The nearest houses were not far below the bridge.
They'd been noticed. Women and children were coming up to meet them. Joker and Senka and Rian descended to keep shop while Damon drove.
The river splayed out into a salt flat cut by bifurcating streams, twenty or thirty before they reached the sea. Near a hundred houses crowded this side of the river. On the far, northwest shore was nothing but sand beach, and a line of posts, and an eroded shape like a shallow dish set on the sand. Tim knew that shape. Cavorite must have settled on its drive flame.
The southeast shore was sand. Inland was a stand of Earthlife trees, just a bit too green and regular, as if tended: possibly a graveyard. Better leave that alone, but there were scrub trees growing elsewhere, dusty green among the Destiny colors. Tim saw that he could make fire pits and find firewood.
That was how they would cook, no problem, if Haunted Bay didn't cook for them.
Out on the water... those tiny shapes were boats. Twenty, thirty, more: narrow, pointed at both ends, with white sails above.
The houses spoke a community of two or three hundred. They were squarish, well made, built wide of the river delta and well back from the sea, leaving a beach scores of meters wide. Tim counted more than thirty boats. None were on the water.
Now, where were the men?
“Tim,” Damon said, “keep the children occupied, will you?”
“Mmm. So their mothers can buy in peace?”
“They buy when we're leaving. Now they just want to see what we've got."
In Twerdahl Town and elsewhere they might have wanted that too. Their wish had not been granted there; why here? But Tim only asked, “What are they expecting, a magic act?”
“Can you do that?”
“No. I could show off my surfing? Nope, not that either.” There were no surfers on the water, and in fact Haunted Bay was as flat as a sheet of glass, barring the boats and a thousand white riffles.
Show off a bicycle? Tim Bednacourt didn't have one and perhaps shouldn't know about them.
He shrugged elaborately, and Damon grimaced. “Get them to lecturing you. You're good at that.”
The children exclaimed over Tim's scrimshaw. Three or four had seen Otterfolk skulls, or claimed to, and one said he'd seen a shark skull. He got them talking about themselves.
A little girl pointed. “That's where we live, see? The little house between two big ones.”
Tim asked, “Why are they only on this side of the river?”
She stared at him, astonished. An older boy said, “We can't build houses on the other side. That's where the Otterfolk come to trade. Mother says they like the water near river mouths. Salty, but not real salty.”
Tim watched, and nodded. Houses along the river had access to fresh water. Southeast, that stretch of beach would feed the chugs. In between was the delta: diluted salt water. “Is that where the Otterfolk live?”
The girl nodded vigorously. An older girl said, “There, and there,” waving toward thousands of square klicks of water, west and northwest.
Joker was suddenly among them, dropped from the wagon roof. “Won't have to worry about sharks here,” he said. “Water's too fresh for 'em. Hi, Carlene!”
“Hi, Joker!”
Joker set to stowing items that ibn-Rushd wagon was getting in trade. Tim asked the little girl, “You know Joker?”
“Since I was little. Mom says he's my father. What's it like, being a yutz?”
“So far so good. I haven't really had time to find out. Carlene, what's that huge dish?”
“Dish?”
He pointed. “On the other side-“
“Oh, Meetplace!” The girl laughed so hard that all the other children started laughing too. “Meetplace is where we trade.”
“In the dish itself?”
“Yes. Kids get to go too sometimes.”
“Where're the Otterfolk now?”
The oldest boy pointed at the bay. “Watch,” she said.
They watched. Boats running back and forth, and riffles of white, and “There!” cried the boy, and Tim saw nothing. Then a white riffle appeared and Tim saw a black dot in its center, only for a moment, just as the boy said, “Their heads pop up and make a little wave.”
He asked, “When do you trade? Is it soon?”
“Oh, no, not while the caravan's in.” Damn!
Merchants and yutzes, local women and children all pitched in to dig out fire pits and fill them with twisted wood from upslope. Coals were burning nicely, and vegetables were cooking, when the boats came in.
It all happened in some haste. Thirty-odd boats ran aground while the men pulled the sails down, then jumped into waist-deep water to pull them up onto the sand. That looked like fun, and Tim plunged in to help.
There were men on either side and he did what they did: grip one of four handholds set at water level, lift, and pull. Fish flopped around two peculiar objects in the bottom of each boat: a flat wooden fin with a bar for a handle, and a bigger heavy fiat thing with no handle.
You couldn't sail a boat with those things lying in the bottom. They'd get in the way. Hmm?
The merchants and yutzes only watched as the sailors, and Tim, pulled the boats ashore.
Now the sailors pulled straight up on the masts, pulled them out and set them on the sand, and set the big wooden fins there too, to get at the fish. They spread the sails on the sand and began scooping fish onto them.
The smell of fish was everywhere.
The women began to clean fish and array them in fire pits.
The men flocked off, not toward the houses but toward the mudflats below. Two came jogging back to get Tim, who stood dripping wet.
Two fishers, mid-teens, jogged up toward the houses. The rest plunged into the several channels of clear water that ran through the delta.
The boys came back with armfuls of towels. Fishers were taking off their clothes, dipping them, and wringing them dry.
The boys were setting their towels on... trays? Not on the mud. Tim hadn't seen that as a problem. And the fishers were setting their wrungout clothes on those same trays, narrow things near a meter wide, scores of them sitting everywhere along the flats. They didn't look carved and they weren't quite flat, and Tim manfully resisted the urge to turn one over.
The fishers were staring at him, not unfriendly, just curious. Tim looked back. They were built like he was, and they must have seen the same, because they were turning away, curiosity satisfied.
Damn, he'd guessed right: he was the first naked man they'd ever seen from a caravan. What had the Haunted Bay women been telling their men?
The smell of dinner lured them back. As they pas~ed a boat Tim pointed at wooden fins lying on the sand. “What are those?”
“That's the rudder,” one of the youngest fishers said. “You steer with that. That's the keel, it keeps the boat moving straight when the wind is from the side.”
Tim had learned not to ask twice. He studied the boat instead. He could see that there were mountings on the bottom of the boat and hinges at the stern. Fins to guide the flow of water?
The locals cooked; the yutz chefs served. Tim found several merchant ladies in a crowd of local men, in the silver glare of Quicksilver. He served out the vegetables he was carrying. He took the chance to ask Senka, “Have you ever seen Otterfolk?”
Senka smiled at him. “Not close.”
He went away, and thought, and came back with a sizable Earthlife fish deboned and cut up for serving. Senka and her grandmother were perched on dunes to eat. Tim asked Shireen, “You must have seen Otterfolk.”
The old lady grinned at him. “Pictures.”