Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

The pier was coming up on the right, a long one, not completed yet. The oarsmen had the sweeps set in the rope locks to turn the ship as soon as the pier was past. The tide wasn’t strong just now, not with the moons all strung out like this, not like Conjunction, when no one in his right mind would try to tie up except at the Riverside itself.

“Hold fast,” breathed Thrasne, locking the sculling oars out of the way of the rudder. “Hold fast.”

“I see it,” grumbled the steersman. “Been doing this for twenty years.”

Thrasne ignored him. If Blint wanted him on the steer-house, it was to take charge of things.

“Hold fast,” he muttered again. “Now! Hard over!” He bent his back to the rudder as the bite of the oars took hold, taking up the slack on the tackle until it was tied hard over and they could watch the sweating men at the sweeps. Blint himself was at the line cannon. In a moment it went off with a dull thwump of its huge wooden springs, and the line arched out over the pier, where half a dozen stand bouts made it fast.

“Sweeps up,” cried Blint. “Stand by the winch!” The ship shuddered as it began to draw toward the pier, moving against the surging tide. Thrasne shook his head, remembering the time they had taken on a boatman from a place called Thou-ne. “Born in Potipur,” he said he was. Sanctimonious half-wit. Insisted that no ship had the right to oppose the tide, and the only way to moor was at the end of a line along the bank. Fool had said winching was evil, anti-life, and against the will of Potipur. He lasted until the time he took an axe to the rope during a winching operation. Assuming he had been a good swimmer and hadn’t encountered the blight, he might still be alive. Since Blint had dropped him over the side in the far mid-River after dark, however, his survival was only conjectural.

There were no other boats at the Baristown piers. Despite this, there was a considerable gathering at the end of the jetty, engaged in some noisy set-to.

“What’re they doing?” Thrasne asked.

“Couldn’t say,” offered Blint. “Have a look if you like. I’ll need the walkway down anyhow for those fat bellies coming.” He nodded toward the town. Several members of the merchant caste were bustling toward them, each trying to be first without being ostentatious about it. None of them quite broke into a run. Thrasne set the walkway, then strolled over it, hands in pockets, down to the end of the pier.

Most of the crowd were simple stand bouts, though there were a few fishermen and merchant apprentices who should have been elsewhere. There was one Laugher in his polished black helm, fiddling with the flasks at his belt, staring at each member of the crowd in turn, as though he would see through to the bones. Those at the end of the jetty, however, were Awakeners directing a worker crew in dragging the River.

2

Thrasne got a whiff of the workers and moved back a few steps. Using workers to labor in Potipur’s behalf was a religious requirement in every town they traveled by, but Thrasne thought it a stinking one, literally and philosophically. The shambling figures were so damned inefficient. Everything had to be done six times over. It took a crew of Awakened workers four times over a field to plow it, and Thrasne had never seen a ditch dug by workers fit to run water through until some competent irrigation manager cleaned it out and trued the sides. Now they were heaving hooks at the ends of long lines, tossing them about a fourth of the distance Thrasne could have thrown them, dragging them back with slow tugs against the tide.

“What’re they looking for?” he asked one of the stand-abouts.

“Some woman went in the River. Drowned herself.”

“So? Why the dragging?”

“She did it to get out of bein’ Sorted. So they say. I don’t know. All I know is the Awakener’s mad as a fisherman with a blight-fish on a new line.”