Southshore Read online

  ‘It is never wise to drink too much of old Porabji’s brews,’ she said. ‘I have had a word with him.’ She passed Thrasne by, not stopping, and he stared after her in confusion. The night before was not at all clear to him. Part of it, he thought, he might have dreamed. And yet something was owed because of it, he thought. Something needed to be done.

  16

  Late that afternoon came wind. It was no small breeze. At first they welcomed it behind them, but the sailors soon began to shake their heads. They reefed the big sail, leaving only the small one at the top of the mast to maintain way. Later the wind fell, but the sailors did not put the sail out again.

  ‘Storm,’ said one of them to Thrasne. His name was Blange, a laconic, stocky man who looked not unlike Thrasne himself.

  ‘Last time I remember the clouds lookin’ like that’ – he gestured to the horizon, where a low bank of cloud grew taller with each passing hour – ‘last time we were lucky enough to get behind an island and ride it out. Five days’ blow it was, and the ship pretty battered when it was over. I don’t like the looks of that.’

  Certainly if Thrasne had been near Northshore, he would have tried to get behind something. He didn’t like the looks of it, either. The sky appeared bruised, livid with purpling cloud, darted with internal lightning so that sections of the cloud wall glowed ominously from time to time, a recurrent pulse of pallid light that was absorbed by the surrounding darkness as though swallowed.

  The River surface looked flat and oily in that light, full of strange, jellylike quiverings and skitterings, as though something invisible ran across the surface. Swells began to heave at the Gift, lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping.

  ‘What’s it likely to do?’ Thrasne asked.

  ‘It’s likely to give us one hell of a beating,’ Blange replied.

  ‘Then let’s get that little boat off the owner-house roof,’

  Thrasne commanded. ‘We don’t need that banging around.’

  They lowered the Cheevle into the water, running her out some distance from the Gift at the end of a stout rope. The two boats began a kind of minuet, bowing and tipping to one another across the glassy water between.

  The wall of cloud drew closer even as they worked, still pulsing with intermittent light, muttering now in a growl that seemed almost constant. Obers-rom and the other boatmen were busy tying everything down that could be tied down and stowing everything else in the lockers and holds.

  ‘Best take some of the spare canvas and nail it over the hatches,’ one of the sailors told Thrasne.

  ‘Surely that’s extreme?’

  ‘Owner, if you want to keep your boat and our lives, I’d recommend it. I’m tellin’ you everything I know, and I don’t know half enough.’

  Thrasne stared at the wall of cloud. Perhaps the man was one of those doomsayers the River bred from time to time. On the other hand, perhaps he wasn’t. Blange wasn’t a young man. He had scars on his face and arms – from rope lashes, so he said. His hands were hard. One thing Blint had always said: ‘You pay a man for more than his strong back, Thrasne. You pay him for his good sense if he’s got any.’

  So. ‘Tell Obers-rom what you need, Blange. I’m going to see what’s going on in the owner-house.’

  What was going on was a card game among four of the inhabitants and naps for the other two.

  ‘Thrasne,’ burbled Eenzie the Clown. ‘Come take my hand. I’m being beaten, but you could fight them off…’

  ‘Yes, Thrasne,’ Medoor Babji said in a chilly voice. ‘Take Eenzie’s cards and we’ll do battle.’

  He shook his head at her, scarcely noticing her tone. ‘No time, Medoor Babji. The sailors tell me we are probably going to be hit by a storm. They say a bad storm. Anything you have lying around should be put away.’ The sound of hammers came through the wall, and old Porabji sat up with a muffled curse.

  ‘What’re they doing?’ Eenzie asked, for once in a normal tone of voice.

  ‘Nailing canvas over the hatches to keep water out.’

  ‘Waves?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in a bad storm. Rain, I suppose. Waterspouts, maybe. I’ve seen those.’ Thrasne was suddenly deeply depressed. The Gift was about to be assaulted and he had no idea how to protect her. ‘If things get violent, you might rig some straps over the bunks and strap yourself in. Less likely to be hurt that way, I should think.’ He turned and blundered out, needing to see what Blange was up to. Surely there would be something he could do.

  When he emerged from the owner-house door, he was shocked into immobility by the wall of black that confronted him. The Gift rocked in a tiny pocket of clear water. Straight above them Potipur bulged toward the west, pushing his mighty belly toward the sunset in a tiny circle of clear sky. Elsewhere was only cloud and the ceaseless mutter of thunder. At the base of the cloud lay a line of agitated white, and Blange pointed this out, his face pale.

  ‘There’s the wind,’ he said. ‘Those are the wave tops, breaking up. It will be on us soon.’ He turned away, shouting for men to help him cover the other hatch.

  ‘The ventilation shafts,’ Thrasne cried suddenly. ‘We have to cover the ventilation shafts.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ said a small voice at his side. Medoor Babji. ‘Taj Noteen and I will help you. We can do the front shaft.’ Indeed, she knew well where it was, for she had sat there many an hour during the voyage, watching as Thrasne himself had once watched. Birds. Waves. The floating stuff that the River carried past.

  ‘Get tools from Obers-rom,’ Thrasne said, hurrying away to the aft shafts, one eye on the rushing cloud.

  Obers-rom gave them a hammer, nails – worth quintuple their weight in any nonmetal coin. ‘Take care,’ he growled at her. ‘Don’t drop them, Medoor Babji. These are all we have.’ He sent one of the other men to carry the cleats.

  She and Taj Noteen scrambled across the owner-house roof and dropped onto the grating above the shaft. They would have to squat or lie on the grating and lean downward to nail the cleats across the canvas. There was not room for two of them.

  ‘Get back up,’ she grunted. ‘You can hand me the cleats as I nail them.’ She spread the canvas beneath her, holding it down with her body, pressing it against the outside of the square shaft, reaching behind her to take the cleat.

  The wind struck. The Gift shuddered, began to tip. Medoor Babji cursed, thrust the hammer between her body and the canvas, and held on. Above her, Taj Noteen shouted, but she could not understand what he was saying.

  The wind got under the canvas, lifted it. Her hands were clenched tight to it, her eyes shut. Only Taj Noteen saw her lifted on the bellying sail, lifted, flown, over the side and down into the chopping River. The water hit her and she screamed then, opening her eyes, seeing the loom of the Gift above her. Under her the canvas bulged like a bubble, air trapped beneath it, floating her. She was moving away from the boat. Away. She screamed again, soundless against the uproar of the sudden rain.

  Then something struck the canvas, brushed it, away, brushed it again. The Cheevle. It bowed toward her once more, and she grabbed the side, lifted by it as it tilted away from her, pulling herself in. The canvas was tangled around her legs. It followed like a heavy tail, and she rolled onto the cover of the Cheevle. The wind stopped, all at once, and glassy calm spread across the waters.

  Medoor Babji shouted. There were figures at the rail of the Gift, staring at her. Blange shouted at her. ‘Get under the cover, Babji! Get under it and lace it up. The wind is coming back. There’s no time to pull you in…’

  She had scarcely time to comprehend what he had said and obey him, hurriedly loosening the lacing at one side of the little boat enough to crawl beneath it. She lay in the bottom of the boat, on the blankets tumbled there, and tugged at the lacing string with all her strength, pulling it tight again only moments before the wind struck once more.

  It was like being inside a drum as the rain pounded down upon the tight canvas and she clung to the la
cing strings, flung this way and that by the wind, protected from battering only by those tumbled blankets and the wet canvas that had almost killed her, then saved her from drowning.

  There were sounds of thunder, muttering, growling, sharp cracks like the sudden breaking of great tree limbs. After one such crack her ears told her the Cheevle was moving, racing, driven by the wind. She imagined the Gift also driven, wondering briefly if one of them preceded the other or whether the wind sent them on this journey side by side. After a time the violent rocking stopped. The rain continued to fall in a frenzy of sound. Lulled by the noise, by the dark, by her fear and the pain of her bruises, she fell asleep, still clinging to the lacing strings of the cover as though they held her hope of life.

  Aboard the Gift, darkness fell like a curtain, rainfilled and horrid. Wind buffeted them. The old boat creaked and complained, tilting wildly on the waves. They had seen Medoor Babji crawl beneath the cover of the Cheevle. They had no time to worry about her after that. In breaks in the storm they managed to cover the forward ventilation shaft. The hammer and nails were caught between the shaft and the forward wall of the owner-house. Except for Thrasne, and for the steersmen, struggling mightily to keep them headed into the waves and wind under only a scrap of sail, the others went into the owner-house and cowered there, waiting for something to happen. Thrasne lashed himself to the rail and peered into blackness, seeing nothing, nothing at all, rain mixed with tears running down his face. He could feel the pain in the Gift, and he was awash with guilt for having brought her on this voyage.

  After an endless time, the wind abated. The rain still fell in a solid curtain of wet. Men went below and came back to say there were leaks – none of them large, but still, water was seeping into the holds. They set up a bailing line, using scoops to clear the water, chinking the seep holes with bits of rope dipped in frag sap. Night wore on. The rain softened to a mere downpour, then to a spatter of wind-flung drops. Far to the west the clouds parted to show Abricor, just off full, descending beneath the River. In the east, the sky lightened to amber, then to rose.

  Thrasne untied the knots that held him to the railing, coiled the rope in his hands, and staggered up to the steering deck to relieve the men there and give orders for repairs. He was half through with it, Obers-rom busy in the hold, Blange and a crew restacking the cargo to make room for caulking, when he chanced to look over the railing to the place the Cheevle swam along in their wake.

  Should have swum. The rope that had tied it lay frayed on the deck, broken in the storm. Of the Cheevle itself, or of Medoor Babji, there was no sign.

  17

  To most of the crew on the Gift, it seemed that Thrasne owner had gone mad. He was determined to search for the Cheevle. No matter what they said, he would not hear them. ‘She’ll be downtide,’ he said, again and again. ‘We have to look for her downtide.’

  Taj Noteen had his own reasons for wanting the Cheevle found. He did not want to go to Queen Fibji and tell her the chosen heir had been lost upon the river, lost with no attempt made to find her. Still, looking about him at the measureless expanse of heaving water, searching seemed ridiculous and was made to seem more ridiculous still by the advice of the sailors, those men who had plied the island chains throughout much of their lives.

  ‘Thrasne owner,’ they begged. ‘Making great circles here in the midst of the water will do no good! The Cheevle was blown as we were blown. The tide moved her as it moved us. If she is not near us now, and if she cannot be seen from the top of the mast, anything we do may merely take us farther from it.’

  Thrasne would not hear it. Why it meant so much to him, he did not bother to figure out. Why his eyes filled at the thought of Medoor Babji alone, possibly injured upon the deep, he did not wonder. Why his gut ached at the idea of her lost, he did not put into words. He spoke often of finding the Cheevle. What he really longed to find was Medoor Babji herself, though he never said her name to himself. The name he had attached for so long to this feeling was Pamra. He had not brought himself to replacing the name, though her image had been replaced by another in his imaginings. In his sexual fantasies he would have whispered Pamra’s name, though the woman in his mind would have been dark and fringe-haired, fire-eyed and silk-skinned as only Medoor Babji was. If he had realized this, he would have accounted this as being unfaithful to his dreams, his hopes, his vows, and therefore he did not admit to any change. If someone had asked him he would have said he loved Pamra Don as he always had, as Suspirra, as herself.

  ‘She is as a member of the crew,’ he wrote in his journal, in yet another of those many books he had filled over the years with Thrasne’s Thoughts, ‘We would not abandon a crew member until all hope was lost; so we may not abandon her.’ As he wrote this, he was conscious that it was not quite the truth, but he could find no other words that satisfied him.’ It may be,’ he continued, ‘as the sailors say, that it is already hopeless.’

  And yet he would not cease searching for the Cheevle.

  They spent some days tacking, circling, up and down, back and forth, the sailors trying to keep some record of the way they had gone, shaking their heads and snarling at one another from time to time. During the storm several of the great water casks had been broken. Thrasne set the carpenter to repairing the casks, a job that did not take them long, but he either did not notice or did not see the implications of the fact that the casks were now empty. In this he was quite alone. The crew and the Noor saw well enough that the remaining water would not last them long. One could drink the brackish River water for a short time, a day or two, perhaps, the sailors said. Longer than that and people drinking the water doubled in cramps and fits and died.

  On the evening of the fifth or sixth day of this aimless searching – during which every available pair of eyes had been stationed at the rail or on the steering deck or even aloft, at the top of the mast, the watchman having been hauled up there in a kind of swing – Taj Noteen made his way to the place Thrasne brooded atop the owner-house.

  ‘Thrasne owner,’ he said. ‘Would you dishonor Medoor Babji?’

  Thrasne turned on him, lips drawn back in a snarl. Then, seeing the quiet entreaty on the man’s face, he subsided, wondering what ploy this was. ‘I would not,’ he growled. ‘As you well know. Medoor Babji is my… friend.’ He heard himself saying this, liked the sound of it, and repeated it firmly. ‘My friend.’

  ‘Then if you would honor your friendship, you should do as Medoor Babji would wish, Thrasne owner.’

  ‘I would presume she would wish to be found,’ he growled, becoming angry.

  ‘Any of us would,’ agreed Taj Noteen. ‘Unless we were on a mission to which we would willingly sacrifice our lives. In that case, we might feel our mission more important than being found.’ He sweated as he said this, and his mouth closed in a hurt, bitter line, for he revered Queen Fibji, as did most of the Noor. Blame for the loss of the Queen’s daughter would fall on the leader of the group. Who else could be asked to bear it?

  ‘So you say,’ Thrasne argued. ‘You, who lead this group. Perhaps those who follow you feel differently. Perhaps to them the mission is not more important than their lives.’

  ‘We go at the Queen’s command,’ Noteen said softly. ’You have been told this.’

  ‘I have been told. Yes.’ It meant nothing to him.

  ‘Medoor Babji is the Queen’s daughter, her chosen heir. Medoor Babji is the real leader of this expedition, boatman. I speak with her voice when I tell you to give up this fruitless search.’

  ‘How can you?’ Thrasne cried. ‘You know her! How can you?’

  ‘Because there are ten thousand Medoor Babjis among the Noor,’ he replied, gesturing wide to include all that world of suffering humanity. ‘Ten thousand to be killed by Jondarites and taken slave in the mines. Ten thousand daughters to weep, ten thousand sons to die. We do not go to Southshore out of mere curiosity, Thrasne. We go because we must. The Noor are being slaughtered, day by day, week by week. Medoor B
abji knows this! How do we honor her death if we perish of thirst here upon this endless water and the mission comes to nothing? Then she will have died for nothing! Would you dishonor her, Thrasne owner?’

  Thrasne did not give up easily. Still, Noteen’s words burned in his head. He went below to his airless little cubby and anguished to himself, thinking that everything he cared for was always reft from him, surprised at the thought, for it was only then he admitted to himself that he cared for Medoor Babji. Realizing it made his grief the worse, and he spent the night attempting to assign that grief some cause and function or to find some reasons in his own life for his being punished in this way. It was no good. He could not really believe in such punishment, though the priests and Awakeners taught it as a matter of course. It was nothing in his own life which controlled the lives of Pamra or Medoor Babji. They, too, were creatures who moved of their own will. He could only touch their lives a little, share their lives a little, if they would give him leave.

  And Medoor Babji had given him leave where Pamra had not. The thought fled, like a silver minnow through his mind, elusive and yet fascinating.

  Still, when morning came, he gave in to Taj Noteen’s entreaties. The sailors turned the Gift toward the south, praying they would find water before many days had passed.

  Despite his decision, Thrasne kept at the rail every hour of the light, or had himself hoisted to the top of the mast, or stood on the steering deck peering into the quivering glow of sun upon the waves for endless hours. He would resign himself to the need of the Noor to go south, he could not resign himself to the fact that she was gone. Something within him cried continuously that he would see the Cheevle dancing in the sun, beyond the next wave.