Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,322

her first look at the Land proper. From the deck of this boat, it looked no different from another Bit in the distance. But Prim could not help gazing on it and thinking about the fact that once you set foot on it you could reach all the places on the big map: not just the Lake Land, which was the nearest part, but the Knot, the Fastness, the Hive, the Palace, and the teeming lands surrounding the great river as it flowed down to the far eastern sea.

Soon visible off to their left was their destination: West Cloven. This port had a sister city, unsurprisingly known as East Cloven, just opposite on the shore of the mainland. In the old days they had been one town straddling a river that drained part of the Lake Land. Like Eltown and Toravithranax farther south, it had been settled in the time after Egdod had thrown down the first Hive, and the souls who had dwelled in it had dispersed to all corners of the Land.

Their home island of Calla had been settled by souls who had begun their journey around Camp, across from Old Eltown, and made their way north and west, following trails laid down by migrating giants. So the speech of the Calladons and Bufrects was a dialect of what was still spoken around Secondeltown. But different folk altogether had created the town that later became Cloven. Its two halves, East and West, had been separated long enough by the gradually broadening Shiver that a different dialect was spoken in each. At the opposite end of the First Shiver, many days’ journey to the south, the people of Toravithranax spoke yet another entirely different language. Of all of these places, Secondeltown, being closest to El’s Palace, and indeed having a direct view of the Palace from the vast and magnificent Temple, Basilica, School, and Monastery of Elkirk looming above it, spoke a language thought to be closest to that of First Town in the Before Times. A simple version of that language—Townish—had come into use up and down the length of the First Shiver as the common tongue of mariners and traders. It was close enough to what the Bufrects and Calladons spoke that with a little practice, and by pruning their sentences, they could make themselves understood around the docks in West Cloven. Or so they were assured by Robst as he piloted them safe into the old harbor after a reasonably uneventful journey. It was not the biggest town they’d ever seen—Farth, the capital of Calla, was bigger and certainly nicer to look at—but it was a considerable town. Much larger vessels than theirs were moored all about, unloading cargo from the Lake Land across the First Shiver. In its place the produce of many Bits was transferred into vacated holds: honey, wax, timber, fish, grains, and fibers.

Robst knew where to go, but even still they’d have been lost without Corvus. Yesterday the giant talking raven had flown away without explanation as soon as the back side of this Bit had hove into view. Today he had appeared high above them as they rowed into the harbor. “He’ll not perch anywhere that his size will draw attention,” Brindle predicted. “Not all folk are as easygoing as we Calladons in the presence of such creatures.”

But one other soul had apparently been keeping an eye on Corvus’s movements, for when they at last found a mooring place, he was standing on the shore waiting for them. Corvus, apparently satisfied the connection had been made, flapped away toward some nearby cliffs topped with dark trees.

The moorage here was makeshift, with smaller craft simply hauled up on the beach. Robst had everyone pull on the oars for a few moments while aiming Firkin at an empty patch of sand, and ran it up just far enough to stick. Lyne scampered up onto the prow and cast a rope down to the soul who was waiting for them. Thus was Edda able to disembark without causing the boat to bob back up in a way that might have attracted notice. For many hereabouts seemed to have a lot of time on their hands, which they whiled away by staring at newcomers. Edda, the moment she touched down, wrapped herself in a long cloak of simple nubby stuff that was nothing to look at—literally nothing, since, once she had pulled it up to cover her, it concealed every bit of the engrossing complexity