Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Used to run back and forth among the islands out there,” one of them told Thrasne. “There’s chains of islands out there, out of sight of Northshore, farther out than the shore boats go, Owner.”

“You ran up-River?” Thrasne asked in astonishment.

“Well—what I’d say about that would depend who I was talkin’ to.”

And thus did Thrasne owner learn of whole tribes of boatmen who paid the tides no more attention than they paid the little pink clouds of sunset.

“You don’t know how the tide works as far out as you plan to go, Thrasne owner,” the man said. “You don’t know and I don’t know. You’ll never row this flat bottom across World River, that’s for sure, and I’m suggestin’ it would be a good idea to have another way to move it.”

Thrasne regarded the mast with a good deal of suspicion, but he could not argue with what the man said. They surely couldn’t row the Gift across the World River.

By the time they were ready to depart, Pamra had been gone for months. Still, word of her came to Thou-ne. The Towers evidently had a way of getting information, and Haranjus Pandel had conveyed certain information to the widow Plot, who conveyed it to half the town.

“She was in Chirubel,” Thrasne said to Medoor Babji in a carefully unemotional tone. “There were thousands and thousands following her when she got there. I wonder how all those people are fed?” He wondered how Pamra herself was fed, but he did not mention it. Thoughts of her were like a wound which he knew could not heal unless he quit picking at it.

“Way I hear,” said Medoor, “some aren’t fed. Many dead, Thrasne. The worker pits in the towns between here and Chirubel are full. Some of the Towers are recruiting extra Awakeners, so I hear it.”

“I’ll bet the old bone eaters love that,” Thrasne said, turning his eyes to the wide wings that circled above the town.

“Well,” she said abstractedly, watching his face, “if there are more dead people, there could be more fliers hatched, couldn’t there? Probably the fliers like that idea.”

“You’re not saying they think?” Thrasne objected. “You mean more of their little ones would survive, that’s all.”

“Did you ever hear of fliers who can talk?” she asked.

And he, driven into memory, remembered a time when old Blint had said something very much like that. Just before he died. He mentioned it to her, wondering.

“Talk to the Rivermen sometime, Thrasne. They know things.”

It was all she would say at the time, but it gave him something else to concern himself about. What was Pamra doing? Hadn’t that Neff been a flier—well, sort of? Was she doing the will of the fliers? Without even knowing it!

These concerns were driven away in the flurry of departure.

It was almost at the end of first summer. The mists and breezes of autumn were beginning. Alternate days were chill and windy, and it was on one such that the Gift left the docks at Thou-ne. So far as the standabouts were concerned, the boat had been hired by the Melancholies for a Glizzee-prospecting voyage among the islands. It departed properly downtide, and only when it was out of sight of the town did it turn on the sweeps and press away from Northshore. Once well away, the new boatmen—sailors they called themselves—put up the bright, unstained sails and the boat moved on its own, cross-current, the wind pushing at it from up mid-River and yet somehow moving it across. It was the way the sail was slanted, the new men said, and Thrasne paid attention as they lectured him.

In the weeks that followed, he learned about tacking, though the new men laughed at the lumbering Gift, calling her “fat lady” and “old barge bottom.” When Thrasne objected, they offered to show him the kind of boat that skipped among the islands, and he gave them leave to stop at a wooded isle they were passing at the time to spend two days cutting logs for ribbing and planks. It was to be a small thing, one that could be put together on the top of the owner-house. Thereafter the voyage was livened for all of them by their interest in the new boat.