***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2016 Martin Stewart 1 The Keep To keepe the Danék. To presserve lyfe and to retreeve those claymed by its watters. To reckord the happnings in the river''s oan voyce. To ackt with dignittie. --Riverkeep Ledgers, Vol. 1, p. 1 "Yer hands are shakin'', Wulliam." Wull shrugged and shifted his hands on the mug.
"It''s cold." Pappa laughed, releasing a stinging breeze of lakoris tobacco. "That''s no'' cold. Cold is when yer eyeballs scratch when ye blink, when it hurts to breathe. Ye''ll be Riverkeep soon. Ye''ll get used to that quick enough." "I''m no'' Riverkeep yet," said Wull. Never, he thought.
Pappa secured a knot and sat back on his haunches. "But a week''ll no'' be long passin'', my boy," he said. "Time feels long for the young, but don''t worry--ye''ll no'' be young for long." He grinned and went to get the boat ready, ruffling Wull''s hair as he passed. The deep creak of his rubber boots faded into the gloom beyond the lamp. Wull put down the mug and looked at his hands, already thickly scarred with the burns of rope and snow. Over the voice of the river--sucking knocks and shifting wood--he felt the needles of sound as the new ice along the banks of the Danék cracked. Ice meant winter and darkness, and for waterfolk a new kind of danger.
Pappa saw it as a great enemy to be feared and defeated with flames and rods. But it brought Wull respite from the river''s black void, its thick scum and little puddles of treacherous clarity, and the huge sharp rocks fringed with weed that swirled like a corpse''s hair. In the heat of summer, perfumed wildflowers grew along the banks, insects skittered on the leaf-padded surface, and silvery clouds of fish burst through the water--chased by the seulas whose wet little heads dotted the surface like stepping stones, their golden summer eyes glowing in the sunlight. But Wull could never think of the river as something living. He had seen what happened on the rocks: the floating bodies, arms raised and mouths howling against the surface as though restrained by thick glass. It was the Riverkeep''s job to push his arms through that barrier to embrace the dead, to lower his face close to theirs and taste the bilge-stink of their breath before lifting them from the water. Pappa did so with a martyr''s grace, blind to gangland markings and forgiving of sinners who took their own lives. Wull had watched them since he could remember: propped in a grotesque parody of sleep, as though they were snatching a nap in the back of the little bäta.
Now he sat with them. Sometimes the bodies were old, and the flesh slid from their shining bones like the skin of a poached fish. Wull did not want this wilderness life. With Pappa''s help he had read the ledgers in their entirety, right through the ninth volume in Pappa''s own careful hand. The ledgers didn''t just list the dates; they told the stories, detailed bodies'' decomposition, and kept the words of the rescued and their reasons for jumping: sweethearts, fear, sicknesses of the mind, and often, so often, "coin." At first Wull had taken this liter- ally, as though they were jumping into a wishing fountain to fish for pennies. Then he had realized and felt like a foolish child. Every entry was the same.
To Pappa this was priceless--a means of creating something that would stand forever as a monument of pride and respectability. To Wull it was a prison of words--repetitive, rotting words. He reached over and touched the ledger that sat open on the desk. Their last discovery had been just over a week ago: 3,101, a widow, faceup and floating, her breasts rot-swollen, her cheek cut with a debtor''s mark. But as always the most recent entry was the next number--3,102--offered with the prayer of the Riverkeep: that the number might be never filled. He closed the ledger. The mold-edged pages, heavy with moisture, fell with a report that bounced round the boathouse like the slamming of an enormous door. Wull heard the creak of Pappa''s boots in the darkness.
"Yer coming tonight." Wull shook his head. "It''s too cold." "Ah''ve told ye, that''s--" "I know, it''s just . Not tonight, Pappa, please." Pappa regarded him a moment, shifting the wad of lakoris leaf around in his mouth. Then he shook his head. "Yer nearly sixteen" was all he said.
The air was sharp and hard in Wull''s lungs. Even wrapped in layers of seula gut, he felt the chill on the exposed flesh inside his boots and around his waist like the cut of wire. The white, still world communicated itself as a sharp whine outside of his hearing, and he stamped his feet on the bäta''s exposed ribs and buried his face in his elk-fur collar, peeping over when his eyes could stand the cold. The lanterns, staked in the riverbed where the currents met and the flotsam gathered in eddied clumps, made glowing islands in the velvety darkness, their flames fuzzed in the fog like dandelions. The industrial might of Oracco was silent, the howls of its foundries and smithies carried away on the east wind. The only sound in the smothered world was the rhythmic clicking of the oars and the soft noise of the blades moving through the water. By the fifth lantern, they had discovered a graygull, torn open by a seula--"Not much else left for them," Pappa said-- and the broken spokes of a carriage wheel. The gull was flap- ping limply, trying to fly on shattered wings while it bled onto the ice.
Pappa reached down and gently snapped its neck be- tween his thumb and forefinger. Wull watched him ease the body into the water on scar-twisted palms. As far out as the edge, at lantern twenty-two, they still had found nothing more than knots of weed and grass clinging to the ice rods. Wull peered into the unseen and untended wilderness beyond the last outpost of the keep''s realm, in the depths of which lurked the bustle of Oracco''s ports, the flashing steel of bandits, and, past a scattering of hamlets, the Danék''s estuary and the wider sea. He trailed his glove tips in the water and flicked droplets out toward the beyond. Pappa saw him, tut-tutted, then--as he turned the bäta toward the boathouse and its warmth-- they found 3,102. It was male, fat-backed and facedown, white flesh streaked with a pattern of cuts and bruises Wull knew came from the fierce, swirling currents near the footbridge where Mamma had drowned. It had been wearing a uniform that still clung to it in scraps, and there were murky tattoos spilled along its visible skin.
Pieces of its scalp were missing, and leaks of blood and fluid colored the wafer of snow-dusted ice that had crept around it. Pappa looked at Wull. "The footbridge," said Wull. Pappa nodded solemnly. The flames cut his face into slices of light and dark, one eye hidden in the black wedge behind his nose. "May Lavernes keep thee," he muttered, lifting the oars from the water. "Here, Wulliam--row." Wull took the oars, turned the bäta, and heaved it for- ward.
Even now, its great weight pulled at him as though it might shatter his wrists. He looked down at the floating form of 3,102. It looked bunched, not loose, and sat tightly in the water. The ice must be holding it steady, he thought, dropping the oars and stilling the bäta. He stood as Pappa stood. The painted eyes on the bäta''s prow faced stoically forward. Half-shut and focused, they peered into a darkness that, beyond the reach of the lantern, was absolute. Wull turned from them to the reassurance of the flames.
Without the movement of the boat, the silence was so empty he felt the weight shift in his stomach and the hair creep on his back. "Pappa," he said. "Ssh, Wulliam, a minute." Pappa tipped back his hat and muttered the Riverkeep''s prayer, then, broad back braced and legs wide, he reached down for that hug to pull the wretched lump into their boat. 3,102 hugged back. In a flurry of movement that lasted no more than a gasp, the two figures disappeared beneath the surface, and Wull stood rigid, his breath billowing and his skin tight. In the instant his pappa had vanished, he''d seen a brown mouth, opened wide like a snake, and two eyes that glittered like razors. The eyes had met Wull''s.
The water was still. There weren''t even bubbles. Fighting the sudden lightness in his skull and with a kick of painful nausea taking his wind, Wull began to sweat, feeling panic speed his heart. He stood still for a timeless age, unable to move, listening to the silence and staring at the space in the water through which Pappa had vanished, trying to force his lips to form Pappa''s name and sending only the tiniest wisps of breath into the freezing air. It was the cold that brought him back to himself, needling wakefulness into his muscles. For the first time in his life he was aware of the thinness of the planks that separated him from the black void beneath, and he felt the emptiness of the world like a fist in his gut--felt the distance of other people as he never had before. Wull heaved the oars into place and sat in the keep''s chair, tears freezing on his cheeks, his gaze locked on the spot where Pappa had vanished. Pappa had shown him how to row--then made him practice until his knuckles bled--but his return journey took an age, weakened by terror and blind to his destination, branches scraping the prow behind him.
A seula broke the water beside the boat, its golden summer eyes now a piercing winter''s blue, and Wull dropped the oars in fright. The grabbing shad.