Yama ached in every muscle. He drew off his wet shirt and trousers and hung them on a branch, then set to the exercises Sergeant Rhodean had taught him until at last his joints and muscles loosened. He drank handfuls of cold water, startling shoals of fairy shrimp that scattered from his shadow, and splashed water on his face until his skin tingled with racing blood.
Yama had come ashore on the side of the banyan that faced toward the far side of the river. He slung his damp clothes over his shoulder and, naked, set off through the thickets of the tree, at first following the broad limb and then, when it joined another and bent upward into the high, sun-speckled canopy, scrambling through a tangle of lesser branches. There was always still, black water somewhere beneath the random lattice of branches and prop roots. Tiny hummingbirds, clad in electric blues and emerald greens, as if enameled by the most skillful of artists, darted from flower to flower. When Yama blundered through curtains of leaves, clouds of blackflies rose up and got in his eyes and mouth.
At last, he glimpsed blue sky through a fall of green vines. He parted the soft, jointed stems and stepped through them onto a sloping spit of mossy ground, where a round coracle of the kind used by the fisherfolk was drawn up on the miniature shore.
The blackened, upturned shell of a snapping turtle held the ashes of a small fire, still warm when Yama sifted them through his fingers. Yama drew on his damp shirt and trousers and called out, but no one answered his call. He cast around and quickly found a winding path leading away from the spit.
And a moment later found the fisherman, tangled in a crude net of black threads just beyond the second bend.
The threads were the kind that Amnan used to catch bats and birds, resin fibers as strong as steel covered with thousands of tiny blisters that exuded a strong glue at a touch.
The threads had partly collapsed when the fisherman had blundered into them, and he hung like a corpse in an unraveling shroud, one arm caught above his head, the other bound tightly to his side.
He did not seem surprised to see Yama. He said, in a quiet, hoarse voice, “Kill me quick. Have mercy.”
“I was hoping for rescue,” Yama said.
The fisherman stared at him. He wore only a breechclout, and his pale skin was blotched with islands of pale green.
Black hair hung in greasy tangles around his broad, chinless froggy face. His wide mouth hung open, showing rows of tiny triangular teeth. He had watery, protuberant eyes, and a transparent membrane flicked over their balls three times before he said, “You are not one of the Mud People.”
“I come from Aeolis. My father is the Aedile.”
“The Mud People think they know the river. It’s true they can swim a bit, but they’re greedy, and pollute her waters.”
“One of them seems to have caught you.”
“You’re a merchant’s son, perhaps. We have dealings with them, for flints and steel. No, don’t come close, or you’ll be caught too. There is only one way to free me, and I don’t think you carry it.”
“I know how the threads work,” Yama said, “and I am sorry that I do not have what is needed to set you free. I do not even have a knife.”
“Even steel will not cut them. Leave me. I’m a dead man, fit only to fill the bellies of the Mud People. What are you doing?”
Yama had discovered that the surface of the path was a spongy thatch of wiry roots, fallen leaves and the tangled filaments of epiphytic lichens. He lay on his belly and pushed his arm all the way through the thick thatch until his fingers touched water. He looked at the fisherman and said, “I have seen your people use baited traps to catch fish. Do you have one on your coracle? And I will need some twine or rope, too.”
While Yama worked, the fisherman, whose name was Caphis, told him that he had blundered into the sticky web just after dawn, while searching for the eggs of a species of coot which nested in the hearts of banyan thickets. “The eggs are good to eat,” Caphis said, “but not worth dying for.”
Caphis had put into the banyan shoal last night. He had seen a great battle, he explained, and had thought it prudent to take shelter. “So I am doubly a fool.”
While the fisherman talked, Yama cut away a section of lichenous thatch and lashed the trap upright to a prop root.
He had to use the blade of the fisherman’s short spear to cut the twine, and several times sliced his palm. He sucked at the shallow cuts before starting to replace the thatch. It was in the sharp bend of the path; anyone hurrying down it would have to step there to make the turn.
He said, “Did you see much of the battle?”
“A big ship caught fire. And then the small boat which has been lying offshore of the Mud People’s city for three days must have found an enemy, because it started firing into the dark.”
“But there was another ship—it was huge and glowing, and melted into fog . . .”
The fisherman considered this, and said at last, “I turned for shelter once the firing started, as anyone with any sense would. You saw a third ship? Well—perhaps you were closer than I and I expect that you saw more than you wanted to.”
“Well, that is true enough.” Yama stood, leaning on the stout shaft of the spear.
“The river carries all away, if you let it. That’s our view. What’s done one day is gone the next, and there’s a new start. He might not come today, or even tomorrow. You will not wait that long. You will take the coracle and leave me to the fate I deserve.”
“My father outlawed this.”
“They are a devious people, the Mud People.” Sunlight splashed through the broad leaves of the banyan, shining on the fisherman’s face. Caphis squinted and added, “If you could fetch water, it would be a blessing.”
Yama found a resin mug in the coracle. He was dipping it into the water at the edge of the mossy spit when he saw a little boat making its way toward the island. It was a skiff, rowed by a single man. By the time Yama had climbed into a crotch of the banyan, hidden amongst rustling leaves high above the spit, the skiff was edging through the slick of feeder roots that ringed the banyan.
Yama recognized the man. Grog, or Greg. One of the bachelor laborers who tended the mussel beds at the mouth of the Breas. He was heavy and slow, and wore only a filthy kilt.
The gray skin of his shoulders and back was dappled with a purple rash, the precursor of the skin canker which affected those Amnan who worked too long in sunlight.
Yama watched, his mouth dry and his heart beating quickly, as the man tied up his boat and examined the coracle and the cold ashes in the turtle shell. He urinated at the edge of the water for what seemed a very long time, then set off along the path.
A moment later, while Yama was climbing down from his hiding place, made clumsy because he dared not let go of the fisherman’s short spear, someone, the man or the fisherman, cried out. It startled two white herons which had been perching amongst the topmost branches of the banyan; the birds rose up into the air and flapped away as Yama crept down the path, clutching the spear with both hands.
There was a tremendous shaking in the leaves at the bend of the path. The man was floundering hip-deep amongst the broken thatch which Yama had used to conceal the trap. The big trap was wide-mouthed and two spans long, tapering to a blunt point. It was woven from pliable young prop roots, and bamboo spikes had been fastened on the inside, pointing downward, so that when a fish entered to get at the bait it could not back out. These spikes had dug into the flesh of the man’s leg when he had tried to pull free, and he was bleeding hard and grunting with pain as he pushed down with his hands like a man trying to work off a particularly tight boot. He did not see Yama until the point of the spear pricked the fat folds of speckled skin at the back of his neck.