Ancients of Days

Chapter Eighteen The Floating Forest

They were late for the rendezvous, but the Weazel was waiting for them as promised, at the upriver end of the floating docks. Yama and Tamora stood at the rail of the quarterdeck as the little ship angled away from the burning town.

The warship was still raking the shore with needles of hot light. Although he had revenged his father’s torture, Yama felt a mixture of shame and anger and helplessness. He stood straight, gripping the polished wooden rail so tightly his arms ached to the elbows, and watched the sack of Aeolis with tears slipping down his cheeks. He would be a witness, if nothing else. He would face this destruction without flinching, and carry it with him forever.

The sailors nudged each other and whispered that he wept for his home. They were only partly right. Yama did not know it, but he was also weeping for the loss of his innocence.

The lookout cried a warning. Tamora pointed to the lights of a picketboat that was coming around the point of the bay, heading out to intercept the Weazel.

“He is coming,” Yama said. “I knew that he would.”

But he was still struck through and through by fear, and had to lean against the rail because he was suddenly trembling so hard.

Captain Lorquital ordered the staysails unreefed. “We’ll make speed as best we can,” she told Yama. “Those boys have oars, but as long as the wind holds we can outrun them.”

Tamora wanted to unshroud the cannon and break out the hand weapons, but Captain Lorquital refused and Aguilar stood foursquare in front of the armory chest.

Yama put a hand on Tamora’s arm and was astonished to discover that she was trembling almost as violently as he was. Prefect Corin had put his mark on both of them.

“I’ll hold by what we agreed,” Captain Lorquital said, “and so will you. We’ve no fight to pick here, no matter what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Silhouetted against the burning town, the picketboat came on across blood-red water, its single bank of oars striking to the beat of a drum. A white lantern shone at its masthead, signifying that it wished to parlay. For several minutes, it steadily closed the gap; then the Weazel caught the wind and the gap began to widen again.

Something shot from the side of the picketboat. It skipped over the water like a flung stone and rose high above the Weazel before Tamora could take aim with her captured rifle. It was a small machine, as flat as a plate and spinning rapidly. It moved to and fro in little jerks above the tip of the mast. As with the machine which had been sent against Yama in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, its mind was hidden by complex loops of self-engulfing logic that grabbed at his attention as he tried to cleave through them. It was like plunging into a briar patch full of snapping jaws and whirling blades. A ghastly light suddenly flooded from the machine, etching everyone’s shadow at their feet, and a voice boomed out, ordering the Weazel to stand to or have her sail cut free.

Captain Lorquital cupped her hands and shouted across the widening gap of water to the picketboat. “Show your authority!”

The machine tipped, aiming its sharp spinning edge at the forestays; at the same moment, Yama untangled the last of its defenses and found its tiny linear mind. It flung itself sideways, falling a long way before striking the water and vanishing with scarcely a splash.

Captain Lorquital gave Yama a long and hard look, but said nothing.

“Well,” Tamora said, “he’ll know you’re on board now.”

“He knows that already,” Yama said.

It became a contest of skill between the Weazel and the picketboat. The warship turned her light cannon away from the burning town, but too late: it fired no more than two ranging shots before the Weazel passed beyond the downriver point of the bay (the paeonin mill had been leveled to a hummock of glassy slag) and the warship and the burning city were lost from sight.

Yama dredged his memory for a map of the complicated web of currents as the Weazel threaded the maze of inshore mud shoals and stands of banyans. A man at the bow dropped a weighted line and called the depth every few minutes, and Yama stood with Captain Lorquital and the helmsman through the night while the crew took turns to rest. Pandaras and Eliphas slept on their mats under the awning; Tamora paced the deck amidships or stood by the man at the bow, peering into the darkness ahead or sharpening the long narrow blade of the sword she had taken from the armory of the peel-house. Eliphas woke near dawn and came up onto the aft deck to ask how things stood.

“Well, we are still here,” Ixchel Lorquital said. “If the wind stays fair we’ll be here a while longer.”

There were floating islands spread everywhere ahead of the ship, ten thousand green dots scattered across the shining sweep of the river. The ranges of cloud that towered above the far-side horizon caught the early light of the sun. Their folds and peaks glowed white and purple and gold.

Eliphas leaned at the rail next to Yama, who was staring into the light of the rising sun, trying to make out the smoke of the burning city against the long line of the shore. The old man cleared his throat, spat accurately into the white water that purled along the ship’s hull, and said, “You should rest, brother. In my small experience of adventure, sleep is a most valuable currency.”

“Why did they do it, Eliphas?”

Eliphas’s silver eyes shone with reflected light. His black skin gleamed as if oiled; scraps of light were caught in the tightly nested curls of his white hair. He said, “Because they wanted to lure you into a trap, and were desperate. Because they have confused their duty and the base desires of their own selves. Because they serve the Preservers in name only, and have turned themselves into a thing that would destroy the world to save it. They have lost their way, brother. They deserve to be destroyed.”

“Yet no one stood against them in the Palace of the Memory of the People until I acted.”

“Those that stand against the Department of Indigenous Affairs are destroyed or absorbed. As are those that do not, by and by. Indigenous Affairs has fed on the war, and the war has become its reason for existence. If it survives the insurrection against it and wins the war, then it will find another enemy, even if it is some part of its own self.”

Yama remembered the story told to him by the headman of the village of the husbandmen, the story of the department known as the Head of the People, which had absorbed all others until at last it had nothing to fight against but its own self. Surely, he thought, the Preservers had not created the world so that it would repeat the same stories in a series of futile cycles, like a book read again and again by an uncomprehending idiot.

He said, “They want to force me to their will. Because of that, I can only see them as my enemy.”

Eliphas said, “Brother, you should use your gift against them. The machine you destroyed is nothing. What you did to free us is nothing. You are capable of much more. You should not allow yourself to be enslaved for the sake of your conscience.”

“Are you scared, Eliphas?”

“Of course. But there are great things to be discovered, if we survive this.”

“I am not sure if I can be free if I use my… gift without knowing how I use it, or why I have been given it. I have done bad things before this, Eliphas, although I did not mean to. I fear that I might do them again.”

Captain Lorquital had been standing at the stern rail, peering upriver through her spectacles; now she came over to Yama and Eliphas and said, “The picketboat is still following, but we have at least two leagues on it, and our lead will widen as long as the wind holds. But the warship is certain to follow us as well, and will be at least as fast as we are. How intent are these people on capturing you, Yama?”

“They will not stop.”

“I thought not. I’ll wake my daughter and we’ll decide what to do. But I know that we can’t run forever.”

“Perhaps we can hide, or find some way of turning to the attack.”

Captain Lorquital regarded Yama thoughtfully. “If it comes to a final fight, what would you do?”

“I do not know how, but I hope that I would be able to save the ship and everyone on it.”

Captain Lorquital seemed satisfied by this answer, but after she had gone to wake Aguilar, Eliphas said, “I hope you will put your scruples aside, brother. You will never find your bloodline if you do not first destroy your enemy.”

Yama thought that Eliphas was wrong. If he defined himself against his enemies, then he would be no better than they were. Yet there was a part of him that exulted in the idea of battle, a voracious cayman at the base of his brain given voice, he believed, by the woman in the shrine. Satisfied not by persuasion but by forceful coercion, not by courtship but by rape, a thing of uncontrolled appetite and lust that would destroy the world rather than die. He must control it. And then he thought, if I know that Derev is dead, if my father is dead or disgraced, which for him will be a living death, will I still be able to keep this resolve?

The free men of the crew broke fast with manioc porridge while the cook and the other slave scrubbed soot stains from the white deck with lye and holystones. Yama ate without appetite. Although he was very tired he felt that he could not rest, so Pandaras brought him the rifle and suggested he try some target practice. For an hour, Yama blipped slugs at bits of flotsam floating by, and then practiced cleaning and reassembling the rifle under Tamora’s instruction, his fingers thick and clumsy with lack of sleep. At last, Pandaras got him to lie down, and he fell asleep at once, and woke with the sun riding at its highest point.

Pandaras brought a hunk of black bread and a bowl of curried lentils salted with flecks of coarse fish flesh. The boy squatted in front of his master in the shade of the awning and watched him eat with a tender anxiety. The triangular mainsail and the square staysails stood taut against the blue sky. There was a ragged green line to starboard: a banyan forest.

Yama said, “Where do we stand?”

“The warship is in sight, master. It will catch up with us in a day, the Captain says. It is a very big ship, but it has big motors and has spread all its sail, too.”

Yama used the heel of the bread to scrape up the last of the lentils from his wooden bowl. He told Pandaras, “I cannot make a wish and save us.”

“No one asks you to, master. We’re making for the forest. We might lose them there, the Captain says. She and Aguilar talked it over while you slept. Tamora is pleased. She wants a fight.”

“I am sorry to have brought you on such a futile adventure, Pandaras.”

Pandaras struck an attitude and said, “Master, I was a pot boy when I found you. Now I am squire to a hero.”

Yama knew that it was not as simple a thing as many people supposed, to give up your life and dedicate it to another. He saw the love in Pandaras’s gaze and smiled.

He said, “A foolish hero, if a hero at all.”

“If that’s so, then I’m as much a fool for following you, master. And I don’t think I am a fool at all. Now let me take your tunic and wash it. I have your second-best shirt here, clean and pressed. We have certain standards to keep, even in these circumstances.”

Thousands of banyans had rooted in a long, narrow shoal at the backwater edge of the swift current in which the Weazel was sailing, a temporary forest that stretched away downriver for several leagues. Now it was almost summer, and the forest was beginning to break up. Already, singleton banyans floated along the edge of the shoal, turning in stately circles; fleets of fist-sized seeds, each with a single upright leaf like a sail, drifted on the currents.

The Weazel entered the forest’s maze by a channel so wide it could hold twenty ships side by side, and for a while she continued to make way under sail. But the channel split and split again, and with each turn it grew narrower until at last the staysails and their spars had to be drawn in. Captain Lorquital ordered the mast lowered, for the canopies of the banyans sometimes pressed together overhead to form a living green arch. Aguilar started the little reaction motor, normally used for maneuvering in harbor. It made a hollow knocking sound and blew puffs of black smoke from the stem vent. The smoke stank of burned cooking oil. The sailors hacked at branches which caught in the rails or scraped the gunwale. Bottom soundings gave wildly differing readings from minute to minute, from narrow channels where the Weazel’s keel scraped a tangled net of interlaced feeder roots to places so deep that no sounding could be made.

The dim green light, the odor of rotting vegetation and of silent green growth, the close fetid heat, like a cloth laid on his skin: all these calmed Yama. Orchids bright as flames grew amongst the glossy, shingling leaves. There were loops of red-leaved creeper and strangler figs and parasitic mangroves, gray hanks of hanging moss. Parts of the waterway were covered with pavements of brick-red water fern or wide patches of water hyacinth, whose waxy white flowers breathed a sickly-sweet odor. Dragonflies with wingspans as long as a man’s arm and jaws that could nip off a finger roosted on the upright spikes of breather roots; armies of metallic blue emmets staged tireless campaigns and caravanserais along mossy boughs.

Birds stalked from floating leaf to floating leaf with a swift strutting gait on feet with long widespread toes; hummingbirds darted from orchid to orchid; parrots flashed through the green shade; gar and caymans raised their snouts to watch the Weazel labor past. A troop of long-nosed monkeys swung along their aerial highways above the channel, screaming curses and raining orange excrement; the old carpenter, Phalerus, shot two with a short bow, and the cook set to skinning them for the pot. Once, the flat face of a manatee rose beneath the surface of the green water and regarded them with brown, human eyes—good to eat but bad luck to kill, Phalerus confided to Yama.

Tamora sat astride the bowsprit, the rifle cradled in her arms, her shaven, scarred head turning from side to side as she scanned the green press of leaves passing by on either side. Twice, the channel the Weazel was following closed into an impenetrable wall of leaves and branches, and the ship had to laboriously reverse course. Once, she grounded on the half-sunken, rotten corpse of a dead tree grown through with the feeder roots of its living neighbors, and had to be pulled off with a block and tackle rig attached to the main trunk of a grandfather banyan, with half the crew pulling on the ropes and the other half pushing with poles.

The light went quickly, a sudden gold-green dazzle amongst the trees and then a swift decline to pitch-black.

Frogs peeped and whistled; fish made splashes in the water around the ship, which in the last light had anchored at the junction of two wide channels. Bats swooped amongst the yards of the mast; insects signaled to each other with coded flashes of yellow or green light.

Supper was roast monkey flesh with fried bananas and rice (Tamora sucked meat from a raw rack of ribs and cracked the thin bones for marrow), eaten in the dim red light of half a dozen lanterns, against which big black beetles ceaselessly dashed themselves in unrequited lust.

Afterward, Yama climbed the tallest of the neighboring banyans, high above a long, narrow, dark sea of ceaselessly rustling leaves slashed and divided by forking channels. Upriver, a sudden flash of light defined the long line of the forest. Yama counted the seconds until the sound reached him: twenty-five. A few moments later there was another flash, a little way downriver from the first. There were machines out there too, but so far off that he could do no more than sense them.

Yama climbed down out of the fresh cool breeze into the dark clammy fetor under the canopy of the banyans, walked along a mossy, horizontal branch and vaulted the rail at the ship’s waist. When he told Captain Lorquital what he had seen, she drew on her pipe and blew a cloud of fragrant smoke before replying. She was the only one not troubled by the bites of black flies which at sunset had risen above the still water.

At last, she said, “They are burning their way through the trees with their light cannon. If I was planning the chase, I would put the warship downriver, beyond the point of the shoal, and have the picketboat quarter back and forth, hoping to flush us out. The forest is many leagues long but it is very narrow, and our enemy knows that we are heading downriver and cannot hide here indefinitely. We’re caught between the two of them.”

Aguilar was sitting cross-legged by her mother’s sling chair. She said, “We should not have come here. Better to take our chances in the open river.”

In the darkness by the rail, Tamora said, “The warship was catching up with us. At least we can make a stand here.”

“We don’t even know where it is,” Aguilar said. “We don’t even know where we are. We’ve trapped ourselves in a maze.”

Yama said, “As long as we follow the channels where there is a current, we will find our way out again.”

The glow of Captain Lorquital’s pipe brightened when she drew on it. Bright, then dim: like an insect signaling in the dark. She said, “I have heard of the trick with the current, but twice today we were following a current that went under a stand of trees and left us in a channel with no current at all.”

Phalerus appeared at the head of the companionway, a shadow against the glimmer of the white deck below. He said, “Something is coming.”

Yama and Tamora followed him to the bow. They climbed up by the cannon and the old sailor said, “Listen.”

The metallic peeping of frogs; little plashes and ripples in the current. Yama whispered that he heard nothing unusual.

“They are out there,” Tamora said, and opened the valve of the lantern she carried.

Its beam fell across the still black water. On the other side of the channel, backed by a wall of foliage, a green-skinned man raised a hand in front of his face.