Ancients of Days, page 24
“They keep away from me, Pandaras. Their master knows what I can do.”
“If they are afraid of you then we should not be afraid of them. So we can go to sleep.”
“They might not stay away forever. Besides, although I have lived by the river all my life, I have never seen this before.”
All around the Weazel, fisherfolk were working by the dim glow of oil lamps, sinking sacks of moss amongst the roots of the banyans. The moss had been soaked in an extract of the hulls of banyan seeds; as this diffused into the water, it stimulated the trees to shed the myriad feeder roots which anchored them. The night was full of the creaking and groaning of banyans which were beginning to shift on the currents; the water all around the Weazel seethed with bubbles as pockets of gas were released by roots dragging through mud.
Yama said, “Oncus told me that there are more than a thousand fisherfolk from a hundred families. But how many more trees?”
“They are fools, master, to believe that they can move a forest. And we are more foolish still to believe them. We should go with them while we have the chance.”
“They know the floating forests better than anyone. We must trust them.”
Near dawn, Oncus returned to the ship and told Yama that another machine had been caught. Yama was taken out in a coracle to the net where it hung, at the far-side edge of the floating forest. The forest was beginning to break up there. Irregular channels and lagoons opened and closed as trees spun slowly around each other. The water was stained with silt and alive with shoals of fish. The picketboat was close by, slowly advancing downriver amongst trees that had become a myriad floating islands. Every now and then the red flash of the picketboat’s cannon lit the dark sky above the tops of the trees, followed by the hiss and crack of water flash-heated to steam. The air had a brassy taste, and there was a constant flutter of falling ash flakes.
“They will be here soon,” one of the fisherfolk said, and Yama saw that the man’s hands were shaking as he aimed the beam of his lantern at one of the floating islands.
The net, woven from monofilament fibers combed from float bush seed heads, fine as air and strong as steel, was strung above the top of the banyan, guyed by bamboo poles. The machine caught in it glittered and gleamed in the beam of the lantern; as soon as the light touched it, it began to vibrate in short furious bursts, shaking the poles and branches to which the corners of the net were fastened.
“Some of the machines can burn their way free,” Oncus said, “but ones like these are merely spies. They are stupid and weak. We sometimes catch them by mistake. They are blind to our nets, or fly too fast to avoid them.”
“And you destroy what you catch,” Yama said distractedly. He was already unpicking the familiar tangle of logical loops and snares which hedged the machine’s simple mind.
“Only the Preservers need to see all,” Oncus said. “Usually we drop the net and the machine drowns, although some can swim as well as fly, and those escape us.”
The machine was no more intelligent than the watchdogs which patrolled the grounds of the peel-house, and after its defenses had been penetrated it was as easy to fool. Once Yama had convinced it that he was its handler, he called for the net to be lowered, and he cradled the machine while two of the fisherfolk began to untangle its vanes from the fine filaments of the net.
They worked quickly, but still had not freed the machine when an intense needle of red light lanced across the channel behind them. The needle struck through the canopy of a banyan, which immediately burst into a crown of fire; a second needle struck the main trunk and burst it apart in an explosion of live steam and splinters.
The two coracles were lifted and turned on a swell of smoking water. All around, floating banyans rocked to and fro, as stately as green-clad dowagers at a ball. The coracles spun apart and the net stretched out between them, wrenching the machine from Yama’s grip. Then the swell passed and the coracles revolved back toward each other, and the net dipped toward the water. For a moment, Yama feared that the machine would be drowned, but Oncus grabbed the net with his good hand, and Yama and the others helped him haul in the slack.
A minute later, they had freed the machine. Yama cradled it to his chest, but before the two coracles could drive for cover, red light flashed again and two more trees burst into flame. Steam and smoke enveloped them. A drumbeat swelled; a dark shape glided between the burning trees.
The coracles bobbed on its wake, and then the picketboat was past.
Yama sent up the machine he had captured as a hunter sends up a hawk, and used it to call other machines to him. It took several hours to find the way back because the floating forest had begun to break up, a maze in which channels opened and closed between ten thousand drifting trees. By the time the two coracles had returned to the Weazel, they were trailing a cloud of glittering machines, like birds following a fishing boat. The sailors eyed the machines with a deep unease, but the fisherfolk beat spears and paddles against the sides of their coracles at this demonstration of Yama’s power.
The Weazel was hauled into a narrow berth hacked into the dead heart of a grandfather banyan, and lashed to the main trunk. The sailors covered her sides with a blanket of leafy branches. Tamora commandeered four coracles and lashed a platform across them and, with Aguilar, took the light cannon to the nearside edge of the forest. When they returned, the banyan in which the Weazel was hidden had begun to float amidst a flotilla of other trees on the strong current.
Late in the afternoon, the tree passed one of the places struck by the warship’s light cannon. It was as wide as the channel by which the Weazel had first entered the shoal. The smoldering stumps of banyans poked through water choked with ashes and the corpses of parboiled fish.
Hundreds of small fires smoldered in the canopy on either side, and smoke hung thick in the air.
The fisherfolk murmured to each other at the sight of this destruction. Oncus told Yama that one day there would be a reckoning. “We are not a fierce folk, but we do not forget.”
By the middle of the afternoon there was open water on all sides of the banyan’s floating island. Yama climbed to the topmost branch and, clinging there, saw a vast archipelago of small green islands scattered widely across leagues and leagues of water. The remaining part of the forest was a green line shrouded in a long cloud of smoke and steam turned golden by the light of the sun.
When Yama climbed down, Captain Lorquital said, “We are set on our course now.”
“I still say we shouldn’t have left our only real weapon behind,” Aguilar said.
“If the timer works, daughter, then it will serve us better than by being here.”
“Of course it will work. I set it myself. But our fee will not cover the cost of replacing it. It’s a poor bargain.”
“Better alive poor than dead rich,” Captain Lorquital said, and Aguilar laughed for the first time since they had entered the forest.
“That’s just what father would say.”
“Sometimes he managed to stumble on a truth without my help.”
Yama said, “They will not believe the machines alone because they know I can fool machines. They must also have something to aim at.”
“I’ve never had to fire the thing in anger,” Ixchel Lorquital said, “but I’ll still miss it.”
At nightfall, the lines which lashed the Weazel to the banyan were cut and she used her reaction motor to maneuver out of her hiding place. It took an hour to raise the mast and haul up the sail; then everyone stood at the port rail and watched the dark line of the forest. They watched a long time, and although they knew about the timer, the sailors cheered when at last the flash of the cannon showed, a vivid red point of light doubled by its reflection in the river. The sharp crack of the discharge rolled across the water a moment later; then the cannon flashed again.
Yama raised his arms—a bit of theater, for he had already told the machines to go. They went in a whirring rush that fanned the air, scattering toward different parts of the forest, where they would lay a hundred false trails in the opposite direction to the Weazel’s intended course.
Even as the machines flew up, the warship answered the Weazel’s light cannon with a bombardment that lit half the sky. At once, Ixchel Lorquital ordered the sail unfurled and the anchor raised. While the sailors busied themselves, the fisherfolk departed without ceremony, their tiny bark coracles dwindling into the river’s vast darkness. Oncus kissed Yama on the forehead and tied a fetish around his wrist. It was a bracelet of coypu hair braided with black seed pearls, and when Yama began to thank Oncus in the formal fashion taught by his father, the leader of the fisherfolk put a finger to his lips.
“Your life is mine,” the old man said. “I give you this to protect and guide you on your journey. I fear you will have much need of it.”
Captain Lorquital thanked Oncus for the safe passage of her ship, and gave him a steel knife and several rolls of tobacco. And then he too was gone.
The Weazel caught the wind and heeled to port as she set course toward the far-side shore. Far off, the cannon of the warship set up a stuttering rake of fire. Vast clouds of steam boiled up as needles of hot light lashed open water.
If the Weazel’s dismounted cannon fired again, it was lost in the bombardment.
Yama stood at the stern rail and watched red and green lights flash within spreading clouds of steam and smoke.
The bombardment continued for a whole watch. Yama knew then that the aim of the chase was not to capture him, but to destroy him. He watched until the warship’s cannon finally stopped firing, and at last the night was dark and quiet beneath the red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers.
Chapter Twenty: The Aedile
The far-side shore was a plain of tall green grasses, winnowed by unceasing wind. It was not wide at that part of the river. During the festival at the beginning of winter, Yama and his stepbrother, Telmon, had often walked from riverbank to world’s edge in a single day. When he had been very young, Yama had often tired himself out by trying to match Telmon’s long, eager strides and had to be carried home asleep in his stepbrother’s arms. On those expeditions, Telmon had always worn a set of bolas around his right arm, for all the world like an indigen from one of the hill tribes. Several times, Yama had seen him bring down one of the moas that roamed the grass plains, breaking the bird’s legs with the bolas and throwing himself on its thrashing body to cut its throat. Telmon had carried a sling, too, and had taught Yama how to use it to hurl stones with killing force at ortolans and marmots.
He had given Yama the bolas and the sling when he had left for the war: remembering all this as the Weazel approached the shore, Yama supposed that they were still in his room in the peel-house.
As the Great River retreated, a wide floodplain of emerald-green bogs and muddy meanders had grown along the margin of the far-side shore. Under gray cloud, swept by quick heavy showers, the Weazel nosed along the belts of mangrove scrub that fringed the new floodplain, guided by Yama to the place where the citizens of Aeolis had made their refuge.
They had arrived only that morning, and were still pitching tents along the low ridge that marked the old shoreline, above a swampy inlet. Men were raising a defensive berm of earth on the landward side of the encampment, and hexes and charms had been fixed to bamboo poles. The Amnan believed that the far-side shore was haunted and never ventured far from their temporary festival camps, unless it was to visit the shrines at the world’s edge.
This camp was a sorry affair. Fires burning here and there sent choking white smoke streaming into the wet air. Piles of possessions were growing soggy under tarpaulins which billowed and cracked in the constant warm, wet wind. Even before the tents had been set up, each family had dug its own wallowing pit and made mud slides down to the inlet. Packs of wives lay in the slides and bickered incessantly, not bothering to brush away the black flies that clustered at their eyes and the corners of their mouths, while pups chased each other and the men looked on disconsolately.
Only the Aedile’s quarters were in good order. A big orange marquee had been raised on a platform of freshly cut logs at the shoreward end of the ridge, and the Aedile’s standard flew at half mast, snapping in the brisk breeze.
Yama saw this omen as the Weazel nosed toward the muddy shore, and his heart sank. Have faith, he told himself. He turned Oncus’s fetish around and around his wrist.
Have faith. But it was hard, with his childhood home put to flame, and all he held dear scattered to the edges of the world.
Tamora came up to him and said, “They will follow us here as soon as they see through your trick. We can’t stay long.”
“It will hold them for a while.”
“They know that you can fool machines.”
“They do not know how much I have learned since they tested me. The machines were strengthened against me, Tamora, yet I broke them as easily as any firefly.”
He felt himself smiling and heard himself saying, “I will be glad if they come here. I will destroy them.”
Tamora said approvingly, “Now you talk like a fighter. About time.”
Flanked by his three surviving sons, the Constable of Aeolis, Unthank, came out to meet Yama when he rowed ashore in the Weazel’s dory with Tamora and Pandaras.
Eliphas had elected to stay aboard, claiming that the chase had tired him out. Yama suspected that the old man was sulking because he had refused to try to destroy the warship and the picketboat.
The Constable did not seem surprised by Yama’s arrival. He was a large, ugly man more than twice Yama’s height, dressed in loose, mud-spattered trousers and a leather waistcoat.
A pair of tusks protruded from his upper lip. One had been broken when he had fought and killed his father for control of the harem, and he had had it capped with silver—the same silver which had capped one of his father’s tusks. The swagger stick that was his mark of office was tucked under one muscular arm. He lumbered up with a rolling gait that reminded Yama of how clumsy the Amnan were on land, and said straightaway that the Aedile was dying. “He’s up there, in the tent with the rest of his household.”
“Is everyone in the city here?”
“Most everyone who escaped. A few went into the City of the Dead, mostly the merchants. We’ll speak later, I reckon.” The Constable spat a string of yellow mucus at Yama’s feet, then turned and walked away. The Constable’s sons stared hard at Yama before following their father.
Pandaras said, “These people have no liking for you, master. Are we safe here?”
“There is bad history between us,” Yama said, as he led Tamora and Pandaras through the refugee camp. “One of his sons died by my hand; another was executed. They were working for someone who tried to kidnap me before I left Aeolis.”
As they passed through the camp, they gathered a tail of naked pups who jeered and whistled, and threw clots of mud. A group of men stood around a smoky bonfire, smoking long-stemmed clay pipes and passing a leather bottle back and forth. Someone said something and the others laughed, a low, mocking, mean laughter.
Yama went up to them and asked if they had seen the chandler and his family. Most looked away, refusing to answer or even acknowledge him, but one, a one-eyed fisherman called Vort, said, “Chasin’ after your sweetheart, young master?”
“Don’t speak,” another man said. Yama knew him, too. Hud, master of the shellfish farms at the mouth of the Breas.
“He deserves a chance like anyone,” Vort said. He wore only a patched linen kilt in the warm rain. His gray skin shone as if greased. There was a livid burn on one massive shoulder. He looked down at Yama and said, “I heard tell they came for the chandler first. Someone came banging on their door in the night. They were gone the next day, and then the ship came.”
“I heard they were informers,” Hud said. “That’s why they got away before the trouble. They got away with their wealth while the rest of us saw our lives burned up.”
“That’s enough,” someone else said. “He don’t deserve to know nothing.” The others standing around the fire mumbled agreement. One took out his penis and urinated with considerable force into the fire. It was a gesture of contempt, and there was another round of mocking laughter.
Yama said to Vort, “Who took them? Where did they go?”
“He don’t deserve it,” Hud told Vort. He glared at Yama through a fringe of lank hair. “I don’t have family; none of us here do. But we lost our lodges all the same, and most of what was in them. They let us take what we could carry and burned the rest to the ground, yet your peel-house still stands.”
“And the temple,” someone else said.
Yama stood his ground and looked at the men. They turned away, mumbling. Only Vort met his gaze. Yama said, “If I had been there, I would have given myself up. But I was not. The city was burned in spite, to hurt me and to draw me into a trap. Well, I was almost caught, but I escaped. And I will not forget what was done.”
“We’re dead men here,” Vort said. “This is the shore of ghosts and spirits, and we’ve come to live here.”
“If you believe that, then you have let them destroy you twice over,” Yama said.
No one replied; even Vort turned away. Tamora got between Yama and the men, and put her hand on the hilt of her sword and glared at their backs as Yama walked away.
Pandaras said, “They are a surly rabble, master. Little wonder you left as soon as you could.”
“They have lost their homes and their livelihoods. Of course they are angry. And I am the cause, walking amongst them with my questions. I shamed them. I should not have spoken.”
She was safe, he thought, and felt a pang of unalloyed joy. She had escaped. Zakiel had said so, and now Vort and Hud had confirmed it.
“It was not you who destroyed their city, but the Department of Indigenous Affairs,” Tamora said. “If they want to lynch someone, they should look for Prefect Corin.”
Yama said, “He might well come here. As you pointed out, my deception will not fool him for long.”
