29: Crossing the River

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next

Getting a caravan across the Redstone River is no easy feat. Even here, at one of the best crossing places, the river is wide and the waters near the middle are rapid and unreliable. Tyk will happily swim about near the shore, but crossing the river would be a dangerous task, and crossing it carrying a load would be impossible. Men can fly across, but with the need to bring heavy travel supplies, that’s not particularly useful.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround – this is, after all, where the traders cross. Two strange metal ropes made of interconnected rings stretch across the water, held in place periodically by anchors and bouys, and between them sits a wide, shallow boat. The ropes are fed through large rings of iron on each side to keep the boat on course. Tyk has never seen so much iron in one place; while the hive load goods onto the boat to transport across the river for the journey (a process that will, apparently, take a couple of days, one boatload at a time), she and the rest of the Redstone River Hive visitors examine the links with fascination. (Smon, for her part, seems to find the ropes thoroughly mundane, and is more interested in the safety of the crossing. She refuses their offer to transport her farm across and insists on bringing it across with herself in the final trip.)

“Are you going to be safe?” Tyk asks her as they watch a loaded boat leave.

Smon shrugs. “I have not been safe for many years. But I will try not to die. The Green Hills Hive seem to know what they’re doing.”

“You’ll know she’s safe when she reaches the Glittergem Hive,” Kesan says, dropping out of the sky to land on Tyk’s back and hum for Ketyk. “We’ve got the latest current maps and we’re sure that the wingsong stream will fall back into its old pattern now.”

“When?”

“Hard to be sure. Less than half a season, though.”

“Will the journey take that long?”

“Given that she’ll be travelling with non-traders again, and this time over the sleeplands, quite possibly. The Green Hills Hive sent its only resident traders upriver before we got here.”

Ayan seems less worried. She comes up next to Tyk to look at the metal rope after Smon and Kesan have drifted off, taps it curiously with one claw, and flicks her mandibles dismissively. “I wish they’d hurry up with this. There’s no way it normally takes this long, and I can’t wait to get back home.”

In a fit of vindictiveness, Tyk says, “Are you sure your family agrees with you? Bette seems pretty comfortable here.”

“She’s catching up with old friends! I know friendship is a foreign concept to you, so let me explain – some of us have people who actually like being around us. Of course, you could stay here, and be a translator for the next sky person who comes through. That’d probably be best for everyone. Except the Green Hills Hive, I suppose.” She turns and walks away before Tyk can react (which is probably a good thing, since Tyk doesn’t want to start a physical fight here), heading back into a crowd of young Green Hills Hive girls. Tyk recognises Penni, and flicks a mandible in greeting. Penni returns the gesture in a polite, distant way, and follows Ayan back towards the hive.

All too soon, it’s the morning of Smon’s departure. She boards the boat with her big bundle of personal effects, including her farm, on the car that Tyk and the others have pulled all the way from the Redstone River Hive, along with a contingent of Green Hills Hive volunteers ready to take her up the trade route to Glittergem. Tyk can’t help but reflect for a moment on the absurdity of the caravan; in theory, only a few people are needed to guide and protect Tyk and pull her cart, but of course those people need food for the journey, and that means more carts which means more people to pull them which means more food for the journey, and if you’re going all the way up to Glittergem you might as well take trade goods with you… it’s like the reverse of the Redstone River caravan, where they were able to easily slot Smon in after already committing to bringing trade goods. Smon herself doesn’t have all that much, but transporting her is a whole big mission.

San and Kesan let Tyk take the boat over the river with Smon to say goodbye to her on the other side. To Tyk’s surprise, Ayan and Keyan also decide to go – maybe they’re interested in the boat.

As the boat pulls away from the shore, propelled by the simple method of strong women pulling on the two ropes of interlinked metal rings that the boat sits between, Ayan drops into the water to swim beside the boat, keeping within reach of the ropes to avoid the risk of getting swept away by the current. She swims underneath the boat, occasionally coming up on one side or another, and seems particularly interested in the metal ropes and the rings holding the boat between them. Keyan, unable to swim, keeps a nervous eye on his truesister from the boat.

Smon sits perched on top of her farm, its various lids bolted down for safety and her various other effects strapped to its side, and stares out at the river ahead, apparently deep in thought. The hard dark caps on the ends of her claw-tendrils, the only carapace-like structures that Tyk has seen on her body except for her teeth, click semi-rhythmically against the hard surface beneath her. As Tyk comes over, she turns to face her and smiles.

“Tyk,” she says. “Thank you. Without you, I’d… well, I’d probably be dead by now.”

“That’s not true,” Tyk points out. “You set up your own home and made your farm and talked to the hiveheart here and everything. All I did was teach you some words and introduce you to the Redstone River Hive.”

“All you did?” Smon shakes her head. “I do not have enough of your words to thank you for all the things you did. And for being…” the echo stone goes silent, missing a word. Smon presses the inside of a claw to the middle of her chest, the place she always gestures to indicate emotion, and then wraps it around Tyk’s horn, the place that Tyk’s people use to indicate emotion.

“Friend,” Tyk says. “The word is friend.”

Smon nods. “Thank you for being Smon’s friend.”

The boat has reached the first set of anchors and bouys that hold the metal guide ropes in place, which presents a problem, since the ropes can’t feed through the metal links on the boats with the anchor attachments in place. The pullers pause so that others can carefully detach said anchors and bouys and reattach them to the rope on the other side of the boat. They’re pretty far from the shore now, although close enough that the people watching them are still visible, and Tyk notes with interest that the reddish film of Redstone riverbank dirt clinging to the metal rope is present even all the way out here, even though the water isn’t red yet. Is it from last year’s wet season?

Getting past the anchors and bouys is a swift process; the boaters are clearly very experienced at their duties. Ayan, apparently tired of her explorations, climbs back aboard the boat as they once again move on. “The water’s getting pretty swift and violent down there,” she observes.

“That’s why we have the guide chains,” one of the pullers reassures her. “The boat’s safe, don’t worry.”

Tyk ignores them. It’s her last chance, so she asks Smon outright, “What is this Rayjo Tau? You’ve never mentioned it before, why is it suddenly so important?”

Smon just smiles. “If we succeed, then when you are grown you should visit. I will show you.”

“I will.” When she’s grown, and no one can stop her.

“Are you happy to go home?”

“Yes. I wish you were coming back, too.”

Smon shrugs.

“This isn’t safe.”

“Safe? I tell you before. I am never safe. On a new Earth, anything could be poison, anything could be danger. I do not know how long my people can live here. We must work fast, to make it safe for our children. Who knows how much time we have?”

“Sounds scary.”

She shrugs again.

The pair sit in silence for a while as the boat moves on. The early morning sun stains the Redstone River prematurely red and the rhythmic pulling of the metal links past the boat reminds Tyk of Smon’s heartbeat, which can be heard through her soft flesh if you press your horn to her chest. But for the activity of the women on the chains and the men watching for problems from above, there’s little movement. Smon’s new caravan-mates look bored, if somewhat tense from the boat ride; they probably don’t take this boat all that often themselves, come to think of it. According to Penni, the Green Hills Hive had had traders present when the wingsong stream had stopped working, but they’d all gone North to Glittergem Hive with Myn and Haidn. (Though, hadn’t Kesan said that the last traders had gone upriver, to the East? Maybe there were two groups of traders present who’d both left around the same time.)

“The chains must be very expensive,” Smon suddenly says, apropos of nothing.

“What?”

She points to the metal ropes in the water. “It’s a lot of metal. And if I understand the trade route properly, it was probably carried all the way up from Deep Bog Hive. Maybe as metal, but I think maybe it was made there – there’s not much wood around here, and probably not enough metal for Green Hills to have its own chain-makers. Very heavy. Very expensive. And in the water, so it will turn to redstone over time. Your nails in your hive had very little redstone.”

“Are they supposed to?” Tyk only rarely sees nails. They stay in the oil-tub until needed.

“Chain is very impressive, lots of work to maintain. This boat must be very important and this river very dangerous.”

“Yeah,” Tyk says. “Probably. Is that important?”

“Not for now,” Smon says; very ominously, Tyk thinks. “Not yet. But we must be very, very careful.”

“Crossing the river?”

“No. At Rayjo Tau.”

“… what?”

The boat’s stopped again as they pass another set of anchors and bouys. But just then, it lurches violently sideways, away from the chains, dragged downriver by the violent current. Ayan, Keyan and about half of the Green Hills Hive contingent on the boat hold their footing, but Tyk slides sideways into Smon, who stays stable only because she’s had the foresight to lash herself to the heavy sky people farm beneath her.

“Look out!” one of the pullers yells. “The boat’s going down!”

First —- Previous —- Glossary —- Archive —- Next