“Got any food in there?” Yran asked, ignoring his question.
Leaper’s stomach growled.
“No.” He tried not to show his anger at Yran’s dissembling.
“Hungry?” Yran laughed. “Not yet. One hundred eggs. One hundred days until we reach the sea. We must be sure that we do not exhaust her before then.”
Exhaust her? I’m exhausted. Forget starvation and infected wounds. Forget lack of sleep. Being alone on a raft with this man is exhausting.
“What’s at sea,” Leaper asked bitterly, “that you’re so keen to arrive there?”
“The City, of course. Wetwoodknee, the City-by-the-Sea. Don’t you know of it?”
“No.”
“Good for trade. Almost as good as Gui. And my nasty mother will never find me there, I know it in my liver. She’ll never be able to make me marry!”
Leaper didn’t ask the obvious questions. He refused to be led down the trail Yran had shown him. Just as Yran had refused to be led.
“What’s at the City-by-the-Sea,” he repeated, “for me? Why share the crocodile’s eggs with somebody unknown? Why did you tie me to the raft instead of letting the whirlpool take me? You’d have been able to steer whichever way you wanted, once you’d gotten rid of me.”
“One,” Yran said, “I need somebody to wake me when my crocodile wakes. Too risky, otherwise.”
“And two?”
“Two! You’d be good for trading. A most excellent slave. You could be a translator, since you’ve stolen and eaten a splinter of the throat bone of the Old God now called Odel. I’ve eaten it, too, but you knew that, future slave. Agile slave. Cunning slave.” Yran grinned. “You could be a fighter, with those razors you hide, but the best thing to do with you would be to trade you back to Canopy for a fallen tree. Wood’s precious at the City-by-the-Sea, and the last time they tried to take some without asking, your god sent a few lightning bolts to burn them to the ground.”
“I see,” Leaper said mildly, wondering whether to cut Yran’s throat immediately, or to wait for the next time the Crocodile-Rider went to sleep.
“You’re thinking you won’t be a slave.” Yran waggled one finger. “You’re thinking you can use bone magic the same as me. But you weren’t born in a crocodile’s nest. You weren’t taught to separate her thoughts from yours. You try to take her from me, and you’ll get stuck in her body forever. Your human self will stop eating or drinking, waste away and die. And then you’ll die, Canopian, because your soul can’t survive in a crocodile’s body. Besides, you don’t know the way to Wetwoodknee. Once you reached the salt, you’d die at sea. So you’d best be taking care of me.”
SEVENTEEN
NINETY-EIGHT DAYS went by on the waterlogged plain.
Leaper mulled over the visions he’d seen of the forest’s creation and destruction. He thought about how the beings he’d known as goddesses and gods were simply adepts who’d had the presence of mind to scoop up the titans’ essence and weld it to their souls at the opportune moment, giving immortality not only to their spirits but to their memories.
If I’d been there, if I’d been one of them, would I have become, post-godhood, as callous and selfish as they are now? Would he have drowned thousands of people for the sake of maintaining his own power?
He didn’t think so. But then, his sister Ylly had been raised in Understorey, and showed no sign of distress at the fact that Understorian villages were regularly decimated by demons. Could one deity stand up to the twelve others, declaring the barrier open, or would they cast her out, as they had seemed to cast out the mysterious fourteenth member of their company? The fourteenth aspect of their single self? You never know what you will do, or won’t do, until the choice is yours.
Rain came and went. The great crocodile sailed on alone, or with an escort of smaller reptiles hoping for the scraps from her meals. Leaper’s clothing was rarely completely dry, but he’d discovered that sleeping on the lee side of Yran’s long bundle, protected from the wind, kept him from losing too much body heat.
Passing days were marked by Yran’s collection and their shared consumption of crocodile eggs. Yran induced their steed to catch fish for them at every opportunity. These they ate raw. Since the night of the whirlpool, every time that Leaper checked his lantern, it gave no light, and he contemplated lighting a fire for cooking fish in the sturdy lantern frame, but decided against it in the end. The forest stayed in the distance, shrinking to a grey blur on the horizon to the south as time went on but, except through the deepest fog, always visible.
Always tantalisingly out of reach.
Every day, at dawn, after Leaper had woken Yran but before Leaper went to sleep, Yran told a different story about why he had left the safety and comfort of his own society. Leaper blatantly avoided explanations of why he’d left his.
“I was born to a couple with very low status,” Yran related, his profile made lumpy by leech and fly bites. “It wouldn’t have been possible for me to marry, ever. Not a clean wife, anyhow. The best I could’ve expected, if I tamed an exceptional crocodile and built a paragon of houses, would’ve been a wife who’d been soiled by touching bones or finding her first husband dead by her side. Our people are a closed-in people. Nobody enters, and nobody leaves. I would have been lonely all my life. Would you have stayed, if it was you, Leaper, never to marry?”
Leaper’s glowing sigil, given by the bone man, Estehass, had faded, taking his protection against insects with it. His skin was similarly spotted and itching, though his bites were from enormous striped mosquitoes in the night rather than the black biting flies of the day.
Occasionally he considered hiding from the swarm by floating behind the raft, mostly submerged as the crocodile was, yet a single glimpse of a highly venomous snake swimming along beside them had induced him to abandon the idea, and he had started to dream pleasantly of being dry again, of holding his hands out to the hearth flames of the home where he was raised.
Occasionally, the dreams seemed more real than the raft, and he started to wonder if slow starvation on the meagre fish and egg diet was better than being bitten by a venomous snake.
“I thought you were running away from your nasty mother, who wanted you to marry.”
Yran’s grin split his face.
“Oh, yes! Of course. That is the true story.”
Leaper had heard so many so-called true stories that he spent half his time with his hands pressed to his ears, feeling the rain run over them and wishing to dissolve like salt. Apart from the snake, they’d passed other sad and sodden-looking animals, stranded on the fixed tops of bamboo clumps or crowded onto uprooted cattails, pythons and parrots sharing islands no more than a pace across, predator and prey too tired to even look at each other.
“You had to run, hypocrite,” he told Yran. “You’re the one who’s soiled, according to your customs. You told me yourself that you ate the speaking-bone. They’d punish you with death if you went back to them. Taking your hair, they call it, right?” He shook his head, trying to clear the image of the king gripping Ilik’s diamond-woven tresses. She refused to come away with me. Would I have stayed, never to marry?
“There’s a bundle,” Yran cried, pointing at a package floating past. “Leather wrapped. Grab hold of it. It could be food!”
Leaper sighed and slipped a bamboo rod from Yran’s trussed bundle. It could be food, or it could be another pregnant pig drowned in her burrow, with her hide all loose and horrible.
The bamboo rod was chopped into a hook at one end. Leaper used it to snag the man-sized bundle, gagging when it turned out to be a body. Cloak and hood came free, showing a skull with shreds of worm-eaten flesh still covering one cheek. Leaper shoved it angrily away with the rod. It was the tenth or twelfth body they’d seen, and he wanted it gone before Yran insisted on searching it, as he’d exhaustively searched drowned Rememberers he’d found while Leaper was sleeping.
“What are you doing? There could have been valuables in the pocket
s!”
“Was he buried with valuables in his pockets? Because this one was under the ground! Whoever buried him didn’t dig deep enough!”
“He was from Gui.” Yran waved dismissively. “They don’t usually bury their dead in the month before the monsoon. They preserve them with spirits until the water goes down, a waste of spirits if you ask me. This time, thanks to your gods, nobody knew it was the month before the monsoon. Or do I owe you my thanks for this flood?” He hooted abruptly, showing his perfect teeth. “The rain covers human tracks. No better chance to get away from my nasty mother! Well? Tell me! Was it you?”
His head was tilted slyly, and his eyes sparkled with good humour, but Leaper sensed that Yran cared as much about the question as Leaper cared about where Yran had gotten Aurilon’s sword.
“Somebody killed the queen of Airakland,” he began carefully, but Yran leaped ahead to excited conclusions.
“The monsoon is vengeance!”
“The monsoon is not vengeance! The monsoon has nothing to do with her, or with me. I didn’t want the rains to come early. It covers human tracks, like you said. Now her killer can’t be found. My mission is over. I never even saw her body.”
Yran shrugged.
“Why should you see it? Is that what Canopians do with their dead? See them?”
They don’t usually bury their dead in the month before the monsoon.
“We don’t see them,” Leaper said slowly. “We let them fall.”
Yran’s people aren’t supposed to touch the dead. The Rememberers said they lit fires to call demons to their dead. If Ilik wasn’t there to be found, does that mean she might have been buried? By somebody from Gui? But Slehah said it wasn’t safe for anyone from Gui to come between the trees.
“Have you heard the story of Grandfather Gollorag?” Yran asked cheerfully. “He was killed by a falling cone from a false palm. Those cones are as big as your head, and spiky. The nuts make good eating, though, and that was why Grandfather Gollorag’s clan built their boats beneath the tree. In the wake of his death, it became clear that Gollorag had made a poor choice, so his son Ollorag moved the clan to the roots of a spinach tree. Ollorag had no way of knowing that the tree-dwellers kept tapirs in spinach trees for the healthful, tapir-fattening foliage, which our people enjoy eating very much when birds and animals break the branches loose. What the tree-dwellers, perhaps, should have considered before taking their livestock into the trees is that tapirs do not fly. As Ollorag discovered when one fell on his head, killing him.”
Leaper couldn’t think while Yran was telling his stupid stories. Is it obvious what happened to Ilik? Can I not see it plainly because of my grief?
“Is that the end of the story?” Please, let it be the end.
“Ollorag’s son Orag dutifully moved the clan again,” Yran went on, waggling his feet in the air with mirth, “to the roots of a floodgum tree. Nothing useful ever falls from a floodgum tree, the saying went, but at least the clan’s people would be safe, according to Orag’s calculations. Unfortunately, Orag had no idea how often Canopians enjoy killing their gods. So he, in turn, was slain by the falling corpse of Airak.”
“That’s funny. Very funny. What a great story. Is it over?”
“That was the end of Grandfather Gollorag’s line. The women consulted amongst themselves, deciding what to do. It was they who appointed the first of the Greatmothers, who have been ruining men’s lives ever since. Including my father’s. He’s one of the Greatmother’s royal husbands, did you know? I am actually a prince. Yet not even my exulted position could keep me beneath the trees. I’ve always felt the urge to live in the light.”
Leaper hardly heard him. Words buried in his memory came back to him like a blow: Burned alive on a boat. That’s what the woman I met ten years ago said they would do to Aurilon. Cut her hair and then burn her alive on a boat.
The dead are only pollution after they’re dead.
“I have to go back,” he said, shocked by his conclusion. He reached for Canopy with both hands as though he could seize its shadow and drag the raft towards it despite Ulellin’s winds. “She could be there, in Crocodile-Rider territory, waiting to be burned alive!”
“Never,” Yran said, rolling onto his back and holding his new hat over his face with his feet. “Burning is for clan members only. Clan members who treacherously worship Canopian deities. Besides, no Canopian queen could be brought into Crocodile-Rider lands. She would pollute our pure women by her presence. We don’t mingle with outsiders.”
“Don’t you?” Leaper shouted, losing his temper suddenly as he had with Ousos. “You don’t mingle with people like me? Just like you don’t grab corpses with a bamboo hook, in case they died with valuables in their pockets? Just like you obey your mothers, or your Greatmothers, or whoever’s in charge of you? Just like you don’t touch the bones of the Old Gods?” He grabbed Yran’s cloth bundle and would have thrown it overboard, if the little man hadn’t kicked his hat out of the way, flown at Leaper, and latched onto the bundle with hands, feet, and perfect teeth.
“Mine!” he growled through a mouthful of cloth. “You want the crocodile to turn on us before we get to Wetwoodknee?”
“Where did you get the sword?” Leaper tried and failed to keep holding the bundle. When he let go, Yran dropped, bottom first, back onto the raft, opening his mouth and looking mildly stunned. “It’s Aurilon’s sword. Did you get it from her dead body? What else did you take from her?” He heard the outrage in his voice, the hypocrisy.
We are as bad as one another. We deserve one another.
“Don’t give up, poor boy,” Yran entreated. “Angry boy. Cursed boy. Don’t kill us both!”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“If you’re dwelling on what I said about slaves, of course I didn’t mean it. I wouldn’t sell you to the women of Wetwoodknee. They don’t keep slaves, don’t you know that? And they can’t be enslaved themselves. Too bad, since they’re so pretty. You’re pretty, broken nose and all, but I still wouldn’t sell you. Not even to the Master of Cast.”
“Not even to who?” Leaper snapped. He’d never heard of the Master of Cast.
“You saved my life! You woke me when you saw the whirlpool. We share the same liver. I’ve never had a friend before. Calm yourself and let’s eat a crocodile egg together. Egg number ninety-nine. Our journey is almost over.” And Yran began shedding great blubbering tears, unmistakeable even in the rain. “Not one friend! That’s why I left home and never looked back. I could have endured every indignity the Greatmother heaped on me if only I’d had just one true friend to talk to.”
Leaper’s anger drained away.
EIGHTEEN
“LOOK,” YRAN said at dusk when he shook Leaper awake.
Leaper uncurled, stretched, and looked. It was difficult to concentrate. He was so hungry. The bones of his hips and spine were painful against the corrugations of the raft.
“What is it?”
“Our destination. You can see. The palace at the heart of Wetwoodknee.”
The monsoon was over. The skies were clear. The winds had fallen away. Yran’s crocodile towed them under its own power across a mirrorlike surface showing lemon yellow sky faded overhead to a deep, soft blue littered with stars.
Ripples from her passage spread ahead and to the sides of her, sending waterfowl honking into the skies. Leaper peered past the crocodile to the route ahead. With the exception of the solitary-seeming structure Yran had named a palace, the City-by-the-Sea was concealed by a mangrove forest that touched the eastern and western horizons.
Leaper supposed the spread of semisubmerged trees was a forest, though the greyish, shrubby mangroves were stunted in comparison to the great trees of Canopy. Those spindly mangrove branches would surely hardly bear the weight of a full-grown human, much less the weight of a great palace.
The protruding part of the so-called palace was a tall, grey, round tower, built from what appeared to be driftwood. Arched windows and sha
ded semicircular balconies spiralled around the upper half of it, while the conical roof was covered in a kind of leathery white weed. A pair of elegant, pale grey birds of prey perched on a twig nest at the very top.
“Should we … I don’t know … should we moor here at the edge of the trees and approach in the morning? What if the raft becomes trapped by some narrow passage or we lose sight of the tower in the dark?”
“No! They will light lamps in the tower soon, you’ll see. If the raft is trapped, we’ll set the crocodile free and climb the rest of the way. We’ve nothing to eat but more raw fish, and Queen Erta is famous for her hospitality. She’ll feast us for a song. She’s very fond of music. Do you know any songs, Canopian?”
It was true enough about the food; their crocodile had stopped giving eggs six or seven days ago. Leaper stared at the lanterns coming to life in the arched windows of the wood-and-white-weed tower. They were feeble things. Not like Airak’s lanterns.
Airak the white with his forked swords of light
stole the gleam from the Old One’s eye
while the winged and the furred, the beast and the bird
come when summoned by Orin, or die.
Oldest-Father had taught him the Understorian version of the godsong. Later, Youngest-Mother, laughing, had sneaked him into her workroom and taught him the mnemonic her mother had taught her for remembering the names of all the Canopian deities. Every Imbecile Agrees: One Angry Orange Ant Is Under An Ugly Old Entrance.
“There’s one song I know fairly well,” Leaper sighed. “I can’t sing it. I don’t have a good voice. Not like my youngest-father. They called him the Nightingale.”
“The birds that sing at night here,” Yran said, “are curlews. Nicknamed screaming womanbirds. When you hear one, you’ll understand why.”
Tides of the Titans Page 14