Indeed the Reliant herself was surely no longer his at all. It would have been a peculiar career which after such a period should have left him in a prime frigate, and yet not seen him advanced to the command of a ship-of-the-line. Either an unlikely disgrace or promotion must inevitably have been his lot—and then he wondered suddenly if the transport herself was his, something in between the two.
He found it hard to sleep that night, searching for some scrap of memory to be a rope-line which he might have climbed to get a look at himself, past horizons which seemed empty all around. But nothing came to hand, and he felt ever more strongly the anxious sense of something lost; he put his hand into the bundle beneath his head and closed it around the hilt of the sword, the ray-skin familiar and not at once. He slept at last fitfully, ill-at-ease, and startled awake when footsteps came into the temple: an old woman carrying a steaming pot, and she screamed when she saw his face and dropped it, fleeing into the early dawn.
“Why, that is a pity,” Kiyo said, yawning tremendously: she seemed able to almost open her jaws in a straight line. “You have made her spill half the sake. Pour the rest in the bowl! It is a little early, but the morning is nice and wet. I do not mind getting up.”
She put them on her back again, when they had eaten the rest of the rice dish, and she had drunk the rest of the wine, and she tramped down the hill through a faint cold drizzle towards the river. “Put the baskets on,” she said, stopping on the shore, “and let us get under way! It’s a long way to Ariake, and we will have to stop and get something to eat along the way.”
There was a sort of harness resting upside-down underneath a little lean-to by the shore: two tightly woven baskets, watertight, lined thickly with straw and a final lining of fabric. These were joined to each other with straps which went about her body; each was big enough for a man to climb inside, and when Laurence and Junichiro had strapped it upon her and ensconced themselves so, Kiyo plunged into the river and swam out into the deep part of the current, very like a horse bearing saddlebags.
Almost directly they had left the curve of the river leading to the temple, they were in settled countryside: women and children on the banks, washing clothing and carrying water, waved to them with enthusiasm as they passed, and fishermen poled small vessels out of their way, yielding precedence. Laurence had bundled his hair beneath a scrap of his old shirt, and he hunched his shoulders and looked down as they sailed onwards to avoid any comment on his features: he was increasingly conscious that any journey overland would have offered scarcely any hope of success.
Junichiro for his part also kept his head down; from what Laurence could see of his expressions, he seemed to be caught in a confused welter of pleasure and misery. His delight in the dragon’s company, and in the condescension she had shown them, was very plain; it was equally plain he did not feel himself deserving of it, and Laurence would not have been surprised to have him burst out in confession of his crime at the least encouragement.
Fortunately this was not immediately forthcoming. The two of them might have been traveling alone, for Kiyo’s head was nearly always submerged beneath the surface as she carried on against the current, her long tendrils streaming away to either side around her like trailers of seaweed caught on a ship’s hull. Her speed was indeed remarkable: better than six knots, Laurence judged.
“Will you tell me about the course we are on?” Laurence asked Junichiro, when they were on an isolate curve of the river, hoping as much to distract him as to learn more of his circumstances: they seemed to have been swept up beyond his control for the moment.
“You must have done something notable in a past life,” Junichiro said, half to himself, as though trying to explain to his own satisfaction what had brought them so much undeservedly good fortune. Laurence, for his part, should have liked to know what he had done either evil or good so as to produce all the ills of his present situation, but as he did not accept Junichiro’s explanation, he could only attribute it to some forgotten act of his lost eight years. “And we are on the Chikugo River, following it to the Ariake Sea,” Junichiro added. “That is between Chikugo Province and Hizen Province—”
“Hold, you leap too far ahead,” Laurence said, and made Junichiro explain a little more of the geography of the nation, a small country like his own; they were upon the island of Kyushu, which after a little description Laurence mentally classed with Scotland: it was not the largest, nor the site of the capital, but the home of considerable wealth and industry; and this divided into several provinces.