Watson, Ian - Black Current 01

by The Book Of The River (v1. 1)

  I stayed ashore overnight at Jambi's house. Her husband I found obliging and amiable. Obviously he adored Jambi—which relieved her of the need to adore him unduly in return. But otherwise he was just a little bit of a zero. I foresaw trouble if Jambi ever had to quit the river; and I could only wonder quite how she had put up with being beached during the course of her pregnancy. I played with her little boy, too. Alas, this reminded me of the infant stranger my own mother was cooking up. . . .

  Jambi, husband and myself visited a raw fish restaurant that evening, where we filled ourselves with thin slices of madder-coloured hoke and yellow pollfish and velvety ajil dipped in mild mustard sauce. And we drank ginger spirit. Afterwards we strolled down to the promenade to view the spangling phosphorescence, which put on a particularly fine display for my benefit; which was the only time that I mentioned the current to Jambi.

  "Maybe," I said, "all the tiny silver things feed on something the black current jettisons here? A sort of excrement from it?" I’d asked earlier, and it turned out that no one really knew. The glassmaker’s art, a la Verrino, had never produced any lenses powerful enough to plumb the really microscopic.

  That was when she glanced, and wrinkled her nose. Perhaps this wasn't surprising—in view of the fact that she had just treated me to wonderful fish. Here was I suggesting that the black current used the neighbourhood as a toilet! This may have seemed an unholy slur on her native town.

  More likely my remark seemed like tipsy nonsense. Jambi was a bustling, practical person who probably dismissed her own Guild initiation quite soon after it occurred as merely a metaphorical masquerade—as something mystical, in which she had no interest.

  As soon as I asked her this, to my alarm I felt a queasiness in my guts. Was this because of the presence of a male, her husband? Pleasantly fired by all the ginger spirit, I might have been on the verge of saying too much. Remembering how sick I had been when I was indiscreet about a Guild secret that one time on board the Sally Argent, I promptly shut up and enjoyed the silvery show.

  Jambi couldn't have minded my comment, since she invited me back to her home on our subsequent calls at Spanglestream during the next few weeks. I accepted her invitation the second time. That night she was throwing a party for some local fisherwomen she had been at school with—at Spanglestream the call of the river did not necessarily call you very far from home. Yet on the third occasion I made an excuse. These invitations, kind as they were, reminded me of how I myself had invited a friend, Hali, home to Pecawar, only to discover that brother Capsi had decamped. To his doom. And then there was the presence of the little boy. The child seemed, by proxy, to dispossess me of all possible homes except those afloat.

  After Spanglestream we came to Croakers' Bayou where the river spilled slackly inland into a maze of hot dank swamps. Here stilt- trees meandered in long winding colonnades, forming vaults and corridors and tunnels. Mudbanks emerged and submerged at whim. Puffballs and great white fungus domes studded the exposed mud. The big froggy croakers squatted and hopped and played their ventriloquists' tricks, voices echoing off the water and the arched tree trunks.

  And I thought fancifully that if the anus of the black current was located off Spanglestream, then here at Croakers' Bayou was the mouldy decaying appendix of the river. The grating croaks were a sort of flatulence, a shifting of gases in the bowels.

  Once out of Croakers' Bayou forests cloaked the shore. The western bank, far away, was likewise a ribbon of green. It occurred to me that the Sons of Adam might not rule the roost everywhere along the far side. How could they, when they denied themselves the advantages of river transport? Maybe their southern reaches were uninhabited. Or perhaps those who dwelled there were savages, without even the dubious level of culture of the Sons.

  Savages! Ah, yet gentler perhaps than the Sons in their treatment of women. . . .

  And maybe they were even worse than the Sons. I spotted no canoes; no smoke plumes from campfires near the shore. If anyone lived over there, they too shunned the river.

  But this was the least of my worries, compared with the unending paint-job. Whenever it rained, which it did with a vengeance now and then, we had to rig tarpaulins.

  Gradually the forest knotted and tangled itself with vines and moss-mats, epiphytes and parasites, moving towards true jungle. Which, by the time we reached Jangali, it was.

  We carried two young lovers as passengers on our journey to Jangali: Lalo and Kish. Kish was a boy from Spanglestream who was a friend of Jambi's family on her mother's side. Lalo had decided that she loved him and was now escorting him back home to Jangali, on the one river trip of his life, to wed him.

  It struck me as a slight shame that Kish's horizons should thus be limited to the small stretch of land between two nearly adjacent towns. Well, granted that Spanglestream and Jangali were 80 leagues apart! But a riverwoman usually thinks big, and I imagined in a rather snobbish way that it was a teeny bit unenterprising of Lalo to seek her husband from a town which was comparatively close to home, rather than from far Sarjoy (say) or Melonby.

  We were chatting below decks one day, the four of us, getting better acquainted. Lalo was holding hands with Kish, while I was trying to pumice some paint off my fingers.

  Like Jambi, Lalo was dark-skinned, though her hair was short and curly. She had an unusually loud voice and always spoke with particular emphasis. At one point she happened to mention that some trees deep in the Jangali jungles were "quite as high as the Spire at Verrino". She just mentioned this in passing, but so assertively did she voice it that I almost tore a nail off on the pumice stone.

  "Ouch!" That Spire, and its observatory, were all too fresh in my memory.

  "Oh, so you got as far as Verrino?" asked Jambi innocently. This was indeed a singularly innocent question coming from a riverwoman, since there are half a dozen major towns further north than that. But Jambi, as I say, was a devoted Southerner.

  "Why yes," said Lalo. "I didn't waste my time. I just didn't find anybody suitable. Not till Spanglestream on the way back." And she squeezed Kish's hand affectionately.

  "It's often that way." Jambi sounded smug.

  I couldn't help wondering whether Lalo had not been growing anxious by the time she got as close to home as Spanglestream. But maybe she had been especially choosy on her travels; which meant that she had made a sensible choice. The marriage would last, and last well.

  I guess from Kish's point of view there was a whole world of difference between Spanglestream and Jangali. Judging from his questions it was plain that Kish was a little apprehensive at the prospect of becoming a junglejack—if indeed he would become one. Lalo teased him with this prospect intermittently. Just about as often, she corrected his misapprehensions. . . .

  "It seems to me," I said, and I suppose I spoke thoughtlessly in the circumstances, "that a woman could find her ideal partner in almost any town chosen at random. It's all a bit of an accident, isn't it? I mean, which street you happen to walk down. Which winehouse you pop into. Who you sit next to at a concert. You turn left here, rather than right, and it's this fellow who'll spend the rest of his life with you, while another fellow walks on by. It could so easily have been the other one instead."

  "Oh no!" Lalo protested. "A feeling guides you. A kind of extra sense that you only use once. You know you should turn left instead of right. You know you ought to carry on to the next town, because the scent's gone dead in this one. You're operating by a sort of special instinct during your wander-weeks. Honestly, Yaleen, you'll know this if it happens to you. It's a heightened, thrilling feeling."

  "You're a romantic," said Jambi. "Kish is lucky. I tend to agree with Yaleen myself. Anyone can settle down with anyone else." (That wasn't quite what I'd said.) "But then," she added, "I also have the river as my first love."

  And lovers in different ports as well, I wondered? Jambi hadn't spoken of this to me. One didn't gossip about one's harmless amorous adventures. For one thing, it would be demeaning to
the men.

  "So you turned right instead of left," I said, "but guided by your nose."

  "And now I'll be a junglejack forever." Kish grinned ruefully. He had a whimsical, expressive face, with twinkling blue eyes, and already a few smile-wrinkles to accompany them. I liked him, and rather wished that I myself had met him—the way that I had first met Hasso in Verrino, before I found out why Hasso had been hoping to meet someone like me.

  "Phooey!" said Lalo. "A junglejack? Why, that's nothing. I tell you, in the jungle you're usually better off up a tree. It's the creepy- crawlies down below that bug us. You'll need some good strong boots. And a stomach to go with them." She couldn't keep a straight face, though. She giggled. "Oh, I'm just kidding. Jangali's a decent, civilized place. Not like Port Barbra. That's where the really weird and queasy things happen, out in the interior. The fungus cult, for instance. Completely wrecks your sense of time and decency. Us, we just get smashed on junglejack like decent mortals."

  "Tell me more," said Kish. "I like getting smashed, too. Preferably not by falling off a tree."

  "You wouldn't, not with safety lines."

  So we began to natter on about junglejack, the drink. Apparently this was distilled from the berries of some high vine. It went off quite quickly and didn't travel—alas for the export economy of Jangali, perhaps fortunately for the economy of everywhere else. And we nattered about junglejacks in general: the people who felled the hardwood trees and also harvested the tangled heights, picking fruit, tapping juice, scraping resin, collecting medicinal parasite plants.

  I became quite enthused about the impending festival of acrobatics, vine-swinging and sky-walking, and also about getting smashed on junglejack, the drink.

  As did Kish; which was of course why Lalo had timed her return for that particular week, to coincide. After a while she even had to remind him gently that not everyone in Jangali was a junglejack. There were also butchers and bakers and furniture makers, just like anywhere else.

  And she went on more emotionally, now, about the beauties of the jungle, brushing aside the creepy-crawlies as of little consequence.

  How I wish she had dampened my enthusiasm about Jangali rather than igniting it! Little did I know then that excesses of enthusiasm would result in my saving Marcialla's life—bringing me in turn a singularly horrible reward.

  Saving Marcialla's life? Well, maybe I exaggerate. Let's change that to: rescuing her from an awkward and potentially lethal situation.

  I was looking forward to arriving at Jangali—which was so decently distant from Verrino. I was looking forward to really enjoying the events. I even imagined that I was, in a sense, successfully running away. All the while in truth I was running—or sailing—towards.

  "Sun's shining! Paint detail on deck!" came Credence's call from the top of the companion way. Why I had bothered cleaning my fingers, goodness knows. Except that if I hadn't, it would have been harder later on. Perhaps there's a moral in this: it's almost always harder later on. Everything is.

  Jangali rejoiced in massive stone quays fronting the river, quarried and cut with steps and timber-slides. The town itself was founded upon that same great slab of rock, which ran back into the jungle before dipping under, submerging itself in humus and vegetation. In the original old town the architecture was of stone, with wooden upper storeys. The new town behind—which I was to see presently —was wholly of timber, and fused with the jungle itself. Some houses there incorporated living trees. Others were built on to them and around them. Some even slung from them cantilever-style. The entire effect of Jangali was of some strange metamorphosing creature which was living wood at one end and fossil rock at the other— or perhaps of dead rock coming gradually to life the further inland you went.

  The locals reminded me of those of Verrino. Indeed, this might have been why Lalo had followed her nose to Verrino in the first place—though with no result. Jangali folk weren't as quicksilver- nimble and chattery, always scurrying every which where. Yet there was an elastic spring to their steps, a bounciness, as if they regarded the stone floor of the town more as a trampoline, ever about to toss them up into the treetops beyond. Its inert rigidity amused them and made them prance, just as a riverwoman sometimes feels about dry land after a long time afloat; they intended never to let themselves be bruised by it.

  As I say, the locals weren't chattery. But they did address one another in tones pitched to carry through tangles of vegetation in competition with the other chatterers of the beast variety; in voices intended to penetrate up to the very roof of the jungle. Conversations generally took place a few paces further apart than they did elsewhere, much more noisily, more publicly. Jangali would have been the ideal place for a deaf person to take up residence.

  Thus the locals reinforced their sense of community. Otherwise, once you were in the jungle, the jungle could swallow you up, stifle you, isolate you, make you mute. I gathered from loud-voiced Lalo that people around Port Barbra behaved more furtively.

  Before Lalo and Kish disembarked, they invited Jambi and me to visit them at their parents' home. Or more truthfully, Kish expressed this desire, so that Jambi (old family friend) could see him in his new abode; Lalo invited Jambi and included me in the invitation too. I suppose Kish was trying to keep a kind of psychological lifeline open to Spanglestream. No doubt he hoped that Jambi would continue to pay the occasional visit whenever she was in Jangali. Personally, I didn't think this was entirely wise—not at this early stage in their relationship. For "a man shall leave his mother and father, and sister and brother, and embrace the family of his wife". That's what it says in The Book of the River. In at the deep end, say I! Just so long as there aren't any stingers in the water (or at least in the hope that there aren't).

  Yet maybe Kish was right. This established him from the start, in a strange town, as on an equal footing with his wife.

  At any rate, it was their own business, and I soon abandoned any minor scruples I might have felt about us getting in the way when I learned that Lalo's parents lived in the new town, in a hanging home high up a tree. This I had to see.

  And that's what we set out to do, the very next day. But before that, an odd thing happened.

  We'd arrived in Jangali in mid-aftemoon. There was the furling of the sails to see to, and the gangers to supervise as they unloaded our cargo: crans of fish from Spanglestream, barrels of salt trans-shipped all the way from Umdala, and pickles from Croakers' Bayou and such. By the time everything was boatshape, we only had time to go ashore for a brisk walk round the monumental old town, culminating in a not so brief visit to Jambi's favourite bar—where I made my first acquaintance with the fiery junglejack.

  The bar in question—the whole town, for that matter—was a-buzz in expectation of the festival. The normal population must have increased by half again, what with people trekking in from up- country and from smaller jungle settlements along the shore, not to mention outside visitors. Lalo pointed out women from Croakers' Bayou, and from Port Barbra. The former she identified by a more sallow look to them, and the latter by the hooded cloaks and scarves they wore—to cope, Jambi said, with occasional pesky clouds of insects in their area; besides Port Barbrans spoke much more softly. By contrast the Jangali locals seemed even noisier than I supposed they usually were. The Jingle-Jangle Bar lived up to its name; and I ended up later on with quite a headache—quite independent, of course, of the junglejack spirit.

  The motif of the Jingle-Jangle wasn't trees, but carved stone. The bar was an artificial cavern of nooks and crannies and stalagmitelike columns, with fat chunky nude statues holding oil lamps. Around their squat necks hung strings of medallions, and around their loins brief girdles of the same. Presumably these medallions would jingle and jangle if you shook them. To my mind the whole mood of the bar was primitive and subterranean, with a hint of secrets and conspiracy, an odour of dark mystery.

  The place was also very hot. There we were in the reeking petrified bowels of a jungle so dense that
it had become a cave. I must say that the place had atmosphere: compounded of perfume and oil- fumes, sweat and mustiness, and partly of sheer hot air from all the babbling voices. I wouldn't have been surprised if savage drums had begun to beat; I noticed that there was a stone dais for entertainers, currently unoccupied.

  And in the Jingle-Jangle I happened to notice Marcialla and Credence sitting over a drink. This wasn't in itself unusual. What was odd was that they seemed to be arguing. Credence was insisting on something; Marcialla kept on shaking her head.

  Every so often Credence glanced in the direction of a small, hooded group of women from Port Barbra; and Marcialla particularly shook her head then.

  I should explain that Marcialla was quite a short woman, though in no way squat even if she must have been in her early fifties. She was wiry, and carried no spare flesh. Credence was big and busty and blonde, and at least fifteen years her junior. Marcialla wore her greying hair swept back in short shingled waves; Credence had hers in chopped off pigtails. All in all Credence looked like an inflated, coarsened girl.

  "I'm peckish. Let's have a bite to eat," I suggested. So we carried our drinks over to the buffet bar—this was supported by carved stone female dwarfs, pygmy caryatids holding up the food table. On Jambi's say-so we bought spiced snakemeat rolls.

  On the way back I ducked into an empty nook just round the comer from our boatmistress and her boatswain. This was just on impulse. Besides, our previous seats had already been taken in our absence.