His tight knee-length boots had been spit-shined so that they gleamed even in the twilight. He was all that Yama yearned to be: elegant, fastidious, kindly and knowledgeable.
Telmon said, “We will leave this brave fellow to his home. There is still a little light, and we might get lucky.”
As they rode on, Yama said, “Dr. Dismas says that he might be able to find out about my bloodline. That is why he wants to make a study of me.”
“Dr. Dismas is easy with his promises, Yama. It is a cheap and quick way of winning people’s gratitude, and I expect he will move on before he has to make good any of them.”
“You will look for my people, Tel. That is, when you are not fighting heretics or charming women.”
“I will keep watch every step of the way, but I cannot promise anything. You know that father has made many enquiries, but never with any success. It is not likely that I will come across anyone of your bloodline by chance.”
They rode up the shallow slope to the top of the rise. There were narrow tracks worn through the tall grasses which Telmon said were certainly made by cassowaries, but all they found were two peahens, which whirred up under their ponies’ hooves and flew off into the dusk.
Yama was still calming his pony when Telmon spied the floating island.
It was like a small round barrow or cairn, but it stood where no barrow or cairn should be, atop the long flat horizon of the edge of the world. When Yama and Telmon rode closer, they saw that the island had grounded on a wide apron of eroded keelrock. It was a dense tangle of violet and red vines and tubes and bladders, as wide as a paeonin field and twice as tall as a house. It was full of noises, stealthy rustles and squeaks and crepitations, as if its vines and bladders were continually jostling and creeping over one another, and little blue lights came and went in its tangled thickets. Yama feared that these might be the lanterns of pirates or heretics, but Telmon laughed and said that they were only burning hydrogen vented from collapsed lift pods.
“Heretics are men like you and me. They have no use for floating islands, either in the air or on the river. Birds roost in the islands, though, and they are inhabited by species of crab found nowhere else, which feed on dead vegetation and fiercely protect their home, and barnacles which sieve the air for floating spores. The whole thing is really one organism, for although it appears to be made of many different species, they have all lost their autonomy so that they might function better within the whole. Each is a servant with a different task, and by specializing in their tasks they have lost the ability to live separately. Rather like the peel-house, eh? This one must be diseased. Usually, they don’t come so close to the world. Out in the air, Yama, is another nature entirely different from the one we inhabit. You should ask Derev about it. It is said that her people once flew there, but gave that up to live here with us.”
Yama, stung by the last remark, said, “That is just a story the Mud People put about. Derev would have told me if it was true.”
Telmon smiled. “You are in love with her. O, do not deny it! I am your brother, Yama, as truly a brother as if you were of my own blood. I have watched you grow up, and it seems to me that you mature quickly. You must give some thought to the shape of your life, for it might not be as long as you wish.”
“It might be longer,” Yama said.
“It might at that. We do not know, do we? It is a terrible thing, not to know who you really are or why you are here, but you cannot fill your life with dreams. I would like to see you give up your wild ideas, and perhaps Derev can help you. There is nothing wrong with metic marriages, and it would certainly make her father pleased.”
Yama said stoutly, “I am going to war, Tel. Like you, I want to fight the heretics and help redeem the world. Besides, I might find my bloodline on my way to the midpoint of the world.”
“Perhaps.” Telmon looked around. “It grows dark, and the ponies are tired. We can come back and look at this in daylight.”
But when they returned the next morning, the island had departed, leaving only a fret of shallow channels eaten into the sloping apron of keelrock on which it had rested. Perhaps the island had not been diseased after all, Telmon said, or perhaps it had cured itself by leaching minerals from the keelrock. He was intensely interested in how the world and its creatures worked. Although Yama spent more time in the library than his stepbrother, it was mostly to dream among the books and maps of finding his bloodline and his true parents. Telmon ransacked it in sporadic bursts to learn about what he had observed, and would as soon dissect the animals and birds he brought back from hunting expeditions as eat them. Like his father, he was interested in things for their intrinsic worth; if he had become Aedile, no doubt he would have filled the peel-house with a menagerie, and its gardens with exotic plants from the length of the world.
But the war had taken him away, and then he was dead.
Yama did not know if he remembered the floating island because of the basilisk, or the basilisk because of the floating island, but he had never forgotten either. Sometimes, he still dreamed that his people were living among the floating islands; once, while shut in the cell in the hive of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, he had dreamed that Derev had taken him to his people, carrying him in her arms while she rowed the air with strong white wings she had somehow grown.
And now he was eager to see for himself the archipelagoes that Eliphas promised would be floating in the sky beyond the edge of the world. He led the way across the stream, pushing through a strong current that swirled around his thighs, his waist, his chest, then throwing himself forward and swimming strongly toward the reed banks that stood along the far bank. He was filled with a sudden inexpressible joy, for it seemed that with Prefect Corin dead his life was his own, to do with it as he would in a world filled with wonders.
Yama hauled himself onto an unstable platform of reeds and rolled over onto his back and lay there in hot sunlight with water steaming from his wet clothes, watching as the others floundered through the stream toward him. Tamora held her sword above her head; Pandaras rode on the cook’s broad shoulders; Eliphas half-walked, half-swam, his hands parting the water in front of his narrow chest with a curiously formal paddling motion, his straw hat perched squarely on top of his head.
Yama shook water from the slick pages of the Puranas and glanced at the picture of Angel’s final, fatal ascension before putting the volume away. A dragonfly perched on a reed and with clawed forelegs preened veined wings as long as his arms while watching him sidelong with prismatic eyes. It flew off with a crisp whir as the others climbed up beside him. He wanted to go on at once, but the cook said that first he must set traps for crayfish.
“The Captain will bear down hard on me if I don’t, master. She does love crayfish fried in a bit of salt butter, and it will stop her fretting about the hurt done to the ship.”
The cook was a large, hairless man with pinkish-gray skin and a round, dolorous face. His name was Tibor. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope, and chain-smoked cigarettes he rolled from scraps of paper and strands of coarse black tobacco he kept in a plastic pouch. He absentmindedly snapped at passing insects, and when he spoke he passed his long red tongue over his black lips at the end of every sentence, as if relishing the taste of his words.
Yama, who had learned the trick as a child, helped Tibor weave crayfish traps from strips of reed. The traps were simple things, little baskets of close-woven reed stems with spines at the mouth which pointed inward; when the crayfish entered, they could not back through the spines to get out. Tibor’s big hands, each with his long fingers set around a sensitive pad, worked quickly and deftly, making two traps for every one of Yama’s. The cook baited the traps with scraps of smelly fat, and tied them at intervals along the margin of the stream.