Child of the River

Chapter Seventeen The Water Market

The vine was just where the pot boy had said it would be.

It was very large and very old—perhaps it had been planted when the inn had been built—and Yama climbed down its stout leafy branches as easily as down a ladder. He knew that he should run, but he also knew that Telmon would not have run. It was a matter of honor to get the coin back, and there in the darkness of the narrow alley at the back of the inn Yama remembered the landlord’s duplicitous smile and felt a slow flush of anger.

He was groping his way toward the orange lamplight at the end of the alley when he heard footsteps behind him. For a moment he feared that the cateran’s body had been found, and that his friends were searching for his killer. But no cry had been raised, and surely the city was not so wicked that murder would go unremarked. He forced himself not to look back, but walked around the corner and drew his knife and waited in the shadows by the inn’s gate, under the wide canopy of the avocado tree.

When the pot boy came out of the alley, Yama pushed him against the wall and held the knife at his throat. “I don’t mean any harm!” the boy squealed. Above them, a parrot echoed his frightened cry, modulating it into a screeching cackle.

Yama took away the knife. The thought came to him that if the one-eyed cateran had crept into the room to cut his throat or use the strangling wire, instead of bursting in with his sword swinging wildly, he, and not the cateran, would now be dead.

“He came for you,” the pot boy said. “I saw him.”

“He is dead.” Yama sheathed his knife. “I should have listened to you. As it is, I have killed a man, and your master still has my coin.”

The pot boy fussily straightened his ragged jerkin. He had regained his dignity. He looked up at Yama boldly and said, “You could call the magistrates.”

“I do not want to get you into trouble, but perhaps you could show me where your master sleeps. If I get back the coin, half of it is yours.”

The boy said, “Pandaras, at your service, master. For a tenth of it, I’ll skewer his heart for you. He beats me, and cheats his customers, and cheats his provisioners and wine merchants, too. You are a brave man, master, but a poor judge of inns. You’re on the run, aren’t you? That’s why you won’t call on the magistrates.”

“It is not the magistrates I fear most,” Yama said, thinking of Prefect Corin.

Pandaras nodded. “Families can be worse than any lockup, as I know too well.”

“As a matter of fact, I have come here to search for my family.”

“I thought you were from the wrong side of the walls—no one born in the city would openly carry a knife as old and as valuable as yours. I’ll bet that dead man in your room was more interested in the knife than your coins. I may not be much more than a street urchin, but I know my way around. If hunting down your family is what you want, why then I can help you in a hundred different ways. I’ll be glad to be quit of this place. It never was much of a job anyway, and I’m getting too old for it.”

Yama thought that this pitch was little more than a gentler form of robbery, but said that for the moment he would be glad of the boy’s help.

“My master sleeps as soundly as a sated seal,” Pandaras said. “He won’t wake until you put your blade to his throat.”

Pandaras let Yama into the inn through the kitchen door and led him upstairs. He put a finger to his black lips before delicately unlatching a door. Yama’s knife emitted a faint blue glow and he held it up like a candle as he stepped into the stuffy room.

The landlord snored under a disarrayed sheet on a huge canopied bed that took up most of the space; there was no other furniture. Yama shook him awake, and the man pushed Yama’s hand away and sat up. The sheet slipped down his smooth naked chest to the mound of his belly. When Yama aimed the point of the knife at his face, the man smiled and said, “Go ahead and kill me. If you don’t, I’ll probably set the magistrates on you.”

“Then you will have to explain that one of your guests was attacked in his room. There is a dead man up there, by the way.”

The landlord gave Yama a sly look. The knife’s blue glow was liquidly reflected in his round, black eyes and glimmered in his spiky white hair. He said, “Of course there is, or you wouldn’t be here. Cyg wasn’t working for me, and you can’t prove different.”

“Then how did you know his name?”

The landlord’s shrug was like a mountain moving. “Everyone knows Cyg.”

“Then everyone will probably know about the bargain he made with you. Give me my coin and I will leave at once.”

“And if I don’t, what will you do? If you kill me you won’t find it. Why don’t we sit down over a glass of brandy and talk about this sensibly? I could make use of a sharp young cock like you. There are ways to make that coin multiply, and I know most of them.”

“I have heard that you cheat your customers,” Yama said. “Those who cheat are always afraid that they will be cheated in turn, so I would guess that the only place you could have hidden my coin is somewhere in this room. Probably under your pillow.”

The landlord lunged forward then, and something struck at Yama’s knife. The room filled with white light and the landlord screamed.

Afterwards, the landlord huddled against the headboard of his bed and wouldn’t look at Yama or the knife. His hand was bleeding badly, for although he had wrapped his sheet around it before grabbing at the knife, the blade had cut him deeply. But he took no notice of his wound, or Yama’s questions. He was staring at something which had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and would only say, over and over, “It had no eyes. Hair like cobwebs, and no eyes.”

Yama searched beneath the bolster and the mattress, and then, remembering the place where he had hidden his map in his own room in the peel-house, rapped the floor with the hilt of his knife until he found the loose board under which the landlord had hidden the gold rial. He had to show the landlord his knife and threaten the return of the apparition to make the man roll onto his belly, so that he could gag him and tie his thumbs together with strips torn from the bedsheet.

“I am only taking back what is mine,” Yama said. “I do not think you have earned any payment for hospitality. The fool you sent to rob me is dead. Be grateful you are not.”

Pandaras was waiting outside the gate. “We’ll get some breakfast by the fishing docks,” he said. “The boats go out before first light and the stalls open early.”

Yama showed Pandaras the gold rial. His hand shook. Although he had felt quite calm while looking for the coin, he was now filled with an excess of nervous energy. He laughed and said, “I have no coin small enough to pay for breakfast.”

Pandaras reached inside his ragged shirt and lifted out two worn iron pennies hung on a string looped around his neck.

He winked. “I’ll pay, master, and then you can pay me.”

“As long as you stop calling me master. You are hardly younger than I am.”

“Oh, in many ways I’m much older,” Pandaras said. “Forgive me, but you’re obviously of noble birth. Such folk live longer than most; relatively speaking, you’re hardly weaned from the wet nurse’s teat.” He squinted up at Yama as they passed through the orange glow of a sodium-vapor lamp.

“Your bloodline isn’t one I know, but there are many strange folk downriver of Ys, and many more in her streets. Everything may be found here, it’s said, but even if you lived a thousand years and spent all your time searching you’d never find it all. Even if you came to the end of your searching so much would have changed that it would be time to start all over again.”

Yama smiled at the boy’s babble. “It is the truth about my bloodline I have come to discover,” he said, “and fortunately I think I know where to find it.”

As they descended toward the waterfront, down narrow streets that were sometimes so steep that they were little more than flights of shallow steps, with every house leaning on the shoulder of its neighbor, Yama told Pandaras something of the circumstances of his birth, of what he thought Dr. Dismas had discovered, and of his journey to Ys.

“I know the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons,” Pandaras said. “It’s no grand place, but stuck as an afterthought on the lower levels of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

“Then I must go there after all,” Yama said. “I thought I had escaped it.”

“The place you want is on the roof,” Pandaras said. “You won’t have to go inside, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

The sky was beginning to brighten when Yama and Pandaras reached the wide road by the old waterfront. A brace of camels padded past, loaded with bundles of cloth and led by a sleepy boy, and a few merchants were rolling up the shutters of their stalls or lighting cooking fires. On the long piers which ran out to the river’s edge between shacks raised on a forest of stilts above the wide mud flats, fishermen were coiling ropes and taking down nets from drying poles and folding them in elaborate pleats.

For the first time, Yama noticed the extent of the riverside shanty town. The shacks crowded all the way to the edge of the floating docks, half a league distant, and ran along the river edge for as far as the eye could see. They were built mostly of plastic sheeting dulled by smoke and weather toward a universal gray, and roofed with tarpaper or sagging canvas. Channels brimming with thick brown water ran between mudbanks under the tangle of stilts and props. Tethered chickens pecked amongst threadbare grass on drier pieces of ground. Already, people were astir, washing clothes or washing themselves, tending tiny cooking fires, exchanging gossip.

Naked children of a decad or more different bloodlines chased each other along swaybacked rope walkways.

Pandaras explained that the shanty towns were the home of refugees from the war. “Argosies go downriver loaded with soldiers, and return with these unfortunates. They are brought here before they can be turned by the heretics.”

“Why do they live in such squalor?”

“They know no better, master. They are unchanged savages.”

“They must have been hunters once, or fishermen or farmers. Is there no room for them in the city? I think that it is much smaller than it once was.”

“Some of them may go to the empty quarters, I suppose, but most would be killed by bandits, and besides, the empty quarters are no good for agriculture. Wherever you dig there are stones, and stones beneath the stones. The Department of Indigenous Affairs likes to keep them in one place, where they can be watched. They get dole food, and a place to live.”

“I suppose many become beggars.”

Pandaras shook his head vigorously. “No, no. They would be killed by the professional beggars if they tried. They are nothing, master. They are not even human beings. See how they five!”

In the shadows beneath the nearest of the shacks, beside a green, stagnant pool, two naked men were pulling pale guts from the belly of a small cayman. A boy was pissing into the water on the other side of the pool, and a woman was dipping water into a plastic bowl. On a platform above, a woman with a naked baby on her arm was crumbling gray lumps of edible plastic into a blackened wok hung over a tiny fire. Beside her, a child of indeterminate age and sex was listlessly sorting through wilted cabbage leaves.

Yama said, “It seems to me that they are an army drawn up at the edge of the city.”

“They are nothing, master. We are the strength of the city, as you will see.”

Pandaras chose a stall by one of the wide causeways that ran out to the pontoon docks, and hungrily devoured a shrimp omelette and finished Yama’s leavings while Yama warmed his hands around his bowl of tea. In the growing light Yama could see, three or four leagues downriver, the wall where he and Prefect Corin had been taken yesterday, a black line rising above red tile roofs like the back of a sleeping dragon.

He wondered if the magistrates’ screens could be turned in this direction. No, they had set machines to look for him, but he had dealt with them. For now he was safe.

Pandaras called out for more tea, and told Yama that there was an hour at least before the money changers opened.

Yama said, “I will make good my debt to you, do not worry. Where will you go?”

“Perhaps with you, master,” Pandaras said, grinning. “I’ll help you find your family. You do not know where you were born, and wish to find it, while I know my birthplace all too well, and want to escape it.”

The boy had small, sharp teeth all exactly the same size.

Yama noticed that his black, pointed fingernails were more like claws, and that his hands, with leathery pads on their palms and hooked thumbs stuck stiffly halfway up the wrists, resembled an animal’s paws. He had seen many of Pandaras’s bloodline yesterday, portering and leading draft animals and carrying out a hundred other kinds of menial jobs. The strength of the city.

Yama asked about the caterans who had been eating in the taproom of the inn, but Pandaras shrugged. “I don’t know them. They arrived only an hour before you, and they’ll leave this morning for the Water Market by the Black Temple, looking for people who want to employ them. I thought that you might be one of them, until you showed my master the coin.”

“Perhaps I am one, but do not yet know it,” Yama said, thinking of his vow. He knew that he was still too young to join the army in the usual way, but his age would be no bar to becoming an irregular. Prefect Corin might think him young, but he had already killed a man in close combat, and had had more adventures in the past two decads than most people could expect in a lifetime. He said, “Before we go anywhere else, take me to the Water Market, Pandaras. I want to see how it is done.”

“If you join up then I’ll go with you, and be your squire. You’ve enough money to buy a good rifle, or better still, a pistol, and you’ll need armor, too. I’ll polish it bright between battles, and keep your devices clean—”

Yama laughed. “Hush! You build a whole fantasy on a single whim. I only want to find out about the caterans; I do not yet want to become one. After I know more about where I come from, then, yes, I intend to enlist and help win the war. My brother was killed fighting the heretics. I have made a vow to fight in his place.”

Pandaras drained his cup of tea and spat fragments of bark

onto the ground. “We’ll do the first before the Castellan of the Twelve Devotions sounds its noon gun,” he said, “and the second before the Galaxy rises. With my help, anything is possible. But you must forgive my prattle. My people love to talk and to tell stories, and invent tall tales most of all. No doubt you see us as laborers little better than beasts of burden. And that is indeed how we earn our bread and beer, but although we may be poor in the things of the world, we are rich in the things of imagination. Our stories and songs are told and sung by every bloodline, and a few of us even gain brief fame as jongleurs to the great houses and the rich merchants, or as singers and musicians and storytellers of cassette recordings.”

Yama said, “It would seem that with all their talents, your people deserve a better station than they have.”

“Ah, but we do not live long enough to profit from them. No more than twenty years is the usual; twenty-five is almost unheard of. You’re surprised, but that’s how it is. It is our curse and our gift. The swiftest stream polishes the pebbles smoothest, as my grandfather had it, and so with us. We live brief but intense lives, for from the pace of our living comes our songs and stories.”

Yama said, “Then may I ask how old you are?”

Pandaras showed his sharp teeth. “You think me your age, I’d guess, but I’ve no more than four years, and in another I’ll marry. That is, if I don’t go off adventuring with you.”

“If you could finish my search in a day, I would be the happiest man on Confluence, but I think it will take longer than that.”

“A white boat and a shining woman, and a picture of one of your ancestors made before the building of Confluence. What could be more distinctive? I’ll make a song of it soon enough. Besides, you said that you know to begin your search in the records of the Department of Apothecaries and Chinirgeons.”

“If Dr. Dismas did not lie. He lied about much else.”

The sky above the crowded rooftops was blue now, and traffic was thickening along the road. Fishing boats were moving out past the ends of the piers of the floating russet and tan sails bellying in the wind and white birds flying in their wake as they breasted the swell of the morning tide. As he walked beside Pandaras, Yama thought of the hundred leagues of docks, of the thousands of boats of the vast fishing fleets which put out every day to feed the myriad mouths of the city, and began to understand the true extent of Ys.

How could he ever expect to find out about his birth, or of the history of any one man, in such a mutable throng?

And yet, he thought, Dr. Dismas had found out something in the records of his department, and he did not doubt that he could find it too, and perhaps more. Freshly escaped from his adventure with the cateran and from the fusty fate the Aedile and Prefect Corin had wished upon him, Yama felt his heart rise. It did not occur to him that he might fail in his self-appointed quest. He was, as Pandaras had pointed out, still very young, and had yet to fail in anything important.

The first money changer refused Yama’s rials after a mere glance. The second, whose office was in a tiny basement with a packed-dirt floor and flaking pink plaster walls, spent a long time looking at the coins under a magnifying screen, then scraped a fleck from one coin and tried to dissolve it in a minim of aqua ragia. The money changer was a small, scrawny old man almost lost in the folds of his black silk robe. He clucked to himself when the fleck of gold refused to dissolve even when he heated the watchglass, then motioned to his impassive bodyguard, who fetched out tea bowls and a battered aluminium pot, and resumed his position at the foot of the steps up to the street.

Pandaras haggled for an hour with the money changer, over several pots of tea and a plate of tiny honeyeakes so piercingly sweet that they made Yama’s teeth ache. Yama felt cramped and anxious in the dank little basement with the tramp of feet going to and fro overhead and the bodyguard blocking most of the sunlight that spilled down the stair, and was relieved when at last Pandaras announced that the deal was done.

“We’ll starve in a month, but this old man has a stone for a heart,” he said, staring boldly at the money changer.

“You are quite welcome to take your custom elsewhere,” the money changer said, thrusting his sharp face from the fold of black silk over his head and giving Pandaras a fierce, hawkish look. “I’d say your coins were stolen, and any price I give you would be fair enough. As it is, I risk ruining my reputation on your behalf.”

“You’ll not need to work again for a year,” Pandaras retorted. Despite the money changer’s impatience, he insisted on counting the slew of silver and iron coins twice over. The iron pennies were pierced—for stringing around the neck, Pandaras said. He demonstrated the trick with his share before shaking hands with the money changer, who suddenly smiled and wished them every blessing of the Preservers.

The street was bright and hot after the money changer’s basement. The road was busier than ever, and the traffic crowding its wide asphalt pavement moved at walking pace. The air was filled with the noise of hooves and wheels, the shouts and curses of drivers, the cries of hawkers and merchants, the silver notes of whistles and the brassy clangor of bells. Small boys darted amongst the legs of beasts and men, collecting the dung of horses, oxen and camels, which they would shape into patties and dry on walls for fuel for cooking fires. There were beggars and thieves, sky-clad mendicants and palmers, jugglers and contortionists, mountebanks and magicians, and a thousand other wonders, so many that as he walked along amongst the throng Yama soon stopped noticing any but the most outrageous, for else he would have gone mad with amazement.

A black dome had been raised up amongst the masts of the ships and the flat roofs of the godowns; at the edge of the river, and Yama pointed to it. “That was not there when we first came here this morning,” he said.

“A voidship,” Pandaras said casually, and expressed surprise when Yama insisted that they go and look at it. He said, “It’s just a lighter for a voidship really. The ship to which it belongs is too big to make riverfall and hangs beyond the edge of Confluence. It has been there a full year now, unloading its ores. The lighter will have put in at the docks for fresh food. It’s nothing special.”

In any case, they could not get close to the lighter; the dock was closed off and guarded by a squad of soldiers armed with fusiliers more suited to demolishing a citadel than keeping away sightseers. Yama looked up at the lighter’s smooth black flank, which curved up to a blunt silver cap that shone with white fire in the sunlight, and wondered at what other suns it had seen.

He could have stood there all day, filled with an undefined longing, but Pandaras took his arm and steered him away.

“It’s dangerous to linger,” the boy said. “The star-sailors steal children, it’s said, because they cannot engender their own. If you see one, you’ll understand. Most do not even look like men.”

As they walked on, Yama asked if Pandaras knew of the ship of the Ancients of Days.

Pandaras touched his fist to his throat. “My grandfather said that he saw two of them walking through the streets of our quarter late one night, but everyone in Ys alive at that time claims as much.” He touched his fist to his throat and added, “My grandfather said that they glowed the way the river water sometimes glows on summer nights, and that they stepped into the air and walked away above the rooftops. He made a song about it, but when he submitted it to the legates he was arrested for heresy, and he died under the question.”

The sun had climbed halfway to zenith by the time Yama and Pandaras reached the Black Temple and the Water Market.

The Black Temple had once been extensive, built on its own island around a protrusion or plug of keelrock in a wide deep bay, but it had been devastated in the wars of the Age of Insurrection and had not been rebuilt, and now the falling level of the Great River had left it stranded in a shallow muddy lagoon fringed with palm trees. The outline of the temple’s inner walls and a row of half-melted pillars stood amongst outcrops of keelrock and groves of flame trees; the three black circles of the temple’s shrines glittered amongst grassy swales where the narthex had once stood. Nothing could destroy the shrines, not even the energies deployed in the battle which had won back Ys from the Insurrectionists, for they were only partly of the world of material existence. Services were still held at the Black Temple every New Year, Pandaras said, and Yama noticed the heaps of fresh flowers and offerings of fruits before the shrines.

Although most of the avatars had disappeared in the Age of Insurrection, and the last had been silenced by the heretics, people still came to petition them.

At the mouth of the bay which surrounded the temple’s small island, beyond wrinkled mudflats where flocks of white ibis stalked on delicate legs, on rafts and pontoons and barges, the Water Market was in full swing. The standards of a hundred condottieri flew from poles, and there were a dozen exhibition duels under way, each at the center of a ring of spectators. There were stalls selling every kind of weapon, armorers sweating naked by their forges as they repaired or reforged pieces, provisioners extolling the virtue of their preserved fare. A merchant blew up a water bottle and jumped up and down on it to demonstrate its durability.

Newly indentured convicts sat in sullen groups on benches behind the auction block, most sporting fresh mutilations.

Galleys, pinnaces and picket boats stood offshore, their masts hung with bright flags that flapped in the strong, hot breeze.

Yama eagerly drank in the bustle and the noise, the exotic costumes of the caterans and the mundane dove-gray uniforms of regular soldiers mingled together the ringing sound of the weapons of the duelists, and the smell of hot metal and plastic from the forges of the armorers. He wanted to see everything the city had to offer, to search its great temples and the meanest of its alleys and courts for any sign of his bloodline.

As he followed Pandaras along a rickety gangway between two rafts, someone stepped out of the crowd and hailed him.

His heart turned over. It was the red-haired woman who last night had sat eating with the man he had killed. When she saw that he had heard her, she shouted again and raised her naked sword above her head.