He would finish her story in a little while, he thought.
He already suspected that he knew how it ended. Enough for now. First his father’s papers, and the shock they contained amongst their dense ladders of calculations. And now this. No more stories.
Yama shook dew from the blanket Pandaras had put around his shoulders and lay down, just for a moment.
And slept.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Gond
“It is a city that shines like the ice flows of the mountains at the end of the world,” Eliphas told Yama. “I last saw it many years ago, but I still remember how it shone in the sunlight across the blue waters of the river. The river may be shrinking, brother, but it runs deeper here than anywhere else in the world, deeper even than at Ys. They fish for leviathans off the shore of Gond.” Yama flinched, remembering the one solid fact he had gleaned from the muddle of his stepfather’s papers. Eliphas did not notice. He was lost in his memories.
“They fish not from coracles or cockleshells,” the old man said, “but from barges as big as fields, with big motors that make the water boil around their sterns when they are working. There are leviathans deep beneath our keel, and that’s what these barges are after. They send down lures as tall as a man and armed with explosive hooks, using steel cables several leagues long. If they strike lucky, they haul up their catch and render it there and then. Of course, most of the time the leviathan escapes, and sometimes, despite its power, a barge is dragged under by what it catches.”
“I thought that the people of Gond led aesthetic and contemplative lives,” Yama said.
“The fishermen come from the cities of the Dry Plains, further downriver. From Ush and Kalyb and Galata, and the twin cities of Kilminar and Balbeck.” Eliphas intoned the names with sonorous pleasure. “If a barge catches more than one leviathan in the hunting season its crew count themselves lucky. The proceeds from rendering one monster would buy a ship like this twice over.”
Yama and Eliphas were leaning side by side at the rail of the main deck of the Weazel, in the shadow of the big, rust-red sail. Sternward, smoky columns of rain twisted beneath the reefs of white and gray clouds that overshadowed the far-side shore—a desolation of mudflats and pioneer mangroves inhabited only by birds and swarms of army crabs. There had been no sign of either the warship or the picketboat in the past three days, and the Weazel was at last angling away from the far-side and the spurious safety of the mangrove swamps. Ahead, in the far distance, the Great River bent toward the Rim Mountains, and at the angle of the nearside shore a mote of light glistened, white as a crystal of salt: the city of Gond. Captain Lorquital had announced that the Weazel would put in there to collect a passenger and to take on fresh provisions.
Yama told Eliphas, “I see that you are happy to retrace the steps you took when you were a young man.”
Eliphas closed his eyes. His face was shaded by the wide brim of the straw hat he wore as protection from the sun. “It has been more than a hundred years. I thought I had forgotten most of it, but each place we pass brings memories rising from the depths of my mind, as the monsters of the abyssal currents of the river rise to follow the glowing lures trailed by the fishing barges.”
He opened his eyes and smiled: silver and white flashed in his black face. “Do not worry, brother. I will fulfill the promise I made to you in the library of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons. I will find the lost city for you. I know that your servants are suspicious of me, but I have your best interests at heart.”
“They are not my servants, Eliphas.”
Eliphas smiled. “They believe otherwise, brother. Look there! A pod of grampuses! See how they sport!”
Three, four, five sleek white creatures swam swiftly through the clear water, effortlessly overtaking the speeding ship. They caught up with the purling bow-wave and rode it briefly, plunging and leaping in white foam, then all at once they sounded, pale shadows dwindling away into the dark depths of the river.
Eliphas said, “Some believe they are intelligent, and that they herd the fish of the river as the autochthons of the mountains herds sheep or goats.”
“When you are swimming in the river, you can sometimes hear them singing,” Yama said. He had often heard their songs himself, for in summer schools of grampuses migrated far upriver. Songs that lasted for hours, deep throbbings overlaid with scatterings of chirps and whistles, haunting, mysterious and somehow lonely, as if defining the inhuman vastness of the Great River.
“They say that the Preservers placed everything on this world for a purpose,” Eliphas said, “and the ultimate purpose is to raise up all the Shaped so that we may live forever in their glory. But I sometimes wonder if the Preservers brought creatures like the grampuses to the world simply because of the joy they strike in the hearts of men. If that is true, I can forgive them much.”
Yama remembered that the woman in the shrine, Angel’s aspect, had said that the Preservers were descended from her own people. He said, “I think that the Preservers were once not so different from us. The first suras of the Puranas tell us that in times long past there were no gods, but only many kinds of humans.”
“There is no gradation in godhood,” Eliphas said. “It is not like the process of aging, which is so gradual that only by looking back are you shocked by how much you have changed, for you have no sense of having changed at all. And of course, from day to day you have not changed in any measurable sense. No, brother, the Preservers changed utterly and at once, and so what they were before they became gods is irrelevant. When godhood descended upon them, or when they ascended to godhood, everything they had been fell away.”
“And yet they made us over in their image. Not as what they became, but as what they once were. And so they did not leave their past behind.”
Eliphas nodded gravely. The old man loved metaphysical discourse. He was one of those for whom the world is merely an object from which theoretical ideals might be abstracted, and therefore less important than thought.
“The Preservers have not forgotten what they once were,” he said, “but they put it behind them, as a butterfly puts behind its caterpillar childhood when it emerges from its cocoon. The Puranas are perhaps that cocoon, which we riddle for clues. Yet it is only an empty shell left clinging to the twig of the world. That which matters has ascended into everlasting sunlight.”
Yama smiled at the old man’s fanciful metaphor. He enjoyed these conversations; they reminded him of the long debates with Zakiel and Telmon, of happier times.
He said, “You have seen me read in the Puranas. It is not to understand the Preservers. It is to understand myself.”
“I believe that your copy of the Puranas is a very old one.”
Yama knew that Eliphas wanted to examine the book, but he had decided that he would not show the transformed pictures to anyone. Not, at least, until he had understood Angel’s story. He would read more tonight. He thought that he already knew how it ended—but perhaps it had not ended after all. Perhaps he was part of that story, coming late onto the stage to draw the curtain and announce the end of the play.
Eliphas said, “Books are more powerful than the world. Even if the world ended, then surely someone would chronicle it. And so that book would save the world, for it would live again in the minds of any who read the account.”