Destiny's Road

13 All at Sea

Willow and Randall Hearst met them as they arrived. She was even more large and magnificent close up. Her husband was shorter, slender, and dapper. Rian was amused and hiding it.

They showed him to Hearst wagon, third from the front. Tim and Randall climbed to the roof. Randall ceremoniously passed him a glarered shaker of speckles, then a gun and some bullets. “Sharks don't get this far into the bay,” he said. “Still, nobody likes surprises. Stow your pack. If you need a rest stop, it's over the hump.”

“I'd better.''

What remained of the Crest was shallow, but taller than he'd thought. Tim paused at the top. He was seven meters up, and the Neck and the bay and the far ocean rolled away to infinity.

The bay was flecked with white. The wagon trains, the fires burning in cracks in the lava, the tables in the middle, were all on the bay side of the hump. The far side was narrower, and dark.

How long had caravans been using this place as a toilet? And a garbage dump too. Even since Cavorite passed? Ever since there were caravans, surely. The smell wasn't intense, but it was inescapable, and ancient.

Along the Road there was always concealment to make a rest area. Here, nothing but distance. No problem, really. If people stayed apart, what could anyone see? But it seemed strange that nobody had put up a building or a wall.

No hiding place. We shoot anyone who crosses the Neck...

As he rejoined the cookforce, Randall Hearst joined him. Randall wanted to know about bandits; about his impressions of the Shire, the health of the various communities, and recent news of Twerdahl Town. Tim answered as best he could while he served Out toast spread with red fish eggs, then roasted potatoes. If Randall wanted to know what had changed since he'd last seen the Road, then his questions might tell Tim something.

The fish eggs would go well in an omelet, he decided. He hadn't seen bird eggs in many days.

Chaff covered the bay to left and right as far as he could see. It hadn't been there when last he looked. Tim remembered the chugs. Twice the usual number of chugs had pulled up a forest of seaweed on the mainland side of the Neck. It had floated back.

Now, which way did the current flow on the narrow side of the Neck? Riffles broke on the bay, raised by a brisk wind or by dark heads rising. The heads stayed, dark dots on the water, watching.

Merchants were eating apart from the yutzes, trading news of the Road, no doubt, and keeping merchant secrets. Hearst, Miller, ibnRushd, and Lyons families discussed cooking and the chefs. Merchants from the weapons wagons fell silent when a chef approached.

Tim ate as he served, as any chef must. Sliced orange. A potato. Bord'n was hobbling around with a stick. He and Tim ripped apart a big Earthlife crab and shared it.

These yutzes had all come with the spring caravan. They knew Tim Bednacourt, and none had been at Warkan's Tavern. In the fading light, all he had to do was avoid notice.

Locals must have brought this barrel of fresh water. Tim drank deeply. He'd need it.

He carved huge fillets of tuna and gave head and bones to a yutz to dump over the hump. He sliced up one fillet and ate a slice and carried the rest of it among the benches.

A merchant gaudy in gray and yellow caught his eye.

Tim knew him instantly: he'd snatched at Jemmy Bloocher as he ran from Warkan's Tavern, and had his belt for an instant before Jemmy tore loose.

Tim Bednacourt's reflexes kicked in ahead of his mind. “Tuna?” he said, offering the platter. “And the sweet potatoes are ready. Did you get any of the fencecutter crab?” looking at other folk of Milliken wagon, the weapons wagon, making it a general offer.

“We got some.” The merchant helped himself to a tuna fillet. “If there's more, we'd love it. Is anybody making tea? It's getting chilly.”

“I'll start some.”

Tim was sweating as he walked into the growing dark. A merchant would starve if he couldn't catch a chef's eye! Tim couldn't avoid notice. There was no help for it but to be a chef

He set a big pot of water on for tea.

The speckles can was as big as a five-month-old baby. There was no color like it on Destiny, barring murals in the Spiral Town Civic Hall. It couldn't be opened. The caravan considered it unstealable, and Tim felt they were right.

He shook speckles over a pot of beans. In a spare moment he oversprinkled a bowl of beans and ate it fast, wincing at what the excess did to the flavor. Merchants used a lot more speckles than Spiral Town did, or anyone else they'd found along the Road. That bowlful would keep him healthy for a while.

The fishers had brought in a clamshell the size of a grown man, armed with siphon/tentacles each the size of Tim's arm, that had curved teeth in the ends. Sub clam. Tim sliced it into strips, ate one (Wow! Delicious!) and carried the rest among the benches. He set the empty platter aside and walked over the hump.

Quicksilver had set a quarter-hour before the sun. Mere traces of red still lit the west, and the hump blocked that. Yutzes dumped their loads at the midden. Tim walked a distance away from them before he did his private business. Then he kept strolling toward the autumn caravan.

The sea was black and empty. He couldn't guess which way the current flowed.

Tim had dropped his pack over the back side of Hearst wagon instead of stowing it. Here it was. Tim donned it, crawled under the wagon, and, with nobody about, walked toward the water. If anyone saw him, he'd be fifty meters away and running hard.

Nobody saw. He slid down the smooth lava slope and entered the bay without much of a splash. The water was warm after the first instant; warmer than the wind on his ears. Taking his time, he put his shoes in his pack, then began to swim.

If he stayed right up against the Road, nobody could see him without walking right up to the edge. But how would he explain himself then? He chose to swim well out into the bay before he turned southeast.

It seemed to take forever to swim past the barbecue. Had he been missed? Fires were the only light, and they were almost gone. Tents were up. If he was seen, he'd be taken for a wind riffle or an Otterfolk.

The rim of the Neck was unclimbable. Tim would have to swim all the way to the Tail Town beaches, and so would anyone who came in after him. Tim hadn't seen anyone swim, merchant or yutz, since he'd left Twerdahl Town.

He'd have felt quite safe but for the Otterfolk.

Otterfolk were a mystery. He'd been led to believe that they were fanatical about their privacy. Now a creature had invaded their home. Drowning him would not be much trouble at all.

But their heads had kept popping up to watch the caravan.

It wasn't as if he had a choice. He swam.

A current was helping him along. There was still no sign of pursuit when he crawled onto a pebbly beach in a line of boats. He was shuddering with cold.

He'd planned it out, this part. He crawled among the boats and began to examine one, as he hadn't been allowed to do in Baytown. In the shadows of boats under a starless sky, he was quite blind. He explored with his hands.

The flat piece with the handle, the tiller, would fit here in notches at the tail end of the boat.

The other flat piece would fit here in the middle of the underside. It slid in from the pointed end.

If he put them on now and tried to get out into the water, they'd break off against the sand. The tiller, he could slide it in after he was afloat. The other? That would have to be inserted from underwater.

He saw that taking a boat would leave a gap in the line. The boat in the shed? No, it was probably in there for repairs! So- A heave uprighted the last boat in line. No gap. He set the tiller and the centerpiece in the bottom.

It was a heavy sonofabitch. Four handles on the bottom meant four men could lift it. Could one man drag it?

He could if he was desperate. The boat moved in surges. He dragged it down the sand until it floated, then pushed it out hard and swam after it. Clambering in was harder than he'd expected, but he made it.

He'd thought of swimming around Tail Town and then ashore. He'd still have to do that if he couldn't control the boat. The boat would be easier travel. Now he felt very conspicuous, one lone stolen boat on this great flat expanse. Get the sail up and get going!

But he needed the tiller to aim the boat.

So: mount the tiller in the dark, using the mountings he'd felt out so carefully, in the dark.

The sail was bound against that horizontal beam. He hadn't spent enough time feeling the lines out, and it cost him. This line would raise it after he untied these. Then tie it down. Where?

He got it up.

The boat had turned under him to face the wind. The sail hung slack. He felt conspicuous as hell. He moved the tiller. It wasn't steering anything.

He lowered himself off the stern and kicked until the bow came around, reached up and swung the tiller hard over.

The sail billowed as sails did at Baytown, and he heaved himself into the boat as it flew back toward shore. He turned the boat into the wind, kept the tiller turned when the boat wanted to just stop and drift, and now he was flying back toward Loria and Twerdahl Town.

Yes! But how on Earth did fishers do this?

Okay, it took four men, one on the tiller while three raised the sails...

Most of Tail Town was quite dark. Torches still burned in the larger buildings. Tim searched the water for Otterfolk, but there were none in sight. Did they sleep?

As dawn showed above the Crest, boats were putting out from the beach beyond Tail Town. Tim had sailed past Tail Town in the night. He watched them, having little better to do.

Sails came up. Five, six boats took to the water, raised sail, then foreshortened, turning toward his position. It looked choreographed.

Merchants armed with guns might be aboard, but Tim didn't believe that. Fishers would be dangerous enough. He was a thief. If they caught him, the least he could expect was to be turned over to the caravan.

The autumn caravan would know him by daylight: Jemmy Bloocher.

A row of dark heads appeared ahead.

Their eyes glittered black, facing forward at water level. As they neared he saw that their heads were as big as his own, capped with a shell that dropped to form the upper part of a beak, like a chug's head. Their beaks were cable-cutter traps, more like a lungshark's mouth than a chug's, but they were clearly related to both species.

He watched for a bit. They did nothing. He waved; nothing.

“I'm-“ He hesitated, then shouted, “I'm Jemmy Bloocher. That's one small step for a man-”

They were waiting for something.

He was about to sail past.

He couldn't see it, but he felt how the boat slid sideways across the water, losing forward momentum. Those fishers would catch him unless he could get the centerboard down.

He was tired of banging his shins on it.

He swung the boat into the wind and saw the sail go slack. The Otterfolk flicked into motion and were with him again. He picked up the centerboard and slid it into the water, hanging on to it until he felt hands take it from him.

Then it was a matter of waiting. He watched more boats take sea room and turn toward him. The floor of the boat thumped and bumped.

The boat began to turn by itself.

The Otterfolk knew how this worked. Tim twisted the tiller to help them put the wind in the sails. The boat took off, but sluggishly. He looked down to see what he'd expected: four Otterfolk, their short, thick forearms wrapped around the handholds at water level.

Damn, he could reach down and touch them.

He didn't. But he leaned far over to look, his arm far back to hold the tiller in place.

He'd half-expected to see smiles. Their beaked faces were immobile, yet it was clear they were having fun.

They were smaller than he was, but he'd known grown men as big as the Otterfolk. Sixty kilograms, he judged, and very alike except for their shells.

Left and aft was the one he was studying. Its legs were short, ending in big splayed fins. Its arms were short too. They pulled its body hard against the handhold. Its body hugged the hull. It twisted to look up at him. It seemed wonderfully agile where the shell didn't bind it.

Its shell was smooth, streamlined-and painted! Painted in unreadable hieroglyphs, in brilliant scarlet and orange and green.

The other riders were painted too. Tim couldn't read the patterns, though they looked more like simplified pictures than an alphabet. But he'd seen those colors before. Where?

Forward left, that one had been injured. Tim could see a healed split along his shell, under paint that turned the crack into a coat of arms. The accident had bent the shell, and bent the Otterfolk's body too.

Tim believed he had known they were sapient the instant he looked into their eyes; but the paints told a more emphatic tale. They were artists.

A creature barred from using fire could never make such paints. Wait, now, that was the red of a speckles can!

Settler magic. The walls of Civic Hall in Spiral Town had murals in those colors, and others too.

The Otterfolk would have used more colors if they'd had them. Somewhere was a source of red and orange and green acrylic paint, and the Otterfolk had access.

Twenty or more sails were chasing him now. Tim wasn't really concerned. Those other boats must be carrying Otterfolk too, to slow them. The handles on a boat weren't placed for fishers' convenience, after all.

The day passed like a dream. This was sensory deprivation: lying in the bottom of a boat, holding the tiller in one position, sometimes finding the will to lift his head, look over the side, check his position. Once he looked just as the left-forward rider reached out, snatched a platyfish from the water, bit off two big bites, and dropped it to be caught by the rider behind him.

Then one of the riders flipped a big Earthlife bass over into the boat. Around midday the rearmost pair dropped off. The boat picked up a little speed, and then he had another pair of riders. Later the front pair dropped away and were replaced.

He was hungry. He was thirsty. He'd eaten and drunk as much as he could hold last night, and it wasn't enough. When Quicksilver blinked out his arms were racked by cramps. He tried steering with his feet and found he could make it work.

That left his agonized hands free to fillet the bass into sashimi.

The fleet came ever closer.

The sun sank, the sky darkened.

In an hour he couldn't tell the land from the sea. He could tell where the wind was. Once, staring into the dark, he perceived the land far too close. He steered hard about, and sensed that the wind was blowing straight at the land. He could keep himself aimed, if Destiny didn't change the rules on him.

Sailing an unfamiliar boat was dangerous enough in daylight. Sailing at night was suicide. Would he even know if the shore was about to smite him? If he'd seen a way, Tim would have surrendered. But the fishers would smash their boats and his if they caught him in the dark.

And in the morning, would they have him surrounded?

Quicksilver peeked above the mountains, a brilliant point against a sky already showing yellow-white.

Sails had come very near, but they hadn't surrounded him yet. With Quicksilver's added light, Tim angled closer to the beach. Closer yet, as the sun itself glared between peaks.

Tim didn't intend to be caught. He'd beach the boat and run when they came close enough.

The waves were tiny, twenty centimeters high, breaking only ten meters from shore. He was sailing only a few meters beyond that point, and that was very near the beach. He could see an endless reach of sand without a shack or wall or footprint anywhere, nothing but sand and weed and painted shells.

Otterfolk shells. A score in view to left and right, now that he thought to look.

Tim edged the boat closer yet. That wasn't an Otterfolk graveyard, was it? Sharks had bones; chugs had bones; but there weren't any Otterfolk bones on that beach. Just shells painted in acrylic colors, all set on the beach beyond the tide line, like headstones maybe, until one shifted suddenly, and again.

The boat rocked. Damn, he was too close, his centerboard was grinding against sand! He turned hard, and back a bit as the sail tried to go slack. The centerboard wasn't grinding anymore because his four riders had dropped off and the boat was riding higher. He angled for open sea before he thought of the other boats.

They were all turning.

He had some sea room now, and he looked back for the particular shell that had moved.

It covered a hollow. Shapes too small to see crawled out from under the edge.

Otterfolk were riding waves to shore. He saw them clearly for the first time, four limber shapes with short finned limbs and long bodies. He half-recognized the markings. Those had been the riders on his boat.

He worked it out later, thus:

Fishers were too skilled, and a fisher boat was too predictable. Boring. A thief in a boat he didn't know how to use, making mistakes and learning as he went, made for an exciting ride.

Four riders piling on a thief's boat would slow it. Fisher boats chasing it, being less interesting, would carry fewer riders. Of course the thief would be caught.

Otterfolk might choose to ride two at a time to give a thief a longer run; but Tim always believed that the Destiny natives had minds but no language. Negotiation had to be basic.

Threatened, the thief sent a basic message. Tim had threatened to beach his boat on the birthground.

The Otterfolk must respond. Perhaps they fouled the fishers' centerboards or tillers, or clung to the handholds in hordes, until the boats couldn't move.

At the time, Tim couldn't guess why the fishers had abandoned their chase. But sailing near shore now seemed a very dangerous thing.

Otterfolk shed their shells: that was clear. They made nests in sand, and left the shell to shade the emerging young: that was a likely guess. Otterfolk would kill any creature found on that shore: that seemed very likely.

He stayed well out to sea until he was nearly to Baytown.

The sky was red with after-sunset, and Quicksilver burned right at the water. Baytown fisher boats were at sea ahead of him. As he came nearer they all turned toward him.

Tim aimed his boat inland, toward where a dish-shaped crater lay on the beach.

The wind was blowing out to sea. He couldn't aim directly toward shore, but he could approach in a switchback pattern. When the centerboard grounded and heeled over, he went overboard. The lightened boat bobbed up and righted. He swam for shore with boats converging behind him. He crawled out winded, and ran for the crater on rubbery legs.

He paused once, and stooped to lift the rim of a painted shell that would almost cover his chest. His vision grayed and he went to his knees. But the cavity under the shell was empty; the Otterfolk children gone. He heaved himself up and kept running, chest heaving, and halffell over the rim of the fused sand dish.

Arcs of wooden bench lined the inland half of the dish. The wood was ancient and weathered. Soft sand lined the bottom on the sea side, and the slanted rim had been painted with hieroglyphs in yellow, orange, green, scarlet, indigo.

The shell he was holding was very like those he'd found scattered over the mudflats that held towels and soggy clothes for the Baytown fishers. Would he have found paint, if he'd turned one over?

It was too big for his pack. He shoved it up between his shirt and rain tunic, against his chest.

He was burning priceless seconds. Fishers had gone overboard. They were in the water, trying to save his stolen boat by attaching lines: they meant to tow it. A few shouted at him, the words blurred, the tone unfriendly.

The five-color cartoons along the rim of Meetplace were old but still vivid. If he studied them he'd see what those simplified figures represented.

But Baytown women were wading the mudflat in his direction, and Tim thought it best to leave.