Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (16 page)

 
          
And
maybe Ajelobo was all surface, and no depths.

 
          
But
equally, who needed to settle anywhere—when every town along the river was
their home, if they wished it to be?

 
          
It
was during our fourth call at Ajelobo, as the year was drawing to a close, that
Marcialla made her announcement to the boat's company. The
Spry Goose
was going to sail all the way
to the source of the river, to the end of the world under the Far Precipices:
to Tambimatu, in good time for New Year's Eve. And one of our own boat's
company
was to be honoured—for good boatwomanship, and for
initiative beyond the call of duty. She would be invited to volunteer to sail
out to the black current at
midnight
, between the old year and the new.

 
          
Myself.
I could have shrunk into my socks.

 
          
Not
out of modesty, exactly. Let me be clear about that. Everyone loves an honour.

 
          
But
because of the way it was phrased: "invited to volunteer." Could it
be that the best way of keeping the applecart trim, when someone young and
irresponsible knew something that they shouldn't know, was
to
...
?

 
          
No,
it couldn't be that. More likely it was a neat way of making me feel extremely
loyal—by putting me through an initiation ceremony, of the second degree.

 
          
Everybody
on deck was staring at me.

 
          
I'd
wondered before what a voice sounds like when it's quavering.

           
If I was quavering when I replied,
though, I wouldn't have known since I couldn't hear myself. "I
volunteer," I said.

 
          
Hands
slapped me on the back. Jambi kissed me on both cheeks. Sula pumped my hand;
while Marcialla looked genuinely delighted and proud.

 
          
I
still couldn't forget all those coded signals and wondered whether any
searching enquiries had been conducted not only about Credence and her
affiliations but also about myself, for instance in Verrino . . . turning up,
perhaps, the fact that my brother appeared to have gone missing earlier in the
year.

 
          
At
this point I realized to my amazement that I had been chastely celibate for
quite a long while. Whether this was somehow out of respect for my dead
brother,
or due to horror at the male fraternity across the
water, or even from some perverse annoyance at my parents for breeding a new
offspring, I had no idea. Maybe I had even been punishing myself by
self-denial; and having effectively tortured my right hand on the abseiling
rope at Jangali I had had enough of it.

 
          
I
determined to repair this omission before we set sail again. I must confess,
too, that in one little part of me I was wondering whether I really would see
the next year in at all. Just in case not, I ought to enjoy some pleasures of
the flesh.

 
          
So
I drank Safe—not with Jambi, who ought to hunt down a languishing
shore-husband, a married man, if she felt this way inclined—but with Klare, a
jolly brunette from Guineamoy. It was she whom I had asked about the cards; and
we went ashore together that night, the last night.
As she
put it, to celebrate.

 
          
I
think I can say that we managed very well indeed. But one doesn't wish to boast
of one's conquests. One shouldn't degrade men in their absence merely because
we have liberty to roam, and they don't. So, like a proper lady of Port Barbra,
I shall draw a discreet scarf and hood over a few very pleasant hours.

 
          
I
was quite unprepared for my first sight of the Far Precipices. Fluffy white
clouds with grey sodden hulls had been sailing along all day, occasionally
emptying their bilges on us. For hours I'd been scanning the river and jungle
horizon ahead for what I presumed would look like an enormous wall. It was
sticky and far too hot, even on the river; the heat was soaking wet, unlike the
dry heat of my native Pecawar.

 
          
Klare
happened by, on some errand.

 
          
"Where, where, where?"
I complained petulantly.

 
          
"Lost
something, Yaleen?"

 
          
"Just the Precipices.
Surely we ought to be able to see
them by
now!"

           
And she looked up into the
sky—almost directly at the zenith, it seemed. The clouds had parted there; into
that high rift she pointed.

 
          
"How
about there?"

 
          
"
Oh.
. . goodness me." For that's where the bare peaks
of the Precipices were, all right. Up, up, and up above me, scraping against
space. I got such a shock. I simply hadn't realized. Of course if it hadn't
been cloudy I should have known sooner. As it was, a god suddenly peered down
at me from overhead. The tops of the Precipices seemed to be floating free
with no possible connexion to the ground.

 
          
Though
these connexions became evident enough by the time we reached Tambimatu . . .

 
          
Not
so much a wall across the world—as the end of the world, period! A stone
curtain, drawn across the rest of creation: one which hung from the stars
themselves at night!

 
          
It
seemed to be toppling forever upon Tambimatu as though about to squash the town
flat. Yet the locals didn't see things quite that way. On the contrary, they
hardly seemed to perceive the Precipices at all; any more than I had, when I
looked for them in the wrong place. The town of
Tambimatu
was a tight maze of lanes and yellow brick
houses leaning in towards each other with overhanging upper storeys and
machiolated attics. The idea seemed to be
nudge
together and make tunnels of all the routes. It was hardly possible to see
those looming Precipices from anywhere in the town itself. Domestically this
interruption in the smooth flow of the world did not exist.

 
          
By
this style of architecture the Tambimatans also excluded the reeking jungle
which clung around their town. The dank, festering mass of vegetation was quite
unlike the bloom-bright tangles I'd seen elsewhere, quite unlike the noble
halls of jungle giants. Spinach puree: that was how I thought of it.
A tide of green pulp a hundred spans high.

 
          
Naturally,
for those who knew, there were ways through it. And there was wealth to find—or
there wouldn't have been a town. The wealth consisted of powder-gold and gems
and other exotic minerals which turned up in the slime-ponds and mudpools; as
if, every now and then, the Precipices nodded and
a scurf
of riches fell into the puree. Actually this wealth was thought to leach and
cascade down through the innards of the Precipices, into the water table,
whence it oozed up into the jungle. Bright jewels for mythical magpies—to make
them build their nests here! In Tambimatu town were gemsmiths and goldsmiths,
cutters and polishers, artificers of sparkling ornaments. Unlike the dowdy
shrouded denizens of Port Barbra these locals wore ear-rings and bangles and
bijoux to match.

 
          
Slime
and sharp facets; sparklers and gloomy mud!

 
          
Only
from the quayside could the diligent eye follow the sweeping planes of stone
upwards into the clouds which so often clung to them—picking out precarious
trees, at first like green chaff, then like threads. Then dust, then nothing.

 
          
Two
leagues south of the town, the river emerged. . . .

 
          
As
a volunteer for the New Year's Eve voyage, first there was an obligatory call
to pay on the quaymistress in company with my sponsor, Marcialla. This was soon
over.
More a matter of checking in, really.

 
          
Next
there was a civic banquet in honour of all the volunteers.

 
          
Besides
myself, there were six others. The boat which we would sail to the black
current was only, in truth, a little ketch. Perhaps this was to present a
smaller profile. The ketch was rigged with a lot of little sails, the better to
manoeuvre it when we got in close, and keep us from fouling it in the current.
At present it rode at anchor a little way out, conveniently separating it from
any male influence along the waterfront. The hull of the ketch was painted
black. Its sails also were black. It looked like a fabled boat of death, for
freighting corpses, perhaps to be set on fire and scuttled. An extensible boom
jutted from one side, to carry the collection bucket.

 
          
But
I'm digressing from the banquet.

 
          
It
was there that I met my six new boatsisters for the first time— and took an
instant dislike to three of them; which is a very high antipathy score for new
acquaintances in my experience! Maybe these particular women were over-proud,
or pious, or otherwise screwed up by the honour bestowed on them. Maybe I was
too. Screwed up, that is. In any case I was younger than all the others; and
thus may have seemed presumptuous.
Bumptious, even.
Consequently I put them on edge, just as they discomfited me.

 
          
Two
of the others were all right, I suppose, and fairly relaxed.

 
          
And
the last one, I actually liked—and felt an instant sense of rapport with. She
was called Peli, and hailed from Aladalia, which brought back happy memories.
Peli was a burly woman in her thirties with a mop of straw hair and a red
weather-beaten face; or perhaps her blood pressure was unusually high. She was
urgent, eager, informative, and talked very fast. However, she hastened to add,
she was
not
artistic. Even so, she
was the only one of us volunteers who had gone shopping in Tambimatu. Now she
wore a coiled bangle which had cost her all of ten fish fifty (after
bargaining). It must have been the only genuinely hideous gewgaw available in
town. I loved her for it.

 
          
The
banquet was held in the jewellers' guild hall, which doubled as a gem market at
other times; however on this occasion there were no men in sight, since this
was woman's business.

 
          
We
mumbled words of introduction to one another; we drank each other's health; we
ate grilled fish. Then the quaymistress rose and read out all our citations to
the assembled throng. Mine sounded distinctly icky, as though I had won my
place simply by swarming around masts like a jackanapes. (No mention, of
course, being made of
all
the
circumstances.)
And won it too for being a dab hand with the
paint brush.
Since my hand was still visibly scarred, that seemed
unlikely. "Someone's little favourite," I heard a voice mutter.

 
          
Afterwards
we drank more toasts, and generally failed to get to know each other (Peli
excepted
); or at least that was my impression.

 
          
No
matter! The quaymistress of Tambimatu, organizer of the New Year's Eve events,
announced a leisurely trip to the source of the river the next day so that we
could frame up into a working team.

 
          
Leisurely,
did I say? Well, yes, that's true. It was leisurely. The quaymistress
accompanied us aboard the black ketch—which uniquely had no name whatever
painted on side or stem, as though whatever was nameless could not be summoned,
and compelled to come—and I have rarely sailed more gently before, except
perhaps when we were idling away from Jangali after the fateful festival.

 
          
But
otherwise! Maybe the quaymistress, as a local, could afford to be blase about
our journey. For me it was awesome, almost an ordeal of courage; though
fascinating too in a nightmare way. Closer and closer we sailed to that
seemingly infinite barrier, to the point where the river which otherwise flowed
through our lives unceasingly, was suddenly no more.
Where
the river ended, vanished.
Or rather, where it all
began
—but began as if created out of nothing.