Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (10 page)

 
          
And
I thought fancifully that if the anus of the black current was located off
Spanglestream, then here at Croakers' Bayou was the mouldy decaying appendix of
the river. The grating croaks were a sort of flatulence, a shifting of gases in
the bowels.

 
          
Once
out of Croakers' Bayou forests cloaked the shore. The western bank, far away,
was likewise a ribbon of green. It occurred to me that the Sons of Adam might
not rule the roost everywhere along the far side. How could they, when they
denied themselves the advantages of river transport? Maybe
their
southern reaches were uninhabited. Or perhaps those who
dwelled there were savages, without even the dubious level of culture of the
Sons.

 
          
Savages!
Ah, yet gentler perhaps than the Sons in their treatment of women. . . .

 
          
And
maybe they were even worse than the Sons. I spotted no canoes; no smoke plumes
from campfires near the shore. If anyone lived over there, they too shunned the
river.

 
          
But
this was the least of my worries, compared with the unending paint-job.
Whenever it rained, which it did with a vengeance now and then, we had to rig
tarpaulins.

 
          
Gradually
the forest knotted and tangled itself with vines and moss-mats, epiphytes and
parasites, moving towards true jungle.
Which, by the time we
reached Jangali, it was.

 
          
We
carried two young lovers as passengers on our journey to Jangali: Lalo and
Kish
.
Kish
was a boy from Spanglestream who was a
friend of Jambi's family on her mother's side. Lalo had decided that she loved
him and was now escorting him back home to Jangali, on the one river trip of
his life, to wed him.

 
          
It
struck me as a slight shame that
Kish
's horizons should thus be limited to the
small stretch of land between two nearly adjacent towns. Well, granted that
Spanglestream and Jangali were 80 leagues apart! But a riverwoman usually
thinks big, and I imagined in a rather snobbish way that it was a teeny bit
unenterprising of Lalo to seek her husband from a town which was comparatively
close to home, rather than from far Sarjoy (say) or Melonby.

 
          
We
were chatting below decks one day, the four of us, getting better acquainted.
Lalo was holding hands with
Kish
, while I was trying to pumice some paint off my fingers.

 
          
Like
Jambi, Lalo was dark-skinned, though her hair was short and curly. She had an
unusually loud voice and always spoke with particular emphasis. At one point
she happened to mention that some trees deep in the Jangali jungles were
"quite as high as the Spire at Verrino". She just mentioned this in
passing, but so assertively did she voice it that I almost tore a nail off on the
pumice stone.

 
          
"Ouch!"
That Spire, and its observatory,
were
all too fresh in
my memory.

 
          
"Oh,
so you got as far as Verrino?" asked Jambi innocently. This was indeed a
singularly innocent question coming from a riverwoman, since there are half a
dozen major towns further north than that. But Jambi, as I say, was a devoted
Southerner.

 
          
"Why
yes," said Lalo. "I didn't waste my time. I just didn't find anybody
suitable. Not till Spanglestream on the way back." And she squeezed Kish's
hand affectionately.

 
          
"It's
often that way." Jambi sounded smug.

 
          
I
couldn't help wondering whether Lalo had not been growing anxious by the time
she got as close to home as Spanglestream. But maybe she had been especially
choosy on her travels; which meant that she had made a sensible choice. The
marriage would last, and last well.

 
          
I
guess from Kish's point of view there was a whole world of difference between
Spanglestream and Jangali. Judging from his questions it was plain that Kish
was a little apprehensive at the prospect of becoming a junglejack—if indeed he
would
become one. Lalo teased him
with this prospect intermittently. Just about as often, she corrected his
misapprehensions. . . .

 
          
"It
seems to me," I said, and I suppose I spoke thoughtlessly in the
circumstances, "that a woman could find her ideal partner in almost any
town chosen at random. It's all a bit of an accident, isn't it? I mean, which
street you happen to walk down.
Which winehouse you pop into.
Who you sit next to at a concert.
You turn left here,
rather than right, and it's this fellow who'll spend the rest of his life with
you, while another fellow walks on by. It could so easily have been the other
one instead."

 
          
"Oh no!"
Lalo protested. "A feeling guides
you.
A kind of extra sense that you only use once.
You
know
you should turn left instead of
right. You
know
you ought to carry on
to the next town, because the scent's gone dead in this one. You're operating
by a sort of special instinct during your wander-weeks. Honestly, Yaleen,
you'll know this if it happens to you. It's a heightened, thrilling
feeling."

 
          
"You're
a romantic," said Jambi. "Kish is lucky. I tend to agree with Yaleen
myself. Anyone can settle down with anyone else." (That wasn't quite what
I'd said.) "But then," she added, "I also have the river as my
first love."

 
          
And
lovers in different ports as well, I wondered? Jambi hadn't spoken of this to
me. One didn't gossip about one's harmless amorous adventures. For one thing,
it would be demeaning to the men.

 
          
"So
you turned right instead of left," I said, "but guided by your
nose."

 
          
"And
now I'll be a junglejack forever." Kish grinned ruefully. He had a
whimsical, expressive face, with twinkling blue eyes, and already a few
smile-wrinkles to accompany them. I liked him, and rather wished that I myself
had met him—the way that I had first met Hasso in Verrino, before I found out
why Hasso had been hoping to meet someone like me.

 
          
"Phooey!"
said Lalo.
"A junglejack?
Why, that's nothing. I
tell you, in the jungle you're usually better off
up
a tree. It's the creepy- crawlies down below that bug us. You'll
need some good strong boots.
And a stomach to go with
them."
She couldn't keep a straight face, though. She giggled.
"Oh, I'm just kidding. Jangali's a decent, civilized place. Not like Port
Barbra. That's where the really weird and queasy things happen, out in the
interior.
The fungus cult, for instance.
Completely
wrecks your sense of time and decency. Us, we just get smashed on junglejack
like decent mortals."

 
          
"Tell
me more," said Kish. "I like getting smashed, too.
Preferably
not by falling off a tree."

 
          
"You
wouldn't, not with safety lines."

 
          
So
we began to natter on about junglejack, the drink. Apparently this was
distilled from the berries of some high vine. It went off quite quickly and
didn't travel—alas for the export economy of Jangali, perhaps fortunately for
the economy of everywhere else. And we nattered about junglejacks in general:
the people who felled the hardwood trees and also harvested the tangled
heights, picking fruit, tapping juice, scraping resin, collecting medicinal
parasite plants.

 
          
I
became quite enthused about the impending festival of acrobatics,
vine-swinging and sky-walking, and also about getting smashed on junglejack,
the drink.

 
          
As did Kish; which was of course why Lalo had timed her return for
that particular week, to coincide.
After a while she even had to remind
him gently that not
everyone
in
Jangali was a junglejack. There were also butchers and bakers and furniture
makers, just like anywhere else.

 
          
And
she went on more emotionally, now, about the beauties of the jungle, brushing
aside the creepy-crawlies as of little consequence.

 
          
How
I wish she had dampened my enthusiasm about Jangali rather than igniting it!
Little did I know then that excesses of enthusiasm would result in my saving
Marcialla's life—bringing me in turn a singularly horrible
reward.

 
          
Saving
Marcialla's life? Well, maybe I exaggerate. Let's change that to: rescuing her
from an awkward and potentially lethal situation.

 
          
I
was looking forward to arriving at Jangali—which was so decently distant from
Verrino. I was looking forward to really enjoying the events. I even imagined
that I was, in a sense, successfully running away.
All the
while in truth I was running—or sailing—
towards.

 
          
"Sun's
shining! Paint detail on deck!" came Credence's call from the top of the
companion way. Why I had bothered cleaning my fingers, goodness knows. Except
that if I hadn't, it would have been harder later on. Perhaps there's a moral
in this: it's almost always harder later on. Everything is.

 
          
Jangali
rejoiced in massive stone quays fronting the river, quarried and cut with steps
and timber-slides. The town itself was founded upon that same great slab of
rock, which ran back into the jungle before dipping under, submerging itself in
humus and vegetation. In the original old town the architecture was of stone,
with wooden upper storeys. The new town behind—which I was to see presently
—was wholly of timber, and fused with the jungle itself. Some houses there
incorporated living trees. Others were built on to them and around them. Some
even slung from them cantilever-style. The entire effect of Jangali was of some
strange metamorphosing creature which was living wood at one end and fossil
rock at the other— or perhaps of dead rock coming gradually to life the further
inland you went.

 
          
The
locals reminded me of those of Verrino. Indeed, this might have been why Lalo
had followed her nose to Verrino in the first place—though with no result.
Jangali folk weren't as quicksilver- nimble and chattery, always scurrying
every which where. Yet there was an elastic spring to their steps,
a bounciness
, as if they regarded the stone floor of the
town more as a trampoline, ever about to toss them up into the treetops beyond.
Its inert rigidity amused them and made them prance, just as a riverwoman
sometimes feels about dry land after a long time afloat; they intended never to
let themselves be bruised by it.

 
          
As
I say, the locals weren't chattery. But they did address one another in tones
pitched to carry through tangles of vegetation in competition with the other
chatterers of the beast variety; in voices intended to penetrate up to the very
roof of the jungle. Conversations generally took place a few paces further
apart than they did elsewhere, much more noisily, more publicly. Jangali would
have been the ideal place for a deaf person to take up residence.

 
          
Thus
the locals reinforced their sense of community. Otherwise, once you were in the
jungle, the jungle could swallow you up, stifle you, isolate you,
make
you mute. I gathered from loud-voiced Lalo that people
around Port Barbra behaved more furtively.

 
          
Before
Lalo and Kish disembarked, they invited Jambi and me to visit them at their
parents' home. Or more truthfully,
Kish
expressed this desire, so that Jambi (old
family friend) could see him in his new abode; Lalo invited Jambi and included
me in the invitation too. I suppose Kish was trying to keep a kind of
psychological lifeline open to Spanglestream. No doubt he hoped that Jambi
would continue to pay the occasional visit whenever she was in Jangali.
Personally, I didn't think this was entirely wise—not at this early stage in
their relationship.
For "a man shall leave his mother
and father, and sister and brother, and embrace the family of his wife".
That's what it says in
The Book of the
River.
In at the deep end, say I!
Just so long as there
aren't any stingers in the water (or at least in the hope that there aren't).