Dominion, Fred Saberhagen [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

quiet voice drifting in faintly from beyond the side door where she had gone out. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was a private yard out there, on the side of the house away from the highway, or at least there had been one when Simon lived here.

   Shortly the girl came back into the shop, followed a moment later by a boy who in apparent age, about fifteen, might have been her twin, but who otherwise resembled her only vaguely. He was tightening the fancy belt buckle on his jeans; his lean chest showed under an unbuttoned gray shirt, and his feet were shoeless like his sister’s.

   Simon asked him: “Five bucks an hour okay?”

   “Yeah. Fine.” The youth sounded moderately eager.

   “Our car’s not going to be in your way out here, is it?”

   The girl assured them: “Nobody’ll bother it.”

   Then Simon and Margie followed her untalkative brother out through the side door, past a couple of lawn chairs in the yard, and down a narrow path toward the water. The river, Simon thought to himself again, was quite high for midsummer; the lands to the north and east, along the upper Sauk and its tributaries in far northern Illinois and Wisconsin, must have been getting heavy rains lately. And he could see rainclouds now, in the southwest sky, beyond the wooded bluff where the hidden castle waited. When you lived in the city steadily, he thought, you lost touch with the weather, caring only how cold it was at the moment, whether you might be going to get wet. Anyway he estimated that the next rain here was still hours away; it shouldn’t interfere with what he and Marge were going to try to do.

   Simon helped the boy turn over the canoe and get it into the water. Marge, following directions and making no fuss about possible tipping, got in without incident. Simon loaded his own considerably greater weight in near the middle of the craft; and then their barefoot guide shoved off and hopped in skillfully behind him.

   Their guide’s presence restricted conversation somewhat. Simon had planned to use this portion of the trip for briefing Margie further on history and local conditions, but he would be able to do that later when they were alone. He sat in the canoe and looked around and thought.

   So far, the view from the water only reinforced his general impression that nothing much had changed, except for people. He wondered without concern where his aunt and uncle were. Surely, if they had sold out or otherwise departed permanently, the name on the mailbox would have been changed by the new occupants. Of course the boy and girl might easily belong to some branch of the family. They would hardly have been born fifteen years ago, and Simon hadn’t kept up with any family events. He wondered idly if perhaps they were really twins; that would be consistent with their being relatives. It seemed that multiple births were more common in the complex of locally interrelated families than they were in the general population.

   “It’s really pretty here,” said Margie, almost dreamily. She was sitting relaxed in the prow, as if she had in fact come here only for the scenery.

   “Actually is,” Simon agreed. In his own mind the view upriver from Frenchman’s Bend was quite ordinary. In the far distance, a couple of miles above the town, the girders of the aging bridge had been repainted at some time and it was evidently still functional. Between the bridge and the town a scattering of tied-up boats and floating docks were visible along both shores. People from Blackhawk or elsewhere maintained riparian summer cottages along here, and farmers sometimes kept small craft tied up during ice-free weather, going fishing when they could. In the middle of a broad stretch half a mile upstream, an outboard towing a water-skier was droning in determined circles, like some huge insect magically confined.

   Change in the scenery came swiftly as soon as the Sauk curved west and south from Frenchman’s Bend. Simon, looking back now, realized that he had always understood somehow that in the downstream direction ordinariness no longer applied. Looking ahead now as the canoe moved with the current, he saw what might almost be one of Mark Twain’s rivers. It would scarcely be a surprise to hear a steamboat hooting from a couple of bends downstream, feeling for the channel. In his childhood the old people of the neighborhood had talked about how in Twain’s day a few boats had actually ventured this far up from the Mississippi, seeking cargo.

   Here, just below the bend, the Sauk ran for a time even broader than above. And here the width of the river appeared to be stretched by a flotilla of islands, all but the tiniest of them heavily wooded. Naturally being broader meant that the river here was shallower as well. With the exception of the elusive and sometimes shifting channel, vast stretches were no more than knee-deep even when the water, as now, was relatively high. This made power boating here below the Bend a very tricky proposition, and usually all the recreational boaters stayed above the town. Canoes, rowboats, and rafts, could certainly ply here without any particular trouble, and yet with the exception of the few craft owned by Frenchman’s Bend people they rarely did. No other boats were to be seen now, anywhere ahead. Nor were there any cabins along the shore, of course you wouldn’t want your cabin on a flood plain ten feet from the highway; and on the far shore the bluffs were too abrupt for cabins.

   “It’s wild, too,” Simon said, belatedly continuing his response to Margie’s comment.

   The boy, still silent behind Simon, just kept on paddling. He evidently knew the best routes among the islands as well as Simon had known them at his age. To reach the castle landing by the quickest way from