Besides the bamboo, the whole world, then as now, had been a grey nothing. Grey waters covered the plain. They reflected the grey sky. Only a black smudge on the horizon hinted at the presence of the Titan’s Forest well to the east of them.
Yran hadn’t answered, at that time.
“The crocodile will go wild again when I fall asleep,” he said now. “And she’ll be angry that we made her help us. Really angry. She’s got eggs inside her, but this way is not where she wanted to build a nest for them. Now the monsoon’s here, she can’t lay them at all, so it’s either waste them into the water or they’ll get stuck inside her and she’ll die.”
“How exactly did we make her help us?”
“We asked nicely.”
“What?” Leaper shifted carefully so that he was facing Yran. “What are you talking about? How do you know all that, about the eggs?”
“We prayed to the crocodile god.” Yran made an odd gesture, palms pressed together, eyes closed, chin tilted upwards.
“We did not.” Leaper fumbled for grip on the bamboo as the raft kicked over a rill. “I did not. There is no crocodile god.”
“We made her help us,” Yran confessed, sighing, “with magic. The magic wears off when I fall asleep, though.”
Yran punctuated this pronouncement with a flash of perfect, straight teeth. The grin was visible through a slit in his hat that he angled towards Leaper when he was speaking.
Then he turned away and went back to humming his bizarre tune.
Leaper’s carrysack, lumpy with such useless items as his no-longer-functional thieves’ lantern and an assortment of adzes with no trees within reach, had not provided the most comfortable of pillows. More painful were the dreams he’d endured while the hostile winds of Ulellin’s curse had driven the bamboo raft in a wide circle that skirted the circumference of Canopy.
Ilik, throat gaping, blood running over the land like the waters of the monsoon. Ousos and Airak, laughing as lightning struck the plain, knowing Leaper was being tossed on a raft in the relentless rain.
Despite the water bubbling up between the bamboo poles at his feet, Yran kept relatively dry beneath an umbrella-like hat he’d made that morning. At the first protruding bamboo clump they’d passed, Yran had somehow signalled the crocodile to keep them still while he cut himself enough canes to poke through the black bun on top of his head. Then, using long leaves from the first clump of rushes they’d passed, he’d woven it watertight, leaving only the wedge-shaped gap at the front for peering through. It covered him from crown to heels where he crouched, humming, with the reins of the crocodile’s harness in his fist.
Yran’s only luggage was a long bundle wrapped in cloth of indeterminate origin and tied with the same lashings that held the raft together.
“What’s in your bundle there?” Leaper asked. “Food? Water?”
Yran bonked himself on top of his bun with one fist, which Leaper was learning to interpret as a sign that the Crocodile-Rider thought Leaper was crazy.
“Water? In this rain? We can catch some at any time!”
As if to emphasise that they couldn’t, they drifted too far to the west and the rain stopped.
“Rain comes from the goddess,” Leaper said tightly, “and she’s tied to the forest.”
“The current will carry us back, closer.”
“And when it does, the wind goddess will drive us away again!”
“You must have made your wind goddess very, very angry. Please tell me the story.”
“The monsoon must have caught you unawares,” Leaper said, changing the subject. “You did well to get the raft finished so quickly. Or did you use magic for that, too?”
Magic to tame crocodiles. That isn’t how it’s done. Or is it? He struggled to remember what the woman he’d met so many years ago had said about magic among Crocodile-Riders. She hadn’t wanted him to look for Aurilon’s bones because they were pollution, he remembered that much. The Old Gods’ bones, too. All pollution. They didn’t use magic. Was he recalling the exchange erroneously? Or was Yran lying to him again, trying to discourage him from any thoughts of rebelliously taking over the raft and hoarding Yran’s presumed bundle of supplies to himself?
Rebellion would serve no purpose. There was only one way the raft was going, despite the current’s best efforts to carry it towards Canopy, and that was at an angle to the forest, deflected by winds that emanated from amongst the trees but could only be most effective in close proximity to it. The crocodile kept them from disastrous collisions but was helpless to dictate their overall direction.
“I can tie knots faster than anyone alive,” Yran boasted.
“What—” Leaper started to say, but in a flash the wiry man was behind him, tightening a noose around his neck. Leaper slid a hand in between the rope and his neck, and before he could recall that he was injured, the spines in his forearms extruded.
Pain brought an involuntary cry to his lips. The lashings sliced and fell away, freeing him. Yran balanced, wide-legged, on the raft to one side of him, looking down in amazement through the crack in his hat.
“Got some good tricks, yourself,” he sputtered.
Leaper held his forearm out in front of him, staring at the throbbing, blood-smeared spines. His tight burn scars had burst at the seams like swollen fruit. It was a mess. With conscious thought, he withdrew the spines into his long bones.
“Those scars,” Yran guessed, squatting abruptly, his umbrella hat covering his knees. “Are they from years of putting those arm-teeth out and in? Killed a hundred warriors with them, have you?”
“No,” Leaper said, watching the blood run into the water, feeling suddenly light-headed and wondering if it would attract more crocodiles. “I took an oath against killing.”
“Oh, me too. No killing. Not me. That rope around your neck was a joke! But you didn’t laugh.”
“Do you have any way to purify water?”
“No.” Yran shrugged. “Bad water might make us vomit or bleed when we squat, I know. My nasty mother used to strain water through a clay bowl first, or through cups of dried fungi. In dry season, we’d cut watervine and hang it over bamboo pots in the evening, so we could drink clean water from the pot the next morning.”
“Will you stop listing things we don’t actually have? What do we have?”
Yran held his belly while he threw back his head and laughed, the back edge of the woven, waterproof hat tapping at his heels.
“Crocodile tears, Canopian,” he hooted. “We’ll eat crocodile eggs and drink crocodile tears until we get to the sea. It is safe for her to drink from the flood, and she will make the water safe for us.”
Leaper assumed his odd companion was joking again. So he was surprised when Yran got to his feet, wrapped the reins around one bamboo pole of the raft, and used both hands to unravel his hat. He opened one corner of the long bundle, and stowed the hat components inside. Leaper glimpsed staves and stoppered bamboo containers of various widths and lengths, and a shimmer that might have been chimera skin sliding over the browns and golden-striped greens.
When he tied his bundle tightly again, Yran came up holding a bamboo cup.
“Watch this!” he cried, and ran out along the crocodile’s back. He dropped down onto its neck, dangling both his legs in the swirling brown water, and held the cup to one of its eyes. “Cry! Drink now, and cry!”
The crocodile’s jaws opened and closed, working up white froth in the water. Tears ran over the glassy surface of its eyeball and into Yran’s cup. Leaper itched to rub his own eyes, hesitating in anticipation of pain, but wondering how this could be happening.
Yran danced back to him on the raft. Pressed the cup to his lips. Leaper sipped the crocodile’s tears, finding sweetness where he expected salt, and saying so.
“Only when we get to the sea,” Yran said. “Now she must conserve salt. Later she must shed it. Hold the cup.”
Leaper gripped it loosely in the hand that wasn’t covered in blood. He wa
tched, wordlessly, as Yran assaulted the swimming reptile once again, lying facedown along its length, his head at the crocodile’s tail end, and groping around underneath it with one hand.
He came up with a crocodile egg. It was dirty white, oval shaped, and leathery shelled. Yran bit into it, tearing a small hole, and squeezed the contents into the bamboo cup, which Leaper still held. The yolk was blood-spotted and air bubbles were trapped in the surrounding slime. In Airakland, eggs were always cooked. Not so in Understorey.
“Drink half,” Yran exhorted, and Leaper did as he was told, reaching futilely with magical senses that had deserted him, wishing he could sense what Yran was doing. The Crocodile-Rider drank down the other half of the raw egg, smacking his lips with satisfaction. “She can catch fish for us, too, later. It is not the rope that binds her, after all, but the magic.”
“Oh, good,” Leaper said.
And then Yran began to yawn and stretch.
“I’m tired,” he murmured, as if in confidence. As if he hadn’t been travelling through the night when the monsoon caught him in the open, built his raft in the early hours of the morning, and then stayed awake all day while Leaper dozed. “We’re both tired, my crocodile and me. I’ll tell her to sleep, and I’ll sleep while she sleeps. That will be safe, but you mustn’t sleep. That’s very important. You’ll wake me before the crocodile wakes.”
“How will I know if she wakes?” Leaper asked, indicating the darkening sky. “It’ll be night.” His cold, dead lantern remained packed in his carrysack.
“Sleep,” Yran commanded the crocodile, ignoring Leaper, and the crocodile closed one eye. Yran hooted. “You see how she tries to fool me? Sleeping with one eye open. It’s how she sleeps, usually, but it’s not how I need her to sleep now. Sleep, I say!”
The crocodile closed her other eye, and her tail movements stopped.
“Is she sleeping?” Leaper asked.
“Lie there,” Yran instructed. “Put your hand on the tip of her tail. You should just be able to reach it. If it twitches, you’ll feel it. When you feel it, wake me.” He left Leaper at the front of the canoe and fetched the hat makings from his bundle.
This time, he made the hat disconnected from the hair on his head, so that he could partially curl up beneath it, his thin bare legs poking out, his head resting on the bundle. “Oh, and one more thing,” he called drowsily from beneath the woven dome. “The water is rushing east towards the forest, while the wind is blowing us back. You can see the little white wave at the western edge of our raft. It’s possible something large, like a log or a Rememberer canoe, could be blown towards us by those winds, from the direction of the forest. But it will be against the current, just like our raft. It will make a white wave, the same as us. Only, bigger. And it will sound like this.” He made a hissing noise. “Listen for that. Wake me if you hear something like that.”
* * *
IN THE darkest part of the night, Leaper heard something that sounded like the hissing noise Yran had demonstrated.
He lifted his cheek from the bamboo. Despite the monotony, he hadn’t fallen asleep.
The right half of his body was numb with cold. Water surging through the poles kept him continually wet, and the wind was on that side. His left arm, extended to touch the crocodile’s tail, tingled too, from the strange pressure of holding the position for so long.
Was it his imagination, or was the wind stronger? He thought the current had increased in speed and brought them closer to the forest. Could the louder sound be simply because Ulellin’s curse was pushing harder against them, due to their proximity?
Light flared momentarily at the seams of his carrysack.
The thieves’ lantern.
Leaper withdrew his arm and rolled onto his side, ignoring screaming muscles and feeling coming back into flesh made lumpy by the ridges of the bamboo. With numb fingers, he unlaced the sack, only to find his lantern dead again.
No, not quite dead after all. Something like the fitful flicker of a star lived inside the clear panes of glass. His first instinct was to stick his arm into it, but then he remembered the windowleaves and wind that had kept him out of it the last time. Ulellin’s curse.
Stop staring into it, Leaper. Lift it. Use it to scout the way. Not to ruin whatever night vision you might have had!
Leaper lifted the lantern in the direction they were drifting. The crocodile floated, inert as a corpse, in its traces. The hissing noise grew louder, and it started to rain.
They had to have drifted closer to Canopy. Ulellin’s wind, Ehkis’s rain, and Airak’s lantern were all growing in strength. Increasingly dense falling droplets reminded Leaper again of the diamonds in Ilik’s hair. He wondered what he was doing, where he was going, reminding himself again that her killer’s trail was covered in monsoon floodwaters, that finding her murderer was no longer an option, and neither was returning to Canopy.
And then he spotted the whirlpool.
Some one hundred paces ahead.
The white ring of the whirlpool’s rim wasn’t especially wide; it was barely wider than the raft. Yet Leaper could clearly see the flotsam ahead of them tilting at the edge of it, like a spectator hesitating to stick his head through the bone ring of Oxor’s eye. After that moment of hesitation, the flotsam sped straight down. Floating dirt clods, reed bundles like bird nests, and the heavy fronds of distant trees were all sucked sharply under.
They did not reappear.
Leaper danced awkwardly across the raft.
“Yran,” he said, crouching, shaking the legs that stuck out from underneath the hat. “There’s a whirlpool. Wake up.” He lifted the bell-shaped hat off his unresponsive host.
Yran’s groggy, gummy-eyed face looked like an overboiled bulrush root in the feeble light of the lantern. He raised his arm to shield his face from the rain.
“What?” he croaked in Canopian. “Who are you?”
Leaper was silent for a startled moment, tongue-tied by his desire to answer in the same language even as his mouth formed the words in the language of the Crocodile-Riders.
“One who walks in the grace of Airak is called Leaper,” he managed at last. “And our raft is heading straight for a whirlpool, Yran. It’s time to wake that crocodile, if you can.”
Yran stared at Leaper a second longer before tapping himself on the temple.
“Good thinking,” he said. “Waking me.”
He rolled into a crouch beside his bundle, while Leaper held the hat in one hand, the lantern in the other, and helplessly watched the whirlpool grow closer. Before he realised what Yran was doing, the smaller man had whipped a rope out of the bundle and lashed Leaper’s lantern hand, along with the lantern handle, to the raft.
“What are you—”
“For safety!” Yran cried, pulling the knots tight.
The next thing he pulled out of his bundle was an unsheathed sword carved from a single piece of ivory. Along the hilt and forming the curved quillons were some variety of rosette-spotted cats. Jaguars, fishing cats, or ocelots. Maybe leopards. Leaper wasn’t great with animals. His fathers had been hunters, but the trade had become his sister Imeris’s legacy, not his own.
He recognised the weapon, though, and was dumbfounded.
Aurilon’s sword.
It was what he’d been looking for, ten years ago. Had Yran found it then, or now? Why was he scraping at it with an axe?
“Hold this,” Yran said, sticking the sword, hilt first, into Leaper’s climbing harness. He held two tiny slivers of bone from the sword, and immediately swallowed one of them. Nothing happened that Leaper could sense or see.
Yran took a valuable few seconds to tie his bundle tightly back to the raft.
“What are you—” Leaper started to ask again. The whirlpool was practically upon them. Yran took a short run, jumped, and landed on the crocodile’s head with both feet.
She came awake at once. One terrible eye caught the light. She twisted and lunged, openmouthed, at man and raft. Yran t
ipped into the water. He came up with both arms wrapped around the crocodile’s lower jaw, snagged on her crooked, stained teeth. Those jaws snapped shut, blood ran, and as the crocodile began tilting, headfirst, towards the whirlpool, Leaper fought the urge to close his eyes against the drowning death the three of them were rushing to meet.
But then the crocodile rose out of the water, propelled by her powerful tail.
God’s bones.
She seemed to hang vertically over the whirlpool. Her scales glistened. Half the sky was blocked by the sight of her. Leaper hung by one wrist from the bamboo raft, which dangled in turn below the slowly twisting column of her bulk. It was all he could do to hold onto Yran’s hat. Yran himself hung from both arms beneath the crocodile’s head.
They landed in air, then dirt, then water.
Leaper held his breath for so long that a branching red pattern showed behind his eyelids. When he opened his mouth, he wasn’t sure if he would suck in life or death; he only knew that he had to suck in something, that his lungs were the deep river and his lips the white circle of the whirlpool on the surface.
He breathed Ulellin’s winds, with a smattering of cold rain that made him wheeze. After a minute or two, he realised he was kneeling on the raft, that the crocodile was quiescent, and their journey down the river had resumed.
Yran’s hat was gone.
The Crocodile-Rider untied Leaper’s trapped wrist with a hoot of laughter. He recovered sword from harness in a gleeful, bloodied grip and shook it under Leaper’s averted gaze.
“We’ve both eaten from Orin’s body. The crocodile and me. It makes us one. We think each other’s thoughts. Until we go to sleep again, but it’s your turn to sleep, friend. Might I hold your lantern while you take your turn? I judge it an hour before dawn still.”
“No,” Leaper said. “The sword goes in your bundle. The lantern goes in my carrysack.” He put it away slowly. Carefully. Tying the laces methodically. “Where did you get that sword, by the way?” Strong pollution, the woman had said. What had her name been? Leaper wasn’t old, but he felt old, thinking of the human faces that had passed in and out of his life, and no way to know who they had truly been or where they were now.
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