Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 (7 page)

 
          
A
long wooden table was piled with curious gear: a large glass globe, a leather
suit, boots with lead weights attached and flipperlike protuberances, various
flexible tubes sewn out of river-snake skin, bladders, thick glass bottles,
satchels—and unmistakably, a dismantled heliograph. So these Observers had
mastered our river code, presumably.

 
          
"That,"
announced Capsi proudly, "is my diving suit. Enough air can be bottled
under pressure to let me breathe inside the glass helmet for nearly twenty
minutes. The helmet and other glass parts are by a special commission from the
grindery. The weights and the gear I'm carrying slung about me will counteract
the buoyancy of all the air. And here," and he picked up what was plainly
a lamp, though of curious design, "is my underwater light supply, if I
have to dive deep and need light, fuelled with magnesium."

 
          
"It'll
explode."

 
          
"No,
it won't," Yosef assured me.
"Been tested."

 
          
"Then
I float up, discard the bowl, and my head is protected from stingers by this
leather cap and wire mask."

 
          
I
turned to Yosef, who had obviously dreamed up all this apparatus. "You
seem to have thought of everything—except for one little detail: what Capsi is
going to
do
for the whole of the rest
of his life over there."

 
          
My
brother grinned at me wolfishly. "Explore, that's what. I'd say that
there's quite enough
terra incognita
to occupy a lifetime. And I'll report back, of course.
At
intervals."

 
          
"So
where do I come into all this?"
As though I hadn't
already guessed.

 
          
"You
have access to boats, sister dear. You know the ropes and the routines. We only
need a very small craft.
Sufficient for me and one other
helper, who'll surrender his once-in-a-lifetime chance on the river to
assist."

 
          
"And
I suppose that brave volunteer is Hasso?"

 
          
Capsi
nodded, unabashed.

 
          
"I'm
not sure if I can handle even a cutter or a sloop on my own. .
.
." But I thought that I could.
Whether
I should was quite another
matter.

 
          
"We
were on the verge of appealing to your better nature," explained Yosef,
in an old wise way. "But now—you have seen what you have seen."

 
          
Yes.
The bonfire.
The burning woman.
The smoke rising up.

 
          
Unsure
whether I was championing my sex, or betraying it, I too nodded.

 
          
After
this, events achieved a momentum of their own. The very next midnight, starlit
and clear, saw me—or rather failed to see me, since I had "borrowed"
the little cutter discreetly, though with my heart in my mouth—rocking far out
upon the river on dark water, within a stone's throw of the deeper darkness of
the current.

 
          
Masked
and helmeted in his preposterous fishbowl, his suit hung with gear, Capsi was
assisted over the side by Hasso. And my brother sank.

 
          
We
didn't hang around; we were drifting closer to the current. I set sail, grabbed
the tiller and we fled back to the shore, where I let Hasso off somewhere
upstream of the quay before sneaking the cutter back to its berth. Without
being noticed.
Though I expected at any moment that somebody
would stroll up on deck for a breath of air, or reel back from a very late
night on the town.

 
          
Returning
to my room, I tried to sleep but couldn't. By earliest dawn I was toiling up
the hundreds of steps of the Spire.

 
          
Almost
all of the observers were up on the platform, spread out along the guard-rail,
keeping silent vigil upon the western shore— with two men even watching the
southerly stretch, though it seemed unlikely that Capsi could have forged
upstream against the flow. With the exception of Big Eye, all of the
telescopes, even the ancient ones, had been pressed into service—brought out
into the open, mounted on swivel tripods; though no one
was
using these to scan just at the moment. One's ordinary field of view, including
peripheral vision, was more likely to catch the tiny blink of reflected light
when it came; if indeed it ever came. Hasso and Yosef were inside the
observatory; so I stayed outdoors.

 
          
An
hour went by—and meanwhile the sun rose behind us.

 
          
Then
suddenly, when I was really beginning to fret, a man cried out and
pointed—quite far to the north.

 
          
Other
observers hastily swung telescopes about and clapped an eye to them; but even
at that distance I could spell out the winks of the helio-mirror.

 
          
"S-A-F-E.
Safe,
"
I
called
out.

 
          
The
rest of the brief message was:
Tired.
Must sleep,
then
move south.
"Tired" was
no doubt a considerable understatement.

 
          
No
sun-signal was sent in acknowledgement, not merely because the sun was at our
backs, but in case anyone on the opposite shore might see it, and be able to
interpret. However a smoky billowing fire was lit briefly in a brazier; and
after a couple of minutes, quenched.

 
          
Since
it seemed ridiculous, after that, to keep returning to my room down in the town
I accepted Yosef's offer of a little bedchamber in the Spire; and by midday I
had stored some of my gear at the quaymistress's office and humped the bare
essentials aloft, declining Hasso's assistance.

 
          
Yet
once ensconced up top, I had nothing to do, and within a few hours I was
feeling bored and restless.

 
          
And anxious?
Where was the use of anxiety for someone whom I
could never see again—except maybe briefly through Big Eye?

 
          
I
ought to have been feeling intensely curious about what Capsi would report, as
pre-arranged, at dawn the next day. Yet when it was a question of why women were
being burned alive, "curiosity" hardly seemed the right description
of my feelings. I . . . dreaded to know the answer. And as to the facts of life
on the west bank, well of course I felt some superficial curiosity—but how much
of it could Capsi satisfy effectively within the first few days? I was
leaving.
Soon.
And I had no wish to sail away and yet
remain in mental thrall to these observers forever more, impelled to dash back
constantly to hear the latest. If I acted in that style, why, Capsi would have
made me a slave of his for life, on a chain as long as the river!

 
          
Selfish little Yaleen?
No, not really. Only sensible, I'd
have said. . . .

 
          
Sensible?
Hardly! I soon began fretting that by taking up
temporary residence on the Spire I might have identified myself too visibly
with the observer men, prompting some busybody in Verrino to ask the question:
why?

 
          
I
realize now that I was in a very confused emotional state, about what I'd done
and what Capsi had undertaken. I wished to flee, but had to stay—and
vice versa!
By
six o'clock
I found myself hesitating at the top of the
stairs, craving a drink in town and ordinary chatter around me. I had to pull
myself up sharpish and retrace my steps to my room, because actually I was
almost ready to keel over in exhaustion and tumble all the way down into town.

 
          
So
back to my chamber I crept. Then, without my quite knowing how it happened,
Hasso was standing by my bedside—where I lay fully dressed.

 
          
"No!"
I cried, blinking at him.

 
          
And
he chuckled, indicating the faint grey light beyond the mul- lion.

 
          
"Dawn's breaking, Yaleen."

 
          
"What?"

 
          
"I
thought I'd best come and fetch you—just in case you slept right through. I'm
sure you'd never have forgiven me for
that
."

 
          
When
the light of the heliograph blinked out, half an hour later, it came from
almost opposite Verrino. But we could be fairly sure that no one else would see
it. It was very low, and we were high; and besides, who else would be looking
out for a signal light from that direction?

 
          
Today's
message was longer.

 
          
Went inland.
Avoided contact.
Hid near town.
All females wear black, confirmed.
Town is shabby, poor, dirt-agric. Plus pigs, chickens, goats.
Mining activity south side hills, thus reason for location.
Male
and female workers.
Overheard passers-by on track.
Same language, few strange words, accent thick but imitable.
Diving suit worked a dream. Black current fifteen spans deep approx.
Same
time tomorrow. End.

 
          
So
there was nothing to do till then.
Unless I wished to pore
over panoramas and grub through records of past observations and hearsay from
Ajelobo to Umdala; which I did not.

 
          
I
could just as easily have stayed in town, and climbed up every day before dawn!

 
          
Perhaps.
Perhaps that mightn't have been quite so easy in
poor light. . . .

 
          
After
a breakfast of black bread, raw fish and pickles in the refectory I decided
that I should certainly spend the day in town, and slipped quietly away.

 
          
Not
quietly enough, however. Hasso caught up with me halfway down the spiralling
steps.

 
          
"Yaleen,
would you let me treat you to lunch? Please."

 
          
"Lunch,"
I pointed out, "is four or five hours away."

 
          
"Well,
I don't mind waiting, if you don't."

 
          
"Did
they send you along to keep an eye on me?"

 
          
"Of course not.
What possible harm could you intend us?
And what harm could you possibly do, without harming yourself into the
bargain?"

 
          
"You've
lost me my brother," said I. "You've lost him for my parents.
Forever."

 
          
"I
think,
Yaleen, that
you and they lost him a long time
ago. But don't think of him as vanished. Don't count on his not being hailed as
a hero, one of these days."

 
          
"A hero—of what?"

 
          
"Of
the knowledge of why things are as they are."

 
          
"And
of how to alter them?"

 
          
Hasso
remained silent.

 
          
"He'll
be so alone," I went on. "Utter strangers, different customs, always
having to sneak around and pretend. . . ."

 
          
"Not
necessarily. He
is
a man, after all.
Who's to say that they won't welcome him over there?
just
as soon as he's checked out the lie of the land. And as to loneliness, maybe he
was always alienated . . . But you know, where one man can cross, another man
can cross too."