The Duchess did look like a serving girl, or perhaps even a young boy, in rough trousers, bulky sweater with a turtle’s neck, and a knee-length coat. A peaked leather cap rode at a somewhat jaunty angle atop brown locks that had been harshly shorn off, giving even her pretty face its present boyish look. The thought of the loss of so much lovely hair gave Tilda a sympathetic pang.
The pair carried backpacks and both had darkened their faces with dirt. When the Duchess was near enough Tilda almost smiled, for the dirt was evenly applied on both sides of the noblewoman‘s face.
Dugan had ambled out of Lolanhi’s shop wearing a metal helm with a short, conical crown and hanging cheek guards. It was a common helmet of Daulic foot soldiers and not altogether different than those worn by Codian legionnaires. Tilda stood up and Dugan stepped off the curb beside her.
“I officially have no money. Again.” he said, but Tilda made no response as the nobles arrived. Everyone looked at each other and tried not to bow from habit.
“Your Grace,” Tilda finally said quietly, speaking in Codian as that was the last language she had just been speaking with Dugan. The Duchess responded effortlessly in the same.
“That should probably be the last time you say that,” she said of her title, and Tilda nodded.
“Something you would prefer?”
“How about ‘Timmy’?” Dugan offered. He got back a cold look that told Tilda all she needed to know about the Duchess’s feelings concerning her present appearance.
“Claudja will do. And Gideon.”
Sir Towsan nodded though he did not look very pleased to be handing his first name over to the use of commoners.
“This one is Dugan,” Tilda said, and Claudja raised a fine eyebrow at him.
“A Gweiyerman?”
Dugan smirked, “Right you are, Claudja. In Correnca was I borned and breaded.”
Towsan said something in Daulic, not exactly hostile but neither pleased. Claudja nodded.
“Yes, we should. The Shugak raft awaits us below the pier.”
Towsan started for the dockside and Claudja followed a step behind, shifting the pack on her back. Tilda expected the Duchess had never carried anything on her back in her life, and quite probably but little in her hands. Dugan took a step after them, then turned and looked back as Tilda had not moved yet.
“You coming?”
Tilda said nothing. John Deskata was ahead of her, somewhere. Either in Camp Town or on his own way there. She and Block had come thousands of miles to find him and for just a moment, Tilda almost felt glad that Block was not alive to know that finding the man no longer mattered, for home had not waited on them. They were too late. They had failed. And it would cost the House of Deskata everything.
“Tilda?” Dugan said, and she looked at him. “Do you still want to do this?”
Tilda shifted the straps of her own pack on her shoulders. She was so used to them now that she hardly felt them.
“What I want has nothing to do with it,” Tilda said, and walked past the man after Claudja and Towsan.
*
The Shugak raft was not an impressive craft to a Miilarkian eye. It consisted of two large squares of timber several strides across, rough planks laid across logs all bound together with ropes twisted from vines. An awful lot of loose ends trailed in the water. The two sections were generally tied together to form a rectangular raft, but they could be detached to maneuver in tight channels. The one in the rear had a mound of provision crates and kegs of potable water in the center under tarps, for two weeks of feeding had been part of the ticket price.
The front raft had a sheet of ash-covered iron sitting atop stones in the middle, which seemed like a terrible idea for cooking. It also had the one piece of furniture on either raft, an old lounge piled in thrush mats with only tufts of the original upholstery surviving. The legs were nailed down at the front end of the raft, making the seat a sort of captain’s chair. There was a pink, ladies’ parasol nailed to an arm, which the captain opened every time he sat there though it was too small to offer much shade.
The captain, and the six or seven members of his crew, were bullywugs. The captain introduced himself to his passengers with a gravelly croak and a lip-smacking blow that puffed out his throat, producing a sound like “Gghhoooorrr! Plalp!” Claudja said its name was Gorpal. The bullywug was fat to the point of being spherical though colored a rather lovely shade of sapphire blue on limbs and back, lightening to a somewhat sickly greenish pallor on the belly and face, which had no discernible neck between them. The bottom half of Gorpal’s head was all wide, frog-like mouth, just a bumpy ridge for a nose, and the cupolas atop his head had long, black, vertical slits for pupils in otherwise milky-yellow eyes. It was hard to tell when the bullywug blinked, for both its sets of eyelids were transparent.
The exact number of wugs constituting Gorpal’s crew was hard to count, for at least half of them were splashing in the water around the rafts at any given moment. On the first stage of the trip, crossing the Black River, all the wugs except Gorpal swam alongside kicking their legs wildly and pulling or pushing through the current while the big rafts swung in majestic circles. All four human passengers sat on the second raft with their backs to the food crates, turning green themselves. Gorpal sprawled in his chair under his pink parasol and croaked commands at a high, wind-piercing pitch, slapping splayed feet against the plank deck.
Once across the river the craft passed onto a swampy backwater region of the Wilds, sluggish bayous and dismal swamps. The raft moved at a less sedate pace than Tilda might have feared for at all times, even on most nights, Gorpal’s crew kept them moving either by paddling in the water or else pushing along from the deck with long poles sharpened at the ends like pikes. Though somewhat jungle-like the shadowy environs bore little resemblance to Miilark, and Tilda did not find them pleasant. The trees were all warped as though twisted in agony, covered in creeping vines that seemed to be trying to strangle them. Saw-grass in damp fields shifted in the breeze and made an unsettling sound like shears through stiff parchment, though it was often drowned out by weird bird calls that somehow sounded accusatory. The raft was often close to the tall banks, and on the first day when Dugan snagged a mottled gray and purple fruit shaped something like a plum from an overhanging bough, Gorpal rushed him with croaks of alarm and a flurry of slapping feet. The wug snatched away the fruit and with a series of pantomimes conveyed the impression that everything, everything in the Vod Wilds was poisonous to humans. Then Gorpal ate the fruit.
The wugs actually ate all day, plucking passing fruit or sometimes floating on their backs to devour fish, as it seemed they had some sort of teeth or something else they could chew with far back in their mouths. Most often however they spit out pink tongues several feet in the air anytime a dragonfly or other drowsy insect buzzed by in the chilly air. The first time it happened it startled Tilda so bad she almost produced a dagger, but she became accustomed to the wet snaps and pops in time as they were as constant as the lap of water against the log rafts.
For the first few days the four travelers spoke hardly a word among themselves except for Claudja and Towsan, who talked to each other in Daulic. They all ate together twice daily for in the middle morning and late afternoon the wugs managed to cook the excess fish tossed onto the raft during the day without setting the deck on fire. Hard cheese and harder rolls occasionally appeared from the crates, but the only fruit or vegetables made available were shrunken grapes soaked in wine, which only Dugan could stomach. While eating, Tilda and Claudja would pass a few words in either Codian or the Trade Tongue, but neither said much.