Equal Rites

It didn’t occur to her to start worrying. For the first eight years of her life the world had been a particularly boring place and now that it was becoming interesting Esk wasn’t about to act ungrateful.

The distant whistler was joined by a barking dog. Esk lay back in the wool and reached out until she found the animal’s mind, and Borrowed it gently. From its inefficient and disorganised brain she learned that there were at least four people on this barge, and many more on the others that were strung out in line with it on the river. Some of them seemed to be children.

She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time—the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich—and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. Sooner or later she would have to go out. It wasn’t her stomach that was pressing the point, but her bladder brooked no delay.

Perhaps if she

The oilcloth over her head was pulled aside swiftly and a big bearded head beamed down at her.

“Well, well,” it said. “What have we here, then? A stowaway, yesno?”

Esk gave it a stare. “Yes,” she said. There seemed no sense in denying it. “Could you help me out please?”

“Aren’t you afraid I shall throw you to the—the pike?” said the head. It noticed her perplexed look. “Big freshwater fish,” it added helpfully. “Fast. Lot of teeth. Pike.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to her at all. “No,” she said truthfully. “Why? Will you?”

“No. Not really. There’s no need to be frightened.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh.” A brown arm appeared, attached to the head by the normal arrangements, and helped her out of her nest in the fleeces.

Esk stood on the deck of the barge and looked around. The sky was bluer than a biscuit barrel, fitting neatly over a broad valley through which the river ran as sluggishly as a planning inquiry.

Behind her the Ramtops still acted as a hitching rail for clouds, but they no longer dominated as they had done for as long as Esk had known them. Distance had eroded them.

“Where’s this?” she said, sniffing the new smells of swamp and sedge.

“The Upper Valley of the River Ankh, " said her captor. “What do you think of it?”

Esk looked up and down the river. It was already much wider than it had been at Ohulan.

“I don’t know. There’s certainly a lot of it. Is this your ship?”

“Boat,” he corrected. He was taller than her father, although not quite so old, and dressed like a gypsy. Most of his teeth had turned gold, but Esk decided it wasn’t the time to ask why. He had the kind of real deep tan that rich people spend ages trying to achieve with expensive holidays and bits of tinfoil, when really all you need to do to obtain one is work your arse off in the open air every day. His brow crinkled.

“Yes, it’s mine,” he said, determined to regain the initiative. “And what are you doing on it, I would like to know? Running away from home, yesno? If you were a boy I’d say are you going to seek your fortune?”

“Can’t girls seek their fortune?”

“I think they’re supposed to seek a boy with a fortune,” said the man, and gave a Zoo-carat grin. He extended a brown hand, heavy with rings. “Come and have some breakfast.”

“I’d actually like to use your privy,” she said. His mouth dropped open.

“This is a barge, yesno?”

“Yes?”

“That means there’s only the river.” He patted her hand. “Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s quite used to it.”

Granny stood on the wharf, her boot tap-tap-tapping on the wood. The little man who was the nearest thing Ohulan had to a dockmaster was being treated to the full force of one of her stares, and was visibly wilting. Her expression wasn’t perhaps as vicious as thumbscrews, but it did seem to suggest that thumbscrews were a real possibility.

“They left before dawn, you say,” she said.

“Yes-ss,” he said. “Er. I didn’t know they weren’t supposed to.”

“Did you see a little girl on board?” Tap-tap went her boot.

“Um. No. I’m sorry.” He brightened. “They were Zoons,” he said; “If the child was with them she won’t come to harm. You can always trust a Zoon, they say. Very keen on family life.”

Granny turned to Hilta, who was fluttering like a bewildered butterfly, and raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, yes,” Hilta trilled. “The Zoons have a very good name.”

“Mmph,” said Granny. She turned on her heel and stumped back towards the centre of the town. The dockmaster sagged as though a coathanger had just been removed from his shirt.

Hilta’s lodgings were over a herbalist’s and behind a tannery, and offered splendid views of the rooftops of Ohulan. She liked it because it offered privacy, always appreciated by, as she put it, “my more discerning clients who prefer to make their very special purchases in an atmosphere of calm where discretion is forever the watchword".