Wyrms

Chapter 6. GLAD RIVER

THEY SPENT NO TIME AT ALL IN THE CUTS THOUGH PATIENCE was fascinated by the glittering clothing and everyone's passionate urgency to spend themselves all in one night, Sken led her at once to a small riverboat, the kind with a mast to help upstream when the wind was good, or to go out to sea on short runs, if there was a need. The heavy oars explained why the fat woman's arms were thick and muscular. Patience began to suspect, as Sken pulled them away from the island, that there was less fat on her than she had supposed at first.

"We wait out here in the dark," Sken whispered, "until his boat comes. Then we go back in and get him."

It was only a few minutes later; this early in the evening, there was a lot of traffic from Kingsport up the Glad River to the Cuts. Angel's disguise was good enough that Sken recognized him before Patience did. She was looking for an aging scholar, or the gracious old woman he sometimes had mimicked in the past. Instead, he was an obvious male whore, slightly drunk, painted till his face fairly glowed in the torchlight.

"I thought the essence of disguise was to be inconspicuous," Patience said. The oars dipped into the water without a splash-Sken knew the river and had the strength to glide upstream without seeming to strain.

"The essence of disguise is to be unnoticed," said, Angel. He dipped his hands into the river to wash his face. "You can do that by being so nondescript that no one notices you, or being so embarrassing that no one can stand to look at you. Either way, your disguise remains unexamined, and so you remain unrecognized."

"Why did you leave me in the tonguing booths all day?" Patience said. She didn't like it when Angel proved that he still knew more than she did.

"Where were you yesterday, little fool, when I stood there in the School with my face hanging out for any of the King's asses to see me?"

"Talk softer," Sken whispered. "The King's patrol are known to anchor their boats on the river and listen in the darkness for fools who think they're alone."

They fell silent then. They passed the eastern edge of Cuts Island and began to pass among the pilings on which houses perched precariously high above the water.

It was a district called Stilts-the town of the river people, who it was said were born and died without ever setting foot on land. It wasn't true, of course, but they did spend most of their lives on the water. The story was they got seasick on land. If they had liquor in them, they couldn't even walk unless there was a shifting deck under them. Patience had always suspected they made up the stories themselves.

"At high tide," said Sken, "the water comes up to there." She pointed to a level on the nearest piling about a meter above the water. "But in spring flood, there are weeks when we live in the attics, because the water on the first floor is three feet deep."

Patience marveled at that-the houses were all a good four meters above the water level. The land on the left bank, where the new town was rising, was high enough that it might not flood in the spring. But the marshland of the right bank must be under water for a good long time.

Patience began to understand how the river controlled the way human beings lived here. Korfu had risen and fallen many times in seven thousand years. Heptam had been a provincial town and the center of the world. Yet in all that time, the river still worked its will in this place.

As if he read her thoughts, Angel said, "There was a levee on the right bank for a thousand years, and the marshland was heavily populated. But about five thousand years ago it was breached and no one rebuilt it.

Within fifty years it was as if it had never been there.

Time is against us."

The boat bumped up against a large piling. A house was built on this single massive stilt, with stabilizing boards angling off to triangulate with the great beams.

"Here," said Sken. She tied the boat to the piling and climbed with surprising ease up a series of boards that made a sort of irregular ladder into the house. Then, before Patience could walk to that end of the boat to climb up, a net dropped down like a heavy spider.

"She's going to lift us up?" asked Patience.

"I brought some luggage with me," said Angel. Patience recognized his small trunk. Of course. Her things he could leave somewhere in hiding, but his little trunk was never long out of his sight. She knew he kept his disguises in it, but there were other things, too, which he showed to no one.

The trunk rose quickly upward into the house. Then Angel motioned for Patience to climb.

The house swayed slightly when they walked from one end to another. To someone who lived on the river, it probably felt fine, but to Patience it was unnerving. It was like living in a constant earthquake, she thought.

And when Sken moved from place to place, her great mass tilted it even more. She seemed not to notice it, and Patience said nothing.

"I'm sorry I didn't meet you on time," Patience said.

"I had some questions I had to ask Father. Questions I could only ask him when he was dead."

"I guessed as much," said Angel. "Did you leave him there when you were through?"

"Oruc had enough use of him when he was alive," said Patience. "He'll have no use of him now."

Sken was horrified. "You killed your father's head?"

"Shut up and tend to the food," Angel said softly.

Sken glowered but obeyed.

"He asked me to," said Patience.

"As any sane man would," said Angel. "Just because we can preserve them doesn't mean we should. Just one more abomination we'll have to answer for someday."

"To God? I don't think he cares what we do with our heads."

Sken couldn't keep her silence. "If I'd known you were blasphemers I would have put you at the bottom of the river."

It was Patience who answered this time. "And if I'd known you were unable to keep your mouth still I would have left your head in the privy hole."

Angel smiled. "So you did have your loop on you?"

"I needed it twice. I wasn't very subtle, either."

"God knows," muttered Sken.

"Well, what did your father tell you?"

Patience looked at him coldly. "He told me what he said you were going to tell me."

"What is that?"

"Tell me what you're supposed to tell me, and I'll see if it agrees."

"Patience, I know more games than I ever taught you. If you tell me what secrets he told you, then I don't have to go on lying to you for the next thirty years."

"Did you know about how mother died?" asked Patience.

Angel grimaced."! see you didn't ask him easy questions."

"He broke in two hours. I thought he had more strength than that."

"He had more strength than anyone."

"He whined and whimpered-and when the worms punished him, he even wept."

Angel nodded gravely. "Of course."

"What do you mean, of course! He was the one who taught me endurance, who taught me that the emotion I showed should never be the emotion I felt, and there he was-"

She stopped, feeling stupid.

"Yes?" asked Angel.

"There he was, showing emotions and I fell for it."

"Ah. So perhaps he didn't break at all."

"He wasn't lying to me. I saw when he was lying, and I saw when he stopped. He can't hide everything. Can he?"

"No. I think he told you the truth. What else, besides your mother's death?"

"Wasn't that enough?" '

"The prophecy?"

"I knew a little about that anyway. He told me what the Starship Captain did with his left hand."

"Mm."

"Angel, I've decided where I want to go."

"Your father left me strict instructions."

"My father is dead now, and you belong to me."

Sken was surprised. "You mean you're a slave? I've been taking orders from a slave?"

"I am the slave of a Slave of the King. That puts me so far above you that you're unworthy to inhale one of my farts. Now will you shut up, woman?"

Actually, thought Patience, I'm the Heptarch now.

You're Slave to the King herself. Her only Slave. Much may it profit you.

"So," said Angel. "Where do you want to go?"

"Cranning," said Patience.

Angel was angry, though he answered with humor.

"Stiff as steel, the girl has lost her mind."

Now Sken was livid. "Girl! Girl! You mean this snip of a boy is a female? It is an abomination for the woman to wear the clothing of the man, and the man to wear the clothing of a woman-"

"Shall I kill her to get us some silence?" Angel asked.

Sken fell silent, stuffing hardbread into sacks and spiced sausages into watertight pouches.

"Child," said Angel, "that is the one place you can never go."

"I'm sure of it," she said. "But it's the one place I: have to go. I was born for it, don't you see?"

"You were born for something better than to go off fulfilling mad prophecies."

"How will you stop me? Kill me? Because it's the only way you ever will."

"It's the Cranning call. That's what makes you want to go. It comes this way, an insane determination to go there, for no reason at all, against all reason-"

"Don't you think I know?"

Angel chewed on that for a moment. "So you think that whatever it is, you're stronger."

"I think that if it can call the wisest men out of the world and force my mother to want to sacrifice her daughter, then someone needs to stop it. Why not me?

Don't the prophecies say that mankind will be reborn?"

"When Kristos comes," muttered Sken.

"The prophets were given their visions and prophecies by whatever it is that calls," said Angel. "They might be lies, to entice you."

"Then I'm enticed. If you're so wise. Angel, why haven't you felt the Cranning call?"

Angel went cold, his face a hard-set mask. She had always had the gift of goading him. "No one ever proved that every wise one heard the call."

There was no need to hurt him; she was using diplomatic tricks on a man whose honest words she would need again and again. So she smiled and touched his hand. "Angel, you spent your life making me as wise and dangerous as possible. When will I be readier? When you're too old to come with me? When I've fallen in love with some cod and had three babies that I have to protect?"

"Maybe you'll never be ready for whatever waits."

"Or maybe now. When I'm willing to die. When I've lost my father for the first time and my mother all over again. Now, when I'm willing to kill because of the rage that burns in me for what has been stolen from me and my father and my mother, now is the time for me to face whatever waits for me there. With you or without you, Angel. But better with you."

Angel smiled. "All right."

Patience glared at him. "That was too easy. You intended to be persuaded all along."

"Come now, Patience. Your father warned us both that the worst thing in the world was waiting in Cranning.

As well as we knew him, and as well as he knew us, don't you think he knew we'd come to this moment?"

Patience remembered her father's head. Was he scheming even then, letting her force from him the very truths that he most wanted to tell her? "I don't care if he was," she said. "Even if my father really wanted me to go, I'll go."

"Good. Tonight then. We don't want another day here." He took a purse from his belt and took out two large steel coins. "Sken, do you know what these are worth?"

"If they're real, then you're a damned fool for carrying them without a bodyguard."

"Are they enough to buy your boat?"

Sken squinted at him. "You know it's enough to buy ten of my boats. If they are steel."

He tossed them to her. She bit them and weighed them in her hand. "I'm not a fool," she said.

"You are if you think they aren't real," said Angel.

"I won't sell you the boat unless you buy me, too."

"Buy you! That's enough to buy your silence, and that's all we want of you."

"I said I'm not a fool. This isn't the price a man offers for a boat if he means to leave the money behind. You plan to kill me before you go."

"If I say I'm buying, I'm buying."

"You've let me hear enough tonight that you daren't let me live behind you. A girl traveling in disguise with a man who tosses steel about as if it were silver? Her father recently dead, and them both afraid of the law? Do you think we of the river haven't heard that Lord Peace died today? And that the King looks for his daughter Patience, the rightful Heptarch, the daughter of prophecy? You didn't care if I figured it out because you knew I'd be dead."

Patience knew Sken was right-she knew Angel well enough for that. "I thought you were talking so openly because this woman was to be trusted, not because she was to die."

"And what if you're right?" asked Angel. "What if I did mean to kill you? Why should I change my mind now, and take you along?"

"Because I know the river and I'm strong enough to row."

"We can hire a rower if we feel the need."

"Because you're both decent folk who don't kill people who don't deserve it."

"We're not that decent," said Angel. "We leave justice up to the priests."

"You'll take me along because she's my rightful Heptarch, and I'll serve her to the end of my life. I'd die before I let any harm come to her."

The fervency of Sken's speech was convincing. Schooled in guile, they knew naivet? when they saw it. Sken hadn't the art to lie to them even if she wanted to.

"Well?" asked Angel.

Patience was willing. Sken's loyalty appealed to her. It hadn't occurred to her until now that she might have more friends with her identity revealed than she could ever have in disguise. "I almost cut off her head before.

It's the least we can do now."

"Until we have no more need of you, then," said Angel. "And your parting wages will be a good deal better than death."

"What about these coins?"

"Keep them," said Angel. "They're an earnest of rewards to come."

It took only a few minutes to load the boat. They sang ribald songs together as they passed among the guardboats, and Sken roundly cursed the guards by name. They knew her well, and let her pass. They rounded a bend and passed into the forest, where the river ran cool and deep.

Heptam was behind them, and they had begun the long road to Cranning.