Michael Flynn - Up Jim River

The company set out two days later in three durms. These were massive, flat-bottomed boats, built of thumb-thick oak planks coated with tar from the seepages near Black Springs. Each was twelve double-paces in length and nearly three arm-reaches wide at the midpoint, and required a crew of five to handle.

Méarana and Sofwari rode in the lead boat, the Madareenaroo , with Djamos Tul, their new guide. They sat on cross-benches that ran athwart the boat. Donovan and Billy Chins rode in the Green Swan together. The two bodyguards rode in the Gadlin with Sloofy. The space between the benches was packed with their luggage, supplies, and trade goods.

The boatmen themselves were a stolid lot and said little beyond the perfunctory greetings and instructions. “We take you to Candletown near the Roaring Falls,” the head sweeper said. “Twelve Freddies for each boat. Six up, and six we gotta go back after we drop you off.” Then he took a position in the rear of the boat and the others unshipped great sweeps and placed them in the locks. “Jennelmen,” the steersman called out. “Dock-side two, push off light! Push!”

One of the oarsmen shoved against the pier with his sweep. “Bow pair, maintain the gain.” The two forward oarsmen stroked against the current while they waited for the other two boats to assume position. When the steersman had assured himself that all was ready, he called out, “All four, normal pull, full stroke.” He waited until the two bowsmen completed a stroke, then called, “Stroke!” and the two stemmen dipped into the water in synch with their brethren, pulling hard with the full length of their bodies. “Eki dumah!” the sweeper announced and then sang out a rhythm:

“ Kay , kay-kay, kay.”

To which the rowers responded:

“ Eki dumah!”

On Eki , all four oars pulled together.

“ Kay , kay-kay, kay.”

“ Eki dumah!”

Under this steady rhythm, the boat began to make way against the current. Behind them, Méarana could hear the other boats calling similar rhythms. After a while, she pulled her clairseach from its case and began to play along. One of the bowsman looked up in surprise and his oar caught a crab and smacked into the sternman’s oar. The steersman hollered at them in the riverman argot and quickly had them back in synch, but by then the Green Swan had passed them, jeering and shouting “lu-lu-lu!” The Swan’s sweeper showed his ass.

“Our steersman does not seem happy with you,” Sofwari said. “He glowers. Perhaps your music can charm him as it charms me.” He shifted to the bench ahead and sat facing the harper. “You play so beautifully.”

“I can play ugly if you wish. My range is wide, and music has many purposes.”

“None higher than beauty, and no purpose greater than simply to be.”

Méarana strummed a bit of goltraí, but softly, so as not to distract the boatmen. “I think you have confused art with entertainment.”

Sofwari opened his mouth to speak, but second-thought stopped him. “I’ll consider that. I’ve only ever been on one side of the music.”

She shifted to the “War Song of Clanthompson,” a tune handed down in her family from the dark age after the diaspora. Fierce, angry, dissonant, and full of wild vengeance, it caused Sofwari to shiver. She stilled the strings with the flat of her hand. “Was that ‘pretty’?” she challenged him.

“I never said ‘pretty.’ I said ‘beautiful,’ and there is more than one kind of beauty. There is beauty in the golden skin and flaming hair of a fierce young woman; but there is wild beauty even in tragedy and death. There is nothing delicate or fragile about it.”

The harper regarded him for a moment in silence. “Now it is you who gives me pause.”

“Almost,” he said. “I am glad your mother is lost. Otherwise, I might never have met you.”

Méarana smiled. “Your second thought saved you from the penalty incurred by the first. But don’t try to be too clever. I’m not one to be gulled by clever words.”

Sofwari bobbed his head. “I’ll speak no parables if you will simply play.”

The boatmen ate lunch on the river, taking turns, but they drew their boats up on the west bank when it was time for evenmeal. Because of the long curve in the rivercourse, the west bank caught the lee of the flood and so the silt was less deep. Stepping out of the boat, the right bowman pressed a copper coin into Méarana’s hand. “Yez honor th’boat,” he said in a thickly accented imperial.

The rivermen had with them a flask of what they called dis; oil, which they used to ignite the still damp-wood they gathered for their fires. This oil was distilled from the rotted remains of the ulmo tree in the far south. A fungus that grew within the tree consumed its woody part and altered it to the oil. Donovan wondered if this were a natural thing, or one that had been created by the fabled engineers of old Commonwealth days.

On the second eve, they reached the ruins of Madéen O’ Loons. Broken columns and walls and statues emerging from the mud revealed where portions of the city lay buried. The boatmen ignored the place, save to pull a panel from the ground to use as a makeshift table; but the Gaelactics explored the ruins. Even Teodorq was impressed.

He had found a statue whose face had been exposed by the recent flood. “This here is one stubborn fella,” the Wildman said. “Look at the eyes and the chin. Do you suppose these people were black, or is that just the stone they used for the statue?”

Donovan found what he supposed the base of the statue, which bore an inscription in the old Tantamiž script. “Hold fast forever,” he read, slowly puzzling it out.

Teodorq looked about the ruins. “What happened to them?”

“Forever came and went.”

Sofwari and Méarana wandered to the higher ground that marked the center of the site. From it, the science-wallah surveyed the vast, treeless, mud-covered plain east of the river and shook his head. “It is as if man and all his works have been wiped from the face of Enjrun,” he told the harper. Three fires burned on the sandy shelf by the river bank, and the smell of wood and flame and meat were carried to them on the now-gentle southern breeze. “We might almost be the last survivors, in a few lonely boats, of a vast world-scraping tsunami.”

Méarana was deaf to his poetry. She faced west and could spy in the far-off distance the glow of the Kobberjobbles that still caught the daylight on their peaks. “Up there somewhere,” she said. “That’s where she went.”

Sofwari caught her hand. “You won’t find her there. Her ship would still be in orbit, otherwise.”

She pulled her hand from his. “I know that. But I may learn why she went there, and given that, where she was bound.”

“I didn’t believe her, you know, when she and I spoke on Thistlewaite. I thought the tale of the Treasure Fleet was pure fable; but she made the leap right off from my anomalies to the old legend. A leap of faith, for she had no data to prove her theory.”

“Mother never let a few facts get in the way of a good theory.”

“That’s why we science-wallahs only tabulate facts. We describe what happens and how it happens. But why it happens…?” He shrugged. “Is gravity a form of love, as many say? All we can know is that it is the nature of matter to attract matter, as Shree Einstein decreed. To answer why it is natural exceeds our writ.”

“Does that not make you feel limited?”

“Oh, no, Lucy! I have the whole of the universe to play with—from the little thread shapes all the way to galaxies, and everything in between. That there is more, who can deny? There is love and justice and beauty—and hate and bias and ugliness.”