A hand broke the surface. Broke it again near the boat, fingers reaching up a piling, failing as they found no purchase.
She got down on her knees on the slats at the sloping prow and probed with the pole down by that piling, not wanting to do that at all, no; what someone threw in the canal was theirbusiness. But this lonely battle was persistent, horrid, down in Old Det's dark bowels. Old Det had eaten something that went down hard: and being water-rat, Altai; was on the side of the something and not greedy black old Det
Give it a chance-. poke it up, make it fight.
Fool, another small voice said in her skull. They might not be unwitnessed. There were the bridges. The killers had gone that way, into the high town. They might be looking down on her this very moment.
Others might be watching. Moghi's folk. Or shore-siders who would sellinformation to worse places; or sell a soul, having learned the relative value of souls and bread on waterside.
The pole hit something yielding, deep-down against the bottom. Something dragged at it below the water, gripped it, began to climb up it—
She took in her breath and shoved the pole hard against the stony bottom, taking the boat back, but that something came along with the pole, making it drag. The water splashed at the bow, a white hand shot up and closed at the rim right by her knees. She snatched at the barrelhook at her belt and watched in mute horror as the fingers began to lose their grip and slip away.
Hook that hand and she might hold him sure. And cripple a man for life. Hook was safe. That pitiful reach up might be a trick, a trap, a drowning man could pull her under that black water and kill them both.
The fingers slipped free. She grabbed that vanishing hand with her bare fingers and pulled, let go the barrelhook and grabbed it with both hands, braced her bare feet and hauled up and back, standing, balancing the stern-heavy boat against the dead weight. A man's limp body came up over the edge, one arm and head and shoulder before she ran out of pull.
It was a body all-over pale even to the hair, a young and well-made body draped precariously over the bow of her skip, which was a vast waste to have feeding the fishes and the eels, even if he was what he probably was, some poor debtor or someone afoul of the gangs. Some gang member, very much the likeliest, and the sensible thing was to let him slide right back down amongst the fishes and the pilings
She stayed braced that way a long several gasps for breath, holding on to his slippery wrist with the boat bobbing and rocking. Then she trod down on his hand, knelt on his back and hauled the other arm out before he could slide back in. Both arms this time.
Pull.
Damn. Damn. Damn fool.
She did not want to be a murderer. Or a party to murder. And by not drifting past she had suddenly gotten to mat kind of choice.
She fell hard onto the bottom-slats, thump!, bruising her backside, and scraped the rest of his body up onto the rim, right up to where it would hurt, which was enough for him to stay aboard and for her to let go of, and altogether enough charity for a stranger. But she caught her breath and worked forward, with a rocking of the boat, knelt down over his back and fished one leg up by main force, heaved and hauled him into a limp, sodden knot on the slats.
The drag his trailing body had given the skip was gone. The boat spun slowly, hit a piling and slewed again, slow shifting perspective through the timbers. She worked over him, knees bruised on the slats, knelt astraddle this human flotsam and leaned with all her might on his back, squeezing the water out, push and push and push, one, two, while he spasmed and the water came up out of his gut and into the bilge. The skip drifted and bumped and thumped its way along, every thump a bruise on something she valued more than this drowned, hopeless nothing. She swore on the edge of every breath. Damn fool. Bang my boat up. Damn you falling into my canal. Not my fault. Blame them. What'd I do to owe you this? (Thump.) Damn.
A moment of moonlight then as the skip drifted between bridges and overhangs. Push and back, push and back. She let the skip drift and spin and kept it up, no time to stop. Dammit, dammit, dammit… "Dammit, breathe, dammit."
He wasbreathing. She felt him choke and falter, water coming up; and kept leaning on him and swearing at him and gasping and swearing, until his hands began a febrile movement and the boat swept into the eddy off Ventani Pier. She started the rhythm again, because the vomiting became too much to let him breathe steadily. Push and shove when he choked, till he heaved it up and got another half-liquid suck of air down his throat.
Bang, broadside onto the timbers of the pier with a shock that popped her teeth together. Old Det was lively when the tide was turning. Push and let be. Push and let be, until the gasps got smaller and equaled her own. Thump, against another piling, and a dizzy spin into moonlight toward the dreaming clutter of night-tied boats at Hanging Bridge.
She let him breathe on his own then. He lay with his face sideways on the deck-slats, where he had twisted trying to breathe and now just rested, his sides working hard for what air would come. His face shone with waxen pallor, a fine face, now that the strangled look had left him, a beautiful dead-looking face, profile against the skip's rough boards; she realized suddenly she was sitting on the handsomest naked man she had ever looked on, and him dying the way all pretty things died the river got its black hands on.
Fever if not the drowning. He had drunk too much of it.
Her mother had gone that way. She had saved kittens out of Old Det's waters. And once a toddler barge-wash knocked off a boat deck. None of them had lived.
Damn. This one too. Dammitall.
He breathed. She felt a spasm, another weak heave of his gut, but this time his hands dragged toward leverage and he tried to move. She rolled aside onto her haunches as he made an effort to get himself farther up onto the dry grating and move his knees out of the bilge—one knee on the slats, and she tried to pull, but got nowhere against his weight. He lay there panting and coughing and then tried again as if he were the only one involved in this, as if he felt nothing, knew nothing but that cold water at one extremity of his body and solid wood in front of him. He got the one knee up, lost it, got it forward again and hunched his arms under him. They went into bridge shadow, drifted perilously toward a cluster of night-moored canalers. She got up and used the pole, and used it continuously for a few moments because the Grand Canal ran perversely awry where the flow from the Snake came into it, by
Hanging Bridge; she averted collision, and kept traveling, imagining curious eyes among boats moored along the shore, watchers among the homeless on the bridge, herself with a naked man lying pale as a seastar on her skip.
She poled along then, past Man to van, beneath its bridge, past Delaree and Ramseyhead, there on the rim of the moonlight where the Grand Canal gave out onto the Channel, and a few big barges had snugged into the wharves for the night, waiting loading tomorrow.
Safe company, those barges. Quiet company. The big black sides hove up like walls, the waves lapped and splashed to tide-draw; and a little skip glided along under the wharf unnoticed—here the drowsing hulk of a fisher-craft, its nets up like gossamer wings against the night sky; here another barge, and another, a deep friendly forest of pilings and mooring-lines like vines in the dark. Yonder a Falkenaer ship rode in deep harbor, masts and rigging webbed against a lowering moon, among the lesser bulk of coasters and Det-barges. There Rimmon Isle bulked, the lights of its landing agleam, the towers in shadow at this hour.