Child of the River

Chapter Fourteen The Bandits

The next day, Yama and Prefect Corin drew ahead of the group of palmers, but never so far ahead that the dust cloud the palmers raised was lost from sight. That night, the palmers caught up with them and camped nearby, and Belarius came over and talked to Prefect Corin about the day’s journey for the length of time it took him to smoke two of his clove-flavored cigarettes. The palmers’ songs sounded clear and strong in the quiet evening.

When Prefect Corin woke Yama from a deep sleep it was past midnight, and the fire was no more than warm ashes.

They had camped by a square tomb covered in the scrambling thorny canes of roses, on top of a bluff that overlooked the Great River. He was leaning on his staff. Behind him, the white roses glimmered like ghosts of their own selves. Their strong scent filled the air.

“Something bad nearby,” Prefect Corin said in a quiet voice. Galaxy light put a spark in each of his close-set eyes. “Take up your knife and come with me.”

Yama whispered, “What is it?”

“Perhaps nothing. We will see.”

They crossed the road and circled the palmers’ camp, which had been pitched in a grove of eucalyptus. Low cliffs loomed above. The openings of tombs carved into the rock were like staggered rows of hollow eyes: a hiding place for an army. Yama heard nothing but the rustle of eucalyptus leaves, and, far off, the screech of a hunting owl. In the camp, one of the palmers groaned in his sleep. Then the wind shifted, and Yama caught a faint, foul odor above the medicinal tang of the eucalyptus.

Prefect Corin pointed toward the camp with his staff and moved forward, dry leaves crackling beneath his feet. Yama saw something scuttle away through the trees, man-sized yet running on all fours with a lurching sideways movement. He drew his knife and gave chase, but Prefect Corin overtook him and sprang onto an outcrop of rock beyond the trees with his staff raised above his head. He held the pose for a moment, then jumped down.

“Gone,” he said. “Well, the priest is right about one thing. They have a ghoul following them.”

Yama sheathed his knife. His hand was trembling. He was out of breath and his blood sang in his head. He remembered the time he and Telmon had hunted antelope, armed only with stone axes like the men of the hill tribes. He said, “I saw it.”

“I will tell them to bury their rubbish and to make sure that they hang their food in branches.”

“Ghouls can climb,” Yama said. He added, “I am sorry. I should not have chased after it.”

“It was bravely done. Perhaps we seared it off.”

Yama and Prefect Corin reached the pass the next day. It was only a little wider than the road, cutting through a high scarp of rough-edged blocks of gray granite which rose abruptly from the gentle slope they had been climbing all morning. A cairn of flat stones stood at the edge of the road near the beginning of the pass, built around a slab engraved with a list of names. Prefect Corin said that it was the memorial of a battle in the Age of Insurrection, when those few men whose names were engraved on the slab had held the pass against overwhelming odds. Every man defending the pass had died, but the army they had fought had been held up long enough for reinforcements from Ys to arrive and drive them back.

Across the road from the shrine was a house-sized platform of red rock split down the middle by a single, straight-edged crack. Prefect Corin sat in the shade of the rock’s overhang and said that they would wait for the palmers to catch up before they tried the pass.

“Safety in numbers,” Yama said, to provoke a reaction.

“Quite the reverse, but you do not seem to understand that.” Prefect Corin watched as Yama restlessly poked about, and eventually said, “There are supposed to be footprints on top of this rock, one either side of the crack. It is said that an aesthetic stood there an age past, and ascended directly to the Eye of the Preservers. The force of his ascent cracked the rock, and left his footprints melted into it.”

“Is it true?”

“Certainly a great deal of energy would be required to accelerate someone so that they could fall beyond the influence of Confluence’s gravity fields, more than enough to melt rock. But if the energy was applied all at once a normal body would be flash-heated into a cloud of steam by friction with the air. I do not blame you for not knowing that, Yama. Your education is not what it should be.”

Yama did not see any point replying to this provocation, and continued to wander about in the dry heat, searching for nothing in particular. The alternative was to sit by Prefect Corin. Small lizards flicked over the hot stones; a scarlet-and-gold hummingbird hung in the air on a blur of wings for a few moments before darting away. At last, Yama found a way up a jumble of boulders to the flat top of the outcrop.

The fracture was straight and narrow, and its depths glittered with shards of what looked like melted glass. The fabled prints were just as Prefect Corin had described them, no more than a pair of foot-sized oval hollows, one on either side of the crack.

Yama lay down on warm, gritty rock and looked up at the empty blue sky. His thoughts moved lazily. He started to read his copy of the Puranas, but did not find anything that was different from his rote learning and put the book away.

It was too bright and hot to read, and he had already looked long and hard at the pictures; apart from the one which showed the creation of the Eye of the Preservers, they were little different from the scenes of the lost past captured in the slates of tombs—and unlike the pictures in the slates, the pictures in the book did not move.

Yama idly wondered why the ghoul was following the palmers, and wondered why the Preservers had created ghouls in the first place. For if the Preservers had created the world and everything in it as was written in the Puranas, and had raised up the ten thousand bloodlines from animals of ten thousand worlds, then what were the ghouls, which stood between animals and the humblest of the indigenous races?

According to the argument from design, which Zakiel had taught Yama and Telmon, ghouls existed because they aided the processes of decay, but there were many other scavenger species, and ghouls had a particular appetite for the flesh of men, and would take small children and babies if they could.

Others said that ghouls were only imperfectly raised up, their natures partaking of the worst of men and of beasts, or that their bloodline had not advanced like those of other kinds of men, or remained unchanged, like the various indigenous races, but had run backward until they retained nothing of the gifts of the Preservers but the capacity for evil. Both arguments suggested that the world which the Preservers had created was imperfect, although neither denied the possibility of perfectibility. Some claimed that the Preservers had chosen not to create a perfect world because such a world would be unchanging, and only an imperfect world allowed the possibility of evil and, therefore, of redemption. By their nature, Preservers could do only good, but while they could not create evil, the presence of evil was an inevitable consequence in their creation, just as light casts shadows when material objects are interposed. Others argued that since the light of the Preservers had been everywhere at the construction of the world, where then could any shadows lie? By this argument, evil was the consequence of the rebellion of men and machines against the Preservers, and only by rediscovering the land of lost content which had existed before that rebellion could evil be banished and men win redemption.

Still others argued that evil had its use in a great plan that could not be understood by any but the Preservers themselves.

That such a plan might exist, with past, present and future absolutely determined, was one reason why no one should rely on miracles. As Ananda would say, no use praying for intercession if all was determined from the outset. If the Preservers wanted something to be so, then they would have created it already, without waiting to hear prayers asking for intercession, without needing to watch over every soul.

Everything was predestined in the single long word which the Preservers had spoken to bring the world into existence.

Yama’s mind rebelled against this notion, as a man buried before his death might fight against a winding sheet. If everything was part of a predetermined plan, then why should anyone in it do anything at all, least of all worship the Preservers? Except that too was a part of the plan, and everyone in the world was a wind-up puppet ratcheting from birth to death in a series of preprogrammed gestures.

It was undeniable that the Preservers had set the world in motion, but Yama did not believe that they had abandoned it in disgust or despair, or because, seeing all, they knew every detail of its destiny. No, Yama preferred to think that the Preservers had left the world to grow as it would, as a fond parent must watch a child grow into independence. In this way, the bloodlines which the Preservers had raised up from animals might rise further to become their equals, and that could not occur if the Preservers interfered with destiny, for just as a man cannot make another man, so gods cannot make other gods. For this reason, it was necessary that individuals must be able to choose between good and evil—they must be able to choose, like Dr. Dismas, not to serve goodness, but their own appetites. Without the possibility of evil, no bloodline could define its own goodness. The existence of evil allowed bloodlines to fail and fall, or to transcend their animal natures by their own efforts.

Yama wondered if ghouls had chosen to fall, reveling in their bestial nature as Dr. Dismas reveled in his rebellion against the society of men. Animals did not choose their natures, of course. A jaguar did not delight in the pain it caused its prey; it merely needed to eat. Cats played with mice, but only because their mothers had taught them to hunt by such play. Only men had free will and could choose to wallow in their base desires or by force of will overcome them. Were men little different from ghouls, then, except they struggled against their dark side, while ghouls swam in it with the innocent unthinking ease of fish in water? By praying to the Preservers, perhaps men were in reality doing no more than praying to their own as yet unrealized higher natures, as an explorer might contemplate the untraveled peaks he must climb to reach his goal.

If the Preservers had left the world to its own devices and there were no miracles, except the existence of free will, what then, of the ghost ship? Yama had not prayed for it; or at least had not known that he had done so, and yet it had come precisely when he had needed a diversion to make good his escape.

Was something watching over him? If so, to what purpose? Or perhaps it was no more than a coincidence: some old machinery had been accidentally awakened, and Yama had seized the moment to escape. It was possible that there was another world where the ghost ship had not appeared, or had appeared too early or too late, and Yama had gone with Dr. Dismas and the warlord, Enobarbus. He would be traveling downriver on the pinnace even now, a willing or unwilling participant in their plans, perhaps to death, perhaps to a destiny more glorious than the apprenticeship which now lay ahead of him.

Yama’s speculations widened and at some point he was no longer in control of them but was carried on their flow, like a twig on the Great River’s flood. He slept, and woke to find Prefect Corin standing over him, a black shadow against the dazzling blue of the sky.

“Trouble,” the man said, and pointed down the long gentle slope of the road. A tiny smudge of smoke hung in the middle distance, trembling in the heat haze, and at that moment Yama realized that all along Prefect Corin had been protecting the palmers.

They found the dead first. The bodies had been dragged off the road and stacked and set on fire. Little was left but greasy ash and charred bones, although, bizarrely, a pair of unburnt feet still shod in sandals protruded from the bottom of the gruesome pyre. Prefect Corin poked amongst the hot ashes with his staff and counted fourteen skulls, leaving nine unaccounted for. He cast about in one direction, bending low as he searched the muddle of prints on the ground, and Yama, although not asked, went in the other. It was he, following a trail of blood speckles, who found Belarius hiding inside a tomb. The priest was cradling a dead woman, and his robe was drenched in her blood.

“They shot at us from hiding places amongst the tombs,” Belarius said. “I think they shot Vril by accident because they did not shoot any of the other women. When all the men had been killed or badly wounded, they came for the women. Small fierce men with bright red slan and long arms and legs, some on foot, some on horse, three or four decads of them. Like spiders. They had sharp teeth, and claws like thorns. I remember they couldn’t close their hands around their weapons.”

“I know the bloodline,” Prefect Corin said. “They are a long way from home.”

“Two came and looked at me, and jeered and went away again,” Belarius said.

“They would not kill a priest,” Prefect Corin said. “It is bad luck.”

“I tried to stop them despoiling the bodies,” Belarius said. “They threatened me with their knives or spat on me or laughed, but they didn’t stop their work. They stripped the bodies and dismembered them, cut what they wanted from the heads. Some of the men were still alive. When they were finished, they set the bodies on fire. I wanted to shrive the dead, but they pushed me away.”

“And the women?”

Belarius started to cry. He said, “I meant no harm to anyone. No harm. No harm to anyone.”

“They took the women with them,” Prefect Corin said. “To despoil or to sell. Stop blubbering, man! Which way did they go?”

“Toward the mountains. You must believe that I meant no harm. If you had stayed with us instead of getting ahead no, forgive me. That is unworthy.”

“We would have been killed, too,” Prefect Corin said. “These bandits strike quickly, and without fear. They will attack larger groups better armed than themselves if they think that the surprise and fury of their assault will overcome their opponents. As it is, we may yet save some of your people. Go and shrive your dead, man. After that you must decide whether you want to come with us or stay here.”

When Belarius was out of earshot, Prefect Corin said to Yama, “Listen carefully, boy. You can come with me, but only if you swear that you will do exactly as I say.”

“Of course,” Yama said at once. He would have promised anything for the chance.

It was not difficult to track the bandits and the captured women across the dry, sandy land. The trail ran parallel to the granite scarp across a series of flat, barren salt pans. Each was higher than the next, like a series of giant steps. Prefect Corin set a relentless pace, but the priest, Belarius, kept up surprisingly well; he was one of those fat men who are also strong, and the shock of the ambush was wearing off. Yama supposed that this was a chance for Belarius to regain face. Already, the priest was beginning to speak of the attack as if it was an accident or natural disaster from which he would rescue the survivors.

“As if he did not invite the lightning,” Prefect Corin said to Yama, when they stopped to rest in the shade of a tomb. “At the best of times, bringing a party of palmers on the land route to Ys without proper escort is like herding sheep through a country of wolves. And these were archivists, too. Not proper archivists—those are from the Department, and are trained in the art of memory. These use machines to record the lives of the dying. If you had looked closely at the skulls, you would have seen that they had been broken open. Some bandits eat the brains of their victims, but these wanted the machines in their heads.”

Yama laughed in disbelief. “I have never heard of such a thing!”

Prefect Corin passed a hand over his black-furred face, like a grooming cat. “It is an abomination, promulgated by a department so corrupt and debased that it seeks to survive by coarse imitation of the tasks properly carried out by its superiors. Proper archivists learn how to manage their memories by training; these people would be archivists in a few days, by swallowing the seeds of machines which migrate to a certain area of the brain and grow a kind of library. It is not without risks. In one in fifty of those who swallow the seeds, the machines grow unchecked and destroy their host’s brains.”

“But surely only the unchanged need archivists? Once changed, everyone is remembered by the Preservers.”

“Many no longer believe it, and because the Department will not supply archivists to the cities of the changed, these mountebanks make fortunes by pandering to the gullible. Like real archivists, they listen to the life stories of the dying and promise to transmit them to the shrines of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

Yama said, “No wonder the priest is upset. He believes that many more died than we saw.”

“They are all remembered by the Preservers in any event,” Prefect Corin said. “Saints or sinners, all men marked by the Preservers are remembered, while true archivists remember the stories of as many of the unchanged bloodlines as they can. The priest is upset because his reputation will be blemished, and he will lose trade. Hush. Here he comes.”

Belarius had ripped away the blood-soaked part of his orange robe, leaving only a kind of kilt about his waist. The smooth yellow skin of his shoulders and his fat-man’s breasts had darkened in the sun to the color of blood oranges, and he scratched at his sunburnt skin as he told Yama and Prefect Corin that he had found fresh horse droppings.

“They are not more than an hour ahead of us. If we hurry, we can catch them before they reach the foothills.”

Prefect Corin said, “They make the women walk. It slows them down.”

“Then their cruelty will be their undoing.” Belarius curled his right hand into a fist and ground it into the palm of his left. “We will catch them and we will crush them.”

Prefect Corin said calmly, “They are cruel but not stupid. They could tie the women to their horses if they wanted to outpace us, yet they do not. They taunt us, I think. They want sport. We must proceed carefully. We will wait until night, and follow them to their camp.”

“They will leave us behind in the darkness!”

“I know this bloodline. They do not travel by night, for their blood slows as the air cools. Meanwhile we will rest. You will pray for us, Belarius. It will set our minds to the struggle ahead.”

They waited until the sun had fallen behind the Rim Mountains and the Galaxy had begun to rise above the far-side horizon before they set off. The tracks left by the bandits ran straight across the flat white land into a tangle of shallow draws which sloped up toward a range of low hills. Yama tried his best to imitate Prefect Corin’s ambling gait, and remembered to go flatfooted on loose stones, as Telmon had taught him. Belarius was less nimble, and every now and then would stumble and send stones clattering away downslope. There were tombs scattered at irregular intervals along the sides of the draws, unornamented and squarely built, with tall narrow doors which had been smashed open an age ago.

A few had picture slates, and these wakened when the three men went by, so that they had to walk along the tops of the ridges between the draws to avoid being betrayed by the light of the past. Belarius fretted that they would lose the trail, but then Yama saw a flickering dab of light brighten ahead. It was a dry tree set on fire in the bottom of a deep draw.

It burned with a white intensity and a harsh crackling, sending up volumes of acrid white smoke. Its tracery of branches made a web of black shadows within the brightness of its burning. The three men looked down on it, and Prefect Corin said, “Well, they know that we are following them. Yama, look after Belarius. I will not be long.”

He was gone before Yama could reply, a swift shadow flowing down the slope, circling the burning tree and disappearing into the darkness beyond. Belarius sat down heavily and whispered, “You two should not die on my account.”

“Let us not talk of death,” Yama said. He had his knife in his hand—he had drawn it upon seeing the burning tree. It showed not a spark, and he sheathed it and said, “A little while ago, I was taken aboard a pinnace by force, but a white ship appeared, glowing with cold fire. The pinnace attacked the white ship and I was able to escape. Yet the white ship was not real; even as it bore down on the pinnace it began to dissolve. Was this a miracle? And was it for my benefit? What do you think?”

“We shouldn’t question the plan of the Preservers. Only they can say what is. miraculous.”

Belarius was more intent on the darkness beyond the burning tree than on Yama’s tale. He was smoking one of his clove-scented cigarettes; cupping it. The light of the burning tree beat on him unmercifully; shadows in his deep eye sockets made a skull of his face.

Prefect Corin came back an hour later. The tree had burnt down to a stump of glowing cinders. He appeared out of the darkness and knelt between Belarius and Yama. “The way is clear,” he said.

Yama said, “Did you see them?”

Prefect Corin considered this. Yama thought he looked smug, the son-of-a-bitch. At last he said, “I saw our friend of last night.”

“The ghoul?”

“It is following us. It will feed well tonight, one way or the other. Listen carefully. This ridge rises and leads around to a place above a canyon. There are large tombs at the bottom of the canyon, and that is where the bandits are camped. They have stripped the women and tied them to stakes, but I do not think they have used them.” Prefect Corin looked directly at Belarius. “These people come into heat like dogs or deer, and it is not their season. They display the women to make us angry, and we will not be angry. They have built a big fire, but away from it the night air will make them sluggish. Yama, you and Belarius will create a diversion, and I will go in and cut the women free and bring them out.”

Belarius said, “It is not much of a plan.”

“Well, we could leave the women,” Prefect Corin said, with such seriousness that it was plain he would do just that if Belarius refused to help.

“They’ll sleep,” the priest said. “We wait until they sleep, and then we take the women.”

Prefect Corin said, “No. They never sleep, but simply become less active at night. They will be waiting for us. That is why we must make them come out, preferably away from their fire. I will kill them then. I have a pistol.”

It was like a flat, water-smoothed pebble. It caught the Galaxy’s cold blue light and shone in Prefect Corin’s palm.

Yama was amazed. The Department of Indigenous Affairs was surely greater than he had imagined, if one of them could carry a weapon not only forbidden to most but so valuable, because the secret of its manufacture was lost an age past, that it could ransom a city like Aeolis. Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol, which merely increased the power of light by making its waves march in step, had been a clumsy imitation of the weapon Prefect Corin held.

Belarius said, “Those things are evil.”

“It has saved my life before now. It has three shots, and then it must lie in sunlight all day before it will fire again. That is why you must get them into the open, so I have a clear field of fire.”

Yama said, “How will we make the diversion?”

“I am sure you will think of something when you get there,” Prefect Corin said. His lips were pressed together as if he was suppressing a smile, and now Yama knew what this was all about.

Prefect Corin said, “Follow the ridge, and be careful not to show yourself against the sky.”

“What about guards?”

“There are no guards,” Prefect Corin said. “Not anymore.”

And then he was gone.

The canyon was sinuous and narrow, a deeply folded crevice winding back the hills. The ridge rose above it to a tabletop bluff dissected by dry ravines. Lying on his belly, looking over the edge of the drop into the canyon, Yama could see the fire the bandits had lit on the canyon floor far below. Its red glow beat on the white faces of the tombs that were set into the walls of the canyon, and the brushwood corral where a decad of horses milled, and the line of naked women tied to stakes.

Yama said, “It is like a test.”

Belarius, squatting on his heels a little way from the edge, stared at him.

“I have to show initiative,” Yama said. “If I do not, Prefect Corin will not try to rescue the women.”

He did not add that it was also a punishment. Because he carried the knife; because he wanted to be a soldier; because he had tried to run away. He knew that he could not allow himself to fail, but he did not know how he could succeed.

“Pride,” Belarius said sulkily. He seemed to have reached a point where nothing much mattered to him. “He makes himself into a petty god, deciding whether my poor clients live or die.”

“That is up to us, I think. He is a cold man, but he wants to help you.”

Belarius pointed into the darkness behind him. “There’s a dead man over there. I can smell him.”

It was one of the bandits. He was lying on his belly in the middle of a circle of creosote bushes. His neck had been broken and he seemed to be staring over his shoulder at his doom.

Belarius mumbled a brief prayer, then took the dead man’s short, stout recurved bow and quiver of unfledged arrows. He seemed to cheer up a little, and Yama asked him if he knew how to use a bow.

“I’m not a man of violence.”

“Do you want to help rescue your clients?”

“Most of them are dead,” Belarius said gravely. “I will shrive this poor wight now.”

Yama left the priest with the dead man and quartered the ground along the edge of the canyon. Although he was tired, he felt a peculiar clarity, a keen alertness sustained by a mixture of anger and adrenalin. This might be a test, but the women’s lives depended on it. That was more important than pleasing Prefect Corin, or proving to himself that he could live up to his dreams.

A round boulder stood at the edge of the drop. It was half Yama’s height and bedded in the dirt, but it gave a little when he put his back to it. He tried to get Belarius to help him, but the priest was kneeling as if in prayer and either did not understand or did not want to understand, and he would not stand up even when Yama pulled at his arm. Yama groaned in frustration and went back to the boulder and began to attack the sandy soil around its base with his eating knife. He had not been digging for long when he struck something metallic. The little knife quivered in his hands and when he drew it out he found that the point of the blade had been neatly cut away, He had found a machine.

Yama knelt and whispered to the thing, asking it to come to him. He did it more from reflex than hope, and was amazed when the soil shifted between his knees and the machine slid into the air with a sudden slipping motion, like a squeezed watermelon seed. It bobbed in the air before Yama’s face, a shining, silvery oval that would have fitted into his palm, had he dared touch it. It was both metallic and fluid, like a big drop of hydrargyrum.

Flecks of light flickered here and there on its surface. It emitted a strong smell of ozone, and a faint crepitating sound.

Yama said, slowly and carefully, shaping the words in his mind as well as his mouth as he did when instructing the peel-house’s watchdogs, “I need to make this part of the edge of the canyon fall. Help me.”

The machine dropped to the ground and a little geyser of dust and small stones spat up as it dug down out of sight.

Yama sat on his heels, hardly daring to breathe, but although he waited a long time, nothing else seemed to happen. He had started to dig around the base of the boulder again when Belarius found him.

The priest had uprooted a couple of small creosote bushes. He said, “We will set these alight and throw them down onto those wicked men.”

“Help me with this boulder.”

Belarius shook his head and sat by the edge and began to tie the bushes together with a strip of cloth torn from remnants of his robe.

“If you set fire to those bushes, you will make yourself a target,” Yama said.

“I expect that you have a flint in your satchel.”

“Yes, but—”

In the canyon below, horses cried to each other. Yama looked over the edge and saw that the horses were running from one corner of the corral to the other, They moved in the firelight like water running before a strong, choppy wind, bunched together and flicking their tails and tossing their heads. At first, Yama thought that they had been disturbed by Prefect Corin, but then he saw something white clinging upside-down to the neck of a black mare in the middle of the panicky herd. The ghoul had found the bandits. Men were running toward the horses with a scampering crabwise gait, casting long crooked shadows because the fire was at their backs, and Yama threw his weight against the boulder, knowing he would not have a better chance.

The ground moved under Yama’s feet and he lost his footing and fell backward, banging the back of his head against the boulder. The blow dazed him, and he was unable to stop Belarius pawing through his satchel and taking the flint. The ground moved again and the boulder started and sank a handspan into the soil. Yama realized what was happening and scrambled out of the way just as the edge of the canyon collapsed.

The boulder dropped straight down. A cloud of dust and dirt shot up and there was a crash when the boulder struck the side of the canyon, and then a moment of silence. The ground was still shaking. Yama tried to get to his feet, but it was like trying to stand up in a boat caught in crosscurrents. Belarius was kneeling over the bundle of creosote bushes, striking the flint against its stone. Dust puffed up behind him, defining a long crooked line, and a kind of lip opened in the ground. Little lights swarmed in the churning soil. Yama saw them when he snatched up his satchel and jumped the widening gash. He landed on hands and knees and the ground moved again and he fell down. Belarius was standing on the other side of the gash, his feet planted wide apart as he swung two burning bushes around his head. Then the edge of the canyon gave way and fell with a sliding roar into the canyon. A moment later a vast cloud of dust boiled up amidst a noise like a thunderclap, and lightning lit the length of the canyon at spaced intervals.

Once, twice, three times.