“Hold that thing still, can’t you?” cried the man on the edge of the aqueduct.
“I’m doing my best!” his colleague protested. He was sweating, his muscles straining with the effort of keeping the canoe where it was supposed to be. He was clearly not accustomed to this particular task and from where I stood, it looked as though he was making a mess of it.
“Cloud Eagle?” I called out from the bank.
“Yes,” snapped the youngster. “What do you want?”
“Sorry to distract you, but...”
The man on the aqueduct threw his jug down in disgust: It dropped straight into the canal, missing the canoe by a hand’s breadth. The young man in the boat sat down heavily.
“Sorry,” I said again, “but it’s about your father...”
With a sigh he got up and took up his pole again, using it to push the boat towards me. “All right. I’m coming. Don’t think I can help you, though.”
From above my head a voice snarled: “Keep it short. We’ve still got a living to make!”
Cloud Eagle did not get out of the boat. He was taller than I, so although the bank was raised a little above the water’s surface, we were almost eye-to-eye.
“My cousin lent me this boat,” he explained, indicating with a glance over his shoulder that his cousin was the elder man still glowering down at us. “He said he’d help me until Father comes back... or at least until we find his canoe.”
I felt my eyebrows lift. “Your father took his boat with him?” That was curious. His wife had not mentioned this. It was odd enough for a man to wander off by night for no apparent reason, but where could he possibly want to go that would mean he needed his canoe? It suggested he had not merely felt the urge to go behind the wicker screen hiding the nearest public latrine, and maybe fallen in a canal on the way. He had had some purpose in mind, one that meant travelling farther than he could easily walk.
“Yes, he seems to have done. I hope the boat comes back... I mean, I hope he comes back, of course, but there’s no way we could afford to replace the canoe. In the meantime, Flint Knife up there has let us use his, and he agreed to help me fill the jars, just for today.” The lad grimaced. “I should have suggested we do it the other way around. I’m usually the one scooping water out of the aqueduct and pouring it out, while Father holds the boat steady. I hadn’t realised his part of the job was so difficult!”
I looked at the jars surrounding him in the boat. None was more than half full. “I expect you’re right and you can’t help, but have you any idea at all where your father might have gone? Or if he was, well, up to anything — well, you know what I mean...”
“I know,” said the young man sadly. “Anything he wouldn’t want my mother to know about, you mean? No, I don’t think so. If there was anything like that he didn’t share the secret with me.”
I sighed. I was going to have to go back to Lily with nothing to report, but I could think of nothing more to ask. “All right. If he does appear let him know that Tiger Lily wants to see him, won’t you?”
As I turned away, and Cloud Eagle picked up his pole again, a thought struck me. “How are you going to carry on now that jug’s gone in the water?” I asked curiously.
“Oh, that happens all the time.” He laughed. “I’ll just dive down and get it again. We’ve lost it in deeper water than this before! It’s only waist-high here, that’s one of the reasons we use this spot.”
Lily was, as I had anticipated, not particularly pleased at my failure, and the prospect of her two years’ free deliveries vanished somewhere beyond the city limits, but she was even less pleased the next morning.
“I don’t believe it!” The words, uttered in her shrillest voice, echoed around the courtyard of her house. “Both of them gone now?”
The bearer of the news was none other than Flint Knife: Cloud Eagle’s cousin.
“That man owes me a good deal,” Lily was saying, “and if you’re telling me his son’s gone missing as well...”
“What happened?” I asked Flint Knife. “And why are you here?”
The man was almost as angry as Lily. His face was a peculiar purple colour. “How should I know what happened? All I know is, when I went to fetch my boat this morning, it wasn’t there. I thought my cousin might have borrowed it so I went to his house. But his mother told me he’d vanished in the night — just like his father before him! I came here because I knew you’d been looking for Blue Feather and you spoke to his son yesterday — I thought you might have some idea where he’s gone.” The man breathed heavily, and added: “I need that boat, you understand? It’s all very well helping out a relative in trouble, but I have to have it back, or else how am I supposed to live?”
The pitiful note in his voice did not impress Lily. “I don’t understand what made you think we could help. I’ve got enough troubles of my own — what?”
Her last word was snarled at me, because I had just cleared my throat. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we can help, after all.” I turned to the water seller. “Just one question, though. When you spoke to Blue Feather’s wife this morning, did she seem upset at all?”
He stared at me incredulously. “What, a woman who’s just had both her husband and her son vanish into thin air?” He paused, frowning. “Actually, now you mention it, she didn’t seem all that concerned. She didn’t look as if she’d been up all night crying, anyway.”
“What are you thinking, Yaotl?” my mistress demanded.
I glanced up at the sky. It was cloudy, but I sensed that the Sun had not yet climbed very high. “It may not be too late,” I muttered to myself. “If he waited until dawn... And he would, he might not find the place in the dark...” I looked at my mistress. “We’ll have to go now, though,” I said. “In fact, if we can run, so much the better!”
I was to regret my suggestion four hundred times over before we had come to the water seller’s house. As a former priest I had been trained to endure pain and exhaustion by the endless round of fasts, ritual self-mortifications, and vigils that our rites demanded, but that had been years before. By the time we reached our objective my lungs felt as though they had been seared by hot smoke and my legs were twitching and threatening to double up under me. Flint Knife looked and sounded worse than I was. Lily, who had kept pace with us with her skirts gathered about her knees, seemed, surprisingly, a little better, although in truth for the last part of the journey we had all more or less slowed to a brisk walk. All the same, as soon as the little house hove into sight I realised we had got there in time.
We all paused for a moment, panting. It was Cloud Eagle’s cousin who was the first to utter words, staggering two further, exhausting steps towards the canoe moored by the house. “That’s... my... boat!” he gasped incredulously.
“Yes,” I muttered, starting forward myself. “And there’s your cousin, and look what he’s holding under his arm! Stop!”
The young man wasted only a moment staring at me and my exhausted and desperate-looking companions. Then he leapt straight into the canoe, the object still cradled under his arm, and seized a paddle with his free hand. At the same time his mother appeared from the house, screeched once, and ran along the bank towards us.