Dr. Dismas pulled out his pistol. “It would be well if your boat put some distance between their miserable skiff. I’m not sure of the range of this thing.”
Enobarbus nodded. “It’s probably for the best,” he said.
“They might guess, and they’ll certainly talk.”
“You overestimate them,” Dr. Dismas said. “They deserve to die because they endangered my plans by their stupidity. Besides, I cannot stand boorishness, and I have been exiled amongst these uncivilized creatures for an entire year. This will be a catharsis.”
“I’ll hear no more. Kill them cleanly, and do not seek to justify yourself.”
Enobarbus turned to give his orders, and at that moment one of the sailors perched in the branches of the banyan to which the pinnace was moored cried out.
“Sail! Sail ahead!”
“Thirty degrees off the starboard bow,” his mate added. “Half a league and bearing down hard.”
Enobarbus gave his orders without missing a beat. “Cut the mooring ropes fore and aft. Dercetas and Diomedes, to your posts at once! Ready the rowers, push off on my word! I want thirty beats a minute from you lads, and no slacking or we’re dead men.”
In the midst of the sudden rush of activity, as oars were raised and sailors hacked at mooring lines, Yama saw his opportunity. Dr. Dismas made a grab for him, but was too slow. Yama vaulted the rail and landed hard in the well of the skiff.
“Row!” Yama yelled to Lob and Lud. “Row for your lives!”
“Catch hold of him!” Dr. Dismas shouted from above. “Catch him and make sure you don’t let go!”
Lud started forward. “It’s for your own good, little fish,” he said.
Yama dodged Lud’s clumsy swipe and retreated to the stern of the little skiff. “He wants to kill you!”
“Get him, you fools,” Dr. Dismas said.
Yama grabbed hold of the sides of the skiff and rocked it from side to side, but Lud stood foursquare. He grinned.
“That won’t help, little fish. Keep still, and maybe I won’t have to hurt you.”
“Hurt him anyway,” Lob said.
Yama picked up the alcohol lantern and dashed it into the well of the skiff. Instantly, translucent blue flames licked up. Lud reared backward, and the skiff pitched violently.
Unbearable heat beat at Yama’s face; he took a deep breath and dived into the river.
He swam as far as he could before he came up and drew a gulp of air that burned all the way down the inverted trees of his lungs. He pulled at the fastenings of his heavy boots and kicked them off.
The skiff was drifting away from the side of the pinnace.
Flames flickered brightly in its well. Lud and Lob were trying to beat out the fire with their shirts. Sailors threw ropes down the side of the pinnace and shouted to them to give it up and come aboard. A tremendous glow was growing brighter and brighter beyond the pinnace, turning everything into a shadow of its own self. The cannon in the prow of the pinnace spoke: a crisp rattling burst, and then another.
Yama swam as hard as he could, and when he finally turned to float on his back, breathing hard, the whole scene was spread before him. The pinnace was sliding away from the banyan tree, leaving the burning skiff behind. A great glowing ship was bearing down toward the pinnace. She was a narrow-hulled frigate, her three masts crowded with square sails, and every part of her shone with cold fire. The pinnace’s cannon spoke again, and there was a crackling of rifle fire. And then Dr. Dismas fired his pistol, and for an instant a narrow lance of red fire split the night.
Chapter Eight
The Fisherman
Dr. Dismas’s shot must have missed the glowing frigate, for it bore down on the pinnace relentlessly. The bristling oars of the pinnace set a steady, rapid beat as it left the burning skiff behind and began to turn toward its pursuer.
Yama saw that Enobarbus was planning to come around to the near side of the frigate, to pass beneath its cannons and rake its sides with her own guns, but before he could complete his maneuver the frigate swung about like a leaf blown by the wind. In a moment, its bow loomed above the stricken pinnace. The pinnace’s cannon hammered defiantly, and Yama heard someone cry out.
But at the instant the frigate struck the pinnace, it dissolved into a spreading mist of white light. Yama backstroked in the cold water, watching as the pinnace was engulfed by a globe of white fog that boiled up higher than the out-flung arm of the Galaxy. A point of violet light shot up from this spreading bank of luminous fog, rising into the night sky until it had vanished from sight.
Yama did not stop to wonder at this miracle, for he knew that Enobarbus would start searching for him as soon as the pinnace had escaped the fog. He turned in the water and began to swim. Although he aimed for the dark, distant shore, he quickly found himself in a swift current that took him amongst a scattered shoal of banyans. They were rooted in a gravel bank that at times Yama could graze with his toes; if he had been as tall as the Aedile he could have stood with his head clear of the swiftly running water.
At first, the banyans were no more than handfuls of broad, glossy leaves that stood stiffly above the water, but the current carried Yama deeper into a maze of wide channels between stands of bigger trees. Here, they rose in dense thickets above prop roots flexed in low arches. The prop roots were fringed by tangled mats of feeder roots alive with schools of tiny fish that flashed red or green dots of luminescence as they darted away from Yama.
With the last of his strength, Yama swam toward one of the largest of the banyans as he was swept past it. The cold water had stolen all feeling from his limbs and the muscles of his shoulders and arms were tender with exhaustion. He threw himself into floating nets of feeder roots and, scraping past strings of clams and bearded mussels, dragged himself onto a smooth horizontal trunk, and lay gasping like a fish that had just learned the trick of breathing air.
Yama was too cold and wet and scared to sleep, and something in the tangled thickets of the tree had set up a thin, regular piping, like the fretting of a sick baby. He sat with his back against an arched root and watched the uppermost arm of the Galaxy set beyond the bank of faintly luminescent fog that had spread for leagues across the black river. Somewhere in the fog was Enobarbus’s pinnace, lost, blinded. By what strange allies, or stranger coincidence? The top of the wide fog bank seethed like boiling milk; Yama watched the black sky above it for the return of the machine’s violet spark. Answered prayers, he thought, and shivered.
He dozed and woke, and dozed again, and jerked awake from a vivid dream of standing on the flying bridge of the ghostly frigate as it bore down on the pinnace. The frigate was crewed neither by men nor even by ghosts or revenants, but by a crowd of restless lights that responded to his unspoken commands with quick unquestioning intelligence. Zakiel had taught him that although dreams were usually stitched from fragments of daily experience, sometimes they were more, portents of the future or riddles whose answers were keys to the conduct of the dreamer’s life. Yama did not know if this dream was of the first or second kind, let alone what it might mean, but when he woke it left him with a clinging horror, as if his every action might somehow be magnified, with terrible consequences.
The Galaxy had set, and dawn touched the flood of the river with flat gray fight. The bank of fog was gone; there was no sign of the pinnace. Yama dozed again, and woke with sunlight dancing on his face, filtered through the restless leaves of the banyan. He found himself on a wide limb that gently sloped up from the water and ran straight as an old road into the dense leafy tangles of the banyan’s heal, crossed by arching roots and lesser branches that dropped prop roots straight down into the water. The banyan’s glossy leaves hung everywhere like the endlessly deep folds of a ragged green cloak, and the bark of its limbs, smoothly wrinkled as skin, was colonized by lichens that hung like curtains of gray lace, the green barrels of bromeliads, and the scarlet and gold and pure white blossoms of epiphytic orchids.