Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (9 page)

 
          
Mother
opened the door, and I stared at her in bewilderment, for she was a stranger
too. Her body had changed shape: she was visibly pregnant.

 
          
My
first fleeting thought was: so she's replaced Capsi already! And my second
thought: she's replaced
both
of us.
My third sad, frightened thought was: she's forty, she'll die,
it's
too late to have another baby!

 
          
But
there she stood, young and glowing, with the false bloom of pregnancy about her
. . .

 
          
How
could anybody turn back the clock like this? Way back nearly twenty years to
another bout with infancy and toddlerhood and school days? But the truth about
a clock is that its hour hand moves on and on inexorably—until suddenly it's
back at the very same hour it was, once in the past.

 
          
"Hullo,
Mother." I embraced her cautiously, though she seemed to have no such
reservation about squeezing me, almost to death. (Had the Sons of Adam crushed
Capsi with heavy weights? Had they used red-hot pincers, and ropes to rack his
bones out of joint?)

 
          
And
I had my answer to the problem of how to tell her. Was it a coward's answer—or
a brave one, because it left me with all the weight to bear myself?

 
          
Now
that she was pregnant I couldn't possibly tell her that Capsi had just been
burnt alive over on the other shore. Not now. The shock would make her
miscarry; then there would be two deaths on my conscience, double grief for
them. I
would
tell Mother, of course;
but not just yet—not till my next visit home, which I would make sure I timed
well after the baby was bom. Nor could I load this weight upon Father alone.

 
          
And
one part of me was asking, all this while: how much
had
Capsi and Yaleen ever really meant to her, or even to both of
them? Or did Mother only really care about herself?

 
          
How
strange, this second late motherhood of hers. I felt lost and alone because of
it.

 
          
"I
visited Capsi in Verrino," I said brightly. "I've just spent a week
with him."

 
          
"Really?
You must tell me all his news." Mother
laughed.
"Young rascal, running off like that!
Almost as bad as you ... So what are we standing here at the door for, like a
pair of strangers?"

 
          
Thus
after a year away I entered my home, which wasn't
my
home any longer but the home of a child unborn who would never
regard me as a sister but only as another adult member of the family, a sort of
aunt or third parent mostly absent.

 
          
I
left after less than a week spent brooding around Pecawar, and signed on to
sail south upon the schooner
Spry Goose,
determined to remain with this same boat for at least a year or two, as though
its crew were my real family; and determined also to become an impeccable
riverwoman upon it, thus somehow to compensate for my dereliction at Verrino.

 
          
And
I suppose 1 must have succeeded in my aim, all too soon, for by the end of that
same year, far to the south in the steamy tropics I was invited by my guild to
volunteer for the New Year's Eve journey out to the black current.

 
 
          
WAS
I glad when the
Spry Goose
got to Jangali! Boatmistress Marcialla was actually
going to allow her crew a few days
holiday. Imagine that.
A rest.

           
Of course, nothing is ever as simple
as it seems. By the time we were to resume our voyage again, a few score hours
later, I would feel distinctly relieved to be back on board. When we arrived on
that sultry late autumn afternoon, however, I wasn't to know this. A somewhat
weary Yaleen was just looking forward innocently to the Junglejack Festival.

 
          
The
problem with the
Spry Goose
wasn't
that Marcialla was a martinet, a disciplinarian. Nor her boatswain Credence,
either. It was simply that Marcialla was boat-proud; and the
Spry Goose
being a three-mast schooner,
there was quite a lot of boat to be proud of. So when we picked up a load of
paint at Guineamoy, and Marcialla had said casually, "Let's give the
Goose
a lick of paint," I didn't
know what we were in for.

 
          
I
soon found that painting isn't a matter of slapping on a fresh coat, then
sitting back to admire it. First there's the rubbing down of the old paint,
often to the wood. Next, any knots in the exposed timber have to be sealed with
knotting juice, and any cracks filled with resin-gum.
After
that there's priming, and then there's undercoating . . . and a long, long
time later you actually get to doing the painting itself—twice over.

 
          
The
less said the better, I think, about all the laborious hours that I and several
others spent while we sailed south with the autumn winds behind us! Three times
over we plied from Guineamoy to Spanglestream and back again. Then from
Spanglestream to Croakers
⁷
Bayou four times there and back.
Rubbing, knotting, priming, painting.
And on each of the
return trips, as we tacked against the prevailing wind, I had rope and canvas
to occupy my idle hands. I think Marcialla deliberately timetabled the loading
and delivery of cargoes just so as to build in optimum drying times.

 
          
Yet
at least this kept my body and mind occupied. Thus it was
almost
"innocently" that I arrived eventually in Jangali,
anticipating a little holiday.

 
          
Innocent,
though, I was not. Not deep in my heart.
For had I not helped
my own brother to go to a horrible death on the far side of the river, where
they bum women alive?
Had I not watched through a telescope, while they
burned him?

 
          
And
I had not dared tell my mother or my father, rationalizing this failure of
courage on my part as a responsible decision—since anguish at the news of Capsi
^’
s
fate might make my mother miscarry. (Though what she imagined she was up to by
having another
baby,
was beyond my comprehension!)

 
          
All
the labour of painting seemed to have laid a coat of paint over these scars in my
soul. Yet it hadn't really done so. I hadn't knotted and gummed and primed
those scars. When the paint dried, they would soon show through again as dark
shadows. The fresh skin of paint would crack and peel.

 
          
Also,
while busy painting—and reefing and luffing, belaying and shinning up rigging—I
had kept my eyes fixed on the tasks in hand. Even so, the black current was
always there. No amount of paint, no spread of sails, was going to hide it or
erase it.

 
          
Was
it really a living creature six hundred leagues long and more? A powerful,
sensitive yet generally comatose being which for its own purposes allowed women
to ply the river, but not men? Was it some kind of alien goddess? Or was it, as
old Yosef had implied, something artificially created to separate us from the
"Sons of Adam" on the west bank, that mysterious brotherhood of men
who turned their backs superstitiously and savagely upon the river; about whom
almost all we knew was the little that Capsi had been able to heliograph back
before they caught him?

 
          
I
had drunk of the current, and it knew me; but it I did not know.

 
          
Maybe
it was impossible ever to know what the black current really was. In which case
how much more sensible it was to ignore it, and get on painting a boat, and
enjoy the journey as much as possible.

 
          
And
really—hard labour and scars of the heart apart—there were so many new sights
for me to soak in. Even when seen twice and thrice over they still remained
quite exciting, by and large.

 
          
South
of Gangee, that scruffy town which I'd visited on my first voyage aboard the
Sally Argent,
was Gate of the South.

 
          
The
tropics put in their first hesitant appearance there—with the townsfolk doing
their best to encourage the show. Butterblooms cascaded from balconies, and
biscus trees were kept well watered by a network of tiny cobbled streams,
although the red trumpet flowers were smaller than those I was to see further
south.

 
          
Just
as my own home town of Pecawar made a virtue of being on the verge of the
desert, so did Gate of the South rejoice in its own position—more so than some
towns of the
deep south
which were tropical through
and through. At Gate of the South it was still possible to "garden"
the vegetation. There was even a ceremonial stone arch which spanned the road
from north to south, with a signpost by it listing all the distances to
furthest Tambimatu 280 leagues away. What practical use this was I couldn't
say, except perhaps as a disincentive to the local men to set out on foot! My
new friend Jambi, with whom I went ashore for a few hours, was a six-year
veteran of these southern reaches, and she pointed out in high amusement that
no road actually ran all the way from Gate of the South to Tambimatu. The
swamps around Croakers' Bayou were obstacle number one. Further south than
that, the jungle increasingly had its own way with roads.

 
          
Jambi
was dark-skinned and jolly, with long black hair which she generally wore in a
bun so as not to get tangled, thus hoisting her up the main mast inadvertently.
She hailed from Spanglestream, and the only time I mentioned the black current
to her she merely glanced and wrinkled her nose, and that was the whole of her
interest in it. This made me suppose that she was rather a good choice as a
friend. She wouldn't remind me of anything painful. Jambi had a shore-husband
and a baby boy at Spanglestream, though she didn't seem to bother about them
unduly, except to the extent that she stayed in southern waters.

 
          
After
leaving Gate of the South, we called at Guineamoy—source of that wretched load
of paint. At Guineamoy you could also have
gardened
the tropics. But the people didn't bother, perhaps because Gate of the South
had stolen their thunder. Guineamoy preferred to wear an ugly face and hide
everything in grime. The people seemed to make a virtue of this, as though foul
air and the stink of chemicals were their way of dealing with the burgeoning
extravagance of nature. Smoke and steam belched out of lots of little
workshops. There were kilns and smelters and smithies. There were warehouses
and rubbish dumps; and outside of the town, half a league inland, was an
artificial lake of filth. Inland, yes. Whatever stenches they pumped into the
air, obviously they had no desire to risk polluting the river itself. If they
had, I suppose the river guild might have banned their cargoes. What the black
current itself would have done about such pollution, if anything, I had no
idea. Just then, I didn't wish to wonder.

 
          
I
suppose grime is comparative. If Guineamoy seemed a filthy place to me, maybe
to its inhabitants it seemed a paragon of virtue and energy, and everywhere
else excessively rustic. Maybe I was unduly sensitive to it, like a green leaf
vulnerable to blight—because I was already a little blighted in my soul.

 
          
After Guineamoy came Spanglestream, which was renowned for its
tasty fish and its dozens of lug-sailed fishing smacks decorated with painted
eyes on hulls and sails.
It was equally famous for the phosphorescent
streamers which snaked across the river at night in bright silver, transforming
the river into one of stars. These streamers only occurred for a couple of
leagues to the north and south of the town, and looked like bubbly exhalations
of breath from the midstream current. I suppose they must have been made up of
myriads of tiny organisms which fed on minerals or whatever was abundant in
the water there—providing in their turn a non-stop meal for the shoals of
larger fish.

 
          
I
stayed ashore overnight at Jambi's house. Her husband I found obliging and
amiable. Obviously he adored Jambi—which relieved her of the need to adore him
unduly in return. But otherwise he was just a little bit of a zero. I foresaw
trouble if Jambi ever had to quit the river; and I could only wonder quite how
she had put up with being beached during the course of her pregnancy. I played
with her little boy, too. Alas, this reminded me of the infant stranger my own
mother was cooking up. . . .

 
          
Jambi,
husband and
myself
visited a raw fish restaurant that
evening, where we filled ourselves with thin slices of madder-coloured hoke
and yellow pollfish and velvety ajil dipped in mild mustard sauce. And we drank
ginger spirit. Afterwards we strolled down to the promenade to view the
spangling phosphorescence, which put on a particularly fine display for my benefit;
which was the only time that I mentioned the current to Jambi.

 
          
"Maybe,"
I said, "all the tiny silver things feed on something the black current
jettisons here?
A sort of excrement from it?"
I
^’
d
asked earlier, and it turned out that no one really knew. The glassmaker
^’
s
art,
a la
Verrino, had never produced
any lenses powerful enough to plumb the really microscopic.

 
          
That
was when she glanced, and wrinkled her nose. Perhaps this wasn't surprising—in
view of the fact that she had just treated me to wonderful fish. Here was I
suggesting that the black current used the neighbourhood as a toilet! This may
have seemed an unholy slur on her native town.

 
          
More
likely my remark seemed like tipsy nonsense. Jambi was a bustling, practical
person who probably dismissed her own Guild initiation quite soon after it
occurred as merely a metaphorical masquerade—as something mystical, in which
she had no interest.

 
          
As
soon as I asked her this, to my alarm I felt
a queasiness
in my guts. Was this because of the presence of a male, her husband? Pleasantly
fired by all the ginger spirit, I might have been on the verge of saying too
much. Remembering how sick I had been when I was indiscreet about a Guild
secret that one time on board the
Sally
Argent,
I promptly shut up and enjoyed the silvery show.

 
          
Jambi
couldn't have minded my comment, since she invited me back to her home on our
subsequent calls at Spanglestream during the next few weeks. I accepted her
invitation the second time. That night she was throwing a party for some local
fisherwomen she had been at school with—at Spanglestream the call of the river
did not necessarily call you very far from home. Yet on the third occasion I
made an excuse. These invitations, kind as they were, reminded me of how I
myself had invited a friend, Hali, home to Pecawar, only to discover that
brother Capsi had decamped.
To his doom.
And then
there was the presence of the little boy. The child seemed, by proxy, to
dispossess me of all possible homes except those afloat.

 
          
After
Spanglestream we came to Croakers' Bayou where the river spilled slackly inland
into a maze of hot dank swamps. Here stilt- trees meandered in long winding
colonnades, forming vaults and corridors and tunnels. Mudbanks emerged and
submerged at whim. Puffballs and great white fungus domes studded the exposed
mud. The big
froggy
croakers squatted and hopped and
played their ventriloquists' tricks, voices echoing off the water and the
arched tree trunks.