tarquin scoffed. “Traitors to a great empire, you mean.”

  “Ayah, Akhaia must be a wonderful empire,” I said. “I guess that’s why little bits of it keep cutting themselves off to become independent.”

  He pressed his lips in a flat line. “The Margrave was just as much at fault for that war as Akhaia.”

  “I heard the current Emparch exiled fifty men and women just for having political meetings,” I shot back. “That was only last year, so you can’t blame it on people who died long ago.”

  “Antidoros Peregrine and his revolutionaries had been a thorn in the Emparch’s side for years.” After a pause, he explained, “But it wasn’t the meetings that caused the Emparch to finally lose his temper. It was that pamphlet he published—full of radical ideas about the rights of the common people.”

  “Have you read it?” I asked, irritated by his dismissiveness. I was one of the common people.

  “Of course not.” He waved a hand. “The Emparch didn’t want it to cause an uprising, so he ordered it burned. But Lord Peregrine used to dine with us when I was a child,” he mused. “Before he published his mad writings. I wonder what became of him.”

  I could have told him. Lord Peregrine was hiding out in Kynthessa. He and his friends were, in fact, the very same rebels whose muskets the harbor master had confiscated in Hespera’s Watch. I certainly wasn’t about to share that secret, since I suspected it would anger my passenger to hear we were running guns to people he considered traitors.

  “Is your father a lord too?” I asked instead. “Or was he elected?”

  “No one is elected in Akhaia,” he said, as if it was a filthy word. “That would show weakness. He was appointed to the council by the Emparch, as is only fitting.”

  I guess he thought our Margravina weak then. Her title was inherited, passed down from the original Margrave who’d led the rebellion against Akhaia all those years ago, but she was really more of a figurehead these days. She presided over the senate, which was elected from among the people. The Free City of Valonikos had gone even further when it seceded from Akhaia, abandoning all hereditary titles. If Tarquin planned to continue talking like this after he got there, he’d offend everyone. I wondered if I should warn him.

  “Ready?” Fee called to me. I jumped up, abandoning the fishing reel.

  She put the tiller hard over and we jibed, the boom slamming across. I paid out the mainsheet as the sail filled with a snap. We began to heel over on the starboard side. Cormorant swept down the river, our wake bubbling behind us.

  Tarquin gripped the edge of the cockpit, his knuckles white. “What’s going on? I don’t like that.”

  “A jibe,” I said. “We switched the sail to the other side.”

  “Next time, please warn me,” he said stiffly.

  “Fee said ‘ready.’ ” I knew he’d had no idea what she meant, but I was tired of his superior attitude.

  I didn’t see how a person wouldn’t enjoy sail
ing on a fine day like this, when the clouds rode aloft like horsetails in the sapphire sky. Couldn’t he feel how Cormorant moved, as if the wind challenged her to a race? I supposed he didn’t appreciate good weather the same way as people who depend on it for their work.

  We’d spotted no sign of Diric Melanos and the Black Dogs since the night they chased us. It was as if the cutter had vanished right into the air. As the day wore on, the only folk we passed were a pair of fishermen in a dory, bobbing among the reeds.

  The sun dipped lower and trees sprang up on either side of the river. We glided through a tunnel of overhanging branches. I couldn’t shake the mounting unease that prickled my neck. We were sailing blind now. If the Black Dogs were near, we wouldn’t see them until we were practically on top of them.

  Reaching over the stern to trail my hand in the cool water, I waited hopefully.

  Nothing happened. The god in the river speaks to us in the language of small things. So the wherrymen say, but what did it mean exactly? I heard buzzing flies and splashing frogs and felt the gentle pull of the water on my skin. That was all.

  Pa said the day my fate came for me, I would know. Annoyance stirred within me. He might have been a bit more specific.

  Glancing up, I caught the flicker of motion behind the trees. A ghostly flash of white. Something tall.

  A ship was sailing up the River Thrush.

  “Come about!” I gasped, scrambling to my feet.

  Fee pushed the tiller all the way to starboard, sending us into an uncontrolled jibe. Cormorant pitched, water sluicing down the deck, and the sail flopped back and forth.

  Tarquin almost fell off the seat. “I told you to warn me!”

  “Shut up.” Frantically I scanned the riverbank for somewhere—anywhere—big enough to hide a wherry. “There!” I pointed to a stand of willow trees, their leaves dangling into the water like a lady’s skirt.

  As Fee steered Cormorant toward the trees, I ran to the mast. A wherry’s mast can be lowered, through a system of winches, weights, and pulleys, to get through low bridges. But we had precious little time.

  “Tarquin,” I whispered. He didn’t respond. “Tarquin!” I hissed louder, until his shoulders jumped. “I need your help.” I gestured up at the peak. “Catch the mast when it comes down. Quiet.”