Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [66]
After their long picnic day, neither of them wanted to do anything in their bedroll but cuddle down and sleep, which Fawn thought Dag still needed. She had slept, she thought, about an hour, when she was wakened by Dag sitting up on one elbow.
“What?” she murmured drowsily.
“I think we have a visitor.”
Fawn heard no footsteps on the front deck, nor bleats from Daisy-goat or complaints from the chickens. “Berry pulled the gangplank in, didn’t she?”
“Not coming down the path. Coming from the river side. Absent gods, I think he’s swimming.”
“In that cold water? Who?”
“If I’m not mistaken, it’s young Remo. Why?” Dag groped for his trousers, pulled them on, and swung off their pile of hides, fighting his way out past their makeshift curtain.
“What should I do?” Fawn whispered.
“Stay here, till I find out what this is all about.”
He padded softly back past the piles of cargo and the bunks, careful to wake no snoring sleepers. Fawn barely heard the creak of the back hatch open and close.
10
The oil lantern burning low on the kitchen table was clever Tripoint handiwork, a glass vase protected by a wire cage mounted on a metal reservoir, with a metal hat and wire handle above. As he slipped past, Dag plucked it up. He eased out the back hatch and closed the door before hanging the lantern on the bent nail and turning the valve key to brighten the flame. He peered out over the water. Any moon or stars were veiled by the overcast sky, and the lamplight reflected off the inky surface of the river in snaky orange ripples.
In a few moments, the ripples fluttered and the lines of light broke up as a dark shape emerged from the darker shadows. Dag made out Remo’s wet hair, then his paler face as he turned again and stroked toward the rear of the Fetch. His left arm, still scored with stitches, was up out of the water towing a makeshift raft, some driftwood hastily lashed together with vines and willow withies. Atop the raft sat folded saddlebags, and atop them a cloth bundle. Remo swam up under the Fetch’s rudder oar, and gasped, “Please…please will you take these?”
If the boy had swum from the opposite shore in this weather, he had to be chilled to the bone and close to exhaustion, youth or no youth. Dag raised his brows, but bent over the back rail, grasped the cloth bundle, and heaved it onto the deck. Ah, Remo’s clothes and boots, of course. Then the saddlebags, containing, from the weight of them, the rest of his life’s treasures. Dag grunted, but set them by the first bundle. He turned to watch Remo trying to lift himself up along the rudder pole on shaking arms, only to slide back. Dag sighed, leaned out, extended his hand, and helped pull the shivering young patroller up over the back rail as well. The abandoned raft ticked against the rudder and drifted away.
Remo nodded gratefully and bent to pick with numb fingers at the knot tying his bundle. He rubbed his naked body down with the wrapping towel and shuddered into his clothes. “Th-thanks.”
“Folks are sleeping inside,” Dag warned in a low tone. He wondered whether he ought to haul the boy indoors and plunk him in front of the hearth, or throw him back over the rail. Well, he’d doubtless find out shortly.
“Yes, right,” whispered Remo. His lip was back to normal size, but the bruises around his eye had darkened to a spectacular deep purple, just starting to go green at the edges. He finished pulling on his shirt and stood with hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, as if his next words were clotting in his throat.
He’d gone to a great deal of trouble for this private talk, Dag thought, only to choke off now. Caution reined in Dag’s curiosity just enough to convert his What can I do for you? into a more noncommittal general eyebrow lift.
It was enough to break the logjam, anyway. Remo blurted, “Take me with you.”
“And, ah—why should I do that?”
The return stare