Child of the River

Chapter Twenty-One The Fierce People

Tamora came back to the campfire at a loping run. She was grinning broadly and there was blood around her mouth. She threw a brace of coneys at Yama’s feet and said proudly, “This is how we live, when we can. We are the Fierce People, the Memsh Tek!”

Pandaras said, “Not all of us can live on meat alone.”

“Your kind have to exist on leaves and the filth swept into street gutters,” Tamora said, “and that is why they are so weak. Meat and blood are what warriors need, so be glad that I give you fine fresh guts. They will make you strong.”

She slit the bellies of the conies with her sharp thumbnail, crammed the steaming, rich red livers into her mouth and gulped them down. Then she pulled the furry skins from the gutted bodies, as someone might strip gloves from their hands, and set about dismembering them with teeth and nails.

She had attacked the merchant’s carcass with the same butcher’s skill, using a falchion taken from one of the dead guards to fillet it from neck to buttocks and expose the thing which had burrowed into the fatty flesh like a hagfish. It was not much like the bottled creature Yama had seen on the lighter. Its mantle was shrunken, and white fibers had knitted around its host’s spinal column like cords of fungus in rotten wood.

Tamora kept most of the coney meat for herself and ate it raw, but she allowed Yama and Pandaras to cook the haunches over the embers of the fire. The unsalted meat was half-burned and half-raw, but Yama and Pandaras hungrily stripped it from the bones.

“Burnt meat is bad for the digestion,” Tamora said, grinning at them across the embers of the fire. She wore only her leather skirt. Her two pairs of breasts were little more than enlarged nipples, like tarnished coins set on her narrow ribcage. In addition to the bird burning in a nest of fire on her upper arm, inverted triangles were tattooed in black ink on her shoulders. There was a bandage around her waist; she had been seared by backflash from a guard’s pistol shot. She took a swallow of brandy and passed the bottle to Yama. He had bought the brandy in a bottleshop and used a little to preserve the filaments Tamora had filleted from the merchant’s body and placed in a beautiful miniature flask, cut from a single crystal of rose quartz, which Yama had found in the wreckage left by the flood when he had been searching for his copy of the Puranas.

Yama drank and passed the bottle to Pandaras, who was cracking coney bones between his sharp teeth.

“Drink,” Tamora said. “We fought a great battle today.”

Pandaras spat a bit of gristle into the fire. He had already made it clear how unhappy he was to be in the Fierce People’s tract of wild country, and he sat with his kidney puncher laid across his lap and his mobile ears pricked. He said, “I’d rather keep my wits about me.”

Tamora. laughed. “No one would mistake you for a coney. You’re about the right size, but you can’t run fast enough to make the hunt interesting.”

Pandaras took the smallest possible sip from the brandy bottle and passed it back to Yama. He told Tamora, “You certainly ran when the soldiers came.”

“Grah. I was trying to catch up with you to make sure you went the right way.”

“Enough stuff to set a man up for life,” Pandaras said, “and we had to leave it for the city militia to loot.”

“I’m a cateran, not a robber. We have done what we contracted to do. Be happy.” Tamora grinned. Her pink tongue lolled amongst her big, sharp teeth. “Eat burnt bones. Drink. Sleep. We are safe here, and tomorrow we are paid.”

Yama realized that she was drunk. The bottle of brandy had been the smallest he could buy, but it was still big enough, as Pandaras put it, to drown a baby. They had needed only a few minims to fill the crystal flask, and Tamora had drunk about half of what was left.

“Safe?” Pandaras retorted. “In the middle of any number of packs of bloodthirsty howlers like you? I won’t sleep at all tonight.”

“I will sing a great song of our triumph, and you will listen. Pass that bottle, Yama. It is not your child.”

Yama took a burning swallow of brandy, handed the bottle over, and walked out of the firelight to the crest of the ridge.

The sandy hills where the Fierce People maintained their hunting grounds looked out across the wide basin of the city toward the Great River. The misty light of the Arm of the Warrior was rising above the far-side horizon. It was past midnight. The city was mostly dark, but many campfires flickered amongst the scrub and clumps of crown ferns, pines and eucalyptus of the Fierce People’s hunting grounds, and from every quarter came the sound of distant voices raised in song.

Yama sat on the dry grass and listened to the night music of the Fierce People. The feral machine still haunted him, like a ringing in the ears or the afterimage of a searingly bright light. And beyond this psychic echo he could feel the ebb and flow of the myriad machines in the city, like the flexing of a great net. They had also been disturbed by the feral machine, and the ripples of alarm caused by the disturbance were still spreading, leaping from cluster to cluster of machines along the docks, running out toward the vast bulk of the Palace of the Memory of the People, clashing at the bases of the high towers and racing up their lengths out of the atmosphere.

Yama still did not know how he had called down the feral machine, and although it had saved him he feared that he might call it again by accident, and feared too that he had exposed himself to discovery by the network of machines which served the magistrates, or by Prefect Corin, who must surely still be searching for him. The descent of the feral machine was the most terrifying and the most shameful of his adventures. He had been paralyzed with fear when confronted with it, and even now he felt that it had marked him in some obscure way, for some small part of him yearned for it, and what it could tell him. It could be watching him still; it could return at any time, and he did not know what he would do if it did.

The merchant—Yama still found it difficult to think of him as the parasitic bundle of nerve fibers burrowed deep within that tremendously fat body—had said that he was a Builder, a member of the first bloodline of Ys. The pilot of the voidship had said something similar, and the slate that Beatrice and Osric had shown him had suggested the same thing. His people had walked Confluence in its first days, sculpting the world under the direct instruction of the Preservers, and had died out or ascended ages past, so long ago that most had forgotten them. And yet he was here, and he still did not know why; nor did he know the full extent of his powers.

The merchant had hinted that he knew what Yama was capable of, but he might have been lying to serve his own ends, and besides, he was dead. Perhaps the other star-sailors knew—Iachimo had said that they were very long-lived—or perhaps, as Yama had hoped even before he had set out from Aeolis, there were records somewhere in Ys that would explain everything, or at least lead him to others of his kind.

He still did not know how he had been brought into the world, or why he had been found floating on the river on the breast of a dead woman who might have been his mother or nurse or something else entirely, but surely he had been born to serve the Preservers in some fashion. After the Preservers had fallen into the event horizon of the Eye, they could still watch the world they had made, for nothing fell faster than light, but they could no longer act upon it. But perhaps their reach was long—perhaps they had ordained his birth, here in what the merchant had called the end times, long before they had withdrawn from the Universe. Perhaps, as Derev believed, many of Yama’s kind now walked the world, as they had at its beginning. But for what purpose? All through his childhood he had prayed for a revelation, a sign, a hint, and had received nothing. Perhaps he should expect nothing else.

Perhaps the shape of his life was the tip he sought, if only he could understand it.

But he could not believe he was the servant of the feral machines. That was the worst thought of all.

Yama sat on a hummock of dry grass, with the noise of crickets everywhere in the darkness around him, and leafed through his copy of the Puranas. The book had dried out well, although one corner of its front cover was faintly but indelibly stained with the merchant’s blood. The pages held a faint light, and the glyphs stood out like shadows against this soft effulgence. Yama found the sura which Iachimo had quoted, and read it from beginning to end.

Yama read on, although the next sura was merely an exhaustive description of the dimensions and composition of the world, and he knew that there was no other mention of the Builders, nor of their fate. This was toward the end of the Puranas. The world and everything in it was an afterthought at the end of the history of the Galaxy, created in the last moment before the Preservers fell into the Eye and were known no more in the Universe. Nothing had been written about the ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence in the Puranas; if there had been, then there would have never been a beginning to the endless disputations amongst priests and philosophers about the reason for the world’s creation.

Tamora said, “Reading, is it? There’s nothing in books you can’t learn better in the world, nothing but fantastic rubbish about monsters and the like. You’ll rot your mind and your eyes, reading too much in books.”

“Well, I met a real monster today.”

“Well, he’s dead, the fucker, and we have a piece of him in brandy as proof. So much for him.”

Yama had not told Tamora and Pandaras about the feral machine. Tamora had boasted that one of her pistol shots had weakened the ceiling and so caused the flood which had saved them, and Yama had not corrected her error. He felt a rekindling of shame at this deception, and said weakly, “I suppose the merchant was a kind of monster. He tried to flee from his true self, and let a little hungry part of himself rule his life. He was all appetite and nothing else. I think he would have eaten the whole world, if he could.”

“You want to be a soldier. Here’s some advice. Don’t think about what you have to do and don’t think about it when it’s done.”

“And can you forget it so easily?”

“Of course not. But I try. We were captured, your rat-boy and me, and thrown into cages, but you had it worse, I think. The merchant was trying to bend you toward his will. The words of his kind are like thorns, and some of them are still in your flesh. But they’ll wither, and you’ll forget them.”

Yama smiled and said, “Perhaps it would be no bad thing, to be the ruler of the world.”

Tamora sat down close beside him. She was a shadow in the darkness. She said, “You would destroy the civil service and rule instead? How would that change the world for the better?”

Yama could feel her heat. She gave off a strong scent compounded of fresh blood and sweat and a sharp musk. He said, “Of course not. But the merchant told me something about my bloodline. I may be alone in the world. I may be a mistake thrown up at the end of things. Or I may be something else. Something intended.”

“The fat fuck was lying. How better to get you to follow him than by saying that you are the only one of your kind, and he knows all about you?”

“I am not sure that he was lying, Tamora. At least, I think he was telling part of the truth.”

“I haven’t forgotten what you want, and I was a long time hunting coneys because I really went to ask around. Listen. I have a way of getting at what you want. There is a job for a couple of caterans. Some little pissant department needs someone to organize a defense of its territory inside the Palace of the Memory of the People. There are many disputes between departments, and the powerful grow strong at the expense of the weak. That’s the way of the world, but I don’t mind defending the weak if I get paid for it.”

“Then perhaps they may be stronger than you after all.”

“Grah. Listen. When a litter is born here, the babies are exposed on a hillside for a day. Any that are weak die, or are taken by birds or foxes. We’re the Fierce People, see? We keep our bloodline strong. The wogs and wetbacks and snakes and the rest of the garbage down there in the city, they’re what we prey on. They need us, not the other way around.” Tamora spat sideways. Yes, she had drunk a lot of brandy. She said, “There’s prey, and there’s hunters. You have to decide which you are. You don’t know, now is the time you find out. Are you for it?”

“It seems like a good plan.”

“Somewhere or other you’ve picked up the habit of not speaking plain. You mean yes, then say it.”

“Yes. Yes, I will do it. If it means getting into the Palace of the Memory of the People.”

“Then you got to pay me, because I found it for you, and I’ll do the work.”

“I know something about fighting.”

Tamora spat again. “Listen, this is a dangerous job. This little department is certain to be attacked and they don’t have a security office or they wouldn’t be hiring someone from outside. They’re bound to lose, see, but if it’s done right then only their thralls will get killed. We can probably escape, or at worse lose our bond when we’re ransomed, but I won’t deny there’s a chance we’ll get killed, too. You still want it?”

“It is a way in.”

“Exactly. This department used to deal in prognostication, but it is much debased. There are only a couple of seers left, but it is highly placed in the Palace of the Memory of the People, and other more powerful departments want to displace it. It needs us to train its thralls so they can put up some kind of defense, but there will be time for you to search for whatever it is you’re looking for. We will agree payment now. You’ll pay any expenses out of your share of the fees for killing the merchant and for this new job, and I keep my half of both fees, and half again of anything that’s left of yours.”

“Is that a fair price?”

“Grah. You’re supposed to bargain, you idiot! It is twice what the risk is worth.”

“I will pay it anyway. If I find out what I want to know, I will have no need of money.”

“If you want to join the army as an officer, you’ll need plenty, more than you’re carrying around now. You’ll have to buy the rest of your own armor, and mounts, and weaponry. And if you’re looking for information, there will be bribes to be paid. I’ll take a quarter of your fees, bargaining against myself like a fool, and share expenses with you. You’ll need the rest, believe me.”

“You are a good person, Tamora, although I would like you better if you were more tolerant. No one bloodline should raise itself above any other.”

“I’ll do well enough out of this, believe me. One other thing. We won’t tell the rat-boy about this. We do this without him.”

“Are you scared of him because he killed the gatekeeper?”

“If I was scared of any of his kind, I would never dare spit in the gutter again, for fear of hitting one in the eye. Let him come if he must, but I won’t pretend I like it, and any money he wants comes from you, not me.”

“He is like me, Tamora. He wants to be other than his fate.”

“Then he’s certainly as big a fool as you.” Tamora handed Yama the brandy bottle. It was almost empty. “Drink. Then you will listen to me sing our victory song. The rat-boy is scared to sit with my brothers and sisters, but I know you won’t be.”

Although Yama tried not to show it, he was intimidated by the proud, fierce people who sat around the campfire: an even decad of Tamora’s kin, heavily muscled men and women marked on their shoulders by identical tattoos of inverted triangles. Most intimidating of all was a straight-backed matriarch with a white mane and a lacework of fine scars across her naked torso, who watched Yama with red-backed eyes from the other side of the fire while Tamora sang.

Tamora’s victory song was a discordant open-throated ululation that rose and twisted like a sharp silver wire into the black air above the flames of the campfire. When it was done, she took a long swig from a wine skin while the men and women murmured and nodded and showed their fangs in quick snarling smiles, although one complained loudly that the song had been less about Tamora and more about this whey-skinned stranger.

“That is because it was his adventure,” Tamora said.

“Then let him sing for himself,” the man grumbled.

The matriarch asked Tamora about Yama, saying that she had not seen his kind before.

“He’s from downriver, grandmother.”

“That would explain it. I’m told that there are many strange peoples downriver, although I myself have never troubled to go and see, and now I am too old to have to bother. Talk with me, boy. Tell me how your people came into the world.”

That is a mystery, even to myself. I have read something in the Puranas about my people, and I have seen a picture of one in an old slate, but that is all I know.”

“Then your people are very strange indeed,” the matriarch said. “Every bloodline has its story and its mysteries and its three names. The Preservers chose to raise up each bloodline in their image for a particular reason, and the stories explain why. You won’t find your real story in that book you carry. That’s about older mysteries, and not about this world at all.” She cuffed one of the women and snatched a wine skin from her. “They keep this from me,” she told Yama, “because they’re frightened I’ll disgrace myself if I get drunk.”

“Nothing could make you drunk, grandmother,” one of the men said. “That’s why we ration your drinking, or you’d poison yourself trying.”

The matriarch spat into the fire. “A mouthful of this rotgut will poison me. Can no one afford proper booze? In the old days we would have used this to fuel our lamps.”

Yama still had the brandy bottle, with a couple of fingers of clear, apricot-scented liquor at its bottom. “Here, grandmother,” he said, and handed it to the matriarch.

The old woman drained the bottle and licked her lips in appreciation. “Do you know how we came into the world, boy? I’ll tell you.”

Several of the people around the fire groaned, and the matriarch said sharply, “It’ll do you good to hear it again. You young people don’t know the stories as well as you should. Listen, then.”

“After the world was made, some of the Preservers set animals down on its surface, and kindled intelligence in them. There are a people descended from coyotes, for instance, whose ancestors were taught by the Preservers to bury their dead. This odd habit brought about a change in the coyotes, for they learned to sit up so they could sit beside the graves and mourn their dead properly. But sitting on cold stone wore away their bushy tails, and after many generations they began standing upright because the stone was uncomfortable to their naked arses. When that happened, their forepaws lengthened into human hands, and their sharp muzzles shortened bit by bit until they became human faces. That’s one story, and there are as many stories as there are bloodlines descended from the different kinds of animals which were taught to become human. But our own people had a different origin.”

“Two of the Preservers fell into an argument about the right way to make human people. The Preservers do not have sexes as we understand them, nor do they marry, but it is easier to follow the story if we think of them as wife and husband, One, Enki, was the Preserver who had charge of the world’s water, and so his work was hard, for in those early times all there was of the world was the Great River, running from nowhere to nowhere. He complained of his hard work to his wife, Ninmah, who was the Preserver of earth, and she suggested that they create a race of marionettes or puppets who would do the work for them. And this they did, using the small amount of white silt that was suspended in the Great River. I see that you know this part of the story.”

“Someone told me a little of it today. It is to be found in the Puranas.”

“What I tell you is truer, for it has been told from mouth to ear for ten thousand generations, and so its words still live, and have not become dead things squashed flat on plastic or pulped wood. Well then, after this race was produced from the mud of the river, there was a great celebration because the Preservers no longer needed to work on their creation. Much beer was consumed, and Ninmah became especially lightheaded. She called to Enki, saying, ‘How good or bad is a human body? I could reshape it in any way I please, but could you find tasks for it?’ Enki responded to this challenge, and so Ninmah made a barren woman, and a eunuch, and several other cripples.”

“But Enki found tasks for them all. The barren woman he made into a concubine; the eunuch he made into a civil servant, and so on. Then in the same playful spirit he challenged Ninmah. He would do the shaping of different races, and she the placing. She agreed, and Enki first made a man whose making was already remote from him, and so the first old man appeared before Ninmah. She offered the old man bread, but he was too feeble to reach for it, and when she thrust the bread into his mouth, he could not chew it for he had no teeth, and so Nimnah could find no use for this unfortunate. Then Enki made many other cripples and monsters, and Ninmah could find no use for them, either.”

“The pair fell into a drunken sleep, and when they wakened all was in uproar, for the cripples Enki had made were spreading through the world. Enki and Ninmah were summoned before the other Preservers to explain themselves, and to escape punishment Enki and Ninmah together made a final race, who would hunt the lame and the old, and so make the races of the world stronger by consuming their weak members.”

“And so we came into the world, and it is said that we have a quick and cruel temper, because Enki and Ninmah suffered dreadfully from the effects of drinking too much beer when they made us, and that was passed to us as a potmaker leaves her thumbprint in the clay.”

“I have heard only the beginning of this story,” Yama said, “and I am glad that now I have heard the end of it.”

“Now you must tell a story,” one of the men said loudly. It was the one who had complained before. He was smaller than the others, but still a head taller than Yama. He wore black leather trousers and a black leather jacket studded with copper nails.

“Be quiet, Gorgo,” the matriarch said. “This young man is our guest.”

Gorgo looked across the fire at Yama, and Yama met his truculent, challenging gaze. Neither was willing to look away, but then a branch snapped in the fire and sent burning fragments flying into Gorgo’s lap. He cursed and brushed at the sparks while the others laughed.

Gorgo glowered and said, “We have heard his boasts echoed in Tamora’s song. I simply wonder if he has the heart to speak for himself. He owes that courtesy, I think.”

“You’re a great one for knowing what’s owed,” someone said.

Gorgo turned on the man. “I only press for payment when it’s needed, as you well know. How much poorer you would be if I didn’t find you work! You are all in my debt.”

The matriarch said, “That is not to be spoken of. Are we not the Fierce People, whose honor is as renowned as our strength and our temper?”

Gorgo said, “Some people need reminding about honor.”

One of the women said, “We fight. You get the rewards.”

“Then don’t ask me for work,” Gorgo said petulantly. “Find your own. I force no one, as is well known, but so many ask for my help that I scarcely have time to sleep or catch my food. But here is our guest. Let’s not forget him. We hear great things of him from Tamora. Hush, and let him speak for himself.”

Yama thought that Gorgo could speak sweetly when he chose, but the honey of his words disguised his envy and suspicion. Clearly, Gorgo thought that Yama’s was one of the trash or vermin bloodlines.

Yama said, “I will tell a story, although I am afraid that it might bore you. It is about how my life was saved by one of the indigens.”

Gorgo grumbled that this didn’t sound like a true story at all. “Tell something of your people instead,” he said. “Please do not tell me that such a fine hero as yourself, if we are to believe the words of our sister here, is so ashamed of his own people that he has to make up stories of subhuman creatures which do not carry the blessing of the Preservers.”

Yama smiled. This at least was easy to counter. “I wish I knew such stories, but I was raised as an orphan.”

“Perhaps your people were ashamed of you,” Gorgo said, but he was the only one to laugh at his sally.

“Tell your story,” Tamora said, “and don’t let Gorgo interrupt you. He is jealous, because he hasn’t any stories of his own.”

When Yama began, he realized that he had drunk more than he intended, but he could not back out now. He described how he had been kidnapped and taken to the pinnace, and how he had escaped (making no mention of the ghostly ship) and cast himself upon a banyan island far from shore. “I found one of the indigenous fisherfolk stuck fast in a trap left by one of the people of the city which my father administers. The people of the city once hunted the fisherfolk, but my father put a stop to it. The unfortunate fisherman had become entangled in a trap made of strong, sticky threads of the kind used to snare bats which skim the surface of the water for fish. I could not free him without becoming caught fast myself, so I set a trap of my own and waited. When the hunter came to collect his prey, as a spider sidles down to claim a fly caught in its web, it was the hunter who became the prey. I took the spray which dissolves the trap’s glue, and the fisherman and I made our escape and left the foolish hunter to the torments of those small, voracious hunters who outnumber their prey, mosquitoes and blackflies. In turn, the fisherman fed me and took me back to the shore of the Great River. And so we saved each other.”

“A tall tale,” Gorgo said, meeting Yama’s gaze again.

“It is true I missed out much, but if I told everything then we would be up all night. I will say one more thing. If not for the fisherman’s kindness, I would not be here, so I have learnt never to rush to judge any man, no matter how worthless he might appear.”

Gorgo said, “He asks us to admire his reflection in his tales. Let me tell you that what I see is a fool. Any sensible man would have devoured the fisherman and taken his coracle and escaped with a full belly.”

“I simply told you what happened,” Yama said, meeting the man’s yellow gaze. “Anything you see in my words is what you have placed there. If you had tried to steal the hunter’s prey, you would have been stuck there too, and been butchered and devoured along with the fisherman.”

Gorgo jumped up. “I think I know something about hunting, and I do know that you are not as clever as you imagine yourself to be. You side with prey, and so you’re no hunter at all.”

Yama stood too, for he would not look up from a lesser to a higher position when he replied to Gorgo’s insult. Perhaps he would not have done it if he had been less drunk, but he felt the sting of wounded pride. Besides, he did not think that Gorgo was a threat. He was a man who used words as others use weapons. He was taller and heavier than Yama, and armed with a strong jaw and sharp teeth, but Sergeant Rhodean had taught Yama several ways by which such differences could be turned to an advantage.

“I described what happened, no more and no less,” Yama said. “I hope I do not need to prove the truth of my words.”

Tamora grabbed Yama’s hand and said, “Don’t mind Gorgo. He has always wanted to fuck me, and I’ve always refused. He’s quick to anger, and jealous.”

Gorgo laughed. “I think you have me wrong, sister. It is not your delusion I object to, but his. Remember what you owe me before you insult me again.”

“You will both sit down,” the matriarch said. “Yama is our guest, Gorgo. You dishonor all of us. Sit down. Drink. We all lose our temper, and the less we make of it the better.”

“You all owe me,” Gorgo said, “one way or another.” He glared at the circle of people, then spat into the fire and turned and stalked away into the night.

There was an awkward pause. Yama sat down and apologized, saying that he had drunk too much and lost his judgment.

“We’ve all slapped Gorgo around one time or another,” one of the women said. “He grows angry if his advances are ignored.”

“He is more angry than fierce,” someone said, and the rest laughed.

“He’s a fucking disgrace,” Tamora said. “A sneak and a coward. He never hunts, but feeds off the quarry of us all. He shot a man with an arbalest instead of fighting fair—”

“Enough,” the matriarch said. “We do not speak of others to their backs.”

“I’d speak to his face,” Tamora said, “if he’d ever look me in the eye.”

“If we say no more about this,” Yama said, “I promise to say no more about myself.”

There were more drinking games, and more songs, and at last Yama begged to be released, for although Tamora’s people seemed to need little sleep, he was exhausted by his adventures. He found his way back to his own campfire by the faint light of the Arm of the Warrior, falling several times but feeling no hurt. Pandaras was curled up near the warm ashes, his kidney puncher gripped in both hands. Yama lay down a little way off, on the ridge which overlooked the dark city. He did not remember wrapping himself in his blanket, or falling asleep, but he woke when Tamora pulled the blanket away from him. Her naked body glimmered in the near dark. He did not resist when she started to undo the laces of his shirt, or when she covered his mouth with hers.