by Greg Keyes
“Tell me,” Win begged. “Tell me more about your adventures.”
“There isn’t so much to tell about me,” he told the boy. “But I can tell you some of the things I saw, coming down the River. I can tell you about the old Mang man I met.”
“Tell me!” Win exclaimed delightedly. “Did you have to kill him with your sword?”
“No, he was very nice to me. He had a dog, too …”
He went on for a while, speaking of the vast open plains, gradually becoming desert the occasional distant mountains, the night that lightning had raged silently on every horizon without ever a thunderclap or a raindrop. As he did so, a peculiar thing happened. Remembering these things with his voice, he suddenly marveled at them. When those sights had been laid out actually there for him to see, he had absorbed them with the eyes of a corpse, indifferent. Wonder, long dormant, now quickened, and he felt like both laughing and crying. Instead he talked on, until Win’s little eyes, fluttering closed and frantically opening again, finally drooped still and stayed that way. Ghaj carried him up to his loft bedroom.
“Let me show you where you will stay,” Ghaj said when she returned. She led him inside the house and motioned to a quilted pallet on the floor. Perkar glanced around, puzzled.
“Where will you sleep?”
Ghaj grinned crookedly with her wide mouth. “The reason people say those things about widows,” she confided, “is because they are true.” He stood dumbly as she reached to her hem and shucked her dress up over her head. “Besides,” she added. “It’s not likely I’ll meet another one like you anytime soon, and I can’t resist seeing how you’re put together.”
“I …” He felt a familiar shame, one almost forgotten in the past months. How could he explain to her, about the goddess, about his problems?
He was still searching for a way to tell her when she stepped closer, reached out, and touched his cheek. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “I may not be as beautiful as you might like, I know …”
Her hand was warm, smelled of garlic and crawfish. Her eyes were kind and just a little hungry, with disappointment already threatening at the edges. Despite himself, despite what he knew, he looked at her, took in her naked body with his eyes. Indeed, she was like no woman he had ever dreamed of having. Her features were broad and thick, lips everted, cheekbones flat, angular. Her body was thick, too, in every dimension, and she was not young. The slightly swelling belly and the curve of her hips were stippled with pale stretch marks, as were her breasts, otherwise generous, enormous nipples charcoal in the moonlight. She was as much a Human woman as anyone could be, nothing like a goddess at all. He gasped aloud, closed his eyes at the sudden rush of blood in his body, at the fierce urge that overtook him then. Ghaj sighed with delight (and perhaps relief) as he sagged forward, embraced her, buried his head in the juncture of her neck and clavicle. She was salty, hot, her skin was a luxury like none he had imagined. He nearly sobbed with ecstasy as her lips closed around the lobe of his ear, as she pushed her hands up under his kilt.
“I …” he gasped as she took control of the situation, gently pushed him back onto the pallet.
“I know,” she whispered. “It’s been a long time since you were with a woman. It’s been a long time for me, too. We have to try and be quiet, though. If we wake Win, we’ll have less time for each other.”
That made good sense to Perkar, but there were many times that night when he wondered how anyone in the entire world could still be asleep.
Later, when they were both exhausted, they held one another until limbs began to go numb and then settled for nestling. Perkar felt his quickening sense of wonder rise above him like a halo. Ghaj was now a beautiful woman, and he gazed at her through the night, noticed that her thick features had become sensual, her stubby hard fingers tender and evocative. The moon was set, sight replaced by touch and memory, when exhaustion drew up over his joy and hope like a warm comforter and settled him into dreams.
At Ghaj’s earnest urging, he stayed another day and night, recovering his strength and enjoying Human company. He spent the day doing more chores and making Win a little bow and arrow so he could be like the great Ngangata of Perkar’s stories. That night, he and Ghaj made love again, and it was even nicer without the weirdness and uncertainty of the first time. He had never imagined that passion and comfort could be combined. After all, one could not be comfortable around a goddess.
He awoke to Ghaj’s steady gaze, her dark skin buttered gold by the morning, her hair hanging mussed in her face. She was tracing her finger lightly over his chest, brushing the white mass of scar tissue where the lion had cut him open, the stiff ridge of it where the Huntress’ spear had driven through him. When she noticed him awake, she smiled faintly. “So young, to have all these,” she said, and lightly kissed the spear wound.
“Thank you,” he said a bit later, as they were getting dressed.
“For what?”
“Everything. I know you don’t understand, but this has been important for me. I’ve never …”
“You aren’t going to tell me you were a virgin,” she teased. “You were clumsy now and then, but not that clumsy.”
“No,” Perkar admitted, embarrassed. “No, not exactly. But it was important”
Ghaj walked over, gathered him in for a hug. “It was very nice,” she said. “I enjoyed our time together. Come back through and if I’m not remarried, we’ll enjoy each other again.” She took his chin in her fingers, kissed him lightly. “You do know I could never ask you to stay? I like you, despite your foreign weirdness, but as a husband you wouldn’t do me much good around here. Despite what I said, I do care what people say.”
“I know. I’m flattered that it even crossed your mind, Ghaj.”
“A sweet boy, despite your scars,” she said, kissing him again.
Later, Win and Ghaj helped him get his things together. Ghaj replaced his dilapidated saddle pack with a woven shoulder-net and after a bit of cobbling reduced some of her husband’s too-large shoes to fit Perkar. Win was delighted with his bow. To Ghaj Perkar had nothing to give, save the little charm his mother had made him. He gave her that. “I wish I had better,” he told her. “You’ve been very kind to me.”
Ghaj’s eyes twinkled. “Come back this way and I’ll be ‘kind’ to you some more.” She gave him another hug and a kiss that lingered just a little, and pointed him down the road.
“You’ll be to the outskirts of Nhol by nightfall, if you walk briskly. You don’t want to enter Nhol at night, so I suggest you go a little more than briskly. I also suggest you find one of the dock-side taverns—they’re used to strangers there and always have rooms. Take this.” She handed him a little pouch. He shook it and it jingled.
“A Royal and a few soldiers,” she informed him. “I can spare just that for you.”
“It’s more than I need. I can’t …”
“Hush. In Nhol, without money, you’ll be sleeping in an alley and have your throat slit before the first half a night. Take the coins, consider it pay for the work you’ve done around here, if you insist. And I suggest if you’re going to stay long in the city that you find some way to pick up a few more soldiers. What I gave you won’t go far at all.”
He nodded. “Again, I’m grateful.”
Ghaj called out to him once more as he was about to turn a bend in the trail. “Don’t trust anyone in Nhol, Perkar.”
He waved and called back that he wouldn’t. Win followed him a little way, but not much beyond the edge of the bottomlands, where the trail climbed up out of the floodplain and onto the drier land around. He watched as the little boy’s stubby legs took him quickly back away.
The sun was hot, but it did nothing to spoil Perkar’s mood. Though the hard dirt trail was taking him to an unknown destiny, he felt ready to meet it now, hopeful even. The doom hanging over him like a thundercloud, if not departed, was at least letting a bit of light in.
In that light the day was beautiful, the strange sc
enery fascinating. It was a landscape of fields, and what fields they were! Grander than most pastures, they rolled out flat on both sides of the road, broken only by an occasional line of trees, the distant levee on his left, and strange streams as straight as arrow shafts. It was only after he crossed a score of these streams, wondering at their perfect regularity, that he was struck with the idea that someone had dug them. The notion dumbfounded him, for though he could see the use of such unthinkably extensive ditches for watering crops, the labor involved was more than he could imagine. And yet the result was as staggering as the effort, for beyond the fields nothing grew but scrub, while the fields were green with strange plants.
And there were no cattle at all. What did these people do for milk, cheese—more important, Piraku? And yet the fields and their artificial rivers spoke eloquently of determination, ingenuity, and strength. Perhaps that, itself, was their Piraku.
Taking Ghaj’s advice, he traveled as briskly as he could, but more than two score days with his butt in the bottom of a boat had not prepared him for a long walk. Near noon he stopped to rest, to eat the leaf-wrapped parcels of smoked catfish Ghaj had given him. In the shade of a cottonwood, he took Harka out to clean his blade.
“You puzzle me,” Harka told him.
“I puzzle myself, but go on.”
“All of that trouble to escape the Changeling, and yet you still follow the course he plotted for you.”
“I said I would finish this, and I will,” he replied. “But on my terms. That’s important to me, to do things because I choose to.”
“Perhaps that is the chief difference between Humans and gods,” Harka offered. “We almost always do things because we must, because it is our nature.”
“No difference,” Perkar said. “Neither gods nor Humans like to be told what to do. Both follow their natures, and both want to be left alone to do it.”
“Human nature changes notoriously quickly, however. The nature of gods changes only slowly, through many passing seasons.”
“Like the Changeling,” Perkar noted.
“He may not be the best example.”
“Once I hoped to kill him,” Perkar said. “Now it is enough for me merely to frustrate him. He wants something of me in Nhol. Very well, I will go to Nhol. But when I get there, I will be my own man. I will judge the situation for myself.”
“Ngangata is right. You are most dangerous when you think.”
“Perhaps. But in Nhol, I do not care whom I kill. I have no kin there, no friends.”
“There is always me,” Harka reminded him.
Perkar was forced to smile at the perversity of that. “If you die,” he said, “I will most certainly be dead, too, and so I will not care. No, my only concern in Nhol is that I kill only those the Changeling does not want me to.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Not at all. I haven’t felt even a flicker of guilt for killing those thieves a few days ago.” That wasn’t quite true, but to his own surprise, it was almost true.
“That isn’t what I mean,” Harka said. “How can you pretend to know what the Changeling wants?”
Perkar finished the fish and stood. “This girl who calls me. I think she must be one of these Waterborn. I think he wants me to save her from something. And so I will not.”
“Perhaps he wants you to kill her. Perhaps it is she who wants to be saved. ”
“We’ll see. We’ll see when we get there. Right now I feel good, Harka, so keep your doubts to yourself. I choose to do this now—on the River I was compelled. I could walk back home if I wanted, I could go live with the Mang or become a fisherman. I pick my own doom from now on.”
“Let us hope,” Harka replied, “that is merely a euphemism and not a prophecy.”
He grinned. “I care not!” he shouted, and brandished Harka above his head before returning him to his scabbard.
He reached the city walls not long before dusk, and found that while his dreams might have been competent to teach him a strange language, they were less adept at preparing him for the sight of the city. The walls alone were larger than any Human-made structure he had ever seen, dwarfing the largest damakuta a hundred times over. To that fact he added that they were clearly made of stone and not wood, and the effort put into building the stupendous stockade was, to him, even more difficult to envision than the artificial streams. As he approached it from a distance, he kept expecting that size to be an illusion that would resolve itself when he got closer, reveal that the city was not really as large as it seemed, that the towers and great rising blocks of buildings that peered at him from over that great wall must be of more reasonable dimensions. And yet, the more closely he approached, the clearer it was that he was in a place where magnificent, impossible things were done. He began to understand, with a sinking feeling, why these people insisted on calling his own “barbarians.” What he saw here made the difference between the dwellings of the Alwat and his father’s damakuta seem insignificant Small wonder that the people of Nhol thought of his people in much the same way as his thought of the Alwat. And yet that thought gave him a bit of comfort, because he now understood—finally—that what people built didn’t make them any more or less brave, worthy, or deserving. No man he had ever heard of had died any better than Digger and her kin or deserved more praise.
The gatehouse was a white-plastered cube the size of his father’s stables; Perkar wondered how many warriors it might hold. He was greeted by only two; they looked at him as if he might be something the River had pulled in, something less than savory. Which, in its own way, was true enough.
“That kitchen knife of yours stays in its sheath here, do you understand?” The soldier spoke slowly, as if he thought Perkar might not comprehend him. “If you go near the great temple, any of the fanes, or within four streets of the palace, you may not wear it at all, unless you are employed by a member of the royal family to do so.”
“I understand,” he replied. “I am seeking employment for my sword, actually. Can you direct me to someone whose business it is to hire?”
The second guard rolled his eyes. “You barbarians. Never been in a city before in your life, have you?”
“No,” he confessed.
“Take my advice. Get a job on the docks, if you need money. That’s good, honest work. The nobles don’t usually hire foreign bodyguards, and when they do it’s usually not very good for your continued well-being, if you understand me.”
“I’m not sure I do,” he said.
“Too bad,” said the first guard, smiling in a way that didn’t seem very genuine. “That’s all the free advice we’ll give today.”
Perkar shrugged, a little put off by their rudeness, but still too overwhelmed by the city to take it personally.
“Go down to the docks, near Southtown,” the second guard called after him anyway. “If someone wants your sword, they’ll come looking for you there.”
“Thank you,” he shouted back, meaning it.
Passing through the thick, plastered walls, he entered a maze of confusion. His first instinct was to go back out take several deep breaths, and reconsider his course of action. How could anyone find anything in such cluttered bedlam?
People were everywhere, as thick as ants on a piece of meat. They clustered in bunches or darted about, called to each other, all talking at once, it seemed. Beyond the gate was a small, cobbled square, buildings bunched at every side of it, enclosing it so that it more resembled a canyon than a yard. The only exits—save for the gate, of course—were a multitude of claustrophobically narrow paths between the buildings, cobbled like the square. Cobbled paths? Once again, he felt dismay at the sheer scale of Nhol.
He also felt horribly out of place. People were staring at him, rudely and openly. Some—particularly the children—even pointed and laughed. He grimaced uncomfortably. He was a stranger here, of exceedingly strange appearance, undoubtedly, though he had hoped the clothes Ghaj had given him would help. However, he noted that thou
gh the people swirling around him were dressed in a similar manner, most wore much more colorful clothing, and though the sun had darkened his skin considerably, it was many shades lighter than any other he saw.
He had not the faintest idea which of the little paths to take, and so he walked down the broadest one; as near as he could tell it led southeast, and the man had said something about Southtown.
The street was crowded, despite the late hour; night seemed to come quickly in the city, and Perkar was reminded of being at the bottom of the gorge at the River’s headwaters. The buildings around him rose far above his head, perhaps four or five times his height. Balconies jutted off of these clifflike faces, here and there, and often people stood or sat out on them. Without fail, all of these upper observers followed Perkar’s progress closely, and he wondered at first if they might be watchmen of some sort; but most were actually women, some of them rather old. It occurred to him that they might—strange as it seemed—live in those lofts, though he had originally supposed the upper rooms were for storing hay or grain.
As the sky darkened, the street reminded him more of the tunnels in the mountain than of a gorge. The heavens still held blue and gray, even a hint of crimson and argent, but smoke and shadows ruled the streets. Torches burned murkily in sconces near doorways, and the dragon-eyes of oil lamps stalked and hovered around him, revealing here a face, there a patch of clothing, the dark knots of the hands gripping the lantern handles. A fog of smoke from burning wood, oil, and tar lay heavily upon him, mingling with the stench of Human Beings, strange foods cooking, and a half-dozen other distinct but unrecognized odors.
