Watson, Ian - Black Current 01 Read Free Page B

expeditions had gone into the deep desert, in the past. One or
two disappeared; one or two returned with the hard-won but unexciting news that
the desert just went on and on.
                 Gangee,
anyway, is on the very edge of the southern tropics, and is rather a fly-blown
town, of sandstone buildings and rank weeds. It has neither the scoured dry
neatness of Pecawar—with its shady arcades and secluded retreats of courtyards
and fountains—nor the luxuriant bloom-bright tangle of cities further south.
It's neither one nor the other; so it's weedy rather than lush, and stony
without bothering to beautify. Still, I visited the bazaar, and the rather
clammy river-aquarium with all its exotic southern
species—frills and teeth and blobs of paint—next to its collection of dourer
northern specimens.
                 Then
it was time to sail back down midchannel to Pecawar again.
                 The Sally Argent carried a complement of
twenty, with one berth still empty; and on the whole my riversisters treated
this apprentice in a brisk and friendly way. The boatswain, Zolanda, was a bit
of a sod at times, usually in the mornings, as though she always woke up with a
headache (and perhaps she did); but my special friend was a rigger, Hali, a
dumpy but energetic twenty-year-old with curly black hair and milky opal eyes:
depending upon the light these either looked enchanting, or else slightly
diseased with incipient cataracts.
                 The
voyage downstream was straighter sailing than all the tacking upstream had
been, and swifter with the tail wind. And less than a third of a league to port flowed the black current—which was the closest I had
ever seen it, though it wasn't close enough for it to seem anything other than
a thin strip of crepe ribbon laid along the entire midriff of the water.
Actually, the current was about a hundred spans wide.
                 Remarkably,
now that I thought of it—for it wasn't something that one generally wondered
about in Pecawar, with only one sample of barren shore opposite—there was no
river traffic at all discernible across the water to the west, not even the
smallest inshore fishing craft, so far as I could see. What's more, there
seemed to be no villages on that other bank—let alone towns—yet the land was
obviously inhabited, judging by the occasional wisp of smoke and, once, a tower
on a hilltop way inland. Didn't they know what boats were, over there? Or that there were tasty fish in the river? (And who were "they", anyway?)
                 I
was relaxing on deck, soaking up the spring sunshine with Hali during a slack
time two days out of Gangee, and staring vaguely at the black current—which was
so much a natural part of the river that it was hard to remember that it meant: madness, and death —when the events of my secret initiation popped back into my
mind, prompting a question that I hoped was discreetly phrased, so that it
didn't violate my oath on The Book.
                 "Did
you ever eat a black slug, Hali, before you joined the guild?" I asked
quite lazily and casually.
                 And
no sooner had I asked the question than I felt as sick as though I had indeed
just crammed a garden slug, fresh from a bed of lettuce, into my mouth and was
trying to swallow the slimy thing. I had to scramble up, rush to the rail and
vomit over the side.
                 Hali
was behind me, steadying my shoulders. "All of us," she whispered,
"ask the question once. I was wondering when you would, Yaleen. You see,
we are of the river now; and we obey its rules—we break them at our
peril."
                 The
convulsions in my guts were easing.
                " Riverside ?" asked a familiarly abrasive voice.
It was Zolanda, of course. "What, on this titchy little
swell?"
                 She
stared at me coolly, as I wiped my mouth; and I realized that she was