As they fought their way against the current, Annwr relented enough to explain how she planned get the boat. “There’s an old man who works on the river, carrying freight and buying and selling boats. He has more boats than he needs, and he owes me one of them for all the times I’ve nursed him through hangovers. He’ll be asleep now, and too drunk to notice if we took his bed out from underneath him.”
With nothing better to suggest and no reason to think that Annwr would listen to him if he did, Caelym waded on, his shoulder and arm throbbing from the strain of keeping Aleswina’s head above water. He was too proud to complain about the weight of his overloaded pack or to remind Annwr that he’d only recently recovered from an almost fatal arrow wound.
It was his pride against the current, and the current was on the verge of winning when they rounded a broad bend and Annwr gave a self-satisfied grunt and pointed with her staff.
Caelym’s mental picture of the boathouse she’d promised was based on the only boathouse he knew—the one on the bank of the sacred lake in Llwddawanden, a fastidiously kept pier with a neat line of sleek boats tucked under the cover of a post-and-beam boat shed, each with its perfectly matched oars leaning against the wall behind it.
What he saw now was a teetering wharf, its docks battered and buckled and a clutter of boats in all states of repair crammed together under a shabby roof. On the upstream side, a heap of river debris was piled halfway up the boathouse wall. The downstream bank was littered with the skeletons of wrecked hulls. On the bank above and behind the boathouse he saw what could have been a heap of smoldering rubbish but was actually, he guessed, the thatched roof of the hovel where the boatman was, hopefully, as sound asleep as Annwr had promised.
While Caelym was taking this in, Annwr forged on. She was about to help Aleswina climb the rickety ladder when he hissed at her to keep her hands off it and keep the girl away.
“The dogs will be set on her scent and yours too!”
“And what about yours?” she hissed back as he edged past her and gave the flimsy railing an experimental tug to see if it would take his weight along with that of his overloaded pack.
“It’s the two of you they’ll be after, so we’ll just hope a small whiff of me won’t catch their interest.” He heaved himself up, wrestled off his pack, and walked gingerly along the creaking dock into the boathouse.
On a darker night or with a better repaired roof, he would have needed to risk lighting a torch to see what he was doing. As it was, the moonlight streaming down through the gaps in the moldering thatch was enough to see by. Of the dozen boats that jostled against each other, six were half sunk, two lacked oarlocks, and three of the remaining four were meant for hauling cargo and were far longer than they needed. That left one, a small, solidly built craft with two sturdy-looking oars already set in place. He untangled its tie rope and pulled it to the end of the dock where Annwr stood waist deep, holding Aleswina against her and glowering at him.
“Give your pack here!” As he’d expected, Annwr’s pack was half the weight of his and the boat barely shifted as he wedged it into the prow. His own was more of a struggle, but he managed to get it over the edge of the dock and shoved back against the stern.
“Now her!”
Leaning precariously over the side, he managed to haul Aleswina up and into the boat with Annwr lifting from below. As she flopped in, the boat rocked back and forth, its pitching efforts made worse by her frenzied effort to pull away from him.
“Hold still!”
Despite saying it clearly in English, his order had no effect, in fact seemed only to add to her thrashing panic. Before she could spill both of them, along with their supplies, into the river, he wrestled her down onto the prow of the boat where she wrapped her arms around Annwr’s pack, clinging to it like a drowning man to a rock in the river.
“You stay there and don’t move!” He spoke more sharply than he would have if the boat weren’t still tossing and pitching out of control. Once he’d gotten hold of a piling and steadied it, he added in a calmer but still firm tone of voice, “And be quiet!” Seeing nothing in the girl’s dazed expression to show that she heard or understood his command, he repeated, “You must not move or make a sound! No matter what happens, you must not speak a single word—not a peep, not a whisper—until I say so.”
He climbed back onto the dock, went to the workbench, found a small, sharp hatchet, and made his way around the outer deck to the piled-up tangle of brush. He hacked off as much as he could carry, then brought the armload of branches and twigs back to the boat and piled them around Aleswina and the packs. In another three trips, he’d covered the boat over well enough that in the darkness and from a distance it could easily be taken for a drift of river refuse. As he stepped back for a moment to admire his handiwork, he heard Annwr mutter, “It’s lovely. Now to get me up and into the boat before I grow gills!”
“Gills would be just the thing for what comes next, so if you’d teach me how to grow my own, I’d be grateful.” He snapped off a twig from the brush covering the boat and squatted down, close to where Annwr was standing, glowering at him.
“Now we must have a plan for getting past the village of savage Saxons hunting her”—he nodded towards the pile of brush covering Aleswina—“and happy to catch us in the bargain.” Drawing lines in the green slime that coated the deck to illustrate what he was saying, he went on, “Here, then, is the river, and here we are, and here is the village. We will keep to the far side and in the shadow of the bank. I will swim in front, guiding the boat, and you will swim at the back, keeping it straight. We will go just with the current and no faster, since even Saxons may have sense enough to wonder at drifting brush that swims on its own accord.”
Before Annwr could argue about who was to swim in front, he picked up the hatchet, inspecting it carefully while watching her out of the corner of his eye. “Now, about what this boatman owes you for all the good care you have given him in his times of need, perhaps it would include this excellent little axe as well as the boat and oars?”
Annwr’s expression remained stern. “I have said he owed me a boat, which of necessity includes the oars. I will not take more than I am owed, nor rob a man while he is passed out from drinking.”
Caelym suppressed a sigh. He was standing up to put the hatchet back where he found it when she said in a softer tone (not as soft as the tone she used with Aleswina, but softer than any she’d ever used with him), “Now, if your heart is set on having that axe, you may reach down on the right side of your pack and you’ll find a flask of fresh mead. I . . .” Here she hesitated, cleared her throat, and went on. “I brought it along for you, as I never gave you any gift for becoming either priest or physician. If you choose, you may leave it in exchange for the axe. Were the old man here now, he would take the drink and be glad of it.”
Caelym found the flask, took a long swallow from it to be sure of its quality, and made the trade. Warmed and encouraged by the drink, he lowered himself back into the water and, together with Annwr, eased the boat out into the current.