“Are you deaf, boy?” asked Leaky. “This Rigg here sounds like he’s been to school. The way he pronounces his words so clear.”
“I’ve been to school!” said Umbo.
“I mean a downriver school,” said Leaky. “We get travelers like that now and then. You really can’t hear the difference in the way he talks?”
“He talks like his father,” said Umbo. “What do you expect?”
“That’s my point,” said Loaf. “You talk like a privick, and he talks like a snooty boy from the schools. He talks like money.”
“Well, I only know how to sound like who I really am,” said Umbo.
“And that’s why I’m calling you my son,” said Loaf, “and him my rich nephew, so why are we having this argument? Besides, I’m going to do the talking anyway. Don’t answer if anybody asks you a question, just look at me. Got it?”
“Yes,” said Rigg.
“This is so stupid,” said Umbo.
“You say that because it’s not your money,” said Leaky.
“Not yours either,” Umbo insisted.
“This boy never backs down,” Loaf growled.
“That’s what makes him a good friend,” said Rigg.
“Some of the money’s ours,” Leaky said to Umbo. “In exchange for the clothes we’re going to buy you two and the passages we’re going to pay for and the days Loaf spends away from here and the bouncers I’ll have to hire when he’s not here to keep the peace. If we don’t make a fair profit on this great and noble service we’re providing you, then he’s a stingy lad and you’re no better.”
“I’ll pay fairly,” said Rigg. “And just so you know, Umbo speaks like an educated boy from Fall Ford, but Father taught me to talk in several different accents and a few completely different languages, too. At home I talk just like Umbo, but for the last week I’ve been talking the way Father said they talk in Aressa Sessamo, cause people understood me better and laughed less.”
“Of course they did,” said Loaf. “That’s the imperial city. And your father sounds like a man who meant you to travel.”
Rigg remembered telling Father that he already knew everything he’d ever need to know—but Father knew all along that Rigg would not be spending his whole life trapping animals in the mountains. Father might not have told Rigg anything about his plans for Rigg’s future, but he’d certainly prepared him to speak wherever he went. Maybe someday Rigg would even have a use for all the astronomy and physics Father taught him. Maybe it would matter that Rigg knew that the Ring was made of dust and tiny stones circling the world, shining in the night because of reflected sunlight. Now that would be a journey!
They went to buy clothes right away that morning; the tailor measured and by evening the clothes were delivered—two of everything for each of them, in different fabrics. “Why do I need two?” asked Umbo.
“So you can wear one while you clean the other,” said Leaky. “Though it’s no surprise you don’t know about washing.”
Rigg interrupted before they could bandy words yet again. “So should I open up a seam and put the jewels back in my clothes? And if I do, which pair of trousers? I tell you I don’t ever want to be caught wearing the wrong pair if a thief steals the other, or if I have to run from somebody.”
“The jewels aren’t very big,” said Umbo. “Can’t you just keep them in a little bag in your pocket?”
Loaf wouldn’t have that. “Pickpockets take whatever they find. Never put in your pocket anything you mean to own for long.”
“I’ll make you a ribbon to put around your waist and tie right tightly,” said Leaky. “And you hang a little bag from the ribbon, inside your trousers, right in front. No one will see it, or if they do, they’ll think it’s your boy parts.”
“Your family jewels,” said Umbo, chortling.
But at that moment, Rigg caught something in Umbo’s eyes, some emotion he couldn’t identify, something that made his eyes shine a little. And he thought: He hasn’t completely forgiven me for letting Kyokay die. It was one thing before, when he didn’t know about the jewels. He could forgive me then, and share blame. But now that he sees me as rich, and knows I hid it from him, it changes everything. He thinks he has reason not to trust me. Does that mean I have reason not to trust him?
It took four days to make the downriver passage to O. First thing the boat’s captain said when they booked passage was, “Pilgrims?” and later Loaf explained that thousands of people a year go to visit the Tower of O. To the captain, though, he told the story that they had agreed on, and Rigg realized that the most important part of the tale was the part about meeting his “father’s men.” It told the captain they were looked for, and by a man of power. They’d be safe enough aboard this boat.
At first it was a delight to travel by boat. The river did all the work—even the rivermen aboard the boat had little enough to do. They were there for the return voyage, when they’d have to pole and row to get upstream against the swift current. For now the rivermen lolled about the deck; and on the cabin roof, where passengers were required to stay, Loaf and Rigg and Umbo did the same.
Until Rigg’s legs began to feel twitchy for lack of use. Father had never let him spend a single whole day abed—not even when he was sick, which wasn’t often. Umbo seemed content enough, and Loaf was positively in heaven, dozing day and night, whenever he could.
It was one of those times when Loaf was sleeping and Rigg was walking around and around the corral—for so it seemed, this small platform edged with a fence—that Umbo came up to him. “Why can’t you hold still?”
“I never got much practice at it,” said Rigg. “It requires a talent for laziness.”
“So what do you see? Paths on the river, too? The people aren’t actually walking, except the insane ones, they just sit there. So do they leave a path even though they’re holding still?”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “They’re moving through space so they leave a path.”
“All right, then that brings another question. I learned in school that the world is a planet moving through space, and the sun moves through space, too. So when the world moves, why don’t all our paths get left out in space? If the world’s like a boat, then even if we’re standing still, we should be leaving paths behind us in space because the world is moving us, the way this boat moves us even while we’re sitting here.”
Rigg closed his eyes, picturing it—all the paths leading out into space.
“It should do what you said,” Rigg finally answered. “But it doesn’t. That’s all I know. All the paths stay where people passed by, on the land or in boats. So I guess there’s something that holds the paths to the exact place on Garden that the people moved through, no matter how long ago. Maybe gravity holds the paths in place. I don’t know.”
Umbo held his silence for a while, and Rigg thought the conversation was over. But Umbo was just coming up with new questions. “Can we do something here on the boat?” asked Umbo. “I mean, you know, practicing that thing we do?”
“I don’t see how,” said Rigg. “The crew would see me walking around and wonder what I was doing. And like I said, there are no paths on this boat, the paths are all hovering above the water, where other boats dragged people through the air. Our own paths are behind us, floating exactly this high above the water. I can see yours right up the river.”
“But that’s all the better. You just wait till some path comes right across this platform, and then you do something.”
“What would I do? Give some poor guy a shove so he falls in the water, five hundred years ago? That would be murder, if he can’t swim.”
Umbo sighed. “I’m just so bored.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s try to teach each other how to do the other one’s thing.”
“Nobody taught us to do what we do already,” said Umbo.
“That’s not even true. Father worked with you, didn’t he? Helped you sharpen it and focus it.”
“Yes, well, that’s right,
but I could already do it, he just trained me.”
“So maybe instead of having none of each other’s ability, we only have a very very little so we never noticed it,” said Rigg. “So you try to explain it to me while you’re doing it, and I’ll try to point out the paths as we pass through them.”
“There’s not a chance it will work,” said Umbo.
“Then let’s find that out. Come on, we’re both bored, this is something to do.”
“Sh,” said Umbo. “I think Loaf is waking up.”
“Unless he’s been awake the whole time, listening.”
Umbo grimaced. “It would be just like him.”
But Loaf seemed not to have heard anything. He was perfectly normal toward them when he woke up—surly and deferent and helpful all at once.
Rigg asked him, “You worked the river yourself, didn’t you?”
“Never,” said Loaf.
“But you’re as muscular as these men.”
“No I’m not,” said Loaf. “I’m much more so.”
Rigg looked at him carefully. “I can see that you’re different from them, but not how.”
“Look at my right shoulder and then at my left. Then look at the rivermen.”
Rigg and Umbo both looked. Umbo saw it first, and chuckled. “They favor one side.”
Now Rigg could see it. They were each stronger on one side of their body than the other, from years of working the same side of the boat.
“On military boats they’re not allowed to do that,” said Loaf. “They make them change sides in regular shifts so they stay even.”
“So were you a military boatman?”
“Military, but not on a boat,” said Loaf. “Before I met Leaky and married her and built the tavern, I was in the army. Got to be a sergeant, a good squad of tough men.”
“Did you fight in any wars?” asked Umbo.
“We haven’t had a war in my lifetime,” said Loaf. “Even the People’s Revolution was back when I was a baby. But there’s always fighting and always killing, because there are always people who won’t do the will of the People’s Revolutionary Council, and always wild people at the edges of civilization who won’t respect the boundary or any other law. Barbarians.”
“So are you a bowman?” asked Umbo eagerly. “A swordsman? Or do you work the pike or the staff? Will you show us?”
“The boy is in love with the idea of soldiering,” said Loaf. “Because you’ve never seen a man holding all his guts in his lap, begging for water because he’s so thirsty, but has no stomach left for the water to go into.”
Umbo gulped. “I know people die,” he said. “They die at home, too, and sometimes in pretty terrible ways.”
Rigg thought of Father under the tree and Kyokay slipping from the rim of Stashi Falls. At least he hadn’t actually seen what the tree did to Father’s body, or what happened to Kyokay when he hit the turbulent, rock-filled water.
“Nothing is more terrible than the way men die in war,” said Loaf. “One slip and your enemy has the best of you. Or you’re walking along and suddenly, pfffft, there’s an arrow in your throat or your ear or your eye or your back and if you aren’t killed outright, you know it’s over for you, it saps the strength from you.”
“But you had an equal chance,” said Rigg. “Or maybe not equal, but you were trained for it. Killing and therefore dying. It can’t be a surprise to a soldier when he dies.”
“Take it from me, boy, death is always a surprise even if you stand there staring it in the face. When it comes, you think, ‘What, me?’”
“How do you know,” said Umbo. “You’ve never died.”
In answer, Loaf lifted up his overshirt and revealed his chest and belly. The man was so huge that Rigg had assumed he was fat, but no, his whole body followed the bulges and creases of his musculature, and veins stood at the surface everywhere instead of hiding in layers of fat.
And running right up his belly, just a little off center to the right, there was a savage scar, still partly red, and it hadn’t been stitched up right, so the skin puckered on one side or the other all the way up and down it. “I’m the man who held my guts in my hand,” he said. “I counted myself as dead. I refused to let my men waste any time trying to take me off the battlefield. I named another man as their new sergeant and ordered them to retreat with the rest of our men. Later they went ahead and won, but they never came back to the battlefield. They knew there’d be nothing left of anyone.”
“Why not?” asked Umbo.
“It doesn’t sound very loyal,” said Rigg.
“Scavengers, my boys,” said Loaf. “The battlefield was empty no more than a minute before these women and old men and boys were among the fallen, killing the wounded and taking their clothes and weapons and whatever else could be found. War brings ’em, like crows to carrion. So there I lie, expecting to die—hoping it doesn’t take long because it hurts in waves like the sea, each one pounding through me and I’m thinking, this is the one that carries me off into death, but it didn’t. I hear footsteps, I look up, and there’s this huge woman standing over me.”
“Leaky,” said Umbo.
“Of course it’s Leaky, you daft boy, but I’m telling the story and I decide when to say things out loud.”
“Sorry.”
“So I look up and she’s looking down and she says, ‘You’re a big one,’ and I didn’t say anything because it was a fool thing to say, what does it matter how big a dead man is? Then she says, ‘You’ve stopped bleeding,’ and I says, “I guess I’m empty.’ It comes out as a whisper but she heard me and she laughs and says, ‘If you can talk and you can joke you aren’t going to die.’ Then she pulls away my armor—which the other fellow’s sword had sliced through like butter, that’s what happens when your armor is built by somebody’s cousin and he makes the steel out of tin-plated dirt. Anyway, she stitches me up—and a right lousy job she did of it, I’d say, but the light was failing and I was going to die anyway, so who cares? She says to me, ‘The skin’s all cut but the stomach and bowel look to be unhurt, which is why you didn’t die. A knuckle deeper and you’d already be dead of it.’ So she hoists me up on her shoulder—me! heavy enough even without my blood—and takes me home and says that by scavenger law I’m her slave. Only when I got better, we were in love like a pair of heroes and we got married and I went home and tossed my old wife and sold the house and land and took my vast fortune and built the tavern in a scabby little mushroom village and turned it into a town and a regular stop for the river traffic. So her not killing me and taking my stuff, but taking me instead—that changed the world, my lads.”
“Hard on your first wife,” said Rigg.
“I was away eight solid years the last time, and when I got home she had three children under five that looked like three different men had done me the service of a substitute. You telling me I did wrong?”
“At least she waited a couple of years faithful,” said Umbo.
“And at least I didn’t kill her, which was my right. I only tossed her out instead of killing her, because Leaky says, ‘Let’s not start with blood,’ and also because I vaguely remembered we were in love once. And besides, I never fathered a child on her, no more than I have on Leaky, so I reckon a woman has a right to her babies, don’t she? Wherever she has to go to get them.”
“A tolerant philosophy. But she’d kept the farm for eight years and you took it right away from her.”
“The servants worked it,” said Loaf, “and it was my farm, just like she was my woman, and those weren’t my children. I didn’t lay a hand on her, but even a saint would sell the farm and take the money from it. She could go for shelter to the dad of one of her little ones, if he’d take her.”
“You’re soft, then,” said Rigg, but he smiled so that Loaf would know he was teasing.
“Yes, boy, jest all you like, mock me hollow, but I am soft. That’s what Leaky did to me. That and the one that gave me this scar. They took the war right out of me. But I st
ill train for it. When I’m on land, that is. Train every day, an hour or two, using all the weapons. I can still put an arrow where I want to, within twenty rods. If I hadn’t slipped in horseflop on the battlefield he’d never have put his sword in me, that’s how good I was. And I still am, barring the changes that fifteen years of not having an opponent better than a drunken riverman makes in an old veteran.”
It was good to know that Leaky was the one who talked him out of killing his old wife. She could brag about how she would have thrown Rigg and Umbo in the river, or tossed them out on the mercy of the rivermen that first night—but Rigg understood now that Leaky and Loaf were kind people, and only had to look and talk tough because of their clientele.
“Does Leaky train with you?” asked Umbo.
Rigg expected him to get cuffed for his impertinence, but Loaf only laughed. “Who else?” he said. “No, she’s no fighter, not like me, but she puts on the pads and helps me through my steps and stings. Nobody else I know can match my reach, except her. I’m right big, you know. So we’re out at dawn, practicing an hour in full light. And it’s not a bad thing if rivermen see us at it, them as aren’t nursing hangovers. So they know that even when I’m not there, she holds her own.”
In the early afternoon of the fourth day, they saw it: the Tower of O, rising above the trees that lined the river. It was almost invisible against the lead-grey wintry sky, but they could all see it, a steel cylinder rising up and rounding off in a dome at the top.
“So we’re there,” said Umbo, and he and Rigg headed for the ladder down to the main deck.
“Wait,” said Loaf. “We won’t reach O till tomorrow noon, or later.”
“But it’s right there!” said Umbo.
“Look how hazy it is. This is clear air, and if it was as close as you think it is, it wouldn’t look that way.”
If the tower was still a day’s journey away, Rigg wondered, how could it rise so high above the trees? “How tall is it?” he asked.
“Taller than you imagine. Do you think people would make pilgrimages to see it, if it was just tall? Besides, the river takes a wide bend that way, and we’ll lose sight of it for hours, and then we come back at it from another direction before we get to see how big it really is. It’s a wonder of the world, to think any nation or city had the brains and the power to build such a thing. And yet it’s completely useless. They say it takes a day to climb to the top, but I don’t know how anybody would know that, the whole thing’s sealed off, and not because the Council of O made some law—no, it’s sealed off inside so you can’t get deep enough inside to figure out even what they built it for.”