River Claim

Last April the river came up over Water Street in one night.

Lenora Ambler carried sandbags for eleven hours. Somebody handed her a city poncho and put her in a line of strangers outside the hardware store, and she passed bags from the person on her left to the person on her right until her arms stopped feeling like arms. When it got light she walked home through water up to her shins and slept in her clothes. The water stayed in the street for three days. A man drowned in his car under the rail bridge. It was on the news.

In September, at work, she opened the box of last spring's river records to file them. The city's flood book had one line for April: No significant events. Under it was a stamp from the superintendent's office, INCOMPLETE BUT ADEQUATE, and after that the book was closed.

She read the line four times. Then she went and found her supervisor.

"It's wrong," she said. "I was there."

"So write a memo," he said.

She wrote three, and nobody answered them. In November she found out why the book mattered. The spring council was going to redraw the channel map, and the city engineers wanted the line moved into the shallows on the far side of the river. Their report said the old channel had silted up on its own, slowly, over years. A big flood would have scoured that channel out, and then the report would be wrong. So there hadn't been a flood.

If the line moved, the Bend's fishing nets would be on the city's side of it, and the orcs who lived across the river would lose most of their water.

The council met in nine days. The only other people who might have written down what happened last April were the orcs themselves. Lenora had asked to cross the river and look at their books in January, and in February, and both times she was told no. In March the superintendent went on vacation, and her supervisor signed the clearance without reading it, mostly to get her out of his office.

---

The checkpoint was a prefab booth at the bottom of Water Street, with a space heater humming under the desk. The clerk was a heavy man in a county fleece. He read her letter with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, and then he pulled the glasses down and read it again.

"Two days," he said.

"Through tomorrow at sundown."

He typed her name into the terminal with two fingers and waited for it. Through the window behind him she could see the ramp going down to the river, with a stripe of yellow paint along one side of it. Past the end of the paint was the ford, and past the ford was a bank of willows, and above the willows, a long way back, the roofs of houses standing on posts.

"No guide today," the clerk said.

"That's fine."

"Wasn't asking. Nobody's going over who doesn't have to. Survey crew had trouble out at the channel markers yesterday." He looked at her over the monitor. "You know what the paint means?"

"It's the line."

"Past the paint, you're on claim. Anything happens to you on claim, that's not ours. Nobody from this side comes to get you." He printed a visitor slip and slid it across the desk. "Watch the third stone. It moves."

---

She changed into rubber boots at the bottom of the ramp and left her shoes side by side on the concrete, at the very end of the paint.

The first two stones were fine. The third one tipped under her heel, exactly like he'd said, and she went down on one knee in the current with cold water pouring over the top of her left boot. She stayed there for a second, on her knee, holding on to the stone with both hands and breathing.

Then she got up and counted the rest of them out loud so she wouldn't look at the water: twelve, thirteen, fourteen. On fourteen she was on the far bank, in the willows, with mud to her ankles and one boot full of river.

She looked back. The booth was small and very yellow. The clerk wasn't at the window.

There was a path up through the willows, narrow and soft. She followed it with her satchel strap in both hands.

She had gone maybe fifty yards when she heard the breathing.

It came from her left, down toward the water, inside the reeds. It was slow and heavy and very close. Bigger than a person. Each breath came in long and rough and stopped at the top, held there, and then went out again in a low shudder she could feel more than hear.

Lenora stopped walking.

She didn't know what lived on this side of the river. She had seen goats from the checkpoint, and dogs. People said there were boars in the marsh. People said a lot of things. She stood in the middle of the path with the reeds higher than her head on both sides and tried to work out how far back the ford was.

The breathing went on. In, and the long held stop, and out.

She took one step backward, very carefully. A stick snapped under her boot.

The breathing stopped.

Everything stopped. The reeds stood still. Somewhere out on the river a bird called once and didn't call again. Lenora stood with her weight on the snapped stick and her heart going so hard she could feel it in her teeth.

"Go back."

It was a voice, low and rough, coming from inside the reeds no more than ten feet away. It wasn't shouting.

"Go back to the paint," it said. "Now."

She almost did. She had actually turned, with one foot already pointed down the path, when she looked down at the water beside it. The path ran right along the edge of the river here, and the water was brown and slow, and there was a thin red thread in it. It came out from the reeds and drifted past her boots and away downstream, curling, the color of rust.

She stood and watched it go by.

"Are you hurt?" she said.

Nothing. Then the breathing started again, faster now, harder, and she heard something heavy shift in the mud.

"I said go back."

"You're bleeding into the river." Her voice came out thin. She cleared her throat. "I can see it."

There was a long pause.

"Then you've seen it," the voice said. "Go."

Lenora put her satchel down on the path. She didn't let herself think about it very hard. She reached into the reeds with both hands and pushed them apart.

---

He was sitting in the shallows with his back against the cut bank, and he was an orc, and he was holding a knife.

She had seen orcs before, from the checkpoint and across the water on market days. Never closer than the width of the river. He was enormous. Even sitting down, his head was level with hers where she stood. His skin was a dark gray-green, slick with water, and his black hair had come loose and was stuck to his neck. Tusks came up from his lower jaw at the corners of his mouth, and one of them was broken off short. His right hand was pressed hard against the top of his thigh, and blood was coming out between his fingers. His left hand held the knife, low, resting on his knee, pointed at her.

Lying in the mud beside him was a boat hook. Its pole had snapped in half. The metal end was dark with blood, and the wooden pole was painted yellow. Bright municipal yellow. The same yellow as the stripe on the ramp.

He saw her look at it.

"You with them?" he said.

"With who?"

He moved the knife a little, toward the hook. "Them."

"No." She couldn't stop looking at the yellow paint. "I'm from the archive. The city archive. I'm not with anybody."

"Same city."

"Yes."

He watched her. His eyes were amber, and they didn't move off her face. The knife didn't move either.

"Why are you here?"

She told him. It came out too fast and in the wrong order. "There was a flood last April. A big one. It came up over Water Street, I was in it, a man drowned. And the city's records say there wasn't one. They say nothing happened. They're using that to move the channel line at the council, and if they move it, your side loses the nets." She was holding on to the reeds on either side of her so tight her hands hurt. "I need somebody else's record. Somebody who wrote it down. I heard the Bend keeps books."

He didn't answer right away. The current pulled at his boots.

"You came across the ford alone and walked into the reeds toward that," he said finally. He meant himself. "For a book."

"For the flood."

He breathed in, and it caught at the top again, and his face went gray around the mouth. The hand on his thigh pressed down harder. More blood came out under it.

Lenora looked at the knife.

"Let me help you," she said. "Then you can tell me to go back again, and I'll go."

He kept the knife on his knee for a moment longer. Then he turned it around in his hand, slowly, so that she could see him do it, and pushed it into the mud beside him, blade first, and let go.

---

The cut was on the top of his thigh, long and deep at one end, ragged where the hook had gone in and then been pulled out. Someone had tried to pack it with a folded shirt, which had slipped. She knelt in the shallows beside him. The water went straight through her skirt to her knees, so cold it hurt, and she ignored it.

"I don't know what I'm doing," she said. "I want you to know that."

"Noted."

She got her water bottle and the roll of soft cotton out of the satchel. She used the cotton at work to clean mold off book covers. She cut away the old shirt with the little scissors she kept for string, and when she peeled it back he made a sound low in his chest that she felt through her knees in the water. Her hands stopped.

"Don't stop," he said. "Worse if you stop."

She poured water over the cut. He tipped his head back against the bank, and the tendons in his neck stood out, and he said something short and flat in his own language. She folded a thick pad out of the cotton and pressed it down on the wound with the heel of her hand, and leaned her weight on it.

His whole leg jumped under her. She kept leaning.

"Count," he said, through his teeth.

"What?"

"I heard you counting on the stones, all the way from here." He breathed. "Do it again. Slow."

So she counted out loud, kneeling in the river with both hands on his leg and her arms locked straight, the way they had told her to press on a wound in a first-aid class at work four years ago that she had mostly spent looking at her phone. One, two, three. His breathing slowed down to match it, gradually. Somewhere upriver, wood knocked on wood, three times, then a pause, then three times again. A heron came over the reeds low and slow and landed on the far bank and stood there.

At sixty she lifted a corner of the pad. Still bleeding. She pressed back down.

"Who did it?" she said, at seventy.

"Survey crew." His eyes were closed now. "They come out at night and move the channel markers. Pull them up, put them down forty yards over, where the city wants the line. I move them back in the morning. They've done it three times this month." He breathed in. "Last night I went out when they were still there."

"And they hit you with that."

"One of them did. Young one. I don't think he meant to do it as hard as he did." He opened his eyes and looked at the hook in the mud, with its yellow pole. "He left that when they ran. I'm keeping it."

Lenora thought about the clerk saying trouble out at the channel markers. She thought about her supervisor saying write a memo.

At ninety the bleeding had slowed to a seep. She tied the new pad on with the rest of the cotton, around and around his thigh, which took most of the roll, and knotted it on top where it wouldn't slip. Her hands were shaking by then. She pulled the knot tight, and then tighter, and he let out a long breath through his nose.

"That's as good as I can do," she said. She sat back on her heels in the water. She was soaked to the waist and her hands were red to the wrists, the blood running into the old gray ink stains on her fingers. "You need somebody who actually knows how."

"The one who knows how is downriver until the end of the week." He got one hand flat on the bank behind him. "So for now it's you."

"Great," Lenora said.

When she moved to get up, her wrist brushed the inside of his knee. It was an accident. His skin was hot, much hotter than she expected after sitting in the river, and she pulled her hand back a second too slowly and felt her face go warm.

He saw it. He lifted his hand, slowly, so she could see it coming, and stopped it near her cheek without touching her. She could feel the heat coming off his palm from an inch away.

She stayed where she was.

After a moment he put the hand on the knot she'd tied instead and pressed on it, testing it, and his fingers covered hers where they were still resting on the cotton. Then he took the hand away.

"It'll hold," he said. "For a while."

---

"Lenora Ambler," she said. "From the archive."

"Hesk. River ward. Second Landing."

"What's a river ward?"

He looked out at the river while he decided how to say it. "This stretch is mine to watch. The ford, the channel, the markers down to the bend. When something's wrong with the water, I go and find out what." He nodded at his leg. "Usually it's not this."

"And the books? The flood books?"

"They're at the reed hall. Upriver." He looked back at her. "I can take you. But if you come with me, you come as a guest under ward. That means you're under my protection while you're on claim, and nobody on this side touches you. Including me, unless you ask." He held her eyes. "And you don't write me up in your city's books. No report on the ward who had a knife on you in the reeds."

"I wasn't going to."

"Your crew wasn't going to hit me with a boat hook, either."

She looked across the water at the booth, and the yellow stripe, and her shoes at the end of the paint. There was a procedure for crossings, and she had read it twice, and she could not remember any of it.

"Show me the books," she said.

He nodded. Then he got his good foot under him and stood up all at once, the way you'd stand if you knew it was going to hurt and wanted it over with, and the bank gave under his weight. He was taller than she'd thought. She came up to the middle of his chest. He swayed, and she put her hand flat on his arm without thinking, and he let her. Then he was steady, and she took it back.

He bent down, slowly, and picked up the broken boat hook with its yellow pole, and tucked it under his arm.

"Stay on the stones," he said, and pointed up the bank. Now she could see them: flat stones half sunk in the mud, going up through the willows in a line. "The soft patch by the big willow took my boot last week. I had to go back in for it."

---

It was a long walk, and slower than it would have been on two good legs.

The stones went up out of the willows into open marsh, where the reeds were taller than Lenora and the path was a raised line through them. Hesk went first. Every few minutes he stopped and stood with his hand on his thigh and looked out at the river, as if that was why he'd stopped. Lenora stopped behind him and waited. By the third time, she had started looking at the river too, so he wouldn't have to pretend alone.

Out in the middle of the water there was a red-and-white marker post, leaning a little.

"Is that one?" she said.

"That's one. It's where I put it back this morning." He pointed downriver with the end of the boat hook, toward town. "They had it way over there. If it stands where they put it, the old channel's gone, and the line moves. If it stands here, the channel's still deep, and it's still ours." He started walking again. "So they move it, and I move it back."

They came up out of the marsh onto a low rise, and from there she could see the Bend.

It was bigger than it looked from the checkpoint. Forty or fifty houses stood on posts in the shallows along the inside of the river's curve, joined to each other by plank walkways, with boats tied up underneath. Smoke came out of a few chimneys. There was washing on a line between two houses, sheets and enormous shirts. On one of the walkways, two orc kids were lying on their stomachs with their arms in the water up to the shoulder, trying to catch something. An old man in a canvas coat was mending a net with a needle as long as Lenora's hand. He looked up when they came along the rise, at Lenora, and at Hesk's bandage, and at the yellow pole under Hesk's arm. He put the needle down.

He called something to Hesk in their language. Hesk answered him, short. The old man looked at Lenora again for a long moment, and then picked his needle back up.

"What did he say?"

"He asked who did it." Hesk kept walking. "I told him."

"What did he say about me?"

"He asked if you were with them, too." He kept his eyes on the walkway ahead. "I told him you were a guest."

The reed hall was at the far end of the walkways, built up on taller posts than the houses, with a long ramp going up to it from the bank. Hesk took the ramp slowly, with his palm flat on the rail. Lenora came behind him with her boot squelching on every other step.

Halfway up, he stopped. This time he didn't look at the river. He leaned on the rail with his eyes closed.

Lenora looked at the posts.

The hall's posts were old and thick and gray, and they were covered in lines. Some were scratched into the wood, some drawn in grease pencil, some painted in tar, one above another, each with a date beside it. High-water marks. The lowest ones were so old the dates had worn away. She found a mark from twenty years ago that matched the city's books. She found one from eleven years ago, and that matched too.

Then she looked up.

Above all of them, almost as high as her head, was a fresh line pressed hard into the wood in black grease pencil. Beside it was the date. Last April.

She put her hand flat on the post under it. Her fingers were still stained with his blood. She thought about the sandbags, and the poncho, and the man in his car under the rail bridge, and the line in the city's book that said No significant events.

Above her, Hesk opened his eyes.

"Yes," he said. "We wrote it down."