Northshore (2 page)

Thrasne leaned over the rail to watch the blighted fish moving alongside, sinking very slowly as they went, still
visible after long minutes had gone by. They floated right side up; they looked almost alive, only the lack of movement betraying that they were fish no more. Or perhaps fish of a different kind. Thrasne had seen a man touched by blight once. In fact, Thrasne had been the one to use the axe, and he still woke in the night sometimes sweating from the memory of it. The boatman had kept his chopped-off leg in a netting sack, sprayed down with blight powder. He carried it about with him to taverns, where he sold topers a look at it in exchange for drinks, daring the foolhardy to touch it and see whether the blight had left it or not.

‘Dangers in every caste and trade,’ said owner Blint from time to time. ‘None free of peril.’

Thrasne supposed that was true. He went below to change his shirt and hide his books. Not that he had many, but those he had he wanted to keep. His book of fables about the South-shore. His
History of Northshore
in three volumes, nine-tenths of it nonsense, Blint said, and all of it forbidden. Thrasne didn’t care. It made a nice thing to do some evenings when the winds were warm, sit on the deck in the light of the owner-house windows and read about how humans first landed on Northshore, down from the stars, and about their great wars with the Thraish, whoever they may have been. Winged creatures, by the sound of it in the stories, who could talk just like men. And all the men using metal tools and weapons, which was enough right there to show you why it was false and unapproved. But who wanted to read approved books? Lives of the Great Awakeners. The biography of Thoulia. Poof. One might as well read the chart-of-towns; it was more interesting.

They’d be in Baris by noon, and owner Blint would likely seek trade. Most of the towns along this stretch were short of spices and salt. They’d want to give pamet in exchange, and the
Gift
couldn’t take it. No room left in the holds. It would have to be something less bulky. Dried fruit, jam, jelly. Candies, maybe. The confectioners were supposed to be something special along here. Something about candies in one of their Festival myths. And toys. Little things for
children. Mechanical ones that could be wound up. The toymakers on this stretch were notable. Not that Thrasne had been along this stretch before; he’d been only four years on the
Gift of Potipur,
starting when he was twelve as go-get-boy.

As he struggled with the buttons of his shirt, he examined the row of carvings set on his storage chest. There was a long, slender piece of clear fragwood he’d been saving, and he thought he’d make a fish of it. A surprised fish, with blight halfway up its tail. The carvings stared back at him from the chest top: merchants, children, the tall robed figure of an Awakener, even a worker, shapeless and hopeless in its canvas wrappings. The little figures seemed almost to breathe. One at the near end of the row looked at him in eternal supplication, and Thrasne took it into his hands with a little groan, warmth pouring into his belly.

‘Suspirra,’ he whispered. It was his name for her, the otherwise nameless ideal, loveliest of all women, created out of his head and his aching loins. She lay on his pillow when he sought his solitary comforts. She watched him when he dressed and washed himself, always with the same expressions of supplication and entreaty. ‘Love me,’ she begged silently. ‘Love me.’ And he did love her, in a lonely fever, almost forgetting sometimes that she was no longer than his forearm. He had carved her in one day-long frenzy of creation, the wood curling away from his blade as though it sought to reveal what lay within it, the pale soft grain of the face, the darker grain of the long, smooth hair, the gown, clinging to her as though wet so he could see every line of her sweet breasts and belly, the curve of her thighs and the soft mound where they joined. Even her feet had sprung out of the wood magically, every toe perfect, the lines of the nails as clean as the line of her lips.

‘Suspirra,’ and he set her down, turning her slightly away from him.

‘You should be artist caste,’ Blint had said when he first saw Thrasne’s carvings. ‘Some of these towns give high status to artists.’

Thrasne had shaken his head. ‘I’d rather see everything.
Not just stick in one town. Maybe, someday, when I’m tired of the River.’

Though he could not imagine being tired of the River. There was always something to see on the River. As there was right now – the new piers fringing the edge of Baristown.

When he reached the deck he gave it a careful look over. No signs of nets or hooks. The net poles were put away. He could still smell the sulphur and frag, but the River breeze would carry it outriver this time of day. He checked the hatch over the net locker to see it was tight. Funny the way shorebound fishermen resented any fishing done by the Riverboats. Even though the Riverboats caught different kinds of fish, to say nothing of the deep River strangeys, which probably weren’t fish at all. Glizzee spice, now. Everyone wanted that, even fishermen. And Glizzee spice was nothing but ground strangey bone, though the boatmen didn’t tell everyone that.

When he’d completed the round, he went back and climbed up to the rudderman. ‘What did Blint say?’

‘Told me to pick the longest piers and see could I come around it.’

‘No side wharfs, hmm?’

‘None we can see from here.’ Some of the towns had at the end of their piers sideways extensions that ran along the River flow rather than across it. A Riverboat could steer close, toss a line to be made fast, then let the tide turn the boat on the line to lay alongside. Coming around a long pier was harder work than that.

‘Is Blint getting the sweeps set?’

‘He got Birk out of his hammock. Said for you to stand by here where you could see everything.’ The man sniggered, not maliciously, and Thrasne grinned at him. Taken all in all, the boatmen rather liked having a carver aboard. There wasn’t one of them he hadn’t carved something for, as a pretty for themselves or a gift for someone they treasured. When a man only came to his home place every six to eight years, he wanted to have something special for his children, at least. Though it wasn’t uncommon to find more children than reason suggested was appropriate. Many a man gone
six years came back to find two- and three-year-olds, but such was the life of a boatman and accepted as such. The women couldn’t be blamed, not with the procreation laws the way they were. And after all, if things like that mattered to a man, he wouldn’t be River.

The pier was coming up on the right, a long one, not completed yet. The oarsmen had the sweeps set in the rope locks to turn the ship as soon as the pier was past. The tide wasn’t strong just now, not with the moons all strung out like this, not like Conjunction, when no one in his right mind would try to tie up except at the Riverside itself.

‘Hold fast,’ breathed Thrasne, locking the sculling oars out of the way of the rudder. ‘Hold fast.’

‘I see it,’ grumbled the steersman. ‘Been doing this for twenty years.’

Thrasne ignored him. If Blint wanted him on the steer-house, it was to take charge of things.

‘Hold fast,’ he muttered again. ‘Now! Hard over!’ He bent his back to the rudder as the bite of the oars took hold, taking up the slack on the tackle until it was tied hard over and they could watch the sweating men at the sweeps. Blint himself was at the line cannon. In a moment it went off with a dull
thwump
of its huge wooden springs, and the line arched out over the pier, where half a dozen standabouts made it fast.

‘Sweeps up,’ cried Blint. ‘Stand by the winch!’ The ship shuddered as it began to draw toward the pier, moving against the surging tide. Thrasne shook his head, remembering the time they had taken on a boatman from a place called Thou-ne. ‘Born in Potipur,’ he said he was. Sanctimonious half-wit. Insisted that no ship had the right to oppose the tide, and the only way to moor was at the end of a line along the bank. Fool had said winching was evil, antilife, and against the will of Potipur. He lasted until the time he took an axe to the rope during a winching operation. Assuming he had been a good swimmer and hadn’t encountered the blight, he might still be alive. Since Blint had dropped him over the side in the far mid-River after dark, however, his survival was only conjectural.

There were no other boats at the Baristown piers. Despite this, there was a considerable gathering at the end of the jetty, engaged in some noisy set-to.

‘ What’re they doing?’ Thrasne asked.

‘Couldn’t say,’ offered Blint. ‘Have a look if you like. I’ll need the walkway down anyhow for those fatbellies coming.’ He nodded toward the town. Several members of the merchant caste were bustling toward them, each trying to be first without being ostentatious about it. None of them quite broke into a run. Thrasne set the walkway, then strolled over it, hands in pockets, down to the end of the pier.

Most of the crowd were simple standabouts, though there were a few fishermen and merchant apprentices who should have been elsewhere. There was one Laugher in his polished black helm, fiddling with the flasks at his belt, staring at each member of the crowd in turn, as though he would see through to the bones. Those at the end of the jetty, however, were Awakeners directing a worker crew in dragging the River.

Thrasne got a whiff of the workers and moved back a few steps. Using workers to labor in Potipur’s behalf was a religious requirement in every town they traveled by, but Thrasne thought it a stinking one, literally and philosophically. The shambling figures were so damned inefficient. Everything had to be done six times over. It took a crew of Awakened workers four times over a field to plow it, and Thrasne had never seen a ditch dug by workers fit to run water through until some competent irrigation manager cleaned it out and trued the sides. Now they were heaving hooks at the ends of long lines, tossing them about a fourth of the distance Thrasne could have thrown them, dragging them back with slow tugs against the tide.

‘What’re they looking for?’ he asked one of the standabouts.

‘Some woman went in the River. Drowned herself.’

‘So? Why the dragging?’

‘She did it to get out of bein’ Sorted. So they say. I don’t know. All I know is the Awakener’s mad as a fisherman with a blight-fish on a new line.’

The Awakener was indeed very angry. He could hear her clearly as she spat at a long-faced, miserable-looking man before her. ‘Fulder Don! It was your duty to come to us if you thought she would do this!’

‘I didn’t think she would,’ the long-faced man said plaintively, his voice flat, almost without expression. ‘I thought it was just her talk. She talked about a lot of things she never did. I didn’t think she’d ever leave the baby. She cared so for the baby.’ The little girl in his arms was crying. About three or four years old, Thrasne thought. Old enough to remember what was going on, without being old enough to understand it.

An old woman with a tight, lipless mouth stood beside the depressed-looking man. ‘Fulder Don,’ she said, ‘I’ve known since you married that silly fool she’d do something like this. I wouldn’t have thought heresy, but who could put it past her? She hadn’t an ounce of loyalty in her.’

‘Mama,’ begged the man placatingly. ‘Now, Mama…’

‘Don’t “Mama” me. You married beneath you and beneath artist’s caste, and that’s all there is to it. Take that idiot child and give her to Delia, will you. I can’t stand the sight of her. It wasn’t enough her mother had to do this dreadful thing, now you’re saddled with the child for her whole life.’

‘Well, Mama, she’s my child, too.’

‘I’m not even certain sure of that.’ The old woman stomped off down the pier, the cane in her hand slamming down in a furious
whap, whap, whap,
which sent angry echoes booming under the pier over the lick and slap of the water.

The Awakener threw up her hands, twirled her staff, and began a slow, mind-curling chant. Thrasne shut it out, humming to himself. He couldn’t stand Awakener chants. If it was to escape this, this chant-driven pretense of life, this shambling excuse for existence, he did not blame the nameless woman who had drowned herself. The band of workers turned from the River to shamble back up the pier, following the glittering staff, eyeless, faceless, only their feet and hands indicating what lay beneath the loosely woven canvas sacks and hoods they wore.

‘Papa,’ the little girl was pleading.’ Papa.’

The man paid her no attention, merely stood staring at the River as though he wanted nothing more than to be deep inside it himself. The passivity of that face moved Thrasne. His hands twitched, wanting to capture that face. This was a man who had given up. He would not do anything, not ever again. He would only float, pushed by the tide of others’ lives, waiting his end under the canvas hood, deserving it. The child turned, caught by the watchfulness in Thrasne’s face, stared at him, eyes wide and accepting with something of that same passivity. ‘Papa,’ she said again, hopelessly.

A woman came out of the crowd to take the child, a nothing much of a woman, small and plump, older than middle-aged. ‘There, there, my Pammy,’ she said. ‘There, there.’ The child sobbed once and laid her head on the woman’s shoulder. That, too, Thrasne coveted, that line of child against the woman’s body, limp and exhausted, giving up everything in the acceptance of this comfort.

Thrasne moved toward the man. What had the old woman called him? Fulder Don. ‘Fulder Don,’ he asked casually, as though he were only another standabout, ‘why did your wife go in the River? How do you know that she did?’

The man looked at his feet, mumbling, ‘A fisherman saw her. She was sick. She was afraid to die. Afraid to risk Sorting Out. My mother… was always at her. Telling her how bad she was. How incapable. I guess she thought…’ His voice trailed away into nothing as he stared into the water, his long, mournful face intent upon another time. ‘She was so beautiful,’ he whispered at last. ‘So very beautiful.’

Something in the intonation made Thrasne look at him again. Yes. Under the shabby cloak the man wore the smock of the artist caste. An artist. Not a successful one, from the looks of it. For which Fulder Don’s mama probably blamed the dead woman. Thrasne turned quickly to return to the
Gift of Potipur,
his hands itching for his carving knife. The man, the woman and child; if he was lucky, he could get both the carvings started before Blint found something else for him to do.