“You offended the whole river? Every god all the way down to the sea?”
“Well. And the Nalendar itself, actually.”
She felt a dropping sensation in her stomach. She’d been afraid at first that the skink had been working for Imk, and then that it had some other motive for attaching itself to her. She had never imagined anything like this. Every city along the Nalendar depended on the river for its life. No one anywhere near its banks would be foolish enough to anger the god. “How did you…” but at that moment Umri felt a tug on her line, and she whipped the pole up and back. It bent forward, and the line wove back and forth in the water behind the boat.
“Need some help, Miss?” called a man from the shade, one of the passengers.
“No, I’ve got it.” She slowly brought the line in, until she pulled the fish up out of the water, a black, whiskered thing a good three feet long and flipping hard, splashing water onto the deck.
“What a catch!” the man said, rising and coming to the rail. He rubbed his hands together. “Nasty bite on that one! Here, I’ll get it for you.”
“No, thank you,” said Umri, and one–handed wound an end of her dress around her fingers.
The captain had been drawn aft by the commotion.“She probably caught her first fish before she could walk,” he said. “I imagine she could dive in and toss two or three up on the deck.”
“Not with this current.” Her hand muffled by the dull green fabric, she grabbed the fish by the jaw and heaved it over the rail and onto the deck where it flipped and buzzed. “And I’ve only ever dived for shellfish.” She pulled a knife out of her belt with her other hand and drove it into the fish’s eye, and the noise and movement stopped.
The passenger froze for an instant, and then backed away. The captain gave him a sardonic glance and then turned his attention to Umri. “You’ve offered it to the Nalendar?”
“Yes,” she said. “And now I’ll send it to the cook. It’s much too big for me to eat myself.”
“That’s very kind of you, Miss,” said the captain. “I’ll take it to him.” And with another word of thanks he took it away.
When he was gone, Umri sat in the sun on a coil of rope. The skink ventured down her neck and along her arm to her knee. “How did a tiny thing like you offend the whole river?” asked Umri, sure no one was close enough to overhear. “And why are you on a boat on the Nalendar itself? Isn’t that… unwise?”
“Very likely.” The skink raised its tiny head and sniffed, and then lay down to bask. “But considering how long it would take me to walk in my present form…”
“Gods can take any form they want, can’t they?”
“Well,” said the skink. “Well. The more work it takes to do something, the more you have to put into it, yes?”
“That makes sense.”
“So this is as much as I could muster. It took some doing as it is—I entered the skink egg as soon as it was laid, and only hatched three days ago.”
“You’ve fallen on hard times,” said Umri. “What happened?”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” said the skink, an edge to its tiny voice that declared the matter closed. “Tell me, why did you leave Kalub? Something to do with this Rilhat Imk person, I imagine.”
Umri sighed. “Yes.”
“You stole something from him?”
“No!” Umri was indignant. “He wants me to be his mistress.”
“Ah, and he’s poor, or ugly.”
“He’s rich. Or very well–off, anyway. He’s a slave broker.” She leaned back against the rail and readjusted her dress, careful not to dislodge the lizard. “He comes to the bathhouse where I work.” Kalub was a spa town, and its bathhouses were famous. They ranged from plain, roofless stone walls surrounding a single communal basin of hot water, to elaborately tiled and inlaid halls where young men and women served refreshments from jeweled gold and silver trays. “He comes for business meetings. He stares at me.”
“Which is what you were there for, I assume.”
It was. “That didn’t bother me, really, it’s happened before. When they approach me, I usually just tell them that the house doesn’t offer that particular service.” The skink gave a derisive squeak. “It doesn’t! And that’s what I told Imk when he asked. And he kept asking. Which was annoying enough, but about a month ago, he told me that he had rented rooms for me and furnished them, and bought clothes and slaves, and that I was to stop my foolishness and be his mistress.”
“And for this you flee the city?” The skink was incredulous.
“When I told him no, he became very angry.” His pale face had gone red, and he had been frozen for nearly a minute. “He said that I had to be his mistress, and that I would help him achieve his destiny.”
“Surely that’s a destiny many men aspire to, and surely any mistress will do.”
Umri laughed. “You’d think. But he came the next day and told me that he would be back in a few weeks with something that would overwhelm all my objections. It seemed wise to be gone before he returned–that sort of thing always ends badly.”
“Does he have a wife?”
“No.”
“That’s a bad sign,” said Little Skink. “A rich merchant in Kalub—how old is he?”
“About thirty–five.”
“Even worse. He should have one by now. No, he’s entirely unsuitable. And besides, you didn’t leave the islands to get tied down to some small–time businessman.”
Umri shifted. The boatmen’s chant stopped for a few moments, and then one voice called and the rest joined in again. “And you? What’s upriver that you can’t find in Kalub?” It was probably better not to even ask, but she was curious.
“Treasure!” said the skink. “But I’ll need help fetching it away. Are you interested?”
At dinner the captain praised her catch, and the stew the cook had made of it, which was delicious. The man who had offered to help her with the fish made short work of it, though Umri noticed that he wouldn’t look at her.
“Ah, the Silver Isles!” the captain said. “Lovely place. Warm breezes, blue water…it must seem cold and drab to you here, Miss.”
“Not at all,” said Umri. She tore off a hunk of flat bread, the better to get the last bits of stew out of her bowl. “The river is quite beautiful.” Behind her ear she felt the skink stir. “I’m sure, captain, that you know nearly everything there is to know about the Nalendar. I would love to hear some of its history. Battles, sunken treasure…” The skink was suddenly still.
“Treasure? Of course! Whole kingdoms’ worth.”
“What would be the largest? The best, the most famous treasure lost to the Nalendar?”
“That,” said the captain, leaning back and pouring another cup of wine for himself, “would be the treasure of Gnarr.” Another passenger made a noise of recognition. “Have you heard of it, Miss?”
“No. What’s Gnarr?”
The captain gestured towards the bow of the boat. “A city upriver from here, and they held all the land for five hundred miles around. By agreement, you understand, with the gods of neighboring countries. Now, Gnarr wasn’t like Kalub, where whatever god can do the best service gets the worship, no, in Gnarr they had an agreement with the god Sursurra, exclusive.
“There was a statue of Sursurra in the center of the city, and at his crowning, the new king would take the statue’s outstretched hand and swear to uphold the contract between his people and their god. The feet of the statue were in a particular spot, you understand, but the agreement with the other gods said that the king would rule for five hundred miles around where he and the statue stood as he held the outstretched hand of the statue.” He paused for a swallow of wine. “So Sursurra, apparently, got to thinking how he might spread his territory without breaking the agreements.”