Lauren Haney: A Vile Justice

"Most have, yes, but…"

"Do you think me any less a swimmer than they are?" "They know the river well-and its hazards."

Bak scowled. "Call one of your men and tell him to guide me across the rocks to the ship. I'll also need a stout lightweight rope."

Neny's eyes flashed resentment at so peremptory a tone, but he bowed his head in acquiescence.

Bak's wait was brief. The young man summoned, fourteen or so years of age, was slim as a reed and seemed always to wear a shy grin. Neny spoke to him in a dialect Bak could not understand, but Imsiba tilted his head, listening closely to words he had known as a child. In the end, he seemed satisfied with the headman's instructions.

Setting off, Bak carried the rope coiled around his left shoulder and the youth, an inflated goatskin used by local people to provide buoyancy in the water. Rather than work their way across the chaos of cracked and broken rock at the base of the promontory, they took a roundabout but less treacherous route, walking ankle-deep through windblown sand, leaping from rock to rock across a swift channel, wading through knee-high weeds and hip-deep water. Beyond a row of islets, craggy and barren of life, flowed the channel through which the ships were pulled. A well-beaten path requiring a modest amount of wading carried them north along the open stretch of swift-flowing water. Bak merely nodded to the men he and the boy passed, certain they would reveal nothing until he had seen the wreck for himself and could question them with the authority of knowledge.

They halted on a high mound of weathered rock adorned with a single tamarisk and dotted with tough, spiky grass. The islet lay slightly upstream, overlooking the wrecked ship. A pole made shiny by the slippage of ropes was wedged between two boulders. The islet was unoccupied, the pole bare of rope. Directly across the channel, a villager sat on his haunches, raising something to his mouth — dates most likely — and chewing with vigor. Close beside him, a taut rope was wrapped several times around a boulder, its far end attached securely to the wreck.

Bak studied the mound on which he stood and the bare pole. "This looks to be a critical place from which to ease a ship down the channel. Why is it not manned?"

The boy shrugged. "Dadu was here. He swam out to the ship with a rope, which he'd made fast to this pole. When last I saw him, he'd come back and was waiting for his team to come help. Then the ship wrecked, and I never thought to look again. Where he's gone now, I don't know."

Bak scanned the channel, the men perched on the rocks overlooking the narrow chute of water, and the calm and safe cove not fifteen paces downstream of the wreck. "Where was Neny when the ship struck the rocks?"

"There."

The youth pointed upstream toward a tall granite monolith rising above the surrounding landscape, an ideal place from which to watch the activity all along the channel and to issue orders. A flatter rock beside the monolith was occupied by a balding man who had snugged his rope around a protruding mass of stone. The far end of the rope was attached to the ship.

Resting his backside against the pole, Bak stared across a short span of swift, tumultuous water, a dozen paces at most, toward the broken ship. The vessel looked no different at so close a distance than from afar. Rather like a lamb savaged by a jackal. Too badly injured to save.

He focused on the cargo, a hundred or more bundles, probably a thousand cowhides total, lashed to the deck in front of the deckhouse and behind it. Those washed by the river were well soaked, but he assumed they could be recovered and dried with no loss in value. No wonder Neny's men were staying close. To salvage so much would earn them ample reward.

Chiding himself for wasting the last precious moments of daylight, Bak knelt beside the water and looked out at the foaming surface. If he were to learn the truth, he must enter the river. He shuddered at the thought. In the not too distant past, he had come close to drowning; now he feared the rapids mightily The boy voiced no objection, but watched with dismay as Bak looped one end of the rope around the pole and carried the remainder of the coil to the water's edge. Trying not to see his own fears mirrored in the youth's face, he shouldered the rope and stepped into the river. Taking a deep breath, shutting down the dread, he dove beneath the surface.

Swimming against the current's tug, he examined in light filtered by silt-laden water the liquid world around him. The rock lining the bottom was an extension of the mound he had just left, a tumble of rough, broken boulders that reached out toward the open channel. During low water, they and the boulders on which the ship lay would form a single barren island. A school of fingerlings-carp, Bak thought-swam among the naked limbs of a drowned bush. He imagined he could taste the fish, the silt, the mustiness of the ages.

Spotting a taller outcrop at what he judged to be midway between him and the wrecked ship, he rose to the surface for air and swam toward the projection. The current pulled at him, trying to carry him downriver. The rope got in his way, hampering the use of his left arm and at the same time breaking his speed as he slowly played it out. Nearing the outcrop, which reached to within a hand's length of the water's surface but was hidden beneath the foam, he lunged toward it.

Without warning, an arm broke the surface. A hand beckoned.

He jerked away, so startled he sucked in water. The current caught him, tore him from the outcrop, and carried him downstream. Froth warned of a maelstrom ahead and he came close to panic. The rope pulled him up short.

Swimming with all his strength, trying not to cough, he regained the outcrop, held on tight, and surfaced for air. The hand-if he had indeed seen a hand-had vanished. He coughed water and at the same time tried to give the boy a reassuring smile. When his breath came easily again, he worked his way around and down the outcrop, taking care not to cut himself on knife-sharp edges of splintered rock. On the far side, he found the hand. And more.

The body of a man, pale in death, wide-eyed with fear, bobbed up and down in the current. A stout rope, snarled and tangled in a crevice, was wound around his legs, holding him underwater. Bak noted the rope's frayed end and a long burn-like injury down the man's right thigh and leg where he had been dragged across the rocks. This, he thought, must be Dadu. The tale he read was clear, but only half a story. To find the rest, he must swim out to the wreck. Sensing the passage of time, he resurfaced, took in air, glanced at the sky. The sun would soon disappear, leaving Wawat in darkness. He must leave Dadu submerged and hurry on.

He swam straight to the wrecked ship, noting as he did the taut ropes rising from the broken vessel to the islets lining the channel, holding the wreck in place. The three boulders on which the ship lay were cracked and pitted, weathered by time. Diving down, he saw the rough-cut sandstone blocks used for ballast spilling around the boulders from the ragged hole in the hull. A school of tiny fish swarmed around the hides. A large perch swam among them, feasting on his smaller brethren, sending them darting in all directions. The frayed end of a thick rope waved from among the blocks, the same rope, he felt sure, as the one around Dadu's legs.

Surfacing for air, he swam around the cargo to the rudder. The hides looked secure on the steeply sloping deck, but for how long? He played out the rope he carried around his shoulder and tied the end to the aftercastle, forming a bridge of sorts between the ship and the islet on which the boy sat. A trio of crows scolded him from the surrounding boulders.

He flung a rock their way, sending them squawking into the air, and dove again. In moments, he found attached to the hull the heavy rope he assumed Dadu had carried out to the ship before his death. Rather than rising toward the islet where the boy stood-as it should have-it curved around the trio of boulders and back toward the ship to disappear in the pile of hides. By prodding and poking, he traced its path through the cargo and back into the water, where all but the frayed end had been entombed beneath the sandstone blocks. It looked, he thought, as if a mighty being, a god perhaps, had torn the rope free and flung it, sending it around the boulders and in among the hides, dooming the ship.