by Greg Keyes
“What I cannot do,” Harka explained to him, “is cut through days as if they were curtains. I cannot cut them open and let you walk on through to where you want to be, not even I. You must brush each drape aside, one at a time, just as anyone would.”
Perkar snorted. “What good are you then?”
“Without me, you would be long dead, piles of shit in a cave.”
He didn’t reply; he still wished sometimes that he had died. He clung now to what the goddess told him long ago. Live with what may be, what is possible, and not what you childishly wish. He was not dead, that was a fact. The goddess was right; remorse and guilt were indulgences, candy to console a troubled child. A man who could not rise above self-pity was useless in any capacity.
He could tell himself that, anyway. But if he had learned that lesson long ago, then his king would still be alive. Apad and Eruka … he still saw their faces each morning. Apad’s ruined features, Eruka’s sightless eyes—the Kapaka as Perkar had last known him alive, ashen, his dreams dead and his own ghost yearning for oblivion. Or worse, the cold, faceless spirit in the moonlight. But he could tell himself that grief was pointless, get on with things. He had a purpose now, though it was vague. He had something more to do.
If only he could do it soon, before he lost this new resolve, before the memories and the dreams dragged him into madness. The wounds on his knuckles were already merely scars, and the tedium of the boat trip made it difficult to sustain his anger. Still, it was there, waiting, at least for the moment.
Five days after he began counting suns again, he passed by the city of Wun. He knew that it was Wun because Brother Horse had told him that Wun was the first city he would encounter. He knew that it was a city because he had never seen anything like it save in dreams. There was nothing astonishing about the first cluster of houses he went by. Though the dwellings were willow and reed rather than of stout planks with shake roofs, in size and number they were much like the village near any damakuta. The people, despite their dark skin and exotic features, were familiar, too, seemed to go about life the way villagers did. A woman filling a water jug, boys swimming in the River, waving at him as he passed, a man watering his sheep. But as he drifted along, the houses grew denser and denser, larger, and the people more numerous. Some young women, bathing in the River, giggled and pointed at him, and one even motioned him toward them, to the mock dismay of her companions. Perkar waved and drifted on, eventually passing houses made of stone, wooden docks thick with ships, some larger than any he had ever imagined, clustered at the planked walkways like fish feeding at the edge of a stream. Men and women in colorful clothes watched him go by curiously, perhaps wondering if the stranger in his little boat could really be as pale as he seemed from a distance. He laid hard on the rudder, though he suspected the uselessness of it, was rewarded only by warmed muscles as Wun slid along beside him, shrank to small clusters of houses again, was gone, leaving him to wonder, from his brief glimpses of color and life, what the people might be like, what they might hope and dream, consider good food, teach their children.
Paradoxically, though he had never seen more people or buildings in one place—perhaps in his entire life—Wun still seemed small to him. His vision of “city” was a dream one, dominated by buildings that dwarfed even the largest in Wun.
Passing Wun, he crossed the mouth of a river flowing down from the north. He surveyed it curiously, speculating about from whence he or she flowed, whether it suffered as much as the Stream Goddess did, where she entered the Changeling. It almost seemed that the tributary spoke to him, not in words or even like Harka, but in signs. In its thick turbid waters, swollen by some far-off rain, Perkar seemed to catch evanescent images of distant mountains, storm clouds, raven black, encasing bones of silent lightning. Rain falling for days on end. The mud the tributary brought fanned out into the Changeling, trailed darkly along his northern edge, thinner with each downstream moment but still visible. Perkar considered the tributary’s resistance, its unwillingness to immediately die, and a vague hope gathered courage and became an idea. Once more he put his weight on the tiller, hoping to enter the fading brown stream, to reach a place where the hold of the Changeling might not be absolute. When that failed, he lifted up his pack and sword and prepared to jump.
“Don’t,” Harka warned him. He ignored the sword and leapt anyway.
He believed, briefly, that he had succeeded. His strokes took him cleanly toward the bank, and the current, while mightily strong, was not swift. Almost he reached the brown streak and its promise, the gift of some storm cloud far away, but then the current took him like an immense fist, and his pitiful Human strength was nothing. Exhausted, he soon found himself back against the boat.
“It was worth a try,” he told Harka later, his shirt drying in the sun.
“I thought you had resigned yourself to this,” the sword chided him.
“I have,” he told it, and did not further explain himself.
A day passed, and a night, and then a new morning. The River in the past few days had swollen to an enormous size, so huge that, even in the center of the channel, Perkar had to strain to see that southern shore, a fine line of green against the yellow haze of endless desert. The Changeling was still meandering east, but the sunrise was still farther to his left each morning, and so he knew they—the boat, the River and he—were gradually turning more southward, toward an ocean he had only heard the vaguest rumors of and could not imagine at all. Surely the River held all of the water there was in the world. How could the “ocean” be larger? His own language did not even have a word for such a thing; he could only call it the Big Lake. But the language in his head, with its strange vowels and clattering short consonants, did have such a word. They could imagine it.
Bemused, Perkar wondered if, as the Changeling ate streams, the ocean could eat the Changeling. That might be worth knowing, a way of eventual escape even, except that whatever could eat him might be worse, more powerful still.
Toward midday, he noticed another vessel approaching him from the northeast bank. It grew quickly in his sight, a lean, long craft with a lateen sail, a white triangle fragment of the overhead sun.
He drew Harka, gazing off in the distance at nothing in particular. His regard was drawn inevitably back to the approaching craft. Twice more he tried looking away, and twice more he found himself staring at the ever-closer sail.
“They are a danger to me, then?” he asked the sword.
“So it would seem,” Harka replied.
He took the tiller and guided the boat toward the opposite bank. The Changeling let him; he knew from experience that he could get close to shore if he wanted, though when the River deemed him too close he would stop him. Despite this maneuver, the approaching sail drew nearer and nearer. In a short time, the strange boat was just to the left of him. As he watched, the canvas came down, and two men began paddling furiously as a third watched him impassively from the bow.
“What do you want?” he called to them, when he judged them near enough to hear.
The man in the bow replied in a language Perkar had never heard before, but understood well. It was the language taught him by his dreams.
“I don’t know that barbarous tongue, westlander,” the man shouted back. “But if you can understand real speech and have any sense, you won’t make trouble for us.”
Perkar opened his mouth, and alien words licked off his tongue, first thickly, but swiftly learning more grace.
“I have no desire to cause you trouble,” he declared.
“Well, then,” the man retorted, as the two boats pulled almost within reaching distance. “In that case, you will abandon your ship now and save us the trouble of throwing you off. If you jump, too, you can leave your boat in a single piece rather than with your head and body separated.”
“I have nothing of value to steal,” Perkar said reasonably. “And I have no wish to fight you.” Both statements were more than true. Though strange-looking, these m
en were Human Beings, not gods who would wing home to their mountain and be reclothed. They were men, and if they died the River would swallow their souls. Perhaps they would end like the watery fish he had speared, far back at the headwaters, memories of themselves in the current Like the Kapaka.
Fury sparked at that. He realized they might well kill him, too, and that he no longer wished.
The man in the bow scowled, fiercely ridged eyebrows bunching above a hawklike nose, piercing black eyes. He held up a curved sword—heavy-looking, more like a giant cleaver than something to fight with. “Jump off or die,” the stranger warned. One of the other men produced a sword, as well, while the third maneuvered the boat closer still.
Perkar drew Harka and stood, too. A month and a half in the boat had left him more than adept at standing in a rocking vessel.
“Please,” he pleaded, though in him the anger was growing. “There is no need for this. I have nothing.”
“You have your boat,” the man countered easily, “and that will fetch a price worth fighting for. In fact, it might fetch a very high price as a curio. The Waterborn down in Nhol like curious things.” His eyes narrowed. “And that sword; quite odd. Furthermore, you are clearly from far, far away. Why would you travel so far unless you have something to trade?”
It wasn’t really a question, and Perkar realized that the man was not neg otiating, but only trying to convince him to jump. Despite his belligerent attitude, he seemed reluctant to attack, even given the advantage he and his men had in numbers. He was perhaps thirty-five or forty, old enough to have experienced a few nasty surprises, to know that even the most promising situation could end in disaster. His men were young, younger than Perkar, though they had a hard look about them and numerous scars. The man’s sons, perhaps?
“You can see I have nothing, or you are blind,” he pointed out. “Let me go in peace. I can’t jump in the River, he won’t let me.” Why wouldn’t they listen to him?
“The River doesn’t care about you—or anybody—except the Waterborn,” the man asserted. He spat. “That for you. Get out of your boat or die.”
He hesitated, wondering what would happen if he did jump overboard. Surely the Changeling would not let them take the boat. But if it did …
Perkar saw the man decide; it was a hardening of the eyes, a tightening of the gut and then, as if by some signal, the two strangers leapt into his boat swords drawn and already swinging.
Sudden, dark joy stabbed through Perkar as he shifted his weight to account for the sudden motion of the boat, crouching as he did so. At last someone to strike, someone to kill who deserved it. He brought Harka up to parry, slid the godsword on over his head to catch the strike of the second man. The first sword rang and slid away, but the younger man’s weapon made a very peculiar sound as Harka cut straight through it. His eyes seeking danger, Perkar turned quickly enough to catch the first attacker’s return stroke. The enemy sword shuddered and nicked deeply. Reversing again, he sliced back at the other pirate, who had not quite come to terms with his ruined sword and was swinging it anyway. Ignoring the wild attack, he cut into the man’s exposed ribs just below the armpit. He sliced cleanly through, felt a slight jolt as the spine clove in two. Harka disengaged easily, caught a third attack by the first man—on whose face a sudden comprehension was just dawning. The parried sword slid into the side of the boat and thunked into the wood as Harka glittered through the sunshine, flinging droplets of blood behind and opened the man’s belly. Entrails spilled out like eels from a split sack, and the man stared at Perkar, wide-eyed. Perkar was turning yet again at Harka’s insistence, but the weight of the younger man fell heavily against him, hands clawing at his head. Perkar brought his elbow in frantically—the fellow was too close for sword work—but it was more of a stumble than an attack; the young man slid against him, slicking him with blood. For the second time in his life, he was drenched in the stinking red fluid of another person’s body.
He snarled and turned toward the boat, though Harka did not beckon him to. The third man was rowing desperately away, eyes wide with terror. Perkar shouted incoherently after him.
The older man was still alive. He lay in the bottom of the boat, trying to hold in his intestines. Perkar shuddered, ran his finger down the river of blood on his body. “This was your fault,” he spat furiously. “You made me do this!”
The man just blinked at him.
Blood, Perkar suddenly thought. The Changeling knew me because he tasted my blood.
He tried not to let the thought form fully, tried not to puzzle it out. It was more instinct than anything else that drove him to grab his pack, sheath bloody Harka, and dive into the River. The bank was close, as close as it had been in a long time.
The River let him go at first, but it had done that before. It wasn’t until he actually felt sand beneath his feet that he shrieked in jubilation. It had worked! The Changeling had mistaken him, cloaked in another’s blood!
Two steps he took through the shallows, and the River took hold of him.
“No!” he hissed through his teeth. He kicked, strained with everything he had. Current clenched him, hauling him back out. In desperation he dove, clawed with his hands at the shallow bottom, and miraculously, his fingers brushed something hard. He tore at it, got a hold, pulled.
Unfortunately he could not hold onto the thing—it seemed to be a root—and raise his head above water, too. He knotted all his determination together, tied it about the root, and heaved, even as his lungs began to remind him frantically that breathing was a necessity. He pulled until his shoulder ached as if stung by ants, but finally he managed to drag himself far enough inland to get just his nose up, to sip a tiny amount of air. His arms were trembling now, but he was so close.
When he got his whole head above water, he knew he would succeed. It took a long time, until his body was weak and his mind reduced to a single thought—pull!—but at last he lay on the sand, the warm, dry sand. With the paltry energy left him, Perkar stumbled as far from the water as he could get, crashing into trees, torn by briars. When he finally stopped, it was because he could go no farther.
He could no longer see the River, but with the last of his strength he faced it. “You let the bit slip,” he gasped. “I warned you.” Then he sank down, resting against a tree trunk, trembling from exertion. Free.
VI
A Visitor
“Well,” Ghan asked, studying her face closely. “To what do we owe this renewed interest in matters intellectual?” His pen remained poised to continue its scratching upon the sheaf of paper open before him.
“I need to see those books, Ghan. Please.”
“A little argument with your paramour, perhaps? A disagreement over ‘lacies’?”
Hezhi suppressed a snarl. “Ghan,” she snapped instead. “I don’t have time to argue with you, do you understand? I know I upset you. I know you think I have better things to do than to play the court games. Don’t you think I know that? But if you ever thought the least bit of me, if you ever cared about me at all, you have to help me. I have no time!”
Ghan’s face changed oddly as she said this. She wasn’t sure what emotions he displayed, so quickly did he master them—dismay? fear?
He regarded her for another moment, his face now carefully blanked, and then tersely commanded, “Come.” Grasping her hand—her hand—he practically dragged her off to the back room, where the index and valuable documents were kept. Shutting the door, he bolted it from the inside.
“You little fool,” he hissed. “Don’t you know better than to go shouting about like that? Who knows who might hear you?”
“What do you mean? What did I say?”
Ghan stepped back, his eyes dark with challenge. “Tell me,” he said, his voice harsh. “Tell me why you have ‘no time.’”
“I cannot,” she breathed. Ghan knew? “I cannot. I know you have been Forbidden.”
“Forbidding stops me from speaking, not from hearing. Tell me.”
>
She studied her teacher, her heart sinking. Tears poised behind her eyes, cataracts waiting to fall. “I can’t trust you,” she sobbed suddenly. “I can’t trust anyone. Not now.”
“Hezhi,” Ghan said more gently. “Hezhi, listen to me.” He took her chin between thumb and forefinger and tugged it gently up. “I notice things, you know,” he said at last. “I heard the talk about the ghost in the Hall of Moments. There are those who think it was after you. I saw, that time when you ordered that boy away from you, and he went, as if you had slapped him. You read books, many books, and all about the Royal Blood, about the old city. Can’t you see I’ve been helping you all along? Child, you must trust me. I’m all that you have.”
She stared at him, blinking away tears. It was true, of course, she knew that. Sometimes his help had been blatant, usually not. She had to trust him because he already knew—because she had to trust someone.
“We cannot get the books you want,” Ghan went on. “The priesthood will not release them to me, and even if they were so inclined, they would certainly want to know who was reading them, and why. They would find you out, you see?”
“They will find me out anyway,” Hezhi all but shrieked. “The next time they test me. The next time …”
“Is it that bad?” Ghan whispered almost wonderingly.
Lips pressed together defiantly, she pulled up her long sleeve, and there it was, blue and green in the pale illumination streaming weakly through the translucent skylight.
“By the River,” Ghan breathed. Hand to his forehead, he sat back heavily onto a small stool, massaging his brow.
“What am I to do with you?” he muttered.
“You can’t do anything,” she rejoined, trying to seem brave. Despite her intentions, her voice sounded like a pathetic moan, even to her own ears.
