Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

A third wave followed but, after the first two, it seemed almost a gentle caress.

By the time the surges had settled down, a break had come in the clouds and the sun beamed, however briefly, on the countryside. The damage to the boat could have been worse. The fore cabin had been stove in. A plank on the left-side galley had been sprung and was leaking into the hull. A rower had been brained by an oar that had pulled loose from its handlers. And a sailor had a bad cut down the length of his forearm that, under local medical standards, would likely fester and kill him.

The rower was wrapped in a sheet sweetened with herbs, and tied to the prow as a guardian against river hazards until they could raise a burning ghat. The carpenter went to work, first on the hull, then on the fore-cabin. Méarana used some of their medical supplies to treat the sailor.

“Captain Pyar says the worst is over,” Méarana told them when she had returned to the cabin and hung the medical bag on a peg in the wall and taken a seat. “The watercourses up in the mountains bake hard as ceramic during the dry season, and the first rains sluice right off it. He expects the water to rise some more, but not such in a tearing hurry; and the rain will slack off to a constant drizzle. The current has pushed us back about a day’s rowing, but now he can raise sail again and make it up.” She rubbed her face with both hands. There was mud all over, courtesy of the first surge, and it streaked her cheeks and brow. “Ah, well. I was getting tired of the insides of ships and habitats anyway.”

When they went out on deck, they could hardly see the edges of the river, so widely had the flood overspread its banks. Farmsteads and villas poked above the water atop earthen mounds. Catboats were putting out from some of them. Here and there the flood had undermined the embankments and toppled the houses into the waters.

At Rajiloor, the endarooa reached the end of its range. Above this point, the river emerged from the Roaring Gorge, a passage not only too narrow for the vessel to navigate, but one at the head of which was the first of the great waterfalls that marked the upper river. The town was mildly prosperous as a transshipment point because of this. Freight and trade goods were transferred here between endarooas from the lower Aríidnux’r and the durms that plied the upper river, or Multawee.

Like the farmsteads on the alluvial plain, the town of Rajiloor was built atop a rammed-earth platform. The mound had survived decades of floods through the judicious use of marble facings and terraces, culverts and cisterns to divert the water, and frantic repairs between ‘soons. She also benefited from being on the lee bank where the river curved, so the floods coming out of Roaring Gorge sought the east bank.

Rajiloor had been a border town of the old Imperium; but a generation earlier the garrison had declared its general the True Qaysar. Before he could sail his troops downstream to debate the issue, a light-complexioned people of long dark hair called the Tooth of the Wolf had come out of the mountains and made themselves masters of the hinterlands, encircled the the city walls, and waited. When the food ran out, the imperial troops had hailed the paramount chief of the Wolves as the new Qaysar. More realistic than his late predecessor, the Wolf had kept the title “Qaysar” and possession of the Rajiloor Sak, but refrained from bothering downstream lords with other opinions. The key to success being ofttimes a judicious lowering of one’s goals, the Qaysar of Rajiloor pretended that the Qaysar of Nuxrjes’r was his overlord, and the Qaysar of Nuxrjes’r pretended he meant it.

The sailors and rowers took their payout from the captain and vanished into a town in which every other building seemed a tavern or a brothel. The population was a mixture of Rajilooris, Nuxrjes’ri, Wolves, Harps, Emrikii, and others.

Méarana set up a headquarters in a wharfside tavern called The River Dog. The main room was low-ceilinged and was constructed of heavy cross-beamed timbers. The wooden tables were long and narrow, with polished surfaces, and names carved into them. The air was redolent of stale beer.

She sent Donovan and Sloofy to hire the durms they would need for the next leg of their journey. Sofwari went into town, with Teodorq to watch over him, to take more of his cheek samples. That left Méarana in the tavern with Billy and the other Wildman.

She had been wary of the little man ever since Donovan’s revelations. But Billy, seeing how she sat away from him, only sighed. “Ah, missy. Was not Billy Chins good khitmutgar? When he not take care for you?”

“You could have told us you were recruiting for the CCW rebels,” she said. Perhaps it was the deceit that grieved her most; although she could not say Donovan had been much less deceitful.

“Would Greystroke have permitted me aboard his ship if I had? At best, he would have left me to face my pursuer. At worst, he would have done my pursuer’s work for her.”

“You do him an injustice.”

“Do I? For such stakes, would you have announced yourself?”

Méarana had to admit she would not. She spread the holomap across the table. The map was impregnated on a flexible substrate, so it would fold up and fit snugly in a carry-bag. Once unfolded, it shook hands with their amshifars and with the traders’ satellite network, and displayed their locations within a half-league of actual.

The tavern-master spoke the imperial language after a fashion—a generation’s occupancy by the Wolves had not obliterated all knowledge of the ancient loora nuxrjes’r —and Méarana desired to learn something of the conditions in the Roaring Gorge region.

“Ah sure, your honor, the Roaring Gorge is right peaceable the now,” the taverner said. “Himself is after going through there no more’n two-three year back and taught’ em to bend the knee. My wife’s cousin’s younger son was with that army. Now, they might be a bit pouty, but if you carry our Qaysar’s safe conduct—may Owl protect him—they won’t dare be touching you.”

“Are there any Gorgeous folk in town? We could use a native guide through that country, and we can pay well.”

The tavern-master fingered his ear and his eyes wandered to the holomap on the table. “So I’ve heard,” he said. “So I’ve heard. There be none of’ em staying here at the Dog, but there’s always some what come down afore the rains, seeking after their fortunes. I’ll put the word around, if you’d like.”

Méarana nodded. “That would be nice.” She pointed to the second great falls, the one that danced off the Kobberjobble escarpment. “We’ll need to find the way past that. They told us in Riverbridge that we might find guides here in town.”

The tavern-master shook his head in admiration. “Ah sure, and that is a fine map your honor has gotten yourself. Is it some charm that a trood has recited into the cloth that makes it grow so? The Qaysar’s master-general has such a high-low map, but it is made of plaster. I saw it myself when I was young and pretty and marched with the Owls, and I thought it surely a wonder, painted up and all in green and blue and brown. But this is like flying above the land itself.” At this point, Méarana’s question seemed to catch up with his admiration, and he tossed his head. “I hear tell of a trail past Second Falls that passes through the Harp country. Good fortune finding a guide. The Harps be enemies of the Gorge-folk and the Wolves alike. ‘But red gold conquers all.’”

“Are these Harps enemies to regarders?” The locals called all off-worlders after the Bonregarde .

The old man laughed. “They’d not likely know of you, at all. They think the nuxru noorin , the river of light, is the mountain path that Fjin Cuul trod long ago, high up the Mountain of Night.”