Page 61 of Katabasis
“En garde!”
He jammed the rod through the ribs of the one straddling Alice and yanked. The pressure disappeared. Alice sat up, gasping.
“Avaunt!”
Alice did not think this was standard dueling vocabulary. The helmeted figure seemed rather to be playing a part, reveling in his performance. He seemed indeed to be having fun, whirling among these creatures—as if they were partners in the same old dance, their moves rehearsed, perfected.
The fallen creatures crowded around their two-legged leader—circling, it seemed, for a coordinated attack. For a moment they regarded each other: the lone boatman on one end, the hissing pack on the other. The leader threw its head back and issued what seemed like a series of orders—clack clack clack. The pack lowered their jaws all at once, back legs coiling to spring.
The boatman swung his staff around and yanked a lever on its other end. It was, Alice realized, a very fancy spritzing bottle. Lethe water rained through the air and the bone creatures whined, skittering backward.
“Back!” cried the boatman.
The bone creatures hissed. The boatman spritzed with the bottle once again. “I say, back! Or I’ll make you a pile of useless bones, I will.”
A series of defiant whines. Then the bone things re-formed a pack and skittered away, rushing past Alice’s legs as they did. They rallied behind their two-legged leader, which stood a moment, gazing silent at the boatman, until it too turned back. Within seconds all had disappeared into the hills.
“Good riddance.” The boatman extended a hand to Alice. “Come aboard, quick.”
Alice saw a clear advantage to trusting a stranger who’d just saved them versus a semi-deity who’d tried to dismember them, so she grasped the boatman’s hand and let him pull her onto the barge. He was reassuringly solid.
The boatman turned and helped Peter up just as the Weaver Girl rushed to the shore. “Come back!” Silks stretched from her waist like reaching hands. “I’m not done with you.”
“I’m not done with you,” mimicked the boatman. “Away, you jealous cow.”
“Lord Yama will smite you for this!”
“You irritate Lord Yama more than I do. Away, harpy!” The boatman shoved the pole at the shore, and the barge pushed off the bank just as the Weaver Girl reached the edge. The boatman held the spear at her face and spritzed her, too. Alice was not sure what effect this might have but the Weaver Girl sputtered, wiped at her face, and fell back.
Silks exploded from the shore and swarmed the air like a kraken’s tentacles, pulsing, reaching. Alice shrank back, batting cloth from her face. But the boatman was faster. The black ship tore into the heart of the Lethe and the tendrils fell away, stung and sizzling from the spray.
On shore the Weaver Girl threw her head back and cackled.
“Good luck,” she called, “fickle lovers. You’ll need it!”
Chapter Fifteen
Hold tight!” The boatman jammed his staff against the riverbank, and the boat pitched accordingly. Alice stumbled into Peter, who stumbled against the railing. “The breaks are dangerous here. Let me get us out of the shallows...”
The little ship bobbed perilously against the Lethe, but the boatman seemed skilled at keeping them afloat. Alice saw a variety of navigating instruments about the deck—several punting poles of varying lengths, two oars, a steering wheel, and even a battery-powered motor that looked suspiciously modern. The ship seemed a patchwork combination of punting canoe, rowboat, and sailboat all at once. The boatman dashed about arranging the sails, then did something complicated-looking with the rudder, until the ship was chugging at a merry pace parallel to the shore. Then he set down his staff and stepped forth to appraise his guests.
“Hullo!” He pulled the mask off his face, revealing large brown eyes on a thin, friendly face. He was a she. “Welcome aboard theNeurath. I’m Elspeth.”
Alice knew this face. She knew this name.
She wasn’t supposed to know it. All mentions of Elspeth were scrubbed from the department records. A framed photograph of every year’s cohort hung along the department walls, excepting the class of 1975. All the faculty liked to pretend Elspeth had never existed. But rumors survived, passed down from cohort to cohort, and when it came Alice’s turn to receive the secret she could not help going to the university library, like so many others had before her, and digging up the microfilm to find the sameCambridge Dailyarticle with a smudged photograph of that face, stubborn and lovely in profile, dark eyes glaring over sullen cheeks.
Elspeth Bayes. Bachelor’s from Radcliffe, master’s from Berkeley; Jacob Grimes advisee, specializing in maths and logic. All this Alice recalled from the first paragraph of theCambridge Dailyheadline. She had died ten years before Alice arrived.
Alice knew well the story. She knew every gruesome detail, etched deeper into popular memory with every retelling, details so chillingly precise that you knew they had to be the truth. They said that one winter’s morning the Lady Margaret women’s VIII went for a pre-Bumps training session up the Cam. They said when the rowers returned to the boathouse, the cox saw something dark floating in the river—a trash bag? A clump of leaves?—just in time to order, “Hold up”—for the rowers to jam their oars perpendicular against the water and park the boat.Bump bump bump bump.Four bow-side oars thwacked the dark thing in succession as the boat drifted past and glided parallel to the shore. They said only the cox realized what had happened at first, since only she sat facing forward; that all the other rowers had left the boat and were straggling up to the boathouse before the cox stumbled out on wobbly legs and fainted dead on the shore.
Emergency services were called, statements were given, and since the unlucky cox had taken an undergraduate survey course in applications of magick the previous term, the blue and bloated body was quickly identified as that of Elspeth Bayes. The punch line of this terrible story, the line no one failed to repeat in a hushed voice over chips and beer: “And the coach said—well, if they weren’t dead before that bludgeoning, they surely are now.”
An autopsy found no evidence of foul play. She hadn’t been strangled, beaten, or stabbed. She was fully dressed, clothes wet and tight against her skin. No evidence of sexual abuse. All anyone could conclude was that Elspeth had drowned in the river Cam of her own accord, and a note found later in her room, in her own handwriting, confirmed the police conclusion:Tired—I am so tired—and I can only go now into the dark. Tell them I am sorry. Tell him—
But that was all they printed.
Professor Grimes never spoke of Elspeth. Alice had met several of his other former students at conferences—invariably tall, deep-voiced young men who laughed comfortably with other faculty the way that only young tenure-track faculty can. They boasted of their time surviving Grimes, and Grimes boasted of their accomplishments in turn. To graduate from under Grimes put you in a rare and exclusive club, self-satisfied veterans with golden futures, to whom the name Elspeth meant nothing.
