Riverkeep (4 page)

“Close one there, Mr. Rattell!” he said, trotting down
the stairs past the little fraudster. “Need to look after me bits an' bobs.”

Rattell hadn't moved—his eyes, both the twitching and the still, were fixed on the slumbering forms of Rigby and Pent.

“They'll be fine, sir. By an' by, you was wond'rin' who sent me for the mandrake. Nobody, as a matter of fact—I came into an awareness of its hereabouts an' thought it'd be a wonderful thing to plant it an' make it mine, rather than have it suffer at your hands. I'm reckonin', though, that the employers you was holdin' it for might want it back fair sore, an' that its pendin' disappearance is the reason you've a streak o' wee on your nicely pressed inseam.”

Tillinghast nodded at the yellow stain on Rattell's white suit.

“Rosie . . . Rosie . . .” muttered the little man. He appeared completely unaware now of Tillinghast's presence—staring through the walls of the cellar into another place, where unspeakable things were already happening to him.

“Well, don't you worry none 'bout that. Jus' tell them that I's got it, an' I likes drinkin' in the inn at Lauston—you gets a fine clear potœm there, an' there's hair on the pork scratchings. They can come an' fetch the mandrake if they fancies. Ta-ta.”

Tillinghast dressed, tucked his neck-silver inside his shirt, then sauntered out the cellar, whistling happily. He stepped
over the unconscious lumps of Rigby and Pent, tucked the mandrake under his elbow, and, holding his severed arm by the hand as though it were an infant child, disappeared into the freezing city night.

Rattell whimpered softly for a few minutes, until his sniffling was interrupted by the handclap fanfare of Mr. Rigby's unconscious fart, at which point he began to sob.

It is a sight to truly gladden the heart when one
sees a bäta break through a river's foggy shroud.
The bright colors in which they are traditionally painted stand in stark contrast to the murk on which they sit and the earthen tones of the surrounding land. Their brightness is for visibility: that they may act as beacons
of fortitude and hope in the darkest places of the waterfolk's world.

But it is perhaps the eyes painted on their ornate prow that remain uppermost in one's mind when their form has once again been subsumed by the clouds: heavy-lidded and wide, they are for the warding off of evil spirits and the guidance of the tillerman's hand. Yet they convey something that is deeper and more human than should emanate from a smear of pigment, and there is no doubt that the beholder reads often into that stare the contents of his own soul.

—Wheeldon Garfill,
A Path Trod Well: Journeys of My Life

“Untie the arms!” shouted Pappa.

Wull leaned on his shoulders, pressing him into the seat. Pappa writhed and fought him, the sinews of his neck straining and pressing inside the quick skin like fish in a sack.

“Sit down!” said Wull, teeth clenched.

“No! Untie!”

“
Please
, Pappa . . .” said Wull.

“Stinking boy! Stinking!” shouted Pappa, the rasp of his voice rising to a wet gurgle again until he spluttered and choked. “Stink! Stink! Stink!”

“Pappa . . .”
said Wull again, and he leaned on the shoulders until his bruises from the oars began to ache.

“The river,” said Pappa urgently, and there again was the sound of his own voice, whipped by the storm that raged inside him.

“The river?” said Wull. “What about the river?” He spoke quickly, trying to hold on to the wet, slippery rope of Pappa's real self. “Pappa? The river?”

“Keep it,” whispered Pappa. “Keep it . . . keep it, keep it, keep it . . . stinking, stinking it that speaks!”

Wull slumped to the ground and watched as the angry, violent face took over Pappa's expression once again. Pappa seethed at him, glowering through his brows, his muscles shaking.

Behind Wull, the Danék moved along as it always
had—relentless and solid. Over Pappa's straining he heard again with his mind the sputter of lanterns in the cold and he felt the weight of it all, the insides of him stewing in the bile of his fear, burning and wasting like a salted slug until he was nothing but the dull ache of Pappa's anger and the river's constant strength.

He checked the bonds on Pappa's wrists—they would hold. Fat, dirty fingers grabbed at his.

Pappa met his eyes as he stood, but they were
not
Pappa's eyes; clouded by milk and fury, they belonged to some hunted thing, not the man who had bounced Wull on his knee and whispered stories to him in bed.

Wull took his hat from the floor, wedged it on, and shrugged himself inside the clammy, seula-gut shift and the deerskin coat (first skin-raisingly cold and then prickly with heat), heaved up the replenished bottle of whale oil, and went out into the frozen night, leaving Pappa tied to the spare chair.

The wind had picked up, and the black surface of the moving water rippled and shimmered. A manic twitch moved the skeletal branches of the trees along the bank, shaking the stark, dead whiteness of the world.

The bäta glared at him from under a soft layer of windblown white; it shouldn't have been out for this time, he knew—the paint would flake down to the wood in the wet wind.

“I'm sorry, all right?” he said, climbing gingerly aboard.

The bäta nodded in the water, moved, he knew, by the river, not as an act of forgiveness.

Wull pushed off into the current and let the boat drift. Even through his glove he felt the smoothness of the wood on Pappa's seat . . . the Riverkeep's seat. His seat.

In the center of the night's star-scattered black, the moon beamed down, half covered by scraps of cloud. If it was high that meant there were no ursas around; only when it dipped below the tree line would he have to worry about them, and by then he would be long gone. He
should
be all right, so long as he was careful. Only once on his keep had Pappa encountered an ursa: an adolescent cub, still twice the size of a man, disorientated by the effect of fermented sunberries. The animal had snapped one of the oars like a twig before Pappa had smashed his lamp on the ground and it fled in a shower of flame.

Pappa had been lucky. “An ursa,” he had said, “will run an' climb an' swim an' fight better than you—better than ten o' ye, twenty o' ye.”

“What about twenty o'
you
, Pappa?” Wull replied.

Pappa had laughed. “They'd make a big, long scarf out of twenty o' me!” he'd said, and mussed Wull's hair.

Wull laughed, but Pappa had taken his shoulders and knelt beside him.

“Ye can't be out past the dippin' moon, all right? 'Cause the moment you see the flash o' their skin it's already too late;
they're on ye! An' ye'd be just a scrap in their teeth.”

“All right, Pappa,” Wull had said, and then he'd gone to bed and dreamed fearless, childish dreams.

And now he was here and they were all around him, hidden in dens covered by snow-drenched branches, caged behind only the thin barrier of sleep.

Sometimes,
sometimes
, if they came at you, it worked to play dead. But you could never be sure. Wull looked at the shadows moving in the woods and wondered how much courage it would take to remain still and silent while an ursa snuffled about your skin and gave your flesh an experimental tug.

In the distance, the ocean barge's soft putter was fading, and the captain's light had already been taken by the fog. The bäta's nods felt impatient to Wull, and he sensed the eyes on him again.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “Let's get it done. It's all well an' good for you—you don't have blisters on your hands.”

He began to row, ghostly bubbles spinning from the blades, the muscles of his back stretching painful and tight across his shoulder blades. The bäta was heavily built, its frame wide with thick-hewn beams.

“It's easy for you right enough,” he muttered to it. “You get crafted an' varnished an' painted up all pretty, an' then you get steered around an' looked after—someone else takin' care o' you. Fine, fine. Tradition, isn't it? Tradition.”

The bäta, nodding in the swell, looked hard at the river before them. Puffs of snow burst soundlessly in the thick heights of the forest, and Wull watched a family of red skirrils flying from branch to branch, their rosy fur monochrome in the pale light.

Gradually, lantern one—whiter and thicker down the wind side—came into view.

“Gods,” said Wull, planting his right oar and letting the bäta ease in alongside. “Look at the state of this now.”

He lifted the whale oil bottle, supporting the porcelain bulb from below with a cupped hand. It was immensely heavy, and he cursed himself for filling it to such a level.

Even Pappa might have struggled to lift this,
he thought, hoisting the bottle onto his shoulder. The water clonked against the bottom of the bäta as it rocked back and forth.

The whale oil stank even in the cold, and Wull held his face back from the glugging sloop of it as it filled the reservoir. A few drops spilled down the side and he straightened the bottle immediately—every drop of the oil had to be used, for its cost was steep, and Pappa . . . He heard what Pappa always said whenever he gave Wull a lesson or a chiding about the river:
An' for Lavernes's sake, don't spill a drop o' that bloody whale oil; it's worth more'n you an' me put together—liquid gold that stuff
.

Wull filled the reservoir without spilling another drop, stoppered the bottle with its rubber cork, and returned it to
the floor of the bäta. Then he worked at the ice around the wick and the rod with his bone-handled knife, stabbing hard at the chunks of it that clung to their surfaces, knocking a spray of white into the air.

A noise from the forest interrupted him.

He froze, looking immediately at the moon. It was still high, far higher than the tree line. There was no sign of movement, no falling snow from the canopy. In the strain to hear more, Wull found his ears filling with the sounds of his own body until listening became useless and he began to feel dizzy.

There was nothing. Just a red balgair, perhaps, or a hare scrattling through a bush.

He resumed his knife work more slowly, keeping half his attention on the forest, which seemed now ever bigger and blacker in its depths.

Soon the wick was freed and Wull gave a small cry of triumph. He struck a match, holding it behind his glove to let the flame swell into life, and held it to the fabric stump. The fire burned against it flatly, as though it were stone. Wull held the match until it winked out in the grip of his fingers and lit another, then another.

“Come on . . .” he whispered. “Light! Light!”

Five matches were spent. He flicked the last black stump into the Danék and sat down in the back of the bäta, in his old seat, looking at the smooth wood of Pappa's bench.

“Now what in hells am I s'posed to do?” he asked the bäta.

The boat moved with the water.

“I'll need to come back tomorrow an' hope a bit of daylight's made the difference. Even if it is still freezin' all bloody day. An' there's no point in gettin' irked, 'cause there's nothin' else I c'n do, is there?”

He moved over and into the keep's seat once again, wiped his damp nose, smelling the fish of whale oil on his gloves. He spat the taste of it over the side.

“Disgustin',” he muttered. “Look, you wouldn't like it much better if I used all the matches an' it still didn't take, so I need to just stick on an' see if the next one does. Right?”

The bäta bobbed into the current as he turned the oars. After working the knife, his fingers had lost all feeling, and the pain from the grips on his hands ached through his wrists and into his elbows.

“I'm glad you thinks so too,” muttered Wull. He shot another look into the unmoving forest, felt its energy looking back, and sculled more quickly into the middle of the Danék.

Lantern two, tucked into a pocket of current beside a grove of trees that had grown in a low sweep over the river's surface, was also iced solid. The trees around it were uncommonly white, accustomed as they were to the heat of the lantern, and the scabs of moss and lichen were crusted with blown snow. Across the grove hung, like strings of pearls, the frozen ropes of weed and parasitic roots that clung to the
trunks and branches of all the riverside trees. Wull wondered how long the lantern had been out—the whole space had an air of unmoving timelessness, and the ice around the rod was far thicker than on lantern one.

He guided the bäta alongside, took up his knife, started to chip away at the prison of ice, the blade bouncing back at him from its unbreaking face. The cold in his hands began to burn, first with a curious warmth, then with a growing and painful fire that ripped at his skin.

He continued to stab until the wick was freed, the closeness of the reaching tree boughs bringing the forest's grasp near to him even as he stood in the wobbling bäta.

“Oh, there you are,” he whispered, brushing the black lump with a thumb that was a wedge of sharp pain. He allowed himself a smile, felt the freezing air grip his teeth, then filled the reservoir with the same fragile care as before, spilling nothing of the precious oil.

By the time he'd thrown the twelfth unsuccessful match into the Danék, he was already sitting in his seat in the back of the boat with his eyes closed.

“What would Pappa have done?” he said to the bäta. “If the fire won't take, then the fire won't take! There's no magic to it. I can't spell flames onto the damn thing! I'm just as well going back in 'cause I'm gettin' nowhere here.”

He glanced at the boat's eyes, and it was then he noticed
it had turned gently to point toward lantern three.

Wull dropped his scarf for a second to spit over the side.

“One more,” he muttered. “Though I don't see the bloody point—I might as well stand by the fire at home an' throw matches out the window for all the good I'm doin'.”

A few minutes of sore rowing took Wull to lantern three, positioned on a straight bank that ran for a few hundred yards. Although burned-out and frozen, its empty reservoir and wick were more clearly visible through the ice.

That looks better,
thought Wull, easing the bäta alongside.

He chipped at the ice, gratified by how rapidly it yielded, coiling lengths of it peeling from the rod like bark shavings. Then he lifted the whale oil. Even with two reservoirs' worth gone it seemed far heavier to hands that were sapped of strength by the knife and the oars. The porcelain slipped against his glove.