We have a problem, you and me,” the boatman said, lifting a lantern so that the light was in her eyes.
Sammish squinted up at him. Her body was sore, and her sleep so fueled by exhaustion that it was hard to tell the thick-bodied man from a dream. She sat up, willing herself back to consciousness.
They were five days south of Kithamar now. Saffa had negotiated passage on one of the flat-bottomed boats that floated down from the northern city to river villages in exchange for loading and unloading at the docks along the way. The food was little more than starvation flavored with fish, the sleeping cots were piled so close over each other that Sammish had opted to brave the flies and mosquitoes on the open deck, and the work would have been punishing for a man twice her size.
They’d reached the second village of the trip near sundown, tying up to an old, waterlogged dock. The plan had been that Sammish and one of the other hired hands—Hansch, with what had been a neatly kept beard that was quickly becoming less so—would unload the cargo before they slept, and Saffa and the boatman would load what was waiting onto the boat in the dark of morning so that they could leave with the light.
The light hadn’t come, but the birds were loud with the threat of it.
“What’s the matter?” Sammish managed at last.
“She’s not working is the matter,” the boatman said. “We have to be off the ties before the next boat comes, and at this rate, we won’t be.”
Sammish cursed under her breath and pushed herself up. The boatman stepped back toward the dock. The river hushed and spat around them as she followed him to the dock. The darkness smelled like the green of summer. Saffa was there, a sack across her shoulders, her eyes cast down as she walked. The boatman went past her like she wasn’t there, making his way to the handcart and the looming darkness of the village warehouse beyond it. Sammish fell into step beside the Bronze Coast woman.
“All well?” Sammish asked. “Big man said you were struggling.”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry. It’s only that I was thinking too much.”
Sammish took the sack from her and slung it across her own shoulders. Saffa walked faster when she wasn’t burdened. “What’s on your mind?”
“It’s almost my son’s nameday,” Saffa said. “And I hear him in the water. He is very much with me. Or his absence is. I’m sorry. I should be able to work.”
Sammish dropped the sack beside half a dozen others like it. Barley left over from the winter promised to a place downstream where the crops had failed. Sammish’s back hurt. “It’s all right. You put off feeling too much about him all while we were in the thick of things. Now you’re safe, it’s time you did.”
“I’m not doing my part.”
“Sure you are,” Sammish said. “Just your part’s for Timu right now. Go get some rest. I’ll take care of this.”
“I’m sorry,” Saffa said again, but at least she headed back toward the cots and didn’t try to keep working. Sammish stretched, spat into the river, and started back along the dock. The boatman had pushed the rest of the sacks off the handcart and gone back into the darkness for another load. Sammish picked up one, balanced it on her shoulder, and then took a second one on her hip like it was a dense, limp, oversized baby. She tried to be careful going back to the boat. The water made the wood of the dock slick in places, and if she slipped and dropped one of the sacks into the river, they’d be walking to the Bronze Coast.
She’d thought that leaving Kithamar would mean a change to everything. She had put the city of her birth—of her full life—behind her. She’d thought that leaving the streets she’d known would mean leaving the girl she’d known too, but here she was, carrying someone else’s weight. Or maybe it was just that all of life everywhere was just the next set of problems, one after the other, until she could sleep in pyre flames.
And in truth, she almost hoped it was.
To leave everything and begin again was a frightening thing. The night when they’d burned the brotherhood and stolen back the knife, she’d found Saffa in the streets of Riverport. When Sammish realized that she was planning to go with her when she left, it had felt like looking over a cliffside. Now that it had happened, it was just more work, more hunger, more interrupted sleep. She knew how to do that.
Another two sacks, and when she went back again, boatman and cart had returned. He didn’t say any words, but his grunt seemed generally approving. He carried a sack with him, Sammish behind, and then stayed on the boat, rebalancing the load. The rest of the carrying looked to be on her.
Sweat trickled down her back and sides. Her muscles hurt. She found herself struggling to get enough air into her lungs and out again. But with each trip to the shore and back, the pile grew less. The birds were louder now, and the star-sown sky to the east was fading from black to charcoal. What had only been blackness had the hard lines of rooftops, the softer curves of trees. The pile of sacks on the ground grew smaller. The one on the boat increased. Sammish suffered, and found to her surprise that she was also enjoying herself.
As she carried another pair of sacks in toward the boat, the other hand came out toward her, and they danced a little, side to side, as they silently worked out how to pass each other. On the boat, she waited for him. He was only carrying one sack.
“We should go together,” she said. “That way we don’t accidentally knock each other over the edge.”
The Hansch scowled at her, as if he were unaccustomed to taking orders from some forgettable wisp of an Inlisc girl, but then he shrugged. “Fair point,” he said.
With him helping, they had the sacks cleared from the dock and secured on the boat before the sun came up, but it was a near thing. The stars were all gone and the clouds the pink of roses when the boatman and the village taxman threw off the ties and pushed the flatboat out into the wide, lazy current of the Khahon. The boatman went into his cabin—a tiny room hardly wider than his shoulders and still bigger than the one his three hired hands shared—and came back out with a brass horn that he blew on. Three long notes, and one short that echoed away down the river. A moment later, she heard an answering call with two short and two long from upriver.
“Cut that one too fucking close,” the boatman said, but there was satisfaction in his voice. “You can make yourselves food if you like. I’ll watch the water.”
The bearded man nodded, and Sammish followed him back to the little crate of rice, dried apples, and salt pork. She started a little cookfire on the stone and he put a mash of rice and apple and river water in a tin pan hardly larger than a fist. It was supposed to be for all three of them.
“What do you think he’s watching for?” the man asked, nodding toward the front of the boat. It was more than he’d said to her since they’d left the little docks by the hospital outside Kithamar.
“Logs, maybe,” Sammish said. “Sandbars.”
He grunted his agreement.
“First time on the river?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Mine too.”
“I took that from what your friend said. Will she be all right?”
“She needs some time is all,” Sammish said, and hoped she was speaking the truth. She thought she was.