The Bird of the River

by Kage Baker

  “I remember all their faces. They haunted my dreams for years afterward. When I was eight I was taken to the Family’s chapel and sworn into their service. I was scared and proud and . . . you don’t understand, do you? I can see it in your face.”

  “No, I don’t understand,” said Eliss. “They sound like horrible people, all of them.”

  “And, do you know, I agree with you?” Krelan closed his eyes. “Gods, I’m tired. I need to sleep. . . . You learn history as your grandfather tells it to you, and on some level that’s always going to be the true history that stays in your heart and makes you do things . . . but then when you get older you read books, and you get out in the world and hear other versions of the stories, and you learn how the rest of the world sees your noble family. You learn the things Grandfather didn’t tell you. And you begin to wonder . . . and you begin to feel a little bit like a traitor inside. And some of the glory goes away, and never quite comes back for you.”

  “Stop talking about them. Just sleep,” said Eliss, drawing her blanket over him. He smiled at her. He said nothing more and in a few minutes she could tell from his breathing that he was asleep.

  She sat on Pentra’s bed with her knees drawn up, staring at him. There are worse lives than mine, she thought. How could anyone live like that?

  Pentra obligingly spent the night in a tent on deck, saying that Eliss couldn’t possibly sleep on the floor. Next day Salpin and the other musicians rigged up a sort of hammock-bunk for Krelan between two bulkhead panels where the sacks of beans were kept. He slept well there by night and dozed peacefully by day, except when Wolkin and the other children came down and stared at him and asked him whether it was really true he had killed four demons and an assassin from Mount Flame all by himself. Eliss found herself getting up in the night and going out to check on him.

  At the end of a week his wound had closed over, and with his side bound up tight Krelan was able to resume some of his galley duties. Captain Glass called him up to the aft deck and spoke to him for an hour or so, too quietly for Eliss up on the mast platform to hear what was said. Krelan was rather pale afterward and did not bring up the matter over dinner. Eliss didn’t ask, either.

  She had a dream one night that she was back in the earliest place she could remember living with Falena, some seaside town without a name, but there had been wide crumbling stone steps with pink flowers growing in the cracks, and lizards sunning themselves. Off one landing of the steps a trail had led to a little stone house with a weedy yard and one tree. Fishing nets were sometimes spread out there to dry. Someone had made an outdoor table by stacking stone blocks and laying an old hatch cover over them.

  In the dream, Falena was sitting at the table with her. There was a pitcher of something on the table, and three cups. Falena was balancing a cup on her head and making funny faces to make Eliss laugh. Someone else was sitting at the table too. He was laughing with Eliss.

  In all the excitement and its aftermath they had almost forgotten about the bank box, stashed away safely in a locker under Eliss’s bunk. When Krelan felt well enough she fetched it out for him. They ate their dinner together in the bows, on a hot still evening when mackerel-shoal pink clouds glowed and lingered long after sunset, radiating light on the quiet face of the river. When they had set their bowls aside, Krelan reached into his pouch and drew out the key.

  “That poor bank officer,” he said, peering down at the key as he turned it in his fingers. “The last thing he did in his life was present me with this key. He did it with a little ceremonial flourish, you know. Everything correct and just so. A minute later he was lying dead on his polished floor and Shellback was pulling off his chain.”

  “There’s a picture like that in Salesh,” said Eliss. “A big mosaic wall. ‘Fortune’s Dance,’ or something like that. Rich people and beggars going round and round, changing places, and Death sitting there playing a concertina.”

  “Shouldn’t it be Fortune playing the concertina? If it’s Fortune’s dance?”

  Eliss shrugged. “Same thing, isn’t it? Everybody dies.”

  “How very bleak, my dear.” With a certain reluctance, Krelan put the key in the lock and turned it. “Here goes . . .”

  The lock clicked. Krelan lifted the iron lid of the box.

  “Jewelry,” observed Eliss.

  “But . . .” Krelan leaned forward to stare. “But these were his.”

  “Well, whose else’s would they be?”

  “I mean, this is his Family gold,” explained Krelan, still unwilling to reach into the box and touch any of it. Eliss looked closely. There was a gold chain with its links worked in the serpent pattern of the Diamondcuts, as well as a heavy gold signet ring with the same device. There was another ring set with a heavy amethyst, and the coiled serpent was also carved into its top facet. Finally, there was a little serpent armlet, like a miniature of the one that had been on Encilian’s body when it was found. Tied to it with a silk thread was a little signet ring, a miniature of the other one in the box.

  “That was his baby gold,” whispered Krelan, pointing at them. “Those were given to him when he was born. There’s his name, engraved inside. Once he grew into them he wore them every day of his life, until he outgrew them, and the old lord had new ones made. That’s the signet ring of the set.” He touched the larger ring. “What are these doing here?”

  “Maybe he wanted to keep them safe,” said Eliss. “He knew he was going to Karkateen, after all.”

  “I suppose. But the baby gold was kept in Lady Cirellise’s coffers.” Krelan stroked his chin, puzzled. “That’s his mother. It would have stayed there until he married, if he ever had, and then it would have been given to his wife for their heirs. Why did he fetch it out and bring it with him here?”

  “What would have happened if he’d never married?”

  “It would have been kept until after the lady had died. Then it would have been melted down and re-cast for some other child of the Family. Something of a punishment, you see, for not marrying and furthering the greater glory of the Family with more offspring.”

  “That’s why, then,” said Eliss. “He knew he probably wasn’t going to marry anybody, and he didn’t like the thought of his baby gold being melted down and given to somebody else, so he stole it.”

  “It’s certainly the sort of thing Encilian would have done,” Krelan admitted. Gingerly he picked out the amethyst ring and held it up. In the crimson light from the clouds it seemed to fluoresce with sullen livid fire. “Mind you, he’d have been married sooner or later, whether he wanted to or not. The old lord had been fairly plain about that. ‘The way you spend money, my boy, we’ll have no choice but to find you an heiress,’ he said. I remember that conversation. They had a huge quarrel.”

  “When was that?” Eliss watched the light play in the carving of the coiled snake. It flashed with the illusion of movement. She put her hand to her own necklace, tracing its pendant’s swirl pattern with her fingertips.

  “Now that I think of it, it was three months before Encilian vanished.” Krelan gave Eliss a shrewd look. “You’re thinking he sailed off so as to avoid getting forcibly married?”

  “Isn’t that the sort of thing he would have done too?”

  “It’s exactly the sort of thing he would have done.” Krelan put the ring back in the box, sighing. “Poor idiot. That’s why he took his personal things with him. I wouldn’t have put it past him to have decided to live incognito in Karkateen for a while. Maybe until the old lord was dead. And that was why he hid them here, or rather there in Krolerett. They’d stay safe in a bank vault until he was ready to reclaim them. And of course he never realized he was giving his servant a perfect opportunity to rob and murder him and get away with it.”

  “Funny that he didn’t put his grown-up armlet in the box too,” said Eliss.

  “Wouldn’t have fit,” said Krelan, closing the box to demonstrate. “See?”

  “Oh.”

  “Poor fool,” Kr
elan repeated, locking the box once more. “May I put this back under your bed? It will have to go to the Family, of course.”

  “How are you going to get it to them? Won’t your brother try to kill you if you come back?”

  Krelan grimaced. “Yes, but one isn’t supposed to let mere considerations of personal safety get in the way of duty. If I kill Waxcast, retrieve Encilian’s head, return triumphant to kneel before the old lord and lay his son’s missing bit and personal effects at his feet—and then find a knife blade in my back the first time my bother manages to be alone with me—well, Grandfather will welcome me into the Garden of Fire with pride. And I’ll probably get a little engraved brass plaque somewhere, commemorating my faithful service to the Family. It’s my duty,” said Krelan, holding up one hand as Eliss made outraged noises. “All I have is my duty. If I fail at this, what use am I?”

  Eliss shook her head. She gathered up the bank box and got to her feet. “You’re crazy, you know,” she told him.

  “I’m not,” said Krelan sadly. “But the world is. If you know of a better one, let’s go live there instead.”

  “I wish,” said Eliss. Something was wrong, some point had been missed, but she couldn’t think what it was. She walked away through the pink twilight, going over their conversation in her mind. The quiet evening water pulsed with color like a bed of coals, where fish came up to feed at the surface.

  Drowsily half-conscious in her bunk that night, Eliss thought about the dreams she’d had lately. She was jolted wide awake by another memory surfacing, an ancient one, a fragment of lost time at the little stone house above the steps.

  She had had a tiny boat of her own, with hand-carved oars, and she had sat in it proudly rowing as she had seen fishermen do. She wasn’t getting anywhere, because the boat sat among the weeds and pink flowers of the yard, but she was happy. Someone was shaking his head as he watched her, while he mixed up something in a can. And Falena had come out of the house, drying her hands on her apron.

  “Poor little thing,” the other person had said. “Look at her, sailing nowhere. You should have let me make her a cart instead.”

  “What, when we live at the top of all these steps?” Falena had shaken her head briskly. “She’d roll right down the steps and split her head open at the bottom.” Her face was the face Eliss remembered, and yet it wasn’t. The Falena who had died on the river had had a face that seemed to have broken and been mended, a sad foolish face. She looked nothing like this practical and cautious girl, whose clear eyes focused sharply. But Falena had been this person once, hadn’t she? She looked like me, Eliss realized, feeling a slow shock. Mama was like me.

  What had happened next? Falena saying something about “. . . a sailor like her daddy.”

  “Of course she will,” the someone had said, leaning down to Eliss, and she had put up her arms and he had swung her up, so high! “All my family were mariners.” Dear gods, was that Daddy? I do remember Daddy, then! He had a close beard, his skin was burnt by the sun, he was handsome. He had slung her on his hip and turned to the can on the table. He had dipped a brush in it and daubed something on the wall beside the door of the little house, a green ripple pattern in a circular swirl.

  “What’s that?” Falena had asked, coming and putting an arm around them both. She had kissed Eliss’s cheek.

  “It’s for protection,” Daddy had said. “So you’ll be all right while I’m gone.”

  Falena had gone tense, then, but her voice had been neutral as she’d said: “I wish you wouldn’t go. I’ve been having the worst dreams.”

  “But we need the money, Falena. One last voyage and then I’ll stay closer to home. Buy a share in the fish stall. Make a steady income, then, like you wanted.”

  “I love you more than a steady income,” Falena had said. Frowning, she had considered the ripple pattern. “Which god’s sign is that? Looks almost like something Yendri.”

  “My mother used to embroider it on my clothes, for good luck,” Daddy had said. He had looked slyly at Falena. “She always swore my father was a river god, you know.”

  “You look like a god,” Falena had said. She had kissed Daddy fervently, desperately, as though she was afraid of losing him. As, of course, she had. . . .

  Eliss buried her face in her blanket, feeling the hot tears start. She did love him. Mama loved him and she lost him and never loved anybody like that again. And she can’t have been much older than I am now. What would I do, if life had been that cruel to me? Would I break the way she did? I’m strong . . . but she was strong once too. Beautiful Falena.

  “Karkateen,” said Krelan, pointing. He had climbed the rigging for the first time since he had been wounded, and once aloft sat rather quietly beside Eliss as she studied the face of the river. She looked up now and saw a distant smoke on the mountains ahead of them, and the late afternoon light gleaming on far high windows.

  “I thought we must be getting close,” she said. “There’s a lot of floating trash coming downriver.”

  “It’s a big city.”

  “What are you going to do when we get there?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m going to go to the runner’s house to pick up any messages my brother might have sent me. He’s probably got someone there watching who’ll go after me if I do.”

  “It would be sort of a dead giveaway, yes.”

  “I suppose I’ll just find out what I can and do the job, if it can be done there. If Waxcast is there.”

  “You’ll have time to look for him,” said Eliss. “Mr. Riveter says we put in for a week at Karkateen.”

  She didn’t want to ask, Will you leave the Bird then? Will you go back to the Family by a quicker route? Will I ever see you again, alive or dead?

  Just before noon the following day, they reached the lake of Karkateen.

  The great city climbed the flanks of the mountains all around the lake. On one ridge, squalid shacks perched above ravines filled with trash; on the next ridge mansions rose on terraces, magnificent as the palaces of the gods. Down at the lakeshore a busy populace hummed and bustled, in shops dug back into the cliff faces, in sloppily built brick buildings, in tents and open-air markets along the docks. To the west the river flowed from the lake; to the north a canal took its way from the lake through a mountain pass, going down to the sea some miles away at great expense to the Lords of Karkateen. The lake was a dirty green color, choked by the industry of its city and the cloudy streams that came down from the emerald mines. Only at its heart was it clean, where the pure upwelling of the spring that fed it created a swirling center of clear water.

  Here was a shrine to the god of the river, built into a moored buoy. It bobbed and swayed on its little platform, and its green jade god raised a hand to bless the city that barely spared it a glance.

  “Why have we moored here?” Krelan asked. Eliss shrugged. The Bird of the River had dropped anchor in the middle of the lake, just in the edge of the zone of clear water.

  “Captain’s got to make an offering,” explained Mr. Riveter in hushed tones. Eliss glanced down the companionway. When Captain Glass had locked the Bird’s tiller and gone below, she had assumed he was simply following his usual routine on arriving at a town. But now he came up the companionway again, wearing nothing but a loincloth. She averted her eyes. Mr. Riveter’s skin bore so many tattoos, and he was so lean and leathery from the sun besides, that his perpetual near-nudity embarrassed nobody; but Captain Glass was scarily pallid and huge in a state of undress.

  Still, he had the dignity of a mountain as he walked to the Bird’s rail. Salpin and Drogin stood there with a basket that had been covered in cloth and tarred inside and out, like a little coracle. They bowed to him.

  “The offerings, Captain, sir,” said Salpin.

  “Set it down,” said the captain. They leaned over and set it carefully on the surface of the water, making it fast with a line tied to one handle. Looking into it, Eliss saw a vial of something golden and a smaller vial of so
mething colorless, as well as something folded in a white napkin. There were also empty vessels, two cups, and a bowl made of what she took to be a particularly thick and cloudy glass.

  “What is that?” she murmured to Salpin, but Wolkin answered eagerly.

  “They’re sugar,” he said. “Molded into offering stuff. Because they have to be able to dissolve. Because you can’t be throwing all kinds of junk into the river. And the yellow stuff is really, really expensive brandy, so the god can have a nice drink. And the white stuff is perfume, so he can smell good. And the berries in the napkin, except they go in the bowl not the napkin because the napkin wouldn’t dissolve, see, are so he can have a nice snack.”

  The captain looked down at him and snorted. “What makes you think the god is a man?”

  “Well, there’s his statue.” Wolkin pointed at the floating shrine. “He has hands and a face and everything, doesn’t he? And legs and feet. Only you can’t see them because they’re under his robe,” he added, peering across at the statue. Captain Glass chuckled.

  “How do you know what’s under his robe?” he said. He stepped over the rail and lowered himself into the crystalline water. The basket bobbed gently on its tether. The captain leaned back in the water with a sigh, spreading out his arms a moment before untying the line from the rail. Taking the end between his teeth, he swam out toward the shrine.

  The musicians struck up a hymn, one of the droning river-songs Eliss had heard nearly every day since she had come aboard. She watched the captain’s progress across the water. As clear as the water was, it was full of strange distortions from the spring’s turbulence, and the captain’s body seemed to lengthen and ripple fantastically. The noonday sun struck down and lit the water’s depths, unimaginably far down into the spring’s heart where it surged from some black chasm in the rock below.

  Eliss wondered if she ought to pray. She reached into the neck of her tunic and found the little crystal pendant the captain had given her, and clasped it tightly. Father of the Green Waters, she improvised, this is Eliss, who reads your course. Please keep my friend safe, if you can. He has something dangerous he has to do in this city. Maybe you don’t care if the Smith’s children kill each other, I’d understand that, but Krelan matters. He doesn’t think he does, but he matters.