Chapter Forty-Seven
Although there was much to accomplish before they could get underway, at least the tasks were straightforward.
A quick inventory of the crew’s personal effects produced nothing remarkable, but that made it suitable for trade. The boat’s purse contained only a few dozen billon marks, and just by weighing them in his palm, Ahearn could tell that they had been cast from a highly debased alloy, clipped, or both.
Other than some new ropes, cordage, and tarps, the boat’s chandlery was useless. The cargo was mostly bolts of fine cloth and worsted, some suitable for bandages or packing wounds. The balance was iron nails and tools: useful for weighing down the bodies, but not much else. Small casks of Mihal’ji dried fruits and hot spices were an unexpected treat but the most helpful find were sacks of spelt and small casks of salt pork and hard, spicy sausages: all good rations for the journey ahead.
They were finally ready to prepare the bodies just after the sun cleared the horizon. They began with Padrajisse. Umkhira opined that her gear should be sunk with her, insisting that it was the closest equivalent to burning her possessions with her.
But Elweyr shook his head. “No, she would want us to take what we need and then return her most personal effects to one who would do her honor.”
Umkhira frowned but nodded. “If we are to convey her personal effects to those who wish to remember her, should we keep something of her, as well? A lock of hair, perhaps?”
Elweyr shrugged. “The Helper gods, or at least the ones most closely aligned with the Ar, feel that the remains of the dead are no longer distinct from other matter. So when the anima that we knew as Padrajisse departed”—he touched the wrapped corpse gently—“this body became an object, no more or less worthy of reverence than any other.”
Druadaen frowned. “Elweyr, how is it that you know so much about the Ar?”
Elweyr did not seem to hear him. “We should prepare her, now.”
The differences between readying her corpse and the others were small: each of the fellowship attached one of the weighted sacks and spent a moment with her. The other bodies were prepared without ceremony, although the captain’s was handled less brusquely, and Ahearn made a point of personally wrapping the Kar Krathauan he’d slain. But when they finally got to Jaffet’s corpse, they frowned and hung back.
“Wish we could leave this one for the vultures,” Ahearn muttered.
S’ythreni shook her head sharply. “No. They’d just vomit him up.”
Elweyr sighed. “I’ve got to confess, I never suspected him of double-dealing.”
Umkhira huffed. “His greater dishonor, that he could lie so very well that all of us were misled.”
Druadaen nodded. “We even believed his dreams of becoming a scholar.”
Elweyr cocked his head. “That might have been true, actually. His long discourses on local history and love of languages weren’t feigned.”
“Meaning?” S’ythreni’s head tilted to match Elweyr’s.
“Meaning that I suspect the Caottaluran wasn’t just paying him with money, but with the promise of sponsorship, of becoming a scholar or alchemist for the Sanslovans.” He paused. “Assuming that his ‘mentor’ wasn’t simply lying.”
S’ythreni smiled coldly. “Now that would have been the crowning irony.”
“No,” Ahearn muttered. “There’s a greater irony here.”
“Which is?”
“Which is that we’ve traveled half the world to win a fortune. But do we find it as we meant to, won through daring battles with legendary foes?” He gestured at the wrapped bodies around them. “No. Our great treasure comes from a bitter end to as dull a trip as was ever taken on a rundown riverboat. Hells, it isn’t even a proper treasure; it’s just scraps and leavings, stripped from these blackguards just as they stripped it from others. The only difference is that we paid for that dubious privilege and paid dear.” He glanced at Padrajisse’s wrapped remains. “Yes, I’ve wanted to find a fortune…but never this way.”
Elweyr’s voice and face were solemn: “Beware what you wish for—”
“‘—because you just might get it,’” Ahearn finished, spitting as he did. “Quote me no tired axioms this day, friend. It’s not yet time for breakfast, and I’ve already had a bellyful of tutoring from Dame Fate.” Shaking his head, he stalked to the stern of the boat and busied himself clearing it so that the sweep’s play was full and free.
* * *
As they finished arranging the cargo to better balance the hull, S’ythreni stood up, rubbing her lower back. “Well, since anyone who finds our trail is likely to be sane, we don’t have to worry about them pursuing us for too long.”
“And why is that?” Umkhira asked.
“Because sane people will run away the moment they realize we’re heading toward a dragon’s lair.”
Elweyr rolled his eyes.
Druadaen shrugged. “She has a point.”
“She usually does,” the mantic allowed with a sigh. “About time we ride north and you and Ahearn start upriver.” Umkhira, who remained wary of boats, quickly hopped over the side and waded to shore. S’ythreni and Elweyr were right behind her.
As they neared the horses, Ahearn grunted. It was the first sound he’d made since going aft to check the stern oar that was the boat’s sole means of both propulsion and steering. “Well,” he muttered, staring at the bank behind, “this is a fine farewell present.” Those on the shore returned to its edge for a better view of the spot at which he was frowning.
The climbing sun’s shadows had shortened enough to reveal a drowned man tangled among the water lilies clustered beneath a low-hanging tree branch.
“One of the oarsmen?” Umkhira asked.
Druadaen nodded. He stripped off his harness and baldric, lowered himself over the low transom, and waded into the shallows to retrieve the body.
“Was he wounded?” S’ythreni called after him.
“Not that I can see,” Druadaen answered as he rolled the corpse over. He began towing it back to the boat.
“You mean…he drowned?” Umkhira murmured in disbelief. “Here? There is almost no current, and the water is barely above one’s head.”
Ahearn spat over the side. “Are his shoes still on?” he asked Druadaen.
“Yes.”
Ahearn shook his head. “Ah-yeh, drowned. Probably the first time he was in water over his knees.” When he saw their stares, he nodded sagely. “Trust me; I’ve seen it before.”
Umkhira sputtered. “But why…why would anyone work on a boat and not learn how to swim?”
Druadaen pulled the corpse around so that he could lift its feet over the transom. “I saw the same thing during my travels as a Courier. But I was warned not to ask about it; the topic was known to embarrass and insult the river folk.”
Ahearn shrugged. “Ignorance is passed on just like knowledge. If parents don’t know how to swim, it stands to reason they can’t teach their children, either. Like as not, the only wisdom they have to offer is ‘Don’t fall in!’”
“That sounds like the voice of personal experience,” Druadaen observed.
Ahearn nodded. “’Twas the advice I was given as a lad, until I came under the wing of a boatman who felt differently and taught me to swim. The hard way, I might add.”
S’ythreni looked confused. “But you didn’t grow up on a boat.”
“Oh,” Ahearn twinkled, “didn’t I, then?” He stood to the sweep with an easy familiarity. “Dunarran, I seem to recall you have a passable familiarity with ships?”
Druadaen smiled. “Passable. Here, let me help you man the sweep.”
“About time you offered. Let’s be off.”
* * *
The current became less swift as they moved further northward on the Serpent River. After a vigorous rush downhill from its source in the eastern foothills of the Thelkrag Kar, the river slowed and widened as it reached the flatlands. According to the maps, it became so broad at Last Ford that the banks, although a hundred yards apart, were joined by a wide bar of sand and rock that was never more than three feet beneath the lazy current.
Two miles south of that landmark, they sculled close along the eastern shore and entered the tributary. After only a hundred yards, the banks pulled away, revealing the pond. They headed toward the deepest waters and, once there, checked the bodies to ensure that the weighted bags would neither tear nor come loose. That done, they began carefully putting them over the side. When it came to the hapless captain and particularly Padrajisse, they were not only even more careful, but gentle.
Ahearn glanced at Druadaen as they prepared to let the corpse of the Corrovani sacrista slide into the dark, still waters only fifteen yards off the pond’s northern shore. “Have any words, mate?”
Druadaen quirked a rueful smile at Ahearn. “I seem to recall a conversation, at the start of our travels, that whereas I was to be the owner aboard, you were to be the captain. Last rites are a captain’s duty, in the absence of a consecrant.”
Ahearn’s smile was a match for Druadaen’s. “Fine time to bring that up. Well, leave a Dunarran to remember every little detail of every agreement.” He stood straighter and said to the open sky, “Thyeru, I’m not of your creed and know little of you. But I know this. Padrajisse of Corrovane was your good and faithful daughter, and to us, a good and faithful friend. Any flaws she might have had”—he seemed to push away a small, sad smile—“are surely of no account when tallying the balance of her soul. I assume she’s already in your creedland. But if she’s not, then know this: that when Ahearn dies on an enemy sword and goes to the Great Tract, he’ll hop the divide between it and your creedland to hold you to account.” His chin jutted defiantly at the sky for one more moment. Then he nodded to Druadaen, who tipped the plank upon which her corpse rested. It slid into the water, ripples painting a pattern of shining concentric rings upon the surface before stillness returned, and it was as if she had never been.
Without speaking, they returned to the sweep and brought the prow around to aim at the white waters rushing into the pond from a low ravine to the northeast. As they drew closer to it, Ahearn started humming a melody that sounded like a highly simplified sea shanty. When Druadaen asked him what it was, he grinned. “A song from my youth. Not so fine and poetic as what I’ve heard on the big ocean-crossing brigs you’re accustomed to. Riverboat work is, as y’may have noticed, repetitive and wearying.” He chuckled. “The songs follow suit.”
Druadaen smiled. “You seem happier since you threatened Thyeru over the fate of Padrajisse’s soul.”
“Well, it’s a bracing thing, engaging in a bit o’ high-stakes heresy before lunch.” His stomach growled audibly. “Or before breakfast, too, as my gut is quick to remind us.”
“We could stop for a—”
Ahearn shook his head. “Nay. You’ve the right of it when you say we’ve no time to waste. Besides, I’m not in the habit of taking orders from my stomach…or anything or anyone else, for that matter. And strange as it feels, there’s some comfort to be had in old habits, old routines,” he finished with an almost languorous pull at the oar.
“Your spirits do seem to be much improved.”
“And why wouldn’t they be, with the bodies—friends and foes alike—overboard and off of our hands.”
“And yet…” Druadaen left the presumed caveat dangling.
“And yet,” Ahearn obligingly completed, “this work puts me in mind of my youth. I had more than a bit of experience doing this, you might have sussed by now.”
Druadaen grinned. “Did your family work a riverboat?”
“Not that I know of. Don’t remember much about me mum or da. Not much more than that they met unfortunate ends. Gaeltaghdan merchants they were. Which is to say, explorers and wanderers as well as speculators after new goods. So, they never got around to encumbering me with siblings.”
Druadaen managed not to roll his eyes. Not because of Ahearn’s story, which was sad and poignantly familiar, but because Druadaen could hardly believe that one of his earliest theories was now confirmed and incarnate in the swordsman: fate had created yet another hero-orphan. Impossible. Absurd. If this was the universe’s idea of a side-splitting joke, he was not amused.
“Best I can recall,” Ahearn continued, “we were on the Ryepare River when I lost them. Rather than put me off at the nearest town to fend for meself, the captain took me on as crew.” He laughed. “Think of it; a four- or five-year-old working as a crew hand on a riverboat! At that age, I was a mouth to feed and not much more. But I was big for my age and not entirely stupid, so I learned the life and became relatively useful.
“And reliable. As you may or may not know, hands on riverboats are a notoriously fickle bunch. It’s rare for any of ’em to stay with the same boat for more than a few years. So by the time I was starting to scratch at the first hairs on my chin, I was the closest thing Captain Lartan had to a son. Or maybe a family at all.”
He worked the sweep a little more slowly as they approached the ravine that framed the rock-strewn mouth of the tributary. “Might still be there now if we hadn’t been set upon by a nasty bunch what called themselves the Riparian Reavers. They killed the captain and took the boat. And me with it. I was thirteen and it’s likely they would have fed chunks of me to the fish ’ceptin’ for the fact that I was as good as any of them at handling a boat. And I’d learned figures from Captain Lartan and the trick of reading as well, so I was part of their ‘loot,’ I suppose.
“Their leader was a grizzled, one-armed fellow who was as shrewd as he was tough and had an eye to grooming me to their crew. But he met his end in a fight he shouldn’t have lost, along with his right-hand man. The new captain was wild, unpredictable, and had little use for the way we’d made most of our coin during my time with ’em: selling what cargos we took in markets where the merchants’ chops wouldn’t be recognized. And as the dead captain had taunted this new one about not having half the brains of a boy—meaning me—he was determined to put me in my place. Which, to his mind, was in his cabin and beneath his smelly, greasy body.”
Druadaen had almost forgotten to mind his half of working the sweep. “What did you do?”
Ahearn timed a shrug so it blended into the pull and push of the stern oar. “Squirmed away, I did. Pots, plates, forks went every which way. Including a knife, which went straight into his eye when he came at me again. The crew were hammering on the door, so I cried out that there’d been murder, let ’em all come rushing in…and went over the side.”
Ahearn saw the winding path of open water that the maps had indicated, shifted the oar sharply and pushed through a crosscurrent to get further upstream. “That happened up in Eld Shire, and I’d just turned fourteen, I think. Came ashore with nothing but the rags on me back and the will to survive. Not proud of the corners I cut to do so, I’ll admit. But by the next year, I’d become acquainted with enough of the locals that I became a…well, I suppose I was the ‘indentured lackey’ of a band of roughs who made their living hunting and bountying. But by sixteen I was large enough to best most of ’em in tests of strength, so I was raised up and made an equal.”
He shrugged. “Learned some skills. Learned to kill Bent. Learned not to care about very much at all except gold and my next meal. Being in Eld Shire also put me near more books than I’d ever seen, and so I became the band’s agent, selling and buying and seeing to our needs. I knew the Ryepare River, from Eld Shire to Taunarisha, better than the back of m’hand. Saw Menara, had visions of being a rich man in a fine house who never had to wash blood off his limbs to become presentable.”
“And then you got lost in the tunnels of the Gur Grehar?”
He nodded. “And by lost, I mean, the only one who survived an ambush. Once again, made away by swimming, but this time in an underground stream, no air pockets to be had. Thought I was as good as dead just before I came up in a cavern—and found meself face to face with a tribe of Bent.” He shrugged. “You know the rest, more or less.”
Druadaen saw movement at the upper limit of his vision. At the lip of the ravine’s overhang, a silhouette on a horse waved to him: Elweyr. He waved back, pointed upstream. The silhouette receded, angling in the direction he’d pointed.
“Mind the oar! Keep us moving ahead, but slowly!” Ahearn shouted. He grabbed a heavy boat hook and ran, sure-footed despite the chop, to the bow. Once there, he pushed the prow away from a series of potentially hull-gutting rocks. When they were in comparatively clear water, he turned and scanned the stretch of the tributary now behind them. He waved to Druadaen, shouted, “Time to go!” and leaped to a rock that led to others which in turn led to the bank.
Druadaen sprinted forward, stumbling; just because he had sea legs did not mean he had what the boat’s captain had called “river feet.” But the skills were comparable enough that he got to the bow just as Ahearn swung out the boat hook to help him lunge to a nearby rock.
“A little warning would have been helpful,” Druadaen muttered sharply as he landed awkwardly on the froth-ringed boulder.
“And where’d be the fun in that?” Ahearn countered with his very white smile. “Besides, I didn’t see a way off until the moment I hopped. And you’ll be happy to see we made a good job of it. Look.”
The water to either side of them, accelerating as it battered and bashed its way through a maze of boulders, caught the boat and spun it around, pushing the prow downstream. Gathering speed, she glanced off one rock, miraculously missed a second, but hit the third almost dead-on. Her prow sundered with a lightning crack. Wood groaned and squealed as she rode over the rocks. It didn’t put a hole in her bottom, but several strakes split and gapped, and her stempost began listing to port: a sure sign that it had partially detached from the rest of the bows.
Dunnage tumbled into the roiling water. The drag on the stempost tugged it away from the hull, made the whole boat sag to port. She tried to right herself, but the water, pinched by the stone-fanged notches through which it flowed, was so choppy and wild that she couldn’t find her natural balance. Instead, the wild currents pushed her relentlessly forward.
For a moment, she seemed steadier—just before cracking straight into a high, rounded boulder. The impact didn’t reduce her to flinders, but the prow came away with a shuddering groan of wood. Water rushed into the widening gap that had been her bow, just as she spun free of the boulder and was driven into a skirmish line of jagged rocks.
The abrupt arrest of her progress pulled her apart at her weakest point. As her dragging prow dug low in the water and caught against a stony mass beneath the fuming torrent, the following current slammed into her suddenly motionless stern. The entire transom came out of the water, flying up fast, hard, and high.
The boat half turned in midair. The remaining dunnage was flung out of her with the force of an explosion. She came down keel-sideways, landing on the rocks with a splintering crash. Although still hanging together, the shattered hull began pulling itself apart as it jounced down toward the next set of rocks, which awaited her like frothing gray molars.
“As I foretold,” Ahearn pronounced proudly, hands on hips. But there was a mournful bend to his brow.
Druadaen stared at him. “Why the sad look?”
He sighed. “It is ever a melancholy thing, witnessing the death of a boat. Particularly if you’re the one who murdered it.”
Druadaen put his hand on the swordsman’s shoulder. “Yet, you’ve done it so convincingly, that it might be what saves our lives.” He looked up at the crest of the ravine, saw figures waving, and heard the distant whinny of an impatient horse. “As you said, Ahearn: ‘Time to go.’”