By flatboat, it took all ten days of the decan for Irella to get to Marna, the Lysar River’s northernmost port. The eastern boatman led his oxen up and over the towbridge toward the stone dock. His wife set aside her knitting as they pulled into port, which Irella took as a signal to stand and stretch her legs. Beside her, Enduca did the same. The _biladiyn_ had been assigned to her as Alem's subordinate in guarding Irella, ostensibly because Irella's mission was potentially dangerous but actually because en-Tirigan had been furious about how Enduca handled the confrontation at the sewers. It was one of many petty revenges the Engineers had wrought for their trip, which Irella had been helpless to prevent. Enduca seemed to accept her new assignment philosophically enough, but Irella didn't quite trust the calm facade, and so her guilt over being responsible for wrenching the _biladiyn_ away from her home in Oruku was compounded by her guilt for not trusting a woman who had by definition dedicated her life to protecting thaumaturges like Irella. "It'll be good to get back on land again," Alem said as he joined them. Irella offered a crooked smile, but said nothing as the boatman tied up at the pier. Unlike the senior _biladiyn,_ she hadn't minded spending ten days sleeping on the open deck, dependent on others to make decisions about their path and progress. So she thanked the boatman and his wife, promised to speak well of them to her superiors the next time she was in Oruku, and disembarked. "Which way?" Alem asked. Irella gestured toward the palace. "I promised Wanishtu I would check in with his father before I went on to Uskune." Irella suppressed a twinge of discomfort as a flicker of surprise crossed Enduca's face. A priestess in her position would normally report to the Temple, not the palace, and she had been criticized in the past for her close relationship with the nobility. The same people, of course, completely ignored how intertwined the the Temple of the Engineer had become with the nobility of Keldehss when they controlled access to the copper trade, and the way the Archivist's Temple in Pontero had an _especially_ close relationship with the nobles who trade in clay. Irella was bitterly certain that if she had been Valentia's daughter or Wanishtu's sister, no one would have batted an eye at her support for Eramepi. The miracles she wrought would have been proof that the Architect favored Eramepi's efforts to be a civilizing force, and nothing more. The farther they got from the docks, the fewer pigeons and dogs they passed, until finally they were mixed in with the two- and three- story homes of the artisans and traders. "Do you hear that?" Enduca said. Confused, Irella stopped walking and focused. The noise she had taken to be the usual dull furor of trade, of women chatting as they filled jugs from a nearby fountain, of children shrieking as they chased pigeons from their roosts was not, in fact, so mundane. Now that Enduca had pointed it out, the sound was deeper, that of a crowd, not a group — and it was coming from the direction of the palace, not the market. "Might be soldiers having a parade?" Alem said doubtfully. "The soonest festival is days away." Irella, who had probably seen more Marnan parades than a _biladiyn_ from Oruku even if she _was_ much younger, shook her head. "They sound angry." "Is there a back way to the palace?" Enduca asked. Irella frowned, then nodded. It looked like she would be checking in at the Temple first after all. --- ## Afterword This scene is sort of my ode to how neat waterborne transportation is. I wound up doing a hilarious amount of research to try and decide how people would transport goods up and down the Lysar River, which is only loosely based on the Euphrates River and bears remarkably little resemblance to the Nile, which we know more about. The question of how the ancient Egyptians moved the big blocks for the pyramids is an enormous focus of study, and we know a lot about the [unloading ramps, sailing patterns, etc](https://www.cheops-pyramide.ch/khufu-pyramid/nile-shipping.html) for that region. But the Nile is a relatively unique river, so that information only gave me a rough estimate of technological possibilities for this era. As far as I know, the Nile has strong southerly winds, and a steady  northbound current. Not all rivers are easily navigated in both directions. That said, canals and rivers allow beasts of burden to pull 50x as much weight as they could pull in a traditional cart on road. A [horseboat pulled along a canal towpath](https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/canal-history/history-features-and-articles/horseboating) can go about 7 km/hr, faster than walking and smoother than a coach. Because it is very difficult to stop a narrowboat loaded with cargo, canals built for horseboating often had strapping posts for boatmen to wrap towlines to slow down the boats. Bridges built over horseboat canals needed to be smooth and curved in order to avoid snagging towlines. The canals need to be maintained required for functional horseboating, including the cutting back of vegetation and dredging of relevant canals. When I was in Georgia visiting my parents, in addition to being inspired to [research dams](https://eleanorkonik.com/dams/) %% ( [[2022-08-08 Dams]] ) %%, I visited one of the nearby old canals and I was really struck by how much it reminded me of digging shallow canals in the (really old, pretty terrible) game [Wurm Unlimited](https://store.steampowered.com/app/366220/Wurm_Unlimited/); it's amazing what less than a foot of year-round water can do in terms of leveling up your transportation capacity. Railroads rendered horseboats (and inland canals) largely obsolete, but some still exist as tourist attractions. In addition to towing narrowboats up and down canals, horses could be used to power the paddle boats that operated as ferries, the horses either circling a post and or walking a treadmill. It's possible that [the Romans yoked animals to wheels that moved paddles](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/11900/roman-navy-propelled-by-animals-instead-of-human-rowers) on the sides of boats in lieu of using rowers, tho there's not exactly a ton of hard evidence that it really happened. I have this notion that a culture discovering how to do that is going to be relevant to the plot of one of my stories someday, but I haven't quite managed to work it in yet.