“Or we could get horses, like he said. Only, are horses very expensive?”
“I think they are. And you have to know how to ride them.” “I do now. Sort of.” “I don’t,” I said shortly.
We walked on; it was easy going, downhill, and Melle flitted right along. At the bottom of the hill a dim footpath led off towards the river, and we followed that.
“So it would be better to get on a boat,” Melle said. “Wouldn’t it?”
I felt my sense of responsibility for her like a stone on my back, weighing me down. If it was just myself I’d run, I’d hide, I’d be gone, long gone…. I was angry with her for holding me back, slowing my steps, arguing with me about how to go. “I don’t know,” I said.
We went on, I always aware of shortening my pace to hers. We were now on a cart track, coming nearer the river, and saw the roofs of a small town ahead to the right, and soon the wharves, and boats tied up.
I’d asked the Lord Luck to give this child the blessing he’d given me. Was I to distrust him, too? Only a fool acts as if he knows better than Luck. I’d always been a fool, but not that kind.
“We’ll see when we get there,” I said, after a half mile of silence.
“We can pay for it. Can’t we?”
I nodded.
So when we came through apple orchards into town we went straight down to the riverfront and looked about. No boats were tied up and nobody was on the dock. There was a small inn just up the street, its door standing open, and I looked in. A dwarf, a man no taller than Melle, with a big head and a handsome, scowling face, looked round the bar.” What’ll you have, Marshy?” he said.
I all but turned and ran.
“What’s that with you? A pup? No, by Sampa, a kid. Both of you kids. What d’you want then, milk?”
“Yes,” I said, and Melle said, “Yes, please.”
He fetched two cups of milk and we sat at a small table to drink it. He stood by the bar and looked us over. His gaze made me very uneasy, but Melle didn’t seem to mind it, and gazed right back at him without her usual shyness.
“Is there a black cat?” she asked.
“Why would there be?”
“It said on the sign over the door. The picture.”
“Ah. No. That’s the house. Sign of the Black Cat. Blessing of Ennu, it is. Where are you bound, then? On your own, are you?” “Downriver,” I said.
“You’re off a boat, then.” He looked out the open door to see if any boat had docked.
“No. Walking. Thought we might go by water if there’s a boat would take us.”
“Nothing in now. Pedri’s barge will be in tomorrow. “Going downstream?”
“Clear to the Sally,” the man said; so it seemed they called the Sensa-ly in this country.
He refilled Melle’s cup, then stumped to the bar and came back with two full mugs of cider. He set one down in front of me and raised the other in salute.
I drank with him. Melle raised her cup of milk too.
“Stay tonight if you like,” he said. Melle looked at me bright-eyed. It was coming on to evening. I did my best to forget my fears and take what Luck gave us. I nodded.
“Anything to pay with?” he asked.
I took a couple of bronzes from my pocket.
“Because if you hadn’t, I’d eat the kid, see,” the dwarf said in a matter-of-fact tone, and lunged with a hideous, gaping, threatening face at Melle. She shrank back against me with a great gasp, but then she laughed—sooner than I could smile at his joke. He drew back, grinning. “I was scared,” she said to him. He looked pleased. I could feel her heart beating, shaking her small body.
“Put it away,” he said to me. “We’ll settle up when you go.”
He sent us upstairs to a little room at the front of the house; it looked out through low windows over the river and was clean enough, though full of beds, five of them crammed in it side by side. He cooked us a good supper, which we ate along with a couple of longshoremen who ate there every night. They didn’t talk, and the host said little. Melle and I walked along the wharves for a while after supper to see the evening light on the water, and then went up to bed. At first I couldn’t get to sleep, my mind racing and racing among fruitless thoughts and fears. At last I dropped into sleep, but never very deeply—and then I sat up, blindly reaching for my knife, which I’d set on the floor beside my cot. Steps on the staircase, stopping and starting. The door creaked.
A man came into the room. I could just make out his bulk in the faint starlight from the windows. I sat still, holding my breath and my knife.
The big dark shape blundered past my bed, felt its way over to the end bed, and sat down. I heard shoes thump on the floor. The man lay down, thrashed about a bit, muttered a curse, and lay still. Pretty soon he began to snore. I thought it was a ruse. He wanted us to think he was asleep. But he kept it up, deep and long, till daybreak.
When Melle woke and found a strange man in the room she was very frightened. She could not wait to get out.
Our host gave her warm milk for breakfast, and me warm cider, along with good bread and fresh peaches. I was too restless and uneasy to want to wait for the barge. I told him we’d be going on foot. He said, “If you want to walk, walk, but if you want to float, she’ll be along in an hour or two.” And Melle nodded; so I obeyed.
The barge came into the wharf in the middle of the morning, a long, heavy craft with a kind of house amidships that made me think of Am-meda’s boat in the Marshes; the decks were piled with crates, hay bales, several cages of chickens, all kinds of goods and parcels. While unloading and loading went on I asked the master if we could take passage, and we settled soon enough on a silver piece for fare all the way to the Sensaly, sleeping on deck. I went back to the Black Cat to settle our bill there. “A bronze,” the dwarf said.
“Two beds, food and drink,” I protested, putting down four bronzes.
He pushed two back to me. “I don’t often get a guest my own size,” he said, unsmiling.
So we left that town, went aboard Pedri’s barge, and set off down the river Ambare at about noon. The sun was bright, the bustle of the docks cheerful, and Melle was excited to be onboard a ship, though she kept at a distance from the master and his assistant, and always very close to me. I felt relieved to be on the water. I said in my mind the prayer to the Lord of the Springs and Rivers I’d learned from my uncle in Ferusi, I stood with Melle watching the longshoreman free the rope and the master haul it in while the gap of roiling water slowly widened between the boat and the dock. Just as the barge began to turn to take the current, a man came down the street and out onto the docks. It was Hoby.
We were in plain sight standing against the wall of the boathouse. I dropped down to sit on the deck, hiding my face in my arms. “What’s wrong?” Melle asked, squatting down beside me.
I dared a glance over my forearm. Hoby stood on the dock looking after the barge. I could not tell if he had seen me.
“Beaky, what’s wrong?” the child whispered.
I finally answered, “Bad luck.”
♦ 15 ♦
The town passed out of view behind us around the bend of the river. We drifted easily downstream in the hot sunlight. As we stood at the rail of the barge I told Melle that I’d seen a man I knew, who might know me.
“From Barna’s house?” she asked, still whispering.
I shook my head. “From longer ago. When I was a slave in the city.”
“Is he bad?” she asked, and I said, “Yes.”
I didn’t think he’d seen me, but that was small reassurance; he had only to ask people on the dock, or the host of the Black Cat, if they’d seen a young man, dark skin, big nose, looks like a Marshman.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re on the boat, he’s on foot.”
But that wasn’t very reassuring, either. The barge went at the pace of the river, steered with a long sweep and rudder at the stern. It put into every town and village on the riverbank, taking on
and putting off cargo and passengers. On its upriver journey it would be pulled by horses on the towpath by the river and would go even slower, the master told me. That was hard to believe. The Ambare, taking its course through great level plains, didn’t exactly run; it wandered and meandered, it moseyed along, in places it oozed. Drovers used the towpath to move their cattle; sometimes we’d slowly come up to a herd of brown and brindle cows clopping along at a cow’s pace, headed downstream like us, and it would take us a long, long time to draw ahead of them.
The days on the water were sweet and dull and calm, but every time we drew into the wharf of a village my fear rose up again and I scanned every face on shore. Over and over I debated with myself whether it would be wiser to debark at some town on the eastern bank and make our way afoot to the Sensaly, avoiding all towns and villages. But though Melle was by now in much better shape than she’d been when I found her, she still couldn’t walk far or fast. It seemed best to float, at least until we were within a day’s journey of the Senssaly.
The end of the barge journey at the rivermeet, was a town called Bemette, and that town I resolved at all costs to avoid. There was a ferry across the Sensa-ly there, the barge master told me, A ferry was what we needed, but that’s where Hoby would be waiting for us. I only hoped he would not be waiting for us sooner than that. On horseback or by wagon or even walking hard, he could certainly outpace the barge and arrive before we did at any of the villages on the western bank.
Pedri the barge master paid us little heed and didn’t want his assistant to waste time talking to us. We were cargo, along with the boxes and bales and chickens and also, between village and village, the goats and grandmothers, and once a young colt who tried, the whole time he was on the barge, to commit suicide by drowning. Pedri and his assistant slept in the houseboat, taking watch and watch while the barge was afloat. We made our own meals, buying food at villages where we stopped, Melle made friends with the chickens, who were being sent all the way to Bemette; they were some kind of prize breeding stock with fancy tails and feathered legs, all hens. They were perfectly tame, and I bought Melle a bag of birdseed to entertain them with. She named them all, and would sit with them for hours.
Sitting with her, I found their mild, continual conversation soothing. Only when a hawk circled up in the sky over the river, all the busy little cluckings and talkings stopped, and they huddled under their perches, hiding in their ruffled feathers, silent. “Don’t worry, Reddy,” Melle would soothe them. “It’s all right, Little Pet. Don’t worry, Snappy, It can’t get you. I won’t let it.”
Don’t worry, Beaky.
I read in my book. I said old poems to Melle, and she learned to recite The Bridge on the Nisas. We went on with the Chamhan.
“I wish I was really your brother, Gav,” she murmured to me one night on the dark river under the stars. I murmured back, “You really are my sister.”
We put ashore at a wharf on the eastern bank. Pedri and his hand were busy at once unloading hay bales. There was no town as such, but a kind of warehouse-barn and a couple of old cowboys guarding it. “How far is it to Bemette from here?” I asked one of them, and he said, “Two, three hours on a good horse.”
I went back aboard and told Melle to gather up her things. My pack was always ready, filled with all the food I could carry I’d paid the fare before we started. We slipped ashore, and as I passed Pedri I said, “We’ll walk from here, our farm’s just back that way,” pointing southeast. He grunted and went on shifting bales. We walked away from the Ambare the way I’d pointed till we were out of sight, then turned left to bear northeast, towards the Sensaly. The country was very flat, mostly tall grass, with a few groves of trees, Melle walked along beside me stoutly. As she walked she muttered a soft litany, “Goodbye Snappy, goodbye Rosy, goodbye Gold-eye, goodbye Little Pet…”
We walked on no path. The country did not change and there were no landmarks, except, very far off northward, a blue line that might be clouds or might be hills across the river. I had nothing but the sun to tell me the direction to go. It came on to evening. We stopped at a grove of trees to eat supper, then rolled up in our blankets and slept there. We had seen no sign of anyone following us, but I was certain that Hoby was on our track, that he might even be waiting for us. The dread of seeing him never left me, and filled my restless sleep. I was awake long before dawn. We set off in the twilight of morning, still heading, as well as I could steer us, northeast. The sun came up red and huge over the plains.
The ground began to get boggy, and there were low places of marsh and reed. About midday we saw the Sensaly.
It was wide—a big river. Not deep, I thought, for there were shoals and gravel bars out in midstream, and more than one channel; but from the shore you can’t tell where the current quickens and has dug deep places in such a stream.
“We’ll go east along the river,” I said to Melle and to myself, “We’ll come to a ford. Or a ferry. Mesun is still a long way upriver from here, so we’re going the right direction for sure, and when we can get across, we will.”
“All right,” Melle said. “What’s the river’s name?” “Sensaly.”
“I’m glad rivers have names. Like people.” She made a song of the name and I heard the thin little chant as we walked, Sen-sally, sen-sallee.., Going was hard in the willow thickets above the shore, and so we soon went down to walk on the river beach, wide floodplains of mud, gravel, and sand.
We could be seen more easily there; but if he was on our track there was no way to hide. This was an open, desolate country. There were no signs of humankind. We saw only deer and a few wild cattle.
When we stopped for Melle to rest I tried fishing, but had little luck, a few small perch. The river was very clear, and as far as I waded out in it, the current was not strong. I saw a couple of places I thought might be fordable, but there were tricky-looking bits on the far side; we went on.
We walked so for three days. We had food for about two more and after that must live by fishing. It was evening, and Melle was tired. I was too. The sense of being pursued wore me down, and I had little sleep, waking again and again all night. I left her sitting on a sandy bit under a willow and went up the rise of the bank, scouting as always for a ford. I saw faint tracks coming down across the beach, ahead of us; indeed there looked to be a ford there in the wide, shoal-broken river.
I looked back, and saw a single horseman coming along beside the water.
I ran down to Melle and said, “Come,” picking up my pack. She was frightened and bewildered, but took up her little blanket pack at once. I caught her hand and brought her along as fast as she could go to the track I had seen. Horses and wagons had crossed the river here. I led Melle into the water, saying to her, “When it gets deep I’ll carry you.”
The way to go was plain at first, the clear water showing me the shallows between shoals. Out in the middle of the water I looked back once. The horseman had seen us. He was just riding into the river, the water splashing up about his horse’s legs. It was Hoby. I saw his face, round, hard, and heavy, Torm’s face, the Father’s, the face of the slave owner and the slave. He was scowling, urging on his horse, shouting at me, words I could not hear.
I saw all that in a glance and waded on, crosscurrent, pulling the child with me as best I could. When I saw she was getting out of her depth I said, “Climb up on my shoulders, Melle. Don’t hold me by the throat, but hold tight.” She obeyed.
I knew where I was then. I had been in this river with this burden on my shoulders. I did not look around because I do not look around, I go forward, almost out of my depth, but still touching bottom, and there is the place that looks like the right way to go, straight up to the shore, but I don’t go that way, the sand gives way beneath my foot. I must go to the right, and farther still to the right. Then the current seizes me with sudden terrific power and I’m off my feet, trying to swim, and sinking, floundering, sinking—but I have foothold again, the child clinging to me hard, I can c
limb against that terrible current, fight my way up into the shallows, scramble gasping up among the willows whose roots are in the river, and from there, only from there, I can look back.
The horse was struggling out in the deep current, riderless.
I could see how all the force of the river gathered in that channel, just downstream from where we had found our way.
Melle slipped down from my back and pressed up tight against me, shuddering. I held her close, but I could not move. I crouched staring at the river, at the horse being carried far down the river, swimming desperately. Now it began to find footing, I watched it make its way, plunging and slipping, back to the other shore. I scanned the water, the islets, the gravel bars, upriver and down, again and again. Sand, gravel, shining water.
“Gav, Gav, Beaky,” the child was sobbing, “come on. Come on. We have to go on. We have to get away.” She tugged at my legs.
“I think maybe we have,” I tried to say, but I had no voice. I staggered after Melle for a few steps up into the willow grove, out of the water, onto dry land. There my legs gave way and I pitched down. I tried to tell Melle that I was all right, that it was all right, but I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t get air enough. I was in the water again, under the water. The water was clear and bright all round me, then clear and dark.
* * *
When I came to myself it was night, mild and overcast. The river ran black among its pale shoals and bars. The little damp hot bundle pressed against my side was Melle. I roused her, and we groped and crawled up through the thickets to a kind of hollow that seemed to offer shelter. I was too clumsy to make a fire. Everything in our packs was damp, but we took off our wet clothes, rubbed ourselves hard, and rolled up in our damp blankets. We huddled together again and fell asleep at once.
My fear was gone. I had crossed the second river. I slept long and deep.
We woke to sunlight. We spread out all our damp things to dry and ate damp stale bread there in the hollow among the willow thickets. Melle seemed to have taken no harm, but was silent and watchful. She said at last, “Don’t we have to run away any more?”
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