Watson, Ian - Black Current 01
Read Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 Online
Authors: The Book Of The River (v1.1)
THE BOOK OF THE RIVER
Copyright ©
1983, 1984 by Ian Watson
This
novel was first
published in four parts
To Ed
Ferman
for encouragement
Black Current
From
time immemorial no boat had crossed the river on account X of the black
current. Yet of course that did not stop us from plying our trade up and down
the eastern shoreline all the way from Ajelobo in the south down to Umdala in
the north where the river fattens out vastly, becoming salt not fresh, and
storm-tossed. And it had always been my ambition as a little girl in dusty
Pecawar— almost midway along the axis of our navigation—to join the boating
guild and be a riverwoman.
And why not?
reasoned
my parents.
At least that's the brave face they put on my decision (or so I thought at the
time). I wouldn't remain on the river forever, but would be bound to find
myself a man sooner or later somewhere along those seven hundred leagues of
shore between north and south and bring him home to Pecawar to settle him there
to raise our family, and probably settle with him —just as other girls took
passage in the spring and returned in the autumn with a newly claimed husband.
In my case it might simply take a little longer, but surely I would tire of
wanderlust. The river, though richly varied from the southern jungles to the
cold northern marshes, is hardly infinite. So after five or six years of
sailing up and down it I ought to be all too familiar with change for its own
sake.
My
twin brother, Capsi, as though perversely determined to play west to my north
and south, had set his heart on joining the tiny monkish fraternity of
observers down in the town of Verrino fifty leagues to the north; about whom we
knew little enough in Pecawar, apart from the mere fact of their existence—but
this was enough for Capsi. From an early age he had peered through a
succession of home-made spyglasses over the league-and-a-half of river—beyond
the black current that streams midway—at the western shore, even though this
is quite blank and barren opposite Pecawar.
I
myself had no interest at all in the western shore.
Nor did
anyone else that I knew of, apart from brother Capsi and those obsessives in
Verrino.
Why should we be interested in what was unattainable and
incommunicative, and which had no
effect
whatever on
our lives, nor had for as far back as records went?
But
all this changed subtly when, at seventeen, the very minimum age, I applied for
membership of the River Guild, and so learned their first guarded secret, the
very existence of which I was sworn, upon
The
Book of the River,
to keep secret. Namely, that one did not merely sign on,
but must be initiated.
"But
what
sort
of initiation is it?"
I asked the quaymistress in her clapboard office down on the waterfront, after
I had sworn and been told.
For I associated the word
initiation with strange painful rituals up in the Ajelobo tropics.
"Child,
do you wish to travel as passenger, or crew?"
"Crew, of course."
"Then
you must be initiated, whatever form this takes." The quaymistress
laughed, and tossed her sun-bleached hair. She was a handsome, weather-beaten
woman of late middle age. She held up her hands, palms out. "See, we don't
chop off fingers. Nor do we keelhaul you, or toss you to the stingers, or
anything savage like that! We don't really even haze you, or terrify you. I
assure you my hair didn't go white from fear."
I
nodded, and she rightly took my silence for consent.
"There's
a lateen-rig due in tomorrow afternoon. Be here at sunset." With that she
dismissed me, and delved back into her manifests.
So
the following evening I duly presented myself and was taken by the quaymistress
on board the
Ruby Piglet,
and down
below deck to the boatmistress's poky cabin, lit by a single oil lantern; and
by now I wasn't so much worried as to the nature of the initiation— which in
this setting, it seemed to me, could hardly be spectacular or exotic—as that I
might somehow be committing myself to sail the river on board
this
cramped tub. I'd had grander
visions in mind, of two masts or three.
A brig or a schooner.
When
we knocked and entered, the boatmistress was wearing a fish-mask, such as we
see at the regatta once a year; nothing particularly daunting in that, even if
the lantern light did lend more credence to the illusion of a woman with a
piscine head, than whenever I'd seen such a mask by daylight. On a little
table before her lay a much-thumbed copy of
The
Book of the River,
with a smaller chap- book perched upon it. The
boatmistress opened this smaller volume and flicked through it in a desultory
way as though to refresh her memory; then she suddenly snapped out at me,
giving me quite a start.
"Candidate
rivergirl, say what the black current is!"
I
suppose I gaped.
"Say!"
"It's,
well, it's the current that stops us from crossing the river."
"What
is its nature?"
"Black?"
I suggested.
"Is
it water? Is it oil? Is it thin, is it thick? Is it fast, is it slow? Is it
living, is it dead?"
"Anyone
who tries to cross it dies," said I boldly. "But first they go mad.
TheyTe swept away, they're dragged down, swallowed. . . ."
The
boatmistress read out of her chapbook. "It isn't water, and it isn't oil.
It is more like blood, but not our red blood. It is more like a nerve, but not
our nerves. It is more like a spinal column, but not our bony spines. It is all
of these, and none.
"The
body of the river lives its life from south to north, and the black current is
its secret soul; but not like our souls, if we have souls. The black current is
its mind; but not like our minds.
"For
the river
is
a creature, and an entity. We are
parasites upon her flesh, and the black current is the life-vein of that flesh.
Enter it, and she drinks us, drowns us. But first she makes us mad.
"For
all the water on this world is alive; it is all one whole, joined to itself.
The river is the flexing tail of the dreaming ocean, ever rippling downstream,
ever replacing itself."
Suddenly
I was terrified, for to us in Pecawar, ever since I had learned to lisp and
point and ask questions, the river had simply been the river: a body of water,
something to gaze up and down as boats sailed by (though not to swim in because
of the stingers), a supply route, a signpost both ways to different cities,
different landscapes.
Certainly
we blessed the river as provider of irrigation (the stingers never surviving
in still water), of trade and mobility, and of rain and thus of our habitable
zone itself—for the baking deserts commenced quite soon inland, even up south
in jungled Ajelobo. But
The Book of the
River
was no more, really, than a gazetteer and guidebook to everything
that lay along the eastern shore: a manual for living in our world. Nowhere did
it claim that the river was alive, and maybe malevolent; that it cared about us
approximately as a dog cares for the fleas on its back—which seemed to be the
implication here, with the added rider "let sleeping dogs lie."
The
black current, in so far as I'd ever bothered about it, was simply an obstacle
equivalent to whirlpools, though much worse; and what it was an obstacle
to—namely the western shore and whoever might live there—was uninteresting
except to monkish oddities, since there was no way of reaching it. And what's
more, whoever was over there, if there was anyone at
all,
was as uninterested in us as we were in them.
But
if the river was alive . . . Well, we all drank the water, didn't we? And human
bodies are almost entirely made up of water. So we were built of river: heart
and lungs, blood and brains.
"Women
are of the river," I quoted; and the boatmistress snapped back at me:
"But
she is not of us!"
Surely
this was all some masquerade, precisely equivalent to hazing me or making me
walk a plank, blindfolded, to tumble into the midst of stingers: something to
bind me emotionally to the sorority of the river and the guild. So that perhaps
I might remain loyal to river life and never choose to settle down with my
imported husband? There were a few such shore-husbands, though not very many,
living in Pecawar—but naturally I had hardly ever even seen their wives, who
remained afloat, only returning for holidays. But just then the fortunes of
husbands were hardly very much on my mind.
Still,
if this was all just an emotional bonding thing, I was convinced! Though it
was a warm evening, particularly in the stuffy cabin, I shivered.
"Yaleen,"
the boatmistress said to me. "If something isn't to notice that you're
foreign to it, then it must think that you're part of
itself
.
That's how a parasite survives in the flesh of its host. Every New Year's Eve,
from Tambimatu in the south. . . ." She paused.
"Where the river rises, beyond Ajelobo."
"The river doesn't
rise
, Yaleen. It doesn't come from a little spring or
bubbling fountain."
"I
know. It flows out from under the Far Precipices. So it must come through an
underground channel from beyond."
"And
it has the same girth at its Tambimatu source as it does at Umdala, where it
spreads into the wild ocean. It emerges from under the Precipices the same way
as a worm emerges from the earth, oozing solidly out."
"It
has to come through a channel."
"But
what is behind the Precipices? We don't know. They're unscalable. They rise
into air too thin to breathe, in any case. Maybe they're ten leagues thick, or
a hundred; or maybe they're as thin as a sheet of paper.
Filter
paper.
They filter the salts from the sea as it squeezes through to
become the river—drawn along by the muscle of the river. And maybe if they
filter salt water into fresh, the way our kidneys filter our blood, then
deposits of salt are massed up and up within and behind the Precipices. Salt
islands like iceberg slabs may calve vertically from time to time and crash
back into the hidden ocean, to float away, break up and dissolve somewhere far
away. Maybe in time you'll see far Tambimatu, where the jungles reek around the
base of the Precipices, and where the whole river oozes out at once into the
open; then you can guess, as well as anyone. But,
Yaleen. . .
.
"
"Ah
yes.
Every New Year's Eve?"
"Right.
At
midnight
when the world sleeps, a guild boat sets
sail from Tambimatu across the river to the edge of the black current."
"To try to
cross over between one year and the next—as though it mightn't be noticed?
As though the river is midway between breathing one year in,
and the next out?"
The
fish-mask shook in denial. "No, to bring back several buckets full of the
blackness. Presumably, since it has always been this way,
midnight
at year's end is something like the
metabolic low point of awareness of the river. Still, that journey out to
midstream isn't without its risks to the volunteers so honoured. Occasionally
it happens that a crew-woman loses her sanity and throws herself
overboard."
"You
bring samples of the black current back to analyse?" I asked, perplexed.