“A voidship,” Pandaras said casually, and expressed surprise when Yama insisted that they go and look at it. He said, “It’s just a lighter for a voidship really. The ship to which it belongs is too big to make riverfall and hangs beyond the edge of Confluence. It has been there a full year now, unloading its ores. The lighter will have put in at the docks for fresh food. It’s nothing special.”
In any case, they could not get close to the lighter; the dock was closed off and guarded by a squad of soldiers armed with fusiliers more suited to demolishing a citadel than keeping away sightseers. Yama looked up at the lighter’s smooth black flank, which curved up to a blunt silver cap that shone with white fire in the sunlight, and wondered at what other suns it had seen.
He could have stood there all day, filled with an undefined longing, but Pandaras took his arm and steered him away.
“It’s dangerous to linger,” the boy said. “The star-sailors steal children, it’s said, because they cannot engender their own. If you see one, you’ll understand. Most do not even look like men.”
As they walked on, Yama asked if Pandaras knew of the ship of the Ancients of Days.
Pandaras touched his fist to his throat. “My grandfather said that he saw two of them walking through the streets of our quarter late one night, but everyone in Ys alive at that time claims as much.” He touched his fist to his throat and added, “My grandfather said that they glowed the way the river water sometimes glows on summer nights, and that they stepped into the air and walked away above the rooftops. He made a song about it, but when he submitted it to the legates he was arrested for heresy, and he died under the question.”
The sun had climbed halfway to zenith by the time Yama and Pandaras reached the Black Temple and the Water Market.
The Black Temple had once been extensive, built on its own island around a protrusion or plug of keelrock in a wide deep bay, but it had been devastated in the wars of the Age of Insurrection and had not been rebuilt, and now the falling level of the Great River had left it stranded in a shallow muddy lagoon fringed with palm trees. The outline of the temple’s inner walls and a row of half-melted pillars stood amongst outcrops of keelrock and groves of flame trees; the three black circles of the temple’s shrines glittered amongst grassy swales where the narthex had once stood. Nothing could destroy the shrines, not even the energies deployed in the battle which had won back Ys from the Insurrectionists, for they were only partly of the world of material existence. Services were still held at the Black Temple every New Year, Pandaras said, and Yama noticed the heaps of fresh flowers and offerings of fruits before the shrines.
Although most of the avatars had disappeared in the Age of Insurrection, and the last had been silenced by the heretics, people still came to petition them.
At the mouth of the bay which surrounded the temple’s small island, beyond wrinkled mudflats where flocks of white ibis stalked on delicate legs, on rafts and pontoons and barges, the Water Market was in full swing. The standards of a hundred condottieri flew from poles, and there were a dozen exhibition duels under way, each at the center of a ring of spectators. There were stalls selling every kind of weapon, armorers sweating naked by their forges as they repaired or reforged pieces, provisioners extolling the virtue of their preserved fare. A merchant blew up a water bottle and jumped up and down on it to demonstrate its durability.
Newly indentured convicts sat in sullen groups on benches behind the auction block, most sporting fresh mutilations.
Galleys, pinnaces and picket boats stood offshore, their masts hung with bright flags that flapped in the strong, hot breeze.
Yama eagerly drank in the bustle and the noise, the exotic costumes of the caterans and the mundane dove-gray uniforms of regular soldiers mingled together the ringing sound of the weapons of the duelists, and the smell of hot metal and plastic from the forges of the armorers. He wanted to see everything the city had to offer, to search its great temples and the meanest of its alleys and courts for any sign of his bloodline.
As he followed Pandaras along a rickety gangway between two rafts, someone stepped out of the crowd and hailed him.
His heart turned over. It was the red-haired woman who last night had sat eating with the man he had killed. When she saw that he had heard her, she shouted again and raised her naked sword above her head.
Chapter Eighteen
The Thing in the Bottle
“They are yours by right of arms,” Tamora, the red-haired cateran, said. “The sword is too long for you, but I know an armorer who can shorten and rebalance it so sweetly you’d swear afterwards that it was first forged. The corselet and the greaves can be cut down to suit, and you can sell the trimmings. That way it pays for itself. Old armor is expensive because it’s the best. Especially plastic armor, because no one knows how to make the stuff anymore. You might think my breastplate is new, but that’s only because I polished it this morning. It’s a thousand years old if it’s a day, but even if it’s better than most of the clag they make these days, it’s still only steel. But, see, these greaves are real old. I could have taken them, but that wouldn’t be right. Everyone says we’re vagabonds and thieves, but even if we don’t belong to any department, we have our traditions. So these are your responsibility now. You won them by right of arms. You can do what you want with them. Throw them in the river if you want, but it would be a fucking shame if you did.”
“She wants you to give them back to her as a reward for giving them to you,” Pandaras said.
“I talk to the master,” Tamora said, “not his fool.”
Pandaras struck an attitude. “I am his squire.”
“I was the fool,” Yama said to Tamora, “and because I was a fool your friend died. That is why I cannot take his things.”
Tamora shrugged. “Cyg was no friend of mine, and as far as I’m concerned he was the fool, getting himself killed by a scrap of a thing like you. Why, you’re so newly hatched you probably still have eggshell stuck to your back.”
Pandaras said, “If this is to be your career, then you must arm yourself properly, master. As your squire, I strongly suggest it.”
“Squire, is it?” Tamora cracked open another oyster with her strong, ridged fingernails, slurped up the flesh and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The cateran’s bright red hair, which Yama suspected was dyed, was cut short over her skull, with a long fringe in the back that fell to her shoulders. She wore her steel breastplate over a skirt made of leather strips and a mesh shirt which left her muscular arms bare. There was a tattoo of a bird sitting on a nest of flames on the tawny skin of her upper arm, the flames in red ink, the bird, its wings outstretched as if drying them in the fire which was consuming it, in blue.
They were sitting in the shade of an umbrella at a table by a food stall on the waterfront, near the causeway that led from the shore to the island of the Black Temple. It was sunstruck noon. The owner of the stall was sitting under the awning by the ice-chest, listening with half-closed eyes to a long antiphonal prayer burbling from the cassette recorder under his chair.
Tamora squinted against the silver light that burned off the wet mudflats. She had a small, triangular, feral face, with green eyes and a wide mouth that stretched to the hinges of her jaw. Her eyebrows were a single brick-red rope; now the rope dented in the middle and she said, “Caterans don’t have squires. That’s for regular officers, and their squires are appointed from the common ranks. This boy has leeched onto you, Yama. I’ll get rid of him if you want.”
Yama said, “It is just a joke between the two of us.”