“Gods rot his liver,” agreed Maggie Barnes.
They threw back their drinks and Donovan sighed as he set his glass down. “Oh, that was smooth. Kurutakki… ’Eye of blood-red color?’”
“Close enough.” Barnes held her glass a moment longer at eye level. “There’s this fellow owns a distillery out near Thillainathan Flats, and he has his own grove of oak clones that grow as barrels. Can yuh imagine! Aged in living trees.” She put the empty shot glass on the table in front of her. “Yuh know we was ten years gettin’ back to known space? Yessir, that there is a fact. After January left New Eireann, an engine blew and we taken the Gessler Sun cutoff. Damn spanking new engine, rebuilt in the Gladiola Yards, and—” A snap of the fingers. “Well, the cutoff is one-way, and we found ourselves down in the Lower Tier. Not as bad as the Wild—or maybe it is. Ah, yuh don’t want to hear old troubles; but…Ten years! And Micmac Anne a-waiting every one O’ them back on Jehovah.”
Méarana said, “I wouldn’t mind hearing the story.” Her fingers curled instinctively on imaginary harp strings.
“We saw a sight of strange things, and that’s a fact. Maybe on the way back. There’ll be time for it then. But I didn’t want yuh to go down there, Donovan, if that’s what yer name is, and maybe git yourself killed, without I tell you what a platinum-plated son of a bitch yuh were.”
Donovan nodded. “Thanks. I hope we haven’t lost the touch.”
“Now git, before I lock yuh up.”
Méarana paused on the way out and studied their projected route on the holographic map. “Up Jim River,” she said.
Donovan heard her. “What’s that mean?”
“Jim River. It’s a wild river on my home world. It’s a nice lazy one in its lower reaches, but the farther upstream you go, the wilder the country gets. Swamps, deserts, mountains, rapids, wild animals—I’m talking Nolan’s Beasts that have gone feral. Not everyone comes back downstream.” She paused in reflection for a moment. “So Dangchaoers say, ‘I’m going up Jim River’ or ‘he’s up Jim River,’ to mean in big trouble.” She gestured to the Aríidnux’r and the mountains beyond. “Looks like we’re heading up Jim River.”
Donovan laughed. “Méarana, we’ve been heading up that river since we left High Tara.”
__________
The night of their arrival from orbit, the G&R Resident hosted a banquet in honor of Méarana and her people, to which he invited several of the Dūqs in town for the “Star Market.” The Resident occupied a palace built of white marble joined and set entirely without concrete. The flooring and trim was of an aromatic wood akin to cedar, and the roofing consisted of ruddy, semicircular terra cotta tiles known as “oyster shells.”
The climate around Riverbridge was warm at that time of year, and Oodalo Bentsen wore only a plain white Enjrunii “jellybean,” a skirt similar to a Terran dhoti that left his torso bare. This made manifest the extent of both his hairiness and his indulgence of his appetites. He liked to think he was bluff rather than crude, and hearty rather than overbearing.
One of the guests was Chuq Lafeev, who was the Rice of Jebelsanmèesh and held the Dūq for the jewelry trade. The locals dined sitting cross-legged on the floor around a great carpet, on which were set basins and plates of hammered copper containing the food. Oodalo had alternated his local guests with the visitors from Blankets and Beads and had placed Lafeev between Méarana and Donovan. Méarana found the local quite witty and not at all unsophisticated about his celestial visitors. He listened sympathetically to the harper’s tale of her search for her mother.
“But of course,” he said, “it remembers me, your mother. It was seven moon-crossings ago…Wait. Good Oodalo, how are crossings tabulated in your ‘years’? So! Sugar and jazz.” Méarana’s earwig translated “sugar and jazz” as “thank you very much.” A servant standing behind Lafeev scribbled hastily on a slip of reed-paper and handed it to the Rice, who glanced at the computations. “Ah, more than a year of your time. Only once, and briefly, did we meet, yet the impression she left is everlasting.” He touched his forehead with his fingertips in a gesture of respect. “She, too, sought the source of the parking stone jewelry, and set off up-country in her flying cart. It fears me that she came to grief up there. Ay! A woman alone, and in the land of the Emrikii!”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Méarana said.
“Alas, never came she back. But perhaps,” he added more brightly, “it was that your mother rode her flying cart all the way back to her ship in feyityis.” He necessarily used the Gaelactic word for orbit, although he introduced a surplus vowel or two. Méarana supposed that the loora noor jesser did not have slender vowels and palatilization.
“That is most likely so,” she said. One thing for certain, Bridget ban’s ship was no longer in orbit. No one but the Resident’s people had the ability to reach orbit; and even they could not have entered a Hound’s vessel without the proper authorization codes. If Bridget ban had died in the high country, her field office would still be circling Enjrun.
“Unless the orbit decayed,” said Donovan when she had given voice to this hope. “Even a Hound’s ship would not survive uncontrolled reentry into a thick atmosphere.”
“Cheerful, as always. If the noor jesser—”
Lafeev chuckled. “Nuxr,” he said.
“Noor.”
“No, no!” Playfully, he enunciated. “‘Nu—’”
“Noo.”
“X—” He breathed roughly.
“Huh.”
“No, cough a little. ‘Nu-x-r.’”
“Noo-huh-r.”
Lafeev threw his head back and violated protocol with a belly laugh. The other Dūqs questioned him and he answered in a dialect that the earwig could not entirely translate. Méarana picked out the phrase “lazy throats,” which evidently referred to the Gaelactic inability to hack and cough their way through the local lingua franca.
She caught his eye and said, distinctly, “Fitir,” properly palatalizing the F, aspirating the T, and trilling the R. Her tongue, struck like a snake on the T. Then, before he could do more than begin to frown, she smiled. “Sure, and the Gaelactic plays as much with the lips and the teeth as your loora does with the throat and the tongue.”
There was no mockery in it, and so he took the correction in good humor. “A man one day older is a man one day wiser,” he pronounced. “By Owl, I swear it, I know not why he gave men such a myriad of tongues. But Owl knows all, and Owl knows best.”
The courses that were brought out also alternated Gaelactic and Enjrun dishes. There was a bean salad called pully that Donovan said was much like the fool he used to get in the Terran Corner. Sofwari commented that pully and fool might both be forms of an earlier word. “My colleague, Gwenna Tong Thalasonam, believes that basic sound units may change and pass on like the little thread shapes. What is an F, after all, but an aspirated P?”
“Did my mother tell you,” Méarana asked the Dūqs, “what she hoped to find up in the hills?”
Lafeev only shook his head. “Whatever it was, may Owl grant that she found it.”
The way things had turned out, Méarana very much feared that Owl had done just that.
XIII UP JIM RIVER
The endarooa Efranizi set forth from the main docks of Nuxrjes’r two days later and rowed upstream until the southerlies freshened and the sail could be let down. She comprised two galleys linked by a platform on which sat fore and aft cabins and a mast from which hung a square mainsail and a triangular “lantern” sail.
“Remarkably stable,” said Sofwari, “but not much for maneuvering.”
The boat’s captain, Pyar Allweed, laughed. “Don’t need much maneuver on Big River. We sail-up straight during the ‘soons; then let the current carry us back. We just reverse the sail-rigging and the rowers’ benches. ‘Course, working the Delta is almighty different.”
“What,” said Méarana, “is the ‘soons?”
“Told you,” said Captain Pyar, nodding his
head toward the south. “When the southerlies blow, it brings the rain.”
Behind them, dark and lowering, thunderheads boiled over the distant Mut’shabiq Delta.
“Well,” Sofwari shouted above the howling wind, “at least we know why they build these little houses on top of the decking.”
Méarana and her people huddled in a close wooden hut, whose canvas door periodically pulled loose of its stays and flapped like a sail with three sheets flying in the wind. Rain sprayed in through gaps in the planking, in the roofing, and through the front door itself.
“Cain’t fer th’ life O’ me see why they bothered,” said Paulie O’ the Hawks.
Zhawn Sloofy, a guide and translator hired in Riverbridge, shook his head. “Alla time, Gaelactics complain. Too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold. Why not stay home where everything more better?”
Paulie O’ the Hawks had come down from Blankets and Beads to gawk at the women and had decided at the last minute to throw in with the expedition. “Youse’re goin’ inta hill country, aina?” he asked the harper. “What farkin good is a cow-kissing plainsman up there?” This, with a nod toward Teodorq. Méarana and Donovan had agreed that another pair of strong arms would not be amiss, and hired Paulie as a second bodyguard.
By morning, the rain had passed on, but a second front moved in right behind it and so by afternoon the downpour had resumed. After a time, Teodorq and Paulie said to hell with it, stripped to loincloths and moccasins, and went out on deck with the boathands, where they helped at odd jobs or squared off in sparring matches. Méarana made them swear not to hurt each other. The sailors watched the matches with interest and bet on the outcomes.
After several days of this, Donovan, in the persona of the Sleuth, announced that the patterns of wins and losses relative to the odds suggested that both Paulie and Teddy were fixing the fights to clean up on the side-bets.
“Which proves there is something those two can agree on,” Méarana said.
The ‘soons moved north in wave after wave. This had a certain predictable consequence. The river began to rise.
“What goes up, must come down,” Captain Pyar told them cheerfully. “Ye’d best brace yourselves for some rough times.”
Teddy and Paulie tied everything down, and laid out straps and lifelines as they had seen the crew do. “One hand for yourself; one hand for the ship,” the captain reminded everyone.
By the fifth day, the river was over its banks and still the ‘soons did not let up. On the shore, the farmers scuttled for high ground and the fields were underwater. The sailors and rowers made signs to the grain-goddess. Sloofy told Méarana that the entire valley depended on the annual rains to refertilize the alluvial plain.
That afternoon, a sailor perched high on the mast hollered, “She’s a-coming!” and slid down the rigging to the deck, where he and his mates struck the sails and joined the rowers at the oars. The helmsman strapped himself to the tiller. Captain Pyar, the boat’s carpenter, and the mate stood at the ready, clipped to the lifelines that ran the length of the deck.
“What’s ‘a-coming’?” Billy Chins asked.
Sofwari frowned. “A flash flood if I don’t miss my guess.”
Donovan grunted. “If the ship’s company think it worthwhile to hang on for dear life, I for one will not call them fools.” And he, too, grabbed hold of the ropes they had run in the aft cabin.
Méarana pulled the cloth flap aside and peered ahead into the steel-gray curtain of rain. The south wind sang through the ropes and stays. The water hissed against the twin hulls. The oars groaned in their locks as the rowers, assisted now by the sailors, bucked the surging current.
And then she saw it. The rain turned black and a wall of water bore down upon them. The rain that had fallen in the northlands was not only returning but, to all appearances, returning all at once.
The boat heeled as the water humped up underneath. Then the wave broke over the deck, and swept Méarana from the doorway and toward the stern. She heard Sofwari’s cry of alarm as she scrambled for the lifeline; but Billy reached out and grasped her arm, hanging on against the force of the water, hauling her to safety.
The wave filled the cabin, lifting them and choking them with turgid water. The cabin walls creaked and Méarana thought they must either burst or the cabin would fill up and drown them all. But the wisdom of the chinks in the woodwork now revealed itself: They acted as scuppers to drain the water out over the stern.
The rowers shouted as they fought to maintain position while a second surge, not as great as the first, lifted them and again drenched everyone on board. The ship heaved and Teddy heaved with it. Billy was dashed against a crossbeam and won a ragged cut. Donovan gripped the lifeline, looking grim. Sloofy asked the goddess why he had ever left the river-bank.
A third wave followed but, after the first two, it seemed almost a gentle caress.
By the time the surges had settled down, a break had come in the clouds and the sun beamed, however briefly, on the countryside. The damage to the boat could have been worse. The fore cabin had been stove in. A plank on the left-side galley had been sprung and was leaking into the hull. A rower had been brained by an oar that had pulled loose from its handlers. And a sailor had a bad cut down the length of his forearm that, under local medical standards, would likely fester and kill him.
The rower was wrapped in a sheet sweetened with herbs, and tied to the prow as a guardian against river hazards until they could raise a burning ghat. The carpenter went to work, first on the hull, then on the fore-cabin. Méarana used some of their medical supplies to treat the sailor.
“Captain Pyar says the worst is over,” Méarana told them when she had returned to the cabin and hung the medical bag on a peg in the wall and taken a seat. “The watercourses up in the mountains bake hard as ceramic during the dry season, and the first rains sluice right off it. He expects the water to rise some more, but not such in a tearing hurry; and the rain will slack off to a constant drizzle. The current has pushed us back about a day’s rowing, but now he can raise sail again and make it up.” She rubbed her face with both hands. There was mud all over, courtesy of the first surge, and it streaked her cheeks and brow. “Ah, well. I was getting tired of the insides of ships and habitats anyway.”
When they went out on deck, they could hardly see the edges of the river, so widely had the flood overspread its banks. Farmsteads and villas poked above the water atop earthen mounds. Catboats were putting out from some of them. Here and there the flood had undermined the embankments and toppled the houses into the waters.
__________
At Rajiloor, the endarooa reached the end of its range. Above this point, the river emerged from the Roaring Gorge, a passage not only too narrow for the vessel to navigate, but one at the head of which was the first of the great waterfalls that marked the upper river. The town was mildly prosperous as a transshipment point because of this. Freight and trade goods were transferred here between endarooas from the lower Aríidnux’r and the durms that plied the upper river, or Multawee.
Like the farmsteads on the alluvial plain, the town of Rajiloor was built atop a rammed-earth platform. The mound had survived decades of floods through the judicious use of marble facings and terraces, culverts and cisterns to divert the water, and frantic repairs between ‘soons. She also benefited from being on the lee bank where the river curved, so the floods coming out of Roaring Gorge sought the east bank.
Rajiloor had been a border town of the old Imperium; but a generation earlier the garrison had declared its general the True Qaysar. Before he could sail his troops downstream to debate the issue, a light-complexioned people of long dark hair called the Tooth of the Wolf had come out of the mountains and made themselves masters of the hinterlands, encircled the the city walls, and waited. When the food ran out, the imperial troops had hailed the paramount chief of the Wolves as the new Qaysar. More realistic than his late predecessor, the Wolf had kept the title “Qaysar” and possession of the
Rajiloor Sak, but refrained from bothering downstream lords with other opinions. The key to success being ofttimes a judicious lowering of one’s goals, the Qaysar of Rajiloor pretended that the Qaysar of Nuxrjes’r was his overlord, and the Qaysar of Nuxrjes’r pretended he meant it.
The sailors and rowers took their payout from the captain and vanished into a town in which every other building seemed a tavern or a brothel. The population was a mixture of Rajilooris, Nuxrjes’ri, Wolves, Harps, Emrikii, and others.
Méarana set up a headquarters in a wharfside tavern called The River Dog. The main room was low-ceilinged and was constructed of heavy cross-beamed timbers. The wooden tables were long and narrow, with polished surfaces, and names carved into them. The air was redolent of stale beer.
She sent Donovan and Sloofy to hire the durms they would need for the next leg of their journey. Sofwari went into town, with Teodorq to watch over him, to take more of his cheek samples. That left Méarana in the tavern with Billy and the other Wildman.
She had been wary of the little man ever since Donovan’s revelations. But Billy, seeing how she sat away from him, only sighed. “Ah, missy. Was not Billy Chins good khitmutgar? When he not take care for you?”
“You could have told us you were recruiting for the CCW rebels,” she said. Perhaps it was the deceit that grieved her most; although she could not say Donovan had been much less deceitful.
“Would Greystroke have permitted me aboard his ship if I had? At best, he would have left me to face my pursuer. At worst, he would have done my pursuer’s work for her.”
“You do him an injustice.”
“Do I? For such stakes, would you have announced yourself?”
Méarana had to admit she would not. She spread the holomap across the table. The map was impregnated on a flexible substrate, so it would fold up and fit snugly in a carry-bag. Once unfolded, it shook hands with their amshifars and with the traders’ satellite network, and displayed their locations within a half-league of actual.
Up Jim River Page 33