Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,321

felt heavy to me!”

Mard nodded. “Yes, we all carried as much as we could. But Brindle, you’ll recall, said from the very beginning that we mustn’t use mounts . . .”

“Because we would only have to abandon them when we reached the water and boarded ship,” Prim recalled. “Of course, it’s a different story with Edda’s.”

She nodded at two mounts who were standing on the shore near the dock, taking a very dim view indeed of the crests of incoming waves. Edda had laden them with baggage for the trip down, so that the rest of the party could walk free of their heavy packs. The beasts had now been unloaded, and Edda had let them know that they were free to leave. They didn’t seem to like the waves at all, and so kept edging back from the shore. But they liked Edda quite a bit, and were reluctant to part from her.

For all the toil that had gone into transporting them to this place, the bags did indeed look like not very much when they were all piled up on the strand. “Firkin is made to carry lots of heavy stuff,” Mard said. “Just now the hold is empty, and it is riding very high in the water.”

“It is?” Prim asked. To her it just looked like a boat.

“Bobbing like a cork,” Mard confirmed. Bufrects, dwelling on the coast, knew more about such things than Calladons in general. In fact Lyne had already boarded the vessel and was clambering around familiarizing himself with how it all worked. “Not safe to sail. Our baggage weighs nothing compared to what that boat could carry, and so Robst is going to have to put more stuff into it just to make it ride lower in the water.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Rocks,” Mard said with a shrug.

“Ugh, rocks again!”

Edda pulled her modest bag from the pile and slung it over her shoulder. She went up to each of the mounts in turn for a sweet face-to-face conversation and a goodbye kiss, then turned her back and stepped up onto the pier, which ran out into the harbor on a series of boulders and pounded-in tree trunks. Firkin was tied up at its end. When she stepped aboard, it settled much lower in the water, as if tons of rocks had just been deposited in its hold. The mounts turned tail and walked off, following the bank of the river back up in the direction of Edda’s cottage.

Robst—who had been engaged in a detailed conversation with Brindle on the topic of rocks—stood still for a long time, gazing at his boat as if he were expecting it to bob back up again. It did not, however, and so after a while he shrugged and walked down the dock to board it and continue his preparations. He struck a deal with two younger kinsmen and a local woman; these would provide him with a skeleton crew so that he could sail Firkin home after discharging the passengers. A short while later they were under way.

Using sails when they could and oars when they had to, they proceeded north up the Shiver in a furtive way, hewing close to the near shore until the mountain of the wild souls was well behind them. Then they ventured out into the middle of the channel, which was many miles broad this far north. They passed out of the Eternal Veil of Mist that surrounded Calla and came out into full sunlight. They caught a stiff west wind that was sluicing down another Shiver that delineated the north coast of Calla. This drove them eastward at a good clip. Prim’s home island fell away aft. At some point Prim realized that she could not see Calla—or, to be precise, the Eternal Veil—anymore, and wondered when or if she would ever see it again. They were navigating now generally eastward between Bits that seemed on the whole darker, colder, and less welcoming. It was because they were covered mostly in trees—the greenish-black trees of far north and high mountain—with only rare patches of farm and pasture.

Four days’ voyaging took them round the south cape of another Bit. As soon as they’d cleared it, they hooked northward into the First Shiver, which in these parts was so broad as to be more of an inland sea than a channel. The coast opposite was not always visible, but they could see hills rising above it. And so this was how Prim got