by J. S. Bangs
Hrenge let out a whispered Kaleksha curse. She gripped Mandhi’s shoulder, her eyes watching the shore. Jhumitu cried, his eyes watering from the clouds of smoke. He rubbed them with his fist and screamed.
Something knocked against the hull of the dhow. Mandhi leaned out and looked down. The capsized boat was there, its timbers blackened and licked with stubby orange flames. It banged against the hull again.
Then it tipped down on one side, and with a splash a figure swam out from underneath it.
“Hey!” Kest shouted. “You fools have a ladder for me or do you expect me to fly up there?”
“Kest!” Mandhi and Hrenge shouted in unison.
They rushed to the rail, met by a half-dozen of the os Dramab. In an instant the rope ladder was cast down the side, and Kest clambered up two steps at a time. His thick pink arm reached over the top of the rail and he pulled himself up and over, collapsing onto the deck.
Mandhi threw herself down next to him, lay a hand on his heaving chest, and kissed his forehead. His hand grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her closer to plant a long, hard kiss on her lips.
“Ah,” she cried, her fingers flying to her bruised throat.
Kest let go. “Something wrong?”
“Devoured choked me,” she whispered. Jhumitu squirmed past her and clambered into Kest’s arms, sparing her the pain of further speaking while the boy bounced on Kest’s stomach.
Hrenge posed an urgent question in Kaleksha, and the other os Dramab pushed close to hear. Kest sat up and leaned against the rail, his voice rumbling in Kaleksha as he tousled Jhumitu’s hair. Murmurs of surprise and thanksgiving sounded through the os Dramab. Flakes of ash fell to the deck around them like a ghastly snow.
When he was done he looked at Mandhi with a twinkle in his eye. “You want to hear it, too?”
“You’re alive,” she said in a weak voice.
“Yes! Thanks to the Devoured. They tipped the boat over, but I got underneath it and held on to one of the benches. Kicked at the Devoured who tried to pull me under. And then they all sank to the bottom—”
“Vapathi and the others,” Mandhi croaked. “She released them.”
Kest nodded and suddenly grew serious. “The stars upon them. Anyway, I was about to swim for the dhow when things got very bright and very hot, and I decided it might be a good idea to stay in the water a while longer.”
He wrapped his hands around Mandhi and rested his head against the rail for just a moment. Then he jerked to life and started bellowing.
“No time to stand around, though! Get out of here before a cinder catches our sail on fire!”
The os Dramab and the rest of the crew resumed their frantic motion. They pushed the Devoured off the deck into the water, finished pulling up and stowing the anchor. A tremendous sea breeze blew toward the fires on the shore, so they furled the sail and set the men on the oars.
The fires receded behind them. They reached the edge of the harbor and pulled out into the deep waters of the sea, and only then did they dare to unfurl the sail on the main mast to catch the stiff breeze running parallel to the shore.
Mandhi watched Amur recede behind them. The shoreline was nothing but a line of red fire as far as she could see in every direction, the sky was a shroud of gray. She turned around.
She found Sudran and the navigator on the rear deck. “We have survived,” she said, loud enough for the whole boat to hear. “We have seen the salvation of Ulaur, but the ruin of Amur. Now do you know where to go?”
The navigator trembled, but he nodded to her. “There is a place in the islands where Jasthi-dar and the rest of the fleet will wait for us, almost due east from here. And from there….”
He looked at Mandhi with a face of uncertainty. Kest clambered up from the hold of the dhow where he had been rowing, and he addressed the rest of the people in the boat.
“We go to Kalignas,” he said. “We have no homes there, but we will make them. I give you the promise of a son of Kalignas and the patriarch of my clan.”
The faces of the people in the boat were fearful and uncertain. A few of them looked back to the burning shores of Amur.
But the navigator nodded. “To the east, and then across the sea.”
Navran
Navran awoke to a thunderous shaking all around him. He was thrown to the side, saw a wooden rail rise before him, and clutched it with his trembling limbs. A swirl of water and wind surrounded him. A tremendous roaring. He cried out, clung to whatever it was that held him, and closed his eyes.
It passed a moment later. The wind subsided. The spray died down. The roaring passed, replaced with the babble of confused and desperate tongues, curses at the sky, and wails of thanksgiving. The violent spinning subsided, replaced by a gentle rocking.
Hands touched his shoulders. He opened his eyes.
“Bhudman,” Navran said.
“Yes, my lord and king. Are you alive? Are you well?”
Navran swallowed. He stretched out his hand, which the old saghada clutched to his chest. He looked at Navran with a desperate expression of worry and panic. Over Bhudman’s shoulder he saw Daladham approach. Other human figures moved vaguely in the background.
Navran stretched his legs. He had no injuries he could feel. His heart thundered in his chest, but he was unhurt.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“On the ship,” Bhudman said.
“Ship?”
“Sailing away from Patakshar. We have joined the rest of the fleet.”
Patakshar. The Devoured. The Powers. Kushma Ulaur.
He trembled and closed his eyes. “What happened?”
Bhudman and Daladham glanced at each other. “We were going to ask you, my lord and king—”
“What happened to Patakshar?”
Bhudman bowed his head. “The ships got away. The Devoured overwhelmed the walls. You were in a trance—”
“I know. But the city. How did you reach the ships?”
“The Devoured overran the inner city. While you slept, Bidhra and a handful of soldiers guarded us. And then the Devoured… fell.”
Navran sat up. His head swam. The boards beneath him rocked, not with the motion of the sea but with the swirling of his head. He blinked and rubbed his eyes.
“They fell?” he asked. “Explain.”
Bhudman looked at Daladham and shrugged. “I don’t know, my lord and king. Their names returned to them, and they fell down dead. Then we carried you to one of the boats and rowed out to meet the rest of the ships.”
Navran reached out and grabbed the rail at the edge of the deck, the thing which he had clung to when the boat was rocking a moment ago. “Utalni? The others?”
“All got away,” Daladham said. “They left before us.”
“And the wind? I was woken by the wind.”
Bhudman fell silent. Daladham moved forward and knelt next to Navran, his gaze turning to the north. A grim expression settled over him.
“The red star shone in the day. After the Devoured fell, the star streaked across the sky and struck the earth in the north. For a few minutes the whole horizon burned with light.” He paused, his fingers clutching at the rail of the dhow. “We were already on the boat by that time. There was an earthquake. Patakshar, what was left of it, was leveled. The roar of wind from the star’s fall reached us some hours later. That is what woke you.”
It was done.
Navran grasped the rail at the edge of the dhow. He stood, shaking unsteadily on his feet, but he didn’t fall. He looked to the north. The shore of Amur was already gone, the destruction complete. He could see nothing except a gray and black haze, the smoke of Amur’s consumption in fire.
He had done his duty. He would never see his home again.
“Gone,” he said.
Bhudman put his hand on Navran’s shoulder. He bowed to the king and asked, with his quivering voice, “What happened? What did you see in the trance?”
Navran was quiet. He was aware that
the other survivors in the ship were crowded around them, that he and Bhudman and Daladham stood in the center of a wide circle of bereft Amurans, hanging on his words.
“Some things should remain secret,” he said.
Bhudman bowed again. He seemed satisfied by Navran’s response. He clasped Navran’s hand, then gestured to the foredeck.
“Follow me,” he said. “There’s a place where you can rest. We will all rest.”
“Where is Utalni?”
Daladham answered. “We’ll signal the ships ahead of us and pass ahead a message. We will find the ship she boarded.”
Navran nodded. He looked to the south, at the stretch of deep, wave-churned blue and the white sky above it.
The field was burned. It was time to plant the seed.
Epilogue
Navran
Mai Tak was the fourth harbor they had found in the Ten Thousand Islands. The previous three had all been the same: though they had villages and shallow bays, the inhabitants had begged them to move on. These islands are too small, they said. Further south, there is a bigger city. Perhaps there you can find homes.
Yavada stood next to Navran at the rail of the dhow and watched as Mai Tak grew closer. His fat, noble figure had been thinned by months of deprivation aboard the dhow, and his rough, cracked fingers picked at the wood of the rail. He leaned close to Navran.
“We have to land soon, my lord and king,” he said. He glanced over Navran’s shoulder at Utalni, lying in the shade of a piece of canvas. Her pregnant belly extended over her knees, the sun-bleached and water-stained sari barely stretching to cover her skin. She looked at the shore with a glum disappointment that matched Navran’s.
“I know,” Navran said.
“Utalni-dar—”
“I know,” Navran repeated. He didn’t need Yavada’s reminders.
The bay that protected the shore of Mai Tak was bigger than any of the previous three. When they rounded the palm-covered point and spied the long line of bamboo and palm-thatch homes along the shore, Navran’s hopes rose briefly. The houses here were stacked several ranks deep, and up the slopes of the hilly emerald inland he could see fields and farms. On a raised, flat-topped hill about a mile from shore was a large compound fenced with bamboo stakes and a long, shallow-roofed house twice as big as any other.
The captain and rowers brought the dhow as near to the shore as they dared. The natives watched and pointed with languid gestures, and soon a trio of canoes launched from the beaches, just as at the other harbors. When the canoes got within shouting distance of the dhow, the men stood and began hollering their questions at the captain.
The captain responded in the terse, clipped pidgin that the Amuran sailors used to talk to the natives of the Ten Thousand Islands. It was like Amuran, or at least it had enough Amuran words mixed in that Navran could pick them out like finding shells on a beach. But the rest of it was a muddy mess of unknown words and misplaced syllables, making no kind of sense that Navran could decipher.
After a tense negotiation, the captain turned to Navran and Yavada with a scowl on his face.
“They knew we were coming,” he growled. “Canoes have been going up and down these islands for days. They want us to leave.”
“Why?” Navran said. “This is the biggest settlement we’ve seen. Looks almost like a real city.”
“They worry we bring demons with us from the ruin of Amur—”
“No, we left the demons behind when we fled.”
“I said that, but they don’t believe me.”
Navran sighed. He bowed his head.
“Tell them we won’t leave,” Yavada said.
“And then what?” Navran said. “We steal their homes with our dhows full of starving peasants?”
“Listen,” Yavada leaned closed and hissed. “We have been passed from place to place three times already. There is nowhere we can go where the people will be happy to see us. At some point we will have to demand the right to land, or we’ll be wandering from island to island until the day of our death.”
“And then what?” Navran said. “Do you intend to make war on every island we see?”
“It wouldn’t take much, Navran-dar. We have arms. A little preparation—”
Navran turned and face him. “And then how will we live? Will we trade, when all of our neighbors hate us? What will we farm, when we don’t know the first thing about the seasons and the crops of this place?”
“Farming? But our berths are full of people who farmed in Amur.”
Navran laughed. “You were never a peasant.” He gestured at the emerald fields on the shoulders of the hills and the little groves at their edges. “Do they grow rice in those fields? Something else? When do the rains come? When do you have to plant, and how quickly is the grain ripe? How much seed do you need to save?”
Yavada looked suddenly flustered. “It’s just farming, my lord and king. It’s not a high craft.”
“You don’t know the first thing about farming,” Navran said. “You can’t just show up, clear some trees, and throw down some grain. If we hope to eat in our first year, we will need the help of those who have already lived here. Forcing our way ashore with bronze in our hands will get us no friends.”
Yavada fell silent, folding his fingers together and casting his gaze down. His lips moved, muttering something too quiet for Navran to hear.
Navran turned back to the captain, who was still waiting with an expectant scowl on his face. “Ask him where their leader is. The khadir, or whoever rules this place.”
The captain relayed Navran’s words to the men in the canoes, and a response came back, swift and bitter.
“They say they will not bring any response from their chief to foreigners. They say we are cursed and bring the doom of Amur with us.”
Navran laughed bitterly. He took a deep breath and glanced aside at Yavada, then said to the captain. “Very well. Tell them we have bronze and will land by force if we must. But we would rather speak to their chief like civilized men.”
“Civilized men,” he heard Yavada mutter behind him.
The captain relayed his words to the canoes again, stirring up a protracted argument among the men. Finally, they sat down and their paddles sliced the water again. The captain stepped back from the rail and looked at Navran with relief.
“They are bringing the chief.”
“Good,” Navran said. “I hope to make no enemies.”
Yavada spoke up. “And what sorts of powers does a chief in this place have?”
The captain shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I have never dealt with him. I talk to the traders who come in their canoes to trade jewels and spices for bronze.”
Yavada sidled up behind Navran. “I knew that you would—”
“Quiet, Yavada-kha,” Navran said. “You wanted us to charge in and slaughter the villagers.”
“I said no such thing, my lord and king.”
“Nonetheless. I’ll make friends here, if I can.”
Soon the chief, or what the locals took for one, appeared on the beach. He was dressed in a form much grander than any of the others they had seen so far, wearing a great cape of brilliant blue, red, and yellow parrot feathers, with a crown that gleamed with pearls and a bronze knife at his waist. His expression was severe and authoritative, and he lowered himself into a canoe with a practiced contempt that reminded Navran of an Amuran noble stepping into a palanquin.
They rowed only halfway to the dhow, while another canoe took up position within shouting distance of Navran’s vessel. The chief began to speak in a quiet voice that barely reached Navran’s ears, while the man in the nearer vessel repeated his words loudly in the Amuran pidgin.
The captain listened for a long time, then began translating for Navran. “They want to know why you’ve come here to bring trouble. They say they never caused trouble for the Amuran traders who visited, but they heard about the doom of Amur and see that our downfall has clouded the sky. They don’t wan
t us bringing our curse down on them. And a whole pile of other nonsense besides—honestly, I don’t know half of what they’re trying to say, but he seems pretty upset.”
Navran cleared his throat. He looked down at his own dress: a salt-stained kurta, its blue color bleached by the sun, and an unwashed dhoti whose frayed hem hung around his knees. Not half as spectacular as the cape worn by this petty island lord, and yet here he was, a king of Amur, begging the man for permission to come ashore.
“Please,” he said. “Tell them we have no desire to be enemies, but we need a place to land. If there is an island of sufficient size nearby with few inhabitants, we will go to it. Otherwise we’ll come ashore where we can. I can see that Mai Tak is a large island with many mountains and valleys within it. Perhaps we can help the chief with something, offer something in trade for the right to build homes here.”
The captain repeated the request to the man in the canoe. A long exchange ensued between the translator and the chief, and then back to the captain. The captain’s face took on a look of surprise. He turned to Navran and said, “It turns out that there may be something.”
“What?”
The captain pointed off to the west, to a long, mountainous peninsula that jutted into the sea. “On the far side of that land, there is a camp of bandits that have been causing problems for him. He says that if we bring him their heads, he will give us the right to make our homes in that place in peace.”
It always came back to slaughter. But if violence was inevitable, then destroying a band of thieves might be an acceptable cost.
“Very well,” he said. “Tell the man we’ll do it.”
Yavada let out a long, satisfied sigh behind him. “Well chosen, Navran-dar.”
* * *
They crept through the jungle with bronze in their hands. Their guides took the lead, picking their way through the palms and undergrowth on paths too subtle for Navran to see, swatting aside flowers, ferns, and vines. Navran glanced back once to make sure the rest of the men followed.