Watson, Ian - Black Current 01

by The Book Of The River (v1. 1)

  At one moment she wanted to run ashore to wake the quaymistress. At another she insisted on setting sail for Port Barbra at once even though it was pitch dark.

  We used our initiative. Despite all her strident threats, appeals and protests we kept her confined to her cabin. Finally, around dawn, she flaked out at last. And Jambi and I could at last crawl to our own bunks.

  When I woke up hours later I could feel that the Spry Goose was out on the river. The light was dying fast, so I must have slept throughout the day. Jambi still lay stretched out, snoring. She only groaned when I shook her. My arms and shoulders ached like hell, and my right hand felt as if it was bandaged in concrete, not linen. I climbed back into the sheets again, and didn't wake until the following dawn. Since the Spry Goose had already been under way by evening, Marcialla was evidently made of sterner stuff than me—unless the aftermath of the drug delirium was kinder to the flesh than the after-effect of abseiling from the heights.

  It's only in stories that a snip of a deckhand suddenly gets promoted to boatswain; and Marcialla wasn't as foolishly grateful as that, merely because I had saved her life (perhaps), and because Credence had deserted.

  By the time I came on deck again, Marcialla had already promoted Sula, from Gate of the South, to the post of boatswain. I couldn't help musing that slim, short Sula wasn't at all the sort of woman who could hoist a paralysed boatmistress all the way up a tree and sit her on a trapeze! ("Let me have those about me that are slight", to parody the ancient fragment Julius Czar.)

  Of course Marcialla did thank me, and granted me sick leave till my hand healed. No more painting or hauling on ropes for a while for Yaleen! Actually this was a mixed blessing, since it meant that I had nothing to do but bum about the boat like a passenger, and watch the jungle pass by, and get in the hair of the cook by offering to help her one-handed. And all the while bottle up what had happened, like a dose of the black current.

  I also had time to think about my fortune, as told by the Port Barbra woman. I had asked a few of the other women what they thought about cartomancy. (I hadn't asked Jambi, perhaps because I didn't want her to ask me in return what the cards had showed.) Only one woman thought anything at all about the matter, and what she thought was rather contradictory. On the one hand, the cards would always tell a story that seemed plausible to the person concerned. But on the other hand this story would be set out quite at random.

  I puzzled about this and decided that the pictures on the cards were really so general that somebody other than me could have extracted an entirely different personal saga from the sequence of spyglass, bonfire and such. And I myself could very likely have picked nine other cards, and seen the very same story mirrored in them too.

  And yet. . . .

  Even in their thumb-marked, washed-out dowdiness there had seemed to be something powerful about the cards, as though they and all their predecessors had been handled for so many centuries that, if there had been no truth in them to begin with, nevertheless by now the images they contained were fraught with generations of uneasy emotion. With each use—here and there, now and then— people put a tiny portion of their own lives and will power into the images on the cards; and this mounted up eventually, so that the cards became, well, genuine.

  We weren't sailing under very much canvas, as though now that we had left Jangali safely behind, Marcialla wished to prolong the time till we next made port. Realistically, of course, this allowed Marcialla to keep a leisurely eye on how well Sula was coping with the sudden change in her duties.

  Just a couple of hours before we were due to reach Port Barbra, Marcialla called me to her cabin.

  * * *

  She poured us both a small glass of junglejack from an almost empty bottle.

  "Oh dear," I said, regarding it.

  "It'll only go off. It doesn't travel." Marcialla smiled. "But you do, Yaleen. You get around. First of all you were in the Jingle-Jangle that night—"

  Hastily I raised my glass and gulped half of the stinging spirit down to prompt my cheeks to flush of their own accord.

  "—then up you popped at the top of that wretched tree, knowing just what was wrong with me."

  "Well you see, Lalo had mentioned the fungus drug, saying how it made time stand still—you remember Lalo and Kish? They were—"

  "I remember. They did help me back to the boat."

  "So when I saw you sitting as still as that in such a dangerous spot—"

  "You put ten and ten together and made a hundred. And a hundred was the right answer. I've already thanked you for your prompt and loyal act of bravery, Yaleen. At the time it would have been ungracious to ask you . . . why you eavesdropped on Credence and me." She waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, don't worry about that. I'm not offended. What I'm really interested in, being a guildmistress. . . ." And again she paused but I only stared at her, waiting it out, till she chuckled. "I think you ought to have expressed a degree of surprise there. You should have exclaimed, all wide-eyed innocence, 'Oh, are you?'"

  "Word gets round," I mumbled; and I swallowed half of the remaining junglejack.

  "As a guildmistress I have a duty to see that, how shall we put it . . . ?"

  "The applecart isn't upset?" I oughtn't to have said this. Marcialla had practically forced me to complete her sentence for her, so long did she put off doing so herself.

  "I was going to say: the order of things. Maybe you've heard people talking about the balance of our little applecart before. . . ."

  This time I certainly did keep my lip buttoned.

  "Well, whatever. I won't press you, since I'm grateful. Now I want you to swear that you'll say nothing at all about this particular insanity—this mad idea of doping the current—which is only really just a gleam in someone's eye, as yet." She reached for The Book of the River and the guild chapbook, both. "Otherwise people begin to gossip. Other people overhear. Sooner or later some man starts to wonder, 'Shall we try it?' Before we know where we are, we're deep in the manure."

  "I already said something—to Jambi. And Lalo, too."

  "Oh, I don't suppose you told everything, did you?"

  I swallowed. Not junglejack this time. I swallowed saliva—and my heart.

  What was "everything"? The drug? The Observers at Verrino? The fact that Capsi had crossed the river without benefit of any crazy fungus drug, but by using a diving suit? The fact that over on the other side they burned women who loved the river, alive?

  All these things together made up "everything." Surely even Guildmistress Marcialla had no way of knowing everything!

  She peered at me quizzically. "You don't seem like a person who tells ... all they know."

  I took the two books and laid my bandaged palm upon them, wondering vaguely whether this meant there was a cushion between me and my oath. "I swear I won't say anything about what Credence was up to. What she had in mind. May I spew if I do."

  "As you have spewed before, I suppose ... Of course we must remember charitably that Credence was simply acting out of, shall we say, devotion: devotion to this river of women, and to the current which is its nervous system. Other people—men in particular— mightn't feel quite so devoted." Apparently satisfied, she took the books back and placed them on a shelf. "You've done well, Yaleen."

  "Um, how did it feel when time stopped?" I asked.

  Marcialla burst out laughing. "You're impossible, dear girl! But since you ask, it was . . . interesting. Though not all that interesting, in the circumstances. Imagine wading through molasses for ten days . . . No, I can't really describe it. I suppose you're fascinated by the current too? Yes, I see you are. Most people take it for granted. You can never ignore it, if you're going to be a guildmistress." Her eyes twinkled. "That, incidentally, is not a promise."

  And she went on to enquire in kindly tones about my hand.

  And so to Port Barbra. After all the excitement and the omens in Jangali I approached this town with some misgivings, as if I might at any moment be kidnapped b
y hooded women, and smuggled off into the depths of the jungle dazed by drugs.

  Not so, however. Neither on this first visit, nor on the several return visits which the Spry Goose was to pay to Port Barbra during the next ten to twelve weeks. (For we started in on a local run: Jangali to Port Barbra to Ajelobo, and back again.)

  Compared with massively stone-hewn and timber-soaring Jangali, Port Barbra seemed something of a foetid shanty town. The main streets were as muddy as the side lanes, though at least the major thoroughfares had wooden walkways along both sides, supported on stilts. Insects were a nuisance, not so much because they bit you, as that every now and then they liked to fly into your nostrils, making you snort like a sick pig on a foggy morning. I took to wearing a scarf, too, when I was in port; and a head scarf as well to keep them out of my hair.

  Port Barbra exported precious timbers: the gildenwood, rubyvein, and ivorybone—all of which trees were small and required no heroic junglejack antics. However, the inhabitants only used cheap woods for their own buildings and furnishings. They built as though they intended to abandon the town as soon as they had all made their fortunes. Except that there were no fortunes in evidence. Frankly I wasn't surprised if in such a place a few people took drugs. And perhaps a town which is one large slum either gives up trying—or else it cultivates a certain mysticism and inwardness. Certainly, in their quiet murmurings and hoodedness, and in their apparent contempt for comfort or luxury, the Port Barbrans appeared to have adopted the latter course. Though of mystical extremes I saw nothing. Nor on any visit did I run into that fortune teller—should I have recognized her, if I had!—nor Credence, either, supposing that she had made her way to Port Barbra with the help of her allies.

  Naturally, I wondered what had happened to Credence. On our first visit to Port Barbra Marcialla spent a long while ashore closeted with the quaymistress. Subsequently I noticed many heliograph signals being flashed up and down stream: signals which I couldn't work out at all. Days later, when we were on the river again, more coded signals reached us, passed on by the boat behind. Later on, I noticed Marcialla observing me with pursed lips when she thought I wasn't looking.

  And so to steamy, bloom-bright, aromatic Ajelobo, a paradise compared with Port Barbra.

  I could have settled happily in Ajelobo. Jumped boat, like Credence. Signed off. Ajelobo was so neat and . . . yes, so innocent, at least on the surface.

  The houses were all of light wood and waxed paper. There were hot springs just outside the town, where the population seemed to migrate en masse every weekend. Children, who were all dressed like flowers, flew kites and fought harmless little battles with them in the sky. Old men with little white beards played complicated board games employing hundreds of polished pebbles. There was a puppet theatre, a wrestling stadium—for wrestling was a local passion—and dozens of little cafes where people talked for hours on end over tiny cups of sweet black coffee, one of Ajelobo's prime exports. There were even three daily newspapers turned out on hand presses, filled with fantastic anecdotes, puzzles, serial stories, poetry, recipes and elegant long-standing arguments by letter (about costume, manners, turns of phrase, antiquarian fragments) which no one plunging into midway could hope to follow, but which regular readers savoured with all the avidity of someone reading an adventure story. Of which, in fact, many of the most exotic were written and published in Ajelobo, and exported.

  And maybe Ajelobo was all surface, and no depths.

  But equally, who needed to settle anywhere—when every town along the river was their home, if they wished it to be?

  It was during our fourth call at Ajelobo, as the year was drawing to a close, that Marcialla made her announcement to the boat's company. The Spry Goose was going to sail all the way to the source of the river, to the end of the world under the Far Precipices: to Tambimatu, in good time for New Year's Eve. And one of our own boat's company was to be honoured—for good boatwomanship, and for initiative beyond the call of duty. She would be invited to volunteer to sail out to the black current at midnight, between the old year and the new.

  Myself. I could have shrunk into my socks.

  Not out of modesty, exactly. Let me be clear about that. Everyone loves an honour.

  But because of the way it was phrased: "invited to volunteer." Could it be that the best way of keeping the applecart trim, when someone young and irresponsible knew something that they shouldn't know, was to ... ?

  No, it couldn't be that. More likely it was a neat way of making me feel extremely loyal—by putting me through an initiation ceremony, of the second degree.

  Everybody on deck was staring at me.

  I'd wondered before what a voice sounds like when it's quavering.

  If I was quavering when I replied, though, I wouldn't have known since I couldn't hear myself. "I volunteer," I said.

  Hands slapped me on the back. Jambi kissed me on both cheeks. Sula pumped my hand; while Marcialla looked genuinely delighted and proud.

  I still couldn't forget all those coded signals and wondered whether any searching enquiries had been conducted not only about Credence and her affiliations but also about myself, for instance in Verrino . . . turning up, perhaps, the fact that my brother appeared to have gone missing earlier in the year.

  At this point I realized to my amazement that I had been chastely celibate for quite a long while. Whether this was somehow out of respect for my dead brother, or due to horror at the male fraternity across the water, or even from some perverse annoyance at my parents for breeding a new offspring, I had no idea. Maybe I had even been punishing myself by self-denial; and having effectively tortured my right hand on the abseiling rope at Jangali I had had enough of it.

  I determined to repair this omission before we set sail again. I must confess, too, that in one little part of me I was wondering whether I really would see the next year in at all. Just in case not, I ought to enjoy some pleasures of the flesh.

  So I drank Safe—not with Jambi, who ought to hunt down a languishing shore-husband, a married man, if she felt this way inclined—but with Klare, a jolly brunette from Guineamoy. It was she whom I had asked about the cards; and we went ashore together that night, the last night. As she put it, to celebrate.

  I think I can say that we managed very well indeed. But one doesn't wish to boast of one's conquests. One shouldn't degrade men in their absence merely because we have liberty to roam, and they don't. So, like a proper lady of Port Barbra, I shall draw a discreet scarf and hood over a few very pleasant hours.

  I was quite unprepared for my first sight of the Far Precipices. Fluffy white clouds with grey sodden hulls had been sailing along all day, occasionally emptying their bilges on us. For hours I'd been scanning the river and jungle horizon ahead for what I presumed would look like an enormous wall. It was sticky and far too hot, even on the river; the heat was soaking wet, unlike the dry heat of my native Pecawar.

  Klare happened by, on some errand.

  "Where, where, where?" I complained petulantly.

  "Lost something, Yaleen?"

  "Just the Precipices. Surely we ought to be able to see them by now!"

  And she looked up into the sky—almost directly at the zenith, it seemed. The clouds had parted there; into that high rift she pointed.

  "How about there?"

  "Oh. . . goodness me." For that's where the bare peaks of the Precipices were, all right. Up, up, and up above me, scraping against space. I got such a shock. I simply hadn't realized. Of course if it hadn't been cloudy I should have known sooner. As it was, a god suddenly peered down at me from overhead. The tops of the Precipices seemed to be floating free with no possible connexion to the ground.

  Though these connexions became evident enough by the time we reached Tambimatu . . .

  Not so much a wall across the world—as the end of the world, period! A stone curtain, drawn across the rest of creation: one which hung from the stars themselves at night!

  It seemed to be toppling forev
er upon Tambimatu as though about to squash the town flat. Yet the locals didn't see things quite that way. On the contrary, they hardly seemed to perceive the Precipices at all; any more than I had, when I looked for them in the wrong place. The town of Tambimatu was a tight maze of lanes and yellow brick houses leaning in towards each other with overhanging upper storeys and machiolated attics. The idea seemed to be nudge together and make tunnels of all the routes. It was hardly possible to see those looming Precipices from anywhere in the town itself. Domestically this interruption in the smooth flow of the world did not exist.

  By this style of architecture the Tambimatans also excluded the reeking jungle which clung around their town. The dank, festering mass of vegetation was quite unlike the bloom-bright tangles I'd seen elsewhere, quite unlike the noble halls of jungle giants. Spinach puree: that was how I thought of it. A tide of green pulp a hundred spans high.

  Naturally, for those who knew, there were ways through it. And there was wealth to find—or there wouldn't have been a town. The wealth consisted of powder-gold and gems and other exotic minerals which turned up in the slime-ponds and mudpools; as if, every now and then, the Precipices nodded and a scurf of riches fell into the puree. Actually this wealth was thought to leach and cascade down through the innards of the Precipices, into the water table, whence it oozed up into the jungle. Bright jewels for mythical magpies—to make them build their nests here! In Tambimatu town were gemsmiths and goldsmiths, cutters and polishers, artificers of sparkling ornaments. Unlike the dowdy shrouded denizens of Port Barbra these locals wore ear-rings and bangles and bijoux to match.

  Slime and sharp facets; sparklers and gloomy mud!

  Only from the quayside could the diligent eye follow the sweeping planes of stone upwards into the clouds which so often clung to them—picking out precarious trees, at first like green chaff, then like threads. Then dust, then nothing.

  Two leagues south of the town, the river emerged. . . .

  As a volunteer for the New Year's Eve voyage, first there was an obligatory call to pay on the quaymistress in company with my sponsor, Marcialla. This was soon over. More a matter of checking in, really.