by Wil McCarthy
“You know how to read the sea,” Kop told him. “You always have, as long as I’ve known you. If you say it’s rising, then it’s rising.”
“Any fool can see it’s rising,” Letoni added. “If you say it’s dangerous, then I believe you.”
But even the gravel, bought at the cost of some sailors’ loyalty, lasted only a few days, and after that the crews were reduced to dredging the sandy bottom up against the existing walls, making them broader even if, at the moment, they couldn’t make them any taller.
Manuah thought about going back to Surapp for another load of blocks, but he did still have to make a living, and his sailors certainly did, so finally he decided to take on six loads of salt and kelp and dried fish (actually seven, for Sharama opted to sail with them), and travel upriver to Shifpar, the northernmost of the mud-brick towns. Never mind the stink of fish; goods from the ocean brought a hefty price there, and Manuah’s boats could return laden with apples and plums and leather and unspun wool.
This mission brought back about half of his missing crewmen, who quietly resumed their positions on his boats. The other half, including all three of the women, had perhaps decided to seek their employment elsewhere, either with Dolshavak (Manuah’s main competitor, who focused mainly on the river trade and owned only three boats), or with fishermen, or else on land somewhere. Well, perhaps they’d be safer there.
In any case, Manuah’s crews were shorthanded on the tricky sail upriver, and every man had to work extra hard and pay extra attention. Shifpar was about sixty and twelve kos upriver (or perhaps, as Adrah would describe it, twelve and three yojana), and although the winds along the river blew northeast or northwest or even true north much of the time, the river’s current moved swiftly in the opposite direction. When the paddles were stowed, they progressed perhaps one yojana inland per day. With paddles engaged for as long and as often as the men could stand it, they could double their progress, but Manuah was wary of this on account of morale. The days were hard enough, tacking back and forth into sidewinds and against the current, oftentimes feeling like they were sweating their balls off just to stand still, and yet also running the constant risk of crashing the boats together. At least the river was wide enough to tack against, or most days it wouldn’t be possible to sail inland at all. Too, the winds at night were unreliable, and as the quarter moon faded to a crescent, they had to beach every night at dusk, when it became too dark to navigate safely, even by the light of the comet, which every night grew larger and brighter in the sky.
It was already long enough to stretch from one horizon to the other; how much larger could it get? The answer was, the head of it could set in the west, and the tail could fill the sky for another hour after that. And then two hours, and then four. The tail broadened as well, going from the width of the moon to the width of two moons to the width of a spread-out hand, held at arm’s length. What were the Cleric Astrologers making of that?
“No one knows what this means,” Manuah assured his men, night after night. “My brother and his people are counting and measuring and practicing secret magic, and yet all they can tell us is that the moon is farther away than any of us have ever voyaged, and the comet is higher than that, and does not affect the tides. And if that’s as much as the wisest men can learn, then really you know as much as they do.”
And the men’s voices would come back with, “Maybe it’s a giant cock, come to fuck us.”
Or: “Maybe it’s Min, the fertility god.”
Or: “I still think it’s a greatfish. They say the sky is the mirror of the Earth, and we have a greatfish down here. Why shouldn’t there be one up there as well? It has more room to grow, for one thing.”
Or: “Maybe it’s a rip in the sky.”
To this one, at least, Manuah could say, “The sky can’t rip. It isn’t a material object, like a curtain. It’s just empty air.”
“Forever? Just up and up and up?”
“I suppose so, yes. The stars are higher up than the Cleric Astrologers can measure.”
“Well then, how do they know it isn’t a curtain?”
Manuah sighed. “I’m not sure. But even if the sky were a curtain, it’s much farther away than this comet.”
He didn’t know how such a remark could be in any way comforting, but it did seem to mollify the men.
On the third day, they passed the little town of Erituak, and on the fifth, they passed the larger town of Larasha. Both were made of mud and straw and gravel. To be fair, a sun-dried, mud-straw brick was nearly as hard as a fired clay pot, and nearly as light as a wooden beam, so as building materials went, it wasn’t entirely awful. But unless you could afford paint (which few of the townies could), it literally looked like shit. Neither town had proper rain gutters down the sides of the streets, either, so both of them smelled like shit, even from the safety of the river. Both had been added to the Kingdom by Sraddah’s ancestor Kagresh, at the cost of considerable bloodshed which the townies here had never fully forgotten. This made them a bit surlier than the other peoples Manuah had met in his travels, and so he tended to avoid these towns, leaving their trade for men like Dolshavak. They were, in Manuah’s mind, the Big Shit and the Little Shit. And then, on the seventh day, they passed the Least Shit—a town whose name Manuah couldn’t even remember, because he had never bothered to stop there.
For several days after that, they saw nothing but tree-lined riverbanks, uninhabited save for the occasional hut of grass or animal hides, almost like something the wildmen would build. The men took to calling out different wild animals they saw. This was difficult, because traveling by river made for a narrow journey, with usually not very much to see. Nevertheless, the men called out:
“Bear!”
“Eagle!”
“Leopard!”
“Three wolves!”
“Six deer!”
But then boredom set in, and the callouts became more fantastical:
“Giants!”
“Dragons!”
“An army of turtles waving the Surapp Presidential Banner!”
And then, inevitably, they became obscene.
“Your mother!”
“Your grandmother!”
“Your sister, in deepest embrace with a pair of oxen!”
Manuah put a stop to it there, before the word daughter could be mentioned. And morale suffered accordingly. More than once, he heard a sailor muttering, “I see Manuah in congress with a pair of oxen.” He got them started on bird colors instead, and that kept them busy for a few hours.
On the eleventh day they passed the little mud town of Tesk, which had been conquered by Sraddah’s father Sretekan, and once that was behind them they were in the North Kingdom, which held a special place in people’s hearts because everything there had been conquered by Sraddah himself, with almost no loss of life.
“We could have walked here by now,” complained Hamurma.
“Oh, wise little worm,” Letoni answered. “It might even have been quicker, but could we have carried all this fish? Ah? Anyway, on the trip back we’ll be like songbirds. Woosh! Woosh! You’ll like that.”
Finally, on the fifteenth day, they arrived at Shifpar. It was the largest of the river towns, and while it too was mostly constructed from mud brick, there were some nice wooden buildings as well, and three (the governor’s mansion and a pair of temples) that were actually fashioned partly from painted stone. Shifpar had proper docks as well, fashioned from flat wooden planking and stood up on heavy wooden piles driven deep into the riverbed, and nestled in a little backwater cove that made getting in and out a lot easier than it might have been. These features cemented Shifpar in Manuah’s mind as a civilized place, albeit barely.
And with his newfound sense of urgency about rising water, Manuah now also noticed that Shifpar was built on a series of hilltops, set well back from the river and significantly higher. If a flood were to strike, Shifpar would weather it better than any of Kingdom’s other towns or cities. It was an i
nteresting thought, but he didn’t know what to do with it.
Once the boats were securely tied and the cargo sold off, Manuah granted the men a night of shore leave. Not because it was a good idea (it certainly wasn’t), but because he feared a mutiny if he didn’t. And so, while the little town of Shifpar tried to absorb the appetites of thirty men, and tried even harder to figure out a reliable way to charge them for it, Manuah took Hamurma to the house of Qitsturt, a man with whom he’d done frequent business, and who had offered him hospitality in the past. This disappointed Hamurma, who wanted to hit the town with his fellow sailors, but Manuah figured that on the brink of his fifteenth birthday, Hamurma was better off with disappointment than he was with sailors on leave.
1.6
“So, what does your brother make of these disturbances?” Qitsturt wanted to know. His thickly accented voice reminded Manuah of the wildmen: high and quick and clipped.
The two of them were up on Qitsturt’s roof, sitting in leaned-back wooden chairs, looking up at the comet and drinking beer from clay mugs. Manuah always expected the beer in Shifpar to taste…inferior somehow, but it never did. Their wine was sour and dry and took some getting used to, but the beer was, if anything, even better than what Manuah could get in The City. Perhaps it was fresher?
Manuah snorted. “He says it’s nothing to worry about.”
“Hmm. And do you believe him?”
Manuah didn’t need to say anything. The comet’s length stretched from one horizon to the other, and its width stretched across a third of the sky’s remainder, now bright enough to blot out many of the familiar constellations.
Qitsturt said, “Dolshavak is a man from your city. He told me last week you’d gone crazy, prattling about greatfish and floods. He says no one listens to you anymore, but you have never struck me as a prattler. There is something going on. The river grows swifter and deeper. And colder.”
“Yes.”
“And The City is built on flat ground. And spring floods do occur, as do storms.”
“Yep.”
“And the sky is, forgive me, rather foreboding.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, my friend, there is nothing crazy about all that. Perhaps it’s your countrymen who prattle. Or, forgive me, our countrymen. My thanks to Sraddah for liberating us from our former condition.”
“You shouldn’t joke about that,” Manuah cautioned.
“Who says I joke? Before we had an army that Sraddah could easily defeat. Now we have Sraddah’s own army. This is meaningful, when the lands of the wildmen begin just a day’s march away, with nothing but a few rude farming villages between us. Which also belong to Sraddah, and are also protected by his army. We gained peace by losing a war. Sraddah is a clever man.”
Manuah snorted at that.
“Now who jokes? You think your cousin is not wise?”
“He doesn’t seem so at times.”
“No? Well, perhaps it is difficult for him. He is accustomed to winning. When the forces of sea and sky begin lining up against him, what is he to do? I tell you this, my friend: if there is a flood in The City, your family is welcome to seek refuge with mine.”
Manuah paused before saying, “Thank you, my friend. My family is small, but not that small. You’re a generous man, but I couldn’t possibly.”
Qitsturt laughed. “We’ll see how reluctant you feel, if the time comes. Now drink! Drink! You leave at dawn, yes? What manner of host am I, if I send you home without a headache?”
Dutifully, Manuah drained his mug, and turned it over to show it was empty.
“There, see?”
“You don’t look happy yet. I’m going to keep serving you until you look happy.”
“Ah. Well, I’ll try. The beer and the company are fine, and I thank you, but the view up here is shit. I’ve had enough of this comet.”
“Yes? Well, it won’t stay around forever.”
“Huh. Yeah. May the next month be kind.”
* * *
If the current had seemed swift on the way upriver, it seemed even more so on the way down. At first, Manuah ordered that each boat have two paddlers in the bow and a steersman in the stern, with the sails stowed away, but the Great River wasn’t the sort of waterway that had rapids. Almost half a kos wide and well over twelve feet deep, it suffered the occasional sandbar or tree, but otherwise presented few navigational hazards. So once the men had found their rhythm, and were rolling down the river under comfortable control, he ordered the sails raised.
“Whooooosh!” the men exclaimed as the wind caught and filled the linen, making the boats leap forward so quickly that they all lost their balance for a moment. In hardly any time at all, their downriver speed had nearly doubled. The boats left wakes now, like comet trails of their own, and when the steersmen started crossing paths to make each other’s boats roll sickeningly, Manuah didn’t put a stop to it. He liked this as well as anyone—the wind in his hair! The thrill of being fastest!
“You see? You see?” Letoni said to a frightened-looking Hamurma. “Songbirds! Whoosh! Whoosh!”
The men in one of the other boats got out their paddles and started churning the water hard, taking a few kesthe to find their synchrony and then, finally, adding even more speed. Though initially they were in the middle of the pack, they began to pull out ahead, until the men in the other boats shouted their objections and unstowed their own paddles.
Now there was no need to keep people busy, to keep them from focusing on how hot and tired and out of breath they were. This was dangerous work and even more dangerous as play, but they’d done it before, and Manuah wouldn’t have thought twice about it if not for the presence of Hamurma. But Hamurma was nearly old enough to get married, and had not been promised to anyone yet, and a little danger would make him more interesting to the young women of The City. Probably not to their fathers, but that was their own problem.
“Race!” he called out to the crew of his own boat. “Pull with your backs! Pull with your legs! Bury those blades, you toads! Plant and pull! Plant and pull! Now! Now! Now! Now!”
They didn’t quite get out in front—no one was about to let the boss beat them in a fair contest!—but they acquitted themselves well enough.
Of course, no one could keep up a race pace for long, so eventually they all settled down into a more leisurely (though still challenging) rhythm, with one boat or another occasionally putting in the effort to take the lead for a while. It was a fine thing, on a fine day, and for a while Manuah was able to forget all the troubles of the world. They made it all the way to the delta, through the widest channel, and back to the Grand Sea a full hour before nightfall, grinning and whooping at their accomplishment. Let’s see Dolshavak beat that.
But at the mouth of the Great River there were lots of sandbars, and they had to pick their way more carefully around the harbor’s cape, and then through the interlocking sea walls, tacking back and forth in the sputtering wind. The sun set, and the sky turned yellow and red and purple and blue. And then the comet appeared, its head hanging low in the northern sky, its tail streaming way out behind it like a ghostly white flame.
“It’s bigger,” someone said.
“It’s closer,” someone else said.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” a third person said, in clear imitation of Adrah’s voice.
The men burst out laughing. And then the greatfish appeared, blocking their way into the harbor, and the laughter stopped.
Yes, blocking their way! The fish spouted and thrashed its tail, raised up an eye to glare at them, then dove and breached and spouted some more. Exactly as though it were trying to get their attention.
1.7
Manuah was stricken with a fear he dared not show. Who had ever heard of such a thing? A greatfish blocking a harbor mouth, on purpose! Hadn’t the gods made their point already? But no, apparently not. Whatever or whoever controlled this fish, didn’t want them entering the harbor. Or perhaps the fish was wily enough to cont
rol itself. Go back, it seemed to say. Go back, this is not the place for you! Or perhaps it was only lost and confused, and maybe even frightened by the strange light in the sky, and had had enough. Out of my way, I’m getting out of here. Was that any better?
“That rips it,” Manuah said, to no one in particular. “I’m moving to Shifpar.”
He’d meant it as a joke, and to his relief it came out sounding like one. A few of the men in his boat even chuckled weakly at it. But he realized it was true. He couldn’t take this stress anymore. Something was going to happen—something awful—and if he couldn’t stop it and couldn’t convince anyone else of the danger, he could at least get his own people to safety.
The thought made him sick. Was he a coward? A deserter? A traitor? His family had looked after the harbor for generations. He was an important person in the life of The City. Did that fact oblige him to die here? To let his children die here?
“Go around the fish!” he called out to his crews, as calmly as he could manage. “It can’t block seven boats at once.”
“Race!” Sharama called out. But that fell flat; the men were tired, and scared, and no longer in a racing mood. But the boats fanned out, working their way around the massive fish. To its credit, the fish didn’t seem to want to hurt anyone. It never got closer than sixty feet, and never raised enough waves to risk swamping anyone. But it surely did seem…agitated. Finally, it sank beneath the water and let them all pass unmolested.
“There’s something you don’t see every night,” Hamurma said, clearly struggling to sound cheerful.
The wind was dead, now, so as tired and sore as they were, they paddled the rest of the way. No man complained. However, one of them did say, “The comet is moving,” as they were maneuvering into the docks by its light.
“Northward,” someone else said.
“Downward,” said a third person.
Manuah looked, and saw that it was true. In the hurta they’d spent mucking around in the harbor, the comet had visibly changed position in the sky. Not by much, but it was more than enough to notice. In an hurta! And that was something you didn’t see every night, either.