Stitch after tiny stitch. It would be the petal of a flower. One of the girls had lightly marked the outline for me with a charred twig. The petal was already beginning to take shape.
Gods can deceive. One may speak vaguely or in riddles, saying what means one thing but also another. Or one can collude with a human. Let the human declare himself the god. The god will provide any necessary display of godly power—including, perhaps, an unnaturally long life for that human. After a sufficiently convincing demonstration, people will believe all but the rankest lie.
The blue thread grew short. I tied it off on the back side of the design and unwound a new length.
It’s an old trick, but one that can only work for so long. The god in question must control or destroy any other gods who might betray his secret, and must prevent clever humans from discovering the truth.
I finished one petal and began the next. Around me women sang or chatted, spun or wove. In the silences between words or verses I heard the sound of stone grinding against stone, one of the girls milling barley for our bread next morning. None of them spoke to me. None of them ever did, except for simple instructions. No one seemed to truly acknowledge my existence. Except Ant.
Flower is its name, it whispered when I had started on the third petal. Cornflower. That blue thing there. It paused. Can you speak of a thing without naming it?
It seemed the urge to speak was beyond me, or knowledge of how to do it was lost with those memories that would have told me who I was and what I was doing here.
But Ant didn’t seem to expect an answer. The rapids you see are the one stretch of river that is impassable to boats.
A woman beside me set down her spinning, raised her hand to shade her eyes. “It’s a boat!”
We all stopped, except the girl grinding the barley, and turned to look upstream, beyond the beginning of the rapids. The boat was long and flat, nearly a raft with side rails and two small huts. Three quarters of its deck was covered with bales and baskets.
“We need salt,” said Essferend. She rose. “Who’ll go with me?” Silence. “Itet.”
For the first time in all the weeks I could remember, I was surprised, a distant and unfamiliar feeling that took me a breath to identify. But I had been in the house long enough to know that Essferend’s orders were to be obeyed. I put away my work and followed her down the steps, around our hill and down to the river Schael.
By the time we reached the riverbank the boat had grounded at the head of the rapids. A group of people and their luggage stood on the bank, confronted by Lord Sun’s men, who wore knives at their belts, and bows slung behind their shoulders.
“It’s my personal belongings,” one of the foreigners was saying to them. She was about twelve or thirteen and wore a long, dark cloak which she held closed against the spring wind. “You know, personal.” She seemed confident and slightly exasperated.
“We search everything,” said the leader of Lord Sun’s men, placing his hand deliberately on his knife
A woman in the girl’s party spoke. “We have nothing of interest to you. And we’ve brought the fee and will say the prayers. And see here.” She pulled a pouch from her belt, pointedly avoiding the stone blade at her waist. She shook the pouch open. Gold gleamed inside. “A little extra for your efforts.”
The man’s fingers moved just slightly away from his blade. He would take the offer, let the girl’s luggage through unsearched.
At that moment the wind gusted hard, and the girl’s cloak blew out behind her, billowing wide. Down its center was a black stripe, and on either side were wings of brown bordered in black with a row of blue circles inside it, and outside that another border of yellow. It streamed and fluttered in the wind, seemingly alive.
Beside me Essferend made a distressed noise and turned her face away. Lord Sun’s men drew their knives and stepped forward. The girl’s party drew their own weapons and closed defensively around her.
“It’s only a butterfly!” cried the girl.
The woman who had offered the gold said, “We have safe passage, guaranteed by the Schael and the Nalendar.”
The leader of Lord Sun’s men shrugged without abandoning his threatening posture. “So?” He stepped forward. “I’ll see what’s in those baskets.”
The girl made an exasperated noise. She bent and pulled a rope aside, yanked the lid off a basket. Curious, I stepped forward to see.
More butterflies. Dozens of them, copper inlaid with gold, wood inlaid with shell. Shining black obsidian. Tiny as a fingertip, large as my two hands spread out, every size in between.
“I,” said the foreign girl, “am the youngest daughter of the matriarch of the Zuxugo. If you hurt me you’ll have a war on your hands. I’m on my way to the Nalendar’s school, to learn reckoning and merchantry. This...,” she gestured to the basket of butterflies. “Is the fee for my schooling, very specifically requested by the Nalendar. So you see I couldn’t have possibly left it behind. And you see what sort of trouble you’ll be in if you threaten me.”
“We have never been defeated in war,” said Lord Sun’s man, “Nor do I care about the Nalendar. Or the Schael for that matter.”
Yes! said the ant happily, almost a squeak. Threaten someone to whom the Schael has, against her natural inclination, granted safe passage! One step forward, one step forward!
Lord Sun’s man took one step forward.
Time froze. I was drowning, gasping, freezing. The scene before me took on a brown-green tinge, as though I saw it through cold river water. My lungs and throat convulsed, and I cried out, “Hawk!” A brown hawk plummeted to the ground before me, the bird I had seen in Lord Sun’s house weeks, months ago.
My mouth moved without my willing it, and I spoke. “The Nalendar has promised these people and their goods safe passage. I have certain agreements with the Nalendar regarding them.”
“You’ve broken agreements before, River Schael,” said the hawk in a grating, screaming voice. “What is the Nalendar to you?”
“And what are you to me, little bird?” I could feel the river’s anger, an icy flood inside me.
“Is she here?” demanded the hawk.
“I neither know nor care.”
The man who purported to be Lord Sun stepped before me—I didn’t know when he had arrived, all my attention was for the river that seemed to have filled my body and mind. “Mighty and beautiful Schael!” he said, his voice sonorous and pacifying. “Let us come to an agreement that will satisfy us both.” The hawk made an angry noise but it must have seen the wisdom of the man’s course, and said nothing else.
I—the river—made no answer. The man seemed to take this for an affirmative. He walked over to his own men. “Let them go. They’re not to spend the night here. They can take the next boat downstream. And they can find another route home.” He came back to me then, and the hawk shot up into the sky. “Is that satisfactory?” he asked.
A wordless sound bubbled up out of my throat, and suddenly the river was gone. I collapsed shivering to the ground.
“Is she alive?” asked the man, his voice surprised. “I’ve never known a human to survive speaking for the Schael.”
To my own surprise I opened my mouth and let out a croaking, “I’m alive.”
“And speaking!” The man seemed pleased.
“What....” I swallowed. “What were those things in the basket?”
“Nothing!” he said. “Nothing at all. Take her home, Essferend. Put her to bed and give her warm milk with honey. She’ll feel better in the morning.”