Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [71]
The sweating keelers, passing, hooted at her, then bent and stamped and strained. She made her fiddle echo their cries almost like a human voice. They were pulling well ahead of the oxen. Berry kept her music chasing them up the shore until they reached the wharf boat, reeled in their keelboat, threw down their rope, and sent up a victory whoop. She made her fiddle whoop back, and finally dropped it from under her chin, panting.
The flatties and locals who had collected along the bank to watch tromped back up the riverside to settle their bets and hoist a drink at the wharf boat, but neither Berry nor the other boat bosses on the lookout point joined them. Instead, they peered upriver, where one of the flatboats had loosed from its mooring and was being slowly sculled out to mid-river. “There goes the Oleana Lily,” someone muttered. They were all watching, Fawn realized, to see if this scout could clear the shoals without hanging up or tearing out its hull.
“If he makes it, will we go?” Fawn asked Berry.
“Not just yet,” said Berry, shading her eyes and squinting at the drifting flatboat, which was picking up speed. “The Lily drew a shallower draft than me even before I undertook to load on extra people, a ton o’ window glass, and a surly horse. You see that long pole sticking up out of the water below the Landing wharf boat?”
Fawn gazed where she pointed at what looked like a slim, bare tree, stripped of side branches, with a limp red flag nailed to its top some thirty feet in the air. Every half foot along its length, it had a groove circling it daubed with red paint, until a few feet up from the water where it changed to black paint. “That tells you how high the water is, right? Is it safe to take the shoals when it changes from red to black?” There seemed to be several feet left for the water to rise.
“Depends on how low in the water your hull and cargo ride. When it changes to black, any fool can get his boat over.”
“The marks go all the way to the top,” said Fawn uneasily. “The water doesn’t ever go that high, does it?”
“No,” said Berry, and Fawn relaxed, until she added, “By the time it’s about halfway, the pole usually rips out and washes away.”
Fawn finally saw why the river people relied on wharf boats, instead of a fixed dock like those she’d seen around Hickory Lake. The wharf boats would rise and fall with the shifting water, could be pulled ashore for winter, and wouldn’t be torn away by floods, drifting trees, or grinding ice. Were less likely to be, she amended that thought.
A few of the boat bosses lined up on the rocks yelled comments or advice to the steersman of the Oleana Lily, which were proudly ignored, but most watched in silence. When the steersman leaped to one side and pulled hard, not a few leaned with him, fists clenching, as if to add their strength to his. When the boat sideswiped a rock, scraping along the whole length of its oak hull, the boat bosses groaned in synchrony. They bent like trees in the wind, then all straightened together and sighed at what sign Fawn could not see; but the Lily was past the last rock and clump of wrack and still moving serenely.
The group broke up and began to trudge back up the path; a couple of men trotted ahead. Berry detoured only briefly at the crowded wharf boat, collecting a couple of bone-cracking hugs from some keelers and money from several more sheepish boatmen. She refused pressing offers of cider, beer, or the drink of her choice. “I got me a boat to launch, boys. We’ve been here too long—you’ve drunk this place dry!”
She paused on the bank to squint again at the ringed pole. “Well, not quite yet. But I think we might load on that horse.”
Back at the Fetch, they did so, laying extra timber for the gangplank. Dag soothed his dubious mount across the bending boards. Copperhead snorted in dismay, but followed; the boat dipped as he clomped down onto the deck and was penned with Daisy-goat.