Angel with The Sword

Chapter 1

NOW in all the world there were above a hundred cities; which was a good deal better world than the Ancestors had left. There was the heptapolis of the Chattalen strung up and down the Black Sea like a line of black pearls; and there was the prosperous river-land of Nev Hettek, which sent its boats chugging down the great Det to the Sundance Sea. There were settlements near the strange ruins of Nex. Wherever human stubbornness could find a toehold, trade went; and the world, which was named Merovin on the charts, got along as best it could, poised between the sure knowledge that outworld humanity had no interest in it and the eternal hope that the inhuman sharrh had no use for it, present or future. Certainly the sharrh had no intention of letting Merovin's scattered inhabitants off the planet and into space.

So the world—it was only in the religious context the inhabitants ever called it Merovin—managed for itself, these hundred cities descended from humans too stubborn to quit the world when the human-sharrh treaty demanded the removal of the colony; descended from colonists clever enough to have hidden out from the search teams; and tough enough to have survived the Scouring which took out the tech. The sharrh ignored Merovin's inhabitants thereafter. (Though there were rumors that there were sharrh onworld who had not kept their side of the treaty.) The uproar and the commotion died down; the human fugitives came out of the hills, rebuilt their ruins and begat offspring. And twenty generations of descendants cursed them for absolute fools.

Twenty generations of descendants built the hundred cities, and lived in them; and knew of a heartdeep certainty that elsewhere in the universe humankind fared a great deal better than humankind did anywhere on Merovin. The stars shone overhead like paradise unattainable and Merovans lived and died under them with the knowledge that the heavens were as wide as their own lives were limited. Thanks be to the Ancestors. Who were fools.

Now there were wonders on Merovin. Even the most sullen and despairing soul admitted a certain majesty in the Misty Mountains and the green rolling Sundance; in the fabled Desert of Gems or (with a shudder) the remote sharrh ruins of Kevogi and Nex. There was a moon to inspire romantics—the Moon, it was called, and two more bits of moon, which Merovans named the Dogs, that chased the Moon through the heavens. There were cities tike Susain, where mines made wealth. There were trading centers like Kasparl, that teemed with strangers from rivers and from caravans. Merovin had its bright spots.

But in all the world of a hundred human cities there was likely no worse place than Merovingen of the thousand bridges, which was six hundred fifty years old and still working on its decay.

Of all the ill luck of the Ancestors, Merovingen had been the worst. First city in the world. The spaceport-well, the Ancestors knew what had come of that. And, in the Ancestors' ineffable wisdom, Merovingen had been situated on the Det, for the anticipated trade that would come down the river on cheap barges to be lifted offworld from the spaceport.

Well, trade did come down the Det, though the spaceport grew up with grass and brush. But the earthquake that had leveled luckless Soghon upriver (which was to be Merovingen's main contact-point with the interior) also shifted the course of the Det so that it largely inundated Merovingen. Merovingen thrust itself up desperately on pilings and built bridges and went on growing up and up and sideways on the flooded ruin of former buildings, despite fever and the slow rising of the river (or the inexorable sinking of Merovingen's pilings, there was de bate which was the case). Merovingen lived, which was its own misfortune, just well enough not to die.

It was a wonder of sorts itself from a distance, like a ruined gray-board pier all built up with towers, a fanciful profusion of windowed wooden spires as if it were all one building. (It nearly was, so closely it crouched over the canals which had replaced other modes of transportation.) It truly had a thousand bridges—a mad three-tiered web of catwalks and air-bridges, bridges joining balconies, bridges joining bridges, stairs joining level to level, so that houses and shops and manufactories jostled one another for the least hour of sunlight, excepting the lofts and towers which were the place to live if one were doomed to live in Merovingen. The towers caught the breezes (and the storms); while the lowermost inhabitants lived in perpetual readiness to move their belongings out come flood. And the whole creaked and groaned in the winds, or to the push of the tide up the shallow harbor and into the canals; or (one feared) the settling of the whole mass of the city another fraction into oblivion. That was Merovingen-above.

Below the city moved a dark demimonde of barges and bargemen, skips and poleboats and whatever craft could negotiate the web of canals and the largely unregulated overhang of Merovingen's bridges. Down in the watery depth of the city existed the lowest of levels, the foundations of buildings in the last stages of shoring-up before they too sank and became part of the underbracings below the mud—little nooks of shops and taverns that catered to the desperate, who would add their bones someday to the underbracings. It was a place of disappearances. Lives came and went transitory as the boats which flitted like black ghosts in and out among the bridge pilings, through some sunlit patch open all the way to the sky, then gone again, silent and untraceable in the web. A life went out, a body slid beneath the water, and no one noticed. Or if someone did, there was nowhere to file the complaint. There was a governor: Iosef Alesandr Kalugin was his name; but no one got that far, and mostly it meant there was a rich somebody who sat atop the pile along with other rich somebodies, who could buy a lot of deaths, and cared little for one more.

So Merovingen got along as the world did. Its marvelous appearance was best appreciated at distance, say, the upwind side of the present bay. Or from the sea beyond the Rim. Closer and one could smell the wind as it rotted there, old Merovingen building its mazy bridgeways with the disdain of latter-day Merovingians for coherent plans of all sorts. It festered on its shallow sidestream and failed harbor, praise the Ancestors for their foresight. It stank. It was the haven of pirates and the desperate and outcast of other cities.

But the majority of unfortunates just happened to be born there.

Altair Jones was one such—poling along through Merovingen's black waterways and under its bridges and along its rare open canals for whatever small freight she could run on her patched-together skip, much of which had been deck-planking on the old Del Star till her boilers blew and sent her fifty two crew and eight hundred nine passengers to their reward. Altair Jones was a lanky, long-limbed seventeen-odd; or sixteen: she forgot, and her mother had left her nothing but a battered boat, the clothes on her back and an Adventist name, the latter of which did her no great service in a city mostly Revenantist. Barefoot, in ragged breeches and a river-runner's cap drawn low on black hair above a dusky tanned face, she was beyond looking like the boy she had pretended to be before she filled out; but you would know if you ever caught her eyes that you were looking at someone who would hole your boat or your barrels if you gave her reason; and that years after the offense; and with you sleeping sound aboard and all unsuspecting. There were easier pickings on the river than Jones. People got that impression early-on. You dealt with Jones business-like and you knew your cargo might get where it was going if you had a barrel or two to carry. And if you were an honest canaler you'd ask Jones to watch your boat and goods while you took a stint ashore. And it would stay unbothered. When she went ashore, her skip left under someone's guard, she carried a knife and a barrel-hook, which were only the tools of her trade, but river-rats and canalers had ways of using the latter that made the townsfolk of the bridges shiver and the ruffians of the mazy walkways think twice: canalmen were never rich pickings and one shout of Ware, hey! would bring every water-rat within earshot into the melee, with their hooks and their knives unsheathed.

Not that there were not scoundrels and cutthroats among canalmen. There were; and bodies quietly slipped into the Det's bay, and boats got robbed, particularly little boats of partnerless canalers who found themselves up some dark bywater with retreat cut off from either end. But Jones was too canny for that. She handled her skip mostly without the ancient little motor, which worked only fitfully at best; she used the pole and the hook, worked in and out the traffic of high day with a deft shift of bare foot and shove of the pole that sped her through tight spots, but she took no chances by night: she left the deep nooks to the combines and the gangs that ran them and did her night tie-up usually by the Hightown Bridge, wherever she could find a spot at the fringes of the other canal-folk, an ungainly midnight collection of ramshackle craft, some real fishing boats of! the Det and out of the harbor, overnighted on a supply trip; mostly canaler-craft; some skiffs or hired-poleboats or smallish barges and numerous skips like her own.

She fished a bit in her idle hours—for eels, mostly; the canals were noxious, but the channel in the harbor was still wholesome, and when things were truly slow and after storms when the sea was boiling into the Dead Harbor and onto the marsh and the Port Flat, she nursed the lame motor out round the Rimwash, built a fire of driftwood on the beach to stake out her territory, and fished and combed the Sundance shingle for what the tide washed in, which was sometimes nets and sometimes line and now and again a bit of plank or a rare shell to dicker with or a -bit of canvas to trade or sell.

And regularly, the only regular trade she had, she would pole up to the back door of taverns here and there, where she would buy up a few barrels; it was up the canalside steps and knock at the back and the potboy would unchain the barrels and sell them off for the few pennies she had; she would resell them to old Hafiz the brewer up the canal and haul a freight of beer and whiskey back again. So the trade went, not much pay and late hours, but it was bread to go with the river eels.

And now and again, at Moghi's tavern by the Fishmarket Stairs, her first and best customer, there was a different sort of trade, a few barrels of very fine brandy to take down-canal to Hafiz with the empties. How that got to Moghi was a good question, coming from high up the Det as it did, or even from the Chattalen. But Hafiz had his uptown clients and when mat fine brandy went down the canal, a big load of Hafiz' best beer came up it, and a bit of real coin came her way at either end.

Tonight might be one of those nights, since there was a Nev Hettek riverboat warped into port Detside, and that meant illicit goods filtering into Merovingen-under-the-bridges, same as it meant tine goods uptown. Altair Jones scented possibilities.

So she came in the dead of night, poling lazily past the gathering of barges at the Hightown Bridge as if she were looking for a mooring-spot, and then going on the Grand Canal under the pilings of the Fishmarket Stairs, where a winding set of steps came down from the triple bridgeways of Merovingen-above. The high board buildings went up level upon level above; catwalks laced the space between them, all silvery gray in the moonlight; and Fishmarket Bridge crossed the canal, on stout pilings that stood like a watery black forest by one of the few solid bits of rock in Merovingen. And tangled amid it all, the back porches of a second-hand store, a spicery, a bakery, and Moghi's dilapidated tavern, where the light of a porch-lantern danced on the waters and invited approach despite barred, shuttered windows and closed door.

There at that corner of Moghi's porch, Altair snagged a convenient piling and looped the tie-rope around, the current carrying the skip up against Moghi's porch ladder, an unobtrusive and rickety span of nailed boards. But when her ears caught a flurry of footsteps on boards, above the slap and ripple of the canal water, she stopped with her hand on the ladder; and her sharp eyes, scanning up and about, caught a move in the moonlight up amongst the back and forth lacery of the Stair, up along the nether tier of the triple bridge.

Men in cloaks. She froze right as she was, hugging her skip to that piling and keeping low by that lamplit porch, because there was more than one kind of vermin that skulked about the bridges of nightbound Merovingen. She pulled her cap-brim down low to shade her eyes from any glimmer of Moghi's porch lantern, and held the rope tight to keep the boat from swinging and bumping against the porch. A shiver set into her muscles, which was the cold and the strain on her arms.

There were maybe a half-dozen of them, all dark-cloaked, out on that bridge not so far above. She heard the mutter of their voices as they came to the rail. Up to no good, it was very sure. Sometimes smugglers dealt with Moghi, on business they wanted private-—that was one kind of trouble. But these looked like something else, all cloaked and hooded and hunched over some weight they carried together to that rail.

Something pale gleamed among them, fitful glimmering; it shone like a body then, suddenly airborne in the night, and hit the black water with a splash that threw water on her. Altair sucked in her breath, huddled tight against the piling as the laughter drifted down to her; another shiver got to her taut muscles, and the current tried to take the boat this way and that, but she resisted it with a steady pull of her arms.

"See him?" one asked, faintly, above her head.

"No," said another. "That's done 'im."

The figures went away then, a flicker of shadow among the railings, and the thump of leather-shod soles up the Fishmarket Stair. Sound diminished. Trouble left the riverside and ascended to Merovingen-above, maybe where it had come from in the first place. And not a thing stirred from Moghi's.

Altair let go the piling; the skip bumped and bumped again in the water-motion, and she fumbled at the tie-rope with cold fingers. No barrels tonight, by the Ancestors. Not a crack would Moghi's porch door open right now, not to any knocking, if they had wind of that, but there were other doors Moghi's bully lads might stir from if they heard that trouble, and she had no wish to be caught in explanations. She jerked loose, coiled the rope, anxious to be away.

Something splashed out of time with the water. She squinted outward. A disturbance broke the ripple-pattern near the pilings of the high bridge's southward jut, a trick of the eyes—no, again, again. Whatever, whoever they had flung in had floated. She froze stock still, cursed to herself and swayed to the motion of the water that was pushing on that floating body too, taking it and her loose boat the same way, beside the webwork of Fishmarket, in the shifting glimmer of the moon and Moghi's reflected porchlight. Black pilings of me high bridge drifted by. A ripple-spot emerged and ebbed in the black-shining water where it caught Moghi's porchlight.

Something struggled there. Death did not attract her. But a struggle for life—that deserved audience, at least. Deserved curiosity. Or some kind of human sympathy.

A gleam of white, then, a splash in the dark. Not wave-motion. The water slapped the pilings out of time to mat sound. She ran out the pole as silently as she could and probed the water at middle depth.

A hand broke the surface. Broke it again near the boat, fingers reaching up a piling, failing as they found no purchase.

She got down on her knees on the slats at the sloping prow and probed with the pole down by that piling, not wanting to do that at all, no; what someone threw in the canal was their business. But this lonely battle was persistent, horrid, down in Old Det's dark bowels. Old Det had eaten something that went down hard: and being water-rat, Altai; was on the side of the something and not greedy black old Det.

Give it a chance-. poke it up, make it fight.

Fool, another small voice said in her skull. They might not be unwitnessed. There were the bridges. The killers had gone that way, into the high town. They might be looking down on her this very moment.

Others might be watching. Moghi's folk. Or shore-siders who would sell information to worse places; or sell a soul, having learned the relative value of souls and bread on waterside.

The pole hit something yielding, deep-down against the bottom. Something dragged at it below the water, gripped it, began to climb up it—

She took in her breath and shoved the pole hard against the stony bottom, taking the boat back, but that something came along with the pole, making it drag. The water splashed at the bow, a white hand shot up and closed at the rim right by her knees. She snatched at the barrelhook at her belt and watched in mute horror as the fingers began to lose their grip and slip away.

Hook that hand and she might hold him sure. And cripple a man for life. Hook was safe. That pitiful reach up might be a trick, a trap, a drowning man could pull her under that black water and kill them both.

The fingers slipped free. She grabbed that vanishing hand with her bare fingers and pulled, let go the barrelhook and grabbed it with both hands, braced her bare feet and hauled up and back, standing, balancing the stern-heavy boat against the dead weight. A man's limp body came up over the edge, one arm and head and shoulder before she ran out of pull.

It was a body all-over pale even to the hair, a young and well-made body draped precariously over the bow of her skip, which was a vast waste to have feeding the fishes and the eels, even if he was what he probably was, some poor debtor or someone afoul of the gangs. Some gang member, very much the likeliest, and the sensible thing was to let him slide right back down amongst the fishes and the pilings.

She stayed braced that way a long several gasps for breath, holding on to his slippery wrist with the boat bobbing and rocking. Then she trod down on his hand, knelt on his back and hauled the other arm out before he could slide back in. Both arms this time.

Pull.

Damn. Damn. Damn fool.

She did not want to be a murderer. Or a party to murder. And by not drifting past she had suddenly gotten to mat kind of choice.

She fell hard onto the bottom-slats, thump!, bruising her backside, and scraped the rest of his body up onto the rim, right up to where it would hurt, which was enough for him to stay aboard and for her to let go of, and altogether enough charity for a stranger. But she caught her breath and worked forward, with a rocking of the boat, knelt down over his back and fished one leg up by main force, heaved and hauled him into a limp, sodden knot on the slats.

The drag his trailing body had given the skip was gone. The boat spun slowly, hit a piling and slewed again, slow shifting perspective through the timbers. She worked over him, knees bruised on the slats, knelt astraddle this human flotsam and leaned with all her might on his back, squeezing the water out, push and push and push, one, two, while he spasmed and the water came up out of his gut and into the bilge. The skip drifted and bumped and thumped its way along, every thump a bruise on something she valued more than this drowned, hopeless nothing. She swore on the edge of every breath. Damn fool. Bang my boat up. Damn you falling into my canal. Not my fault. Blame them. What'd I do to owe you this? (Thump.) Damn.

A moment of moonlight then as the skip drifted between bridges and overhangs. Push and back, push and back. She let the skip drift and spin and kept it up, no time to stop. Dammit, dammit, dammit… "Dammit, breathe, dammit."

He was breathing. She felt him choke and falter, water coming up; and kept leaning on him and swearing at him and gasping and swearing, until his hands began a febrile movement and the boat swept into the eddy off Ventani Pier. She started the rhythm again, because the vomiting became too much to let him breathe steadily. Push and shove when he choked, till he heaved it up and got another half-liquid suck of air down his throat.

Bang, broadside onto the timbers of the pier with a shock that popped her teeth together. Old Det was lively when the tide was turning. Push and let be. Push and let be, until the gasps got smaller and equaled her own. Thump, against another piling, and a dizzy spin into moonlight toward the dreaming clutter of night-tied boats at Hanging Bridge.

She let him breathe on his own then. He lay with his face sideways on the deck-slats, where he had twisted trying to breathe and now just rested, his sides working hard for what air would come. His face shone with waxen pallor, a fine face, now that the strangled look had left him, a beautiful dead-looking face, profile against the skip's rough boards; she realized suddenly she was sitting on the handsomest naked man she had ever looked on, and him dying the way all pretty things died the river got its black hands on.

Fever if not the drowning. He had drunk too much of it.

Her mother had gone that way. She had saved kittens out of Old Det's waters. And once a toddler barge-wash knocked off a boat deck. None of them had lived.

Damn. This one too. Dammitall.

He breathed. She felt a spasm, another weak heave of his gut, but this time his hands dragged toward leverage and he tried to move. She rolled aside onto her haunches as he made an effort to get himself farther up onto the dry grating and move his knees out of the bilge—one knee on the slats, and she tried to pull, but got nowhere against his weight. He lay there panting and coughing and then tried again as if he were the only one involved in this, as if he felt nothing, knew nothing but that cold water at one extremity of his body and solid wood in front of him. He got the one knee up, lost it, got it forward again and hunched his arms under him. They went into bridge shadow, drifted perilously toward a cluster of night-moored canalers. She got up and used the pole, and used it continuously for a few moments because the Grand Canal ran perversely awry where the flow from the Snake came into it, by Hanging Bridge; she averted collision, and kept traveling, imagining curious eyes among boats moored along the shore, watchers among the homeless on the bridge, herself with a naked man lying pale as a seastar on her skip.

She poled along then, past Man to van, beneath its bridge, past Delaree and Ramseyhead, there on the rim of the moonlight where the Grand Canal gave out onto the Channel, and a few big barges had snugged into the wharves for the night, waiting loading tomorrow.

Safe company, those barges. Quiet company. The big black sides hove up like walls, the waves lapped and splashed to tide-draw; and a little skip glided along under the wharf unnoticed—here the drowsing hulk of a fisher-craft, its nets up like gossamer wings against the night sky; here another barge, and another, a deep friendly forest of pilings and mooring-lines like vines in the dark. Yonder a Falkenaer ship rode in deep harbor, masts and rigging webbed against a lowering moon, among the lesser bulk of coasters and Det-barges. There Rimmon Isle bulked, the lights of its landing agleam, the towers in shadow at this hour.

The sweat ran on her sides, beneath the oversized sweater; sweat ran down her temples beneath the band of the cap, despite the nighttime chill. She found a likely place on the edge of moonlit water and whipped the weighted line around a piling, warped in and made a secure hitch, this side and the other, and dropped down on her haunches, trembling. She removed her cap, wiped the sweat with her arm.

Her passenger had gotten onto the dry slats, and lay sprawled one foot still in the bilge. So he had life in him enough to care for cold and wet. Part of her wished he had gasped his last and just lain there to be rolled back into the canal where he would be no more bother to anyone; and part of her said she ought to quietly heave him now; while a third small part of her mind just sat still waiting to see whether she might not have to take a barrelhook to him after all when he waked. But until then she was not obliged to become a killer, which she was prepared to be, which she had determined long ago she had to be, to stay alive in Merovingen-below.

Tonight, perhaps. The boat drifted and swayed on the currents that surged among the harbor pilings. Almost out of her territory. Almost. They were beyond the Dike. Beyond this point the deep currents began. And beyond this point no boat could go by pole, except beneath the pilings that led out past Rimmon bridges to the Dead Wharf and the Ghost Fleet and the marsh. She sat there panting and letting the sweat dry in the wind and waited for something, his move, her recovery, it was uncertain what.

He made feverish small movements, and still lay there with his eyes open and maybe not seeing her at all, except as a lump of shadow.

So she did not have to think about the barrelhook. He would die before morning. Very likely he would, of the shock and the cold. Like the kittens. Like the Gentry toddler. A body did that, betrayed itself by letting go when it had fought its way all the way back from this much shock. Now surely fever would set in. And the cold would take him. The river gave up very little, and maybe his skull was cracked. There were black marks all over his pale body, bloody scratches, the shadows of bruises. One leg bled a dark trail into the bilge He blinked finally, blinked yet again, a shadowy flutter of half open eyes.

"You're on my boat," she said, if he should wonder where he was. Another blink. He lay there a long moment with no more movement than that and and his breathing. He was not shivering. And that meant he was still dying, only slower.

"I," he said. "I—"

He might live till sunrise, If he did, he had a chance in the hot sun, in its baking warmth. If it were not so long till dawn. Everything was against him. The hour. The canal-water he had drunk.

"You want to live?"

"Uhhhn"

"You hear me?"

"Uhhhn"

"There's a blanket in the hidey. Right ahead of you. You want it, you get inside. Straight on.'*

He stirred a hand, an arm, as if reaching in that direction were enough; and then the other arm, and a knee, and he edged himself a little forward. Again. Slow hitches. He managed a harder shove, and made it with his arms under his belly this time, as if his gut hurt, which it must. He stopped finally. She got the pole and jabbed him in the side, the way she touched dead things in the canal, to get them out of her way. "Move."

He moved. She had not thought he would this time. He crawled inside the halfdeck shelter, all excepting his feet, and stopped, not a care that he would be freezing. Nothing. She had a man going to die among her belongings, right in there in a crawlspace where a dead weight was going to be difficult to get out, and she sat out here with her teeth chartering from fright.

Fool. Dump him in. Give him to the fish tonight instead of tomorrow, that's what you ought to do. He's just going to die, is all. Too many people could have seen you. Some might know you. If Moghi gets wind of you and this trouble at his door—

But after a long time of imagining that villainy she locked her arms between her knees, and rocked and thought and rocked and thought without any shape to her thinking: mist-thoughts, the Revenantists called it, nowhere thinking, back to past lives and past deeds that damned a soul to Merovin instead of the stars; and double-damned a soul to Merovingen; and three tunes damned it to the hell of Merovingen-below.

The Revenantists promised at least no worse place, Which thought failed to cheer her. Mist-thoughts led in circles, and came back to self-preservation. That was the law in hell.

Until a fool intervened in others' business and got a load of karma for it; and a dying man on her hands; and nothing for it but to sit and wait; or do something to help him, because he hid no strength or wit to wrap himself in the blanket in the hidey.

She stowed the barrelhook in a coil of rope and put her knife beside it: her mother's first rule—Don't you get in no wrestling-match with no man. You knife 'im later, hear? and you do that, too, hear? Don't you never threaten. You just do it. If it takes you twenty years. World's got enough bastards. Take 'em out as you find 'em.

Her mother had killed a man. Maybe more than one, her mother had said. None of your business. Ain't a thing to talk on. It's something you just do when you got to and if you go talking about it you're asking his friends for more trouble. Who needs more trouble? They don't want it 'less they're crazy. You don't. —But old Seb don't like me much. I tell you why. It was his brother I killed. Watch him. If he ever crosses you, you're a fool if you don't get him.

Seb was dead now. Someone else did him. Her mother had died first. Altair had no feuds of her own that she knew of. She was a fool to take one on. But her mother had never reproached her about skimming kittens out of the Det. Only when she had pulled the Gentry boy out of the canal, when she came back all wet and shivering onto the boat from the other mother's thanking her (she had dived deep for him, had gone all the way to Det's dark bottom)—You drink any of that? her mother had said, eyes white-edged with anger. Damn fool. And slapped her in the face.

She was days figuring out it was love. And fright. She had been twelve and her mother's moods used to scare her, But maybe the Revenantists were right and it was mist-thinking, and her mother saw into her own future. Her mother died of that water, in high summer when it was most dangerous. Died without telling her essential things. Like who her father was. Or whether it was that man she had killed.

She had never told her how a woman dealt with getting a man onto her boat without having him get out of line and thinking he could take it over; and she had no idea at ail whether she was a fool for saying no when men made her offers. She didn't want to kill anybody, She didn't want to make a fatal mistake. She didn't know what the tight and wrong of things were—she knew well enough how it was to have a lover: a lot of things happened on barges right under the eye of God and everybody, on hot nights when the hidey was too hot. But her mother never had a man she ever saw. Her mother muttered ugly things when men shouted invitations. And Altair Jones pretended she was Retribution's son, not her daughter, as long as her mother lived. That was her mother's idea. And she did her bathing at night and wore loose clothes after she began to have breasts. She gave up some of the cautions after she showed too much, which was when she was twelve and after her mother died; but habits were hard, they were very hard. And she was a fool now. And scared.

And guilty, in a confused way, not sure whether it was a betrayal of her mother she contemplated, or something her mother would have looked at like her skimming up a struggling kitten and just hoping one would live, finally— Break your heart, her mother would say with a shake of her head. Poor thing's gone, Altair.

And she: Mama. Flatly. Never saying what ached inside her, snuffling back her tears when another thing died in her hands. So there was herself and her mother alone on the boat and never another living thing to touch. She saw cats in the rich houses, scampering through the balcony-gardens. She caught a feral cat once the year after her mother died, and it was so crazy it leapt into the Grand and swam for shore. She let it go; it had bitten her half a dozen times, and the bites went bad. She had imagined it would be soft to touch and would take to boat life. It would kitten and she would have kittens to sell to rich shore folk and do well for herself. But it was a shore creature. And her hand and her whole arm swelled. After that she had a chance to get a tame cat off a poleboatman—he wanted her, she wanted the cat. But in the end she got scared, mat we would get what he wanted and then maybe kill her and rob her: he was a back-canaler and maybe stole that cat from rich customers—who knew?

So she gave up on cats. Slowly gave up on chance-taking And men,

Till she got, in a confused way, step by step, to be a fool for something else floating down the canal.

Well, she said to herself this night—she talked to herself now and again, in her head, in her mother's voice—well, you finally got a man on your boat, didn't you, same as the damn kittens. Or maybe like that ingrate cat. And you got yourself a problem, don't you, Altair? What you going to do? Huh? Let him die?

He ain't any harm the way he is. Hasn't got a chance, the damn fool, without I do something.

So she stirred herself and she crawled into that shelter and heaved and hauled the blanket out from under him and over both of them, because she knew what it was when water-chill had gotten into one's bones. —"Tuck your feet up, fool, get all of you inside."

He moved. She tried to get her arms about his damp, cold body and keep the blanket snug, but he was too heavy to get an arm under; she pillowed his head on her arm and put herself up against him as close as she could get. The cold went from him to her, until the shivering started, great racking tremors that knotted him up for minutes on end until the last strength went out of him.

Then he was still.

That's the end of it, she thought. Out of strength. Fever comes now.

Rain-chill, winter-chill, river-chill: but there was a way to make a body warm. Her mother had done it for her; she had kept the sick kittens close against her heart, trying the same. And it was not the same as her mother and the kittens; but it was dark inside the hidey; and he was clean, Ancestors knew, clean as old Det let anybody be; and more, he was dying, not going to tell anybody or snigger about it later.

It was selfish, more than anything, just for herself, scraps, which wouldn't hurt anything, and wouldn't go anywhere, since he was dying. The last living thing she had touched, really touched and held, was five years ago, when her mother was alive. So it was selfish; and perhaps every wicked act put the Retribution further away; but every good one brought it closer—so maybe what she did to make him easy balanced the wickedness in her mind.

Damn. It won't hurt. It might help.

She flung her arms up and wormed out of her sweater, undid her breeches and worked out of them too, till she could get her bare skin next to his full length—no great thrill: he was cold as a day-old fish. But she rubbed him till her arms ached and hugged him against her and bled the heat of her exertion into him, and did it again when she had caught her breath. He came to in the midst of this and started shivering again, which made him hard to hold on to, but she kept working—nothing sensual in the business at all: it was a fight that she kept up, chafe his skin till she had to rest and warm him with her sweat and do it again till finally either she was chilled or he was warm as she was. She gave a great sigh when she realized that; she put her arms about that human warmth and snuggled in without a twinge of guilt.

So she would dream about him after he had gone into the water and fish swam in and out the sockets of his eyes and picked the last little memory out of his brain who he had been, or why he had died; but he would not haunt her for it. Her mother had, for a while; until she came in a dream and cursed her gently the way she had when she snuffled over the kittens. Damn fool, Altair. Damn fool. Everything dies. Old Det gets it all. Love life and cuss death and be as good as you can.

She drew a great breath and gave a long sigh, relaxing further, inside as well as out. She made up memories for her bit of flotsam. He was a rich merchant's son, fallen on hard times. He had come downriver and met misfortune.

His father and his mother would send searchers. But they would be too late. They would find a trinket or two in the markets. His bones would He at the harbor bottom, under the keels of the moving ships. She would stand on the quay and watch the fine foreigners come ashore and she would hold the secret they wanted, a little canalrat would hold the secret all to herself and watch them in their fine clothes and their jewels offering rewards for the recovery of this rich man.

But he had come to her with never a thing, and she could not prove her claim to rescue. So there was no good to tell; and dangerous anyway, to meddle in the affairs of rich merchants. There would be the smugglers and the brigands and the gangs after the rich men left. They were the law on the river and in the harbor and in the canals of Merovingen. And the collection of fish-picked bones down there in the mire of the Det was already considerable. She had no wish to join them. Hence her silence.

Their ship would steam back upriver, the rich relatives uncomforted.

She held him close and let him sleep, so that the life would go out of him that gentle way the way it went out of drowning kittens and birds that fell in the winter ice, just quietly, on a breath. She would roll him overboard in the morning, slip, splash. Her secret. The closest secret almost-event in her life, when she had almost saved a rich man's son and almost had a lover.

Somewhen she fell asleep and woke in an unfamiliar tangle of male limbs. A gentle snoring had waked her. The snoring stopped. He had a hand on her breast—her knee was tucked up against him somewhere embarrassing. She held still. He shifted a leg and nestled closer there in the sightless black of the shelter, his head burrowed against her bare shoulder. Then she lay there with her heart pounding, thinking whether to get up or not to get up, and since she had to wonder about it, it seemed all too much effort to escape a man who was, well, if not dead, at least not in a way to make himself a nuisance by morning. He was only warm, and different, and temporarily all her own in a way no one but her mother had ever been.

Merovingen was out to take, that was all: body, soul, life and property if a woman was once fool enough to give up that line that said No; and fool enough ever to share that little portion of the world that a pole and a boathook and the habit of sleeping lightly could keep solitary and safe from men bent on mischief and murder.

So, well—once. Maybe once, for a few days when he got well, if he got well; and then put him off somewhere. On her terms. And let him do what was natural for a man the gangs were after, which was get on the First boat up the Det and keep going. Far away from Merovingen. So he would never talk, one way or the other. So he was a safe kind of lover. She mulled that over in her mind and came to that conclusion. He had no grudge against her. He had every motive to stay out of sight and let her get him to some destination; and if he looked like he had designs, well, then, she would pick that up: she was good at reading intentions. Then it was the boathook for him—or she would find out who his enemies were and give him to them if he looked to turn ugly. If he made any threat to take her boat.

Now that she had come this far she suddenly knew all sorts of ways to get a man off her boat. Like wait till he was asleep and do for him. Or hail a fellow like One-Eye Mergeser and start a fight; or a dozen strategems she could think of, if things went wrong.

But they would not. He was not like that. He had a gentle way about him, even if he was asleep. He would be grateful, for a few days, in the strange nowhen that had cast this pretty bit of flotsam up onto her boat.

Old Del gave a gift, that was what.

A lover from a past life?

Only if the Revenantists were right.

She doubted it.

One got what one took in this life. Her mother told her so.