Lois Bujold - Passage

Barr flinched. “I wasn’t trying to seduce her,” he got out, in a much smaller voice.

“What were you trying, then?” said Dag, still in that dead-level tone.

Barr’s teeth clamped.

“I know where Berry keeps the rope, up in the stores,” said Whit grimly. “We could hang him. Plenty of trees back in those woods.”

“I wouldn’t stop you,” said Remo. Barr winced.

Berry pressed her temples uncertainly. “It seems I took no harm. Thanks to you boys,” she added a little gruffly, with a nod all around at her crew. The young men all stood a bit taller. “Hanging might be too much.”

“Too much, or too good?” said Whit.

Hod offered helpfully, “My sister made me drown some extra barn kittens once—tied ’em in a sack with some rocks, see. We got some feed bags up front, and there’s plenty of rocks on the bank. We could do that.”

Barr’s eyes shifted toward Hod in deep uncertainty.

“Dag?” said Whit, and “Dag?” echoed Remo and Hod.

“Wait, how’d I get elected judge, here?” said Dag. “It’s Berry’s boat. She’s boss; any decision’s hers.”

“You’re the expert in Lakewalkers,” Berry said. The only trusted one, she did not add aloud, but it sort of hung in the air implied, Fawn felt.

“I’m not Barr’s patrol leader. I’m not even a member of Pearl Riffle patrol. Dag No-camp, indeed. Closest thing Barr has to a senior officer here would be Remo.” Dag tilted his head invitingly at the dark-haired patroller.

What are you thinking, Dag? Fawn wondered. Besides ahead…

Barr said desperately, “Remo, Amma’s holding me responsible for you, and I can’t make you do anything! It’s not fair!”

“Now you know how I’ve always felt about you.” Remo took a breath, nostrils flaring. “It’s Berry’s boat. Whatever she decides, I’ll abide.”

“It wasn’t what you think…”

Berry stalked up to Barr, sweeping her blistering gaze from his boots up to his blond hair. “You are about the most worthless sack of skin I ever met. You ain’t payin’, you ain’t workin’, and you ain’t welcome on my boat. So git!”

“No!” cried Barr in ill-considered defiance. “Not without my partner!”

Dag’s brows went up. “You heard the boat boss. Hod, Whit, get his boat in the water. Fawn, Hawthorn, fetch his things and bung them in. Remo…” Dag stood to his full height as Barr started to struggle. “I’ll lend you a hand.”

The crew of the Fetch scattered into action. Fawn brought the bedroll, conveniently already rolled up, and the bow and quiver, and flung them any which way into the rocking narrow boat right after Hawthorn tossed down the pack and the sacks.

Dag and Remo manhandled the struggling Barr through the door, although he stopped fighting and froze once Dag’s hook eased around and pressed into the corner of one eye. “Don’t move sudden. That’s better. Now, you got two choices,” Dag advised. “You can climb down into your boat from the deck, here, or you can climb up into it from the water, over there.”

The water was black and utterly opaque this morning, and even here by the shore the current raced, making strange patterns on the surface. And it looked so cold Fawn would not have been surprised to see little skins of ice jostling, but it was likely still too early in the season for that.

“I’ll climb down,” Barr choked. The two released him, and he scrambled over the rail, bitter fury in every jerky motion. The narrow boat rocked only a little as he sank, balanced, into his seat. Remo bent down and gave it a hard shove out into the swirling current.

Barr looked around him. “Hey!” he said indignantly. “Where’s my paddle?” He held up both empty hands in protest as his boat drifted farther from the bank.

“Oh, leave him go, just like that!” cried Whit in delight. “Downriver bass-ackwards!”

Berry, lips clamped, stalked over to retrieve one of the narrow boat’s paddles from where they lay by the cabin wall. She strode to the back rail and launched it endwise; it landed a good thirty feet downstream of Barr’s narrow boat, and was caught by the current. If she’d thrown it the same distance upstream, it would have drifted right to Barr’s reaching hand.

“There’s your paddle, patroller boy! Chase it!” she yelled after Barr.

“Nice,” said Whit, leaning on the rail with eyes aglow.

Barr, with a lot of choked muttering in which Blight! was the most frequent word Fawn could make out, leaned from side to side and began clawing the water with his hands in an effort to overtake his paddle’s head start.

“Who gave Barr the shiner?” Fawn asked, leaning beside Whit.

“Remo. And me. And Hod, but he was too scared to hit him very hard.”

“Ow,” said Fawn.

“He earned it.”

“I won’t argue with that.”

The clinging river mist closed around the narrow boat, although the disembodied cries of Blight it! drifted back for a while longer.

Berry squinted out in satisfaction. “Right. That should make the Fetch a sight more peaceful.” She dusted her hands and led her crew back in to find breakfast.

Fawn hesitated by Dag, who stood with his hand on the rail looking out into the layer of gray damp, but seeing, she suspected, much more than she did. There was scant satisfaction in him, only close attention. “There,” he said at last, straightening. “He’s got his paddle back.”

“Is that the end of him?” Fawn asked hopefully.

Dag smiled down at her. “Well, there’s this. He’s a Lakewalker boy away from home for the first time, all alone. He’s not going upstream by himself, that’s for sure. His only choice is to keep going down, like us. So we’ll see.”

She frowned at him in doubt. “Do you want him to come back?”

“I don’t like losing patrollers.”

“You kept Remo. That’s one.”

“I don’t like losing two patrollers ’bout twice as much as I don’t like losing one.”

“Well, I hope you can find more value in Barr with your groundsense than I can with my eyes and ears.”

“I hope I can, too, Spark,” he sighed.

Though the weather stayed cloudy and chilly, the Fetch made steady downriver progress all that day. The enclosing hills flattened out, sign, Berry explained to Fawn, that they were passing west out of the hinterland of Oleana into level Raintree. The riverbanks were drained of color, sodden brown with gray tree boles broken only by an occasional glum-looking river village, or sometimes dun farm fields open down to the water. No longer autumn…not yet winter.

Berry kept Remo on the sweeps with her—possibly, Fawn figured, to avert another grounding, since she encouraged Remo, in a way Bo had not, to offer warnings. At least Bo did not ignore Dag’s laconic remarks. Clearly, river pilot could be another job for Lakewalkers amongst farmers, in addition to medicine maker. When Fawn started sorting through the possibilities with an open mind, it seemed to her that farmers and Lakewalkers offered vast possibilities to each other, for all that Lakewalkers scorned any task that diverted them from hunting malices. Yet someday the last blight bogle ever had to emerge and be destroyed. What would patrollers do when there was no more need for patrols? Not in my lifetime, Dag had said. Maybe Lakewalkers were better off not dwelling on an end none of them would live to see.

She glimpsed Barr’s narrow boat ahead of them a couple of times that day, and what might have been a campfire on the far shore that night, till the rains came again and doused the distant glow. The following day she saw his boat trailing far behind, an ink-stroke on the gray water, before the Fetch rounded another curve and the shifting shoreline hid it.