Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [127]
The river’s pace picked up abruptly around noon, when a great brown flood swept in from the right, and the current grew rolling.
“That’s not the Gray already, is it?” Fawn asked Berry, startled, when she looked out her moving kitchen window to find the shore grown alarmingly distant.
“Nope,” said Berry, in a tone of satisfaction, and took another swig of tea. “That’s the Beargrass River. It swings up through Raintree to Farmer’s Flats. We’re three-fourths of the way from Tripoint to the Confluence now! They must have had heavy storms in Raintree this past week—I haven’t often seen the Beargrass this high.”
“Do boats go on it?” Fawn peered some more.
“Sure. All the way to Farmer’s Flats, which is the head of navigation, pretty much. Which is why the town is where it is, I ’spect. The Beargrass is almost as busy as the Grace.”
Blighted Greenspring had lain on one of the Beargrass’s upper tributaries, as Fawn recalled soberly. Bonemarsh Camp, too. Last summer’s grim campaign against the malice had all played out north of the big town of Farmer’s Flats; the disruption hadn’t reached down here. Dag might thank the absent gods, but Fawn thought the thanks were better due to Dag.
With the addition of the Beargrass, the Grace nearly topped its banks, and in some places overflowed them. Some of the lower-lying islands were drowned already, bare trees sticking up from the water as if growing out of a lake, except that the lake was moving sideways at a fair clip. Fawn sometimes saw animals trapped up the island trees; possums and raccoons, of course, a couple of black bears, and once, excitingly, a catamount, quite close. They passed a wild pig swimming strongly in the current, and the men aboard were barely restrained from trying to hunt it from the boat. Floating wrack either lodged on or broke loose dangerously from towheads, those accumulations of trees and logs at the top ends of the islands that from a distance resembled, the boatmen said, the unruly locks of a fair-haired boy, hence the name Beargrass.
Toward evening, Berry put two men on each sweep to fight the unwieldy Fetch in to shore. As they were tying up in the lee of a bend, a peculiar arrangement floated past in the dusk: two flatboats lashed together side by side. The crew apparently struggled in vain to steer this lumbering rig, because it was slowly spinning in the current.
Out on the back deck, Bo called across the water for them to break up and tie to shore before dark, but the men on the double-boat either didn’t hear or didn’t understand; their return cries were unintelligible.
“Why’d they fix their boats together like that?” asked Fawn curiously, coming out to look.
“I expect because they’re fool Raintree boys who don’t know a thing about the river and have got no business being on it,” said Bo, and spat over the side for emphasis.
“For company, maybe, or not to lose each other in the dark. It likely made ’em feel safer, out on this big river,” said Whit slowly. “Even the Fetch is starting to look pretty small.”
“Do you see why it don’t make ’em safer?” said Berry.
“Oh, I do!” said Fawn excitedly, staring after the receding Raintree flatties.
Berry grinned. “I bet you do. Now wait for Whit.”
Whit squinted into the dusk and said slowly, “They’re trying to move twice the weight with half the oars.”
Fawn nodded vigorously.
“That’s right,” said Berry, straightening in satisfaction. “We may make a riverman of you yet.”
Whit smiled blindingly at her. “I sure hope so.”
She smiled back involuntarily; not her usual wry grin, but something unwitting and almost unwilling. She rubbed her lips and shook her head. “And to top it, they’re running at night. Unless they got themselves their very own Lakewalker