Child of the River

Chapter Thirteen The Palmers

Yama discovered the knife at the bottom of his satchel on the first evening of his journey to Ys in the company of Prefect Corin. Yama had given the knife to Sergeant Rhodean that morning, because Prefect Corin had said that it was not the kind of thing an apprentice should own. The Prefect had been quite specific about what Yama could and could not carry; before they had set off he had looked through Yama’s satchel and had removed the knife and the carefully folded map of Ys and the horn-handled pocket-knife which had once belonged to Telmon. Yama had been able to take little with him but a change of clothes and the money given to him by the Aedile. He had the copy of the Puranas and the anchorite’s coin, which he wore around his neck, inside his shirt, but because they had been given to him so recently they did not yet seem like proper possessions.

Sergeant Rhodean must have slipped the knife back into the satchel when Yama had been making his farewells. It was sheathed in brown-and-white goatskin and tucked beneath Yama’s spare shirt and trousers. Yama was pleased to see it, even though it still made him uneasy. He knew that all heroes carried weapons with special attributes, and he was determined to be a hero. He was still very young.

Prefect Corin asked him what he had found. Reluctantly, Yama slipped the knife from its sheath and held it up in the firelight. A blue sheen slowly extended from its hilt to the point of its curved blade. It emitted a faint high-pitched buzz, and a sharp smell like discharged electricity.

“I am certain that Sergeant Rhodean meant well,” Prefect Corin said, “but you will not need that. If we are attacked, it will do nothing but put you in danger. In any case, it is very unlikely that we will be attacked.”

Prefect Corin sat cross-legged on the other side of the small campfire, neat and trim in his homespun tunic and gray leggings. He was smoking a long-stemmed clay pipe which he held clenched between his small even teeth. His iron-shod staff was stuck in the ground behind him. They had walked all day at a steady pace, and this was the most he had said to Yama at any one time.

Yama said, “That is why I gave it away, dominie, but it has come back.”

“It is not regulation.”

“Well, but I am not yet an apprentice,” Yama said. He added, “Perhaps I could make a gift of it to the department.”

“That is possible,” Prefect Corin allowed. “Tributes are not unknown. Weapons like that are generally loyal to their owner, but loyalty can be broken with suitable treatment. Well, we cannot leave it here. You may carry it, but do not think to try to use it.”

But after Prefect Corin had fallen asleep, Yama took out the knife and practiced the passes and thrusts that Sergeant Rhodean had taught him, and later slept sweetly and deeply, with the point of the knife thrust into the warm ashes of the campfire.

The next day, as before, Yama dutifully walked three paces behind Prefect Corin along raised paths between the flooded fields that made an intricate green and brown quilt along the margin of the river. It was the planting season, and the fields were being ploughed by teams of water buffalo commanded by small, naked boys who controlled their charges with no more than shouts and vigorous application of long bamboo switches.

A cool wind blew from the Great River, ruffling the brown waters which flooded the fields, stirring the bright green flags of the bamboos and the clumps of elephant grass that grew at the places where the corners of four fields met. Yama and Prefect Corin rose just before dawn and prayed and walked until it was too hot, and sheltered in the shade of a tree until early evening, when, after a brief prayer, they walked again until the Galaxy began to rise above the river.

Ordinarily, Yama would have enjoyed this adventure, but Prefect Corin was an impassive, taciturn companion. He did not comment on anything they saw, but was like a machine moving implacably through the sunlit world, noticing only what was necessary. He responded with no more than a grunt when Yama pointed to a fleet of argosies far out across the glittering waters of the Great River; he ignored the ruins they passed, even a long sandstone cliff-face which had been carved with pillars and friezes and statues of men and beasts around gaping doors; he ignored the little villages which could be glimpsed amongst stands of palms, flowering magnolias and pines on the ridge of the old riverbank in the blue distance, or which stood on islands of higher ground amongst the mosaic of flooded fields; he ignored the fishermen who worked the margin of the Great River beyond the weedy gravel banks and mud flats revealed by the river’s retreat, fishermen who stood thigh-deep in the shallows and cast circular nets across the water, or who sat in tiny bark boats further out, using black cormorants tethered by one leg to catch fish. (Yama thought of the verse which the old curator, Beatrice, had recited to him. Had its author seen the ancestors of these fishermen? He understood then a little of what Zakiel had tried to teach him, that books were not obdurate thickets of glyphs but transparent windows, looking out through another’s eyes on to a familiar world, or on to a world which lived only when the book was read, and vanished when it was set down.)

The mud walls of the straw-thatched huts of the villages often incorporated slates stolen from tombs, so that pictures from the past (as often as not sideways or upside-down) flashed with vibrant colors amongst the poverty of the peasants’ lives. Chickens and black pigs ran amongst the huts, chased by naked toddlers. Women pounded grain or gutted fish or mended fishing nets, watched by impassive men sitting in the doorways of their huts or beneath shade trees, smoking, clay pipes or sipping green tea from chipped glasses.

In one village there was a stone pen with a small dragon coiled on the white sand inside it. The dragon was black, with a double row of diamond-shaped plates along its ridged back, and it slept with its long, scaley snout on its forelegs, like a dog. Flies clustered around its long-lashed eyes; it stank of sulfur and marsh gas. Yama remembered the abortive hunt at the end of last winter, before poor Telmon went away, and would have liked to see more of this wonder, but Prefect Corin strode past without sparing it a single glance.

Sometimes the villagers came out to watch Yama and Prefect Corin go by, and little boys ran up to try and sell them wedges of watermelon or polished quartz pebbles or charms woven of thorny twigs. Prefect Corin ignored the animated crowds of little boys; he did not even trouble to use his staff to clear a way but simply pushed through them as through a thicket. Yama was left behind to apologize and ask for indulgence, saying over and over that they had no money. It was almost true. Yama had the two gold rials which the Aedile had given him, but one of those would buy an entire village, and he had no smaller coins. And Prefect Corin had nothing but his staff and his hat, his leggings and his homespun tunic, his sandals and his blanket, and a few small tools packed inside the leather purse that hung from his belt.

“Be careful of him,” the Aedile had whispered, when he had embraced Yama in farewell. “Do all he asks of you, but no more than that. Reveal no more than is necessary. He will seize on any weakness, any difference, and use it against you. It is their way.”

The Prefect was a spare, ascetic man. He drank tea made from fragments of dusty bark and ate only dried fruit and the yeasty buds of manna lichen picked from rocks, although he let Yama cook the rabbits and lizards he caught in wire snares set each evening. As he walked, Yama ate ghostberries picked from thickets which grew amongst ruined tombs, but the ghostberries were almost over now and difficult to find under the new leaves of the bushes, and Prefect Corin would not allow Yama to move more than a few paces from the edge of the path. There were traps amongst the tombs, he said, and ghouls and worse things at night. Yama did not argue with him, but apart from the necessities of toilet he was never out of Prefect Corin’s sight. There were a hundred moments when he wanted to make a run for it. But not yet. Not yet.

He was learning patience, at least.

The stretches of uncultivated country between the villages grew wider. There were fewer flooded fields and more ruined tombs, overgrown with creepers and moss amidst rustling stands of bamboo or clumps of date or oil palms, or copses of dark green swamp cypress. Then they passed the last village and the road widened into a long, straight pavement. It was like the ancient road that ran between the river and the edge of the Silent Quarter downriver of Aeolis, Yama thought, and then he realized that it was the same road.

It was the third day of the journey. They camped that night in a hollow with tall pines leaning above. Wind moved through the doffing branches of the pines. The Great River stretched away toward the Galaxy, which even at this late hour showed only the upper part of the Arm of the Warrior above the horizon, with the Blue Diadem gleaming cold and sharp at the upflung terminus of the lanes of misty starlight.

Halo stars were like dimming coals scattered sparsely across the cold hearth of the sky; the smudged specks of distant galaxies could be seen here and there.

Yama lay near the little fire on a soft, deep layer of brown pine needles and thought of the Ancients of Days and wondered what it might be like to plunge through the emptiness between galaxies for longer than Confluence had been in existence. And the Ancients of Days had not possessed one hundredth of the power of their distant children, the Preservers.

Yama asked Prefect Corin if he had ever seen the Ancients of Days after they had arrived at Ys. For a long time, the man did not answer, and Yama began to believe that he had not been heard, or that Prefect Corin had simply ignored the question. But at last the Prefect knocked out his pipe on the heel of his boot and said, “I saw two of them once. I was a boy, a little older than you, and newly apprenticed. They were both tall, and as alike as brothers, with black hair and faces as white as new paper. We say that some bloodlines have white skin—your own is very pale—but we mean that it has no pigmentation in it, except that it is suffused by the blood in the tissues beneath. But this was a true white, as if their faces had been powdered with chalk. They wore long white shirts that left their arms and legs bare, and little machines hung from their belts. I was in the Day Market with the oldest of the apprentices, carrying the spices he had bought. The two Ancients of Days walked through the aisles at the head of a great crowd and passed by as close to me as you are now.”

“They should have been killed, all of them. Unfortunately, it was not a decision the Department could make, although even then, in Ys, it was possible to see that their ideas were dangerous. Confluence survives only because it does not change. The Preservers unite us because it is to them that each department swears its loyalty, and so no department shows particular favor to any of the bloodlines of Confluence. The Ancients of Days have infected their allies with the heresy that each bloodline, indeed every individual, might have an intrinsic worth. They promote the individual above society, change above duty. You should reflect on why this is wrong, Yama.”

“Is it true that there are wars in Ys now? That different departments fight each other, even in the Palace of the Memory of the People?”

Prefect Corin gave him a sharp look across the little fire and said, “You have been listening to the wrong kind of gossip.”

Yama was thinking of the curators of the City of the Dead, whose resistance had dwindled to a stubborn refusal to yield to the flow of history. Perhaps Derev would be the last of them. He said, trying to draw out the Prefect, “But surely there are disputes about whether one department or another should carry out a particular duty. I have heard that outmoded departments sometimes resist amalgamation or disbandment, and I have also heard that these disputes are increasing, and that the Department of Indigenous Affairs is training most of its apprentices to be soldiers.”

“You have a lot to learn,” Prefect Corin said. He tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and lit it before adding, “Apprentices do not choose the way in which they serve the Department, and you are too young to be an apprentice in any case. You have had an odd childhood, with what amounts to three fathers and no mother. You have far too much pride and not enough education, and most of that in odd bits of history and philosophy and cosmology, and far too much in the arts of soldiering. Even before you can be accepted as an apprentice, you will have to catch up in all the areas your education has neglected.”

Yama said, “I think I might make a good soldier.”

Prefect Corin drew on his pipe and looked at Yama with narrowed eyes. They were small and close together, and gleamed palely in his black-furred face. The white stripe ran past the outer corner of his left eye. Eventually he said, “I came down here to execute two men because their crimes involved the Aedile’s private life. That is the way it is done in the Department. It demonstrates that the Department supports the action of its man, and it ensures that none of the local staff have to do the job. That way, there is no one for the locals to take revenge on, with the exception of the Aedile himself, and no one will do that as long as he commands his garrison, because he has the authority of the Preservers. I agreed to bring you to Ys because it is my duty. It does not mean I owe you anything, especially answers to your questions. Now get some sleep.”

Later, long after the Prefect had rolled himself in his blanket and gone to sleep, Yama cautiously stood and backed away from the fire, which had burnt down to white ash around a dimming core of glowing coals. The road stretched away between hummocks of dry friable stone and clumps of pines. Its paved surface gleamed faintly in the light of the Galaxy. Yama settled his pack on his shoulders and set off. He wanted to go to Ys, but he was determined not to become an apprentice clerk, and after the final dismissal of his worth he thought that he could not bear Prefect Corin’s company a day longer.

He had not gone very far down the road when he heard a dry rattle in the darkness ahead. Yama put his hand on the hilt of his knife, but did not draw it from its sheath in case its light betrayed him. He advanced cautiously, his eyes wide, his whole skin tingling, his blood rustling in his ears. Then a stone smashed onto the paved road behind him! He whirled around, and another stone exploded at his feet. A fragment cut his shin, and he felt blood trickle into his boot.

He gripped the knife tightly and said, “Who is it? Show yourself!”

Silence, and then Prefect Corin stepped up behind Yama and gripped the wrist of his right hand and said in his ear, “You have a lot to learn, boy.”

“A clever trick,” Yama said. He felt oddly calm, as if he had expected this all along.

After a moment Prefect Corin released him and said, “It is lucky for you I played it, and no one else.” Yama had never seen Prefect Corin smile, but in the blue light of the Galaxy he saw the man’s lips compress in what might have been the beginning of a smile. “I promised to look after you, and so I will. Meanwhile, no more games. All right?”

“All right,” Yama said.

“Good. You need to sleep. We still have a long way to go.”

Early the next day, Yama and Prefect Corin passed a group of palmers. They soon left the group behind, but the palmers caught up with them that night and camped a little way off.

They numbered more than two decads, men and women in dust-stained orange robes, their heads cleanly shaven and painted with interlocked curves which represented the Eye of the Preservers. They were a slightly built people, with pinched faces under swollen, bicephalic foreheads, and leathery skin mottled with brown and black patches. Like Prefect Corin, they carried only staffs, bedrolls, and little purses hung from their belts. They sang in clear high voices around their campfire, welding close harmonies that carried a long way across the dry stones and the empty tombs of the hillside.

Yama and Prefect Corin had made camp under a group of fig trees beside the road. A little spring rose amongst the trees, a gush of clear water that fell from the gaping mouth of a stone carved with the likeness of a fierce, bearded face into a shallow pool curbed with flat rocks. The road had turned away from the Great River, climbing a switchback of low, gentle hills dotted with creosote scrub and clumps of saw-toothed palmettos as it rose toward the pass.

The priest who was in charge of the palmers came over to talk with Prefect Corin. His group was from a city a thousand leagues downriver. They had been traveling for half a year, first by a merchant ship and then by foot after the ship had been laid up for repairs after having been attacked by water bandits. The palmers were archivists on their way to the Palace of the Memory of the People, to tell into the records the stories of all those who had died in their city in the last ten years, and to ask for guidance from the prognosticators.

The priest was a large smooth-skinned man by the name of Belarius. He had a ready smile and a habit of mopping sweat from his bare scalp and the fat folds of skin at the back of his neck with a square of cloth. His smooth, chrome-yellow skin shone like butter. He offered Prefect Corin a cigarette and was not offended when his offer was refused, and without prompting started to talk about the risks of traveling by foot. He had heard that there were roving bands of deserters abroad in the land, in addition to the usual bandits.

“Near the battlelines, perhaps,” Prefect Corin said. “Not this far upriver.” He drew on his pipe and stared judiciously at the fat priest. “Are you armed?”

Belarius smiled—his smile was as wide as a frog’s, and Yama thought that he could probably hold a whole watermelon slice in his mouth. The priest said, “We are palmers, not soldiers.”

“But you have knives to prepare your food, machetes to cut firewood, that kind of thing?”

“0h, yes.”

“A large group like yours need not worry. It is people traveling alone, or by two or by three, who are vulnerable.”

Belarius mopped at his scalp. His smile grew wider. He said eagerly, “And you have seen nothing?”

“But for the chattering of this boy, it has been a quiet journey.”

Yama smarted at Prefect Corin’s remark, but said nothing. Belarius smoked his cigarette—it smelt overpoweringly of cloves—and gave a rambling account of exactly how the ship on which he had hoped to take his charges all the way to Ys had been ambushed one night by water bandits in a decad of small skiffs. The bandits had been beaten off when the ship’s captain had ordered pitch spread on the water and set on fire.

“Our ship put every man to the oars and rowed free of the flames,” Belarius said, “but the bandits were consumed.”

Prefect Corin listened, but made no comment.

Belarius said, “The bandits fired chainshot. It damaged the mast and rigging and struck the hull at the waterline. We were taking on water in several places, and so we limped to the nearest port. My charges did not want to wait out the repairs, so we walked on. The ship will meet us at Ys, when we have finished our business there. A ghoul has been following us the past week, but that is the only trouble we have had. Such are the times, when the road is safer than the Great River.”

After Belarius had filled his waterskin from the spring and taken his leave, Yama said, “You do not like him.”

Prefect Corin considered this, then said in a measured tone, “I do not like veiled insults about the competence of the Department. If the Great River is no longer safe, it is because of the war, and those who travel on it should take suitable precautions and travel in convoy. Not only that, but our well-upholstered priest did not hire any bodyguards as escort on the road, which would have been prudent, and it would have been more prudent to have waited until the ship was repaired than to have gone forward on foot. I rather think that he has told us only half of the story. Either he does not have the money to hire men or to pay for repairs to the ship, or he is willing to risk the lives of his charges to make extra profit. And he put aboard with a bravado captain, which says little for his judgment. If the ship was able to outdistance the fire it set on the water, then it could have outdistanced the bandits. Often flight is better than fight.”

“If less honorable.”

“There is no honor in needless fighting. The captain could have destroyed his ship as well as the bandits with his trick.”

“Will we stay with these people?”

“Their singing will wake every bandit in a hundred leagues,” Prefect Corin said. “And if there are any bandits, then they will be attracted to the larger group rather than to the lesser.”