When he saw us, I saw him perform some task that made his little boat veer to the left so that he would pass us with a generous space of water between us. As I stared at him and his unusual vessel, I heard heavy footsteps on the deck behind me. I turned to see my father and the captain tamping tobacco into their pipes as they strolled toward the bow for their evening smoke together. Captain Rhosher gestured with his unlit pipe and observed genially, “Now there’s a sight you hardly see anymore on this river. Wind wizard. When I was a youngster, we often encountered such as him, in his calabash boat. They grow those boats, you know. The gourds from such a vine are immense, and they fertilize them with rabbit dung and shape the fruits as they grow. When the gourds are large enough, they cut them from the vine, let them dry and harden, and then shape each one into a boat.”
“Now that’s a tale,” my father challenged him with a smile.
“No, sir, as I’m a riverman, I’ll tell you it’s true. I’ve seen them growing, and once even watched them cutting the gourd to shape. But that was years ago. And I think it’s been over a year since I’ve seen a wind wizard on this river,” the captain countered.
The little boat had drawn abreast of us as he spoke, and a strange chill ran up my back, making the hair stand up on my neck and arms. The captain spoke true. The man in the boat stood tall and still, but he held his spread hands out toward his little sail as if guiding something toward it. As there was every night on the river, a gentle breeze was blowing. But the wind that the Plains mage focused toward his sail was stronger than the mild breeze that barely stirred my hair. His wind puffed his sail full, pushing the boat steadily upstream. I had never seen anything like it, and I knew a moment of purest envy. The solitary man, silhouetted against the sinking sun, was at once so peaceful and so powerful a sight that I felt it sank into my soul. With no apparent effort, one with his magic, the wind, and the river, his shell boat moved gracefully past us in the twilight. I knew I would remember that sight to the end of my days. As he passed us, one of our polemen lifted his hand in greeting, and the wind wizard acknowledged him with a nod.
Suddenly there was a gun blast from the upper deck behind me. Iron pellets struck the wind wizard’s sail and shredded it. As my ears rang with the shock, I saw the craft tip and the man spilled into the river. A moment later a cloud of sulfurous smoke drifted past me, choking me and making my eyes water. The angry shouting of the captain and the raucous laughter from the upper deck barely reached me through the ringing of my ears. The two young nobles stood on the upper deck, arms about each other’s shoulders, roaring with drunken laughter over their prank. I looked back toward the wind wizard’s boat, but saw nothing there but blackness and water.
I turned to my father in horror. “They murdered him!”
Captain Rhosher had already left us and was running toward the ladder that led to the upper deck. One of our Plainsmen polemen was faster. He did not use the ladder, but scrambled up the side of the cabins to the upper deck, where he seized their gun. The poleman threw it wildly away from them, and it sailed over the side of the boat, splashed, and sank. A moment later the guide, probably alerted by the gunshot, was on the scene. He seized the Plainsman and spoke to him in his own language, forcibly holding him off the two young nobles as the captain hurried up the ladder. Down on the deck, the other poleman was running frantically up and down the length of the flatboat, scanning the river for any sign of the wind wizard. I ran to the railing and leaned out as far as I could. In the darkness, I could barely make out our wake. “I can’t see him!” I called out.
A moment later my father joined me at the railing. He took my arm. “We are going to our cabin, Nevare. This is none of our doing, and none of our business. We shall stay clear of it.”
“They shot the wind wizard!” My heart was hammering with the shock of what had happened. “They killed him.”
“They shot his sail. The iron pellet destroyed the magic he was doing. That was all,” my father insisted.
“But I can’t see him!”
My father glanced at the water, and then pulled firmly at my arm. “He’s probably swum to shore. He’d be far astern of us by now; that’s why you can’t see him. Come on.”
I went with him, but not eagerly. On the upper deck, Captain Rhosher was shouting at the guide about keeping “those drunken youngsters under control” while one of the young men in question was complaining loudly about the cost of the gun that had been thrown overboard and demanding that the captain compensate him. The poleman on the upper deck was shouting something in his own language and angrily shaking a fist. The captain still stood between him and the others.