Cowl Riverkeep

Backstory
"Yer hands are shakin', Cowl." Cowl shrugged and shifted his hands on the mug. "it's cold." Pappa laughed, releasing a stinging breeze of tobacco. "That's no' cold. Cold is when yer eyeballs scratch when ye blink, when it hurts to breathe. Ye'll be Riverkeep soon. Ye'll get used to that quick enough." "I'm not Riverkeep yet," said Cowl. Never, he thought. Pappa secured a knot and sat back on his haunches. "But a week'll no' be long passin', my boy" he said. "Time feels long for the young, But don't worry-ye'll no' be young for long." He grinned and went to get the boat ready, ruffling Cowl's hair as he passed. The deep creak of his rubber boots faded into the gloom beyond the lamp. Cowl put down the mug and looked at his small hands, already thickly scarred with burns of rope and snow. Over the voice of the river-sucking knocks and shirting wood-he felt the needles of sound as new ice along the banks of the river cracked. Ice meant winter and darkness, and for waterfolk a new kind of danger. Pappa saw it as a great enemy to be feared and defeated with flames and rods. But it brought Cowl respite from the river's black void, its thick scum and little puddles and treacherous clarity, and the huge sharp rocks fringed with weed that swirled like a corpse's hair. In the heat of summer, perfumed wildflowers grew along the banks along with raspberry bushes that tasted as sharp as lightning. Insects skittered on the leaf-padded surface, and silvery clouds of fish burst through the water-chased by the fish whose wet little heads dotted the surface like stepping stones, their golden summer eyes glowing in the sunlight. But Cowl could never think of the river as something living. He had seen what happened on the rocks: the floating bodies, arms raised and mouths howling against the surface as though restrained by a thick layer of glass. It was the Riverkeep's job to push his arms through the barrier to embrace the dead, to lower his face close to theirs and taste the bilge-stink of their breath before lifting them from the water. Pappa did so with a martyr's grace, blind to the gangland markings and forgiving of sinners who took their own lives which the Riverkeep would later turn into medicine. Cowl had watched them since he could remember: propped in a grotesques parody of sleep, as though they were snatching a nap in the back of the little boat. Now he sat with them. Sometimes the bodies were old, and the flesh slid from their shining bones like the skin of a poached fish. Cowl did not want this wilderness life. With Pappa's help he had read the ledgers in their entirety, right through the ninth volume in Pappa's own careful hand. The ledgers didn't just list the dates; they told the stories, detailed bodies' decomposition, and kept the words of the rescued and their reasons for jumping: sweethearts, fear, sicknesses of the mind, and often, so often, "coin." Every entry was the same. To Pappa this was priceless-a means of creating something that would stand forever as a monument of pride and respectability. To Cowl it was a prison of words-repetitive, rotting words. He reached over and touched the ledger that sat open on the desk. Their last discorvery had been just over a week ago: 3,101, a widow, faceup and floating, her breasts rot-swollen, her cheek cut with a debtor's mark. But as always the most recent entry was the next number-3,102-offered with the prayer of the Riverkeep: that the number might never be filled. He closed the ledger. The mold-edged pages,heavy with moisture, fell with a report that bounced round the caravan like the slamming of an enormous door. Cowl had heard the creak of Pappa's boots in the darkness. "yer coming tonight." Cowl shook his head. "It's too cold." "Ah've told ye, that's-" "I know, it's just...Not tonight, Pappa, please." Pappa regarded him a moment, shifting the wad of tabaco leaf around in his mouth. Then he shook his head. "Yer nearly sixteen." was all he said The air was sharp and hard in Cowl's lungs. Even wrapped in layers of blankets and wool, he felt the chill on the exposed flesh inside his boots, around his waist like the cut of wire. The white, still world communicated itself as a sharp whine outside of his hearing, and he stamped his feet on the boats exposed ribs and buried his face in his elk-fur collar, peeping over when his eyes could stand the cold. The lanterns, staked in the riverbed where the currents met and the flotsam gathered in eddied clumps, made glowing islands in the velvety darkness, their flames fuzzed in the fog like dandelions. The industrial might of Kais Termina was silent, the howls of it's foundries and smithies carried away on the east wind. The only sound in the smothered world was the rhythmic licking of the oars and the soft noise of the blades moving through the water. By the fifth lantern, they had discovered a graygull, torn open by a shark-"Not much else left for them," Pappa said- and the broken spokes of a carriage wheel. The gull was flapping limply, trying to fly on shattered wings while it bled onto the ice. Pappa reached down and gently snapped its neck between his thumb and forefinger. Cowl watched him ease the body into the water on scar-twisted palms. As far out as the edge, at lantern twenty-two, they still had found nothing more than knots of weed and grass clinging to the ice rods. Cowl peered into the unseen and untended wilderness beyond the last outpost of the keep's realm, in the depths of which lurked the bustle of Kais Termina's ports, the flashing steel of bandits, and, past a scattering of hamlets, the river estuary and the wider sea. He trailed his glove tips in the water and flicked droplets outward the beyond. Pappa saw him, tut-tutted, then-as he turned the boat toward the caravan and it's warmth-they found 3,102. It was a male, fat-backed and facedown, white flesh streaked with a pattern of cuts and bruises Cowl knew came from the fierce, swirling currents near the footbridge where Mamma had drowned. It had been wearing a uniform that still clung to it in scraps, and there were murky tattoos spilled along it's visible skin. Pieces of its scalp were missing, and leaks of blood and fluid colored the wafer of snow-dusted ice that had crept around it. Pappa looked at Cowl. "The footbridge," said Cowl. Pappa nodded solemnly, The flames cut his face into slices of light and dark, one eye hidden in the black wedge behind his nose. "May Lavernes keep thee," he muttered, lifting the oars from the water. "Here, Cowl-row." Cowl took the oars, turned the boat, and heaved it forward. Even now, it's great weight pulled at him as though it might shatter his wrists. He looked down at the floating for of 3,102. It looked bunched, not loose, and sat tightly in the water. The ice must be holding it stead, he thought dropping the oars and the stilling boat. He stood and Pappa stood. The boat's prow faced stoically forward. Half-shut and focused, they peered into the darkness that, beyond the reach of the lantern, was absolute. Cowl turned from them to the reassurance of the flames. Without the movement of the boat, the silence was so empty he felt the weight shift in his stomach the hair creep on his back. "Pappa," he said. "Ssh, Cowl, a minute." Pappa tipped back his hat and muttered the Riverkeeps prayer, then, broad back braced and legs wide, he reached down for that hug to pull the wretched lump into their boat. 3,102 hugged back. In a flurry of movement that lasted no more than a gasp, the two figures disappeared beneath the surface, and Cowl stood ridgid, his breath billowing and his skin tight. Fighting the sudden lightness in his skull and with a kcik of painful nausea taking his wind, Cowl began to sweat, feeling panic speed his heart. He stood still for a timeless age, unable to move, listening to the silence and staring at the space in the water through which Pappa had vanished, trying to force his lips to form Pappa's name and sending only the tiniest of wisps of breath into the freezing air. It was the old that brought him back to himself, needling wakefulness unto his muscles. For the first time in his life he was aware of the thinness of the planks that separated him from the black void beneath, he felt the emptiness of the world like a fist in his gut-felt the distance of other people as he never had before. Cowl heaved the oars in place and sat in the keep's char, tears freezing on his cheeks, his gaze locked on the spot where Pappa had vanished. Pappa had shown him how to row-then made him practice until his knuckles bled- but his return journey took an age, weakened by terror and blind to his destination, branches scraping the prow behind him. A shark broke the water beside the boat, its golden summer eyes now a piercing winter's blue, and Cowl dropped the oars in fright. The grabbing shadows of the banks reached across the white water, and beneath him the river moved unusually, each swell and press of current renewing the feeling of terror, and he prepared himself for the water to rise up and take him. 3,102 was wating for him on the sand. Faceup, the sight was no better: the face was fish-picked and rotten, the guts torn by an adventurous shark so that it's stomach hung open like a bad of wet coal. It's uniform was that of a seafarer, and a broken musket still hung from its belt. It wasn't moving, and seemed to be quite dead. With a huge effort of courage, Cowl threw a stone at it. The pebble bounced harmlessly off the hollow body as though it were nothing more that a sponge. Fearing to expose himself to the thing unguarded, he backed into the caravan and closed the door. By the time he reached the window, it was gone. Cowl stood at the window for as long as he could before releasing his creath and clouding the glass. Then he went and made himself tea, focusing on the loose leaf and the water and the stove's flame to ground him, to bring him back to normality; in a world of tea and unreliable matcher there could not also exist corpses and that moved. There could not exist an absence of Pappa. as there could not be an absence of sky or air or water. He pictured Pappa, though of his voice. The ledger, pappa would say. It's the record of the Riverkeep. Of us. Cowl drew the book to him and lifted the enormous cover. As it fell open he thought of the movements that might be Hiden by the sound and he glanced around him, into the corner left by the flickering lamps. The body of a man found by lantern twenty-two, he wrote carefully, elbow pointed, swollen and white having been tampered with by the rocks and fishes and by a shark. Stomach open and black. He paused Unable to return the body. Gone. Cowl lifted his tea, then lowered the mug without drinking. He raised the pen again and wrote the next number-3,103-then sat back, tears creeping onto his face. He felt that his blood, rather than ink, had stained the parchment. "May this number be never filled," he whisper eyes closed in prayer. The timbers of the jetty creaked, steadily, and the sound grew larger until the footsteps reached the sand and ceased. "May the waters spare whosoever a-crosses their path from here unto eternity..." There came a new sound of creaking rubber boots. They reached the door of the boathouse, and Cowl could sense the angry weight on the other side, a plank's thickness away, and he knew it was his pappa as he had always known him-heavy with tobacco and slow of movement-but there was something else there now too. Cowl began to sob, forcing his eyes to remain closed. The handle turned. "And bless the Riverkeep on his journeys." said Cowl, fighting his fear as the smell of the river filled the air and the eight of the thing that moved toward him, "as he endeavors to jeep thy waters safe from causing harm or from being themselves a-harmed." The movement behind him stopped. "Da halfwicc ma," said Cowl