Chapter Twenty-Six
Theias’s Treasure
The envoy from Gond, Theias, did not come down from the crow’s nest that day. When Aguilar went aloft with his midday meal, Yama asked her to tell the envoy that he was eager to meet him. But when she descended—despite her bulk, she slid down a backstay with an acrobat’s casual grace—she told Yama that the envoy sent his apologies.
“He says he has a lot to think about,” Aguilar said. “He’s a holy man all right. He wanted only a little bread and salt to eat, and river water to drink.”
“He could stay up there for the whole voyage, brother,” Eliphas said. “They are a strange people, in Gond.” Later, Yama sat alone at the bow and thought again about what the book had shown him. Angel’s aspect had wanted him to understand her history, but how could he trust what he had been told? Angel’s story was more dangerous than most. It was a scream aimed straight at the most primitive part of the mind, where raw appetite dwelled like a toad at the bottom of a well. Seize the day!
Forget duty, forget responsibility, forget devotion to the Preservers, forget everything but personal gain.
There was no denying what she had discovered, but it did not mean that people should fear the Universe. Rather, Yama thought, they should celebrate its vast emptiness.
By accepting the Universe for all that it was, you became a true part of it and could never truly cease to exist until it also ceased to exist. It was not necessary to distinguish between being and nonbeing, between life and mere dead matter. It was all part of the same eternal braid. Only the Preservers had stepped outside of the Universe—an act of transcendence impossible for those who were not gods.
Although Angel feared the ultimate darkness of nonbeing—that was why she had been so quick to despair—Yama knew that it was nothing to fear, for it was nothing at all. The Puranas taught that just as there was no time before the beginning of the Universe, there was also no time after death, for in both cases there was no way to measure the passing of time. Death was a timeless interval before rebirth at the infinite moment at the end of all time.
Angel denied this. She did not trust what she could not understand. She trusted no one but her own self. She had no faith, except faith in herself, and she believed herself to be unique, entire, and circumscribed, so that a time when she was absent from the Universe was, to her, simply unthinkable. It was true that she had passed hundreds of years of shipboard time as a mere text, that she had died and risen again: many times. But these brief interregna were nothing compared to the billions of years of nonbeing between now and the end of the Universe, and the machineries which stored her self and gave her rebirth time and time again were real in a way that the Preservers were not. It did not need a leap of faith to believe in machines.
Yama thought about these things for a long time, while the Weazel stood before a fair wind and raced her own shadow across sunlit waters. The crew mended the staysails and tightened lanyards and stays through deadeyes; the joints of the deck were resealed with pitch and its planks were scrubbed until they shone as white as salt; a cradle was lowered over the side so that Phalerus could smooth and repaint places splintered and scraped by weather and passage through the floating forest. There had not been time to fully reprovision the ship, and the shoat, which had been pampered on scraps since the Weazel had left Ys, was led from its pen onto an oilcloth and soothed with song before the cook cut its throat. For a moment the shoat stood astonished as rich red blood pattered noisily into a blue plastic bucket held under its head; then it sighed and sat down and died.
Tamora helped with the butchery, and ate the shoat’s liver raw. The joints, ribs, head, tongue and heart were sealed in barrels of brine, and the intestines were cleaned and steamed with the lungs. After sunset, everyone feasted on fried plantain leaves and fritters of banana and minced pork. All except the envoy, who still had not shown himself. Yama was beginning to believe that he did not exist.
That night, Yama slept alone on the triangular bit of decking over the forecastle. He woke at dawn to find someone hanging upside down from a forestay above his head. A small, slightly built man, his flat face, the color of old parchment and framed by a fringe of fine hair, cocked at his shoulder so that he could stare straight down.
Yama realized with a shock that the envoy from Gond was of the some bloodline as the long-lost Commissioner of Sensch, Dreen.
The envoy smiled and said in a high, lilting voice, “You are not so much after all,” and swung the right way up.
“Wait,” Yama said, “I would like to—”
“I expected someone taller, with thunder on his brow, or a wreath of laurels. Perhaps you are not him, after all.”
Before Yama could reply, the envoy turned and ran off along the forestay. He swarmed up the mast as nimbly as any sailor and disappeared into the crow’s nest.
Toward midmorning, Yama saw a machine spinning above the waves half a league to starboard, a little thing with a decad of paired mica vanes that flashed and winked in the sunlight, and a tapered body that was mostly a sensor cluster. He brought it closer, and made it circle around and around the crow’s nest. It made a thin crackling sound like oil seething in a hot pan, and occasionally spat a fan of sparks that sputtered down the bellying slope of the sail’s rust-red canvas. Captain Lorquital watched from her sling chair, but said nothing.
At last, the envoy swung out of the crow’s nest and ran down the forestay, halting halfway and calling to Yama, “Am I supposed to be impressed? You are very foolish!”
Yama let the machine go. It shot away to starboard in a long falling arc that almost touched the river’s glassy swell before it abruptly changed direction in a twinkling of vanes, just like a dog shaking itself awake. In a moment, it was lost from sight.
The envoy descended to the end of the forestay. He wore a simple belted tunic which left his legs bare, and carried a leaf-shaped fan woven of raffia and painted with a stylized eye. His feet had long gripping toes. He thwacked Yama on top of the head with his fan, said, “That is for your impertinence, young man,” and leapt lightly onto the deck.
The sailors who had been watching grinned at this display. Tamora shook her head and turned away; Pandaras, sitting bare-chested and cross-legged in the shade of the awning at the far end of the main deck, looked up from the embroidery work he was doing on the collar of his shirt. In her sling chair on the quarterdeck, Captain Lorquital puffed imperturbably on her pipe. Eliphas sat beside her, his wide-brimmed straw hat casting his face into shadow.
The envoy said to Yama, “Here I am. What is your question?”
“I hoped we could talk, dominie.”
“But what will you talk about? Something important, I hope, unless you are even more foolish than you look.”
“Perhaps we should talk about my foolishness.”
“You assume that I am interested in it,” the envoy said. “Do you know who I am?”
“Theias, the envoy from Gond to the warring cities of the Dry Plains.”
“And you, Child of the River, should know that I was contemplating my mission when you sent that poor imitation of a dragonfly buzzing around my eyrie. I like it up there. I can see all that is going on without having to be an active part of it. I can see so far that I can spy into the future—there is trouble in it for you, young man, but why I am telling you I do not know.”