Free The Luck of Brin's Five by Cherry; Wilder Page A

sky.
    â€œBut where . . .?” I cried.
    â€œHere, of course!” said a familiar voice. The barge heaver threw back his hood, and it was Mamor.

IV
    Brin set up my enemy, the mat-loom, on the open deck, but I doubt if I completed ten rows of leaf pattern in all the time we went downriver. It was just so good, so new, to be moving on the water. I fell into my sleeping bag the moment Esto went down and woke early, with Esder’s thin light silvering the broad stream. Mamor let me be tillergrip; Diver and Brin took turns at the paddle wheel. Old Gwin and the Harper turned to and washed our linen as if it were already spring. We were travelling light: most of our new work had been left in the cave at Stone Brook for Beeth Ulgan’s factors to collect and market. Narneen sat in the stern catching fat water flies for our spinners and chasing the flatbills from our fishing nets with a green branch.
    Down in the city I have seen plenty of tame flatbills in ponds and watergardens fed every day on cultured worms. But they cannot match the marvellous wild creatures who live in the Troon north of Otolor. The big ones, the To-tofee, are golden brown with dull green webs; they roll and play and chase each other from morning to night. They thought nothing of taking locusts from our fingers over the side or chasing across the deck, two or three at a time, with a peculiar snuffling noise from their broad bills and their tails slapping on the boards. Then there are two smaller varieties, the common Narfee and the striped Utonar. We saw them swimming in lines, their heads just breaking the surface of the water.
    Diver came across the box of wood paints for decorating the barge and painted a frieze of flatbills on the lid of the cargo locker. His artwork was to spread over the face of Torin too quickly for our safety. It must have been about this time that one of the townees in Cullin found his drawings in the cave at Stone Brook and had them copied, with notes in Brin’s own written script. Perhaps Beeth Ulgan had a hand in this; she has never denied it.
    Mamor was the only one of our Five accustomed to boats; he was the child of river people, far away on the Datse, the river that leads to the Fire-Town. On the second day he and Diver broke out the mast from its long slot on the deck and raised sail. The barge lumbered along faster, but it was very clumsy. It was a matter of watching for channels, shoving off from banks and shoals, shouting a warning to other craft; there were not many at this time of year. We passed villages and hamlets on either bank where we had made spring and summer camps in other years. What a pleasant thing to sail past a track you trudged on, once before.
    Diver sat with me at the tiller, and we saw a herd of wool-deer, outside Nedlor, where the banks rise up and there is a hanging bridge over the river. The shepherds were having a hard time cramming the silly creatures into their high-walled fold. Every so often a wool-deer broke free and went leaping and bounding to the edge of the cliff overlooking the river. Then the shepherds moved in with their catch-nets on long flexible poles and brought the straggler in by catching its “hands” and its strong tail. The wool-deer were unshorn; their coats become so thick you can sink an arm up to the elbow in the lovely fleece. This was a herd of pied cross-breds, and their colors were black, white and tan. Diver laughed and told me some more about a strange place on his world where the wool-deer leap about with no wool and the fleece comes from a more docile species.
    It was that same day, in the evening, as I rode in the bow, going tillergrip for Mamor, I spotted a boat ahead of us. It moved oddly in the water.
    â€œWhat is the matter with that craft?” I asked Mamor.
    â€œStuck on a sand bank!” We were under sail, so he had Brin reef it in a little as we steered closer. The river was broad and shadowy at this point, with a clear, deep