A man came into the room. I could just make out his bulk in the faint starlight from the windows. I sat still, holding my breath and my knife.
The big dark shape blundered past my bed, felt its way over to the end bed, and sat down. I heard shoes thump on the floor. The man lay down, thrashed about a bit, muttered a curse, and lay still. Pretty soon he began to snore. I thought it was a ruse. He wanted us to think he was asleep. But he kept it up, deep and long, till daybreak.
When Melle woke and found a strange man in the room she was very frightened. She could not wait to get out.
Our host gave her warm milk for breakfast, and me warm cider, along with good bread and fresh peaches. I was too restless and uneasy to want to wait for the barge. I told him we’d be going on foot. He said, “If you want to walk, walk, but if you want to float, she’ll be along in an hour or two.” And Melle nodded; so I obeyed.
The barge came into the wharf in the middle of the morning, a long, heavy craft with a kind of house amidships that made me think of Am-meda’s boat in the Marshes; the decks were piled with crates, hay bales, several cages of chickens, all kinds of goods and parcels. While unloading and loading went on I asked the master if we could take passage, and we settled soon enough on a silver piece for fare all the way to the Sensaly, sleeping on deck. I went back to the Black Cat to settle our bill there. “A bronze,” the dwarf said.
“Two beds, food and drink,” I protested, putting down four bronzes.
He pushed two back to me. “I don’t often get a guest my own size,” he said, unsmiling.
So we left that town, went aboard Pedri’s barge, and set off down the river Ambare at about noon. The sun was bright, the bustle of the docks cheerful, and Melle was excited to be onboard a ship, though she kept at a distance from the master and his assistant, and always very close to me. I felt relieved to be on the water. I said in my mind the prayer to the Lord of the Springs and Rivers I’d learned from my uncle in Ferusi, I stood with Melle watching the longshoreman free the rope and the master haul it in while the gap of roiling water slowly widened between the boat and the dock. Just as the barge began to turn to take the current, a man came down the street and out onto the docks. It was Hoby.
We were in plain sight standing against the wall of the boathouse. I dropped down to sit on the deck, hiding my face in my arms. “What’s wrong?” Melle asked, squatting down beside me.
I dared a glance over my forearm. Hoby stood on the dock looking after the barge. I could not tell if he had seen me.
“Beaky, what’s wrong?” the child whispered.
I finally answered, “Bad luck.”
♦ 15 ♦
The town passed out of view behind us around the bend of the river. We drifted easily downstream in the hot sunlight. As we stood at the rail of the barge I told Melle that I’d seen a man I knew, who might know me.
“From Barna’s house?” she asked, still whispering.
I shook my head. “From longer ago. When I was a slave in the city.”
“Is he bad?” she asked, and I said, “Yes.”
I didn’t think he’d seen me, but that was small reassurance; he had only to ask people on the dock, or the host of the Black Cat, if they’d seen a young man, dark skin, big nose, looks like a Marshman.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re on the boat, he’s on foot.”
But that wasn’t very reassuring, either. The barge went at the pace of the river, steered with a long sweep and rudder at the stern. It put into every town and village on the riverbank, taking on and putting off cargo and passengers. On its upriver journey it would be pulled by horses on the towpath by the river and would go even slower, the master told me. That was hard to believe. The Ambare, taking its course through great level plains, didn’t exactly run; it wandered and meandered, it moseyed along, in places it oozed. Drovers used the towpath to move their cattle; sometimes we’d slowly come up to a herd of brown and brindle cows clopping along at a cow’s pace, headed downstream like us, and it would take us a long, long time to draw ahead of them.
The days on the water were sweet and dull and calm, but every time we drew into the wharf of a village my fear rose up again and I scanned every face on shore. Over and over I debated with myself whether it would be wiser to debark at some town on the eastern bank and make our way afoot to the Sensaly, avoiding all towns and villages. But though Melle was by now in much better shape than she’d been when I found her, she still couldn’t walk far or fast. It seemed best to float, at least until we were within a day’s journey of the Senssaly.
The end of the barge journey at the rivermeet, was a town called Bemette, and that town I resolved at all costs to avoid. There was a ferry across the Sensa-ly there, the barge master told me, A ferry was what we needed, but that’s where Hoby would be waiting for us. I only hoped he would not be waiting for us sooner than that. On horseback or by wagon or even walking hard, he could certainly outpace the barge and arrive before we did at any of the villages on the western bank.
Pedri the barge master paid us little heed and didn’t want his assistant to waste time talking to us. We were cargo, along with the boxes and bales and chickens and also, between village and village, the goats and grandmothers, and once a young colt who tried, the whole time he was on the barge, to commit suicide by drowning. Pedri and his assistant slept in the houseboat, taking watch and watch while the barge was afloat. We made our own meals, buying food at villages where we stopped, Melle made friends with the chickens, who were being sent all the way to Bemette; they were some kind of prize breeding stock with fancy tails and feathered legs, all hens. They were perfectly tame, and I bought Melle a bag of birdseed to entertain them with. She named them all, and would sit with them for hours.
Sitting with her, I found their mild, continual conversation soothing. Only when a hawk circled up in the sky over the river, all the busy little cluckings and talkings stopped, and they huddled under their perches, hiding in their ruffled feathers, silent. “Don’t worry, Reddy,” Melle would soothe them. “It’s all right, Little Pet. Don’t worry, Snappy, It can’t get you. I won’t let it.”
Don’t worry, Beaky.
I read in my book. I said old poems to Melle, and she learned to recite The Bridge on the Nisas. We went on with the Chamhan.
“I wish I was really your brother, Gav,” she murmured to me one night on the dark river under the stars. I murmured back, “You really are my sister.”
We put ashore at a wharf on the eastern bank. Pedri and his hand were busy at once unloading hay bales. There was no town as such, but a kind of warehouse-barn and a couple of old cowboys guarding it. “How far is it to Bemette from here?” I asked one of them, and he said, “Two, three hours on a good horse.”
I went back aboard and told Melle to gather up her things. My pack was always ready, filled with all the food I could carry I’d paid the fare before we started. We slipped ashore, and as I passed Pedri I said, “We’ll walk from here, our farm’s just back that way,” pointing southeast. He grunted and went on shifting bales. We walked away from the Ambare the way I’d pointed till we were out of sight, then turned left to bear northeast, towards the Sensaly. The country was very flat, mostly tall grass, with a few groves of trees, Melle walked along beside me stoutly. As she walked she muttered a soft litany, “Goodbye Snappy, goodbye Rosy, goodbye Gold-eye, goodbye Little Pet…”