Southshore Page 13

  18

  I remember when Blint first brought me aboard the Gift, sometimes at night I would wake from a dream of being lost upon the River. I was only twelve or thirteen, I suppose. Not a man yet, or anything near it. Perhaps they were a child’s dreams, just as children dream of falling or flying but grown-ups seldom do. At least, I suppose that is true. I used to dream of falling all the time but don’t anymore. I don’t dream of being lost on the River anymore, either, but sometimes I dream of swimming – as though I were one of the strangeys …

  From Thrasne’s book

  Medoor Babji woke to the slup-slup-slup of wavelets on the side of the boat, to the heat of the sun on the canvas above her. The air was stifling. She lay in a puddle of wet blankets, cozied into them like a swig-bug into water weed. It took her some minutes to extricate herself and untangle the lacing strings from fingers that were stiff and sticklike. ‘Blight,’ she cursed at herself, attempting cheer. ‘My fingers have the blight.’

  Her head came out of the Cheevle, bleary eyes staring around at the sparking wavelets on all sides, taking some notice of the clear amber of the sky and the high, seeking scream of some water bird before realizing, almost without surprise, that the Gift was gone. It was as though part of herself had been prepared for this eventuality – aware of it, perhaps, when the rope snapped, even during the fury of the storm – even as some other, less controlled persona prepared for panic.

  ‘Now, now,’ she encouraged herself, quelling a scream that had balled itself tight just below her breastbone and was pushing upward, seeking air. ‘It may not be the Gift’s gone. Maybe I’m gone. Separated, at any event. Oh, Doorie, now what?’ Her insides were all melting liquid, full of confusion and outright fear, but the sound of her own voice brought a measure of control.

  The persona in charge postponed answer of this question, postponed thought while she unlaced half the drum-tight covering of the Cheevle and folded it over the intact half. She wrung out the blankets as best she might and laid them over the loose canvas, seeing steam rise from them almost immediately. Her clothing followed. There was water in the bottom of the boat, though not much, and she sought the bailing scoops the sailors had carved, still tight on their brackets beneath the tiny bow deck. She postponed thought still further while bailing the boat dry, and further yet by turning and returning the blankets and clothing so that all were equally exposed to the drying rays of the sun.

  And when all this was done, when she had dressed herself and taken a small drink of water from the River, brackish but potable – so Thrasne had told her, though one should drink very little at a time and not for long – there was no change in the circumstance at all. The Cheevle still bobbed on the wavelets, alone on the River, with no rock, no island, no floating flotsam in view.

  ‘And no food,’ she murmured to herself. ‘And no really good water.’ The taste of the River on her tongue was mucky, a little salty. It had done little to reduce her thirst.

  The mast lay in the bottom of the boat. She had slept between it and the sharp rib corners all night. Now she considered it with a kind of fatalistic resignation. She had paid some attention when the sailors had demonstrated how the mast was to be stepped. It had, as she recalled, taken two of them to get it up. Still. If she had the wind, she might go somewhere. If she went on bobbing here, like some little wooden toy, lost in immensity by a careless child, she might float forever.

  The mast was heavy. After using her strength to no purpose for a time, she stopped fooling with the thing and thought it through. She took the lines loose from the canvas cover, maneuvered the butt of the mast into position against its slanting block, then attached a line halfway up the mast, running it under and over two of the lacing hooks and using a third to take up the slack. She heaved, sweated, cursed, saw the mast rise a little. She tied it off and recovered, panting, then tried again. By alternately heaving and cursing at this primitive pulley arrangement, she managed to get the mast almost upright, at which point it slid into its slot with a crash that made her fear for the bottom of the boat. She felt around it gingerly, praying to find no water. There was water. Was it left over from bailing or from a new leak? She had no idea and spent several anxious moments measuring it with eyes and hands to see whether it got any higher.

  When she had convinced herself – deluded herself, her other persona kept insisting – that the hull was sound, she restored the lacing to the cover and relaced half of it, folded the now dry blankets under this shelter, remembered to drop in the wedges that held the mast erect, and set about trying to recall what Blange had said about sail.

  ‘If you cannot remember what you are told,’ Queen Fibji had told her more than once, ‘you must use trial and error. The thing to keep in mind about trial and error is that some errors are quite final. Therefore, it might be wise to listen carefully to the instructions of those who have experienced what they are trying to tell you about.’

  ‘People are always telling me things,’ Medoor Babji had complained. She had been about twelve at the time, coming into rebellion as inevitably as a flame-bird chick into its plumes.

  ‘They don’t even ask me what I think.’

  The Queen had nodded, brow wrinkled a little at this. They were in the Queen’s own tent, and her serving women were redoing the Queen’s hair as well as Medoor Babji’s. It was a long process, though infrequent. Each strand was carefully combed out, washed and rinsed, one by one, then rewound and decorated at the bottom with a bead of bone or faience. The serving women chatted between themselves, politely, pretending that the Queen and Medoor were not present, thus allowing the mother and daughter the same freedom.

  ‘Ah,’ Queen Fibji had said. “Well, let us suppose you have broken your leg. Chamfas Muneen is sent for. Chamfas says to you, “Hold fast, this is going to hurt,” and then sets your leg and binds it up. Do you want Chamfas to ask you what you think before doing it?’

  ‘Chamfas is a bonesetter!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So of course he won’t ask me what I think! I don’t know anything about bonesetting.’

  ‘Well, let us suppose it is Aunty Borab. Suppose she tells you to eat your breakfast.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I mean. She doesn’t ask me if I want breakfast. She just tells me.’

  ‘And what is Aunty Borab?’

  ‘She’s just an old woman.’

  ‘Ah, no, Medoor Babji. There you are wrong. Aunty Borab is a life liver. She is a survivor. She is a power holder and a health giver. She is no less expert at what she does than is Chamfas Muneen. But you call her an old woman and disregard what she says.’

  ‘She’s bossy!’

  ‘So is Chamfas, when he knows what is best for you. So am I when I seek to save my people hurt. And so is Borab when she knows it is best for you to eat your breakfast.’

  The Queen’s expression had been mild, but there had been obsidian in her eyes. Hard, black, and questioning. Is this one to be my heir, or shall I choose some other? After a pause, she continued. ‘Instead of thinking of older folk as bossy persons with whom you must contend for control, Medoor Babji, think first what they are trying to tell you, or save you.

  Indeed, they may only be attempting to assert the privilege of age, but it does no harm to listen, even to agree. They will die before you, and you will have time to do it your way.’

  Medoor Babji had not wanted Queen Fibji to choose some other heir, so she had begun to save the rebellion for other targets and pay attention to Aunty Borab.

  Now she wished she had paid as much attention to Blange and the other sailors.

  ‘My fault,’ she said, putting the rising sun on her right hand and bowing her head in the direction she assumed was north, toward the Noor lands, toward the Queen. ‘I called them common sailors in my mind. I should have called them expert boat handlers and learned from them.’ She closed her eyes in meditation. One had to meditate on mistakes when they were discovered. Otherwise, the opportunity to learn from them might pass
one by. Another of the Queen’s axioms that Medoor had adopted as her own.

  When the meditation was over, she had remembered a few things. Other details came to her as she worked. There was a line to haul the triangular sail on its boom up and down the mast. There were lines to move the trailing end of it right or left. In the morning, they kept the wind behind them. That she remembered, for Thrasne had said it over and over. ‘Morning wind to take us out, evening wind to bring us back.’ After a time she got the hang of it, even remembering to steer a bit east of south. Then there was nothing to do but sit hot under the sun, watching a far bank of cloud in the west retreat below the horizon and disappear while other clouds formed out of nothing, fled away into shreds, and vanished. Around her the River heaved and pulsed, clucking against the boat’s side. She grew half-blind from sun glimmer. She thought she saw things, strange winged figures larger than people, riding upon the waves. She blinked, and they were gone.

  When the sun was directly overhead, something huge moved beside the boat. She felt the planks quiver and shift, not a natural, water-driven movement. Fish broke the surface of the water, leaping high to escape whatever was below. Two of them fell into the boat, flapping there with high-pitched squeals. Medoor Babji was not squeamish. She grasped them by their tails and banged them against the side of the boat. Her folding knife was in her sleeve pocket with her other essentials. She gutted the fish and filleted them, laying most of the strips of yellow flesh on the canvas to dry in the sun, eating the others slow mouthful by slow mouthful, grateful both for the sweet flesh and for the water in it.

  ‘Strangey below,’ she told herself. What else could be that size? Some monster of the mid-River? Had the provision of the fish been accidental? Somehow she didn’t think so. What was it Thrasne had said? Sometimes strangeys picked up boatmen who had fallen overboard and returned them to their boats. Perhaps they fed stranded River wanderers as well.

  By midafternoon she knew one thing more. Sometimes strangeys took small boats where they wanted them to go. In the lull after the morning wind had failed, Medoor Babji had attempted to set the sail as she remembered the sail on the Gift being set in the afternoons. She had accomplished this more or less and was headed westward once more when the boat shuddered, the sail flapped, and she found herself moving in a slightly different direction. Perhaps a bit more west of south than she had intended.

  ‘When things are moving inexorably in a given direction,’ Queen Fibji had told her, ‘only foolish men attempt to move against the flow. And yet, those men who give themselves over entirely to the movement may also be foolish. The wise man works his way to an edge, if he can, and waits for opportunity to get ashore. From there he can observe what is happening without personal involvement.’

  Having no other occupation, Medoor Babji meditated upon this saying of the Queen’s. She had some time in which to do it. At sundown she ate some of the sun-dried fish. It was well after dark when the movement of the boat changed from one of being towed to a mere floating once again. Against the stars she saw the bulk of hills crowned with trees. The tidal current washed her onto a shelving beach, whether of sand or rock she could not tell, and all motion ceased. She crept into the blankets beneath the canvas cover and fell asleep.

  Morning came with a twitter of birds, a bellow of lizards. By the shore stilt-lizards walked, their narrow heads darting into the shallows to bring up bugs and fishes, stopping now and then to utter their customary cry, ‘Ha-ha, ha-ha,’ without inflection. Stilt-lizard meat was edible, Medoor Babji told herself, coming out of sleep all at once, fully conscious of being somewhere new, different, unknown. This place could not be too foreign, she thought, if there were stilt-lizards. Edible. Yes. Hunger pinched her stomach and brought a flood of saliva into her mouth. She sat up in the boat, unwrapping herself. The lizards fled at sudden motion, then returned to stalk the shore once more, meantime keeping a wary eye on her.

  The boat was halfway up a narrow beach, less sandy than stony, cut by a streamlet that bubbled down a shallow channel into a little bay. Contorted protrusions of black rock jutted from the beach and from the smooth surface of the bay, culminating in two writhing shapes, like a mighty arm and hand at each side of the entrance, reaching toward one another, braceleted with colonies of birds. Outside that embrace the River swept by, empty and endless.

  Now the immediate danger was past. Now there was food and good water. Now that persona who had wished to cry for some time could cry.

  It was some time before she realized what she was crying about, where the grief came from, boiling up from some deep well within her. It was not being lost, not being fearful for her life. It was being separated from Thrasne, lost from him, fearful for his life. And with that realization, she dried her tears, laughing at herself. The Gift was a strong, heavy boat, one that had plied the World River for generations. She thought of Thrasne fussing over it, repairing it at every opportunity, and of his crew of experienced men. Why had she assumed at once that he had met with some disaster? She was far more likely to have perished in the tiny Cheevle, and yet she lived. And if she lived, she could find the Gift again, somewhere, if not on Southshore or mid-River, then on Northshore when it returned.

  ‘If strangeys allow it,’ she told herself with some asperity, trying to give herself something else to think about. It was a cheerless thought, yet it had the same strengthening force as one of Queen Fibji’s lectures. ‘Settle,’ the Queen had said to her often. ‘Settle, daughter. Consider calmly what you will do. Cry when it is done with, when you have the luxury of time.’

  ‘How did you get to know absolutely everything?’ Medoor had asked, somewhat bitterly.

  There had been a long silence, then a humorless laugh. Medoor had looked up at her mother, startled, almost frightened. She had not heard that laugh before.

  ‘I’ll tell you a secret,’ the Queen had said with a faraway, angry look on her face. ‘I don’t know. Much of the time I don’t know anything. However, my not knowing will not help my people, so I must know. And I do. It is easier to correct a mistake than to be caught doing nothing. It is easier to beg forgiveness for a mistake than to beg permission to act. People will forgive you, child, but they will not risk allowing action. Go to a council and say, “Let me do this thing.” They will think of ten thousand good reasons you should not. It could be wrong. Or it could be not quite right. Or it could be right, but of a strange rightness they are unfamiliar with. Oh, daughter, but they will talk and talk, but they will not say, “Do it.” That is why I am Queen and they are my followers. Because they cannot risk anything nor take part in others doing so. They are herdbeasts, daughter. And yet I love them. When I speak to you of trial and error, Babji, whose experience do you think I am speaking of? …’

  ‘So,’ Medoor Babji told herself. ‘If the Queen can prevail in such a way, so her daughter can also prevail.’

  The resolution did not help her much in deciding what to do next. Securing food seemed most logical, and this decision was helped by a cramp of hunger that bent her in two. Fish was well and good, but it left one empty between meals.

  It was important she not lose the Cheevle. She tugged it farther up the beach and tied it firmly to a tree. A tidal bulge might come by; the presence of beaches argued for that probability. As she faced the bay, the sun was rising on her right hand, so the bay faced northward. Could this land be Southshore? Had the strangeys brought her to her journey’s end? The beach extended on either hand as far as she could see, riven with tormented rock outcroppings here and there but interrupted by no headland, curving slightly outward at its western extremity to vanish in the River haze. She had come ashore in the only protected place within sight, though the haze prevented her from being sure she was on the only land in the vicinity.

  The forest was made up almost entirely of one variety of tree, one unfamiliar to her, a short, thick-trunked tree, rather twisted in habit, with two or three main branches, also short and stout, with many graceful twigs bearing lac
y clusters of pale green leaves that seemed almost pruned, so gracefully they barely overlapped one another, allowing each leaf its measure of sun.

  Some of these trees carried large, waxy blooms of magenta and azure blue, fringed with silver. Others bore seed heads, drying, almost ready to open. Among these strange trees were other, more familiar ones. She found a puncon tree – a larger one than she had ever seen on Northshore – with fruit almost ripe. Not far from the fruit tree was a small grove of fragwood, and beyond that, inland, stood a gawky, feathery tree that looked and smelled almost like the thorn trees of the steppes. The leaf was more divided than in the trees she knew, and the fruit was larger. The scent pulled her halfway up the tree, stretched along a branch as she fumbled for ripe ones among the cluster, finding them sweeter than she was used to and more welcome for that. She ate a few bites, filling a sleeve pocket with more. She would stuff herself later, if she didn’t get sick or die in the meantime.

  Returning to the boat, she robbed it of enough line to make snares. By noon there were three stilt-lizards caught, killed, gutted, and drying in the smoke of a small fire. There were patches of white on many of the rocks, River salt dried by the sun, and she sprinkled this on the lizard meat. She had bought River salt in the markets of half a hundred towns but had never seen it in its natural state before. There had been no unpleasant result from eating the thorn tree fruit, so she ate a bit more, chasing it down with roast leg of lizard. The water in the streamlet was chill and pure. She felt less inclined to weep. ‘Full stomachs,’ Aunty Borab had been fond of saying, ‘make calm judgements.’ Or the reverse, sometimes. ‘Hunger makes haste.’

  It was time, she felt, for a slightly longer exploration. The boat could always be found so long as she kept the River within sight or hearing and went out with it on the one hand and returned with it on the other. The boat was safe enough. She piled brush over and around the lizard carcasses to let them dry a while longer in the smoke of the smothered fire, then strode off into the forest as far as she could without losing sight of the River through the trees, walking westward at a good pace, taking note of what she saw but making no effort to examine any aspect of the landscape in detail. There were more and more of the lacy-leafed trees interrupted by occasional groves of other kinds, some fruit bearing. She gathered the ripe fruit, filling her sleeve pockets as instinctively as a bird might gather seed. The Noor had been gatherers for generations. They did not pass bounty by.