Chapter Three: The River
- From
- The Dossier of Dr. Brink, Volume One, Part One
Morning came in through the hide flap as a band of pale gold, and with it, the ordinary business of being alive in a new world. Upon rising and reorienting myself, I greeted Scur in two of my languages—comrade—first in Opentongue, then in Gnomic, but stopped myself short of attempting it in Fabrican. The chieftain, who had evidently decided that tolerating my linguistic enthusiasm was simply a cost of working with me, returned both greetings with an answering click.
Communal breakfast in the village center was brief and efficient. It featured another trade of one of my rations for fish—of which I was down to two-thirds of my original stock—but this time, Scur fetched a basin of water from a rain-collection apparatus and dipped the biscuit into it, letting it soften for a minute or so, and seemed to savor the result much more than they had previously.
The two of us then returned to the chieftain’s hut. Scur brought me to their map and traced out a path along the river, from the village cove to the skull symbol deep in the forest, and looked at me in a way that seemed to ask, are you ready for this journey? Although I could not be certain of the precise distance, the skull seemed to be very far inland—several times farther than my initial trek along the beach—and I considered that we might find it necessary to set up camp overnight. I pointed to my mattress and tried in vain to express this thought via gesture.
Receiving no response beyond blank confusion, I decided on my own to prepare for the possibility—better to have and not need than to need and not have, ran my pithy logic—and took it upon myself to find a practical solution to transport the mattress. I had dragged it across kilometers of sand and stone already, and my arms had not yet forgiven me for it. Scur, watching my clumsy attempts to wrestle the rolled, dried bedding into something liftable, disappeared into the corner of the hut and returned with a coil of cured leather straps and a bone awl, seeming to wear the expression of someone who had also grown tired of watching me drag furniture across the landscape.
What followed was twenty minutes of genuinely satisfying collaboration. Scur punched holes through the leather with quick, practiced jabs of the awl; I used my tinkering tools to weave the straps through the mattress’s thick seams and rig a pair of sliding knots that could be tightened or loosened with one hand. Together, we built a proper harness, the mattress now riding on my back instead of dragging through the sand behind me, with the remainder of my collected kindling secured tight within the roll. I hoisted it on and felt faintly ridiculous in a productive sort of way, like a turtle that had upgraded its shell through diligent effort.
Scur gave the harness a firm, approving tug, yipped once, and turned to their own preparations: four waterskins, a few strips of cured fish, a satchel filled with various herbs and powders, the spear they had been carrying when we first met. Upon Scur’s call two spear-carrying escorts fell in outside the hut, leaner and more alert than the rest of the village, with round hide shields strapped to their forearms. I took the time to introduce myself and ask for their names in return, which I received only after Scur’s translation-prompting: the slightly smaller individual was—to the best of my transliteration—Tetch, and the larger one was Koss.
Once we were all thoroughly prepared, waterskins full, many villagers having approached to seemingly wish us well with the word kar’tal, I cracked my knuckles—a habit, an old ship-surgeon’s preparatory ritual—and the sound made both escorts flinch as if I’d drawn a blade, or perhaps broken my own bones. Scur let out a series of amused clicks; I blushed, then recomposed myself. “Comrades,” I said in Opentongue, pointing westward. “Let’s go!”
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Scur led our expedition party west, following the river along its northern bank. Koss tested the ground ahead with their spear before each step, which I thought showed excellent professional instinct. Shortly out of the cove, the beach gave way to marsh, reeds, humming insects, the croaking of unseen frogs. The initial leg of the journey was uneventful. Over the course of an hour, however, the environment steadily changed around us. The sounds of nature began to drop away, and a peculiar odor filled the air, growing more noticeable as we progressed. Eventually Koss noticed something in the river, and we stopped.
A deer lay half-submerged in the slow water. It had been dead for some time. The deer was not what held my attention, however, but the water around it—the faint, oily iridescence on the surface, the yellowing of the reeds at the bank, the absence of the insects and frogs that should have been everywhere, and the smell: a sickly-sweet chemical taint, now sharp enough to turn my stomach.
I set down my pack, removed my harness, and got to work. I used my supplies to take samples: river water in some vials, surface oil—isolated to the best of my ability—in others. The Sauropsians gave me respectful space, forming a perimeter while I arranged my rudimentary field laboratory atop the mattress. I exposed a litmus strip and the few other reagents in my possession to the clouded water sample, observed oil viscosity and color, and cross-referenced the results against the mental catalog of alchemical knowledge I had spent decades accumulating.
My investigation was revealing: the river carried a high concentration of dissolved heavy metals, intensified by the severe acidity of the water. These metals were toxic—incredibly toxic at this concentration—likely causing cascading organ failure in any living thing unfortunate enough to drink from this river. The oil remained unidentified but, in conjunction with all other evidence, directed my suspicions toward a specific type of scenario I had witnessed in some societies near my homeland, and whose victims I had treated during a handful of medical expeditions.
The situation, in my view, resembled the outcome of an alchemical refining process, in which byproducts were being dumped or allowed to drain into the river with no regard for the surrounding environment or for any society that made use of it. The source was upstream, and the contamination was, by my estimation—considering the profound concentration of the dissolved metals—the result of a continuous, steady process. Someone was actively creating this poison as a waste product and simply releasing it as pollution into the watershed.
Upon this realization two things surfaced at once within my mind. First, a recognition that this land, or parts of it, possessed a level of economic organization capable of supporting relatively advanced alchemical industry. I found this to be interesting.
Second, a sense of dissonance: my own homeland had, over the recent centuries, developed a robust system of strict procedures and continuous oversight to prevent this sort of scenario from occurring—and to hold any perpetrators accountable—but here, somewhere deep in this forest, along this river, it was being allowed to manifest, freely, to the extent that a Sauropsian community downstream was suffering. I found this to be very interesting.
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After some minutes lost in these thoughts, I returned my attention to a matter of practicalities. I found several new questions bubbling up in my awareness on the basis of my new hypothesis: What is the nature of the operation responsible for this? Can we stop it? How do we purify the river?
The last of these questions had the most immediate answer, at least in concept: an alkaline agent could neutralize the acidic waters of the river, forcing the heavy metals to precipitate out of solution and fall to the riverbed as relatively inert grains that could then be removed manually. Small amounts could manage to purify a sustainable water supply for the village, but to cleanse the entire river and allow aquatic life to return, the quantity required would be enormous—likely several tons—and I was unaware of any local source of such an agent, in any amount.
I considered that the Sauropsians might have been in possession of such knowledge, so I asked. What followed was one of the more challenging communications of my professional life—and I have delivered a terminal diagnosis to the family of a foreign commodore. I arose from the squatting position I had been maintaining at my makeshift worktable and called to Scur. I held up a vial of the clouded river water and made the sickness gesture. They growled, grave and serious. Yes, this is the death-water. I then tried for several minutes to pantomime a neutralization reaction, attempting to highlight in particular the concept of an alkaline substance as a reactant, pointing at stones, at the river, connecting and disconnecting my hands, all to Scur’s ongoing confusion.
To my honest surprise, it was Tetch who eventually gleaned what I may have been trying to communicate, or at the very least formed a productive inference. They abruptly interrupted my awkward gesturing—I did not take offense—to get Scur’s attention, and they conversed for a short while. Scur’s eyes widened, and they reached into their satchel to retrieve several smaller pouches, which they handed to me with a questioning click.
I looked through them sequentially—a vivid blue dust, several dried herbs, what appeared to be plain soil—until a grainy white powder grabbed my attention. “Yes!” I expressed as a minor shout, then uncorked my vial of river water and carefully sprinkled some of the powder inside. At once, the water fizzed, and in exactly the outcome I was hoping for, a cloud of dark, gritty, rust-colored sediment appeared within the solution, swirled around, and sank gracefully to the bottom of the vial.
Scur and the escorts purred in amazement, and I may have jumped for joy. I pointed to the pouch of powder, a wild grin on my face, asking where can we get more of this? Scur understood me perfectly, thought for a moment, then took their spear and began to draw a map into the dirt of the forest floor. They drew the coast with the cove, then the river, then drew the line of northern cliffs I had previously noticed on the map back at their hut, tapping it with their spear. Spa’ka, they said, and I inferred that these were likely cliffs of chalk or limestone.
With great satisfaction, I too pointed at the representation of the cliffs, then at the river behind me. I mimed the fizzing neutralization reaction, very dramatically. I took my scalpel and cut a symbolic line over the deposited metals in the vial, followed by pretending to drink from it, patting my abdomen, and at last giving a V-sign with my other hand—which without the preceding context might have been quite incomprehensible but here seemed to drive home the point with perfect clarity.
The Sauropsians’ black eyes lit with a spark of genuine optimism. Scur turned to Tetch and Koss and they all exchanged a rapid series of clicks and yips in their language, and their collective posture changed from the wariness they had been carrying to something closer to resolve. We had, at least, a crucial component of a plan. The cliffs could undoubtedly provide enough alkaline stone to purify not only a reliable supply of clean drinking water for the village, but also the entire river, allowing aquatic life to flourish yet again.
Nonetheless, the issue of the continuing source of pollution upriver still remained. I had no faith in my ability to communicate the intricacies of industrial toxin production to my companions. I did not know if the byproduct drainage would intensify, outpacing the Sauropsians’ ability to haul massive quantities of alkaline stone day after day, or if the rate already did outpace that ability. I had no idea what the actual nature or scale of the operation was, or if our reconnaissance party of four—or even the entire village—would be able to do anything about it without facing insurmountable resistance.
Upon my directed point and “Let’s go!”—more nervous this time—we continued up the river, deeper into the forest.