Child of the River

Chapter Twelve The Execution

After sunset, Yama climbed to the heliograph platform that circled the top of the tallest of the peel-house’s towers. He uncapped the observation telescope and, turning it on the heavy steel gimbals which floated in sealed oil baths, lined up its declinational and equatorial axes in a combination he knew as well as his own name.

Beyond the darkening vanishing point, the tops of the towers that rose up from the heart of Ys shone in the last light of the sun like a cluster of fiery needles floating high above the world, higher than the naked peaks of the Rim Mountains. Ys! In his room, Yama had spent a little time gazing at his old map before reluctantly rolling it up and putting it away. He had traced the roads that crossed the barrens of the coastal plains, the passes through the mountains that embraced the city. He vowed now that in a handful of days he would stand at the base of the towers as a free man.

When he put up the telescope and leaned at the rail, with warm air gusting around him, he saw prickles of light flickering in the middle distance. Messages. The air was full of messages, talking of war, of faraway battles and sieges at the midpoint of the world.

Yama walked to the other side of the tower and stared out across the wide shallow valley of the Breas toward Aeolis, and saw with a little shock that the execution pyre had already been kindled. The point of light flickered like a baleful star fallen to the ground outside the wall of the little city.

“They would have killed me,” he said, trying out the words, “if there was money in it.”

Yama watched for a long time, until the distant fire began to dim and was outshone by the ordinary lights of the city.

Lob and the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns were dead. The Aedile and the colorless man, the clerk, Prefect Corin, would be in grave procession toward the temple, led by Father Quine and flanked by Sergeant Rhodean’s men in polished black armor.

His supper had been set out in his room, but he left it and went down to the kitchen and, armored by his new authority, hacked a wedge from a wheel of cheese and took a melon, a bottle of yellow wine, and one of the heavy date loaves that had been baked that morning. He cut through the kitchen gardens, fooled the watchdogs for the last time, and walked along the high road before plunging down the steep slope of the bluff and following the paths along the tops of the dikes which divided the flooded paeonin fields.

The clear, shallow Breas made a rushing noise in the darkness as it ran swiftly over the flat rocks of its bed. At the waterlift, two oxen plodded side by side around their circle, harnessed to the trimmed trunk of a young pine. This spar turned the shaft that, groaning as if in protest at its eternal torment, lifted a chain of buckets from the river and tipped them in a never-ending cascade into the channels which fed the irrigation system of the paeonin fields. The oxen walked in their circle under a roof of palm fronds, their tails rhythmically slapping their dung-spattered flanks. Now and then they snatched a mouthful of the fodder scattered around the perimeter of their circular path, but mostly they walked with their heads down, from nowhere to nowhere.

No, Yama thought, I will not serve.

He sat on an upturned stone a little distance off the path and ate meltingly sweet slices of melon while he waited. The oxen plodded around and around, turning the groaning shaft. Frogs peeped in the paeonin fields. Beyond the city, at the mouth of the Breas, the misty light of the Arm of the Warrior was lifting above the far-side horizon. It would rise a little later each night, a little farther downriver. Soon it would not rise at all, and the Eye of the Preservers would appear above the upriver vanishing point, and it would be summer. But before then Yama would be in Ys.

Two people were coming along the path, shadows moving through the Galaxy’s blue twilight. Yama waited until they had gone past before he whistled sharply.

“We thought you might not be here,” Ananda said as he walked up to where Yama sat.

“Well met,” Derev said, at Ananda’s shoulder. The Galaxy put blue shadows in the unbound mass of her white hair and a spark in each of her large, dark eyes. “Oh, well met, Yama!”

She rushed forward and hugged him. Her light-boned body, her long slim arms and legs, her heat, her scent. Yama was always surprised to discover that Derev was taller than himself. Despite the cold certainty he had nursed ever since Ananda’s remark about Lob’s drunken spree, his love rekindled in her embrace. It was an effort not to respond, and he hated himself because it seemed a worse betrayal than anything she might have done.

Derev drew back a little and said, “What’s wrong?”

Yama said, “I am glad you came. There is something I want to ask you.”

Derev smiled and moved her arms in a graceful circle, making the wide sleeves of her white dress floatingly glimmer in the half-dark. “Anything! As long, of course, as I can hear your story. All of it, not just the highlights.”

Ananda found the wedge of cheese and began to pare slices from it. “I’ve been fasting,” he explained. “Water for breakfast, water for lunch.”

“And pistachios,” Yama said.

“I never said I would make a good priest. I am supposed to be cleaning out the narthex while Father Quine dines with the Aedile and Prefect Corin. This is a strange place to meet, Yama.”

“There was something Dr. Dismas once said to me, about the habits we fall into. I wanted to be reminded of it.”

Derev said, “But you are all right. You have recovered from your adventures.”

“I learned much from them.”

“And you will tell all,” Ananda said. He handed around slices of bread and cheese, and pried the cork out of the wine bottle with his little knife. “I think,” he said, “that you should start at the beginning.”

The story seemed far stranger and more exciting than the actual experience. To tell it concisely, Yama had to miss out the fear and tension he had felt during every moment of his adventures, the long hours of discomfort when he had tried to sleep in wet clothes on the floor of the banyan, his growing hunger and thirst while wandering the hot shaly land of the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead.

As he talked, he remembered a dream he had had while sleeping on the catafalque inside the old tomb in the Silent Quarter. He had dreamed that he had been swimming in the Great River, and that a current had suddenly caught him and swept him toward the edge of the world, where the river fell away in thunder and spray. He had tried to swim against the current, but his arms had been trapped at his sides and he had been helplessly swept through swift white water toward the tremendous noise of the river’s fall. The oppressive helplessness of the dream had stayed with him all that morning, right up to the moment when Lud and Lob had caught up with him, but he had forgotten about it until now. And now it seemed important, as if dream and reality were, during the telling of his tale, coterminous. He told his two friends about the dream as if it were one more part of his adventures, and then described how Lob and Lud had surprised him, and how he had killed Lud by accident.

“I had found an old knife, and Lob got hold of it, ready to kill me because I had killed his brother. But the knife hurt him. It seemed to turn into something like a ghoul, or a giant spider. I ran, I am ashamed to say. I left him with his dead brother.”

“He would have killed you,” Derev said. “Of course you should have run.”

Yama said, “I should have killed him. The knife would have done it for me if I had not taken it, I think. It helped me, like the ghost ship.”

“Lob escaped,” Ananda said. “He wanted his father to condemn you for the murder of his brother, the fool, but then you came back. Lob had already convicted himself, and Unprac confessed to his part as soon as he was arrested.”

Unprac was the name of the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns. Yama had not known it until the trial.

“So I killed Lob anyway. I should have killed him then, in the tomb. It would have been a cleaner death. It was a poor bargain he got in the end.”

“That’s what they said about the farmer,” Derev said, “after the girl fox had lain with him and took his baby in payment.”

Suddenly, with a feeling like falling, Yama saw Derev’s face as a stranger might. All planes, with large dark eyes and a small mouth and a bump of a nose, framed by a fall of white hair that moved in the slightest breeze as if possessed with an independent life. They had pursued each other all last summer, awakened to the possibilities of each other’s bodies. They had lain in the long dry grasses between the tombs and tasted each other’s mouths, each other’s skin. He had felt the swell of her small breasts, traced the bowl of her pelvis, the elegant length of her arms, her legs. They had not made love; they had sworn that they would not make love together until they were married. Now, he was glad that they had not.

He said, “Do you keep doves, Derev?”

“You know that my father does. For sacrifice. Some palmers still come here to pray at the temple’s shrine. Mostly they don’t want doves, though, but flowers or fruit.”

“There were no palmers this year,” Ananda said.

“When the war is over, they’ll come again,” Derev said. “My father clips the wings of the doves. It would be a bad omen if they escaped in the middle of the sacrifice.”

Ananda said, “You mean that it would be bad for his trade.”

Derev laughed. “Then the desires of the Preservers are equal to those of my father, and I am glad.”

“There is one more mystery,” Yama said, and explained that he had been knocked unconscious by a fall and had woken somewhere, in a little room in a hollow crag by the Great River’s shore, watched by an old man and an old woman who claimed to be curators of the City of the Dead.

“They showed me a marvel. It was a picture slate from a tomb, and it showed someone of my bloodline. It was as if they had been waiting for me, and I have been thinking about what they showed me ever since I was returned here.”

Derev had the bottle of wine. She took a long swallow from it and said, “But that’s good! That’s wonderful! In less than a decad you have found two people of your bloodline.”

Yama said, “The man in the picture was alive before the building of Confluence. I imagine he is long dead. What is interesting is that the curators already knew about me, for they had the picture slate ready, and they also had prepared a route from their hiding place to the very grounds of the peel-house. That was how I returned. One of them, the woman, was of your bloodline, Derev.”

“Well, so are many. We are traders and merchants. We are to be found throughout the length and breadth of Confluence.”

Derev looked coolly at Yama when she said this, and his heart meltingly turned. It was hard to continue, but he had to. He said, “I did not think much of it for that very reason, and I did not even make very much of the fact that, like you, they had a fund of cautionary sayings and stories concerning magical foxes. But they kept doves. I wonder, if I looked amongst your father’s doves, if I would find some that were not clipped. I think you use them to keep in touch with your people.”

Ananda said, “What is this, Yama? You make a trial here.”

Derev said, “It’s all right, Ananda. Yama, my father said that you might have guessed. That was why he did not allow me to go to the peel-house, or to talk with you using the mirror. But I came here anyway. I wanted to see you. Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what we know. How did you guess that I helped you?”

“I think that the old woman, Beatrice, had a son, and that he is your father. When Lob returned to Aeolis, you gave him money and got him drunk to learn his story. I know that he had not been paid by Dr. Dismas, so he had to get the money from somewhere. You found me, and took me to your grandparents. They made up a story about looking for a lost goat and finding me instead, but they ate only vegetables. As do you and your parents, Derev.”

“They make cheese from goats’ milk,” Derev said. “And they did lose one last year, to a leopard. But you more or less have the truth. I’m not sure what scared me more, getting Lob drunk, or climbing down the cliff using the rope he had left behind and picking my way through the dark tomb to find you.”

“Did your family come here because of me? Am I so important, or am I merely foolish to believe it? Why are you interested in me?”

“Because you are of a bloodline which vanished from the world long ago. My family have stayed true to the old department as no others of my bloodline have. We revere the dead, and keep the memory of their lives as best we can, but we do not remember your bloodline, except in legends from the beginning of the world. Beatrice isn’t my grandmother, although she and her husband came to live at the tower after my great-grandparents died. My grandparents wanted a normal life, you see. They established a business downriver and my father inherited it, but Beatrice and her husband persuaded him to move here because of you.” She paused. She said, “I know you are destined for great things, but it doesn’t change what I feel for you.”

Yama remembered Beatrice’s verse and recited, “Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs.”

Derev said, “Yes, it’s a favorite verse of Beatrice’s. She has always said that it was far older than Confluence. But we keep the memory of all the dead alive, even if no one else will.”

Yama said, “Am I then of the dead?”

Derev walked about, pumping her elbows in and out as was her habit when agitated. Her white dress glimmered in the fight of the out-flung arm of the Galaxy. “You were very ill when I found you. You had been lying there all night. I took you to Beatrice and Osric: by the keel road and they saved your life, using old machines. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought you might die if I took you to Aeolis, or if I went to fetch the soldiers who were looking for you. Well, it is time you knew that my family have been watching over you. After all, Dr. Dismas found out about you and put you in peril. So might others, and you should be ready.”

Ananda said, “What are you saying, Derev? That you’re some kind of spy? On which side?”

Yama laughed. “Derev is no spy. She is anxious that I should receive my inheritance, such as it is.”

“My father and mother know, too. It isn’t just me. At first, I didn’t even know why we came here.”

Ananda had drunk most of the wine. He tipped the bottle to get the last swallow, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said gravely, “So you don’t want to sell rubbish to sailors and Mud Men, Derev? There’s no harm in that. It’s good that you want to keep to the old ways of your people.”

“The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead was disbanded long ago,” Yama said, looking at Derev.

“It was defeated,” Derev said, “but it endures. There are not many of us now. We mostly live in the mountains, or in Ys.”

“Why are you interested in me?”

“You’ve seen the picture,” Derev said. She had turned her back to Yama and Ananda, and was looking out across the swampy fields toward the ridge at the far side of the Breas’s valley. “I don’t know why you’re important. My father thinks that it is to do with the ship of the Ancients of Days. Beatrice and Osric know more, I think, but won’t tell even me all they know. They have many secrets.”

Ananda said, “The ship of the Ancients of Days passed downriver years before Yama was born.”

Derev ignored his interruption. “The Ancients of Days left to explore the neighboring galaxy long before the Preservers achieved godhead. They left more than five million years ago, while the stars of the Galaxy were still being moved into their present patterns. It was long before the Puranas were written, or the Eye of the Preservers was made, or Confluence was built.”

“So they claimed,” Ananda said. “But there is no word of them in the Puranas.”

“They returned to find all that they knew had passed into the Eye of the Preservers, and that they were the last of their kind. They landed at Ys, traveled downriver and sailed away from Confluence for the galaxy they had forsaken so long ago, but they left their ideas behind.”

“They turned innocent unfallen bloodlines against the word of the Preservers,” Ananda said. “They woke old technologies and created armies of monsters to spread their heresies.”

“And twenty years later you were born, Yama.”

“So were many others,” Ananda said. “All three of us here were born after the war began. Derev makes a fantasy.”

“Beatrice and Osric think that Yama’s bloodline is the one which built Confluence,” Derev told Ananda. “Perhaps the Preservers raised his bloodline up for just that task and then dispersed it, or perhaps as a reward it passed over with the Preservers when they fell into the Eye and vanished from the Universe. In any event, it disappeared from Confluence long ago. And yet Yama is here now, at a time of great danger.”

Ananda said, “The Preservers needed no help in creating Confluence. They spoke a word, and it was so.”

“It was a very long word,” Derev said. She lifted her arms above her head, and raised herself up on the points of her toes, as graceful as a dancer. She was remembering something she had learned long ago. She said, “It was longer than the words in the nuclei of our cells which define what we are. If all the different instructions for all the different bloodlines of Confluence were put together it would not be one hundredth of the length of the word which defined the initial conditions necessary for the creation of Confluence. That word was a set of instructions or rules. Yama’s bloodline was part of those instructions.”

Ananda said, “This is heresy, Derev. I’m a bad priest, but I know the sound of heresy. The Preservers needed no help in making Confluence.”

“Let her explain,” Yama said.

Ananda stood. “It’s lies,” he said flatly. “Her people deceive themselves that they know more of Confluence and the Preservers than is written in the Puranas. They spin elaborate sophistries, and delude themselves with dreams of hidden power, and they have snared you, Yama. Come with me. Don’t listen anymore. You leave for Ys tomorrow. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you are more than you are.”

Derev said, “We don’t pretend to understand what we remember. It is simply our duty. It was the duty of our bloodline since the foundation of Confluence, and my family are among the last to keep that duty. After the defeat of the department, my bloodline were scattered the length and breadth of the Great River. They became traders and merchants. My grandparents and my father wanted to be like them, but my father was called back.”

Yama said, “Sit down, Ananda. Please. Help me understand.”

Ananda said, “I don’t think you’re fully recovered, Yama. You’ve been ill. That part I believe. You have always wanted to see yourself as the center of the world, for you have no center to your own life. Derev is treating you cruelly, and I’ll hear no more. You’ve even forgotten about the execution. Let me tell you that Unprac died badly, screaming to the Preservers for aid with one breath, and cursing them and all who watched with the next. Lob was stoic. For all his faults, he died a man.”

“That is cruel, Ananda,” Yama said.

“It’s the truth. Farewell, friend Yama. If you must dream of glory, dream of being an ordinary soldier and of giving your life for the Preservers. All else is vanity.”

Yama did not try to stop Ananda. He knew how stubborn his friend could be. He watched as Ananda walked away beside the noisy river, a shadow against the blue-white arch of the Galaxy. Yama hoped that the young priest would at least turn and wave farewell.

But he did not.

Derev said, “You must believe me, Yama. At first I became your friend because it was my duty. But that quickly changed. I would not be here if it had not.”

Yama smiled. He could not stay angry at her; if she had deceived him, it was because she had believed that she was helping him.

They fell into each other’s arms and breathlessly kissed and rekissed. He felt her heat pressing through their clothes, the quick patter of her heart like a bird beating at the cage of her ribs. Her hair fell around his face like a trembling veil: he might drown in its dry scent.

After a while, he said, “If you took me to Beatrice and Osric, and they nursed me back to health, then what of the ghost ship? Do they claim that, too?”

Derev’s eyes shone a handspan from his. She said, “I’d never heard of it before you told me your story. But there are many strange things on the river, Yama. It is always changing.”

“Yet always the same,” Yama said, remembering Caphis’s tattoo, the snake swallowing its own tail. He added, “You thought that the anchorite we saved from Lud and Lob was one of my, bloodline.”

“Perhaps he was the first generation, born just after the ship of the Ancients of Days arrived.”

“There may be hundreds of my bloodline by now, Derev. Thousands!”

“That’s what I think. I told Beatrice and Osric about the anchorite, but they didn’t seem to be very interested. Perhaps I was mistaken about him being of your bloodline, but I do not think I was. He gave you a coin. You should take it with you.”

“So he did. I had forgotten it.”