It’s over, Supaari thought, and there was no regret in him.
He had been close enough to his life’s ambition to see what he was buying and to reckon the cost of living it out, snared in the twisted skein of aristocratic alliances, hatreds and resentments. With a merchant’s certainty, he cut his losses, slicing through the tangle with a single word: "leave." So Supaari VaGayjur had walked away from the Kitheri compound without bothering to tell anyone he was going. He took only what was of value to him and to no one else—the child, who was at that moment being dangled over the edge of the barge, piss flying into the wake.
Paquarin had agreed to make the trip south with him as far as Kirabai, and she laughed now, swooping the baby through the water to clean her. She’ll sleep now, he thought, smiling as the look of outraged startlement on the howling infant’s face was replaced with drowsy contentment in Paquarin’s lap, the Runao’s fine hands stroking and soothing her.
Leaning against a transport basket of sweetleaf, drowsy himself, he watched the riverbanks slide by and wondered idly why the Jana’ata insisted on clothing bodies protected by dense coats of hair. Anne Edwards had asked him that once and he hadn’t had a good answer for her, except to observe that the Jana’ata generally preferred elaborate to plain. Almost dozing as he dried in the breeze, it came to him that the purpose of clothing was neither protection nor decoration but distinction—to mark off military first from bureaucratic second and both of those from academic or commercial third, to keep everyone in his proper position so that greetings were correctly measured and deference appropriately apportioned.
And to put distance between the rulers and the ruled, he realized, so that no Jana’ata would be mistaken for a Runa domestic! Eyes closed, he smiled to himself, pleased to answer Ha’an at last.
Until the extraordinarily polymorphic foreigners pointed it out to him, Supaari himself had never wondered about the uncanny similarity between Jana’ata and Runa. Hadn’t even noticed it, really—one might as well ask why rain is the same color as water—but it intrigued the foreigners. Once, while in residence with Supaari in Gayjur, Sandoz had suggested that in ancient times, the resemblance between the two species had been less, but the Runa had somehow caused the Jana’ata to become more like themselves. Predator mimicry, Sandoz called it. Supaari had been greatly offended by the notion that the most successful Jana’ata hunters preying on Runa herds might have been those who looked and smelled most like Runa — who could approach the herds without alarming them.
"Such hunters would be healthier and more likely to find a mate," Sandoz said. "Their children would be better fed and have more children. Over time, the resemblance to Runa would be more noticeable, more frequent among Jana’ata."
"Sandoz, that is foolishness," Supaari had told him. "We breed them, they don’t breed us! More likely our ancestors ate the ugly ones, which left only the beautiful Runa—who looked like Jana’ata!"
Now Supaari admitted to himself that there might be some truth in what Sandoz had suggested. "We tamed the Jana’ata," his Runa secretary Awijan had told him once. At the time, Supaari had dismissed the remark as irony, but Jana’ata babies were raised by Runa nurses, and it was a sort of taming…
He slept then and, in his dream, stood at the entrance to a cave. In the way of dreams, he knew somehow that the passage before him led to caverns. He took a single step forward but lost his way immediately, and became more and more lost—and woke to the nuptial bellows of white-necked cranil lumbering in the shallows. Disturbed and anxious, he scrambled to his feet, and tried to shake off the unease by walking around the pilothouse to watch the animals roll together in titanic earnest, and to wish them good fortune, whatever that might be for cranil. When he looked back toward his daughter, sleeping curled next to Paquarin, he thought, I have taken a step into the cave, and I am carrying the child with me.
Not "the child." My child. My daughter, he thought.
There was no one to discuss her naming with. By custom, a first daughter would take an unused name from among the dead of the dam’s lineage. Supaari had no wish to commemorate anyone from Jholaa’s family, so he tried to remember names of his own mother’s ancestors, and realized with dismay that he didn’t know any. A third who, it was presumed, would never breed, Supaari had not been told the names of the old ones; or, if he had been told, he did not remember any. Having no fixed notion of what he would do next, beyond leaving Inbrokar with his child alive and intact, Supaari had decided to go home to Kirabai. He would ask his mother to choose a name, and hoped that his request would please her.
Filling his lungs with air that carried nothing of cities, he thought, Everything is different now.
And yet, the scents of home were the same. The horizon was blurred with redbush pollen, visible in the slanting light of second sundown—a haze of fragrance rising off the ground. Where the riverland flattened, and the water widened and slowed, lazy winds brought the familiar medicinal vapor of grass digested: the strangely clean smell of piyanot dung. And there was the peppery tang of green melfruit a few days before ripening, and the pungent smokiness of datinsa past its peak. All that welcomed him and his daughter, and he slept on deck that night, dreamless and content.
He roused on the fourth day south to a stirring among the passengers as the barge approached the Kirabai bridge; many would stop here overnight to trade. Supaari stood and told Paquarin to gather up their baggage and get ready to disembark, and began to brush himself down clumsily. Without his asking, a Runa trader stepped forward to join Paquarin in unpacking Supaari’s best clothes and, chatting, helped with his laces and the overrobe buckles. Glad to be done with the forced hauteur of Inbrokar, Supaari thanked them both.
A small, strong excitement rose in him — optimism, pent-up energy, a gladness to be home. He turned to Paquarin and held out his own arms for the baby, careless of his finery. "Look, child," he said, as the barge passed under graceless limestone arches. "The keystone bears the emblem of your ninth-generation beforefather, who fought noticeably well in the second Pon tributary campaign. His descendants have held Kirabai since, as birthright." Her eyes widened, but only because the barge had moved from sunlight to the shadow beneath the bridge. Supaari lifted her to a shoulder and breathed in the musty infant sweetness of her. "I tell you truly, little one, we have to go back that far to find someone to be proud of," he whispered wryly. "We are hostelers, providing lodging four nights south of Inbrokar and three nights north of the seacoast. In return, we’re due a stipend from the government, and one part in twelve of any trade carried out by VaKirabai Runa. Your father’s family, I am afraid, is not illustrious."
But we don’t murder children with deceit, he thought as the barge reemerged into the light.
"We will stop here only until the second dawn tomorrow, lord," the Runa barge owner called to him from the pilothouse. "Will you come with us downriver?"
"No," Supaari said, elated by the sight and smell and sound of Kirabai. "We are home."
Outwardly serene, he handed the baby back to Paquarin as the barge was poled to a halt, watching as huge braided tie lines were thrown over the pilings. He searched faces and tasted windborne scents among the carriers on the dock but found no kin to people he’d known as a boy, so he pressed past the Runa crowd declaring cargo and paying dock fees, and hired a Runao at random for the baggage, even though there was not much baggage and he did not have a great deal to spend on pride. He had been driven from Kirabai with almost nothing, but he’d built a trading company that generated money as the plains breed grass; he had known wealth and had thought sometimes, in the dark hours when sleep would not come, of returning home in luxury and triumph. Instead, he had surrendered all his assets to the state treasury when he took his place as Founder. Now he was arriving on a freight barge no better than the one he’d left on, with nothing to show for his striving but a nameless baby and six hundred bahli—all he had after selling his jewelry at the Inbrokar dock to hire Paquarin and buy her passage on the barge. So he had dressed in his best and hired a bearer, hoping to make a good first impression, and wished his claws were longer.