Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [118]
The crew of the Fetch scattered into action. Fawn brought the bedroll, conveniently already rolled up, and the bow and quiver, and flung them any which way into the rocking narrow boat right after Hawthorn tossed down the pack and the sacks.
Dag and Remo manhandled the struggling Barr through the door, although he stopped fighting and froze once Dag’s hook eased around and pressed into the corner of one eye. “Don’t move sudden. That’s better. Now, you got two choices,” Dag advised. “You can climb down into your boat from the deck, here, or you can climb up into it from the water, over there.”
The water was black and utterly opaque this morning, and even here by the shore the current raced, making strange patterns on the surface. And it looked so cold Fawn would not have been surprised to see little skins of ice jostling, but it was likely still too early in the season for that.
“I’ll climb down,” Barr choked. The two released him, and he scrambled over the rail, bitter fury in every jerky motion. The narrow boat rocked only a little as he sank, balanced, into his seat. Remo bent down and gave it a hard shove out into the swirling current.
Barr looked around him. “Hey!” he said indignantly. “Where’s my paddle?” He held up both empty hands in protest as his boat drifted farther from the bank.
“Oh, leave him go, just like that!” cried Whit in delight. “Downriver bass-ackwards!”
Berry, lips clamped, stalked over to retrieve one of the narrow boat’s paddles from where they lay by the cabin wall. She strode to the back rail and launched it endwise; it landed a good thirty feet downstream of Barr’s narrow boat, and was caught by the current. If she’d thrown it the same distance upstream, it would have drifted right to Barr’s reaching hand.
“There’s your paddle, patroller boy! Chase it!” she yelled after Barr.
“Nice,” said Whit, leaning on the rail with eyes aglow.
Barr, with a lot of choked muttering in which Blight! was the most frequent word Fawn could make out, leaned from side to side and began clawing the water with his hands in an effort to overtake his paddle’s head start.
“Who gave Barr the shiner?” Fawn asked, leaning beside Whit.
“Remo. And me. And Hod, but he was too scared to hit him very hard.”
“Ow,” said Fawn.
“He earned it.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
The clinging river mist closed around the narrow boat, although the disembodied cries of Blight it! drifted back for a while longer.
Berry squinted out in satisfaction. “Right. That should make the Fetch a sight more peaceful.” She dusted her hands and led her crew back in to find breakfast.
Fawn hesitated by Dag, who stood with his hand on the rail looking out into the layer of gray damp, but seeing, she suspected, much more than she did. There was scant satisfaction in him, only close attention. “There,” he said at last, straightening. “He’s got his paddle back.”
“Is that the end of him?” Fawn asked hopefully.
Dag smiled down at her. “Well, there’s this. He’s a Lakewalker boy away from home for the first time, all alone. He’s not going upstream by himself, that’s for sure. His only choice is to keep going down, like us. So we’ll see.”
She frowned at him in doubt. “Do you want him to come back?”
“I don’t like losing patrollers.”
“You kept Remo. That’s one.”
“I don’t like losing two patrollers ’bout twice as much as I don’t like losing one.”
“Well, I hope you can find more value in Barr with your groundsense than I can with my eyes and ears.”
“I hope I can, too, Spark,” he sighed.
17
Though the weather stayed cloudy and chilly, the Fetch made steady downriver progress all that day. The enclosing hills flattened out, sign, Berry explained to Fawn, that they were passing west out of the hinterland of Oleana into level Raintree. The riverbanks were drained of color, sodden brown with gray tree boles broken only by an