Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 01 - Child of the River

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THE WHITE BOAT

T 0 1 0 N S T A B L 1 0 F Aeolis was a shrewd, pragmatic man who

did not believe in miracles. In his opinion, everything must

have an explanation, and simple explanations were best of

all. "The sharpest knife cuts cleanest, " he often told his sons.

"The more a man talks, the more likely it is he's lying."

But to the end of his days, he could not explain the affair

of the white boat.

It happened one midsummer night, when the huge black

sky above the Great River was punctuated only by a scattering

of dim halo stars and the dull red swirl, no bigger than

a man's hand, of the Eye of the Preservers. The heaped lights

of the little city of Aeolis and the lights of the carracks riding

at anchor outside the harbor entrance were brighter by far

than anything in the sky.

The summer heat was oppressive to the people of Aeolis.

For most of the day they slept in the relative cool of their

seeps and wallows, rising to begin work when the Rim Mountains

clawed the setting sun, and retiring again when the sun

rose, renewed, above the devouring peaks. In summer, stores

and taverns and workshops stayed open from dusk until dawn,

fishing boats set out at midnight to trawl the black river for

noctilucent polyps and pale shrimp, and the streets of Aeolis

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were crowded and bustling beneath the flare of cressets and

the orange glow of sodium vapor lamps. At night, in summer,

the lights of Aeolis shone like a beacon in the midst of the

dark shore.

That particular night, the Constable and his two eldest sons

were rowing back to Aeolis in their skiff with two vagrant

river traders who had been arrested while trying to run bales

of cigarettes to the unchanged hill tribes of the wild shore

downstream of Aeolis. Part of the traders' contraband cargo,

soft bales sealed in plastic wrap and oiled cloth, was stacked

in the forward well of the skiff-, the traders lay in the stem,

tied up like shoats for the slaughter. The skiff's powerful

motor had been shot out in the brief skirmish, and the Constable's

sons, already as big as their father, sat side by side on

the center thwart, rowing steadily against the current. The

Constable was perched on a button cushion in the skiffs high

stem, steering for the lights of Aeolis.

The Constable was drinking steadily from a cruse of wine.

He was a large man with loose gray skin and gross features,

like a figure hastily molded from clay and abandoned before

it was completed. A pair of tusks protruded like daggers from

his meaty upper lip. One tusk had been broken when he

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had

fought and killed his father, and the Constable had had

capped with silver; silver chinked against the neck of the

cruse each time he took a swig of wine.

The Constable was not in a good temper. He would make

a fair profit from his half of the captured cargo (die other

half would go to the Aedile, if he could spare an hour or so

from his excavations to pronounce sentence on the traders),

but the arrest had not gone smoothly. The river traders had

hired a pentad of ruffians as an escort, and they had put up

a desperate fight before the Constable and his sons had managed

to dispatch them. The Constable's shoulders had taken

a bad cut, cleaving through blubber to the muscle beneath,

and his back had been scorched by reflection of the pistol

bolt which had damaged the skiff s motor. Fortunately, the

weapon, which had probably predated the foundation of Aeolis

, had misfired on the second shot and killed the man using

it, but the Constable knew that he could not rely on good

luck forever. He was getting old, ponderous and muddled

when once he had been quick and strong. He knew that

sooner or later one of his sons would challenge him, and he

was worried that this night's botched episode was a harbinger

of his decline. Like all strong men, he feared his own weakness

more than death, for strength was how he measured the

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worth of his life.

Now and then he turned and looked back at the pyre of

the smugglers' boat. It had burnt to the waterline, a flickering

dash of light riding its own reflection far out across the river's

broad black plain. The Constable's sons had run it aground

on a mudbank, so that it would not drift amongst the banyan

islands which at this time of year spun in slow circles in the

shallow sargasso of the Great River's nearside shoals, tethered

only by fine nets of feeder roots.

Of the two river traders, one lay as still as a sated cayman,

resigned to his fate, but his mate, a tall, skinny old man

naked but for a breechclout and an unraveling turban, was

trying to convince the Constable to let him go. Yoked hand

to foot, so that his back was bent like a bow, he stared up

at the Constable from the well, his insincere frightened smile

like a rictus, his eyes so wide that white showed clear around

their slitted irises. At first he had tried to gain the Constable's

attention with flattery; now he was turning to threats.

"I have many friends, captain, who would be unhappy to

see me in your jail, " he said. "There are no walls strong

enough to withstand the force of their friendship, for I am a

generous man. I am known for my generosity across the

breadth of the river."

The Constable rapped the top of the trader's turban with

the butt of his whip, and for the fourth or fifth time advised

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him to be quiet. It was clear from the arrowhead tattoos on

the man's fingers that he belonged to one of the street gangs

which roved the ancient wharves of Ys. Any friends he might

have were a hundred leagues upriver, and by dusk tomorrow

he and his companion would be dead.

The skinny trader babbled, "Last year, captain, I took it

upon myself to sponsor the wedding of the son of one of my

dear friends, who had been struck down in the prime of life.

Bad fortune had left his widow with little more than a rented

room and nine children to feed. The son was besotted; his

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bride's family impatient. This poor lady had no one to turn

to but myself, and 1, captain, remembering the good company

of my friend, his wisdom and his friendly laughter, took it

upon myself to organize everything. Four hundred people ate

and drank at the celebration, and I count them all as my

friends. Quails' tongues in aspic we had, captain, and mounds

of oysters and fish roe, and baby goats tender as the butter

they were seethed in."

Perhaps there was a grain of truth in the story. Perhaps

the man had been one of the guests at such a wedding, but

he could not have sponsored it. No one desperate enough to

try to smuggle cigarettes to the hill tribes would have been

able to lavish that kind of money on an act of charity.

The Constable flicked his whip across the legs of the prisoners

. He said, "You are a dead man, and dead men have

no friends. Compose yourself. Our city might be a small

place, but it has a shrine, and it was one of the last places

along all the river's shore where avatars talked with men,

before the heretics silenced them. Pilgrims still come here,

for even if the avatars are no longer able to speak, surely

they are still listening. We'll let you speak to them

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after

you've been sentenced, I suggest you take the time to think

of what account you can give of your life."

One of the Constable's son's laughed, and the Constable

gave their broad backs a touch of his whip. "Row, " he told

them, "and keep quiet."

"Quails' tongues, " the talkative trader said. "Anything

you want, captain. You have only to name it and it will be

yours. I can make you rich. I can offer you my own home,

captain. Like a palace it is, right in the heart of Ys. Far from

this stinking hole-"

The boat rocked when the Constable jumped into the well.

His sons cursed wearily, and shipped their oars. The Constable

knocked off the wretched trader's turban, pulled up the

man's head by the greasy knot of hair that sprouted from his

crown and, before he could scream, ffirust two fingers into

his mouth and grasped his writhing tongue. The trader gagged

and tried to bite the Constable's fingers, but his teeth scarcely

bruised their leathery skin. The Constable drew his knife,

sliced the trader's tongue in half and tossed the scrap of flesh

over the side of the skiff. The trader gargled blood and

thrashed like a landed fish.

At the same moment, one of the Constable's sons cried

out. "Boat ahead! Leastways, there's running lights."

This was Urthank, a dull-witted brute grown as heavy and

muscular as his father. The Constable knew that it would not

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be long before Urthank roared his challenge, and knew too

that the boy would lose. Urthank was too stupid to wait for

the right moment; it was not in his nature to suppress an

impulse. No, Urthank would not defeat him. It would be one

of the others. But Urthank's challenge would be the beginning

of the end.

The Constable searched the darkness. For a moment he

thought he glimpsed a fugitive glimmer, but only for a moment

. It could have been a mote floating in his eye, or a dim

star glinting at the edge of the world's level horizon.

"You were dreaming, " he said. "Set to rowing, or the

sun will be up before we get back."

"I saw it, " Urthank insisted.

The other son, Unthank, laughed.

"There!" Urthank said. "There it is again! Dead ahead,

just like I said."

This time the Constable saw the flicker of light. His first

thought was that perhaps the trader bad not been boasting

after all. He said quietly, "Go forward. Feathered oars."

As the skiff glided against the current, the Constable fumbled

a clamshell case from the pouch hung on the belt of his

white linen kilt. The trader whose tongue had been cut out

was making wet, choking sounds. The Constable kicked him

into silence before opening the case and lifting out the spectacles

that rested on the waterstained silk lining. The spectacles

were the most valuable heirloom of the Constable's family;

they had passed from defeated father to victorious son for

more than a hundred generations. They were shaped like

bladeless scissors, and the Constable unfolded them and carefully

pinched them over his bulbous nose.

At once, the hull of the flat skiff and the bales of

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contraband

cigarettes stacked in the forward well seemed to gain a

luminous sheen; the bent backs of the Constable's sons and

the supine bodies of the two prisoners glowed with furnace

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light. The Constable scanned the river, ignoring flaws in the

old glass of the lenses which warped or smudged the amplified

light, and saw, half a league from the skiff, a knot of tiny,

intensely brilliant specks dancing above the river's surface.

"Machines, " the Constable breathed. He stepped between

the prisoners and pointed out the place to his sons.

The skiff glided forward under the Constable's guidance.

As it drew closer, the Constable saw that there were hundreds

of machines, a busy cloud swirling around an invisible pivot.

He was used to seeing one or two flitting through the sky

above Aeolis on their inscrutable business, but he had never

before seen so many in one place.

Something knocked against the side of the skiff, and Urthank

cursed and feathered his oar. It was a waterlogged

coffin. Every day, thousands were launched from Ys. For a

moment, a woman's face gazed up at the Constable through

a glaze of water, glowing greenly amidst a halo of rotting

flowers. Then the coffin turned end for end and was borne

away.

The skiff had turned in the current, too. Now it was broadside

to the cloud of machines, and for the first time the

Constable saw what they attended.

A boat. A white boat riding high on the river's slow

current.

The Constable took off his spectacles, and discovered that

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Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 01 - Child of the River

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