by Greg Keyes
“My name is Yushnene, or at least it was when I was younger. That means ‘Wolf-Minded.’ They called me that because I was such a terror in battle.” He chuckled to himself, as if at some small joke. “After that, they called me Gaan, because I was a shaman—that’s what that means—but now, when I see anybody they just call me Old Man or something like that. But when I used to go up into your country, to trade, up there your people called me Brother Horse. You can call me whatever you want.”
Despite himself, Perkar felt a smile drawn from him by the old man’s manner. “Any of your other names would make me sound as if I were sneezing,” he admitted. “May I call you Brother Horse?”
“That’s fine with me. I always used to laugh when they called me that, because it had to do with a misunderstanding. I didn’t speak your language very well, and someone asked me my horse’s name. I didn’t know how to say ‘He is Dog-Chaser, my second cross-cousin on my father’s side,’ and so I just tried to tell them he was my cousin. What came out, though, was ‘brother.’ By the time I realized my mistake, the name was stuck to me. Anyway, I like it well enough, and I thought of Dog-Chaser as a brother anyway.”
“You are Mang then?” Perkar blurted. “I’ve heard you share lineage with your mounts.”
“Mang? Yes, that’s what you people call us. My own tribe is really the Sh’en Dune, the South People, but foreigners always call us Mang.”
“The Mang are the chief tribe in their confederacy,” Ngangata explained. “The ones your people are usually at war with.”
The old man nodded. “Yes. I’ve never been to war against you Cattle People, though, so I hope there are no grudges.”
Perkar shook his head. “No. Mang attacked my father’s damakuta many years ago, but I hold no enmity against brave warriors.”
“Well, that’s good,” Brother Horse replied. “It would be a shame if Heen and I were forced to kill you both.” His eyes crinkled merrily in his square, dark face. His hair still had some black amongst the white, but Perkar thought he must be older than any other man he had ever met.
“How long have you been on this island?” Perkar asked, not wanting to speak any further about warriors or battle.
“Heen and I have been here for five winters. But what you mean to ask is why I’m out on this island, don’t you?”
“He marked you,” Ngangata observed. Perkar nodded sheepishly.
“Well, it’s a tragic story,” Brother Horse told them. “If I did not mention it, I will tell you that I am quite an old man. Did I mention that?”
“I’m not sure,” Perkar replied.
“Well, I am,” Brother Horse stated carefully. “I have outlived my sons and daughters, and all of the horses of my line. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren are fond enough of me, of course, but they don’t want to have to look after an old man like me. They would, of course, but they wouldn’t like that and I’d know it. My last wife died a good while ago, too, and so I thought I might find me a new wife—to look after me, you know. I even thought I might find one, for a change, who could outlive me, and a pretty one hopefully. I heard about this girl Ch’an De’en—that’s ‘Pretty Leaf’—up in the north foothills. She was supposed to be daughter of Nuchiinuh, the Woodpecker Goddess—ah, wait a moment.” He rose back up and took the kettle off the flames; the water in it was boiling. He ambled back into the house and returned with three porcelain cups. “Got these from a down-River trader,” he confided. He poured a bit of the tea into each cup and handed one to Ngangata, one to Perkar, and kept one for himself.
“There. Where was I?”
“You were going after this girl.”
Brother Horse nodded. “I took along presents, of course, the kinds of things gods like—beer, wine, incense—”
“You were going to marry a goddess?” Perkar interrupted.
“Her mother was a goddess. Her father was some Tiger People man. So, I went up there, and the old woman said no.”
“The goddess?”
“Right. She said I was too old for her sweet daughter. And she was sweet, very beautiful, just past sixteen and never seen a man before. So, well, I knew this little song that I thought would make Nuchiinuh sleep, and after I sang that, I thought I would convince the girl to go with me. She was willing enough—it must have been boring for her up there in the mountains. We were just ‘trying each other out’—she thought I might be too old, you know, for marriage. So we were doing that when Nuchiinuh woke up. She wasn’t too happy about things. I managed to hide myself with another song and get back home, but when I got there I found the Woodpecker Goddess had been there before me, looking for me. There aren’t too many places you can be safe from a goddess like that, but out here in the River is one of them,” he finished. “None of them dares come within sight of him. So here I sit, wondering how long she’ll stay mad. A few more years, maybe.” He took a long sip of his tea. “People come out here, now and then, and bring me presents. I told everyone that I had decided to become a hermit and meditate, so they come out here to ask me questions about things. I guess I can tell you the truth, though, since you aren’t Mang.” He smiled crookedly, raised his cup, and took another drink.
Ngangata seemed to be regaining some of his strength, as he usually did when they were on land. He finished his tea and then asked if he might get more. The old man nodded at the kettle.
“Well,” Brother Horse said after a time. “My people always considered me a little too talkative, and I’ve only gotten more garrulous and nosy since I’ve been living alone. Heen is a slow talker, you see. But Heen was wondering what brings the two of you so far from your forests, pastures, and cattle.”
Perkar noticed that Heen seemed to be snoring, but didn’t feel it was politic to mention that fact
“Well,” Ngangata said, before Perkar could respond. “To explain that, I would have to tell you the tale of Perkar, and that would be too long in the telling. I think Heen would be bored.”
“Heen can suffer through almost any tale, the more long-winded the better,” the old man responded.
Perkar shifted uncomfortably, remembering his conversation with Ngangata about heroes and songs. Ngangata patted his shoulder and continued.
“Like your story,” Ngangata began, “this begins with the wooing of a goddess …”
If the story had been sung, the way Eruka had done it, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it. But Ngangata fold their adventures plainly yet with great elegance. He was true to his word about songs, however. Somehow Perkar’s most terrible mistakes became tests put forth by the gods. Even the fight between the two of them became a magical moment in which they became fast friends. Ngangata shifted the blame of the old woman’s death entirely onto Apad, without ever making Apad seem bad. Perkar remembered that killing as vividly as if it were yesterday, how frightened and nervous they all were, Apad half mad with tension and self-doubt. In Ngangata’s words he was a true champion, beguiled by the illusions of the evil Lemeyi into his action. Somehow, this made Perkar feel a bit better, though he was unsure why. He had avoided thinking about his dead companions as much as possible, and Ngangata was offering him a way to think about them stripped of their faults. He also pared away Perkar’s shortcomings—the parts about himself in Ngangata’s story rang hopelessly flat in Perkar’s ears, twisted his stomach. But hearing Eruka and Apad turned into characters from a song seemed better. The fact that it was Ngangata doing it was an act of generosity almost beyond comprehension, and it was this more than anything that prevented Perkar from shrieking “That isn’t how it happened at all!” The story was both Ngangata’s forgiveness and the punishment he exacted from Perkar, and Perkar felt compelled to accept both of them, the grace and the pain.
“So now we go down-River, trapped by the will of the Rivergod,” Ngangata concluded, “not knowing our destiny, the meaning of Perkar’s strange dreams, but ready to meet fate.”
Brother Horse seemed rapt, nodding here and there with enthusiasm and disma
y, but utterly taken by the story. Only toward the end did he seem troubled.
“That city you dream about,” he said a bit later, after they had eaten some fish soup. “I have been there, you know.”
“So it is real, then?” Perkar wondered. It wasn’t something he really questioned, more a prompt to keep the old man on the subject.
“Oh, yes, Nhol is real. It is the greatest city in the world. I went down there once, when I was very young, with a party of warriors. We had some very unrealistic ideas about raiding the city.” He laughed at the memory. “In any event, when we got there, we saw how hopeless it was, how pointless. Instead we got drunk in one of the portside taverns, gambling with boatmen. They took everything we had, including our swords. But it was a wonderful sight, that city. It was also frightening.”
“My dreams of it frighten me.”
“The city is wholly of the River,” Brother Horse went on. “There is nothing else. There are no little gods in the houses, no Fire Goddess in the flame, no spirits in the trees. They have killed them all. Even the River doesn’t have that kind of power, not by himself. He can eat what comes near him. But for scores of leagues on either side of the River, in the whole empire Nhol rules, there is not one god but the River.” He shook his head dolefully. “It’s beautiful, but it’s dead, haunted by ghosts from the River and his children.”
“What do you mean, his children?” Ngangata asked.
“I say there are no gods,” Brother Horse said. “I can see them, you know—I was given the sight by my totem god Yush very early on. In Nhol, I could see only the River, except—except there were certain people, the rulers of the city. They looked to me something like gods.”
“They killed the gods in the land and on the land,” Ngangata declared, “and the River made gods of the Human Beings who helped him.” He turned to Perkar. “As I told you once,” he reminded him. “The River simplifies things.”
Perkar shook his head. “They pray to these half gods?”
Brother Horse nodded. “The Waterborn, they are called.”
“In my dream, there is a girl,” Perkar said thoughtfully. “I am supposed to do something for her—or to her, perhaps. The farther down-River we go, the more clear that seems.”
Brother Horse grimaced. “I don’t know about these matters,” he grumbled. “If it were not Nhol you were being called to, I would suspect that your dreams were sent by a goddess. But there are no goddesses in Nhol.”
“But what of these Waterborn? You say they are like gods.”
“Like gods. They resemble gods as anger resembles love. Both are strong emotions, both can make you kill, but they are very different, with different ends. I think the Waterborn are just walking, talking aspects of the River. He sleeps, you know. He is more wakeful now than I have ever known him to be—this may be the result of your adventures. But I think it is really through those Waterborn that he is wakeful.”
“Do you know this?” Perkar inquired.
“No. It is only a feeling. I was only there once, long ago. It is just that I have been thinking about the River and Nhol a lot lately.”
“Since you’ve been on the island.”
“No, only in the past few months. Your story makes me think.”
“Makes you think?”
Brother Horse dusted off his bandy little legs, stood, and stretched. “Makes me think of a god so huge that his head doesn’t always know what his feet are doing. Of messages traveling up and down the River, like an old, old man talking to himself, do you see? And me, sitting here with Heen, hearing just a little bit of that senile mumbling.”
“And what is he talking about, this old man?”
Brother Horse fixed Perkar with a strange gaze. “You, perhaps.”
Perkar shifted the bundle of firewood in his arms, wondering how far upstream the branches had drifted from. Above him, the familiar stars were dwarfed by the splendor of the Pale Queen, and for the first time in many days, he was struck almost physically by a longing for his native pastures. How long had it been since he departed them? Months, but he didn’t even know how many.
Already that life of his was gone, become the story Ngangata had told today. He felt prepared to add another observation to Ngangata’s pondering on songs. They were lies, yes, but they were also corpses, dressed in finer clothes than they had ever worn in life.
Preparing to return to the camp, Perkar’s gaze was suddenly drawn up-River by something odd. Caught from the corner of his eye, it took a moment before his strained vision could make out what it was.
Shafts of moonlight, walking on the water. Walking. The surface seemed dimpled, an amorphous constellation of stars winking on and off, coming slowly and deliberately downstream. Perkar wondered if it might be some school of fish—or ghost-fish—that glowed beneath the waves, swimming toward him, for the River had held no moonlight since that moment in which he awoke. Was he sleeping again?
Perkar watched, the single eerie call of a whippoorwill the only companion to the rasp of his breath. He could see the texture of the lights now, and they were clearly on the River’s surface, not beneath it. Concavities appearing and vanishing in the current, cups of moonlight first here and then gone. It was nothing he had seen before, but it was familiar …
“Do you want to see?” Harka asked as he furrowed his brow in concentration.
“See?”
“I can show you, if you want.”
“Show me,” he breathed. And his vision changed, blood running tingling up his back, stroking his heart and lungs with shock.
The dimples were hoofprints. There were horses, walking upon the water. Formed of water, flanks of glistening moonlight, whirlpools of darkness for eyes. Nevertheless, he knew them instantly. Ngangata’s old mount, and Bear, the Kapaka’s stallion.
The Kapaka sat astride Bear. His face was a hollow, featureless, but Perkar could not mistake him, the way he sat his horse, the relaxed hold on the reins. The nothing beneath the helm turned to Perkar, and suddenly he was cold beyond belief, cocooned in water. All of his pain and fear chilled dull, faded, the sharp angles of his crimes coated in layers of muck and sand. For that instant, he was a tree made of ice, motionless, without passion, watching the ghost of his king as if it were nothing more unusual than a flight of geese.
The head turned from him, and fire rushed back into Perkar’s belly. Everything: pain, remorse, hatred. He groaned hoarsely, flung himself savagely into the trunk of a willow, the firewood he had gathered flying about him. He reeled but did not fall, spun to look again upon his king. But the image was gone, the faint spackle of moonlight fading even as he watched. Snarling, he drew Harka, dashing at the line of trees, hacking at the branches clumsily until finally he dropped the sword and began hitting the trunks with his bare knuckles, pounding until bones cracked and blood smeared up to his wrists. At last, clumsily embracing the trunk of an oak, he slid down to the ground, sobbing.
“I hate you!” he cried, out at the water, but it was unclear even to him whether he meant the River or himself—or both.
Why? Why had the River shown him those ghosts? It could not be an accident, not with everyone and everything the River had swallowed in his time. The bones of a hundred kings must he in his depths, a thousand steeds.
His hands were aching now, balls of flame, but he forced himself to think, to confront. What did the River want of him?
“What?” he shouted, but no answer came save the distant sound of the nightbird.
“Father, help me,” he sighed. “Mother!” He reached up to finger the little charm his mother had given him, and he felt a familiar spark there, the same life that had entered him at birth. Touching it, he touched the place where his caul was buried, and for the beat of a bee’s wing he saw that place: a mighty oak, limbs spread like a big man yawning and stretching, and near its roots a silver stream, laughing and lovely. In that instant, the distance between him and his father’s damakuta dissolved; it stood just beyond the star-flecked horizon
. There sat his father and mother, wondering what had become of him. A day’s travel from there was Apad’s family, and not much more distant, Eruka’s. At his masterless damakuta in Morawta, the grandchildren of the Kapaka might be wondering where the old man was, why he hadn’t returned.
What would his father tell him to do? What would he say?
Finish what you begin, he would say. Piraku is more than having, it is doing.
But do what? He had believed that there was nothing good he could do now but die. Anger surged again, and he spat out into the River, glared across his now-quiet waters.
“Yes!” he hissed. “Yes, take me where you wish. I will go with you. Do you hear me, Changeling? I resist you no more.”
Damn Ngangata for reminding him, for making it all clear. He had begun a story and resisted ending it. There was still a chance to redeem his failures, make the saga come out right. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t worthy. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t understood where his actions would lead him. He had no choice, that much was clear. Piraku demanded that he go on, and if he had betrayed his people in everything else, he could at least not betray them in that.
“I warn you,” he told the water, voice flat. “I warn you that if you let the bit slip from my teeth—if you give me the slightest opportunity—you will rue the day that you set me on this task. If it is this girl I am to seek—what do you want of her? But if you want her alive, I will kill her. If you want her dead, she shall live.” He shook his fists, and droplets of blood made rain-circles in the stream. “Take more of my blood,” he said, almost without volume. “Take all of me you want, but one day we will reckon things, you and I.”
Harka tingled as he took the sword in his hand.
“I was beginning to wonder about you,” he said. “Wonder if there was anything in you besides remorse and self-pity.”
“Oh, yes,” Perkar told his blade. “I just found it.”
He gathered up the firewood and took it back to the clearing, where Brother Horse sat braiding his long gray and black hair. His eyes lingered an instant on Perkar’s bloody knuckles, but he made no comment about them.
