I looked at him a long time, then shook my head. “Why?”
He shrugged. “The ways of the goddess are strange. I cannot speak for her, but I would say she saw your future in you: a girl of eight, three days alone in the delta, who killed a constrictor, who fought a jaguar. She could see what you might become. She did not want to waste it.”
“Waste what?”
“A woman,” he answered with a smile, “who might one day be worthy of the hunt.”
I shook my head. “She couldn’t have known I would come back.”
He spread his hands, as though to embrace me, the feast, the village, the entire night. “Yet here you are, years later, searching for her.”
* * *
The drinking went on late into the night. I remembered thinking at one point, drunkenly, how strange it was that the same people who had eyed us askance then tried to feed us to crocodiles should become so welcoming, so generous, so voluble. The jugs of quey went around and around and, as children cleared away the remnants of the feast, people began drifting from raft to raft, leaving one conversation to join another. I couldn’t understand the language, but from the fingers pointed our way and the vigorous miming, it seemed that the most popular topic was the afternoon’s struggle. The old people nodded knowingly, as though they’d seen it all a thousand times. The children, those too young to have faced the crocodiles themselves, spent the night rehearsing every point, searching for some insight, some advantage, that might give them an edge when the moment came for them to swim naked into the lake.
The Vuo Ton seemed fascinated by all of us. They studied Ruc’s arm, debated volubly about the welts on Ela’s shoulder, and eyed Kossal with obvious, if wary, interest. A few approached Chua, women and men old enough that she might have known them before she abandoned the floating village for Dombâng. The fisher didn’t seem pleased to have returned to her childhood home, and slipped away just as people began producing clay pipes, packing them with some pungent leaf I didn’t recognize, inhaling smoke from the tiny glowing fires.
Most of all, the Vuo Ton seemed interested in me. When I finished my story, the Witness had spoken at length to the village. When he was done, the townsfolk turned to me, nodded their heads in deference. By the time the drinking and smoking were well underway, people were crowded around me, draping necklaces over my head, pressing pipes or bottles into my hands, urging me to drink, smoke, dance. What I wanted to do was sleep, but as the quey seeped into my blood, I found myself stumbling through unfamiliar steps to the pounding of a dozen hide drums set in a semicircle on the largest barge.
Ruc found me in the press of bodies, dragged me momentarily clear, to the edge of the wide raft. The water trembled with the music, each beat shattering the moonlight glazed on the surface. I had not seen him drink or smoke all night.
“You realize,” he growled at me, “that drunk people are easier to kill. They sleep so much more soundly.”
I stared into his dark eyes, then gestured past him, to the celebration. Kossal had vanished, but Ela was whirling from partner to partner, long limbs already fluent in the new music. Children sang with the drums and those too old to dance tapped the rhythm on their knees with gnarled hands.
“Do you really think that is what this is?” I asked.
His jaw tightened.
“Look,” I said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and turning him. “Look. Don’t you think this would be a strange way to give us to the god?”
“What god?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
I cursed my drunkenness, stumbled ahead. “Any god. They could have killed us with their bows the moment we paddled into the lake. They could have killed us right after we fought the crocs. They could have poisoned your arm instead of healing it. They could have poisoned all of us at any point in the meal.” I shook my head, drawing him close. “Instead,” I went on, “they’ve fed us, given us a hut for the night.”
Hut wasn’t quite the right word. The three homes that the Witness had commandeered for us were tidier than huts—cozy domed structures of tight woven rushes, each floating on its own raft. Kossal had already claimed one, Chua the other. Ela seemed never to need to sleep, which left the third for me and Ruc. A warm wind gusted up out of the east. For just a moment, the ocean’s salt tang swept aside the quieter scents of mud and human bodies. Then the rain hit, so heavy it obliterated the sight of everything but Ruc, his face lit by the smeared light of the lanterns swaying with the wind.
“Come on,” I said, dragging him by the shoulder.
“Come where?” he demanded, his voice barely louder than the rain splattering the rafts, stippling the water with a million tiny splashes.
“Inside,” I said, gesturing toward the dim shadowed shape of our hut. “If they’ve decided to kill us, we might as well be dry.”
He shook himself free of my grip. I thought he intended to resist, but after a moment he nodded, then waved me ahead.
The thick rush roof muted the rain, dulled the sound of the drums that the Vuo Ton were still playing out on the largest rafts. The small space was dark, warm, redolent of smoke, sweat, some spice I didn’t recognize. At first I couldn’t see anything beyond Ruc’s vague form and the rain draped like a silver curtain over the outline of the low door. A single lantern whirled just outside that door, flame dancing in the wind but resolute behind the shield of scales; the red light drained into the hut, and after a few moments I could make out shapes: a line of clay jars arranged neatly by the door, fishing spears racked against the wall, half a dozen baskets hung from the rushes overhead, a mattress of reeds all the way toward the back.
The two of us stood just inside. I could hear his breathing, feel the heat pouring off of him. I lifted the clay jug I was holding.
“Drink?”
He shook his head curtly, staring out into the rain.
I draped an arm around his shoulder, drawing him close. “Maybe, just once, it’s all right to trust someone.”
Ruc stiffened inside my arm. “They murdered Dem Lun.”
“That guy,” I said, knowing the words were wrong, but lost in the haze of whatever it was I’d been smoking, “was never going to make it out of the delta anyway.”
“He didn’t have to die in the jaws of a fucking croc.”
“He didn’t have to run screaming into the water like croc food.” I dangled the jug in front of his face once more. “Try this.”
He tried to pull away, but I felt it coming and held him close.
“Let go of me,” he growled.
“Nope.”
I could see glimpses of the Vuo Ton, shadows dancing through the rain’s soft needles. The storm slackened for half a heartbeat, and I saw Ela, whirling through the crowd. Love isn’t something you experience alone, I reminded myself. It’s not something in your head. It’s in the space between two people.
“Listen,” I said, dragging Ruc around to face me. “You want me to say I’m sorry about Dem Lun.” I shook my head. “I’m not.”
“Because you ‘saw the goddess’?” he asked quietly. “Because you suddenly understand the truth? Because now you understand the need to sacrifice to the Given Land?”
I tucked a foot behind his ankle, slammed him down onto the rushes, my face inches from his own. “I was sacrificed to the delta. I spent three days out there thinking I was going to die before a boat of baffled Dombâng fishers found me.”
“So now it’s time for everyone to have a turn? Your father hit you, hated you, your mother gave you up, and so it’s fine to feed someone else, someone who had nothing to do with that, straight into a croc’s mouth?”
There was a fire where my heart should have been. I half expected to see Ruc’s face burst into flame when I spoke. I could feel the coiled strength of his body beneath me, but for some reason he made no effort to break free.
“How did you want him to die?” I growled.
“Not like this.”
“It is all like this,” I said. “The stuff that
comes before—the teeth or disease, the knife, the sword, the snake bite—none of that matters. None of that is death.” My breath burned in my throat. I could smell his sweat. I could feel the memory of his bloody lips on my lips as I breathed into his mouth. “Death is what stops the suffering. Death is the blessing.”
“Then why have you spent your life avoiding it?”
“You don’t know the first thing,” I growled, “about how I’ve spent my life.”
Ruc met my glare. “No. I don’t. I don’t know if you’re Kettral or Skullsworn or some fucking mercenary in league with the bastards trying to destroy Dombâng.”
“If I’m trying to destroy Dombâng, then what am I doing here? Why am I helping you?”
“Are you? You’ve certainly been near me, but what have you actually done?”
“Aside from cutting you out of that croc’s jaws? Aside from breathing my own breath into your mouth?”
His jaw tightened. I took his chin in my hand, pressed myself against him.
“If I wanted you dead,” I went on quietly, “all I needed to do was wait.” I slipped a knife out of its sheath. “I could kill you now.”
Ruc caught my wrist, shook his head, flipped me over onto my back. “No,” he growled. “You couldn’t.”
He twisted my wrist, and I let the knife go. It wasn’t time for the knife, not yet.
I needed to love him first.
“I came back to Dombâng,” I said, “because there were things here I could not forget. Things I needed to see again.”
His breath was hot on my face. “Your goddess. The fucking myth I’ve spent the past five years trying to stamp out.”
“She is not my goddess.”
“But you believe she’s real, that she’s out there.”
“You’re real,” I said, sliding a hand behind his head, drawing his face down toward mine, so close I was breathing his breath. “You’re right here. That does not make you a god.”
His eyes were holes in his head. “What the fuck do you want, Pyrre?”
I want you.
I couldn’t say it.
Not that it wasn’t true. I wanted him in that moment, wanted to feel his weight on top of mine, his skin naked against my own. I wanted him to love me and I wanted to fall in love, but that wasn’t all. The things I wanted were legion—my mother’s throat in my hands all over again, Ananshael’s blessing, the cool air of Rassambur on my face, to see again that perfect creature that had saved me from the jaguar all those years ago—they pressed around me, beggars with hands outstretched demanding more, more.
“I want to be lighter,” I said finally.
Ruc snorted—a sound halfway between a laugh and a grunt a man makes when you punch him in the stomach—then rolled off of me.
Not like that, I wanted to say. It’s my own weight I don’t want. But he was already gone, sitting in the doorway, staring at the rain as he took a long pull on the jug of quey, then another, then another. I sat up, retrieved my knife, then joined him, still searching for the words. The storm had slackened, and I could see Ela on the raft across the way. Most of the Vuo Ton had taken shelter, retreating to their own huts or the wide octagonal halls ringing the settlement, but a dozen men and women flouted the downpour, dancing to the thudding drums. Ela was at the center of the motion, rain streaming down her face, slicking her skin as she spun from one partner to another.
“I want to be like her.”
I didn’t realize the words were true until I said them.
“She seems insane,” Ruc replied.
I shook my head. “She knows who she is. She understands what she wants. Nothing bothers her.”
“It ought to.”
“What ought to?”
Ruc took another long pull from the crock, handed it back, then waved a hand toward the rain. “Take your pick. The world is broken. Anyone who doesn’t know that, who doesn’t feel it right down in their bones, has to be broken, too.”
“What if we’re all broken?”
He chuckled grimly. “It’s a possibility I’ve considered.”
I reached over, ran a finger along the wound carved into his arm, then reached up to touch the scar on his chin.
“So what do we do?”
He shook his head. “Try to be better.”
The rain picked up again, driving into the rushes, slicing silver knives across the lamplight, spattering through the open door to wet my feet, my legs. I could hear the last dancers still out there, but couldn’t make out much more than shape and motion. When I turned to look at Ruc, my vision lurched. Lamplight glinted in his eyes, on the sweat beading his chest. For the rest, he was a man built out of heat, hard planes, and darkness.
“To be better,” I said, testing the words. I took his face in my hands. “That’s why I came back.”
For once, then, something that wasn’t a lie.
He touched my fingers, as though surprised to find them there, followed my bare arm back to my shoulder, his touch shockingly gentle. I could remember fighting him, fucking him, but nothing like this.
“You should have found somewhere else,” he said, easing me back onto the rushes, shifting his body over me. “Someone else.”
I reached down to fumble with his belt, yanked it free, slid a hand inside his pants to find him hard, ready.
“There is no one else,” I said, sliding his pants down, then kicking them off his ankles with my foot. I raised my arms for him to strip away my vest. “It had to be you.”
And of course, like most men, like most people, he heard the wrong thing. He heard the last word—you—when he should have been asking about the first, What is it?
21
I woke to find dawn’s light smeared like wax across the eastern sky. My head throbbed, and my body ached in a dozen places where the crocodile had battered me the day before. I rolled over groggily to find Ruc lying naked on his back, one arm tossed across the rushes, the other, the one with the wound, cradled at his chest as though he were trying to hold close something vitally important. I watched him for a while, his wide chest rising and falling, the twitching of his closed lids as he lived some dream I would never see. Then I turned away, searching for my knives.
I found them by the basket just inside the door, though I didn’t remember taking them off or placing them there. Whole portions of the night, in fact, seemed vague or missing altogether. I could remember Ruc’s lips against mine, his fingers tracing wonderful arcane shapes over my skin, his fingers inside me, his tongue between my legs—but those memories were lightning flashes—too bright, almost vicious in their precision—separated by long, dark blanks.
I straightened, worked the kinks from my legs and back, then bent over to strap a knife to each thigh. The weight felt good, right. Those knives were a reminder that, no matter how much I wanted my legs bare for Ruc’s hands to explore, I was here for a purpose. I wasn’t wearing the knives for self-defense or ornament. They were my instruments, just as I was Ananshael’s. If I could find love in the darkness of my heart, dredge it up—strong, gleaming, writhing—into the light, those knives would be the tools with which I finished it.
I glanced back at Ruc, tried to imagine driving a blade between his ribs, forcing it past the muscle into his heart. Something inside me quailed. I stopped, half turned in the light of the doorway, naked save for the blades at my legs, trying to understand what had just happened in my mind, to chase after that fleeing emotion, haul it back out, pin it down, look at it. It had been a long time, a very long time, since death had troubled me, and yet, for just a moment, the vision of that knife parting the flesh, of the hot blood pouring forth—it made me queasy.
I watched the pulse rise and fall at Ruc’s neck, traced the hard lines of his body with my eyes.
Is this love? I wondered. Could that sickness in my gut be love?
It seemed unlikely, but that’s the trouble. Love is not like the things of the world—trees, sky, fire—to which you can point and affix a name. Stranger
s from different lands speaking different languages can teach thousands of words with no more effort than the breath spent to say them. This is a flower. This is my hand. That is the moon. Love, however, gives nothing to point to. All we have are a woman’s words, her actions, the way she holds herself, the things she does or does not do. For most people, millions scattered the world over, love is the opposite of burying a knife inside a chest. To hear them tell it, Skullsworn are incapable of love. Ela, of course, disagreed, but who was I to say if they were right, if she was? I couldn’t see inside their heads. I could barely make out what was going on inside my own.
Irritated, and vexed with my own irritation, I turned away from Ruc, pulled on my pants and vest, stepped out the door, and froze.
Everything was gone.
Not the delta, of course. The lake was still there, mud-brown water bunched by the breeze, ringed in the distance by that wall of rushes. Winebeaks darted in and out of the reeds. Half a dozen tufted ducks bobbed on the wavelets a few paces distant. The raft beneath my feet was solid enough, and the hut from which I’d just emerged. There was one just like it tethered to either side, and our own boat tied off just beyond. All that was as I remembered. The rest of the village of the Vuo Ton, however, the barges and boats, the scores of floating homes, the dugout canoes—all of it had vanished.
For a few heartbeats, all I could do was stare. My mind, still groggy from exhaustion, from an evening smoking and drinking, struggled to yoke my fragmented memories to the scene before me. As I stood gaping, Kossal stepped from the door of the next hut down, glanced at the vacant expanse, scowled, spat into the water, and then, before I could frame an appropriate question, disappeared back into his hut. A few moments later he emerged again, this time with Ela. The priestess had shed her soaking clothes for a light blanket draped over one shoulder, tied around her waist. She looked as bleary as I felt, spent a few moments rubbing her eyes and knuckling her back before she noticed her surroundings. Then she started laughing.
“I thought that quey tasted strange.”
Kossal shook his head. “I didn’t drink the quey.”
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