Up the River

(Ged)

The others were still arguing about whether to fish the deep pool again when Ged shouldered his pack and said he’d best get home.

Nobody minded. Pól was already wading back out with the net, and Senna shouted something about him being soft, and that was the whole of the goodbye. He walked the track down to the landing, where old Hesk had the flat-boat tied, and left his pack with him.

“Tell my dad I’ll be along,” Ged said. “I want to walk the way home.”

Hesk, who had known Ged’s father thirty years and was not a man who asked questions, spat in the water and nodded. “Long way for it.”

“I know it.”

He did know it. That was the point.

He waited until Hesk had poled off around the bend, and then he stripped to his shirt and trousers, rolled his boots into his belt, took the little book in its oilcloth and tied it high on his back where the water wouldn’t reach, and slid into the river.

The current took him the way he’d known it would. He didn’t fight it — you never fought it — he lay on it like a log and let it carry him down, steering with a hand now and then, watching the banks go by. An hour, maybe a little more. The town smell came up, woodsmoke and tar and the tanneries, and then the mouth of the tributary opened on his left, the one that came down out of the hills where the mine was, and he turned into it and started to swim.

Now it was work.

The tributary ran fast and narrow, and where it cut through the canyon it ran faster, white over the rocks, the walls going up sheer on both sides so there was no bank to climb out onto, only the water and the stone. He swam it the way he swam everything, steady, not wasting himself, reading the river — the slack water behind the boulders, the seams where the current eased, the places to rest a breath before the next push. His arms began to burn somewhere in the middle of it and he kept on. His lungs. He kept on. There was a stretch near the top where the whole river funnelled down into a chute and he thought, for three or four strokes, that it had him — that he’d come up the canyon to be spat back down it — and then his hand found a ledge and he hauled himself into the slack behind a rock and hung there, gasping, his heart going like a drum.

It was a mighty thing he’d done, getting up that canyon. He knew it. He let himself know it for about ten seconds.

Then he noticed the water.

It tasted wrong. He’d had it in his mouth the whole way up and not marked it, his head too full of the swimming — but resting now, he tasted it, and it was wrong: a flatness, a faint sourness under the tongue, a sting at the back of the throat. His eyes were stinging too. He looked for fish and there were no fish. No weed on the rocks. The water came down clear enough to the eye but there was nothing living in it, and the wrongness of that crept up his neck.

This water’s getting bad, he thought.

He was in it up to his chin.

Past the canyon the valley opened and the river slowed and widened, and the bank came back, mud and grey reeds, and he crawled out onto it and lay a while getting his breath and his legs. Then he went on along the bank, low, keeping to the reeds.

The river got worse the higher he went. The reeds gave out. There were no birds. The mud at the edge had a crust on it, pale, and a smell came off the water now that he didn’t have a word for — not rot, not smoke, something flatter and meaner than either. He kept the book high and dry on his back and went on.

It was somewhere along that stretch, picking his way over the dead ground with the bad water sliding by on his right, that the thought caught up with him properly, the one he’d been outrunning since the canyon: this is a really dumb thing to do.

Because if they caught him here, that was the end. There was no story he could tell, no friend’s farm to say he’d wandered onto. A boy creeping up the poisoned river toward the mine in the dark — they wouldn’t even need to do much. They’d put him in the crusher with the ore and that would be all. No one would ever find him. His mum would never know. Brin would make speeches about him and never know.

He stood there a while with that.

Then he went on, because he’d come this far, and going back down the canyon in the dark was its own kind of dying, and because — he was honest enough with himself to know it — he wanted to see. He’d come to see, and the seeing was just up ahead.

He lay up in a fold of the ground above the workings until nightfall, and watched.

He watched all afternoon. He watched the carts come and go and the men move and the way the channels ran from the workings down to the river, and he marked where the guards walked and where they didn’t, and after a while he understood the thing that would get him in: they didn’t watch the river side. Two men on the road gate, one walking the yard, and not one of them giving the river a glance. Why would they. Nobody came up the river. The river was the wall. The river was so bad it did their watching for them.

He waited for the dark and then for the moon, and when the moon came up enough to draw by, he went down.

He went up along the tailings on the river side, on his belly, the book out of its cloth now and open against a flat stone, and he drew. He drew the channels — where they came from, where they went, the big one that ran straight down off the high workings and into the river above the dam, above the weir, above the place the whole town’s water was drawn. He drew the ponds and the sluices and the way they’d been built, and the more he drew the more he understood what he was looking at, and his hand went cold on the pencil.

He had heard his mother say it to Alder. The river. He’d heard the household tell it after — how she’d asked him, gentle, about the river, and how Alder had said he’d put good people on it, he’d see it handled, you have my word.

It was handled. That was the thing Ged understood, lying on the tailings in the moonlight. It was handled with great care. Everything that would have burned the men, everything that would have shown on a freed contractor and made a story — it had all been gathered up and run, neat as plumbing, away from the men and into the river. Above the weir. Above the town’s water. The men were clean and the river took it all, and the river ran down to where everyone drank.

He almost missed the guard.

A boot scraped on stone not ten feet off and Ged went flat and still as the dead, the pencil under his hand, his face in the cold grit, and the man stood there a long moment hawking and spitting and looking out at nothing — at the river, the wall that did his watching — and then moved off, and Ged lay there with his heart slamming until he could trust his hands again.

He had what he came for. But the moon had swung wrong for the way back and he had to wait for it to clear the ridge, and there was nothing to do in the waiting but lie still and not think about the crusher, so he turned the book over to a clean page and he wrote a poem.

He was no good at poems. Brin was the one for words. But he loved the shape of them, the way a true thing could be stood up square and made to hold, and so he built one, slow, in the moonlight, reaching for what he’d seen and not finding the words for it and setting down the ones he had.

They made it clean for the men who dig.
They took the bad and they sent it down.
Down is the water. Down is the town.
Down is the cup in my mother’s hand.

Nobody made them. They chose the plan.
Clean for the few and the rest can drink.
I saw the ditch. I saw where it ran.
I have no word for a man who’d think

a town is a thing you pour into.
But I saw it. So now it’s true.

It wasn’t good. He knew it wasn’t good — the lines wouldn’t sit even, and think and drink weren’t a real rhyme, and there was a word missing somewhere in the middle he couldn’t find however he reached for it. But it was true, every line of it was true, and that was the part he could make hold. He folded the cloth back over it and put it high on his back, and when the moon cleared the ridge he went back along the bank and into the water.

The way down was cold past anything he had a name for.

He’d been cold before, plenty — he was a water boy, he knew cold — but this was a cold that got into the bone and stayed, the bad water taking the heat out of him faster than he could make it, and the long dark hours of it nearly finished what the canyon hadn’t. Twice he cramped and went under and came up swearing and swimming. He stopped feeling his hands. He steered by the dark shapes of the banks and the pull of the current and the one fixed thing in his head, which was the dock — his dad’s dock, the good landing below the spit, where the bank was soft and a man could come out easy — and he aimed himself at it the whole long way down because it was the only thing he was sure of.

And there was one stretch, coming down past the city, where he had to swim for his life in a different way — had to claw himself out across the current to the far side and hold there, fighting, because he knew this water, he’d grown up on this water, and he knew what waited below the spit on the town side: the intake. The great drowned mouth where the city drew its water, the grille and the suck of it, where the river got pulled sideways and down into the pipes that fed the whole town. Every water-boy knew the intake. You learned it before you learned to spit. You did not go near the intake; men had been took into the intake and not come out, or come out in pieces at the screens; and here he was, half-frozen and cramping, having to find in his dead arms one more hard ferry across the pull of it, because the river that was carrying him home ran straight at the thing that would kill him and he had to get past it on the far side or be drawn in with the rest of what the town would drink. He made it. Barely. He didn’t let himself think, then or after, about how close a thing it had been — how close the boy with the proof of the poisoned water came to going down the town’s own throat with it.

It was, the whole of it, top to bottom, a swim that should not have been made. He let himself feel mighty about it for a moment on the tailings and would let himself feel mighty about it again, later, telling it — but the truth, the cold truth he carried in his bones the rest of the way down, was that grown men, strong men, the best swimmers on the river, could not have done what he had just done, and he had only done it because he was young and stupid and did not properly believe, even now, even cramping in the dark above the intake, that the river could actually kill him. That disbelief was the only reason he was alive. It was not a thing to be proud of. It was a thing to be alive after.

He came out right at the dock, many cold hours later, in the full light of morning, and crawled up out of the water on his hands and knees and knelt there shaking.

The first thing he did — before his arms, before anything — was reach over his shoulder for the book.

It was dry. The oilcloth had held. He unwound it with hands he could barely feel and turned the pages and they were dry, every one, the channels and the ponds and the sluices and the long straight line of the poison running down to the weir, all of it dry and dark and clear on the paper. He wound the cloth back over it and sat a moment with it held against his chest, and let himself feel it.

He’d done it. Whatever else, whatever happened now, he’d gone up that river and come back down it and he had the thing in his hands. Nobody could argue with what was in the book. He knew what he’d done, and he let himself know it, kneeling there on the dock dripping and half-frozen with the morning coming up bright over the town.

It was then, looking down to wind the cloth tighter, that he saw his arms.

There was no hair on them.

He looked at his arms, and then he ran a hand over his head — his hair was short, he kept it short for the water — and there was nothing there either, nothing, smooth as an egg. He looked down at the rest of himself, the way a boy would, quick and worried, and — no. Bald as the rest, every hair gone, but only the hair. Everything where it ought to be. Only the hair.

He sat back on his heels in the bright morning light and looked at his own bare arms and did not understand for a moment.

Then he did, and it went through him cold and huge.

The river had done this. The hours in the river had done this. He’d been in it half a night and it had stripped every hair off his body clean as a blade — and nobody knew that. Nobody knew what the water did. People said the tap-water was foul, you didn’t drink it, everybody knew that much — but they didn’t know this, that an hour of it took the weed off the rocks and a night of it took the hair off a boy, that the thing running down past the weir into the cups and kettles of the whole town would do that to a living body given long enough at it. He had drawn where the poison came from and where it went, the whole neat plumbing of it, and now he was kneeling on his father’s dock wearing the proof of what it was — not a drawing, not a story he’d have to make anyone believe, but his own bald raw body, that no one could argue with and no one could explain any other way.

He had it. He had the whole thing. The book in one hand and his own skin for the rest, and between them there was no part of it left that a clever man could talk his way around.

It was the biggest thing he had ever held in his life, and he knelt there half-frozen and bald and grinning at it like a fool.

He started to laugh, a little, in a way that wasn’t quite laughing.

He got his feet under him and stood, the book in one hand, and climbed the reeds up the bank — and at the top of it, with the morning bright and the dock busy below him, fishermen and porters and a woman with baskets all there to see, his clothes gave way.

They didn’t tear. They came apart. The shirt simply went, in pieces, off his shoulders and down, and the trousers followed, the cloth gone soft and rotten as wet paper from the hours in the water, and Ged stood at the top of the bank, bald, raw, and stark naked, holding nothing in the whole world but a little oilcloth book.

That was when the laughter started — up from the dock, somebody barking it out first and then the rest of them, the porters and the basket-woman and a man who had to set down his load he was laughing so hard. The bald boy. Stood up out of the river with no hair on him and then shed his clothes like a snake at the top of the bank, in the full light of morning, in front of the whole waking waterside.