“You will bring me luck, for it was by luck that you saved yourself from the phantom and then found me.”
With Yama seated on one side and Caphis wielding a leaf-shaped paddle on the other, the coracle was surprisingly stable, although it was so small that Yama’s knees pressed against Caphis’s bony shins. As the craft swung out into the current, Caphis paddled with one hand and filled a long-stemmed clay pipe with ordinary tobacco with the other, striking a flint against a bit of rough steel for a spark.
It was a bright clear afternoon, with a gentle wind that barely ruffled the surface of the river. There was no sign of the pinnace; no ships at all, only the little coracles of the fisherfolk scattered across the broad river between shore and misty horizon. As Caphis said, the river bore all away. For a while, Yama could believe that none of his adventures had happened, that his life could return to its normal routines.
Caphis squinted at the sun, wet a finger and held it up to the wind, then drove his craft swiftly between the scattered tops of young banyans (Yama thought of the lone frog in Caphis’s story, clinging to the single leaf above the universal flood, bravely calling but finding only death, and in death, transfiguration).
As the sun fell toward the distant peaks of the Rim Mountains, Yama and Caphis worked trotlines strung between bending poles anchored in the bottom of the gravel bank.
Caphis gave Yama a sticky, odorless ointment to rub on his shoulders and arms to protect his skin from sunburn. Yama soon fell into an unthinking rhythm, hauling up lines, rebaiting hooks with bloodworms and dropping them back. Most of the hooks were empty, but gradually a pile of small silver fish accumulated in the well of the coracle, frantically jinking in the shallow puddle there or lying still, their gill flaps pulsing like blood-red flowers as they drowned in air.
Caphis asked forgiveness for each fish he caught. The fisherfolk believed that the world was packed with spirits which controlled everything from the weather to the flowering of the least of the epiphytic plants of the banyan shoals. Their days were spent in endless negotiations with these spirits to ensure that the world continued its seamless untroubled spinning out.
At last Caphis declared himself satisfied with the day’s catch. He gutted a pentad of fingerlings, stripped the fillets of pale muscle from their backbones, and gave half to Yama, together with a handful of fleshy leaves.
The fillets of fish were juicy; chewed, the leaves tasted of sweet limes and quenched Yama’s thirst. Following Caphis’s example, he spat the leaf pulp overboard, and tiny fish promptly swarmed around this prize as it sank through the clear dark water.
Caphis picked up his paddle and the coracle skimmed across the water toward a bend of the stony shore, where cliffs carved and socketed with empty tombs rose from a broad pale beach.
“There’s an old road that leads along the shore to Aeolis,” Caphis told Yama. “It will take you the rest of this day, and a little of the next, I reckon.”
“If you would take me directly to Aeolis, I can promise you a fine reward. It is little enough in return for your life.”
“We do not go there unless we must, and never after nightfall. You saved my life, and so it is always in your care. Would you risk it so quickly, by taking me into the jaws of the Mud People? I do not think you would be so cruel. I have my family to consider. They’ll be watching for me this night, and I don’t want to worry them further.”
Caphis grounded his frail craft in the shallows a little way from the shore. He had never set foot on land, he said, and he wasn’t about to start now. He looked at Yama and said, “Don’t walk after dark, young master. Find shelter before the sun goes down and stick to it until first light. Then you’ll be all right. There are ghouls out there, and they like a bit of live meat on occasion.”
Yama knew about the ghouls. He and Telmon had once hidden from a ghoul on one of their expeditions into the foothills of the City of the Dead. He remembered the way the man-shaped creature’s pale skin had glimmered in the twilight like wet muscle, and how frightened he had been as it stooped this way and that, and the stench it had left. He said, “I will be careful.”
Caphis said, “Take this. No use against ghouls, but I hear tell there are plenty of coneys on the shore. Some of us hunt them, but not me.”
It was a small knife carved from a flake of obsidian. Its hilt was wrapped with twine, and its exfoliated edge was as sharp as a razor.
“I reckon you can look after your own self, young master, but maybe a time will come when you need help. Then my family will remember that you helped me. Do you recall what I said about the river?”
“Everything comes around again.”
Caphis nodded, and touched the tattoo of the self-engulfing snake on his shoulder. “You had a good teacher. You know how to pay attention.”
Yama slid from the tipping coracle and stood knee-deep in ooze and brown water. “I will not forget,” he said.
“Choose carefully where you camp this night,” Caphis said. “Ghouls are bad, but ghosts are worse. We see their lights sometimes, shining softly in the ruins.”
Then he pushed away from the shallows and the coracle waltzed into the current as he dug the water with his leaf-shaped paddle. By the time Yama had waded to shore, the coracle was already far off, a black speck on the shining plane of the river, making a long, curved path toward a raft of banyan islands far from shore.
Chapter Nine
The Knife
The shore was made of deep, soft drifts of white shell fragments; it was not until Yama began to climb the worn stone stair that zigzagged up the face of the carved cliff that he remembered how difficult it was to walk on firm ground, where each step sent a little shock up the ladder of the spine.
At the first turn of the stair, a spring welled inside a trough cut from the native stone. Yama knelt on the mossy ground by the trough and drank clear sweet water until his belly sloshed, knowing that there would be little chance of finding any potable water in the City of the Dead. Only when he stood did he notice that someone else had drunk there recently—no, to judge by the overlapping footprints in the soft red moss, it had been two people.
Lud and Lob. They had also escaped Dr. Dismas. Yama had tucked the obsidian knife into his belt under the flap of his shirt, snug against the small of his back. He touched the handle for reassurance before he continued his ascent.
An ancient road ran close to the edge of the cliff, its flat pavement, splashed with the yellow and gray blotches of lichens, so wide that twenty men could have ridden abreast along it. Beyond, the alkaline, shaley land shimmered in the level light of the late-afternoon sun. Tombs stood everywhere, casting long shadows toward the river. This was the Silent Quarter, which Yama had rarely visited—he and Telmon preferred the ancient tombs of the foothills beyond the Breas, where aspects could be wakened and the flora and fauna was richer. Compared to the sumptuously decorated mausoleums of the older parts of the City of the Dead, the tombs here were poor things, mostly no more than low boxes with domed roofs, although here and there memorial steles and columns rose amongst them, and a few larger tombs stood on artificial stepped mounds, guarded by statues that watched the river with stony eyes. One of these was as big as the peel-house, half hidden by a small wood of yews grown wild and twisted.
In all the desiccated landscape nothing stirred except for a lammergeyer high in the deep blue sky, riding a thermal on outspread wings.
When Yama was satisfied that he was not about to be ambushed, he set off down the road toward the distant smudge that must surely be Aeolis, halfway toward the vanishing point where the Rim Mountains and the misty horizon of the far-side seemed to converge.