Free Legends of Dimmingwood 02:Betrayal of Thieves by C. Greenwood Page B

they hadn’t seen use in decades. By contrast, a collection of small wooden huts erected at the other end of the wharf teemed with activity. Bits of brightly colored laundry fluttered in the open windows of the little dwellings and tendrils of smoke rose from holes in the thatched roofs. Dozens of men and women, river people I decided by their unique appearance, were mending nets, cleaning fish, and going about their daily routines. I saw a group of men near the water’s edge laboring over stacks of timber and coils of rope and decided they were constructing the sturdy rafts they were known for. River children played up and down the long piers, dodging beneath the feet of their elders, chasing one another dangerously across unsteady walkways.
    Our arrival attracted a good deal of attention. No one shouted or made any move against us, but it was obvious by the flat, hostile gazes directed our way that our presence was an unwelcome intrusion. I stared back at the strangers just as frankly. Their unfamiliar appearance and clothing was unsettling and vaguely threatening in its strangeness.
    The men, with the exception of the little ones, wore their heads shaved bald and kept their faces and chests equally bare. The only clothes they bothered with were loose fitting trousers made of the same fabric as the brightly colored sails of their rafts. But there was no impression of nakedness because their arms, torsos, and occasionally even their faces were so heavily patterned with various colors of ink that in many cases I could hardly see the man beneath the tattoos. Any natural skin visible gleamed a dark bronze from long years spent toiling under the sun.
    While I was engrossed in studying these people, Fleet had taken the initiative and was approaching one. This river man was a large fellow at the water’s edge who was wrestling with a coil of rope to draw in a line of floating logs from the distant shore. With his frustrated scowl and the tenseness of his muscled back, he didn’t have the look of a man I would have chosen to interrupt in the middle of his work. But Fleet had already greeted him. I hung back to see how things would play out, reasoning if the street thief got himself thrown into the lake, someone ought to be standing by to fish him out.
    I could see by his exaggerated hand gestures, Fleet was making our situation known to the stranger, but the river man’s attention never left his work. Fleet talked uselessly to his back for a few minutes, but when neither this man nor the other laborers alongside him showed any indication they were listening to the babbling city man, Fleet eventually gave up his efforts and returned to me.
    “This is a waste of time,” he complained. “I’ll wager they don’t even understand a civilized tongue. We’d get farther asking a dog for directions.”
    But as we walked away I noted how the big river man glanced back at us with a flicker of something dark in his eyes, and I had the decided feeling he understood much more than he let on. We were more successful in our next attempt. This time, Fleet made his inquiries of a tiny, silver-haired old woman whose quick, beady eyes darted up and down the length of us both, reminding me of a curious little bird. I tried not to look at the sharp bone ornament thrust through her chin.
    The old one looked unimpressed with the coppers Fleet flashed at her, but her interest was caught by the bright glass bauble dangling from his ear. In the end, he reluctantly parted with it in exchange for information and, cackling gleefully at her trade, the old woman informed us with gestures and a smattering of the Known tongue what she knew of the man we sought. She told us to ask after him at the home of the woman named Seephinia, out on the water. We took this to mean Seephinia lived among the flotilla of river rafts anchored a short distance from the docks.
    Fleet caught a passing river boy and offered him a copper to lead us to this Seephinia. The child