Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [40]
6
Fifty paces up the slope from the Pearl Bend wharf boat, Fawn craned her neck as the wagons halted in front of a plank shed. It seemed to be trying to grow into a warehouse by budding, add-ons extending in all directions. Whit jumped down from the lead wagon to help Hod hobble over to a bench against the front wall, displacing a couple of idlers that Mape, after a prudent sobriety check, promptly hired to help unload his fragile cargo. To Fawn’s surprise, they only shifted the top layer of slat boxes from her wagon; after that, Whit climbed up with them and Tanner took the reins to turn the rig toward the river.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Tanner nodded toward the ferryboat tied next to the wharf boat. It looked like a barn floor laid out on a barge, except for a pole sticking up on one side like a short, stubby mast. “Across the river, and up past the Riffle. This load goes upstream from Possum Landing.”
Well, Dag could doubtless find her even over there. Fawn went to Weft’s head to coax her up the broad gangplank, which rather resembled a barn door tossed on its side, while Whit did the same for Warp. The horses were dubious, but at last seemed convinced that it was only some sort of strange bridge, and did not disgrace themselves or their former owner by trying to bolt. The boredom of the lead pair also helped.
The stubby mast turned out to be a capstan; a thick hemp rope was wound about it a few times, high up, one end leading to a stout tree up the bank, the other, supported by a few floats, to a similar tree on the other side. Fawn was a little disappointed not to ride on the famous Lakewalker ferry, but watched with interest as the two Bend ferrymen stuck oak bars into holes on the capstan and started turning it. Whit, equally fascinated, volunteered to help and went to work pushing the squeaking post around, winding and unwinding the rope and slowly pulling the ferry across the river. The water seemed clear and calm to Fawn’s eye, but she jumped when a log floating just under the surface thumped into the side, and she was reminded that this was no quiet lake. Working the ferry might not seem so pleasant when the water was high or rough, or in rain or cold. From out here in the middle, the river looked bigger.
“How do the other boats get past the rope?” she asked Tanner, watching the big log catch, roll under the obstruction, right itself, and sluggishly proceed.
“The ferrymen have to take it down,” he said. “They haul it back and forth across the river with a skiff, usually, but with the river this low nothing’s going over the Riffle anyways, so they just leave it up.”
When the ferry nosed up to the far bank, the ferrymen ran out the gangplank on that end. She and Whit repeated their reassurances to the horses, and the rig rumbled safely, if noisily, onto dry land once more. They both clambered up next to Tanner as he turned the team onto a rutted track leading upstream.
Fawn sat up in anticipation as they topped a rise and the line of flatboats tied to the trees beyond Possum Landing came into view. They were as unlike the Lakewalkers’ graceful, sharp-prowed narrow boats as they could be, looking like shacks stuck on box crates, really. Ungainly. Some even had small fireplaces with stone chimneys, out of which smoke trickled. It was as if someone’s village had suddenly decided to run off to sea, and Fawn grinned at the vision of an escaped house waddling away from its astonished owners. People ran away from home all the time; why shouldn’t the reverse be true? On one of these, she and Dag would float all the way to Graymouth. All running away together, maybe. Her grin faded.
But even such odd thoughts could not quench her excitement, and when Tanner brought the wagon to a halt in front of another rambling shed-warehouse, she hopped down and told her brother, “I’m going to go look at the boats.”
He frowned after her in frustration but stuck with his task as Tanner directed him to unlatch the tailboard and start lugging. “You be careful, now,” Whit called. More in envy than concern,