After Yama had used the spray which dissolved the threads’ glue, Caphis wanted to kill the man who would have killed and eaten him, but Yama kept hold of the spear, and at last Caphis satisfied himself by tying the man’s thumbs together behind his back and leaving him there, with his leg still in the trap.
The man started to shout as soon as they were out of sight.
“I gave, you the stuff, didn’t I? I didn’t mean no harm. Let me go, master! Let me go and I’ll say nothing! I swear it!”
He was still shouting when Caphis and Yama put out from the banyan.
The fisherman’s scrawny shanks were so long that his knees jutted above the crown of his head as he squatted in the coracle. He paddled with slow, deliberate strokes. The threads of the trap had left a hundred red weals across the mottled yellow skin of his chest. He said that once he had warmed up his blood he would take Yama across to the shore.
“That is, if you don’t mind helping me with my night lines.”
“You could take me to Aeolis. It is not far.”
Caphis nodded. “That’s true enough, but it would take me all day to haul against the current. Some of us go there to trade, and that’s where I got that fine spear-point last year. But we never leave our boats when we go there, because it is a wicked town!”
Yama said, “It is where I live. You have nothing to fear. Even if the man gets free, he would be burnt for trying to murder you.”
“Perhaps. But then his family would, make a vendetta against my family. That is how it is.” Caphis studied Yama, and said at last, “You’ll help me with my lines, and I’ll take you to the shore. You can walk more quickly to your home than I can row. But you’ll need some breakfast before you can work, I reckon.”
They landed at the edge of a solitary grandfather banyan half a league downstream. Caphis built a fire of dried moss in the upturned turtle shell and boiled up tea in the resmi mug, using friable strips of the bark of a twiggy bush that grew, he said, high up in the tangled tops of the banyans.
When the tea started to boil he threw in some flat seeds that made it froth, and handed Yama the mug.
The tea was bitter, but after the first sip Yama felt it warm his blood, and he quickly drained the mug. He sat by the fire, chewing on a strip of dried fish, while Caphis moved about the hummocky moss of the little clearing where they had landed. With his long legs and short barrel of a body, and his slow, deliberate, flatfooted steps, the fisherman looked something like a heron. The toes of his feet were webbed, and the hooked claws on his big toes and spurs on his heels helped him climb the banyan’s smooth, interlaced branches.
He collected seeds and lichens and a particular kind of moss, and dug fat beetle grubs from rotten wood and ate them at once, spitting out the heads.
All anyone could want could be found in the banyans, Caphis told Yama. The fisherfolk pounded the leaves to make a fibrous pulp from which they wove their clothes. Their traps and the ribs of their coracles were made from young prop roots, and the hulls were woven from strips of bark varnished with a distillation of the tree’s sap. The kernels of banyan fruit, which set all through the year, could be ground into flour. Poison used to stun fish was extracted from the skin of a particular kind of frog that lived in the tiny ponds cupped within the living vases of bromeliads. A hundred kinds of fish swarmed around the feeder roots, and a thousand kinds of plants grew on the branches; all had their uses, and their own tutelary spirits which had to be individually appeased.
“There’s hardly anything we lack, except metals and tobacco, which is why we trade with you land folk. Otherwise we’re as free as the fish, and always have been. We’ve never risen above our animal selves since the Preservers gave us the banyans as our province, and that is the excuse the Mud People use when they hunt us. But we’re an old folk, and we’ve seen much, and we have long memories. Everything comes to the river, we say, and generally that’s true.”
Caphis had a tattoo on the ball of his left shoulder, a snake done in black and red that curled around so that it could swallow its own tail. He touched the skin beneath this tattoo with the claw of his thumb and said, “Even the river comes to its own self.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, where do you think the river goes, when it falls over the edge of the world? It swallows its own self and returns to its beginning, and so renews itself. That’s how the Preservers made the world, and we, who were here from the first, remember how it was. Lately, things are changing. Year by year the river grows less. Perhaps the river no longer bites its own tail, but if that is so I cannot say where it goes instead.”
“Do you—your people, do they remember the Preservers?”
Caphis’s eyes filmed over. His voice took on a singsong lilt. “Before the Preservers, the Universe was a plain of ice. The Preservers brought light that melted the ice and woke the seeds of the banyans which were trapped there. The first men were made of wood, carved from a banyan tree so huge that it was a world in itself, standing in the universe of water and light. But the men of wood showed their backs to the Preservers, and did not respect animals or even themselves, and destroyed so much of the world-tree that the Preservers raised a great flood. It rained for forty days and forty nights, and the waters rose through the roots of the banyan and rose through the branches until only the youngest leaves showed above the flood, and at last even these were submerged. All of the creatures of the world-tree perished in the flood except for a frog and a heron. The frog clung to the last leaf which showed above the flood and called to its own kind, but the heron heard its call and stooped down and ate it.”
“Well, the Preservers, saw this, and the frog grew within the heron’s stomach until it split open its captor, and stepped out, neither frog nor heron but a new creature which had taken something from both its parents. It was the first of our kind, and just as it was neither frog nor heron, neither was it man or woman. At once the flood receded. The new creature lay down on a smooth mudbank and fell asleep. And while it slept, the Preservers dismembered it, and from its ribs fifty others were made, and these were men and women of the first tribe of my people. The Preservers breathed on them and clouded their minds, so that unlike the men of wood they would not challenge or be disrespectful to their creators. But that was long ago, and in another place. You, if you don’t mind me saying so, look as if your bloodline climbed down from the trees.”
“I was born on the river, like you.”
Caphis clacked his wide flat lower jaw—it was the way the fisherfolk laughed. “Sometime I’d like to hear that story. But now we should set to. The day does not grow younger, and there is work to do. It is likely that the Mud Man will escape. We should have killed him. He would bite off his own leg, if he thought that would help him escape. The Mud People are treacherous and full of tricks—that is how they are able to catch us, we who are more clever than they, as long as our blood is warmed. That is why they generally hunt us at night. I was caught because my blood had the night chill, you see. It made me slow and stupid, but now I am warm, and I know what I must do.”
Caphis pissed on the fire to extinguish it, packed away the cup and the turtle shell beneath the narrow bench which circled the rim of the coracle, and declared himself ready.