Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (5 page)

 
          
Credit,
yes . . . though there was the genuine happiness to see me, too, and brotherly
affection; which rather confused the matter for me emotionally, otherwise I
might never have fallen for his suggestions. But my actions seemed correct and
brave at the time; and in defence of my own sex, even.

 
          
Indeed,
Capsi managed to keep off the topic of his own obsession so well that after a
couple of days I relented, and asked him, "Well, what about the tiny
people over there?"

 
          
"Tiny, because they're at the range of the Big Eye's powers of
resolution."

 
          
"Oh,
I
know
that."

 
          
He
frowned. "But on a clear day, when the atmosphere's still, you can tell
the men from the women. They're dressed differently: the women all wear
black."

 
          
"How
can you tell they're women?"

 
          
"Babies.
Sometimes they take babies with them, into the
fields."

 
          
"Could
as easily be the menfolk."

 
          
"Feeding
a baby? That's how it
looked to our keenest-eyed watcher." He hesitated before naming him:
"Hasso."

 
          
"Ah,"
I said; I was
almost
prepared for
this.

 
          
"He
sends you his affectionate apologies, Yaleen."

 
          
I
flushed; did my brother know all about that first night? I was angry, ready to
walk away; but instead I shrugged, and said, "It seems to me that you
people base a whole lot of inference on one man's voyeuring of something
leagues away!"

 
          
He
waved his hand dismissively.
"Maybe, maybe not.
The people over there don't go anywhere near the river. They don't sail so much
as a plank on it. They don't net any fish. They don't even have a single shack
that we know of, anywhere near the water. Why?"

 
          
"Because
. . . only women can sail the river—"

 
          
"And
no woman is allowed within a league of it. As I said, it's only a little
town—so where are their cities, if they have them? Presumably they do. They're
inland; right inland, as far away into the habitable zone as they can
get."

 
          
"Assuming
there are deserts beyond.
Same as this side."

 
          
"Fair assumption."

 
          
"So
they don't like the river; that was always obvious. What else is new?"

 
          
"What
else is new, Yaleen, is that they
bum
women over there."

 
          
".
. . What?"

 
          
"About
six months ago, when Big Eye was first commissioned—"

 
          
"Only
boats are commissioned, brother dear."

 
          
"Well,
whatever word. Through Big Eye we saw a crowd gather outside the town. Then a
little cart was pulled through the crowd, to what looked like a pile of wood.
One of the tiny black figures—we couldn't be sure they were women then—was
dragged off the cart . . . and soon the flames crackled and the smoke curled
up."

 
          
"Is
this true?"

 
          
"I
swear on
The Book
it is."

 
          
"But
why should they do anything so cruel?"

 
          
"Because
they hate and fear the river. And woman is of the river. And fire is the foe of
water."

 
          
I
gripped Capsi's wrist. "Water," I said,
"quenches
fire."

 
          
And
this was the beginning of my undoing. Well, perhaps not of
my
undoing personally; but certainly the start of a fateful
sequence of events for my brave if wayward brother.

 
          
The
very next day I was toiling up that damned never-ending stone staircase. Capsi
climbed behind me; thus at least I could set the pace.

 
          
The
stairs wound round the Spire at least thrice before we finally entered an
upward tunnel with subsidiary stairways and chambers leading off it, cut in the
naked rock; and thus arrived at last back in the open air up on the top stone
platform. This was wider than I'd expected from down below: about seventy spans
across, with a safety rail around the exposed parts of the rim. On the eastern
side a stone wall acted as a windbreak—not that the wind would blow from the
east for more than thirty days in the whole year (unless high wind was
different from river wind), but up on this exposed eminence a windbreak of any
kind was probably better than none. Set on the western edge of the platform,
blocking my immediate view of the far shore, was a low observatory building of
brick, roofed in slate.

 
          
The
platform was an austere, breezy place, strangely blank and untenanted—yet at
the same time worn smooth by habitation.

 
          
"Where
is everyone? Where do you live?"

 
          
Capsi
jerked his thumb below.
"Underneath in the rock.
There are lots of rooms."

 
          
How
weird and contrary to my expectations that Capsi, so high up in the air, should
be leading what amounted to a troglodyte life!

 
          
High,
yes: far higher than any mast I had ever shinned up. Walking over to the
guard-rail I stared downriver, away and away in the direction of Sarjoy, though
even so Sarjoy itself must have been quite some distance beyond the horizon. I
picked out familiar landmarks on the eastern shore, and at least half a dozen
boats which might almost have been motionless (but weren't); and I missed
something. My whole body missed it, so that 1 gripped the rail for balance. It
was movement that was absent: the slight rocking to and fro that I'd known any
other time I had been up a height, upon the river, the gentle tilt back and
forth of a masthead.

 
          
Yet
the clouds above looked to be as high in the sky as ever; and the river,
strangely, seemed wider rather than narrower now that I was seeing its span
entire from bank to bank, the way a bird sees it. The river—with the band of
the black current dividing it midway
like
the loading
line along a beached hull. . . .

 
          
I
scanned the far shore for Capsi's reputed town, somewhere inland amidst the
rolling, wooded hills and little valleys, but couldn't pick it out unaided—nor
any other landmarks but those of nature. Highways? No, I could see none . . .
Unless . . . was that one, far far off, winding inland?

 
          
And
directly below me was bustling, hither and thither Verrino: half a league of activity
and variety, with its orchards and vineyards beyond, and off to the east some
sandy hills hiding the glassworks.

 
          
"What
a sad life up here, Capsi!"

 
          
"Sad?
What's that got to do with it? Come on, I'll show you Big Eye." He pulled
me away from the railing and all its grand vistas, towards the brick building;
and it seemed to me that none of the sights were quite real to him unless he
spied at them from out of the dark indoors, through a glass like a voyeur.

 
          
A
wooden door, studded with rusty iron bolts: he pushed it open, and I was
prepared to find myself in gloom reminiscent of the river- aquarium in Gangee.

 
          
But
no: it was light and airy. A whole strip of exposed scenery cut a welcome
swathe several spans high through the whole length of the westerly wall; for
the midriff of this wall was all hinged windows, with most of the panes
hoisted up and out to form a canopy, ventilating the observatory and sheltering
the instruments from rain, unless a shower was scudding from due west.

 
          
Several
ancient telescopes were retired to comers, but three principal instruments
poked their barrels through different windows, two of these in use—the westward
gazers seated on wooden chairs with straight backs, and cushions as a
concession to comfort. There was no doubt at all which of the instmments
was Big Eye
: it was fully nine spans long, and my arm would
hardly have gone around the tube.

 
          
The
northern wall was shelved, with what I took to be logbooks filed on it, and
sketching material: while the whole south wall was taken up by a huge panorama
which quite dwarfed the one that Capsi had made for his bedroom wall back home.
Quite what use the panorama was, with the reality in plain view, I thought I
would forbear to ask—though doubtless it was easier to examine details (such as
individual trees?) upon that great scroll of paper, and measure the distances
from place to place. (And doubtless too, trees grew ... so that the panorama
must always be inaccurate.)

 
          
The
man seated at the smaller instrument glanced round. Dressed in worn brown
trousers and a tight jerkin, with his shirtsleeves rolled up for business, he
was white-haired with a wrinkled impish face. He simply registered our
presence, nodded, then got back to his observations—which struck me as
something of a waste of time, since surely his aged eyes were feebler than the
young man's next to him, and the telescope he was using was less powerful too.

 
          
The
young man next to him . . . Wearing jauntier attire: boots, flared trousers
tucked in, and an unforgettable shirt, striped scarlet and black.

 
          
"Hasso,"
said Capsi; and as though the watcher at Big Eye had awaited this signal, he
looked round; and sprang up. Hasso was just as handsome as I remembered.

           
"See all sorts of things on the
far bank," he remarked merrily and unselfconsciously. "Welcome back,
Yaleen."

 
          
"And
sometimes," said I, "you have to go fishing for hints. How's your
brother?"

 
          
"Oh,
he's a townsman at heart. Never comes up here. We just go around together ...
on occasion."

 
          
"Okay,
okay, I don't mind." (But I did mind, quite a bit.) "That's so much
water down the river."

 
          
Fortunately
he did not attempt anything as crass as to advance and peck me on the cheek; he
simply motioned me politely to his chair, and the vacant eye-piece of Big Eye.
I sat down, and shut one eye to stare.

 
          
The
telescope was trained on the little town—no more than a large village, really,
nestling in the gradients of the land; and for me the weirdest thing of all in
looking upon it was that the place was nameless. Nowhere in
The Book of the River
was its name
inscribed; which meant that it did not exist—and yet it did.

 
          
Compared
with
Verrino,
or even the smallest settlement on our
shore, even to my unpractised eye it looked impoverished and primitive.
Straw thatch?
Apparently.
Walls of dried mud?
Some, perhaps, of
wood.
There was nothing of architecture or adornment about the
settlement, except for one central building of stone, with an onion dome at one
end. I felt not so much that I was gazing across a few leagues of space, as
back hundreds or even thousands of years through time. Perhaps Capsi was right
in his obsession, after all, and here was a more curious sight than any to be
seen from Ajelobo to Umdala ... I found myself itching to peel away the hills,
step up the power of the telescope and discover what
did
lie further to the west; yet this wasn't a particularly
pleasant sort of itch, not the kind that it's satisfying to scratch.

 
          
"Do
you see a black patch, on the green outside the town?" Hasso whispered in
my ear, as though the folk I was spying upon might hear him if he spoke too
loudly. "That's where they burned her.
Alive.
In flames."