“We must escape. We must cross the lines of the enemy.”
“We have already done so, little master. Sleep now. If you can sleep, then it is a sign that you can begin to get well. Those too sick to sleep always die, in my experience. But I do not think you will die.”
“I want—”
But Pandaras was too tired to complete the thought, and he slept.
Day by day Pandaras grew stronger. He had been sicker than most of those around him and at last he was strong enough to realize how sick he had been. When he was at last able to sit up and take notice of his surroundings, in the late afternoon of the sixth or seventh day of his confinement, he saw that this part of the lazaret was empty except for himself and a heavily bandaged man three cots over in the same row. A machine like a cat-sized mosquito squatted over the bandaged barrel of the man’s chest, circulating his blood through loops of clear tubing; his breathing was ragged and loud.
The coin was no brighter, but the dots and dashes of light within it were more active than ever, scurrying to new patterns, freezing for only a heartbeat, and scurrying about again. Pandaras watched for hours, trying to understand their dance.
In the night, the man tended by the mosquito-machine suffered some kind of crisis. He was taken away amidst a flurry of chirurgeons and charge hands. Pandaras lay awake for hours afterward, but the man did not return.
The next morning, Pandaras was taken up on deck by Tibor, and saw at last what the hierodule had been trying to tell him. The lazaret was traveling downriver. It had been taken by the heretics.
At the Marsh of the Lost Waters, the Great River divided into many shallow, sinuous, slow-moving streams. The lazaret was following one of these. It was less than a league across, and stained red-brown with silt. Trees grew densely on either side, half-submerged in the sluggish current, their leaves vivid green in the bright sunlight. The sun burned off the water. It was very hot and very humid. Pandaras broke into a sweat at the slightest exertion and he was content to sit with Tibor under an awning of crimson silk, listening to one or another of the discussion classes which were part of the process the heretics called Reeducation and Enlightenment.
The lazaret was a barge as wide and flat as a field. A flying bridge crowned its blunt bow; gun emplacements nestled like seeds at regular intervals along its sides; a decad of pods which housed reaction motors swelled at its stern. A pentad of machines followed its wide wake as birds might follow a fishing boat. They were as fat as barrels and entirely black, with clusters of mobile spines fore and aft. They made a slow fizzing sound as they moved through the air. Sometimes one would break off and make a wide slow loop above the forest canopy before rejoining its fellows. At night they were each enveloped in a faint red nimbus, like a constellation of halo stars.
There were other machines too. Small silvery teardrops that zipped from one place to another like squeezed watermelon seeds; black angular things like miniature mantids that stalked the white-scrubbed, tar-caulked planks of the deck on long, thin legs. And a thing of jointed cubes and spheres that was slung in a hammock on the bridge, close to the huge wheel that, manned by three sailors, controlled the barge’s rudders. The plastic casings of its components had once been white, but were now stained and chipped. It was a very ancient machine, Pandaras learned, and it had control of the barge; many of the smaller machines were slaved to it. It seemed that these machines were not the servants of the world, as in Ys, but were the equals of or even superiors to the flesh-and-blood heretics.
The soldiers who guarded the prisoners and otherwise manned the barge were of a recently changed bloodline from the lower slopes of the Rim Mountains. They were a tall, muscular people covered in thick white fur. They wore only elaborate harnesses of leather straps and buckles and pouches. Their narrow faces, with long muzzles and small brown eyes that peered from beneath heavy brow-ridges, were as black and wrinkled as old leather, and all were heavily tattooed with silvery swirls and dots. They called themselves the Charn or the Tchai. Although of a single bloodline and a single culture, they were divided into two distinct tribes which, by taboo, never intermarried: one herded llamas and goats in the birch forests; the other hunted in the wilderness of rock and snow above the tree-line. Pandaras, who still believed that he had the right to talk with anyone, discovered that they had a rich store of tragedies concerning star-crossed lovers from the two tribes, and blood feuds which lasted for generations. To their amusement, he elaborated several versions of his own upon these eternal themes.
The white-furred guards did not like the close, fetid heat. When they were not patrolling the deck, they sprawled in front of electric fans, their red tongues lolling. They were a short-tempered people, and the heat made them even more irritable. Those officers captured with the lazaret had already been killed, but the guards would sometimes make the prisoners line up, pluck someone from the ranks at random, and execute him. One night, one of the guards went mad and tried to storm the bridge. There was a brief but furious firefight before he was shot. More than thirty prisoners were killed or wounded in the crossfire; all were unceremoniously tipped over the side for the caymans and the catfish.
Pandaras asked Tibor why he had not been executed when the lazaret had been captured. “You’re something like a priest, right? I think that it would make you more dangerous than any officer.”
Tibor scratched at the long, vertical scars of his chest while he thought about this. At last he said, “I am only a slave, little master. I am not a leader of men. Besides, the heretics believe that to convert one such as me is a great prize.”
“Surely there were other hierodules working in the lazaret when it was captured? But I see no others now.”
“They fled, little master. But I could not leave you.”
“You know that I am not your master, Tibor!”
The hierodule did not reply.
Pandaras tried a new argument. “I am grateful that you are here, Tibor. But as an equal. As a friend.”
“You could not be a friend to one such as I, little master. What am I? Lower than a worm, because my ancestors took the side of the feral machines during the Age of Insurrection.”
“You are a man, Tibor. As much a man as anyone here. Don’t put the burden of your life on my head.”
Again Tibor did not reply. He took out a little plastic pouch from the waistband of his trousers and, with maddening slowness, began to roll a cigarette.
Only the weakest and most seriously wounded prisoners lay in the close heat and stink of the black air below deck. The rest camped under awnings rigged from brightly colored canvas or silk and scattered across the broad deck of the barge like flowers strewn across a field. They took turns to trawl for fish and shrimp, which were shredded and added to the cauldrons of sticky rice or maize porridge, but most of their waking hours were taken up with Reeducation and Enlightenment.
The discussion classes formed just after dawn, and often continued beyond sunset. Although the prisoners were told that the classes were voluntary, everyone knew that those who refused to take part were likely to be chosen by the guards for execution. They reminded Pandaras of the penny school he had occasionally attended as a cub. His education had ended when his father had disappeared, for the man his mother had married after that had refused to waste money on luxuries like learning. It had been no great loss. Pandaras had always hated the stifling atmosphere of the school, and the rote recitations of the Puranas which had taken up much of the time had for him almost killed their beautiful and terrible stories. He did not mind that he was unlettered, for his people had always kept their stories and songs in memory rather than on paper—”written in air rather than on stone,” as their tradition had it, for what was forgotten did not matter, and that which was of value was kept alive in the mouths and instruments of a thousand singers long after the unmourned death of the author.