Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (34 page)

 
          
Three weeks inland; and still no change in the dearth and death of
the landscape.
Only minerals grow here.

 
          
Impasse:
the other four want to return while there's time. But Josep cannot bear to
fail—though this is one of those enterprises where even to have attempted it is
a sort of success. Josep wants to journey at least a fraction as far as / have
travelled, on the river; but in his own direction. Only such a one could I
love, who mirrors me.

 
          
After
a parched conference, it's decided that three will stay here, camped in a jumble
of crystal-crusted rocks in a shattered region of shale. Three will scout
onward: Josep, me, and Hark.

 
          
A
day later Hark decides that we're marching to our deaths. And maybe we are.
Maybe my bones will lie down locked with Josep's bones upon a bed of sand.

 
          
Hark
and Josep quarrel; not violently but in a softly hateful way.
Hark
acts as though Josep is betraying the spirit of our
expedition, by pressing on with it. Hark can't bear to be within the aura of
our love, which grows fiercer the more it is prevented.

 
          
He
leaves us early in the morning to retrace his steps to where we left the
others. When he reaches them, they will stay two more days,
then
depart, taking all the food and water with them; that's the threat.
The promise.

 
          
As
soon as Hark has gone, Josep and I set out for the nowhere beyond nowhere. We
have just one more day, one night.

 
          
How
defiantly we spend that night! It seems as though the entire purpose of our
expedition, all those weeks of preparation, all the porters and supplies, is
simply for us to make love. Will we return and report, "Oh yes, we
discovered
something
—we found each
other"?

           
Yet at sunrise, when we stir again
in one another's arms, the suspicion dawns on me that Josep is making love not
to a woman, but to the desert itself—to this naked emptiness far from the river
where no codes of river life apply. My breasts are as star-dimes, my flanks a
dune-slope under his sliding fingers. Between my thighs is the well of liquid
we have not found. I'm the desert made flesh. Only thus can he master it; he
who must master something.

 
          
That
day we return in silence to the place where we parted from Hark. That night,
when we unroll our blankets on the sand, Josep is impotent—because he is
withdrawing from the desert now. Although he clutches me cruelly and
forcingly, in a way I have never known a man act before, he achieves nothing.
At last he turns aside in an agony of shame, so that I have to comfort him; and
this is worse, for he weeps like a child.

 
          
In
the morning when I wake his tears are still falling on my face. It feels that
way. Actually stray raindrops are spitting down on my skin from a solitary
cloud.

 
          
Off
to the west, an impossibly dark mass of clouds bunches low, dispensing rain;
dirty sheets of water drench down. Within an hour the clouds have fled, the sky
is clear.

 
          
And
when finally we reach the jumble and the shale, first we find one drowned
corpse then another then a third. The freak flood has vanished; the desert is
parched dry again. Waterskins have been washed away and ripped by shale, so
that there's only a slop of liquid left in those we recover. We find a fourth
corpse, Hark's, his skin already turning to leather.

 
          
"You
brought the river here!" Josep screams at me insanely.

 
          
Thankfully
my life as Lalia jerks forward at this point, lurching towards its close.

 
          
A
few days later, somewhere further west amidst star-dimes, Josep falls down
dying of thirst.
As I am dying too. . . .

 
          
And
for a moment I believe that a miracle has happened, and that actually I
have
commanded the river and it has come
to pour down my swollen throat and slake my terrible thirst!

 
          
But
I'm dead; and the black current has received its daughter into it from afar. As
I soon discover. I've come home—to myself at last; and it's this which
illuminates all other earlier moments of my life . . .

 
          
I'm
Chama, a teenager of Melonby, eager to join the riverguild in another year or
two.

           
Right now it's the cruellest winter
in memory. The river has frozen over. Boats are locked at their moorings, with
ropes and spars crusted by frost just like the decorations on iced nameday
cakes. No river traffic moves.

 
          
With
my best friend Pol I venture on to the ice, skating and skidding, and scuffing
up the dust of snow in lines and arcs. (It's so cold, the snow is dusty not
moist.) I carve my name upon the river for all to see.

 
          
Some
of those who see are boys, who begin to dare each other, for it seems as if the
river has become as safe and solid as a road. They admire me; resent me.
They're scared, and proud. In the bitter calm cold they grow hot-headed,
jeering and teasing, us and each other. Presently the boldest and most foolish
of the boys steps on to the ice himself, and skids along beside us.

 
          
"You'll
have to walk for a wife now!" warns Pol. "You've used up your one
go."

 
          
"Nonsense!
I'm not on the
river,
I'm on ice—on top of it! I bet you could cross all the way to the other
side!"

 
          
"Oh
no, you couldn't. The ice'll be thin in the middle.
Maybe no
ice at all."

 
          
"Wheee!"
He runs, and crouches into a skid. He
tumbles and pratfalls all along the ice. Scrambling up, he slides back to the
bank and hops ashore. "Come on, you lot!"

 
          
"No
fear!"

 
          
"Not
likely!"

 
          
"Chickens,"
he sneers, and jumps back to his ice-sport.
Leaps on the ice
a second time.

 
          
"Oh,
I'm a river-boy," he sings. (Of course, the real song is about a river
-girl)
"My boat is quite a toy! She
brings me heaps of joy—!" (He's just making up the words, mocking them.)

 
          
Suddenly
he screams: "Destroy!
De-ssss-troy—!"

 
          
He
windmills his arms wildly. He begins to race. Out, out. . . .

 
          
We
all watch, numbstruck. Soon he's hundreds, a thousand spans away. In his green
coat he's a leaf blowing over the ice. Then he's no more than a sprig of grass.
Finally, far away, he vanishes. The faintest twang sings through my feet. The
ice has cracked, out there.

 
          
And
a death has happened, because I wrote my name on the river.

 
          
I'll
not
feel guilty! Of his death I am
innocent!

 
          
I'm
a boatswain of Firelight, a happy and fiercely passionate woman. How can she be
both at once? She is. I know; I'm her. She bums like the dancing jets of
flaming gas in the caldera outside the town; yet inside she is sunned by her
passions, not consumed or exploded. . . .

 
          
I'm
a multitude of lives, all linked, reflecting into one another. All those vistas
and ventures I ever dreamed of as a little girl—and was robbed of so
abruptly—just as suddenly are mine; to overflowing. . . .

 
          
I
am Nelliam, aged
guildmistress. . . .

 
          
Nelliam?
Guildmistress from Gangee?
But
how—?

 
          
I'm
in Verrino, residing with the quaymistress. I've been here for weeks, engaged
in negotiations with the Observers. Perhaps I'm not the best choice of
intermediary, since I can't possibly climb that wretched Spire in person . . .
But I meet a young man on neutral ground, usually one of the many wine-arbours.
He has coppery skin, lustrous eyes and a pert little nose. If I were only forty
years younger, and less sadly wise than I am now. . . .

 
          
(My
own heart lurches—for of course, the young man is Hasso, my erstwhile one-night
lover, he who plucked the first flower of my flesh.)

 
          
From
another point of view, that of someone who can look back down many thousands of
days of life, maybe I'm the best person for the job.
But only
maybe.

 
          
So
I set my sails to the task, applying gentle persuasion, as though I'm out to
seduce this young man; and only occasionally do I lose patience with him.

 
          
Much
has been agreed in principle, and even put into practice; but now I want those
panoramas of the west bank which the Observers have been collecting and
hoarding for a hundred years. I want these sent to Ajelobo, there to be
engraved by craftsmen—and printed in a gazetteer which our own signallers can
emend by pen.

 
          
All
of Yaleen's information will be printed in this gazetteer as well. It will be a
second
Book of the River
, a ghost
guide to a world hitherto unknown. Or maybe I should describe it as a second
Chapbook, since its distribution will be strictly limited. No additional,
unofficial copies will sneak out; of that I can be sure. Those Ajelobo
publishers depend on us to freight their wares.

 
          
Tonight
is the night before New Year's Eve, and the wine-arbour is lit by fairy
candles. The arbour isn't heavily patronized this evening; most people are
saving themselves up for the morrow.
A cou- pie of riverwomen
natter
together. A lone old man broods. Two lovers—husband and wife of a
few
week's
vintage, by the look of them—whisper in a
nook.

 
          
Apart
from these, only Hasso and I. Age wooing youth—except that Hasso is a little
too
experienced, suave and cautious.
Personally I could do with an early night. No rest for the wicked, though.

 
          
"What
guarantees can you offer?" he's asking.

 
          
"Our
word of honour," I repeat. "Your panoramas will be perfectly safe.
We just want to borrow them. We'll return them inside a year. It'll take as
long as that."

 
          
Lights
flicker softly around us. There should be music to serenade us. But no; music
would lull me to sleep.

 
          
"Okay,
I believe you. I'll consult. . . ."

 
          
We
agree to meet again in this same arbour on the night after New Year's Day; it
should again be quiet, in the aftermath of all the parties and revels.

 
          
But
come that night in the New Year, the arbour isn't quiet at all. It's packed and
noisy.
Because the head of the black current has passed
Verrino.
Now everyone is telling everyone else about it, offering
explanations, contradicting each other. Instead of peace and privacy there's
pandemonium.

 
          
It's
a clouded black night, as black as the current which has now abandoned us. All
those fairy candles are just petty twinklings lighting up the tiniest part of
our fearful darkness. Crowds have sought sanctuary in this and the other
arbours, away from the now naked river.

 
          
And
I know that I, Nelliam, am about to die . . . Soon, and bloodily. I try to make
myself stand up, to flee while there's time. But that isn't how it was;
Nelliam's legs don't heed Yaleen.

 
          
Unsurprisingly
Hasso turns up late for our appointment. He chucks down two glasses of wine
straight off before whispering to me what the Observers saw of the worm's head
through their telescopes. I can hardly make out his mumbling, with
all the
surrounding din. "Speak up, will you!"