Ruins

CHAPTER 20 Larfold

The flyer carried them over pristine landscape, but because Rigg saw with the eyes of a pathfinder, he was struck by how empty it was. Like Vadeshfold, only even more devoid of paths. Though Odinfold had billions of paths, they were all faded by the thousands of years that had passed, and in recent years the paths had been few, and clustered up against the Wall.

How different they all were from Ramfold, full of life, the webs of paths still weaving themselves afresh with every day’s activity.

Odinfold was carpeted with ruins; Vadeshfold had its one empty city; but Larfold had nothing at all in this vast sweep of forested land, the hills and cliffs and mountains. Only the wispy trails of the colonists from eleven thousand years before, heading northward to the sea, and then nothing on land that was more than a few hundred meters from the shore.

Yet this land was similar in climate and terrain to the land the Sessamids had come from, the barbarian forests that had spawned invasions of the great valley of the Stashik River again and again through history. The land was the same, but untorn by slash-and-burn farming, unscarred by roads, ungraced by bridges and buildings.

It was not more beautiful than lands that human beings had shaped, thought Rigg. He remembered the ruins of the old arches that had once spanned the Stashi Falls, broken in ancient storms or earthquakes. He remembered the stairs cut into stone that led up in a breath-robbing highway to the crest of the falls; he remembered running up those stairs, and also staggering down them carrying bundles of pelts. Was the mountain somehow ruined because humans had cut away stone to make a stairway for themselves? Or was it made more beautiful as well as more useful?

What comes into being naturally is pleasing to the eye, yes, Rigg thought. There is a beauty to the wildness of it. But there was also beauty in the Great North Road that wound along beside the Stashik River, and beauty in the patchwork of farms, and in the rough raw buildings of Leaky’s Landing, which was such a new place, and in the ancient buildings of O, so many of them built of stone barged down the river, as if humans had moved a mountain to make O. There was beauty in Aressa Sessamo, too, by nature a shifting swampland, but made by humans into a huge island of raised earth on which a city ablaze with life had been raised, a forest of wooden buildings where an empire was governed and people lived their lives of joy and misery, of boredom and excitement, leaving paths behind them in a tangle that to Rigg seemed the very tapestry of life.

The natural land is beautiful, and it is beautiful again when it reclaims the ruins of humans who are gone. But when humans are there, that is the beauty I love the most, because it’s a web I’m part of, it’s the fabric that my own life, my own path, is helping to create. What humans make is not less beautiful than what comes into being out of wildness alone.

“We’re wild, too,” said Rigg aloud, because he needed to hear the words, and so he had to say them.

Olivenko was the only one near enough to him in the flyer to look up at the sound of his voice.

“We’re wild,” said Rigg. “We humans. We shape nature, but our shapes are also natural. We shouldn’t say that because humans shaped a place, it’s therefore unnatural.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t say it,” said Olivenko, “but I think that if you look at the meanings of the words, whatever humans do is unnatural.”

“But that’s the mistake, for us to think that humans aren’t also a part of nature.”

Olivenko looked out of the flyer at the ground they were passing over, the high thick cushion of leaves only beginning to turn color in preparation for winter. “Not a particularly prominent part of it here,” he said.

“No. We’ve never touched this place.” Then he laughed with a little bitterness. “Except, of course, when the starships crashed so hard they blew rocks into the sky to make the Ring, and raised great circling cliffs like Upsheer, and killed almost all the natural life of Garden, and replaced it with the plants and animals of Earth. Except for that, which means that all of Garden is so vastly shaped by human hands that nothing we’re seeing here is ‘natural.’ ”

“Well, I can’t argue with that,” said Olivenko. “Except to say that when humans leave it alone, nature comes back and closes the gaps the way the sea fills in behind each passing fish. What we’re seeing down there is natural now, even if it was once reshaped by human action.”

“But now it’ll be reshaped by mice,” said Rigg.

“Humans masquerading as mice,” said Olivenko. “But I don’t think they’ll be cutting down the trees.”

“If they wanted to cut them down,” said Rigg, “they’d find a way. That’s what humans do.”

“And if they wanted to build them up?”

“They’d plant them like an orchard.”

“Or slaughter each other as they did in Vadeshfold,” said Olivenko, “and let the trees come back and plant themselves.”

“I really hate philosophy,” murmured Loaf. “You talk and talk, and in the end, you don’t know any more than you did.”

“Maybe less,” said Rigg, “because I thought I had an idea, and now Olivenko makes me wonder whether I did or not.”

“One idea is as worthless as another,” said Loaf. “Until you actually do something about it, and then it’s the action, not the word, that matters.”

“Who’s philosophizing now?” asked Olivenko. “We take action because of the words we believe in, the stories that we think are true, or intend to make true.”

“I don’t think so,” said Loaf. “I think we do what we do because we desire it. And then we make up stories about why the thing we did was right, and the thing that other people did was wrong.”

“Or both,” said Rigg. “It works both ways, all the time. We act because of our stories; we make up stories to explain or excuse the way we acted.”

But the trees don’t do that, or the squirrels, thought Rigg. They just do what they do. And they can’t change what they do, because they don’t have any of this philosophy.

“Our destination is the shore where humans are most often seen,” said the flyer. “Far in the north.”

“When we get closer,” said Rigg, “skim the coast. I’ll tell you then where to set this flyer down.”

“What will you look for, to decide?” asked Olivenko.

“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “Wherever the paths are thickest and most recent, so we have the best chance of meeting people.”

“Of getting killed in our sleep on the first night there,” said Olivenko.

“We didn’t come here to avoid the people,” said Rigg.

“Can’t save ’em if we can’t see ’em,” said Loaf.

Probably can’t save them even if we do see them. “If it turns out I picked a bad spot, we can go back and pick another,” said Rigg.

“But you can’t appear to us here in this flyer,” said Olivenko. “Right? Unless you took the flyer up to exactly the same path and matched the flight perfectly, because the path remains behind us in the air.”

Rigg turned and saw their paths stretch back along the route they had just flown. “That’s right.”

“I wonder how far you have to go upward,” said Olivenko, “until our paths stop being part of the sky of Garden, and remain inside a ship.”

“Every starship when it crashed here had human beings aboard,” said Rigg. “I should have looked for the paths, the incoming trajectories.”

“You should have looked to see if their paths during the voyage stayed with the ship,” said Umbo, who was finally joining in the conversation.

“I will the next time we’re at a starship,” said Rigg. “I should have done it before, but I had other things on my mind.”

“That’s right,” said Umbo, “blame it on me for being so clumsy as to leave corpses lying around to distract you.”

“You may not have killed them,” said Rigg, “but you made them. Didn’t your mother teach you to clean up your own messes?”

They had to traverse the whole of Larfold, from the south to the northern shore. The wallfold continued far out to sea—Rigg remembered that from the maps in the library, but most clearly from the huge map inside the Tower of O; despite the many other maps he’d seen, that one remained the true map to Rigg, the way he pictured the world. A globe with wallfolds delineated on its face, the Walls stretching out over land and sea alike.

“I wonder why they went underwater here,” said Param. “Why not build boats and live on the shore, and sail where they wanted? Why go into the sea?”

“Better climate?” suggested Olivenko.

“I think it has to do with how they managed to handle the breathing problem,” said Umbo.

“There wasn’t a breathing problem until they went under the sea,” said Param. Rigg hated the scorn in her voice, especially when she talked to Umbo.

But Umbo answered her scorn for scorn. “You don’t start living underwater unless you already have a way of surviving there.”

“They didn’t suddenly start having babies with gills,” said Param, “and then decide to go swimming.”

“But they did start swimming fulltime within a few hundred years of the start of the colony,” said Umbo. “Why would they do that unless they already had a way to breathe?”

Loaf said, “Why are you two arguing about it when we’ll be there in a very little while, and then we can go into the past if we have to and see what we find out. See if they’re even human anymore. From what Olivenko said about the death of the king, these are monsters that dragged Knosso out of a boat and drowned him. Maybe they’ve turned into sharks with hands.”

When they reached the coast, Rigg had the flyer soar above the northern beaches, which is the general region where the Odinfolders’ books said the Larfolders had established their one long-abandoned colony. Here along the coast there were many paths, and recent ones. But they all led out of the water and then back into it, like the tracks of turtles returning to shore to spawn. Rigg wondered if they would still count as human if the Larfolders had started laying eggs like turtles.

He tried to trace the paths out into the water. He could easily follow the paths when they ran just under the waves, but the deeper they were, the harder it was for Rigg to sense them. And they seemed to meander randomly. And why not? Underwater, the Larfolders could swim anywhere. There were no roads they had to stay on. Mostly they stayed away from the shore, out in deeper water, behind the breakers that gleamed in shifting white ribbons, and deep, where Rigg could barely sense them.

Returning to gaze at the paths that led onto land, Rigg tried to find some meaning, some pattern in the tracks. He failed. “When they come to shore,” said Rigg, “it isn’t for fresh water to drink.”

“If they solved the breathing problem, the drinking problem couldn’t have been too hard,” said Param. She had saved a little scorn for Rigg, too.

“I bet the peeing problem was even easier,” said Umbo.

“But cooked food,” said Rigg. “That’s the challenge. Human teeth need cooked food. We don’t have the massive jaws and molars of chimps or australopithecines.”

“How did they ever find a recipe for underwater bread?” said Umbo.

“I think they specialize in seaweed salad,” said Rigg.

“What do they come ashore for?” asked Loaf, a little impatiently.

“We’ll find out soon enough, once we land,” said Rigg.

“They come to the beach for human sacrifice,” said Param. “There’s hardly a wallfold that hasn’t invented it at one time or another.”

“I wonder what it says about human beings that we keep inventing that particular excuse for murder,” said Olivenko.

“It’s an easy way to dispose of excess prisoners of war without offending a taboo against killing those who surrendered,” said Param.

“Was that one of the theories you read?” asked Loaf.

“Yes,” said Param, sounding quite prepared to take on any challenges.

“In my experience,” said Loaf, “soldiers don’t have a taboo against killing helpless prisoners. It’s hard to get them not to.”

Suddenly the paths below changed from individual forays onto land into a huge array of interlocking paths. Thousands and thousands of them, ranging from ten thousand years ago to the past few days. “Set down here,” said Rigg to the flyer.

The flyer swerved to shore and gently settled to the ground about fifteen meters above the highwater line. “This is where they hold their annual beach party and sports tournament,” said Rigg.

“Really?” asked Param, sounding skeptical.

“I have no idea,” said Rigg. “But hundreds of them at a time come to shore here, and they’ve been doing it for a long, long time. From the beginning—their first colony was only a few kilometers farther inland.”

“Maybe all those solitary shore visits you saw were women giving birth,” said Param. “Maybe they have to come to land for that.”

“Or men who got thrown out of the house by untrusting wives,” said Umbo.

In answer, Rigg got out of the flyer and strode toward the water. There were no humans on the beach, but since he knew they often returned, he figured he’d meet them soon enough.

Rigg had never felt large quantities of sand beneath his feet before. It was hard to walk in sand; it kept sliding and he kept slipping.

Sure enough, in sand higher above the water, there were tracks—normal human footprints. “They don’t have webbed feet,” said Rigg.

“Or maybe they clip the webs between their toes, as we do with our toenails,” said Param.

Loaf was looking at the tracks. “There might be toe-webs after all. That slight dusting of sand right . . . here.”

Rigg saw what he was indicating, thin lines between the foremost toes on only a couple of the footprints. But Rigg had seen other such artifacts in the tracks of animals and men in the forests of Ramfold throughout his childhood. “Is that real, or just wind-blow?” asked Rigg.

“Could be either,” said Loaf. “How long do we wait?”

“Well,” said Rigg, “now that we’ve passed through the Wall, I don’t see why we can’t go back into the past to the most recent gathering of just a few of them. We’ll go to them, since we can’t signal them to come to us.”

“We’re using the Larfold flyer,” said Umbo, “and yet the expendable hasn’t come to us and the ship hasn’t tried to talk to us beyond acknowledging the command to send the flyer.”

“We’re not looking for the expendable anyway,” said Param. “I’m glad it’s not here.”

“The expendables are too powerful to ignore them,” said Rigg. “Umbo’s question is a good one, but Param’s point is also good.”

“We can’t both be right,” said Param.

“Yes you can,” said Rigg, “and you are. We don’t have to search for the expendable right now, but we also have to be sharply aware that whatever he’s doing right now, it’s not nothing, and might be dangerous to us.”

“Very delicately done,” said Olivenko.

“What a dance between your rival siblings,” said Loaf.

“And how completely unhelpful for you to call attention to it,” said Rigg.

“We’re not at war and we’re not rivals,” said Param. “Or siblings.”

“How can a peasant boy be a rival to a queen?” asked Umbo.

“What about my idea of going back in time to meet them?” asked Rigg.

“Why not go all the way back, and watch them go into the water?” asked Olivenko.

“If we could be sure we could watch undetected, I’d agree,” said Rigg. “But why not meet them now?”

“I’d rather meet them back when they were human,” said Olivenko.

“But are we even human?” asked Rigg. “And for all we know, they’re as human as we are right now.”

“We can’t make any decisions until we know more,” said Param, “and we can’t know more until we make those decisions.”

“Why not have one of us go back and look?” asked Umbo. “I send you back, and snap you home to us if something goes wrong?”

Rigg nodded, but it was the nodding of thought, not a decision. “That’s good. Safer in some ways. But then I’m the one seeing them. And what if I change something back then that affects us now?”

“You don’t want to face them alone,” said Loaf.

“I don’t know if I’ll understand enough of what I’m seeing,” said Rigg. “And I don’t know how seriously they’ll take me if I’m alone. I’m just a kid.”

“Not so young as you used to be,” said Olivenko. “And never just a kid even then.”

“I’m an experienced old soldier,” said Loaf. “Experienced enough to know that when somebody is cautious about his own ability to judge, it means he’s much better prepared to judge a situation than people who don’t doubt their ability to judge.”

“I’d like to be able to quote you on that,” said Param, “but I’m not sure I know what you said.”

“I said Rigg isn’t as young as he thinks, but he’s also right. We should all go together.”

“Back to a time when we have no control over the flyer?” said Umbo.

“Who’s being cautious now?” asked Param.

“We didn’t have control over the flyer until the very end of our time in Vadeshfold,” said Rigg. “We can handle a few weeks without it now.” Rigg rose to his feet and held out his hands. “A few weeks ago, there was a group of three people—and their paths look as human as anybody’s, if that helps. They came ashore here, then walked up near the river. Maybe they were harvesting river mussels or something, but they could have done that from the water.”

“They still walk,” said Umbo. “That’s something. They haven’t turned into seals or dolphins or some other aquatic mammal.”

“Otters,” said Rigg.

“Sharks with hands,” said Olivenko, and the reminder of Knosso’s fate stilled the nervous merriment that Rigg and Umbo had started.

They joined hands.

“Any mice with us?” asked Olivenko.

“Three,” said Loaf.

“Eight,” said Rigg at the same moment.

“Stealthy little bastards,” said Loaf.

“No secrets anyway,” said Rigg. “They know they can’t hide from me, and we have no need to conceal what we do from them.”

“Do you have the path we’re jumping to?” asked Umbo.

“I do,” said Rigg. “Take us back.”

“You can do it yourself,” Umbo reminded him.

“I’m not sure I can take all of us at once,” said Rigg. “And you’re stronger and better practiced. I’ll aim, you loose the bow.”

So Umbo did.

There were three women near the river, their backs to the group of Ramfolders. Standing over them was an expendable. Larex.

“I guess this means that the expendable knows more about the Larfolders than the other expendables thought,” murmured Umbo.

“Or they held back the knowledge from the mice,” said Param.

“Or the mice held it back from us,” said Olivenko.

The expendable looked at them and waved. The women turned around to look.

“I think he heard us,” said Rigg.

“They do have good hearing,” said Param.

Rigg strode forward, and the expendable came rapidly to meet him. The women stayed where they were.

Rigg tried to keep his attention on Larex, who looked so much like Father that Rigg couldn’t help being glad to see him, and so much like Vadesh and Odinex that he couldn’t help but mistrust him. Still, his eyes strayed to the women, who looked clothed and naked at the same time. They certainly had some kind of garment that concealed their womanly shape, but the garment was absolutely the color of skin, so that they seemed also to be nude.

Were they even women, or did he think that only because their hair was so long?

Was that really hair, or something else? It seemed not to hang quite right.

The women stood up, and as they did, their clothing seemed to change, to move, to become something else. They were definitely women, and naked, and the clothing wasn’t clothing at all. It was another creature, one on each woman, which rode them like a mantle, and changed shape to fit on them in different ways. It draped when they were sitting, but now it furled like the sails on a ship, rising up out of the way across their shoulders, so they could fight or run if need be.

And their hair was hair, but it had looked wrong because it was growing as much out of the other creature as out of their heads. No, it was growing entirely from the creature. While it rode atop their heads, the hair seemed to be in the normal place. But now they were bald, and the hair had been furled up in the creature.

“Let me guess,” said Larex. “You’re the folks from Ramfold who crossed the Wall into Vadeshfold a few weeks ago. What brings you here? And what brings you now, for that matter, since as far as I know you’re still in Vadeshfold, heading for Odinfold.”

“We are,” said Rigg. “We made it to Odinfold, learned many interesting things, and then came back to a time only a few weeks from now to come through the Wall into Larfold. And then we shifted in time to here, because I saw the paths of these women.”

“Bet you didn’t see mine,” said Larex with a smile.

“You know that I can’t,” said Rigg. “There’s not much about the Larfolders in the logs of the other ships.”

“Because we know how the Odinfolders blab,” said Larex.

“So you can conceal what you know from the shared logs?” asked Rigg.

“Of course,” said Larex. “When there’s a compelling reason to.”

“And what would that reason be?”

“When you take control of all the ships and expendables, then I imagine I’ll be forced to tell you,” said Larex, still smiling.

“So why not tell me now?” asked Rigg.

“You’re the man from the future,” said Larex. “Why not tell me whether I ever tell you?”

This was a game with no point. Rigg’s instinct to like him had been wrong; his instinct to mistrust him, absolutely right. “We’re here to meet the Larfold people,” said Rigg. “And it seemed practical to meet them first when they happened to be on shore.”

“I saw where your eyes went,” said Larex. “You’re fascinated by their naked bodies.”

“I’m fifteen years old, I think,” said Rigg. “My eye goes to naked women. But I’m more interested in their living clothing.”

“But don’t you recognize it?” asked Larex. He looked pointedly at Loaf.

“They’re wearing facemasks?” asked Rigg.

“A related species,” said Larex. “Let’s say that what lives upriver, in Vadeshfold, is the primitive version. What the first colonists found here in Larfold was a much more evolved cousin.”

“So you helped Vadesh develop this?” asked Loaf.

“Not at all,” said Larex. “I never told him anything about these symbiotes.”

“Why not?” asked Umbo.

“He was having so much fun developing his own,” said Larex.

“You’re a renegade,” said Rigg.

“Not at all,” said Larex. “We all lie to Vadesh.”

For the first time, it occurred to Rigg that this statement might itself be a lie. The one certain thing was that the expendables all lied to humans. It was far more doubtful that they actually lied to each other. Much more likely they lied to humans about lying to Vadesh.

But that was too complicated to sort out now. “Do you have any objection to our talking to these women?” asked Rigg.

“Would it matter if I did?” asked Larex.

Rigg made no reply. It was obvious that Larex stood between the women and the Ramfolders, and that neither group was going to come any nearer to each other than they were, until the expendable made some gesture.

Larex smiled, then strolled off to the side, so he was no longer between them. Then he nodded his head, and waved the two groups together.

The Larfold women moved hesitantly toward them. They were staring as curiously at the Ramfolders as Rigg and his party were at them.

“Hi,” said Umbo.

“Oh, what a diplomat,” murmured Param.

“They’ve never been through the Wall,” said Olivenko. “They don’t understand this language.”

“Until they speak,” said Rigg, “we can’t tell what their language is.” He held out his hand in an open gesture, somewhere between begging for food and offering a handshake.

They took it the first way—or maybe offering food was how they shook hands. One of the women reached into a pocket in her living mantle and drew out—something. Something raw and shiny and moving. Rigg let her put it in his hand, but she did not let go.

She said something.

Rigg didn’t understand at first. And then he did. She wanted him to close his hand. Because the thing was alive, and if he didn’t, it would get away.

So he enclosed it in his fist, and only then did she slip her fingers out of his grip.

Then she gestured toward her own mouth, pantomiming dropping the creature into her mouth and swallowing.

“It’s a hospitality ritual,” murmured Param.

Or else a clever way to introduce their symbiotes’ larval form into his body. But Rigg did not speak the thought aloud. Instead he smiled, lifted his fist over his open mouth, and dropped the creature in.

It skittered up his tongue as if trying to escape. For a tiny fraction of a second, Rigg thought of biting down hard on the thing in his mouth to keep it in place, to kill it. But then he thought of a cockroach or small frog exploding in his mouth, filling it with the flavor of guts and death and animal poo, and so instead Rigg simply swallowed the thing whole.

It wiggled all the way down.

At least it had no claws to catch at him, or jaws to bite the inside of his gullet.

The woman who had given him the bug nodded. “Can you talk?” she asked.

“A little,” said Rigg. They’d have to say a lot more than this before the language of the Wall made him fluent.

“You are naked,” she said, indicating his body.

By this Rigg understood her to mean that he had no symbiote. He looked at Loaf.

“He is half naked,” said the woman. “He has an ugly on his face.”

“That he does,” said Rigg. “But it wasn’t all that pretty before.”

The woman seemed mildly perplexed. Clearly Rigg did not understand the context well enough yet to make a joke.

“We come from beyond the Wall,” said Rigg.

The women looked at each other in astonishment, and then at Larex, who smiled and nodded, giving that slight bow of his head that Rigg had never seen Father do, but which Vadesh had done all the time.

“You came through hell to speak to us,” said the woman, and the others echoed the sentence. To Rigg, it seemed that this was some kind of quotation. Maybe a bit of scripture or an adage or a ritual greeting.

“Hell stepped aside to let us pass,” Rigg answered. Yes, they had sort of passed through hell, or parts of it, when they first crossed the Wall into Vadeshfold. But they had only heard faint echoes of hell when they came through the Wall to Larfold just now.

The woman came and enfolded him in an embrace that was anything but ritualized. She meant it with her whole body. And in a moment the other two women had embraced him as well.

“I told them you were coming,” said Larex.

“How did you know?” asked Rigg.

“When the Odinfolders made you,” said Larex, “the purpose was to make Wall crossers who would visit every wallfold. Eventually you’ll get everywhere.”

“That’s not an answer,” said Rigg.

“The knife is a communicator,” said Larex. “I’ve been following your movements.”

The women released him from their embrace—then stroked his body, his hair, his face.

“You live in the sea,” said Rigg to the women.

“The sea,” they answered, saying nothing but that word, several times, and meaning different things each time they said it. Rigg understood all the meanings: Home. Dark-and-dangerous. Eating place.

“Why did you come on shore?” asked Rigg.

“Why don’t you come into the sea?” she asked in reply.

“I would die there,” said Rigg. “But your body was made to walk on land.”

“My body on land,” she said. “And my mantle in the sea. Two friends made one by blood.”

This last phrase seemed alien to Rigg, as if he were incapable of understanding some nuance that he had no mental preparation to receive. Clearly she was indicating the mantle when she spoke of friends made one, but Loaf didn’t speak of his facemask as some kind of friend.

“Hard to believe it’s a facemask,” murmured Olivenko.

“Something like it,” said Rigg. “I think we’ve answered the question of how they breathe.” He said this in the language of Odinfold, which they had spoken so long in the library that it was the first that came to mind.

Loaf stepped forward. “Can you show us how this mantle lets you live in the water?”

“You don’t know?” asked a woman.

Loaf shrugged.

“Then what is that for?” she asked, pointing to his face.

“Ugly. Ugly,” murmured the other two women, as if they were captioning a picture of Loaf’s facemask.

And it was true. Where Loaf’s facemask made him misshapen, replacing his eyes with asymmetric imitations, their mantles seemed to blend seamlessly into their bodies. When they moved, it was as if the women’s own skin moved. And maybe it was part of their skin now.

The woman who had fed a bug to Rigg passed her hand up the front of her body and closed her eyes. At once her mantle shifted, rising up her neck like someone pulling off a sweater. It covered her whole head, then suddenly sucked in and clung as if to a skeleton. New eyes—bigger ones—extruded from the sides of her head, like the eyes of a fish. And when she opened her mouth to speak, a membrane covered her mouth. It deadened her voice, though she could still speak through it.

“I can go in the water now,” she said. “But I know that I am not myself a waterbreather. My friend breathes the water, and passes the result to me in my blood.” She looked at Loaf. “He can’t go in the water, not with that one. It’s only an animal.”

“And your mantle is not?”

“It is the companion of my heart,” she said. “It is the sister of my soul.”

“Air in the water,” chanted another.

“Light in the darkness,” murmured the third.

“So you all have these mantles?” asked Rigg.

“Without them we would die,” said the leader.

“So why did you murder my father?” demanded Param.

So much for diplomacy, thought Rigg.

“Your father?” asked the woman who led them.

“Knosso, king of Stashiland,” said Param.

“He crossed over far to the west of here,” said Olivenko. “Then you dragged him out of his boat and drowned him.”

The women backed away, puzzled by the accusation and by Param’s vehemence in saying it.

“Do you mean the man who dances on water?”

To Rigg that seemed as apt a description of travel in a small boat as these people were likely to see it. “Yes,” said Rigg.

“But he isn’t dead,” said one woman.

“Should we fetch him?” asked another.

“Yes,” said Rigg. “In our wallfold, we thought him dead.”

“Why should he be dead?” they asked. “Was he deserving of death?”

“No,” said Olivenko, perhaps a bit too fervently. “So are you saying that this man-who-dances-on-water is still alive?”

“Of course,” said the leading woman. “Shall we bring him now, or do you have more questions to ask us first?”

“Please bring him, yes,” said Rigg.

“I thought you’d want to see him as soon as I saw you,” said one of the other women.

“I know he’ll want to see you,” said the third.

“Let me send out a call for him,” said the leader. Without further discussion, she ran to the nearest water—the river, in this case—and ducked her mantled head into it. She stayed a long time—at least it seemed long to Rigg, who instinctively held his breath as if his own head were also underwater.

Then she lifted her head out of the water, dropping a spray of water that caught the sunlight like stars.

She sat on the riverbank and laughed. “He’s very happy,” she called out. “He’s coming now.”

“Knosso,” murmured Olivenko. “Is it really possible he didn’t die?”

“They must have had a mantle waiting for him,” said Loaf.

“Of course we did,” said one of the remaining women. “Didn’t the Landsman tell us he was going to float to us on the waves?”

“So when you dragged him under the water—”

“It was to keep his evil wife from killing him,” said a woman.

“And he had so many questions saved up for us,” said the other woman.

“I can’t wait like this,” said Param, sounding distressed. “I can’t. I won’t.” And then she disappeared.

Of course, thought Rigg. By slicing time until she sees Father Knosso come out of the water, she will spend only moments waiting, while we might spend hours.

But it wasn’t hours, it wasn’t many minutes, until, out of the waves of the sea and the currents of the river, there arose a host of hundreds of mantle-wearing people, men and women, striding out of the water, their mantles receding from their faces, eyes appearing where they should be in human faces, mouths opening, smiling, calling greetings to the women, who called out in reply. Here, meet these people from overWall.

Then the Larfolders turned and parted and made a way for one man who strode laughing from the waves and fairly ran up the beach toward them. “Where’s my Param?” he cried. “They said my daughter was here!”

Rigg knew that Param couldn’t hear when she was slicing time, but she didn’t have to. She must have recognized his face as soon as it emerged from under the receding mantle, and she became visible again, running across the sand to embrace her father.

He held her for a long time, stroking her in the gentle way the women had stroked Rigg after their embrace. “Param, Param,” he murmured, and other words that Rigg could not hear at a distance. He did not want to interrupt their reunion, but this was Father Knosso, and he could not stop himself from walking tentatively nearer.

The man looked up from his daughter’s hug, and then managed to step from the embrace without quite breaking it. Instead he gathered her into his forward movement as he strode to Rigg and then stopped only a couple of meters from him.

In Fall Ford, Rigg had rarely seen himself—only a few people owned mirrors, and since he didn’t shave, there was no reason for him to consult the mirror in Nox’s house. But once they arrived in O and later in Aressa Sessamo, Rigg had many opportunities to see his own face looking back at him from the glass; in Flacommo’s house, there were so many mirrors that one could hardly escape from the sight of oneself.

So Rigg knew what he was seeing when he looked for the first time into his father’s face. There were no images of him in Aressa Sessamo—a dead male from a female-centered royal line that was utterly discredited by the People’s Revolution? It would be twice-over treason to treasure his visage.

Still, someone might have told Rigg how perfectly he resembled his dead father. Especially since he wasn’t dead after all.

Umbo came up between them, looking back and forth. “No wonder my father hated the sight of me,” said Umbo. “Never once, when he looked into my face, could he see his own face looking back at him like this.”

“He said you would grow up to cross the Wall,” said Knosso.

“He never told me you existed, or that I was your son,” said Rigg.

“He wasn’t supposed to. How could a child keep a secret like that? Better for you not to know until it was time.”

“And is it time now, Father?” asked Rigg.

“Oh, and past time.” Knosso opened up his arms and Rigg stepped into the embrace that Ramex, the Golden Man, had never given him, though Rigg had always called him father, and had loved him. But that love had been misplaced. This was the man, and Rigg was his son, and he belonged inside these arms the way these Larfolders belonged inside their mantles. I am a part of him. I was made from him. I am his. He is mine. And Rigg wept against his father’s shoulder as his father’s hands stroked and stroked him, and Knosso murmured again and again, “Rigg Sessamekesh, my son, my son.”