Her passenger had gotten onto the dry slats, and lay sprawled one foot still in the bilge. So he had life in him enough to care for cold and wet. Part of her wished he had gasped his last and just lain there to be rolled back into the canal where he would be no more bother to anyone; and part of her said she ought to quietly heave him now; while a third small part of her mind just sat still waiting to see whether she might not have to take a barrelhook to him after all when he waked. But until then she was not obliged to become a killer, which she was prepared to be, which she had determined long ago she had to be, to stay alive in Merovingen-below.
Tonight, perhaps. The boat drifted and swayed on the currents that surged among the harbor pilings. Almost out of her territory. Almost. They were beyond the Dike. Beyond this point the deep currents began. And beyond this point no boat could go by pole, except beneath the pilings that led out past Rimmon bridges to the Dead Wharf and the Ghost Fleet and the marsh. She sat there panting and letting the sweat dry in the wind and waited for something, his move, her recovery, it was uncertain what.
He made feverish small movements, and still lay there with his eyes open and maybe not seeing her at all, except as a lump of shadow.
So she did not have to think about the barrelhook. He would die before morning. Very likely he would, of the shock and the cold. Like the kittens. Like the Gentry toddler. A body did that, betrayed itself by letting go when it had fought its way all the way back from this much shock. Now surely fever would set in. And the cold would take him. The river gave up very little, and maybe his skull was cracked. There were black marks all over his pale body, bloody scratches, the shadows of bruises. One leg bled a dark trail into the bilge He blinked finally, blinked yet again, a shadowy flutter of half open eyes.
"You're on my boat," she said, if he should wonder where he was. Another blink. He lay there a long moment with no more movement than that and and his breathing. He was not shivering. And that meant he was still dying, only slower.
"I," he said. "I—"
He might live till sunrise, If he did, he had a chance in the hot sun, in its baking warmth. If it were not so long till dawn. Everything was against him. The hour. The canal-water he had drunk.
"You want to live?"
"Uhhhn"
"You hear me?"
"Uhhhn"
"There's a blanket in the hidey. Right ahead of you. You want it, you get inside. Straight on.'*
He stirred a hand, an arm, as if reaching in that direction were enough; and then the other arm, and a knee, and he edged himself a little forward. Again. Slow hitches. He managed a harder shove, and made it with his arms under his belly this time, as if his gut hurt, which it must. He stopped finally. She got the pole and jabbed him in the side, the way she touched dead things in the canal, to get them out of her way. "Move."
He moved. She had not thought he would this time. He crawled inside the halfdeck shelter, all excepting his feet, and stopped, not a care that he would be freezing. Nothing. She had a man going to die among her belongings, right in there in a crawlspace where a dead weight was going to be difficult to get out, and she sat out here with her teeth chartering from fright.
Fool. Dump him in. Give him to the fish tonight instead of tomorrow, that's what you ought to do. He's just going to die, is all. Too many people could have seen you. Some might know you. If Moghi gets wind of you and this trouble at his door—
But after a long time of imagining that villainy she locked her arms between her knees, and rocked and thought and rocked and thought without any shape to her thinking: mist-thoughts, the Revenantists called it, nowhere thinking, back to past lives and past deeds that damned a soul to Merovin instead of the stars; and double-damned a soul to Merovingen; and three tunes damned it to the hell of Merovingen-below.
The Revenantists promised at least no worse place, Which thought failed to cheer her. Mist-thoughts led in circles, and came back to self-preservation. That was the law in hell.
Until a fool intervened in others' business and got a load of karma for it; and a dying man on her hands; and nothing for it but to sit and wait; or do something to help him, because he hid no strength or wit to wrap himself in the blanket in the hidey.
She stowed the barrelhook in a coil of rope and put her knife beside it: her mother's first rule—Don't you get in no wrestling-match with no man. You knife 'im later, hear? and you do that, too, hear? Don't you never threaten. You just do it. If it takes you twenty years. World's got enough bastards. Take 'em out as you find 'em.
Her mother had killed a man. Maybe more than one, her mother had said. None of your business. Ain't a thing to talk on. It's something you just do when you got to and if you go talking about it you're asking his friends for more trouble. Who needs more trouble? They don't want it 'less they're crazy. You don't. —But old Seb don't like me much. I tell you why. It was his brother I killed. Watch him. If he ever crosses you, you're a fool if you don't get him.
Seb was dead now. Someone else did him. Her mother had died first. Altair had no feuds of her own that she knew of. She was a fool to take one on. But her mother had never reproached her about skimming kittens out of the Det. Only when she had pulled the Gentry boy out of the canal, when she came back all wet and shivering onto the boat from the other mother's thanking her (she had dived deep for him, had gone all the way to Det's dark bottom)—You drink any of that? her mother had said, eyes white-edged with anger. Damn fool. And slapped her in the face.
She was days figuring out it was love. And fright. She had been twelve and her mother's moods used to scare her, But maybe the Revenantists were right and it was mist-thinking, and her mother saw into her own future. Her mother died of that water, in high summer when it was most dangerous. Died without telling her essential things. Like who her father was. Or whether it was that man she had killed.
She had never told her how a woman dealt with getting a man onto her boat without having him get out of line and thinking he could take it over; and she had no idea at ail whether she was a fool for saying no when men made her offers. She didn't want to kill anybody, She didn't want to make a fatal mistake. She didn't know what the tight and wrong of things were—she knew well enough how it was to have a lover: a lot of things happened on barges right under the eye of God and everybody, on hot nights when the hidey was too hot. But her mother never had a man she ever saw. Her mother muttered ugly things when men shouted invitations. And Altair Jones pretended she was Retribution's son, not her daughter, as long as her mother lived. That was her mother's idea. And she did her bathing at night and wore loose clothes after she began to have breasts. She gave up some of the cautions after she showed too much, which was when she was twelve and after her mother died; but habits were hard, they were very hard. And she was a fool now. And scared.
And guilty, in a confused way, not sure whether it was a betrayal of her mother she contemplated, or something her mother would have looked at like her skimming up a struggling kitten and just hoping one would live, finally— Break your heart, her mother would say with a shake of her head. Poor thing's gone, Altair.
And she: Mama. Flatly. Never saying what ached inside her, snuffling back her tears when another thing died in her hands. So there was herself and her mother alone on the boat and never another living thing to touch. She saw cats in the rich houses, scampering through the balcony-gardens. She caught a feral cat once the year after her mother died, and it was so crazy it leapt into the Grand and swam for shore. She let it go; it had bitten her half a dozen times, and the bites went bad. She had imagined it would be soft to touch and would take to boat life. It would kitten and she would have kittens to sell to rich shore folk and do well for herself. But it was a shore creature. And her hand and her whole arm swelled. After that she had a chance to get a tame cat off a poleboatman—he wanted her, she wanted the cat. But in the end she got scared, mat we would get what he wanted and then maybe kill her and rob her: he was a back-canaler and maybe stole that cat from rich customers—who knew?