by M J Engh
“I don't doubt,” said the Captain, as these three sat on the river side of the Mouse's bow, with their backs against her hull, “that this Dreeg will carry us wherever we choose to go. It must flow again into the Soll—” (here the Warden grunted) “—or into another Soll, or into some greater river that will bring us back to the Soll at last.” For she was one of those who held that the world was round.
Here the Warden objected that only the Sollet flowed into the Soll, and the Sollet flowed from the Mountains. But, “How do you or I know what flows into the Soll?” answered the Captain. “Upcoast or downcoast, past Perra and the desert country—” and here broke off, for Broz beside her was bristling and growling, and now he leaped up and raced around the bow, just when a shout rose from the other side of the Mouse, and worse noises like a great dog mumbling its meat.
It was a dog indeed to look at, or something like a dog, but when it reared itself to claw at the game in the tree it was taller than Lethgro, and its chest broader than any human's. The sailors were busy around it with shouting and waving of sticks, and Broz with snarling and barking, but it paid them little heed, only rolling up its black lips to show its muzzleful of great teeth, that looked well made for stabbing and ripping. When it sank back down onto all fours it was yet chest high to the sailor who stood before it, and it snarled at him, its heavy head slung low and tilting to the side, so that he sprang backward and brandished his stick more for protection than in threat. The Captain had shouted to break out pikes (for the thing seemed too huge to fight, if it came to fighting, with any lesser weapon); but before this could be done, the beast, which till then had moved its shaggy bulk with a stately slowness, suddenly whirled and struck down another sailor with its forepaw. All of them (except the two who were fetching pikes from the Mouse) recoiled for a second at that blow and then plunged forward, some silent and some howling like beasts themselves, and Broz among the first. The monster seemed about to give back, and two or three of them seized the fallen sailor to drag him away; but it rolled forward again, as a great wave rolls, and plucked down neatly one of these sailors with its paw and began to bite at her head and shoulders.
Now for a time the noises on that beach were hideous to hear, with the ravening of the beast and the crying of the sailor in its jaws and the shrieks and snarling all around. Broz flung himself again and again at the monster's very head, distracting it a little from its work; and others beat at it with sticks and tried to poke it in the eyes, and the Warden (cursing the prudence that had made them put out their campfire) struck a light and would have kindled a firebrand to use against it. But by then the pikes were brought, and with four hands on a pike they charged at the beast, driving the blades in through its thick fur; and it half reared, and struggled, and struck at the pikes, and then gave way before them, retreating in short runs, turning to snarl and threaten, and then running again, till it was hidden in the woods. Broz followed it for a time, and came back snuffing and sneezing with his anger. By then they had built fires along the forest edge of the beach and were tending the wounded sailor (for he who had been struck down first had no hurts worth mentioning). The Captain's face was very stark; for though she was skillful enough with salves and splints and bandages such as every captain has need of, she was no surgeon, and the wounds were not light ones.
When all had been done that could be, the Captain took counsel of the Warden. “It's not as if we had a choice,” she said. “We can only go on.”
“But how far, Rep?” Warden Lethgro asked gloomily. “That's the question.”
“It's a question we don't have to answer yet,” Repnomar replied with almost equal gloom, for her sailor's wounds on top of Flitten's death had cast her down, and she seemed to see her crew dissolving in blood before her eyes. Still, she shrugged her shoulders and went on more sturdily, “At least we can agree to get out of this place and find a safer one. But first we'll lay in supplies.”
“Like the game I hung in the tree?” Lethgro demanded sourly. “Who'll go hunting or picking in the forest now?”
But she answered, “We'll get the Mouse afloat first, and we'll go four or five together and well armed. We need food, Lethgro, and it's here for the taking. How do we know what we'll find downriver?”
So the Mouse was dragged off the beach and anchored in the shallows, and the wounded sailor made as comfortable as might be in the Captain's own bunk, and one other of the crew set to watch over her, and another to stand guard on the beach, and all the rest of them set out well armed to gather whatever food they found. But this was not before the crew, who had taken their own counsel, built a small altar of branches and sand and stones and made what peace they could contrive there with the wild gods of this country.
They saw no more monsters in the woods, though now and then they heard noises that made them start; but neither did they see much game. So they came back at last well laden with fruit and nuts and green stuff but with little enough meat, and were glad to find that the sailors on guard had passed their time with catching fish. So they weighed anchor and moved out into the current. “And now,” said the Captain, “we'll see where the Dreeg takes us.”
7
Of the Running Downhill of Water
Deeper and deeper into a forest land that called to them with unknown voices, the Mouse drove on downstream. The canyon walls began to fall away, sinking into broad forested hills as the river widened. They saw no sign of human life, but twice they saw great doglike shapes on the shore, and once heard a strange roaring. The opinion of the crew was that these monsters were what the Low Coasters called Dreeg, and had best be prudently worshipped, from a good distance; but the Captain stuck to it that Dreeg was the river itself. “And if not,” she said, “I'll call it so anyhow; for a river must have a name.”
Watch by watch they drifted onward, stopping twice or three times to send a hunting party ashore, after what the crew hoped were proper rites. And perhaps they were, for the hunters found game without going far and without seeing unwholesome beasts. Watch by watch the wounded sailor in the captain's bunk raved as her hurts festered, and then sank into a drooling weakness that was painful to see. Now the Exile showed himself a good nurse, tending the sailor very patiently, though there were those in the crew who held it unwise and unsuitable for an outlander to care for one of the Mouse's own people. But, “We're all outlanders here,” said the Captain. “We'd best stick together.” Nevertheless the sailor died, and they went ashore to bury her, digging a very deep grave because of monsters, and dragging a log over it; for all agreed that it was unseemly for alien beasts to eat human flesh.
It was after this burial that Warden Lethgro first complained of two uncanny things that had been troubling him for some time past. “I can understand,” he told Repnomar, “why the light is in the wrong place.” (This was the first of the things that troubled him.) “We've traveled under it and are on the other side now. But I don't understand the wind.” And indeed all the crew were afflicted with the same trouble, and more keenly than the Warden. For till this voyage their lives had been spent steering by light and wind, that were to them as secure almost as the Mountains and the Sollet to Lethgro; and now the light had changed sides in the sky, so that shadows fell the wrong way, and the wind had risen from the wrong point, dead ahead, so that with light astern and wind on the bow they all felt in their bones that they had somehow turned and were heading back for Beng, though at least the wiser of them knew this could not be.
“On the far side of the light,” Repnomar said cheerfully, “it may be everything sails on the opposite tack.” Indeed she seemed not at all oppressed by so much strangeness, but glad of it and eager for it, so that Lethgro many times looked at her and blinked his eyes in dismay. Broz seemed in two minds about the matter, sometimes gamboling like a puppy, or standing hourlong a-quiver in the bow as he snuffed in and snorted out the strange scents, but other times creeping forlornly into the Captain's cabin, as the last safe place in a changed world, and (if she was
there) pressing his head hard against her leg. The crew, too, could not agree either to despair or to rejoice, but kept the Mouse all alive with their quarrelings and imaginings. Only the Exile seemed quiet in his mind, taking what came as it came, all things alike without complaint and with equal wonder.
“I feel sometimes,” the Warden said plaintively to Repnomar, “like a father teaching a toddling baby to talk.” For he spent much time now in conversation with the Exile, questioning him and instructing him and trying to make out first meaning and then truth in his talk. But the Exile's answers were still strange ones, for he claimed he did not remember being driven out from his own place, nor how he had come to the Upper Sollet, where the foresters had found him blinking and gaping. At the same time, he claimed to know things (or at least had strong opinions about them) that it seemed impossible for any human to know. Thus he said that the winds of the world flowed like two great rivers running down from opposite heights till they met in that region of squalls and calms and veering breezes along the Low Coast. And he said with assurance that both of those great winds turned like a waterwheel, scooping up water as they skimmed over Soll or over marshes, lifting that water and carrying it backward through the upper air to the heights from which they had come, and spilling it there each year as the Rains.
“There's no reason, of course,” Lethgro said to Repnomar privately, “to believe him.”
“And not much more to think he lies,” she retorted.
“None but common sense,” the Warden said with some asperity, for it seemed to him that all this matter of the Exile served to encourage in Repnomar a wild and hazardous spirit. It was clear, too, in Lethgro's opinion, that if the Exile told some truth he did not tell it all. His bright eyes seemed always searching, and he listened to the talk of the crew, as to the Warden's conversation, with the quiet eagerness of those who hope to hear answers to questions they dare not ask. Too, he never claimed that he could not remember where his own place was, but only that he did not know how to get there—a nice distinction of words, but one that Lethgro believed the Exile well able to make now.
So in uncertainty and discontent, and against a rising wind—shifting at first but steadying watch by watch—they rode down the Dreeg. “It's no river to compare with the Sollet,” Lethgro said at last, when he had studied the matter fairly.
“It's half a mile wide,” exclaimed Repnomar, as if that answered him; for she had not been up-Sollet from Beng harbor for many years, so that the Dreeg seemed to her a great river indeed.
Lethgro looked kindly on her, as pitying her ignorance, and explained that half a mile was not wide for a river, and that width, in any case, was a lesser thing than depth. “This is as shallow as a snow stream,” he added slightingly.
Here the Exile, moved perhaps by the word snow, remarked that it had grown colder.
“Not quite so hot, at least,” said the Captain. It was true that the heat no longer oppressed them on board the Mouse, and not all of this was because of the wind, for even under hatches it was cooler now. Likewise, now that they no longer faced into the burning light, their eyes were eased, so that all, except perhaps the Exile, had some cause for better cheer. The crew and the Captain were much occupied with learning the handling of a ship on a river (a ship not built for it, at that); and though all complained of it bitterly, and spoke with scorn of this means of travel, and swore to an unusual degree, it was clear to the Warden that they were glad of the occupation and pleased with their new skills.
For himself, the Warden felt like one blindfolded and whirled round and round on a log that floated from eddy to eddy. All sense of direction seemed to have gone from him, leaving only a queasy and groping unsteadiness, and whenever he rose from sleep he hurried first of all to search out the direction of the light. But that too was harder at every trial, for they were farther from it now and the clouds were thicker, so that there was no longer one bright point from which all light seemed to flow, but only a brighter side of the sky and a duller side. As for the wind, it was sometimes on the port bow, sometimes the starboard, and sometimes even abeam; but it was not easy to know if the wind had turned, or the river, or it might be both.
“Be glad it's not strong enough to drive us up-current,” said Repnomar. “We'd have a hard time beating against it between river banks.”
It was in Lethgro's mind to ask why they should beat against it, and where she supposed they were going, and why they should go there; but he said nothing. Indeed he saw nothing for it but to sail on, unless they should haul out the Mouse and cut down trees and settle between the forest and the river, living by fishing and hunting and what fruits and salads they could gather or grow, with perhaps a strong stockade against monsters; and this (though in fact there was much to say for it) he did not like to mention, for it seemed to him altogether too final. And who, if he did not come back, would be Warden of Sollet Castle? The League could not leave that important post unfilled for long, so that the only answer he made to Repnomar was, at last, “We're making good time.”
She had hoisted sail again (for she understood winds better than river currents) and was working this breeze for all it was worth, heading now slantwise downstream on a broad reach and in hope of doing better still, for a little ahead the river curved away from the wind, so that the Mouse should be able to run straight on into the curve without turning, and have the wind then (unless it changed suddenly) almost on her beam.
Here the Exile came up to report brightly on the state of his laundry, for he had taken to doing washing for all on board, and to check on a nestful of fledging crows in one of the boxes. But the Captain broke in on his chatter, asking harshly, “Do you hear anything?”
They had come into the bend of the river, their straight course cutting close to the inside bank; and as the new stretch opened before them, a tangle of whiteness showed on the dark water, as if a great pure-white net had been flung across the river, bank to bank, and floated now on its surface, here spread loose, there heaped and wrinkled. Broz paced stiff-legged toward the bow, his ears slanted forward; a noise like a storm wind rose from the white-laced water; the Captain gripped the tiller with both hands, shouting an order to swing the sail full into the wind and keep it there; and the Mouse, jerked thus sideways against the current and her old course, turned her head, staggered for a moment, and plunged toward the near bank.
It was lucky (as the Captain explained later to the Warden and the Exile) that they were already so close inshore; otherwise they would have been swept into the rapids before the Mouse had enough headway to resist the current, which was stronger farther out. This, when she first explained it, seemed like some comfort; but the longer the Warden considered their situation, the less he was comforted.
They sat, like three crows on a spar, along a fallen log, from which Repnomar now and again jumped up for a few words with the crew. The Mouse had been hauled out and lay canted on her side, while the sailors labored outside and in to mend her battered hull. “And we're lucky,” Repnomar said again, “to have taken no worse damage on these rocks. If she'd been really staved in, we'd have had to wait for her to dry out before we could even begin to patch the hole. A week, at least.” And she shook her head at the thought, for a whole week of ten watches spent on shore was, in Repnomar's opinion, a week half lived, at best.
“And how long as it is?” asked Lethgro. His right hand steadied the staff of a pike that stood grounded at his knee, and from time to time he glanced at the woods behind them.
Repnomar squinted thoughtfully at her ship. “The middle of next watch before she's sound enough,” she said. “And then we'll be rigging rollers and cutting a path through the brush, and some trees will have to come down too, before we can drag her past the rapids and get her afloat again ... say two watches and a half altogether. A little less if we push it hard.”
“Time enough,” said Lethgro, and he stood up, saying to the Exile, “Shall we take a walk downstream?” And the Exile popped up eagerly.
The Captain objected that she would do with her own ship what she chose and when she chose. But in fact she saw that it was a good plan, and only bettered it by making them take a shipcrow with them. “For the crow,” she said, “can fly faster and straighter than you can hike upstream, and so you can scout almost twice as far before you turn back. Or if the Dreeg is fit for a ship all the way, then don't turn back at all, but send word by the crow what landmark you'll wait beside, and we'll pick you up when we get there.”
No one spoke of monsters, but the Captain had already kindled a fire beside the Mouse, and they set out well provided, with a pike for each, and bow and arrows for the Warden, and live coals in a jar, and the crow. They tramped along as fast as might be with this baggage and the Exile's short legs, the Warden telling himself (though not the Exile, for whom he felt some distrust) that there were worse places to grow old and die than along the Dreeg. Indeed they had come into a country of pleasant coolness, so that the Exile pulled the neck of his shirt close about his throat, and Lethgro sighed for pure homesickness.
When at last the crow came cawing and hooting over the treetops (not well pleased with all this forested country, nor with the unnatural slant of the spar on which it lit) the Captain was pacing restlessly along the bank. The Mouse had been ready to float for more than an hour, and every minute of that time had chafed the Captain, for the portage past the rapids would be a slow business, and she wanted to get on with it, so that now in her impatience she called the crow down with little ceremony, a mistake she repented of at once, for the bird only clutched its perch and cawed angrily; and to climb for it, while that mood was on it, would be to lose it for an hour. The sailors exchanged looks concerning this, for the Captain's temper, though it was familiar to all of them, had seldom been known to interfere with the Mouse's business; and for the most part they took it as an omen of worse things to come.