Free Chains by A. J. Hartley

 
    It was a long way down to the turbid waters of the river Kalihm.
    I buckled myself into my harness and hooked its lanyard to the cable which ran alongside the great chain links. The chains formed a long, slow swag several hundred yards long between the towers of what will be—if it ever gets finished—Bar-Selehm’s first suspension bridge. The saddles on the tower tops where I was working featured a series of great pulley wheels which allowed the massive chains a little movement, and while that would mostly stop once the carriageway was hung, without it—and in this foul weather—the chains were constantly straining and relaxing so that the entire skeletal frame of the bridge groaned unnervingly. Occasionally, an entire link would shift over the pulley and the chain would suddenly drop a couple of feet all along its length. If you were caught under it, the weight might tear you out of your harness and send you hurtling down, so you got used to listening for the humming creak of the iron vibrating from link to link.
    Though I had not admitted it even to Tanish, my eleven-year-old apprentice, I was afraid of the river, and not just because of the creatures that lived in it. Though I had grown up close to water, I had learned early to be wary of it, and I had never learned to swim.
    Not that I’d get the chance here. A fall from the tower tops would be as good as hitting cobbles, so I’d be dead before the crocs got to me which was, I supposed, a kind of blessing. I knew that because I’d seen it only a week before. One of the boys from the Sidings gang—a shy, nervous kid who I had shown how to clean the paint from his brushes so he wouldn’t get shouted at by the foreman—had lost his footing in the last hour of the shift. He fell right past me and vanished noiselessly under the surging brown water. I thought I saw him resurface downstream, but he was quite still. If the crocodiles didn’t take him he was probably carried all the way into the bay and out to sea.
    I never knew his name, and after the day of the accident, I didn’t hear anybody talk about it. It was, they assumed, just how things were. That they were probably right left a cold hollow in my gut.
    I took hold of the guide cable in one gloved hand and drew myself along, inching out away from the tower. We had already worked the metal with scrapers and steel wool, so the surface was coated by a fine orange powder that smelled uncannily of blood. About sixty feet out, and about the same height above the temporary catwalk, I wiped away the surface rust, dipped my brush, and began to daub the bare metal with the oily paint. Black as tar and almost as thick, it dripped on everything. By the end of my first day on the job my brown arms and face, my clothes and hair had all been hard and sticky with the stuff no matter how much I washed at the pipe on the dockside. The next morning I went down to the river itself to bathe, but it was moving too fast and I couldn’t see if there were crocodiles lurking near the bank, so I gave up. Instead, and though I knew the boys would mock me, I cut my hair short with a mortar knife, returning to my tent conscious of the way the black Mahweni laborers watched me, their faces curious at what the Lani girl was doing, as if I was a strange and solitary bird, rarely seen in the city.
    In a sense they were right, but I was, in fact, quite comfortable in the city—far more than I would have been out in the weancat-haunted wilds of the bush—and was just as comfortable in my strangeness and solitude. It was only being on the ground among people that unsettled me. The only benefit of working on this bridge was seeing firsthand all the details that went into its construction. The newspapers had been breathlessly telling the world that the bridge would be “the architectural jewel of Bar-Selehm.” Who wouldn’t be caught up in the excitement? The answer, apparently,