The Book of the River

Book 165: Gateway Essentials

by Ian Watson

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

The river cuts right across the known world, from the impassable Far Precipices to the sea. The people on one bank are cut off from those on the other, for the black current has the power to stop them crossing. Only women can travel repeatedly up and down the river, but when Yaleen joins the boating guild and becomes a riverwoman, she is singled out to follow an even more extraordinary path...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 232

Sample

From time immemorial no boat had crossed the river on account 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 sunbleached 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 Chapbook 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. They’re 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.

Tor 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.

Tor 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 with-out 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.

The woman shook as though laughing silently; naturally I couldn’t see her expression.

‘What apothecary has the tools to analyse anything as alien as that? No, that isn’t why. But this is.’ And from a shelf the boatmistress snatched a stoppered phial with wet darkness inside it. ‘Do you still wish to be a riverwoman?’

I hardly faltered, reasoning that the contents of that phial were surely simply inkstained water. Or something similar.

‘Yes, boatmistress. I do.’

She unstoppered the phial and held it out to me.

‘Then drink. Drink of the black current.’

‘And what will happen?’ For maybe, after all, the liquid wasn’t simple and innocuous. Maybe it was exactly what she said it was.

‘Why, I’m still alive and of sound mind, aren’t I, child?’ murmured the quaymistress, at my shoulder.

‘What will it do to me?’

‘It will make you a riverwoman. Drink it quickly – all in one gulp.’

Accepting the phial in my hand, I sniffed it, detecting hardly anything at all: a smell of… dankness, perhaps – and I drank.

The sensation wasn’t so much that of liquid flowing down my throat, as of swallowing a fat garden slug whole. Or a blob of jelly. One moment it was blocking my throat entirely; the next, and it was gone.

I held the phial up to the lantern light. The glass looked perfectly clean, with no dregs or droplets clinging inside.

Laying the empty phial down on the table before me I awaited… I knew not what. A sudden sunburst of light and understanding? A plunge into terror or ecstasy? Creeping clammy cold? Delirium? Menstrual cramps? I sat and waited; and my two witnesses – or assessors? – waited too.

Finally, the boatmistress nodded. ‘You’re safe. The black current doesn’t heed you. You don’t offend it.’

‘What if I had?’

‘Then you would have run up on deck, leaped over the side and done your best to swim oblivious of stingers all the way to the current to join it. In other words you would be dead.’

‘I’ve never heard of anyone doing such a thing.’

‘It doesn’t happen to female applicants very often. Once in a thousand times, if that. And then we have to put it about that they signed on and sailed away without telling friends or family, and had an accident, or else that they stowed away and jumped the boat in a distant port.’

‘So I wasn’t very worried,’ put in the quaymistress mildly.

I laughed nervously. ‘You said “female applicants”, as though there could be such a thing as a male applicant!’

‘Poor choice of words. Men may only sail once in their lives, with their wife-to-be, thus our genes are mixed.’

I knew this, of course; it was laid down in the preface to The Book of the River (though I’m sure this boatmistress had no more notion than I, exactly what ‘genes’ were). ‘But what if men do sail twice? Or try to?’

‘Ah, there we have it. The black current calls them, and drowns them. The river is a jealous female entity, I suppose. Once, she permits a man to sail, so that we may thrive. Twice, and she kills.’

‘I thought,’ said I, ‘that she simply ignored us?’

The fish-mask dipped, as if in prayer. ‘Strange are the ways of the river. But one thing’s for sure: if you’re a woman who’s really a man, she’ll cull you out.’

‘A woman who’s really a man?’

‘You know! Well, you’re young yet, so perhaps you don’t…’

I was sure (or at least halfway sure) that all this rigmarole was simply guild lore that had bloomed in the misty dark age after our arrival on this world, as a way of authenticating social patterns that had proved so stable and self-perpetuating; with women being the travellers and traders, with men marrying into their woman’s household. Matrilineal descent, and so on and so forth. It was really all gloss on the privileges of the guild; and I reminded myself that any man who was so inclined, and sufficiently energetic, could walk all the way back to his home town away from a wife he had grown to hate, or anywhere else for that matter. But obviously out of self-interest in the status quo no boat would ease his passage.

The boatmistress lifted her mask; she was a sharp-faced freckled redhead, perhaps forty years old.

‘That’s all over,’ she said. ‘Not a word, mind. Now you can forget about it.’ She reached for a flask from the shelf containing a different kind of liquid – ginger spirit – and brought down three glasses, too. ‘So: welcome to the river and the guild, apprentice boatwoman.’ She poured. ‘Here’s to faraway places, and unfamiliar shores.’

The spirit was strong, and rushed to my inexperienced head.

The most unfamiliar shore,’ I heard myself saying presently, ‘is just a league and a half away, right over there.’ Nudging the glass westward.

The boatmistress looked angry, and I hastened to add, ‘I only mention it on account of my twin brother. He wants to watch from Verrino.’

‘Verrino, eh? That’s a long walk, for a young fellow.’ In the boatmistress’s voice I caught a hint of vindictiveness, as though Verrino was some bastion of rebellion against the rightful way, the way of the river. If Capsi wished to get to Verrino he would have to hike the fifty leagues; unless by some wild chance a husband-hunting girl from Verrino decided to visit us in Pecawar, fell madly in love with young Capsi and carried him back home with her to wed. I didn’t think that Capsi quite qualified yet as a noteworthy catch. Maybe in another couple of years he would. But equally, why should some girl marry him just to provide him with an easy journey downstream to that watchful fraternity of his?

‘When do I join a boat?’ I asked, in more practical vein. Wishing, a moment later, that I hadn’t – since I had no particular wish to bunk down on the Ruby Piglet (named, perhaps, in sardonic honour of its redheaded boat-mistress?). But I needn’t have worried.

Said the quaymistress, ‘There’s a brig due in, day after tomorrow, with two empty berths; bound for Gangee, carrying grain. They heliographed ahead, wanting crew. Then they’re running back all the way down to Umdala. Far enough for you, first-timer?’

I got home at nine o’clock, quite tipsy, and went up to Capsi’s room; he was in, playing around with his latest reconstruction of the original spyglass, adding an extra lens or something. For all the good that would do. Perhaps my face was flushed: Capsi gave me much more than a second glance.

‘I’ve joined the guild,’ I said proudly.

‘Which guild?’ he asked with mock innocence, as though there was any other guild for me.

‘I’m sailing out. Thursday. Bound for Gangee, then Umdala. On the brig the Sally Argent.’ As though the name of the brig would mean anything to him. He hadn’t spent years hanging about the quayside, sniffing around the ropes and bollards, and getting in the way of the gangers unloading.

‘Well, Sis, if you’re going to the Gangee, you’ll be back here in about three weeks.’

I advanced on him. ‘That’s the last time you’re going to call me Sis! I’m older than you, anyway.’

‘By two minutes. Fancy some rough and tumble, eh?’

I halted. ‘Not especially.’

‘Some sublimated eroticism? Grope and squeeze?’

‘How dare you!’

‘Well, what do they get up to when you join the guild? Strip you naked and prod you with a windlass handle? Splice your mainbrace, whatever that means?’

‘What makes you think they get up to anything? Well, they don’t. So there.’

‘And pigs can fly.’ Had he slunk down to the quayside, and spied on me? Or had he just happened to notice that the Ruby Piglet was in town? Or neither – since it’s often said that twins are empathic? Well, there was precious little empathy going on right now! At first I couldn’t understand it.

He pointed his spyglass at me. ‘Seriously, Sis, you need a tumble. You’ll probably have to learn to fight with knives, if you’re going on a boat.’

‘Oh, I see. I see. You’re bloody jealous – because after I’ve been to Gangee and back, in another week or two I’ll be sailing smoothly into Verrino, while you’ll still be stuck here burning your eyes out staring at sweet all.

Don’t worry, Capsi: when I’m home, from Umdala, in six months or so, I’ll tell you what your darling Verrino’s all about.’

His lips whitened. ‘Don’t you worry. I’ll be there by then.’

‘In that case,’ and I peeled off one shoe, then the other, ‘you’ll be needi. . .