The Book of Fire (38 page)

N’Doch watched Stoksie labor for about three strokes, then took up a second pole from the deck and signaled his readiness to help. The raft began to glide along at an impressive speed. Erde thought of the dragon back in the street, but did not send him an immediate image. Her proximity to all this moving water would only upset him, although she’d noticed that his terror of it had abated somewhat since his sister had joined them.

The passages between the buildings were narrow and dark, with the tall red walls sometimes rising up inches from the sides of the raft. Often N’Doch was forced to set his pole aside and ease the raft along the green-slimed walls with his hands. They followed many sharp turnings, some of which looked like dead ends until the very last minute, in a mazelike progression from courtyard to courtyard, and everywhere the same tall red walls and shadowed, broken-out windows. I would get lost, Erde observed, then understood
that this was exactly the point of it. She spotted other gangways, cobbled together out of whatever had been to hand, making bridges between two buildings or an exterior access around the perimeter of a hidden courtyard. But she saw no other floating docks like the one they had just left. Once, they slid under a particularly elaborate bridge construction, and N’Doch gave it a complimentary wave.

“Yer crew, dat?”

Stoksie nodded. “All dat.” His gesture was a high inclusive circling, and Erde took it to mean the entire city. Baron Köthen sat up ahead of her with his back to the big post in the middle of the raft, so that he faced Stoksie, as well as the girls paddling behind. He was so quiet and still, it made her nervous. Once, he asked her to translate some remark of Stoksie’s. When she’d checked with the dragons and passed it along, he looked away, up at the shadowed walls sliding slickly past, touched along the tops with the bright orange of the late sun.

“It’s like some sort of fever dream, isn’t it?” His eyes flicked toward her dolefully. “Not, of course, a dream such as you are accustomed to, my lady witch, though as I appear to be in it with you, perhaps I am mistaken about that as well. Still, it seems more like a vision—such as one is forced to move through without choice or control.”

“My dreams were always like that,” she reminded him sternly. “But this is not a dream, my lord. It is real, I can assure you.”

Köthen laughed, soft and dry as a whisper. “To you perhaps it is.”

And then they were distracted. The raft slipped out of the shade of a narrow alley into angled red sun glinting off a big rectangle of open water, like a flooded market square. Stoksie leaned into his pole and the raft lurched forward. N’Doch let out a happy yell and bent to his own pole. Soon they were coursing down the length of the square in full orange daylight at the speed of galloping horses. Erde grappled for handholds and clung to the deck as if she might be swept off by the breezes that riffled her hair. They shot out of the square into a long straight passage, approaching another sort of building, the hugely tall towers visible from the distance when they’d first entered the city. Close up, they were terrifying: taller than any cathedral spire Erde
had ever seen, both gleaming and dark, and so narrow she could not imagine how they remained upright. Staring up at their soaring heights made her dizzy, and convinced her they were tumbling down on top of her. Several of them gaped open at the water level, with holes so vast that the entire raft could have floated right through and in among their charred and twisted beams.

Suddenly N’Doch gave another whoop and hauled his pole out of the water. “Too deep na, man!”

“Yah!” Stoksie replied. “Getchu heah, hold ’er steady, while I put up sail.”

N’Doch trotted the length of the raft, as surefooted as if on dry land. Behind, the girls were padding madly to catch up. Stoksie slid his pole into a slot between two bits of wood projecting upward at the rear of the raft. The pole rested at an angle and drifted a bit, side to side. N’Doch took hold of it, pushed it back and forth experimentally, and Erde saw that the raft shifted direction according to the motions of the pole.

“Gotcha,” said N’Doch. Stoksie went toward the front to shoo Baron Köthen away from the central post, which Erde now recognized as a sort of mast. After several complicated maneuvers and the untying of several knots, Stoksie straightened and shoved a thick rope into Köthen’s hands.

“Haul it a gud’ un, whitefella!” he cried. Then he whirled away to fumble with a mound of stained cloth beginning to stir in the wind as he released its bindings.

“He means pull on it hard!” N’Doch translated, with obvious glee.

Köthen flashed him a look as sharp as a needle, then took a firmer grip on the rope and pulled. A dented metal rod clanked upward at a precarious angle to the mast, drawing the sail up with it. The raft slewed clumsily as the hot wind leaned into the folds of the canvas and puffed it outward toward a smoother curve. Stoksie snatched the rope from Köthen’s grasp, looped it around a raised bit of the decking, then fastened it with an abrupt flick of his arm. The girls grabbed at the end of the raft, one to either side of N’Doch, and sprang up out of their boats, dragging ropes to tie them with. The little boats bobbed along like dogs on a chain as the raft picked up speed.

“Hard off ta port, na!” Stoksie yelled. He clapped Köthen familiarly on the back as he scrambled toward the rear. Erde braced for another fight, but Köthen just stood there, fighting for balance against the craft’s new momentum and observing the activity blurring around him with a bemused frown. When N’Doch shoved the pole to one side and the raft swung to obey, the patched and mildewed sail snapped into full billow. The girls sped forward, shoving Köthen aside to grapple with the ropes flapping from the bottom corners of the canvas. Köthen stared after them, then retreated to his safe seat at the base of the mast. Erde eyed him covertly. Had she misjudged his survival reflexes? Was all this newness and change going to prove too much for him?

“’S’alright, Dolph!” N’Doch called from the helm. “We’ll make a sailor outa you yet!” He grinned hugely and turned his face into the wind. Erde could not recall him ever looking so delighted, except when he was making his music.

The raft handles a lot better than N’Doch expects it to. Must be one helluva rudder attached to this mumbo jumbo tiller, he decides. And though he’s sure that the beat-up sad wreck of a sail will split its many seams as the steep downdraft between the high-rises swells it out like a nine-months’ pregnant woman, it doesn’t. The crude stitching holds, and the raft responds to his touch.

“Which way, na?” he yells to Stoksie.

The older man crabs backward to join him in the stern. He points out a course between the plundered office buildings. The girl-babies take turns manning the sail sheets and refilling their water bottles from a big plastic barrel on the foredeck. N’Doch worries about the sanitary procedures, then figures if these folks are carrying all their own water, they must be taking steps. He’s just gonna have to risk it and hope for the best, or go thirsty.

“Getting deep,” he remarks, as the raft skates past the tip of some drowned church’s bell tower.

“Yu gud deckman, tallfella.”

N’Doch is pleased. “Grew up on da watta.”

Stoksie looks at him. “So who din’t?”

N’Doch guesses the man’s age: maybe forty-five, fifty at the most. Has the water been high that long? He jerks his thumb forward. “Dem two.”

“Yah? Mount’in-bred, den?”

“Betcha.”

Now Stoksie’s looking at him hard. “
Town
folk?”

“Nah. Castles, is more like.” He wonders what the man’s got against townfolk. Something, that’s for sure.

“Yah? Where’sat?”

“Ever hear a Europe?”

Stoksie shrugs. “Sure, one time. All unda na, ri’?”

All under.
All under what? All underwater? N’Doch swallows. How’s he ever going to tell the girl? “Nah. Mount’ins still lef’. Like here,” he guesses, with a glance toward the west where, between the shafts of dying skyscrapers, blue crenellations press upward like a woman’s breasts against the red sky. The picture is coming in clearer now. It’s just what the vid guys predicted. Half the world’s underwater. Holy shit. “S’ dey come heah, lookin’ fer a fren’.”

“Alla way frum Urop? Mus’ be sumkinda gud fren’, na.”

N’Doch nods gravely. “Betcha.”

“Sumun roun’ heah?”

“Mebbe. Don’ know fer shur. Din’t find ’im yet.” N’Doch sees the water opening out ahead, past the sunstruck edge of a steel office tower and through a gateway of rusted girders. “Dis town gotta name?”

Stoksie turns his blackened grin on him. “Jokin’, ri’?”

“Nope. Askin’.”

“Dis here’s Big Albin, tallfella. Da prida Nyork. How far yu say yu come?”

“Li’ I tellyu, man. Way far.”

Stoksie takes over the helm when they swing out into the open bay. N’Doch feels some mean crosswinds cutting across his nose, as dry as a gust off the Sahara but honed with salt. A current catches the raft and heads it downstream. But it seems Stoksie intends to tack upstream, so the going is slow for a while, back and forth in the unrelenting sun. But better than walking, N’Doch tells himself.
He goes forward for a long warm drink at the water barrel, then settles down next to the girl to unload what he’s heard. He’ll let her pass it on to his lordship and the dragons. He does ask her, though, how they’re doing.

She eyes him impishly. “Lady Water says she’s waiting for you to stop enjoying yourself and get on with business.”

N’Doch coughs out a guilty laugh. “She didn’t say that.”

“No. But she might have.”

“Ha, girl! You made a joke! I’m keeping my eye on you now!”

The bay is long. Eventually, N’Doch decides it must be a river. It’s risen with the seas and flooded out the low-lying areas, so it just looks like a bay, with barren, rocky shores. The girl-babies chatter among themselves as Stoksie laboriously guides the raft upstream. They throw looks at Köthen as he leans back against the mast and appears to doze. He looks stunned and passive, but N’Doch doesn’t believe it for a nanosecond, and he’s pretty sure the girl-babies don’t either. At least the man’s had the sense this time not to insist on taking charge. Maybe 913’s favorite hothead is learning how to go with the flow.

After a tough hour of fighting the current, Stoksie is looking slick and tuckered. N’Doch worries for the little man’s heart. “Yu wan’ sum help?”

Stoksie waves him off stubbornly, and then, as if his refusal has gained him strength, the raft glides along more readily, actually picking up speed. Stoksie rubs his bald head and flashes a big, gap-toothed grin. “See dat? I ain’ dun fer yit!”

“Yu ain’ even half dun!” The dude’s been so easy to deal with so far, no sense making him feel bad. N’Doch winks sideways at the girl so she doesn’t spill the beans. There’s no sign from below, no odd ripples, no careless bumping against the underside, but he knows a certain water dragon is down there, helping things along. He pictures her, a blue shadow streamlined into porpoise sleekness. He smiles, leans back, and shuts his eyes.

A much easier hour later, when Stoksie heads the raft toward a little inlet on the western shore, N’Doch has actually been dozing. He stirs, refreshed, looks around. Things are a little greener up here, though not by much. The trees are stunted and dust-cloaked, but they have scrawny little
crops of leaves, and the weeds scattering the tops of the steep clay banks show a few yellow flowers. N’Doch spots a line of broken foundations along the bank top, and an occasional bit of crumbling wall. Might have been a town once, but it’s history now. His little nap has reawakened his curiosity.

“Wha’s dat up deah?” he calls to Stoksie.

“Sumplace. I fergit whaddit wuz back den. Call it Plaguetown nah.”

N’Doch looks alarmed.

“Na, dey’s nuttin deah nah. Dem plagues is long gone.” Then it’s Stoksie’s turn to look concerned. “Yu got plague still up nort’?”

“Na. None a dat.”

“Gud. Cuz yu don’ lookit. Look reel healt’y, alla yus. Firs’ ting I notice.”

Stoksie noses the raft expertly into the inlet, then strips his pole free of the rudder and plunges it into the water again. N’Doch leaps up to join him. It’s too shallow here for invisible dragon assistance. The girl-babies race back to haul the rudder out of its casing. They toss it long and dripping on the deck, then grab their paddles out of the trailing boats to lend a hand at forward motion.

The inlet was probably once a creek emptying vigorously into the river. Now the water wanders sluggishly upstream. Jumbles of boulders, still marked by tar stain, line both sides of a steep and scrubby ravine. Soon the streambed sprouts rocks and becomes an obstacle course as the ground climbs around them. More ruins perch on the slopes past the rockfall, wooden structures sagging into shapelessness and char among the bleached skeletons of pine trees. Quaint houses along a picturesque mountain stream, N’Doch muses, recalling travel vids of Switzerland, or the American Rockies, where the cowboys come from. Then there’s a cry of metal on stone, and Stoksie calls a halt. The raft’s oil drum pontoons are scraping bottom. He poles toward a bankside stair made of ascending natural ledges, and lands the raft with a final shove and a twist of his pole. A faintly worn track winds up and away through the stiff scrub clinging to the slope.