Yama and Prefect Corin had made camp under a group of fig trees beside the road. A little spring rose amongst the trees, a gush of clear water that fell from the gaping mouth of a stone carved with the likeness of a fierce, bearded face into a shallow pool curbed with flat rocks. The road had turned away from the Great River, climbing a switchback of low, gentle hills dotted with creosote scrub and clumps of saw-toothed palmettos as it rose toward the pass.
The priest who was in charge of the palmers came over to talk with Prefect Corin. His group was from a city a thousand leagues downriver. They had been traveling for half a year, first by a merchant ship and then by foot after the ship had been laid up for repairs after having been attacked by water bandits. The palmers were archivists on their way to the Palace of the Memory of the People, to tell into the records the stories of all those who had died in their city in the last ten years, and to ask for guidance from the prognosticators.
The priest was a large smooth-skinned man by the name of Belarius. He had a ready smile and a habit of mopping sweat from his bare scalp and the fat folds of skin at the back of his neck with a square of cloth. His smooth, chrome-yellow skin shone like butter. He offered Prefect Corin a cigarette and was not offended when his offer was refused, and without prompting started to talk about the risks of traveling by foot. He had heard that there were roving bands of deserters abroad in the land, in addition to the usual bandits.
“Near the battlelines, perhaps,” Prefect Corin said. “Not this far upriver.” He drew on his pipe and stared judiciously at the fat priest. “Are you armed?”
Belarius smiled—his smile was as wide as a frog’s, and Yama thought that he could probably hold a whole watermelon slice in his mouth. The priest said, “We are palmers, not soldiers.”
“But you have knives to prepare your food, machetes to cut firewood, that kind of thing?”
“0h, yes.”
“A large group like yours need not worry. It is people traveling alone, or by two or by three, who are vulnerable.”
Belarius mopped at his scalp. His smile grew wider. He said eagerly, “And you have seen nothing?”
“But for the chattering of this boy, it has been a quiet journey.”
Yama smarted at Prefect Corin’s remark, but said nothing. Belarius smoked his cigarette—it smelt overpoweringly of cloves—and gave a rambling account of exactly how the ship on which he had hoped to take his charges all the way to Ys had been ambushed one night by water bandits in a decad of small skiffs. The bandits had been beaten off when the ship’s captain had ordered pitch spread on the water and set on fire.
“Our ship put every man to the oars and rowed free of the flames,” Belarius said, “but the bandits were consumed.”
Prefect Corin listened, but made no comment.
Belarius said, “The bandits fired chainshot. It damaged the mast and rigging and struck the hull at the waterline. We were taking on water in several places, and so we limped to the nearest port. My charges did not want to wait out the repairs, so we walked on. The ship will meet us at Ys, when we have finished our business there. A ghoul has been following us the past week, but that is the only trouble we have had. Such are the times, when the road is safer than the Great River.”
After Belarius had filled his waterskin from the spring and taken his leave, Yama said, “You do not like him.”
Prefect Corin considered this, then said in a measured tone, “I do not like veiled insults about the competence of the Department. If the Great River is no longer safe, it is because of the war, and those who travel on it should take suitable precautions and travel in convoy. Not only that, but our well-upholstered priest did not hire any bodyguards as escort on the road, which would have been prudent, and it would have been more prudent to have waited until the ship was repaired than to have gone forward on foot. I rather think that he has told us only half of the story. Either he does not have the money to hire men or to pay for repairs to the ship, or he is willing to risk the lives of his charges to make extra profit. And he put aboard with a bravado captain, which says little for his judgment. If the ship was able to outdistance the fire it set on the water, then it could have outdistanced the bandits. Often flight is better than fight.”
“If less honorable.”
“There is no honor in needless fighting. The captain could have destroyed his ship as well as the bandits with his trick.”
“Will we stay with these people?”
“Their singing will wake every bandit in a hundred leagues,” Prefect Corin said. “And if there are any bandits, then they will be attracted to the larger group rather than to the lesser.”
Chapter Fourteen
The Bandits
The next day, Yama and Prefect Corin drew ahead of the group of palmers, but never so far ahead that the dust cloud the palmers raised was lost from sight. That night, the palmers caught up with them and camped nearby, and Belarius came over and talked to Prefect Corin about the day’s journey for the length of time it took him to smoke two of his clove-flavored cigarettes. The palmers’ songs sounded clear and strong in the quiet evening.
When Prefect Corin woke Yama from a deep sleep it was past midnight, and the fire was no more than warm ashes.
They had camped by a square tomb covered in the scrambling thorny canes of roses, on top of a bluff that overlooked the Great River. He was leaning on his staff. Behind him, the white roses glimmered like ghosts of their own selves. Their strong scent filled the air.
“Something bad nearby,” Prefect Corin said in a quiet voice. Galaxy light put a spark in each of his close-set eyes. “Take up your knife and come with me.”
Yama whispered, “What is it?”
“Perhaps nothing. We will see.”
They crossed the road and circled the palmers’ camp, which had been pitched in a grove of eucalyptus. Low cliffs loomed above. The openings of tombs carved into the rock were like staggered rows of hollow eyes: a hiding place for an army. Yama heard nothing but the rustle of eucalyptus leaves, and, far off, the screech of a hunting owl. In the camp, one of the palmers groaned in his sleep. Then the wind shifted, and Yama caught a faint, foul odor above the medicinal tang of the eucalyptus.
Prefect Corin pointed toward the camp with his staff and moved forward, dry leaves crackling beneath his feet. Yama saw something scuttle away through the trees, man-sized yet running on all fours with a lurching sideways movement. He drew his knife and gave chase, but Prefect Corin overtook him and sprang onto an outcrop of rock beyond the trees with his staff raised above his head. He held the pose for a moment, then jumped down.
“Gone,” he said. “Well, the priest is right about one thing. They have a ghoul following them.”
Yama sheathed his knife. His hand was trembling. He was out of breath and his blood sang in his head. He remembered the time he and Telmon had hunted antelope, armed only with stone axes like the men of the hill tribes. He said, “I saw it.”
“I will tell them to bury their rubbish and to make sure that they hang their food in branches.”
“Ghouls can climb,” Yama said. He added, “I am sorry. I should not have chased after it.”
“It was bravely done. Perhaps we seared it off.”
Yama and Prefect Corin reached the pass the next day. It was only a little wider than the road, cutting through a high scarp of rough-edged blocks of gray granite which rose abruptly from the gentle slope they had been climbing all morning. A cairn of flat stones stood at the edge of the road near the beginning of the pass, built around a slab engraved with a list of names. Prefect Corin said that it was the memorial of a battle in the Age of Insurrection, when those few men whose names were engraved on the slab had held the pass against overwhelming odds. Every man defending the pass had died, but the army they had fought had been held up long enough for reinforcements from Ys to arrive and drive them back.