Shrine of Stars

Chapter Three The Trader

Pandaras and Tibor drifted downriver for three days, always keeping close to the edge of the mangrove swamps which fringed the far-side shore. Pandaras did not dare set out across the broad river on the little raft, for a single wave might swamp it in an instant. Even though he could swim well, he tied himself to the bundles of reeds each night in case he slipped overboard in his sleep and drowned before he could wake. He slept very little, and Tibor did not sleep at all. The hierodule said that sleeplessness was another curse the Preservers had placed upon the bloodline. Pandaras thought that it helped explain why the fellow was so lacking in imagination, for he had no dream-life.

The spark in the coin did not grow brighter, but neither did it grow dimmer. Yama was alive, but he was very far away. It did not matter. Every time he looked at the coin, Pandaras pledged to find his master even if it took him beyond the end of the world, even if it took him all his life.

To pass the time while Tibor paddled steadily and the ragged margin of mangrove stands and banyan islands drifted by, full of green shadows despite the bright, hot sunlight, Pandaras told the hierodule every detail of his adventures with Yama. How he had appointed himself Yama’s squire after the landlord of The Crossed Axes tried to kill Yama for the coins he carried; how they had met the cateran, Tamora, and their failed attempt to bring the escaped star-sailor to justice; the destruction of the Temple of the Black Well and their entry into the Palace of the Memory of the People (of which Pandaras remembered little, for he had been laid out by a blow to the head). The conspiracy in the Department of Vaticination which had led to capture by Yama’s enemy, Prefect Corin, and then escape from imprisonment, with Yama full of wrath and cloaked in blue fire he had conjured from a shrine, the first time Pandaras had been truly afraid of his master. And the miracle by which Yama had raised up a baby of one of the indigenous races which lived in the Palace, and the triumphant procession of Yama through the streets of Ys. The rest, the voyage of the Weazel downriver, the sack of Yama’s childhood home and the chase by Prefect Corin which had ended in an attack by monstrous polyps from the deep and a storm and near shipwreck, Tibor already knew. But Pandaras, who loved stories, told it anyway.

“My master says that stories are the only kind of immortality achievable without the grace of the Preservers. Certainly, they are the lifeblood of my people. We are so very short-lived, yet live long in memory because of our skill in making stories and songs. A good story can be handed down through a hundred generations, its details changing but its heart always the same, and the people in it live again each time it is told. So might we, Tibor, for surely this is the greatest story the world has ever known.”

“All the world is a story,” Tibor said, after paddling silently for a while. “Who can find the single droplet which falls from a leaf-tip into the flood of the Great River? Who can say where one story ends and another begins?”

Pandaras thought that Tibor was quoting from an obscure sura in the Puranas and, having no wish to argue theology with a hierodule, for once held his tongue.

The nights were dark and still, lit only by the dim red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers. The Eye rose slightly earlier each night, and each night reached a slightly higher point in the black sky above the river’s black plain before falling back toward the far-side horizon. In the vast stillness of the night, Pandaras felt most acutely the emptiness of the unpeopled shore, and he was relieved when at last the song of birds and monkeys and the whistling chorus of millions of frogs greeted the dawn. The days quickly grew hot, but Tibor did not seem to mind the heat. He said that he had grown up in a far hotter land, near the midpoint of the world. A little sun like this was nothing.

Without salt, the antelope meat went off before they could eat more than a quarter of it, but there was food all around. There were always ripe fruits waiting to be plucked from strangler figs or banana plants. Tibor plaited nets from fibers scraped from the fronds of the big ferns which clung to the mangroves, and trawled for catfish and lampreys in shallow backwaters, while Pandaras nimbly climbed about the canopies of banyans, taking eggs from bird and lizard nests. Tibor ate insects too, often catching them on the wing with his long red tongue.

Occasionally they glimpsed the flash of a sail far out in the middle of the river, an argosy or carrack heading for the war, and one day a machine circled the raft before rising up and flying straight toward the misty line of the nearside shore. It had a long, wasp-waisted body, a decad of paired, shimmeringly fragile vanes, and a cluster of bright red eyes. Pandaras cocked the arbalest while the machine dipped overhead, remembering the machines which Prefect Corin had sent out to search for Yama. But Prefect Corin must be dead, drowned when his ship had been torn apart by the giant polyps Yama had called from the deep river-bottom. There were many machines on Confluence, Pandaras told himself. It signified nothing.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, they reached the house of an itinerant trader. It was tucked away in a backwater shaded by tall mangroves, a ramshackle shanty built in the branches of a banyan, with walls and a peaked roof fashioned from panels of woven grasses. A decad of small boats were strung out along an anchor line on the still, black water below. Little glowing lamps shone everywhere amongst the tree’s glossy green leaves, like a horde of fireflies. Music from a cassette player came clearly across the water as Tibor paddled the raft toward the shanty, and a bird set up a harsh clamor, warning of their approach.

The trader was a crafty old man named Ayulf. He was of a bloodline familiar to Pandaras, the bloodline of half the ruffians who smuggled cigarettes and other proscribed trade goods to indigens, or otherwise scraped a living on the wrong side of the law along the docks of Ys or on the Great River. Ayulf wore only a dhoti around his scrawny waist, in which he habitually rummaged to scratch or rearrange his genitals. His arms and legs were long and stringy, and his small head was crowned with a dirty, half-unraveled turban from which greasy spikes of hair stuck out in every direction. His eyes were yellow, like flame or bits of amber, and he hissed softly to himself when he was thinking; he did that a lot as Pandaras told a highly edited version of his story while devouring a salty mess of rice and fish.

Ayulf traded with the local fisherfolk, exchanging cigarettes, cheap cooking pots, fish hooks, nylon netting and leaves of bronze or iron for lizard, snake and cayman skins, the hides of marsh antelopes, the feathers of bell birds and birds of heaven, and rare spices and medicines extracted from plants and lichens which grew on the banyans and mangroves. The shanty was cluttered with bales of cigarettes wrapped in black plastic, wooden cases and machines or bits of machines. Some kind of large gun was in pieces on the floor by the large, flat stone which served as a hearth. Salted hides were slung beneath the roof, layered with aromatic tar-bush leaves to keep off insects. A pentad of fisherfolk women and more than twice that number of their children moved about in the dusky evening light, lighting lamps, mending clothes, stirring the cook-pot in which fish soup perpetually simmered, chattering in their dialect and casting covert glances at Pandaras and Tibor. A half-tame crow hopped about, too. It was big, half Pandaras’s height, and looked beadily at him as if wondering whether it would be easy to kill him, and what he might taste like. The crow’s white droppings spattered the floor and the stacks of plastic-wrapped bales, and it was given to crying out hoarsely and jumping here and there with an abrupt dry flutter of its black wings. It was always just at the corner of Pandaras’s sight. It made him jumpy, and he kept one hand near the hilt of his ivory-handled poniard. The arbalest was slung at his shoulder. He did not trust the trader.

“You don’t mind my bird,” Ayulf said. “He’s never seen no one like you before and he’s curious.” He had been cuddling the youngest of the women to him; now he dismissed the girl with a slap to her haunches and said, “They are animals, not men, but someone like me must make a living as best he can, and take what company he can, too. You understand, eh? You being in the same line of business as me. Don’t deny it. I know a man that lives by his wits when I see him.”

Ayulf was staring at Tibor when he said this, but then he seemed to recollect himself and winked at Pandaras. “I can see that you make a good living here,” Pandaras said.

“There’s a lot that washes downriver,” the trader said, “and a lot that makes its way back from the war.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That culverin, for instance. I’d sell it to you, except I’ve promised it to a good friend of mine who’ll be along to collect it once I’ve fixed its firing mechanism. But I have other guns. I’ll take that arbalest off you in part exchange for something with a bit more bite. You need heavy weapons around here. The Preservers don’t see so well in this part of the river, if you get my meaning.”

Ayulf’s friend was probably a pirate, Pandaras thought. The trader must pay a good deal of tribute for protection. He said, “You are generous to your friends, dominie.”

“It helps to be generous out here,” Ayulf said. He plucked a bit of gristle from his gappy teeth and tossed it to the crow, which snapped it from the air with its bone-white beak and swallowed it whole. “Favors bring business and keep trouble away.”

“I can see that your business is good. You have a good place here, many women, many things to trade. Why, you even have an abundance of boats.”

“You need a boat to get about. How does that raft of yours handle out on the river?”

“Well enough, for a raft. My friend here has a lot of experience with rafts.”

Ayulf’s yellow gaze flicked toward Tibor. “Friend, eh? With a friend like yours, you are a rich man indeed, and deserve better than a raft, I would think.”

They slowly got around to bargaining, and at last, with Tibor following, climbed down to the lowest branches of the banyan to inspect a long narrow pirogue. It had been dug out of a single tree trunk and had a log outrigger and a high prow. A reaction motor lay in the stinking water which half-filled it. Although Ayulf could not get the motor to start, he promised that it usually ran as sweet as the streams of the paradise which the Preservers would create at the far end of time. The sun had set and, despite the little lights strung through the branches of the banyan, there was not much light under the shanty, but Pandaras could see better in the dark than the trader. He took a hard look at the motor—it was clogged with dried mud and probably had been dropped in the river at some point—and said that it was a big motor for a small boat.

“Sometimes in my line of work you need to get somewhere quickly,” Ayulf said, showing his ruined teeth in a ghastly grin. “This will take you anywhere on the river, my little man, swift as a thought from the Preservers.”

Pandaras smiled at him. “It might do that once it is fixed. If it can be fixed. The inlet and outlet channels are clogged and bent, but that’s a trivial matter. What’s worse is that the reaction chamber might be corroded under all this mud, and the feeder valves and the ignition spark will need complete readjustment. That is, if they are still working. There’s a hole in the fuel tank, too. Did someone shoot at it?”

Ayulf walked his long fingernails up his narrow jaw and pulled at his ear. He glanced at Tibor and crowded closer to Pandaras, who lightly touched the hilt of his poniard. The trader pretended not to notice the gesture. He stank powerfully of tobacco, sweat and urine. He said, “If you know something of motors, you will see that this is a fine one, very powerful.”

“I see that it is very broken. No doubt you got it from someone who was foolish enough to drop it into the river or have their boat sunk from under them. It’s been lying too long at the bottom of the river to be any good, but I’d be happy to take it away from you as a favor, since the look of it spoils the rest of your fine fleet.”

With hot food in his belly and his face and feet and hands washed in filtered water, Pandaras felt more cheerful than he had since the flier had taken away his master and destroyed the Weazel. This poor shanty could almost count as civilization, and bargaining was the stuff of civilization, the way by which you measured yourself against your fellows. He had Tibor carry the reaction motor into the shanty and pretended to be angry that someone had burdened Ayulf with something in such a bad condition. On this basis, he and Ayulf bargained for an hour over glasses of peppermint-flavored arak; Pandaras took care to pour most of his share through a crack in the floorboards whenever Ayulf was distracted by one of his women.

Ayulf was a crafty bargainer, but he was not as clever as he thought he was. He had been too long amongst river pirates and the simple fisherfolk, and had lost his edge. He suggested almost straightaway that Pandaras leave Tibor with him and take the pirogue and the motor, and plenty of supplies too, but Pandaras said that he wanted only the pirogue, although he would take the motor if Ayulf had no need for it. In the end, it cost Pandaras half Yama’s store of iron coins as well as the husks of the burnt-out machines. He had shown these to Ayulf early on and knew, by the widening of the man’s yellow eyes, that the trader instantly coveted them.

Ayulf broke open another bottle of arak to celebrate the deal, and although Pandaras drank only enough to be polite, it quickly went to his head. “That’s it,” Ayulf said encouragingly. “Drink. Be happy. We’ve both done well with this deal. Let your slave here drink, too. Aren’t we all friends?”

“I do not drink alcohol,” Tibor said. “It is a poison to my people.”

“We wouldn’t want to poison you,” Ayulf said. “Not you. You’re worth a lot to your master.” He said to Pandaras, “You can really fix that?”

“I’m going to do my best,” Pandaras said, and opened up the motor’s combustion chamber and began to remove and clean the feeder valves and the rotary spark. The crow perched close by, cocking its head this way and that, fascinated by the bright bits of metal which emerged from their coatings of mud. Ayulf watched sidelong, and said that Pandaras seemed to know a little about motors.

“One of my uncles on my stepfather’s side had a trade in them. This was in Ys, where such things are forbidden, so it was on the black side of the market. Others think that our bloodline is famous only for songs and stories, and see our hands and think that we cannot do good work with them. But while our fingers are crooked, they are also strong, and we are very patient when we need to be. You might think this motor worthless, but when I’m done it will be better than new. You are very generous, Ayulf, and I thank you a million times over. Here, more of this rotgut, eh? We will drink to my success.”

“You stay here a few days,” Ayulf said. “You and your slave.”

“He isn’t my slave.”

“He has to be someone’s, and he came with you. Maybe we become partners, eh? Make much money. There is much that needs fixing here. I hear the war goes badly, which means it goes well for you and me, eh? More and more in the regular army run away from it, have to sell stuff cheap to buy what they need dear, and caterans are always hungry for the best weapons, no matter what side they are on.”

“I have to find my master,” Pandaras said.

Tibor said, “And the ship.”

Ayulf poured Pandaras’s shot glass brimful, drank from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It left you behind, eh? Maybe after an argument or a delicate kind of disagreement? I sometimes find those who have fallen out violently with their shipmates, if the caymans and fishes haven’t found them first.”

“There was certainly a fight,” Pandaras said, glaring at Tibor.

“And you lost and were left to rot on some island? I know how that is. Are you sure they want you back? More likely you ran away, eh? They wouldn’t leave a valuable slave behind with you. Yes, you took him and ran away, I would guess. No, it’s all right, I won’t tell. Listen, why go downriver? I have all you want here. Food and drink and women. Well, the women are animals, of course, but they know how to please a man in the warm trade.”

Ayulf grabbed at the nearest of the women, but she pushed him away with a loud laugh and turned back to frying shrimp in a big blackened cast-iron pan.

“Always cooking,” Ayulf said. He started at the woman and made a humming noise in the back of his throat. “Why now, eh? Why so late? You all eat too much, you and your brats. I should throw a few of you to the caymans, eh? Which ones first?” He stuck his long middle finger (its nail had been filed to a sharp point, and was painted red) at the nearest woman and made a noise like a pistol shot. She giggled and put her hands over her face. Her fingers were webbed, and spread very wide, like a fan. They were tipped with little black claws.

“Someone is coming,” the oldest woman said, from the far corner of the shanty. She was very fat, overflowing the stool on which she perched. She was working at a bit of wood with a tiny knife. Her skin was as green as moldy cheese. She said, “They bring hides to trade, man. They will make you rich.”

“They share their thoughts,” Ayulf told Pandaras. “They are not like us, who keep our thoughts sealed in our skulls. Everything is shared with them, like air or water. Kill any one of them, and it makes no difference.”

Pandaras nodded. He was having trouble focusing on the spring, ball-bearing and three bits of metal that should fit together to make one of the feeder valves. There seemed to be too many of them, and his fingers too clumsy. He was drunk, and he had not meant to become drunk. But Ayulf was drunk too, and Pandaras had his poniard and the arbalest, and, at a pinch, Tibor (although he was not sure that Tibor, for all his size and strength, would be any good in a fight). And fisherfolk were coming. The trader would not try anything in front of them.

“You like to think we are all a single mind,” the old woman in the corner told Ayulf, “but you know it is not true. It is just that we think alike, that’s all. Hush! They are here.”

There were whistles from below, a muffled splash. The crow stirred and hopped to the rail of the veranda, finding its balance with a rustling stir of wings. It cried out hoarsely. Ayulf stumbled to the rail, pushed the bird out of the way, and peered down into the darkness.

Voices floated up. The trader cursed and threw down the half-empty bottle of arak he had been clutching. It shattered on one of the banyan’s branches. “Too fucking late! You understand? Understand too late? Come back tomorrow!”

More voices. The trader cursed again, clambered over the rail, and swarmed down the banyan. Pandaras stood (the cluttered, shadowy shanty seemed to revolve around him, and he felt a spasm of nausea) and went out onto the veranda. Below, lit by the tiny lanterns scattered amongst the banyan’s leaves, Ayulf was arguing with a tall thin man who stood in a coracle. The man was holding up what looked like a huge ragged book. There were other coracles at the edge of the darkness beyond the glow of the lanterns.

Tibor came out and stood at Pandaras’s back. He said, “The woman wants to speak with you, young master.”

“Hush. I want to know what is going on.”

“This is a bad place.”

“I know. That’s why I need to know what this is all about.”

“We should go.”

“I want to fix the motor. I can do it, but I’m tired. Later. I’ll finish it later.”

Below them, Ayulf finished a long impassioned speech, but the man in the coracle made no reply and at last the trader threw up his skinny arms and climbed back to the veranda. He fell flat on his face when he clambered over the rail, got up and went inside and found another bottle of arak, ripped the plastic seal away with his teeth and took a long swallow.

“They are impossible,” Ayulf said petulantly, to no one in particular. He took another swallow and wiped his wet lips, glaring around at the women. A child woke somewhere and made a snuffling noise. Two more children clung to their mothers’ legs, staring at the trader with big black eyes. In the corner, the fat old woman was calmly whittling her bit of wood. “Animals,” the trader said. “Why am I wasting my time with animals?”

One by one, the fisherfolk climbed to the veranda and, stooping, entered the shanty. There were four of them.

Unlike their women, they were so thin that if they had been of Pandaras’s bloodline they would have been in the last stage of starvation, and so tall that their heads brushed the ceiling. Their green skins were dappled with darker tones. It was not a book their leader carried, but a sheaf of bloody uncured hides, and he placed this at Ayulf’s feet.

One of the women crept up to Pandaras while the trader dickered with the leader of the fisherfolk in their croaking dialect. The leader squatted face to face with Ayulf, his sharp knees above the top of his head, nodding impassively, occasionally picking a shrimp from the heaped plate and examining it with slow thoughtfulness before dropping it into his wide mouth and swallowing it whole. His companions stood behind him in the shadows, as still as herons waiting for a fish to swim by. Most of the hides were of marsh antelope, but one was that of a leopard. Ayulf had spread it out in front of him and was stroking the spotted, viridescent fur with his long fingernails. To Pandaras’s great scorn, the trader made no attempt to conceal how much he coveted the leopard hide.

“My mother will speak with you,” the woman said in Pandaras’s ear. “We know that you are a friend of ours, and we will help you.”

Pandaras yawned. It was very late and he was drunk. Drunk and tired. He had given up trying to fit the motor back together. His fingers were numb and his stomach hurt. Later. Tomorrow. The shanty was swaying to and fro like a boat on the breast of the river. The lanterns seemed very bright, a swarm of hectic colors that kept trying to run into each other. It was an effort to keep anything in focus for more than a moment.

The woman touched the fetish which Pandaras wore over his shirtsleeve, but Pandaras mistook the gesture and pushed her away. He wanted to curl up around the pain in his stomach. He wanted to sleep.

“Your master is a fool,” he told the woman. He was aware of Tibor’s steady gaze on the other side of the shadowy shanty. He said, “I can take care of myself.”

“Oncus,” the woman said, but Pandaras had forgotten that name and stared at her dumbly until she went away. Pandaras woke with a start some time later. It was still dark. His mouth was parched and he had a bad headache and somehow he was standing upright. Then he realized that Tibor was holding him up by the collar of his ragged shirt and kicked out indignantly. Tibor let him go. The hierodule had the reaction motor under his arm.

Ayulf was in a hammock on the far side of the shanty, half-curled around a fat young woman and snoring through his open mouth. A knot of children slept below. The oldest woman was watching Pandaras from her stool on the other side of the slab hearth, the carved peg of wood in one hand, her little knife in the other. “We go, young master,” Tibor said in a low, hoarse whisper.

Pandaras drew out his poniard. “I’ll cut his throat,” he said. He was still drunk. His stomach hurt badly, as if he had been swallowing slivers of hot metal. The muscles in his arms and legs felt as if they were on the verge of cramping. He said, “He poisoned me. I’ll cut his throat and watch him die in his own blood. I can do it.”

Tibor wrapped a large, six-fingered hand around Pandaras’s wrist. The poniard’s blade pressed against the hierodule’s gray skin, but did not cut it. “You fixed the motor,” Pandaras said stupidly.

“It is very like the motor of the Weazel,” Tibor said, and added, “Your pardon, but I think you need to be helped,” and lifted Pandaras up and swung him over the rail of the veranda.

They were halfway down when Pandaras remembered something and began to scramble back up. Tibor tried to catch his foot, but Pandaras kicked his hand away. “The pack and the arbalest,” he hissed. “My master’s book. His money.”

The women stirred and whispered amongst themselves when Pandaras reappeared, but he ignored them. He found the arbalest and the pack by the flat hearthstone—the book was still inside, but the money was gone.

“Where is it?” he hissed at the old woman. “Where did your master hide my money?”

She shook her head, and put her fingers to her throat. Pandaras showed her the poniard. “I’ll kill him where he sleeps. Show me where he hid it and I will go.”

On its perch above the stay of Ayulf’s hammock, the crow stirred, gave a single hoarse screech, and flew directly at Pandaras. Pandaras dropped the pack and slashed blindly as the bird enveloped him in its beating wings and pecked at the forearm he had raised to protect his eyes. He cut it with a lucky thrust and it fluttered away, trailing blood and dragging a black wing across the floor.

Pandaras chased after it, bleeding from half a dozen places, and went down under Ayulf’s weight and hot stink. For a moment, the trader’s hands were everywhere as he sought to prise the poniard from Pandaras’s grasp, but then his weight was lifted away. Pandaras rolled over, gasping, and saw Tibor throw Ayulf across the shanty. The skinny trader crashed into the woven panels of the far wall. As they collapsed around him, he rolled away, quick as thought. Pandaras’s poniard quivered in the planking where he had been.

Pandaras scrambled for cover too.

“I’ll kill him,” Ayulf said. He was pointing a percussion pistol at Tibor, who stood foursquare in the middle of the shanty, the arbalest dangling from one hand. “Come out, my little man, and maybe I’ll let you live. Otherwise your slave dies, and then you die.”

Pandaras stood, his hands spread in front of him. He was covered in cold sweat. Ayulf grinned and raised the pistol—and then his arm slammed backward into one of the posts which held up the roof. The pistol clattered on the floor.

Tibor lowered the arbalest. “We go,” he told Pandaras. Ayulf pawed at the bolt which pinned his forearm to the post and screamed at the women, “Get me free! Kill them and get me free!”

The old woman rose from her stool. The floor of the shanty creaked under her weight. “Go,” she told Pandaras. “I will tend to him.”

Pandaras jerked the poniard from the planking, scooped up the pack and stuffed two bottles of arak in it, and ran after Tibor. He more or less fell through the branches of the banyan and landed on his back in the stinking water which half-filled the pirogue.

As Tibor pushed off from the banyan, Pandaras fixed the reaction motor to its post and asked Tibor if he had mended the fuel tank.

“With a plug of resin,” Tibor said.

Pandaras’s hands were shaking badly. He got half the arak over himself when he tried to fill the tank. The motor started on the third attempt and spat a mass of bubbles with a coughing roar. Pandaras shoved the tiller up. The motor’s inlet flooded with a solid thump and its outlet spewed a creamy wake that glimmered in the darkness and the pirogue shot forward. With Tibor using his paddle to steer, they made a wide arc toward the open river, the constellations of lights strung through the banyan dwindling into the darkness of the shore.

Looking back, Pandaras saw Ayulf stagger to the veranda. Something was on his shoulder: the culverin. A tongue of flame burst from its throat. Ayulf fell backward and the roof of the shanty caught fire.

The reaction motor ran out of fuel just as the sun began to free itself from the band of blue haze that marked where the Rim Mountains stood, far beyond the nearside shore of the Great River. When the motor sputtered to a stop, Pandaras tipped it up on its frame. Tibor, kneeling in the bow of the pirogue, set to with the paddle.

Behind them, across several leagues of water, the mangroves of the far-side shore made a ragged black line against the brightening sky. There was no sign that Ayulf had tried to follow them; no doubt he was too busy trying to save his shanty from the blaze caused by the misfire of the culverin.

“The women told me that they put something in his arak to make him sleep,” Tibor told Pandaras, “but they knew that he would try to kill you when he woke and found you still alive, even though he was very afraid.”

Pandaras showed his teeth. His head and stomach still hurt, but he was no longer drunk. He said, “Of course he was afraid. That’s why he drank so much—because he was afraid, and because he was ashamed of his fear. I would have killed him if he tried anything, and he knew it. I’ve killed bigger men than him, and they wore armor and carried energy pistols.”

It had only been one man, the guard at the gate of the house of the rogue star-sailor. Pandaras had killed him by a trick and had been captured by the other guards almost immediately afterward, but he was certain that he could kill again if he had to.

“Ayulf was afraid of me, not you, little master,” Tibor said placidly. “He knew that I am yours to command, and that I would have intervened if he had tried to shoot or stab or strangle you. But he also knew that once you were dead, I would have served him. He smeared poison in the bottom of your glass, the poison fisherfolk use to stun fish, but you poured away most of the arak he gave you, and that saved you.”

“Hah. You suggest that you are more valuable than me. But who is the master here, and who the slave?”

“I know my price, little master, because I was sold on the open market and Captain Lorquital paid well for me. But do you know your worth?”

“It isn’t measured in coin,” Pandaras said. “And I think that you overestimate your value. What’s the use of someone who can fix a reaction motor but forgets that it needs fuel?”

“I thought that we should leave quietly and quickly.”

“And forgot my master’s book and the money, too.”

“You were nearly killed when you went back, little master. Life is more important than things.”

“Easy to say if you’ve never owned anything. The book is important. Don’t you remember how much time my master spent studying it? And we’ll need money, soon enough.”

Tibor paddled silently for a while.

“Well,” Pandaras said at last. “Ayulf got what he deserved. Why do those women stay with him, do you think?”

“I understand that it is the custom of the fisherfolk to offer up hostages to secure bargains between different families. And so they secured bargains with Ayulf, although I do not believe that he understood what obligations he owed them. The eldest of the women told me that she knew a great chief called Oncus. She recognized his fetish, and that is why she decided to save you.”

Pandaras touched the coypu-hair fetish, which he wore on his upper arm, over his shirt. It was loose there, although it had fitted snugly on his master’s wrist. He said, “I had forgotten the name of the old croaker who helped us when Prefect Corin tried to flush us out of the floating forest. What luck, eh?”

“Who can say what is luck, and what is the will of the Preservers?”

“That’s easy. A man makes his own luck. Anything else is a gift, but no one should hope to build their lives on the gifts of others. My master was clever enough to leave the fetish behind so that I would know he had been taken alive, and I was clever enough to find it and to wear it. So it was by the luck I made from my master’s forethought that we were saved.”

“Yet our lives are the gifts of the Preservers,” Tibor said solemnly. “You are engaged on a holy task, little master, and you should behave accordingly.”

“A holy task?”

“Why, you seek your master, of course. Did you not tell me that he will raise up all the indigenous peoples? If that is true, may he not also redeem the sins of my own people, and of all the races of hierodules?”

“We have to find him first,” Pandaras said, and touched the ceramic coin which, hung from his neck on its leather thong, dangled inside his shirt. “I fear for him.”

Pandaras had been badly weakened by the dose of poison, and was suffering from stomach cramps. While Tibor drove the pirogue steadily toward the nearside shore, he sat in the stern and leafed through the book he had risked his life to save.

He knew that this was an old and valuable copy of the Puranas, and that some of its pictures had been changed when his master had visited a shrine. They were quite unlike any Pandaras had ever seen before, but because, like many of his people, he was a gifted storyteller, he was able to guess something of their narrative. One of the Ancients of Days had escaped from the others and had become mixed up in a Change War. Then her ship had found her, and she had been executed by the rest of its crew. Pandaras knew that there must be more to the story than that, for his master had studied long and hard in the book while the Weazel had sailed downriver, but he could not riddle it and at last put it away.

It took a day and a night to paddle the rest of the way to the nearside shore, a patchwork of marshy fields, dense green woods and little villages. Many of the villages stood a league or more from the shore, stranded there by the river’s slow retreat. Pandaras carved a flute from a joint of bamboo and usually managed to win his supper each night by playing a medley of tunes. He quickly discovered that those he had learned as a child and put away when he had grown older were most appreciated by the indigens. In that sense at least they were as children, but Pandaras thought that the children of men would be less trusting and less innocent than these simple folk.

The indigenous people of the shore were closely related to the husbandmen who lived in the ruins of the pleasure gardens on the roof of the Palace of the Memory of the People. They were not much taller than Pandaras, but were very muscular, with seamed skin the color of freshly broken brick. Their stubby fingers were sometimes linked by loose webs of skin, and in one village the skin tones were darkened by greenish mottling, as if in the past they had had some congress with the fisherfolk.

Each night, Pandaras saved some of the food he was given and took it to Tibor, who stayed hidden outside the villages. After the incident with Ayulf, Pandaras trusted the indigens far less than they trusted him, and did not want anyone to see the hierodule and think that they could take him away. Sometimes he was also able to bring some palm wine, which could be used in the reaction motor; with a little fuel, they could travel thirty leagues in a day.

It was a slow, lazy time. One day was much like the next, hot and sunny with quick fierce showers in the afternoon, for it was the rainy season. At last, a little over a decad after they had first reached the nearside shore (Pandaras made a notch in the hull of the pirogue each day, like a prisoner), they came to Ophir.