Yama said, “Am I then of the dead?”
Derev walked about, pumping her elbows in and out as was her habit when agitated. Her white dress glimmered in the fight of the out-flung arm of the Galaxy. “You were very ill when I found you. You had been lying there all night. I took you to Beatrice and Osric: by the keel road and they saved your life, using old machines. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought you might die if I took you to Aeolis, or if I went to fetch the soldiers who were looking for you. Well, it is time you knew that my family have been watching over you. After all, Dr. Dismas found out about you and put you in peril. So might others, and you should be ready.”
Ananda said, “What are you saying, Derev? That you’re some kind of spy? On which side?”
Yama laughed. “Derev is no spy. She is anxious that I should receive my inheritance, such as it is.”
“My father and mother know, too. It isn’t just me. At first, I didn’t even know why we came here.”
Ananda had drunk most of the wine. He tipped the bottle to get the last swallow, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said gravely, “So you don’t want to sell rubbish to sailors and Mud Men, Derev? There’s no harm in that. It’s good that you want to keep to the old ways of your people.”
“The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead was disbanded long ago,” Yama said, looking at Derev.
“It was defeated,” Derev said, “but it endures. There are not many of us now. We mostly live in the mountains, or in Ys.”
“Why are you interested in me?”
“You’ve seen the picture,” Derev said. She had turned her back to Yama and Ananda, and was looking out across the swampy fields toward the ridge at the far side of the Breas’s valley. “I don’t know why you’re important. My father thinks that it is to do with the ship of the Ancients of Days. Beatrice and Osric know more, I think, but won’t tell even me all they know. They have many secrets.”
Ananda said, “The ship of the Ancients of Days passed downriver years before Yama was born.”
Derev ignored his interruption. “The Ancients of Days left to explore the neighboring galaxy long before the Preservers achieved godhead. They left more than five million years ago, while the stars of the Galaxy were still being moved into their present patterns. It was long before the Puranas were written, or the Eye of the Preservers was made, or Confluence was built.”
“So they claimed,” Ananda said. “But there is no word of them in the Puranas.”
“They returned to find all that they knew had passed into the Eye of the Preservers, and that they were the last of their kind. They landed at Ys, traveled downriver and sailed away from Confluence for the galaxy they had forsaken so long ago, but they left their ideas behind.”
“They turned innocent unfallen bloodlines against the word of the Preservers,” Ananda said. “They woke old technologies and created armies of monsters to spread their heresies.”
“And twenty years later you were born, Yama.”
“So were many others,” Ananda said. “All three of us here were born after the war began. Derev makes a fantasy.”
“Beatrice and Osric think that Yama’s bloodline is the one which built Confluence,” Derev told Ananda. “Perhaps the Preservers raised his bloodline up for just that task and then dispersed it, or perhaps as a reward it passed over with the Preservers when they fell into the Eye and vanished from the Universe. In any event, it disappeared from Confluence long ago. And yet Yama is here now, at a time of great danger.”
Ananda said, “The Preservers needed no help in creating Confluence. They spoke a word, and it was so.”
“It was a very long word,” Derev said. She lifted her arms above her head, and raised herself up on the points of her toes, as graceful as a dancer. She was remembering something she had learned long ago. She said, “It was longer than the words in the nuclei of our cells which define what we are. If all the different instructions for all the different bloodlines of Confluence were put together it would not be one hundredth of the length of the word which defined the initial conditions necessary for the creation of Confluence. That word was a set of instructions or rules. Yama’s bloodline was part of those instructions.”
Ananda said, “This is heresy, Derev. I’m a bad priest, but I know the sound of heresy. The Preservers needed no help in making Confluence.”
“Let her explain,” Yama said.
Ananda stood. “It’s lies,” he said flatly. “Her people deceive themselves that they know more of Confluence and the Preservers than is written in the Puranas. They spin elaborate sophistries, and delude themselves with dreams of hidden power, and they have snared you, Yama. Come with me. Don’t listen anymore. You leave for Ys tomorrow. Don’t be fooled into thinking that you are more than you are.”
Derev said, “We don’t pretend to understand what we remember. It is simply our duty. It was the duty of our bloodline since the foundation of Confluence, and my family are among the last to keep that duty. After the defeat of the department, my bloodline were scattered the length and breadth of the Great River. They became traders and merchants. My grandparents and my father wanted to be like them, but my father was called back.”
Yama said, “Sit down, Ananda. Please. Help me understand.”
Ananda said, “I don’t think you’re fully recovered, Yama. You’ve been ill. That part I believe. You have always wanted to see yourself as the center of the world, for you have no center to your own life. Derev is treating you cruelly, and I’ll hear no more. You’ve even forgotten about the execution. Let me tell you that Unprac died badly, screaming to the Preservers for aid with one breath, and cursing them and all who watched with the next. Lob was stoic. For all his faults, he died a man.”
“That is cruel, Ananda,” Yama said.
“It’s the truth. Farewell, friend Yama. If you must dream of glory, dream of being an ordinary soldier and of giving your life for the Preservers. All else is vanity.”
Yama did not try to stop Ananda. He knew how stubborn his friend could be. He watched as Ananda walked away beside the noisy river, a shadow against the blue-white arch of the Galaxy. Yama hoped that the young priest would at least turn and wave farewell.
But he did not.
Derev said, “You must believe me, Yama. At first I became your friend because it was my duty. But that quickly changed. I would not be here if it had not.”
Yama smiled. He could not stay angry at her; if she had deceived him, it was because she had believed that she was helping him.
They fell into each other’s arms and breathlessly kissed and rekissed. He felt her heat pressing through their clothes, the quick patter of her heart like a bird beating at the cage of her ribs. Her hair fell around his face like a trembling veiclass="underline" he might drown in its dry scent.
After a while, he said, “If you took me to Beatrice and Osric, and they nursed me back to health, then what of the ghost ship? Do they claim that, too?”
Derev’s eyes shone a handspan from his. She said, “I’d never heard of it before you told me your story. But there are many strange things on the river, Yama. It is always changing.”
“Yet always the same,” Yama said, remembering Caphis’s tattoo, the snake swallowing its own tail. He added, “You thought that the anchorite we saved from Lud and Lob was one of my, bloodline.”
“Perhaps he was the first generation, born just after the ship of the Ancients of Days arrived.”
“There may be hundreds of my bloodline by now, Derev. Thousands!”
“That’s what I think. I told Beatrice and Osric about the anchorite, but they didn’t seem to be very interested. Perhaps I was mistaken about him being of your bloodline, but I do not think I was. He gave you a coin. You should take it with you.”