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needs reassuring about something. When he talks so, Blint-wife makes a kind of face, as though she had tasted something bitter.’
    ‘It is bitter for women not to have the fruit of their bodies when they are denied the world’s fruits. Bitter to have her man seek for a son in his old age. Men, who harvest the world’s fruits, care less for their own.’
    ‘It’s true she gets little of the world’s fruit,’ Thrasne agreed. ‘The River is a man’s world.’
    The thought stayed with him as he moved among the boatmen in the following years, proving its truth to himself again and again. Those who had little enough of the world’s fruits were most needy of their own. He thought often of the old woman, Fulder Don’s mother. What had she had, after all, but Fulder Don himself? Had him, and had been disinclined to share him. Had she driven his first wife to her death, too? As she had his Suspirra? If she were dead, which he was not at all certain of.
    Blint came to him one day with a bulky document, wrapped about with tape and sealed with wax. ‘My boy, I want you to keep this. I want you to swear oath to me you’ll see I go into the River when my time comes and not into any town workers’ pit.’ He looked deep into Thrasne’s face, gray lines around his eyes, loose jowls betraying a loss of flesh. His hands trembled, too, and Thrasne was moved to such a sympathy of feeling, it was a time before he could bring himself to speak.
    ‘You know I would do that without any oath, Blint. You have been a father to me. You may rely on me.’
    ‘Tie ballast to my bones, boy. Don’t let the Awakeners get me into those damn pits. Put me deep as the strangeys swim.’
    ‘I’ll do it, owner Blint. And where no blight is, either.’
    The man looked at him oddly then, and for a bit Thrasne thought he had given something away, but nothing more was said. Time went on. Blint seemed to recover some of his jovial ways. He put on a little weight. Thrasne sighed inrelief. He was to open the document if anything happened, and he knew Blint-wife would be furious that Blint had not given it to her. Still, he owed much to Blint.
    ‘Why didn’t he give it to her?’ he asked Suspirra.
    ‘Because he knew he could rely on you to do what he wanted. He knew she might not. Often she does the opposite of what he says, you know, only to remind herself she is still a person. Otherwise, she forgets.’
    Thrasne knew it. He made a carving of it. A man, climbing, carrying a woman on his back, not looking at her. She, gazing at him, tripping him as he went. The faces were not anyone’s faces. Still, Blint blinked when he saw it and looked at Thrasne with widened eyes.
    Suspirra went on changing. Now that Thrasne had the hang of it, he simply drew a picture of her every twenty days or so, binding them together as he had previously. He thought she was beginning to say the same thing again. More than that, however, her body was changing shape. She who had been slender as a frag sapling, yielding as a reed, seemed thicker, more stolid, as though she fattened upon the air of the little room, gained substance from their conversation.
    They came one warm second summer to the Straits of Shfor. All the boatmen were on deck with the fending poles. They had lashed great bundles of rope and sacks of pamet to the side of the boat to protect it against the fanglike stones of Shfor. One could not go through at slack water on the oars, for the way was too narrow. One wanted a low, easy tide and a slight wind to get through the straits, or one wanted a long voyage out into World River to go around. As they moved into the canyon, Thrasne looked up to see great birds gathered in hundreds along the rimstones.
    ‘Owner Blint,’ he called, pointing up.
    ‘Ah? Oh, this is a Talon, boy, full of fliers as a strangey is of bones. There’s many of ‘em up there, isn’t there. Servants of Abricor. Takes a clear day to see ‘em. Last time we were through was wrapped up