Child of the River

Chapter Eight The Fisherman

Dr. Dismas’s shot must have missed the glowing frigate, for it bore down on the pinnace relentlessly. The bristling oars of the pinnace set a steady, rapid beat as it left the burning skiff behind and began to turn toward its pursuer.

Yama saw that Enobarbus was planning to come around to the near side of the frigate, to pass beneath its cannons and rake its sides with her own guns, but before he could complete his maneuver the frigate swung about like a leaf blown by the wind. In a moment, its bow loomed above the stricken pinnace. The pinnace’s cannon hammered defiantly, and Yama heard someone cry out.

But at the instant the frigate struck the pinnace, it dissolved into a spreading mist of white light. Yama backstroked in the cold water, watching as the pinnace was engulfed by a globe of white fog that boiled up higher than the out-flung arm of the Galaxy. A point of violet light shot up from this spreading bank of luminous fog, rising into the night sky until it had vanished from sight.

Yama did not stop to wonder at this miracle, for he knew that Enobarbus would start searching for him as soon as the pinnace had escaped the fog. He turned in the water and began to swim. Although he aimed for the dark, distant shore, he quickly found himself in a swift current that took him amongst a scattered shoal of banyans. They were rooted in a gravel bank that at times Yama could graze with his toes; if he had been as tall as the Aedile he could have stood with his head clear of the swiftly running water.

At first, the banyans were no more than handfuls of broad, glossy leaves that stood stiffly above the water, but the current carried Yama deeper into a maze of wide channels between stands of bigger trees. Here, they rose in dense thickets above prop roots flexed in low arches. The prop roots were fringed by tangled mats of feeder roots alive with schools of tiny fish that flashed red or green dots of luminescence as they darted away from Yama.

With the last of his strength, Yama swam toward one of the largest of the banyans as he was swept past it. The cold water had stolen all feeling from his limbs and the muscles of his shoulders and arms were tender with exhaustion. He threw himself into floating nets of feeder roots and, scraping past strings of clams and bearded mussels, dragged himself onto a smooth horizontal trunk, and lay gasping like a fish that had just learned the trick of breathing air.

Yama was too cold and wet and scared to sleep, and something in the tangled thickets of the tree had set up a thin, regular piping, like the fretting of a sick baby. He sat with his back against an arched root and watched the uppermost arm of the Galaxy set beyond the bank of faintly luminescent fog that had spread for leagues across the black river. Somewhere in the fog was Enobarbus’s pinnace, lost, blinded. By what strange allies, or stranger coincidence? The top of the wide fog bank seethed like boiling milk; Yama watched the black sky above it for the return of the machine’s violet spark. Answered prayers, he thought, and shivered.

He dozed and woke, and dozed again, and jerked awake from a vivid dream of standing on the flying bridge of the ghostly frigate as it bore down on the pinnace. The frigate was crewed neither by men nor even by ghosts or revenants, but by a crowd of restless lights that responded to his unspoken commands with quick unquestioning intelligence. Zakiel had taught him that although dreams were usually stitched from fragments of daily experience, sometimes they were more, portents of the future or riddles whose answers were keys to the conduct of the dreamer’s life. Yama did not know if this dream was of the first or second kind, let alone what it might mean, but when he woke it left him with a clinging horror, as if his every action might somehow be magnified, with terrible consequences.

The Galaxy had set, and dawn touched the flood of the river with flat gray fight. The bank of fog was gone; there was no sign of the pinnace. Yama dozed again, and woke with sunlight dancing on his face, filtered through the restless leaves of the banyan. He found himself on a wide limb that gently sloped up from the water and ran straight as an old road into the dense leafy tangles of the banyan’s heal, crossed by arching roots and lesser branches that dropped prop roots straight down into the water. The banyan’s glossy leaves hung everywhere like the endlessly deep folds of a ragged green cloak, and the bark of its limbs, smoothly wrinkled as skin, was colonized by lichens that hung like curtains of gray lace, the green barrels of bromeliads, and the scarlet and gold and pure white blossoms of epiphytic orchids.

Yama ached in every muscle. He drew off his wet shirt and trousers and hung them on a branch, then set to the exercises Sergeant Rhodean had taught him until at last his joints and muscles loosened. He drank handfuls of cold water, startling shoals of fairy shrimp that scattered from his shadow, and splashed water on his face until his skin tingled with racing blood.

Yama had come ashore on the side of the banyan that faced toward the far side of the river. He slung his damp clothes over his shoulder and, naked, set off through the thickets of the tree, at first following the broad limb and then, when it joined another and bent upward into the high, sun-speckled canopy, scrambling through a tangle of lesser branches. There was always still, black water somewhere beneath the random lattice of branches and prop roots. Tiny hummingbirds, clad in electric blues and emerald greens, as if enameled by the most skillful of artists, darted from flower to flower. When Yama blundered through curtains of leaves, clouds of blackflies rose up and got in his eyes and mouth.

At last, he glimpsed blue sky through a fall of green vines. He parted the soft, jointed stems and stepped through them onto a sloping spit of mossy ground, where a round coracle of the kind used by the fisherfolk was drawn up on the miniature shore.

The blackened, upturned shell of a snapping turtle held the ashes of a small fire, still warm when Yama sifted them through his fingers. Yama drew on his damp shirt and trousers and called out, but no one answered his call. He cast around and quickly found a winding path leading away from the spit.

And a moment later found the fisherman, tangled in a crude net of black threads just beyond the second bend.

The threads were the kind that Amnan used to catch bats and birds, resin fibers as strong as steel covered with thousands of tiny blisters that exuded a strong glue at a touch.

The threads had partly collapsed when the fisherman had blundered into them, and he hung like a corpse in an unraveling shroud, one arm caught above his head, the other bound tightly to his side.

He did not seem surprised to see Yama. He said, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “Kill me quick. Have mercy.”

“I was hoping for rescue,” Yama said.

The fisherman stared at him. He wore only a breechclout, and his pale skin was blotched with islands of pale green.

Black hair hung in greasy tangles around his broad, chinless froggy face. His wide mouth hung open, showing rows of tiny triangular teeth. He had watery, protuberant eyes, and a transparent membrane flicked over their balls three times before he said, “You are not one of the Mud People.”

“I come from Aeolis. My father is the Aedile.”

“The Mud People think they know the river. It’s true they can swim a bit, but they’re greedy, and pollute her waters.”

“One of them seems to have caught you.”

“You’re a merchant’s son, perhaps. We have dealings with them, for flints and steel. No, don’t come close, or you’ll be caught too. There is only one way to free me, and I don’t think you carry it.”

“I know how the threads work,” Yama said, “and I am sorry that I do not have what is needed to set you free. I do not even have a knife.”

“Even steel will not cut them. Leave me. I’m a dead man, fit only to fill the bellies of the Mud People. What are you doing?”

Yama had discovered that the surface of the path was a spongy thatch of wiry roots, fallen leaves and the tangled filaments of epiphytic lichens. He lay on his belly and pushed his arm all the way through the thick thatch until his fingers touched water. He looked at the fisherman and said, “I have seen your people use baited traps to catch fish. Do you have one on your coracle? And I will need some twine or rope, too.”

While Yama worked, the fisherman, whose name was Caphis, told him that he had blundered into the sticky web just after dawn, while searching for the eggs of a species of coot which nested in the hearts of banyan thickets. “The eggs are good to eat,” Caphis said, “but not worth dying for.”

Caphis had put into the banyan shoal last night. He had seen a great battle, he explained, and had thought it prudent to take shelter. “So I am doubly a fool.”

While the fisherman talked, Yama cut away a section of lichenous thatch and lashed the trap upright to a prop root.

He had to use the blade of the fisherman’s short spear to cut the twine, and several times sliced his palm. He sucked at the shallow cuts before starting to replace the thatch. It was in the sharp bend of the path; anyone hurrying down it would have to step there to make the turn.

He said, “Did you see much of the battle?”

“A big ship caught fire. And then the small boat which has been lying offshore of the Mud People’s city for three days must have found an enemy, because it started firing into the dark.”

“But there was another ship—it was huge and glowing, and melted into fog . . .”

The fisherman considered this, and said at last, “I turned for shelter once the firing started, as anyone with any sense would. You saw a third ship? Well—perhaps you were closer than I and I expect that you saw more than you wanted to.”

“Well, that is true enough.” Yama stood, leaning on the stout shaft of the spear.

“The river carries all away, if you let it. That’s our view. What’s done one day is gone the next, and there’s a new start. He might not come today, or even tomorrow. You will not wait that long. You will take the coracle and leave me to the fate I deserve.”

“My father outlawed this.”

“They are a devious people, the Mud People.” Sunlight splashed through the broad leaves of the banyan, shining on the fisherman’s face. Caphis squinted and added, “If you could fetch water, it would be a blessing.”

Yama found a resin mug in the coracle. He was dipping it into the water at the edge of the mossy spit when he saw a little boat making its way toward the island. It was a skiff, rowed by a single man. By the time Yama had climbed into a crotch of the banyan, hidden amongst rustling leaves high above the spit, the skiff was edging through the slick of feeder roots that ringed the banyan.

Yama recognized the man. Grog, or Greg. One of the bachelor laborers who tended the mussel beds at the mouth of the Breas. He was heavy and slow, and wore only a filthy kilt.

The gray skin of his shoulders and back was dappled with a purple rash, the precursor of the skin canker which affected those Amnan who worked too long in sunlight.

Yama watched, his mouth dry and his heart beating quickly, as the man tied up his boat and examined the coracle and the cold ashes in the turtle shell. He urinated at the edge of the water for what seemed a very long time, then set off along the path.

A moment later, while Yama was climbing down from his hiding place, made clumsy because he dared not let go of the fisherman’s short spear, someone, the man or the fisherman, cried out. It startled two white herons which had been perching amongst the topmost branches of the banyan; the birds rose up into the air and flapped away as Yama crept down the path, clutching the spear with both hands.

There was a tremendous shaking in the leaves at the bend of the path. The man was floundering hip-deep amongst the broken thatch which Yama had used to conceal the trap. The big trap was wide-mouthed and two spans long, tapering to a blunt point. It was woven from pliable young prop roots, and bamboo spikes had been fastened on the inside, pointing downward, so that when a fish entered to get at the bait it could not back out. These spikes had dug into the flesh of the man’s leg when he had tried to pull free, and he was bleeding hard and grunting with pain as he pushed down with his hands like a man trying to work off a particularly tight boot. He did not see Yama until the point of the spear pricked the fat folds of speckled skin at the back of his neck.

After Yama had used the spray which dissolved the threads’ glue, Caphis wanted to kill the man who would have killed and eaten him, but Yama kept hold of the spear, and at last Caphis satisfied himself by tying the man’s thumbs together behind his back and leaving him there, with his leg still in the trap.

The man started to shout as soon as they were out of sight.

“I gave, you the stuff, didn’t I? I didn’t mean no harm. Let me go, master! Let me go and I’ll say nothing! I swear it!”

He was still shouting when Caphis and Yama put out from the banyan.

The fisherman’s scrawny shanks were so long that his knees jutted above the crown of his head as he squatted in the coracle. He paddled with slow, deliberate strokes. The threads of the trap had left a hundred red weals across the mottled yellow skin of his chest. He said that once he had warmed up his blood he would take Yama across to the shore.

“That is, if you don’t mind helping me with my night lines.”

“You could take me to Aeolis. It is not far.”

Caphis nodded. “That’s true enough, but it would take me all day to haul against the current. Some of us go there to trade, and that’s where I got that fine spear-point last year. But we never leave our boats when we go there, because it is a wicked town!”

Yama said, “It is where I live. You have nothing to fear. Even if the man gets free, he would be burnt for trying to murder you.”

“Perhaps. But then his family would, make a vendetta against my family. That is how it is.” Caphis studied Yama, and said at last, “You’ll help me with my lines, and I’ll take you to the shore. You can walk more quickly to your home than I can row. But you’ll need some breakfast before you can work, I reckon.”

They landed at the edge of a solitary grandfather banyan half a league downstream. Caphis built a fire of dried moss in the upturned turtle shell and boiled up tea in the resmi mug, using friable strips of the bark of a twiggy bush that grew, he said, high up in the tangled tops of the banyans.

When the tea started to boil he threw in some flat seeds that made it froth, and handed Yama the mug.

The tea was bitter, but after the first sip Yama felt it warm his blood, and he quickly drained the mug. He sat by the fire, chewing on a strip of dried fish, while Caphis moved about the hummocky moss of the little clearing where they had landed. With his long legs and short barrel of a body, and his slow, deliberate, flatfooted steps, the fisherman looked something like a heron. The toes of his feet were webbed, and the hooked claws on his big toes and spurs on his heels helped him climb the banyan’s smooth, interlaced branches.

He collected seeds and lichens and a particular kind of moss, and dug fat beetle grubs from rotten wood and ate them at once, spitting out the heads.

All anyone could want could be found in the banyans, Caphis told Yama. The fisherfolk pounded the leaves to make a fibrous pulp from which they wove their clothes. Their traps and the ribs of their coracles were made from young prop roots, and the hulls were woven from strips of bark varnished with a distillation of the tree’s sap. The kernels of banyan fruit, which set all through the year, could be ground into flour. Poison used to stun fish was extracted from the skin of a particular kind of frog that lived in the tiny ponds cupped within the living vases of bromeliads. A hundred kinds of fish swarmed around the feeder roots, and a thousand kinds of plants grew on the branches; all had their uses, and their own tutelary spirits which had to be individually appeased.

“There’s hardly anything we lack, except metals and tobacco, which is why we trade with you land folk. Otherwise we’re as free as the fish, and always have been. We’ve never risen above our animal selves since the Preservers gave us the banyans as our province, and that is the excuse the Mud People use when they hunt us. But we’re an old folk, and we’ve seen much, and we have long memories. Everything comes to the river, we say, and generally that’s true.”

Caphis had a tattoo on the ball of his left shoulder, a snake done in black and red that curled around so that it could swallow its own tail. He touched the skin beneath this tattoo with the claw of his thumb and said, “Even the river comes to its own self.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, where do you think the river goes, when it falls over the edge of the world? It swallows its own self and returns to its beginning, and so renews itself. That’s how the Preservers made the world, and we, who were here from the first, remember how it was. Lately, things are changing. Year by year the river grows less. Perhaps the river no longer bites its own tail, but if that is so I cannot say where it goes instead.”

“Do you—your people, do they remember the Preservers?”

Caphis’s eyes filmed over. His voice took on a singsong lilt. “Before the Preservers, the Universe was a plain of ice. The Preservers brought light that melted the ice and woke the seeds of the banyans which were trapped there. The first men were made of wood, carved from a banyan tree so huge that it was a world in itself, standing in the universe of water and light. But the men of wood showed their backs to the Preservers, and did not respect animals or even themselves, and destroyed so much of the world-tree that the Preservers raised a great flood. It rained for forty days and forty nights, and the waters rose through the roots of the banyan and rose through the branches until only the youngest leaves showed above the flood, and at last even these were submerged. All of the creatures of the world-tree perished in the flood except for a frog and a heron. The frog clung to the last leaf which showed above the flood and called to its own kind, but the heron heard its call and stooped down and ate it.”

“Well, the Preservers, saw this, and the frog grew within the heron’s stomach until it split open its captor, and stepped out, neither frog nor heron but a new creature which had taken something from both its parents. It was the first of our kind, and just as it was neither frog nor heron, neither was it man or woman. At once the flood receded. The new creature lay down on a smooth mudbank and fell asleep. And while it slept, the Preservers dismembered it, and from its ribs fifty others were made, and these were men and women of the first tribe of my people. The Preservers breathed on them and clouded their minds, so that unlike the men of wood they would not challenge or be disrespectful to their creators. But that was long ago, and in another place. You, if you don’t mind me saying so, look as if your bloodline climbed down from the trees.”

“I was born on the river, like you.”

Caphis clacked his wide flat lower jaw—it was the way the fisherfolk laughed. “Sometime I’d like to hear that story. But now we should set to. The day does not grow younger, and there is work to do. It is likely that the Mud Man will escape. We should have killed him. He would bite off his own leg, if he thought that would help him escape. The Mud People are treacherous and full of tricks—that is how they are able to catch us, we who are more clever than they, as long as our blood is warmed. That is why they generally hunt us at night. I was caught because my blood had the night chill, you see. It made me slow and stupid, but now I am warm, and I know what I must do.”

Caphis pissed on the fire to extinguish it, packed away the cup and the turtle shell beneath the narrow bench which circled the rim of the coracle, and declared himself ready.

“You will bring me luck, for it was by luck that you saved yourself from the phantom and then found me.”

With Yama seated on one side and Caphis wielding a leaf-shaped paddle on the other, the coracle was surprisingly stable, although it was so small that Yama’s knees pressed against Caphis’s bony shins. As the craft swung out into the current, Caphis paddled with one hand and filled a long-stemmed clay pipe with ordinary tobacco with the other, striking a flint against a bit of rough steel for a spark.

It was a bright clear afternoon, with a gentle wind that barely ruffled the surface of the river. There was no sign of the pinnace; no ships at all, only the little coracles of the fisherfolk scattered across the broad river between shore and misty horizon. As Caphis said, the river bore all away. For a while, Yama could believe that none of his adventures had happened, that his life could return to its normal routines.

Caphis squinted at the sun, wet a finger and held it up to the wind, then drove his craft swiftly between the scattered tops of young banyans (Yama thought of the lone frog in Caphis’s story, clinging to the single leaf above the universal flood, bravely calling but finding only death, and in death, transfiguration).

As the sun fell toward the distant peaks of the Rim Mountains, Yama and Caphis worked trotlines strung between bending poles anchored in the bottom of the gravel bank.

Caphis gave Yama a sticky, odorless ointment to rub on his shoulders and arms to protect his skin from sunburn. Yama soon fell into an unthinking rhythm, hauling up lines, rebaiting hooks with bloodworms and dropping them back. Most of the hooks were empty, but gradually a pile of small silver fish accumulated in the well of the coracle, frantically jinking in the shallow puddle there or lying still, their gill flaps pulsing like blood-red flowers as they drowned in air.

Caphis asked forgiveness for each fish he caught. The fisherfolk believed that the world was packed with spirits which controlled everything from the weather to the flowering of the least of the epiphytic plants of the banyan shoals. Their days were spent in endless negotiations with these spirits to ensure that the world continued its seamless untroubled spinning out.

At last Caphis declared himself satisfied with the day’s catch. He gutted a pentad of fingerlings, stripped the fillets of pale muscle from their backbones, and gave half to Yama, together with a handful of fleshy leaves.

The fillets of fish were juicy; chewed, the leaves tasted of sweet limes and quenched Yama’s thirst. Following Caphis’s example, he spat the leaf pulp overboard, and tiny fish promptly swarmed around this prize as it sank through the clear dark water.

Caphis picked up his paddle and the coracle skimmed across the water toward a bend of the stony shore, where cliffs carved and socketed with empty tombs rose from a broad pale beach.

“There’s an old road that leads along the shore to Aeolis,” Caphis told Yama. “It will take you the rest of this day, and a little of the next, I reckon.”

“If you would take me directly to Aeolis, I can promise you a fine reward. It is little enough in return for your life.”

“We do not go there unless we must, and never after nightfall. You saved my life, and so it is always in your care. Would you risk it so quickly, by taking me into the jaws of the Mud People? I do not think you would be so cruel. I have my family to consider. They’ll be watching for me this night, and I don’t want to worry them further.”

Caphis grounded his frail craft in the shallows a little way from the shore. He had never set foot on land, he said, and he wasn’t about to start now. He looked at Yama and said, “Don’t walk after dark, young master. Find shelter before the sun goes down and stick to it until first light. Then you’ll be all right. There are ghouls out there, and they like a bit of live meat on occasion.”

Yama knew about the ghouls. He and Telmon had once hidden from a ghoul on one of their expeditions into the foothills of the City of the Dead. He remembered the way the man-shaped creature’s pale skin had glimmered in the twilight like wet muscle, and how frightened he had been as it stooped this way and that, and the stench it had left. He said, “I will be careful.”

Caphis said, “Take this. No use against ghouls, but I hear tell there are plenty of coneys on the shore. Some of us hunt them, but not me.”

It was a small knife carved from a flake of obsidian. Its hilt was wrapped with twine, and its exfoliated edge was as sharp as a razor.

“I reckon you can look after your own self, young master, but maybe a time will come when you need help. Then my family will remember that you helped me. Do you recall what I said about the river?”

“Everything comes around again.”

Caphis nodded, and touched the tattoo of the self-engulfing snake on his shoulder. “You had a good teacher. You know how to pay attention.”

Yama slid from the tipping coracle and stood knee-deep in ooze and brown water. “I will not forget,” he said.

“Choose carefully where you camp this night,” Caphis said. “Ghouls are bad, but ghosts are worse. We see their lights sometimes, shining softly in the ruins.”

Then he pushed away from the shallows and the coracle waltzed into the current as he dug the water with his leaf-shaped paddle. By the time Yama had waded to shore, the coracle was already far off, a black speck on the shining plane of the river, making a long, curved path toward a raft of banyan islands far from shore.