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heard without getting hoarse. You sort of push your voice out of here--" Salpin reached for her waist to show her and, when Eliss drew back involuntarily at his touch, put his hands on his own diaphragm. "And you breathe like this . Watch."
    He took a few deep breaths in a certain way. Eliss watched closely.
    "And now I sound like this, but now --" said Salpin in a normal conversational voice, before booming out:

    "Then cried our noble duke, 'Who calls From Lagin's bare and broken walls?' "

    His voice echoed from the riverbanks. Below on deck, faces turned upward to them. Someone catcalled, "It's me, noble duke! Your tailor! You still haven't paid me!"
    "You try, now," said Salpin.
    "But I don't know that poem."
    "You can say anything."
    "Er ... Hello! Can you hear me? "
    "That's good!" Mr. Riveter called up to them. Eliss was pleased.
    "Old Sandgrind used to sing out so loud, they could hear him all up and down the river," said Salpin.
    "Who was he?"
    "Sandgrind? Sandgrind the fiddler. He had the best Calling Voice in the whole crew. Had the sharpest eyes too. He could spot a buoy from two miles away. He read the river like a book. He could tell you if a single twig lay on the bottom three fathoms down, just from the look of the water." Salpin shook his head. "But he was a gray old man. One fine morning I climbed up in the windmill tower to ask him what he'd have for breakfast and there he was, stiff in his blankets. We've still got his fiddle, -- nobody could bear to send it through the fire with him. I hope he doesn't mind."
    "People sleep in the windmill?" Eliss turned her head to look down at its briskly turning vanes.
    " We do," said Salpin. "It's our prerogative. You can't leave a fiddle or a boxhorn out in the damp, can you? So we need to be indoors. But we don't rate cabins of our own, so we get the tower. When nobody's using the mill," he added.
    Eliss remembered a rainy night she and Alder and Falena had sheltered in a windmill. "How do you get any sleep? Windmills make noise all night long!"
    "Best thing, for a musician," said Salpin. "The wheel goes around and the rhythm works itself into you. Makes you play better."
    Eliss shrugged warily. She could never be sure when an adult was saying things to be silly, as opposed to truthfully speaking of something absurd. She looked down at the water.
    "Tell me how to read the river."
    "All right. See how smooth it is, all across here? The water's deep. But look ahead, look at that circling, surging patch there. There's a rock under that water, and if the Bird was just a boat, she'd bash her hull on it. She's too big to have to worry much about rocks, but you can bet that every freight captain has that place marked on his charts.
    "And, speaking of charts! See that lady up in the bow?"
    Eliss looked down. A sunshade had been pitched there, so she couldn't see much, but she had noticed the person under it before. The woman sat at a table with drawing pens and ink, and a pair of scrolls open before her, and she studied the river intently and now and then made notes. "Who is she?"
    "That's Pentra Smith. She's our cartographer. She maps the changes in the river, and there are changes every trip. Every time we end a transit, she takes the changes in to the Bureau of Maps in Port Ward'b and they publish a new one. And all the freight captains buy them. If they didn't, they might find themselves stuck on a sandbar or even in the middle of the woods, next trip."
    "What's that?" Eliss pointed to a curious pattern she had noticed in the water. It foamed and ran up the way the water did around the snag markers, but there was no buoy in sight.
    "What?" said Salpin, and went pale when he noticed it too. He leaned forward and, in the loudest Calling Voice Eliss had heard so far, shouted: "Snag! Unmarked snag to larboard!" and in a normal voice to Eliss: "Excuse me. Stay there."
    He scrambled out on the yard as orders were shouted on deck, and all the topmen hurried after him. Eliss had