“Unless the orbit decayed,” said Donovan when she had given voice to this hope. “Even a Hound’s ship would not survive uncontrolled reentry into a thick atmosphere.”
“Cheerful, as always. If the noor jesser—”
Lafeev chuckled. “Nuxr,” he said.
“Noor.”
“No, no!” Playfully, he enunciated. “‘Nu—’”
“Noo.”
“X—” He breathed roughly.
“Huh.”
“No, cough a little. ‘Nu-x-r.’”
“Noo-huh-r.”
Lafeev threw his head back and violated protocol with a belly laugh. The other Dūqs questioned him and he answered in a dialect that the earwig could not entirely translate. Méarana picked out the phrase “lazy throats,” which evidently referred to the Gaelactic inability to hack and cough their way through the local lingua franca.
She caught his eye and said, distinctly, “Fitir,” properly palatalizing the F, aspirating the T, and trilling the R. Her tongue, struck like a snake on the T. Then, before he could do more than begin to frown, she smiled. “Sure, and the Gaelactic plays as much with the lips and the teeth as your loora does with the throat and the tongue.”
There was no mockery in it, and so he took the correction in good humor. “A man one day older is a man one day wiser,” he pronounced. “By Owl, I swear it, I know not why he gave men such a myriad of tongues. But Owl knows all, and Owl knows best.”
The courses that were brought out also alternated Gaelactic and Enjrun dishes. There was a bean salad called pully that Donovan said was much like the fool he used to get in the Terran Corner. Sofwari commented that pully and fool might both be forms of an earlier word. “My colleague, Gwenna Tong Thalasonam, believes that basic sound units may change and pass on like the little thread shapes. What is an F, after all, but an aspirated P?”
“Did my mother tell you,” Méarana asked the Dūqs, “what she hoped to find up in the hills?”
Lafeev only shook his head. “Whatever it was, may Owl grant that she found it.”
The way things had turned out, Méarana very much feared that Owl had done just that.
XIII. UP JIM RIVER
The endarooa Efranizi set forth from the main docks of Nuxrjes’r two days later and rowed upstream until the southerlies freshened and the sail could be let down. She comprised two galleys linked by a platform on which sat fore and aft cabins and a mast from which hung a square mainsail and a triangular “lantern” sail.
“Remarkably stable,” said Sofwari, “but not much for maneuvering.”
The boat’s captain, Pyar Allweed, laughed. “Don’t need much maneuver on Big River. We sail-up straight during the ‘soons; then let the current carry us back. We just reverse the sail-rigging and the rowers’ benches. ‘Course, working the Delta is almighty different.”
“What,” said Méarana, “is the ‘soons?”
“Told you,” said Captain Pyar, nodding his head toward the south. “When the southerlies blow, it brings the rain.”
Behind them, dark and lowering, thunderheads boiled over the distant Mut’shabiq Delta.
“Well,” Sofwari shouted above the howling wind, “at least we know why they build these little houses on top of the decking.”
Méarana and her people huddled in a close wooden hut, whose canvas door periodically pulled loose of its stays and flapped like a sail with three sheets flying in the wind. Rain sprayed in through gaps in the planking, in the roofing, and through the front door itself.
“Cain’t fer th’ life O’ me see why they bothered,” said Paulie O’ the Hawks.
Zhawn Sloofy, a guide and translator hired in Riverbridge, shook his head. “Alla time, Gaelactics complain. Too wet, too dry, too hot, too cold. Why not stay home where everything more better?”
Paulie O’ the Hawks had come down from Blankets and Beads to gawk at the women and had decided at the last minute to throw in with the expedition. “Youse’re goin’ inta hill country, aina?” he asked the harper. “What farkin good is a cow-kissing plainsman up there?” This, with a nod toward Teodorq. Méarana and Donovan had agreed that another pair of strong arms would not be amiss, and hired Paulie as a second bodyguard.
By morning, the rain had passed on, but a second front moved in right behind it and so by afternoon the downpour had resumed. After a time, Teodorq and Paulie said to hell with it, stripped to loincloths and moccasins, and went out on deck with the boathands, where they helped at odd jobs or squared off in sparring matches. Méarana made them swear not to hurt each other. The sailors watched the matches with interest and bet on the outcomes.
After several days of this, Donovan, in the persona of the Sleuth, announced that the patterns of wins and losses relative to the odds suggested that both Paulie and Teddy were fixing the fights to clean up on the side-bets.
“Which proves there is something those two can agree on,” Méarana said.
The ‘soons moved north in wave after wave. This had a certain predictable consequence. The river began to rise.
“What goes up, must come down,” Captain Pyar told them cheerfully. “Ye’d best brace yourselves for some rough times.”
Teddy and Paulie tied everything down, and laid out straps and lifelines as they had seen the crew do. “One hand for yourself; one hand for the ship,” the captain reminded everyone.
By the fifth day, the river was over its banks and still the ‘soons did not let up. On the shore, the farmers scuttled for high ground and the fields were underwater. The sailors and rowers made signs to the grain-goddess. Sloofy told Méarana that the entire valley depended on the annual rains to refertilize the alluvial plain.
That afternoon, a sailor perched high on the mast hollered, “She’s a-coming!” and slid down the rigging to the deck, where he and his mates struck the sails and joined the rowers at the oars. The helmsman strapped himself to the tiller. Captain Pyar, the boat’s carpenter, and the mate stood at the ready, clipped to the lifelines that ran the length of the deck.
“What’s ‘a-coming’?” Billy Chins asked.
Sofwari frowned. “A flash flood if I don’t miss my guess.”
Donovan grunted. “If the ship’s company think it worthwhile to hang on for dear life, I for one will not call them fools.” And he, too, grabbed hold of the ropes they had run in the aft cabin.
Méarana pulled the cloth flap aside and peered ahead into the steel-gray curtain of rain. The south wind sang through the ropes and stays. The water hissed against the twin hulls. The oars groaned in their locks as the rowers, assisted now by the sailors, bucked the surging current.
And then she saw it. The rain turned black and a wall of water bore down upon them. The rain that had fallen in the northlands was not only returning but, to all appearances, returning all at once.
The boat heeled as the water humped up underneath. Then the wave broke over the deck, and swept Méarana from the doorway and toward the stern. She heard Sofwari’s cry of alarm as she scrambled for the lifeline; but Billy reached out and grasped her arm, hanging on against the force of the water, hauling her to safety.
The wave filled the cabin, lifting them and choking them with turgid water. The cabin walls creaked and Méarana thought they must either burst or the cabin would fill up and drown them all. But the wisdom of the chinks in the woodwork now revealed itself: They acted as scuppers to drain the water out over the stern.