The morning of the 416th day of their journey was like every morning. The sun had risen above the top of the range on their left. The wind from Up River was an estimated fifteen miles per hour, as always. The warmth rose steadily with the sun and would reach the estimated 85 degrees Fahrenheit at approximately 2 in the afternoon. The catamaran The Hadji, tacked back and forth. Burton stood on the “bridge” with both hands on the long thick pine tiller on his right, while the wind and the sun beat on his darkly tanned skin. He wore a scarlet and black checked kilt reaching almost to his knees and a necklace made of the convoluted shiny-black vertebrae of the hornfish. This was a six-foot long fish with a six-inch long horn that projected unicorn-like from its forehead. The hornfish lived about a hundred feet below the surface and was brought in on a line with difficulty. But its vertebrae made beautiful necklaces, its skin, properly tanned, made sandals and armor and shields or could be worked into tough pliable ropes and belts. Its flesh was delicious. But the horn was the most valuable item. It tipped spears or arrows or went into a wood handle to make a stiletto.
On a stand near him, encased in the transparent bladder of a fish, was a bow. It was made of the curved bones protruding from the sides of the mouth of the whale-sized dragonfish. When the ends of each had been cut so that one fitted into the other, a double recurved bow was the result. Fitted with a string from the gut of the dragonfish, this made a bow that only a very powerful man could fully draw. Burton had run across one forty days ago and offered its owner forty cigarettes, ten cigars, and thirty ounces of whiskey for it. The offer was turned down. So Burton and Kazz came back late that night and stole the bow. Or, rather, made a trade, since Burton felt compelled to leave his yew bow in exchange.
Since then, he had rationalized that he had every right to steal the bow. The owner had boasted that he had murdered a man to get the bow. So taking it from him was taking it from a thief and a killer. Nevertheless, Burton suffered from thrusts of conscience when he thought about it, which was not often.
Burton took The Hadji back and forth across the narrowing channel. For about five miles, The River had widened out to a three and a half mile broad lake, and now it was forming into a narrow channel less than half a mile across. The channel curved and disappeared between the walls of a canyon.
There the boat would creep along because it would be bucking an accelerated current and the space allowed for tacking was so limited. But he had been through similar straits many times and so was not apprehensive about this. Still, every time it happened, he could not help thinking of the boat as being reborn. It passed from a lake, a womb, through a tight opening and out into another lake. It was a bursting of waters in many ways, and there was always the chance of a fabulous adventure, of a revelation, on the other side.
The catamaran turned away from a grailstone, only twenty yards off. There were many people on the right-side plain, which was only half a mile across here. They shouted at tie boat or waved or shook their fists or shouted obscenities, unheard but understood by Burton because of so many experiences. But they did not seem hostile; it was just that strangers were always greeted by the locals in a varied manner. The locals here were a short, dark-skinned, dark-haired, thin-bodied people. They spoke a language that Roach said was probably proto Hamite-Semitic. They had lived on Earth somewhere in North Africa or Mesopotamia when those countries had been much more fertile. They wore the towels as kilts but the women went bare-breasted and used the “bras” as neckscarfs or turbans. They occupied the right bank for sixty grailstones, that is, sixty miles. The people before them had been strung out for eighty grailstones and had, been tenth-century A.D. Ceylonese with a minority of pre-Colombian Mayans.