Child of the River

Chapter One The White Boat

The constable of Aeolis was a shrewd, pragmatic man who did not believe in miracles. In his opinion, everything must have an explanation, and simple explanations were the best of all. “The sharpest knife cuts cleanest,” he often told his sons. “The more a man talks, the more likely it is he’s lying.”

But to the end of his days, he could not explain the affair of the white boat.

It happened one midsummer night, when the huge black sky above the Great River was punctuated only by a scattering of dim halo stars and the dull red swirl, no bigger than a man’s hand, of the Eye of the Preservers. The heaped lights of the little city of Aeolis and the lights of the carracks riding at anchor outside the harbor entrance were brighter by far than anything in the sky.

The summer heat was oppressive to the people of Aeolis.

For most of the day they slept in the relative cool of their seeps and wallows, rising to begin work when the Rim Mountains clawed the setting sun, and retiring again when the sun rose, renewed, above the devouring peaks. In summer, stores and taverns and workshops stayed open from dusk until dawn, fishing boats set out at midnight to trawl the black river for noctilucent polyps and pale shrimp, and the streets of Aeolis were crowded and bustling beneath the flare of cressets and the orange glow of sodium-vapor lamps. At night, in summer, the lights of Aeolis shone like a beacon in the midst of the dark shore.

That particular night, the Constable and his two eldest sons were rowing back to Aeolis in their skiff with two vagrant river traders who had been arrested while trying to run bales of cigarettes to the unchanged hill tribes of the wild shore downstream of Aeolis. Part of the traders’ contraband cargo, soft bales sealed in plastic wrap and oiled cloth, was stacked in the forward well of the skiff, the traders lay in the stern, tied up like shoats for the slaughter. The skiff’s powerful motor had been shot out in the brief skirmish, and the Constable’s sons, already as big as their father, sat side by side on the center thwart, rowing steadily against the current. The Constable was perched on a button cushion in the skiff’s high stern, steering for the lights of Aeolis.

The Constable was drinking steadily from a cruse of wine.

He was a large man with loose gray skin and gross features, like a figure hastily molded from clay and abandoned before it was completed. A pair of tusks protruded like daggers from his meaty upper lip. One tusk had been broken when he had fought and killed his father, and the Constable had had it capped with silver; silver chinked against the neck of the cruse each time he took a swig of wine.

The Constable was not in a good temper. He would make a fair profit from his half of the captured cargo (the other half would go to the Aedile, if he could spare an hour or so from his excavations to pronounce sentence on the traders), but the arrest had not gone smoothly. The river traders had hired a pentad of ruffians as an escort, and they had put up a desperate fight before the Constable and his sons had managed to dispatch them. The Constable’s shoulders had taken a bad cut, cleaving through blubber to the muscle beneath, and his back had been scorched by reflection of the pistol bolt which had damaged the skiff’s motor. Fortunately, the weapon, which had probably predated the foundation of Aeolis, had misfired on the second shot and killed the man using it, but the Constable knew that he could not rely on good luck forever. He was getting old, ponderous and muddled when once he had been quick and strong. He knew that sooner or later one of his sons would challenge him, and he was worried that this night’s botched episode was a harbinger of his decline. Like all strong men, he feared his own weakness more than death, for strength was how he measured the worth of his life.

Now and then he turned and looked back at the pyre of the smugglers’ boat. It had burnt to the waterline, a flickering dash of light riding its own reflection far out across the river’s broad black plain. The Constable’s sons had run it aground on a mudbank, so that it would not drift amongst the banyan islands which at this time of year spun in slow circles in the shallow sargasso of the Great River’s nearside shoals, tethered only by fine nets of feeder roots.

Of the two river traders, one lay as still as a sated cayman, resigned to his fate, but his mate, a tall, skinny old man naked but for a breechclout and an unraveling turban, was trying to convince the Constable to let him go. Yoked hand to foot, so that his back was bent like a bow, he stared up at the Constable from the well, his insincere frightened smile like a rictus, his eyes so wide that white showed clear around their slitted irises. At first he had tried to gain the Constable’s attention with flattery; now he was turning to threats.

“I have many friends, captain, who would be unhappy to see me in your jail,” he said. “There are no walls strong enough to withstand the force of their friendship, for I am a generous man. I am known for my generosity across the breadth of the river.”

The Constable rapped the top of the trader’s turban with the butt of his whip, and for the fourth or fifth time advised him to be quiet. It was clear from the arrowhead tattoos on the man’s fingers that he belonged to one of the street gangs which roved the ancient wharves of Ys. Any friends he might have were a hundred leagues upriver, and by dusk tomorrow he and his companion would be dead.

The skinny trader babbled, “Last year, captain, I took it upon myself to sponsor the wedding of the son of one of my dear friends, who had been struck down in the prime of life. Bad fortune had left his widow with little more than a rented room and nine children to feed. The son was besotted; his bride’s family impatient. This poor lady had no one to turn to but myself, and I, captain, remembering the good company of my friend, his wisdom and his friendly laughter, took it upon myself to organize everything. Four hundred people ate and drank at the celebration, and I count them all as my friends. Quails’ tongues in aspic we had, captain, and mounds of oysters and fish roe, and baby goats tender as the butter they were seethed in.”

Perhaps there was a grain of truth in the story. Perhaps the man had been one of the guests at such a wedding, but he could not have sponsored it. No one desperate enough to try to smuggle cigarettes to the hill tribes would have been able to lavish that kind of money on an act of charity.

The Constable flicked his whip across the legs of the prisoners. He said, “You are a dead man, and dead men have no friends. Compose yourself. Our city might be a small place, but it has a shrine, and it was one of the last places along all the river’s shore where avatars talked with men, before the heretics silenced them. Pilgrims still come here, for even if the avatars are no longer able to speak, surely they are still listening. We’ll let you speak to them after you’ve been sentenced. I suggest you take the time to think of what account you can give of your life.”

One of the Constable’s sons laughed, and the Constable gave their broad backs a touch of his whip. “Row,” he told them, “and keep quiet.”

“Quails’ tongues,” the talkative trader said. “Anything you want, captain. You have only to name it and it will be yours. I can make you rich. I can offer you my own home, captain. Like a palace it is, right in the heart of Ys. Far from this stinking hole—”

The boat rocked when the Constable jumped into the well. His sons cursed wearily, and shipped their oars. The Constable knocked off the wretched trader’s turban, pulled up the man’s head by the greasy knot of hair that sprouted from his crown and, before he could scream, thrust two fingers into his mouth and grasped his writhing tongue. The trader gagged and tried to bite the Constable’s fingers, but his teeth scarcely bruised their leathery skin. The Constable drew his knife, sliced the trader’s tongue in half and tossed the scrap of flesh over the side of the skiff. The trader gargled blood and thrashed like a landed fish.

At the same moment, one of the Constable’s sons cried out. “Boat ahead! Leastways, there’s running lights.”

This was Urthank, a dull-witted brute grown as heavy and muscular as his father. The Constable knew that it would not be long before Urthank roared his challenge, and knew too that the boy would lose. Urthank was too stupid to wait for the right moment; it was not in his nature to suppress an impulse. No, Urthank would not defeat him. It would be one of the others. But Urthank’s challenge would be the beginning of the end.

The Constable searched the darkness. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a fugitive glimmer, but only for a moment. It could have been a mote floating in his eye, or a dim star glinting at the edge of the world’s level horizon.

“You were dreaming,” he said. “Set to rowing, or the sun will be up before we get back.”

“I saw it,” Urthank insisted.

The other son, Unthank, laughed.

“There!” Urthank said. “There it is again! Dead ahead, just like I said.”

This time the Constable saw the flicker of light. His first thought was that perhaps the trader had not been boasting after all. He said quietly, “Go forward. Feathered oars.”

As the skiff glided against the current, the Constable fumbled a clamshell case from the pouch hung on the belt of his white linen kilt. The trader whose tongue had been cut out was making wet, choking sounds. The Constable kicked him into silence before opening the case and lifting out the spectacles that rested on the water-stained silk lining. The spectacles were the most valuable heirloom of the Constable’s family; they had passed from defeated father to victorious son for more than a hundred generations. They were shaped like bladeless scissors, and the Constable unfolded them and carefully pinched them over his bulbous nose.

At once, the hull of the flat skiff and the bales of contraband cigarettes stacked in the forward well seemed to gain a luminous sheen; the bent backs of the Constable’s sons and the supine bodies of the two prisoners glowed with furnace light. The Constable scanned the river, ignoring flaws in the old glass of the lenses which warped or smudged the amplified light, and saw, half a league from the skiff, a knot of tiny, intensely brilliant specks dancing above the river’s surface.

“Machines,” the Constable breathed. He stepped between the prisoners and pointed out the place to his sons.

The skiff glided forward under the Constable’s guidance. As it drew closer, the Constable saw that there were hundreds of machines, a busy cloud swirling around an invisible pivot.

He was used to seeing one or two flitting through the sky above Aeolis on their inscrutable business, but he had never before seen so many in one place.

Something knocked against the side of the skiff, and Urthank cursed and feathered his oar. It was a waterlogged coffin. Every day, thousands were launched from Ys. For a moment, a woman’s face gazed up at the Constable through a glaze of water, glowing greenly amidst a halo of rotting flowers. Then the coffin turned end for end and was borne away.

The skiff had turned in the current, too. Now it was broadside to the cloud of machines, and for the first time the Constable saw what they attended.

A boat. A white boat riding high on the river’s slow current.

The Constable took off his spectacles, and discovered that the boat was glimmering with a spectral luminescence. The water around it glowed too, as if it floated in the center of one of the shoals of luminous plankton that sometimes rose to the surface of the river on a calm summer night. The glow spread around the skiff, each stroke of the oars broke its pearly light into whirling interlocking spokes, as if the ghost of a machine lived just beneath the river’s skin.

The tongue-cut trader groaned and coughed; his partner raised himself up on his elbows to watch as the white boat turned on the river’s current, light as a leaf, a dancer barely touching the water.

The boat had a sharp, raised prow, and incurved sides that sealed it shut and swept back in a fan, like the tail of a dove.

It was barely larger than an ordinary coffin. It made another turn, seemed to stretch like a cat, and then it was alongside the skiff, pressed right against it without even a bump.

Suddenly, the Constable and his sons were inside the cloud of machines. It was as if they had fallen headfirst into a nebula, for there were hundreds of them, each burning with ferocious white light, none bigger than a rhinoceros beetle.

Urthank tried to swat one that hung in front of his snout, and cursed when it stung him with a flare of red light and a crisp sizzle.

“Steady,” the Constable said, and someone else said hoarsely, “Flee.”

Astonished, the Constable turned from his inspection of the glimmering boat.

“Flee,” the second trader said again. “Flee, you fools!”

Both of the Constable’s sons had shipped their oars and were looking at their father. They were waiting for his lead.

The Constable put away his spectacles and shoved the butt end of his whip in his belt. He could not show that he was afraid. He reached through the whirling lights of the machines and touched the white boat.

Its hull was as light and close-woven as feathers, and at the Constable’s touch, the incurved sides peeled back with a sticky, crackling sound. As a boy, the Constable had been given to wandering the wild shore downriver of Aeolis, and he had once come across a blood orchid growing in the cloven root of a kapok tree. The orchid had made precisely the same noise when, sensing his body heat, it had spread its fleshy lobes wide to reveal the lubricious curves of its creamy pistil. He had fled in terror before the blood orchid’s perfume could overwhelm him, and the ghost of that fear stayed his hand now.

The hull vibrated under his fingertips with a quick, eager pulse. Light poured out from the boat’s interior, rich and golden and filled with floating motes. A body made a shadow inside this light, and the Constable thought at once that the boat was no more than a coffin set adrift on the river’s current. The coffin of some lord or lady no doubt, but in function no different from the shoddy cardboard coffins of the poor or the enameled wooden coffins of the artisans and traders.

And then the baby started to cry.

The Constable squinted through the light, saw something move within it, and reached out. For a moment he was at the incandescent heart of the machines’ intricate dance, and then they were gone, dispersing in flat trajectories into the darkness. The baby, a boy, pale and fat and hairless, squirmed in the Constable’s hands.

The golden light was dying back inside the white boat. In moments, only traces remained, iridescent veins and dabs that fitfully illuminated the corpse on which the baby had been lying.

It was the corpse of a woman, naked, flat-breasted and starveling-thin, and as hairless as the baby. She had been shot, once through the chest and once in the head, but there was no blood. One hand was three-fingered, like the grabs of the cranes of Aeolis’s docks; the other was monstrously swollen and bifurcate, like a lobster’s claw. Her skin had a silvery-gray cast; her huge eyes, divided into a honeycomb of cells, were like the compound lenses of certain insects, and the color of blood rubies. Within each facet lived a flickering glint of golden light, and although the Constable knew that these were merely reflections of the white boat’s fading light, he had the strange feeling that things, malevolently watchful things, lived behind the dead woman’s strange eyes.

“Heresy,” the second trader said. Somehow, he had got up on his knees and was staring wide-eyed at the white boat.

The Constable kicked the trader in the stomach; the man coughed and flopped back into the bilge water alongside his partner. The trader glared up at the Constable and said again, “Heresy. When they allowed the ship of the Ancients of Days to pass beyond Ys and sail downriver, our benevolent bureaucracies let heresy loose into the world.”

“Let me kill him now,” Urthank said.

“He’s already a dead man,” the Constable said.

“Not while he talks treason,” Urthank said stubbornly. He was staring straight at his father.

“Fools,” the trader said. “You have all seen the argosies and carracks sailing downriver to war with their cannons and siege, engines. But there are more terrible weapons let loose in the world.”

“Let me kill him,” Urthank said.

The baby had caught at the Constable’s thumb, although he could not close his fingers around it. He grimaced, as if trying to smile, but blew a saliva bubble instead.

The Constable gently disengaged the baby’s grip and set him on the button cushion at the stern. He moved carefully, as if through air packed with invisible boxes, aware of Urthank’s burning gaze at his back. He turned and said, “Let the man speak. He might know something.”

The trader said, “The bureaucrats are trying to wake the Hierarchs from their reveries. Some say by science, some by witchery. The bureaucrats are so frightened of heresy consuming our world that they try anything to prevent it.”

Unthank spat. “The Hierarchs are all ten thousand years dead. Everyone knows that. They were killed when the Insurrectionists threw down the temples and destroyed most of the avatars.”

“The Hierarchs tried to follow the Preservers,” the trader said. “They rose higher than any other bloodline, but not so high that they cannot be called back.”

The Constable kicked the man and said roughly, “Enough theology. Is this one of their servants?”

“Ys is large, and contains a multitude of wonders, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Most likely it is a foul creature manufactured by the forbidden arts. Those trying to forge such weapons have become more corrupt than the heretics. Destroy it! Return the baby and sink the boat!”

“Why should I believe you?”

“I’m a bad man. I admit it. I’d sell any one of my daughters if I could be sure of a good profit. But I studied for a clerkship when I was a boy, and I was taught well. I remember my lessons, and I know that the existence of this thing is against the word of the Preservers.”

Urthank said slowly, “We should put the baby back. It isn’t our business.”

“All on the river within a day’s voyage is my business,” the Constable said.

“You don’t know everything,” Urthank said. “You just think you do.”

The Constable knew then that this was the moment poor Urthank had chosen. So did Unthank, who subtly shifted on the thwart so that he was no longer shoulder to shoulder with his brother. The Constable met Urthank’s stare and said, “Keep your place, boy.”

There was a moment when it seemed that Urthank would not attack. Then he inflated his chest and let out the air with a roar and, roaring, threw himself at his father.

The whip caught around Urthank’s neck with a sharp crack that echoed out across the black water. Urthank fell to his knees and grabbed hold of the whip as its loop tightened under the slack flesh of his chin. The Constable gripped the whip’s stock with both hands and jerked it sideways as if he held a line which a huge fish had suddenly struck. The skiff tipped wildly and Urthank tumbled headfirst into the glowing water. But the boy did not let go of the whip. He was stupid, but he was also stubborn. The Constable staggered, dropped the whip—it hissed over the side like a snake—and fell overboard too.

The Constable kicked off his loose, knee-high boots as he plunged down through the cold water, kicked out again for the surface. Something grabbed the hem of his kilt, and then Urthank was trying to swarm up his body. Light exploded in the Constable’s eye as his son’s hard elbow hit his face.

They thrashed through glowing water and burst into the air, separated by no more than an arm’s length.

The Constable spat a mouthful of water and gasped, “You’re too quick to anger, my son. That was always your weakness.”

He saw the shadow of Urthank’s arm sweep through the milky glow, and countered the thrust with his own knife. The blades clashed and slid along each other, locking at their hilts.

Urthank growled and pressed down. He was very strong. The Constable felt a terrific pain as his knife was twisted from his grasp and Urthank’s blade buried its point in his forearm.

He kicked backward in the water as Urthank slashed at his face; spray flew in a wide fan.

“Old,” Urthank said. “Old and slow.”

The Constable steadied himself with little circling kicks. He could feel his hot blood pulsing into the water; Urthank had caught a vein. There was a heaviness in his bones; the wound on his shoulder throbbed. He knew that Urthank was right, but he also knew that he was not prepared to die.

He said, “Come to me, son, and find out who is strongest.”

Urthank grinned, freeing his tusks from his lips. He kicked forward, driving through the water with his knife held out straight, trying for a killing blow. But the water slowed him as the Constable had known it would, and the Constable kicked sideways, always just out of reach, while Urthank stabbed wildly, sobbing curses and uselessly spending his strength. Father and son circled each other. In the periphery of his vision, the Constable was aware that the white boat had separated from the skiff, but he could spare no thought for it as he avoided Urthank’s next onslaught.

At last Urthank stopped, paddling to keep in one place and gasping heavily.

“Strength isn’t everything,” the Constable observed. “Come to me, son. I’ll grant you a quick release and no shame.”

“Surrender, old man, and I’ll give you an honorable burial on land. Or I’ll kill you here and let the little fishes strip your bones.”

“O Urthank, how disappointed I am! You’re no son of mine after all!”

Urthank lunged with a sudden, desperate fury, and the Constable punched precisely, hitting the boy’s elbow where the nerve traveled over the bone. Urthank’s fingers opened in reflex and his knife fluttered away through the water. He dove for it without thinking, and the Constable bore down on him with all his weight, enduring increasingly feeble blows to his chest and belly and legs. It took a long time, but at last he let go and Urthank’s body floated free, facedown in the glowing water.

“You were the strongest of my sons,” the Constable said when he had his breath back. “You were faithful after your fashion, but you never had a good thought in your head. If you had killed me and taken my wives, someone else would have killed you in a year.”

Unthank paddled the skiff over and helped his father clamber into the well. The white boat was a dozen oar-lengths off, glimmering against the dark. The skinny trader whose tongue the Constable had cut out lay facedown in the bilge water, drowned in his own blood. His partner was gone.

Unthank shrugged, and said that the man had slipped over the side.

“You should have brought him back. He was bound hand and foot. A big boy like you should have had no trouble.”

Unthank returned the Constable’s gaze and said simply, “I was watching your victory, father.”

“No, you’re not ready yet, are you? You’re waiting for the right moment. You’re a subtle one, Unthank. Not like your brother.”

“He won’t have got far. The prisoner, I mean.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Probably drowned by now. Like you said, he was bound hand and foot.”

“Help me with your brother.”

Together, father and son hauled Urthank’s body into the skiff. The milky glow was fading out of the water. After the Constable had settled Urthank’s body, he turned and saw that the white boat had vanished. The skiff was alone on the wide dark river, beneath the black sky and the smudged red whorl of the Eye of the Preservers. Under the arm of the tiller, on the leather pad of the button cushion, the baby grabbed at black air with pale starfish hands, chuckling at unguessable thoughts.