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
