The Current Beneath the Willows

At two in the morning of the third night, the last brass rivet gave way with a metallic sigh under the pressure of the bone punch. The blue leather cover opened slowly on the table and released a breath of old air that smelled of iron-gall ink, camphor and pine tar. Simón lifted the marbled endpapers with the tip of the folder, without touching them with his fingers. Before his eyes unfolded a sheet of vellum two yards wide, hand-coloured with washes of walnut ink and vermilion.

"It's the chart of the lower river," Simón whispered, bending over the drawing in the golden light of the lamp. "Your grandfather didn't just trace the main current and its shoals; he noted in tiny figures the exact depths in fathoms, the clean gravel beds where you can anchor, and side channels no skipper in the port knows today."

Lucía, who had spent hours on the rush-seated stool whittling a new wooden peg for the tiller with a curved knife, sprang up and leaned her elbows on the edge of the table. Her brown curls brushed Simón's cheek, but neither of them made the slightest move to draw away.

"Look closely here," she said, her voice alight, pointing with the steel tip at a narrow, winding bend hidden behind a dense stand of willows. "In his letters home my grandfather called this the Otters' Passage. If this channel is still open and navigable, we can get around the dreaded pumice shoals where the council's heavy barges run aground every year."

"The chart says the channel draws twelve feet at mean water," Simón observed, following the dotted line of crimson ink with his fingertip. "But this pilot-book is twenty-five winters old, Lucía. Flood mud may have blocked the mouth of the passage with fallen trunks."

"There's only one honest way to find out on this river, bookbinder. Come aboard La Noria. Bring your case of tools, your waterproof inks and that brass lamp of yours that won't go out even in a north wind."

Half an hour later, the great oak barge cast off from the deserted quay of Puerto Sauces. The autumn fog wrapped the water like a white wool blanket and let them see no more than ten fathoms ahead. Lucía held the ash tiller with the ease of someone who feels every rib of the hull in the soles of her feet. Simón stood by the forestay, holding the chart open on a greased board to protect the vellum from the dew.

"The Oreb never forgives the proud, but it always grants a backwater to whoever knows how to wait with the tiller ready," said Lucía, bearing two points to starboard as the barge's sharp bow cut the current with a steady sound of tearing silk.

"Up ahead, on the left bank," Simón warned, raising the lantern to cut through the mist. "Two giant willows with their branches woven over the water into a vault. That's exactly the mark on folio three of the atlas."

Lucía hauled in the gaff-sail sheet with one hand. The barge slid under the vault of willows and into a channel of still, deep water that the river kept hidden in the fog. The silence was complete, broken only by the drip of leaves on the deck.

Simón turned toward Lucía on the poop deck. He saw her smile under the brim of her green cap, with a quiet boldness that quickened his pulse more than any codex in the chancellery.

"Your grandfather was a master of rivers, Lucía. He didn't lie in a single line."

As the barge pushed deeper into the maze of bends along the lower bank, a flock of herons rose from the bulrushes and tore the morning fog. Simón set his compasses on the chart, measuring the distance to the next ford with the patience of his trade. Lucía watched him from the tiller, knowing that on that stretch of the Oreb an inch of error meant splitting the keel on a gravel bank, and after a while she asked him to measure the next stretch: she wanted to know how many hours they had left before the Wolf's Bend.

Simón turned the leaf. Damián Ribes had noted every fathom, every ford and every gravel bank of the river in a tiny, patient hand. But where the Wolf's Bend should have begun, the ink stopped dead against an old water stain. The atlas knew everything about the Oreb, except the one passage that had swallowed its author.