Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (15 page)

 
          
When
I woke up hours later I could feel that the
Spry
Goose
was out on the river. The light was dying fast, so I must have slept
throughout the day. Jambi still lay stretched out, snoring. She only groaned
when I shook her. My arms and shoulders ached like hell, and my right hand felt
as if it was bandaged in concrete, not linen. I climbed back into the sheets
again, and didn't wake until the following dawn. Since the
Spry Goose
had already been under way by evening, Marcialla was
evidently made of sterner stuff than me—unless the aftermath of the drug
delirium was kinder to the flesh than the after-effect of abseiling from the
heights.

 
          
It's
only in stories that a snip of a deckhand suddenly gets promoted to boatswain;
and Marcialla wasn't as foolishly grateful as that, merely because I had saved
her life (perhaps), and because Credence had deserted.

 
          
By
the time I came on deck again, Marcialla had already promoted Sula, from Gate
of the South, to the post of boatswain. I couldn't help musing that slim, short
Sula wasn't at all the sort of woman who could hoist a paralysed boatmistress
all the way up a tree and sit her on a trapeze! ("Let me have those about
me that are slight", to parody the ancient fragment
Julius Czar.)

 
          
Of
course Marcialla did thank me, and granted me sick leave till my hand healed.
No more painting or hauling on ropes for a while for Yaleen! Actually this was
a mixed blessing, since it meant that I had nothing to do but bum about the
boat like a passenger, and watch the jungle pass by, and get in the hair of the
cook by offering to help her one-handed. And all the while bottle up what had
happened, like a dose of the black current.

 
          
I
also had time to think about my fortune, as told by the Port Barbra woman. I
had asked a few of the other women what they thought about cartomancy. (I
hadn't asked Jambi, perhaps because I didn't want her to ask me in return what
the cards had showed.) Only one woman thought anything at all about the matter,
and what she thought was rather contradictory. On the one hand, the cards would
always tell a story that seemed plausible to the person concerned. But on the
other hand this story would be set out quite at random.

 
          
I
puzzled about this and decided that the pictures on the cards were really so
general that somebody other than me could have extracted an entirely different
personal saga from the sequence of spyglass, bonfire and such. And I myself
could very likely have picked nine other cards, and seen the very same story
mirrored in them too.

 
          
And yet. . . .

 
          
Even
in their thumb-marked, washed-out dowdiness there had seemed to be something
powerful about the cards, as though they and all their predecessors had been
handled for so many centuries that, if there had been no truth in them to begin
with, nevertheless by now the images they contained were fraught with
generations of uneasy emotion. With each use—here and there, now and then—
people put a tiny portion of their own lives and will power into the images on
the cards; and this mounted up eventually, so that the cards became, well,
genuine.

 
          
We
weren't sailing under very much canvas, as though now that we had left Jangali
safely behind, Marcialla wished to prolong the time till we next made port.
Realistically, of course, this allowed Marcialla to keep a leisurely eye on how
well Sula was coping with the sudden change in her duties.

 
          
Just
a couple of hours before we were due to reach Port Barbra, Marcialla called me
to her cabin.

 
          
* *
*

 
          
She
poured us both a small glass of junglejack from an almost empty bottle.

 
          
"Oh
dear," I said, regarding it.

 
          
"It'll
only go off. It doesn't travel." Marcialla smiled. "But you do,
Yaleen. You get around. First of all you were in the Jingle-Jangle that
night—"

 
          
Hastily
I raised my glass and gulped half of the stinging spirit down to prompt my
cheeks to flush of their own accord.

 
          
"—then
up you popped at the top of that wretched tree, knowing just what was wrong
with me."

 
          
"Well
you see, Lalo had mentioned the fungus drug, saying how it made time stand
still—you remember Lalo and
Kish
? They were—"

 
          
"I
remember. They
did
help me back to
the boat."

 
          
"So
when I saw you sitting as still as that in such a dangerous spot—"

 
          
"You
put ten and ten together and made a hundred. And a hundred was the right
answer. I've already thanked you for your prompt and loyal act of bravery,
Yaleen. At the time it would have been ungracious to ask you . . . why you
eavesdropped on Credence and me." She waved a dismissive hand. "Oh,
don't worry about that. I'm not offended. What I'm really interested in, being
a
guildmistress. . . .
" And again she paused but
I only stared at her, waiting it out, till she chuckled. "I think you
ought to have expressed a degree of surprise there. You should have exclaimed,
all wide-eyed innocence, 'Oh, are you?'"

 
          
"Word
gets round," I mumbled; and I swallowed half of the remaining junglejack.

 
          
"As
a guildmistress I have a duty to see that, how shall we put it . . . ?"

 
          
"The
applecart isn't upset?" I oughtn't to have said this. Marcialla had
practically forced me to complete her sentence for her, so long did she put off
doing so herself.

 
          
"I
was going to say: the order of things. Maybe you've heard people talking about
the balance of our little applecart before. . . ."

 
          
This
time I certainly did keep my lip buttoned.

 
          
"Well,
whatever. I won't press you, since I'm grateful. Now I want you to swear that
you'll say nothing at all about this particular insanity—this mad idea of
doping the current—which is only really just a gleam in someone's eye, as
yet." She reached for
The Book of
the River
and the guild chapbook, both. "Otherwise people begin to
gossip. Other people overhear. Sooner or later some man starts to wonder,
'Shall
we try it?' Before we know where
we are, we're deep in the manure."

 
          
"I
already said something—to Jambi.
And Lalo, too."

 
          
"Oh,
I don't suppose you told
everything,
did you?"

 
          
I
swallowed. Not junglejack this time. I swallowed saliva—and my heart.

 
          
What
was "everything"?
The drug?
The Observers at Verrino?
The fact that
Capsi had crossed the river without benefit of any crazy fungus drug, but by
using a diving suit?
The fact that over on the other
side they burned women who loved the river, alive?

 
          
All
these things together made up "everything." Surely even Guildmistress
Marcialla had no way of knowing everything!

 
          
She
peered at me quizzically. "You don't seem like a person who tells ... all
they know."

 
          
I
took the two books and laid my bandaged palm upon them, wondering vaguely
whether this meant there was a cushion between me and my oath. "I swear I
won't say anything about what Credence was up to. What she had in mind. May I
spew if I
do.
"

 
          
"As
you have spewed before, I suppose ... Of course we must remember charitably
that Credence was simply acting out of, shall we say,
devotion:
devotion to this river of women, and to the current which
is its nervous system. Other people—men in particular— mightn't feel quite so
devoted." Apparently satisfied, she took the books back and placed them on
a shelf. "You've done well, Yaleen."

 
          
"Um,
how did it feel when time stopped?" I asked.

 
          
Marcialla
burst out laughing. "You're
impossible,
dear girl! But since you ask, it was . . . interesting. Though not all
that
interesting, in the circumstances.
Imagine wading through molasses for ten days . . . No, I can't really describe
it. I suppose you're fascinated by the current too? Yes, I see you are. Most
people take it for granted. You can never ignore it, if you're going to be a
guildmistress." Her eyes twinkled. "That, incidentally, is
not
a promise."

 
          
And
she went on to enquire in kindly tones about my hand.

 
          
And so to Port Barbra.
After all the excitement and the
omens in Jangali I approached this town with some misgivings, as if I might at
any moment be kidnapped by hooded women, and smuggled off into the depths of
the jungle dazed by drugs.

 
          
Not
so, however.
Neither on this first visit, nor on the several
return visits which the
Spry Goose
was to pay to Port Barbra during the next ten to twelve weeks.
(For we
started in on a local run: Jangali to Port Barbra to Ajelobo, and back again.)

 
          
Compared
with massively stone-hewn and timber-soaring Jangali, Port Barbra seemed
something of a foetid shanty town. The main streets were as muddy as the side
lanes, though at least the major thoroughfares had wooden walkways along both
sides, supported on stilts. Insects were a nuisance, not so much because they
bit you, as that every now and then they liked to fly into your nostrils,
making you snort like a sick pig on a foggy morning. I took to wearing a scarf,
too, when I was in port; and a head scarf as well to keep them out of my hair.

 
          
Port
Barbra exported precious timbers: the gildenwood, rubyvein, and ivorybone—all
of which trees were small and required no heroic junglejack antics. However,
the inhabitants only used cheap woods for their own buildings and furnishings.
They built as though they intended to abandon the town as soon as they had all
made their fortunes. Except that there were no fortunes in evidence. Frankly I
wasn't surprised if in such a place a few people took drugs. And perhaps a town
which is one large slum either gives up trying—or else it cultivates a certain
mysticism and inwardness. Certainly, in their quiet murmurings and hoodedness,
and in their apparent contempt for comfort or luxury, the Port Barbrans
appeared to have adopted the latter course.
Though of
mystical extremes I saw nothing.
Nor on any visit did I run into that
fortune teller—should I have recognized her, if I had!—nor Credence, either,
supposing that she had made her way to Port Barbra with the help of her allies.

 
          
Naturally,
I wondered what
had
happened to
Credence. On our first visit to Port Barbra Marcialla spent a long while ashore
closeted with the quaymistress. Subsequently I noticed many heliograph signals
being flashed up and down stream: signals which I couldn't work out at all.
Days later, when we were on the river again, more coded signals reached us,
passed on by the boat behind. Later on, I noticed Marcialla observing me with
pursed lips when she thought I wasn't looking.

 
          
And
so to steamy, bloom-bright, aromatic Ajelobo, a paradise compared with Port
Barbra.

 
          
I
could have settled happily in Ajelobo.
Jumped boat, like Credence.
Signed off.
Ajelobo was so neat and . . . yes, so
innocent, at least on the surface.

 
          
The
houses were all of light wood and waxed paper. There
were
hot
springs
just outside the town, where the population seemed to migrate
en masse
every weekend. Children, who
were all dressed like flowers, flew kites and fought harmless little battles
with them in the sky. Old men with little white beards played complicated board
games employing hundreds of polished pebbles. There was a puppet theatre, a
wrestling stadium—for wrestling was a local passion—and dozens of little cafes
where people talked for hours on end over tiny cups of sweet black coffee, one
of Ajelobo's prime exports. There were even three daily newspapers turned out
on hand presses, filled with fantastic anecdotes, puzzles, serial stories,
poetry, recipes and elegant long-standing arguments by letter (about costume,
manners, turns of phrase, antiquarian fragments) which no one plunging into
midway could hope to follow, but which regular readers savoured with all the
avidity of someone reading an adventure story. Of which, in fact, many of the
most exotic were written and published in Ajelobo, and exported.