The Continent of Lies by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

10

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Bad Doings on the River Lethe

The River Lethe did not invite navigation. Its shallows were gummy and choked with dreams. Its depths wound between a Scylla of jagged rocks and a Charybdis of rapids. Its sandbars looked completely unprincipled. But when Flick pointed out that the currents would be with us, when he calculated that we might easily double our overland speed, I asked Iggi to start drawing up plans for a raft.

A catamaran would be feasible, he concluded. Get lots of reeds, he advised. Bundle them up, he instructed. Lash the bundles together with vines, he elaborated, and you’ve got yourself a hull.

So we did.

The same procedure gave us the second hull.

Next Iggi had us make a lateen sail from bark. We hung it on an A-frame mast supported by shrouds, forestays, and backstays of vegetable fiber. Decking, leeboards, sternpost, rudder, tiller: noostree wood served for all of these. With images of last month’s fight against the false dreamfarm still vivid in our minds, we knew that plundering live branches for the needed planks would be sheer insanity. Fortunately, so many dead ones clogged the river that we did not have to risk Hamadryad’s wrath. We fished them out, smoothed them down, fitted them into Iggi’s design. Thus did our enemy make generous contributions to the campaign against her.

The deckhouse was a hut snuggled under the A-frame, its roof a checkerboard of bamboo mats. Our emergency skiff was a hollowed-out limb. And for aesthetics, a couple of wooden figureheads, one lashed to each bowsprit. Jonnie sculpted them with his sword. They looked like his android trollops.

When the raft was finished, we assaulted the portside hull with a transplastic canteen containing Lethe waters and coffee. We christened her the Amaranth. Amaranth: the flower that never fades. Our Amaranth drifted down the Lethe at fifteen kilometers per hour, a towline of braided moss leading from the sternpost to the skiff; the tiny boat cleaved to our wake like an imprinted duckling.

Bound for a violent and unwaning sun, we fell on dog days that lasted through their nights. Heat…heat…heat. Gishbar stuffed its fire down our throats, scraped its flame against our skins, lashed its glare across our eyes. The deckhouse proved the best defense, the shade of its interior compensating twice over for the inconvenience it caused when you wanted to go fore or aft. For additional relief, a swim in the Lethe served well. We had to keep our mouths closed, though. We had to be careful not to inoculate ourselves with The Lier-in-Wait.

I did not expect to appreciate Flick Longslapper. After all, how could there be any common ground between an art critic like myself and a man who had spent his life mewling at cephapple pickers and wondering whether there was enough fertilizer on The Million Year Foreplay? Imagine my comeuppance when Flick turned out to be as adept in the history and analysis of dreambeans as he was in their care and feeding. Flowering Judas, he’d

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