Nevertheless, before the sun stood at midday they had arrived at the top of the bluff, sweating and triumphant, and by afternoon the Kingfisher’s Nest was clanking away upriver at last. Her owner, who had made the whole remarkable journey in his bunk, fastened in with sheets like a dead chieftain in a particularly splendid tomb, was sound asleep and hence unconscious of his good fortune.
But he was sitting up in bed and smoking by the time Smith moored that evening and went below.
“Well done, Smith,” he called cheerily. “I must remember to buy you a nice big shiny machete of your very own when this is all over. One for Willowspear, too.”
“So you didn’t die again, eh?” Smith leaned against the bulkhead. His arms felt as though he had been hammering steel all day. “Great.”
“Must be all this damned fresh air,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and blew a smoke ring. “Our humble servant Willowspear actually handled meat to prepare me a cup of broth, can you believe it? And he grilled the ribs of whatever-it-was for you. They’re in the kitchen.”
“Galley,” said Smith automatically.
“In the covered blue dish,” Willowspear called.
With a grateful heart Smith hurried in and found that Willowspear had indeed inherited his mother’s ability to cook. He carried a plate back to the lordling’s stateroom.
“How much farther is this monastery?” he inquired, slicing off a portion with his knife. “I went aloft three times today, and I couldn’t spot a building anywhere.”
“Oh, well, it’s not what you or I would think of as a building,” said Lord Ermenwyr dismissively. Willowspear looked indignant.
“The brothers live in bowers, open to the air,” he said. “They need no more than that, because they own nothing the air can hurt.”
“Except for writings,” said Lord Ermenwyr.
“They have a library,” Willowspear conceded.
“So they do have one building?” Smith inquired through a full mouth.
“No; the library is housed in a deep cave,” Willowspear explained. “All the Lady’s epistles are archived there.”
“So … will I have any way of knowing when we’re close?”
“Oh, you can’t miss, it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “There’s this whacking great rock spire, and the river goes behind it through a gorge. There’s even a landing.”
“Great,” said Smith. “The sooner we can get this over with, the better.”
He told them about the dart he had found on Cutt. Lord Ermenwyr scowled.
“Nine Hells. I’d have thought the Steadfast Orphans were all at Hlinjerith for the big race war by now. Well, perhaps the boys got them all.”
“We have to go past Hlinjerith on our way back!” said Smith.
“Don’t get excited! I’ll be downstairs here, well out of sight. If you just sail past, they shouldn’t bother you,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “Other than shooting at you a little.”
“They would do no such thing,” said Willowspear severely. “They’re surely going there to protect a sacred place and for no other purpose.”
“But if you time it right with the, er, tide and all that nautical business, they’ll be past before you know it,” Lord Ermenwyr assured him.
Mounting aloft the next day, as a hot wind filled the sails with the scent of forest and plain, no least hint of sea, Smith beheld Rethkast.
It looked like a fist of rock standing in the land, an improbable mountain upthrust alone, towering and strangely streaked with colors. Smith could see no sign of habitation at first, though as he stared he thought he could make out a certain regularity of green along the valley floor below the rock, in long lines. He watched it until a range of hills rose to obscure everything but the rock, and told Willowspear about it when he came down.
“That would be the orchards, and the garden,” said Willowspear, looking pleased.
“What do they grow there?” Smith inquired.
“Healing herbs,” Willowspear replied. “The Lady sends them seeds and cuttings with Her letters, cultivars of Her own creation, whose purpose it has not yet pleased Her to reveal to us. They have kept this garden for thirty years in Her name, in this open land where the air is mild and warm.”
“Thirty years?” Smith was astonished. “We can’t grow anything longer than two years, before the land goes dead.”
“What do you mean, goes dead?”
“Well, you know. The first year your cabbages come up fine, then the second year they’re not so big, and the next year all this chalky stuff comes up out of the ground, and the cabbages are tiny and yellow,” said Smith. “Nothing for it then but to move on. The only place that doesn’t happen is in the grainlands around Troon, because the barley grows itself. We don’t do anything but harvest it.”
“You’ve never heard of crop rotation?”
“What’s crop rotation?”
Willowspear turned and stared at him, saying nothing for a moment. At last he said, “Merciful Mother of All Things, no wonder your people go through the world like locusts!”
“What the hell’s crop rotation? Does it have anything to do with irrigation? Because we know how to do that; our aqueducts will take water anywhere,” said Smith defensively. “We’ve made deserts bloom, you know. Just not for more than two years.”
“But you can’t—” began Willowspear.
He turned and staggered away from the helm, and Smith jumped into place at the wheel. “We know how to steer, too,” he snapped.
Willowspear collapsed on a barrel, holding his head in his hands. “All this time, I thought—”
“That you’re better than us,” said Smith. “I know.”
“No! I’ve been trying to teach your people the Way of the Unwearied Mother. I’ve been teaching them meditation and prayer. What I should have been teaching them all along was simply how to garden,” said Willowspear.
Smith shrugged. “I never thought it was as easy as just saying the Green Saint’s name over and over again, whatever you told me.”
“If you only took the filth you dump into the sea and put it on your fields instead—” Willowspear rose and paced to and fro on the deck in his agitation.
“So I guess interracial orgies aren’t the answer, either?”
“You don’t—there must he love. There must be tolerance, and faith. But—there must be much more, or none of it will do any good! It’s complicated.”
“Well, nothing is simple, son,” Smith told him. “Not one damned thing in this world is simple.”
Willowspear did not reply, staring ahead at the spire of Rethkast.
“It’s just as well you figured this out now, since you’re going to be a father soon,” Smith added. “By the way … was that sorcery the other night, that cold light in the jar?”
“No,” said Willowspear. “It was the powdered bodies of certain insects in a solution of certain salts. Mix them, and the mixture glows. When the powder precipitates out, the glow fades and dies. The Lady’s invention.” He looked oddly at Smith. “But She must purchase the jars from your people. The Yendri have never learned how to make glass.”
As they drew nearer, yet they were driven back; for now the river narrowed between high hills, and the current had greater force. Yet the Kingfisher’s Nest put on all her canvas, and with a fair wind and the steam oars going at full speed they made way at last, and moored in a backwater where a landing pier did indeed welcome them.
“So where’s this back door?” Smith inquired, staring upward at the sheer rock wall.
“We have to climb up and knock,” said Lord Ermenwyr, setting his hat at a rakish angle. “How’s this look? Suitably adventurous? An appropriate ensemble for sweeping a lady off her feet?”