And there’s something about the crossing of a river that’s miraculous too. They are their own lands—only the opposite, if you get me. And almost every waterway requires its own special crossing. Some you can cross by a variety of means; others have just one route from one bank to the other. Some rivers, you want to cross ’em, you’ve got to do it without going through. The Missouri’s like that, in places. Try to cross through it on your own power, and you’ll likely never surface again. Over’s the only way. But even going over a river can mean different things. If you bridge moving water and cross from bank to bank, never touching the surface, do you arrive at the same place in the end as if you were to row? And what of the rivers where rowing’s nearly as dangerous as trying to swim? What bank, what strange land, would you reach if you could reach the other side alive?
I’ve often thought a river can be something like the adit-gate in Mr. Amalgam’s tale, though I’d never heard the term before. Surely it’s like Mr. Sangwin’s hollow-way, lying strangely on the land. You may think you know what’s on the other side, but some percentage of the time, when you get there, you’ll be wrong.
I’ve spent a lot of time on rivers. Mostly playing cards on steamboats, but occasionally for other reasons. And I’ve come to understand that there are places that can be reached only by crossing waterways. They don’t exist on any maps, and they can be reached only by traversing in a particular way: by securing the services of a Ferryman. Not a small-f ferryman. A Ferryman, capital F. Some people call them psychopomps, but I met a Ferryman once who thought that word gave all the wrong ideas.
“The Susquehanna River doesn’t become the Styx just because you cross it in my keelboat,” he told me, though he had to repeat himself before I understood what he was saying, for the man was always talking over the buzzing of the bees that had made a hive of the bobcat skull he used for a figurehead. “And not every far bank is heaven or hell or Fiddler’s Green or whatever you want to call that sort of place. But I can take you to shores an ordinary pilot can’t, and that’s a fact.”
So a Ferryman is not like the keeper of any old workaday passage boat, and some rivers are stranger than others. Which brings me to my tale: I heard a story only a fortnight ago about a Ferryman on the river Skidwrack.
According to my Nagspeaker friend, the one who told me the tale I’m about to tell you, the Skidwrack is unpredictable in many ways, but not generally vicious—the occasional flooding aside, and I don’t think you can really blame only the river for that. There is, however, one place where the water brooks no passage. It’s supposed to be a little ways downriver from an old abandoned floating mill, so it’s often called the Tailrace. It doesn’t look like much, just a rocky, misty stretch, but try to go from one side to the other and you’ll get very wet, very fast, and possibly very dead in the same span of time.
And I suspect this might be a related fact: If you do manage to ford the Skidwrack at the Tailrace, you won’t find Nagspeake on the other side.
Where would you wind up if you did cross there? My friend couldn’t say. Perhaps in Fiddler’s Green; perhaps in the States, perhaps in someplace stranger yet. Perhaps it’s different for every passage. Except, of course, you can’t pass there. Not on your own. But for those who, for whatever reason, simply must find a way, there is a Ferryman.
This particular Ferryman piloted—or perhaps still does pilot—a boat called the Inferus, and for a while he had a first mate. This is the story of how that partnership came to be.
The Ferryman had once been a man called Isaac Knickpointe, and although he had never precisely been an average, commonplace fellow—roamers never are—he’d come to this particular occupation late in life, and at the time our story begins, he was still adjusting to it. He’d taken the contract because he had wanted to retire somewhere and mess around with boats all day.
I do not know how he came across the job vacancy, though, or how the post came to be available. I’d like to find out sometime. Anyhow.
We’ve heard some tales of tricksters. Knickpointe the Ferryman was, I suppose, a trickster as well—but a very reluctant one. Again, he’d been hoping for a quiet retirement, and hadn’t taken the job for the sake of skinning would-be crossers out of their last coins. Still, it is a rule that crossings of this sort must be paid for. And while all rules can be broken (many, it must be said, should be broken, and as often as possible), some can’t be broken without consequences.
In Nagspeake in those days, there was a shortage of metal money. But people didn’t stop needing to navigate into the miraculous just because they couldn’t pay for it. In fact, the Ferryman observed, it was just the opposite. Nagspeake in those days needed miracles more than usual, and although crossing the Skidwrack at the Tailrace didn’t necessarily promise a miracle, it put you on the road to a place where you could perhaps begin the search for one.
The Ferryman was duty-bound not to allow passage without payment, though he was often tempted to bend that rule. For a while he tried a system of trade tokens—coins he made himself from bits of bone and driftwood, whatever he could find. But he couldn’t simply make the coins and hand them to would-be travelers for them to hand right back; the river
