"I love you," Perkar breathed.
"Of course you do, silly thing," she said, smiling.
"Since I first saw you, when I was only five. You haven't changed at all."
"Oh, I have," she corrected him. "A little here, a little there. Wider in some places, more narrow in others. My hair, up in the mountains, changes most. Each storm alters it, alters the tiny rivulets that feed into me."
"I meant…"
"I know what you meant. My Human form will always look like this, little Perkar."
"Because…"
"Because someone with this shape was sacrificed to me long ago. I forget her name, though I remember a little of what she remembers…"
"She was lovely," Perkar said, feeling a bit bolder. When he said things like that to the girls at the gatherings, they blushed and hid their faces. The Stream Goddess merely returned him a frank stare.
"You court me, little Perkar? I am older by far than your entire lineage."
He said nothing to that.
"It is so silly," the goddess went on. "This thing about swords and men. I made my agreement with your family only because it amused me."
"Agreement?"
"There is more to receiving your sword than I suspect you know. A silly, symbolic thing, but as I said, amusing." And she reached out her long, slim arm. He took it, and felt that her flesh was indeed warm, like a Human Being's. She stepped up out of the water, glistening, her long, graceful legs nearly touching him. She smelled like—he didn't know. Rose petals?
He was certainly frightened. He had gone off, recently, with Hame, a girl his own age and Human. What they did—touching each other, exploring—had frightened him enough. The feelings it aroused had been so hungry. He could not see how such feelings could be sated, though he had come near to understanding once when he was alone.
But this woman drawing him down to her flesh was not Hu-man. She was Anishu, a spirit, a goddess. Perkar was trembling as she gently tugged at the belt of his pants. "Shhh," the Stream told him. "Don't worry."
Perkar and the goddess lay beneath a sky gone slate gray, and the shutters of the brightest stars were opening as night threw wide her windows. Huna, the Pale Queen, was brightening but already halfway across the sky, a thick crescent. Though the night breeze should have been cool, Perkar's bare skin prickled with unnatural warmth. The Stream Goddess was tracing the lean contours of his face with her index finger. She giggled at the downy promise of beard, then cupped his cheek when he flushed in embarrassment.
"You people age so quickly," she told him. "Don't hurry it more than necessary."
Perkar nodded without understanding. His life was too full just now. He felt as if all that he had ever seen and known was about to boil up out of him, become something he had never anticipated. He was having trouble thinking. And he was in love.
"That first time, when I was so young," he asked her. "Why did you appear to me then?"
"I need no excuse to appear," she said lightly.
"You came this time to honor a bargain."
"True enough. I came last time because you were laughing, and I thought it beautiful. I wanted to hear you with Human ears."
"The stream cannot hear?"
"Oh, it can. I can hear everything, the entire length and breadth of me, from the mountains until…" Her lovely face clouded. "I can hear it all. But it isn't like this. Being tied up in one place, being just a point, a quickly moving speck—it has a different sort of appeal."
"Is that what we are to you? Specks?"
She frowned, turned over on her side, so that the curve of her hip gleamed, impossibly beautiful to Perkar. "Before, my memories are different. I remember being born, I think, long and long ago. I remember when I came through this place in the old dry bed, over there." She gestured behind them. "Mostly, though, it was all the same: swelling with the rains, greeting my little ones and taking them in. The little thoughts of all the things that live within me. The Old People—you call them the Alwat—they came and touched me now and then, but I hardly noticed them— though other spirits told me much about them. Then your people came. They annoyed me at first; they angered me. I tried to ignore them. That was when they cut this girl and put her in the water. Her blood mixed up with mine, I felt her brief little life swimming away in me. Not like a fish at all. I was very sad, sad that Human Beings thought I craved such things. That is not my nature."
"Some spirits crave death, my father says."
"The land spirits need it, though they care little for sacrifice. Without death, forests have nothing to eat. But I…"
"Streams do not crave death?"
Perkar did not understand at first. The idea of a goddess weeping was beyond his young imagination. And yet she was.
"Why are you crying?"
"My song. Do you remember the last part of my song?"
Of course, Perkar thought. How could I ever forget your song? He cleared his throat.
Swollen,
I flow across short grass
Where the wild horses drink from me
There I end, I flow on
But I am not the same
Not the young woman
I am the Old Man there
The Old Man
And everyone fears me.
Perkar finished the stanza, gazing with wonder into her tear-streaked eyes.
"What?"
"The Old Man," she said at last, "is a terrible god. He eats me up. He eats me up!" She shuddered, her breath hissing.
"He swallows me each day. In time he will swallow this seed you have just put in me. He eats everything."
She rose up, a night goddess now. Huna touched her with silver.
"Stay away from him, Perkar," she said.
"Stop. I love you." He had begun to weep, too.
"I'm always here." She sighed, but now he heard the pain in that. As if she had also said, "and he always devours me." He could picture how, each moment of each day, she fell down the hills into him. Whoever he was.
She stepped onto the water, smiled at him. Then she was a sheet of silver water, collapsing. She was a ripple. She was the stream.
Perkar watched her flow, long into the night.
"I love you," he said again, before he left. He took up the sword that had been made by the god Ko, but it no longer seemed a delightful burden. It seemed heavy, somehow. Yet it was not a melancholy heaviness, not a grief. He felt strong, happy. But sober. Determined.
I will find out who this River is that eats her, he promised. That is the first thing I shall discover.
It was morning before Perkar returned home. The rising sun banished the melancholy from his soul, lightened his step as it lightened the sturdy cedar walls of his father's damakuta. He stopped at a little shrine at the base of the hill the fort stood upon, offered a bit of wine to the little god that slept there in the stone. A rooster crowed from somewhere up beyond the wall.
The damakuta had always seemed unimaginably huge to him, but as he glanced back up the hill at it, he knew that it had be-come smaller. He was a man now, in every way that mattered, the first of his father's sons to come of age. Soon he would seek Piraku, a thing that had many faces: destiny, wealth, cattle, prestige—and, of course, a home. Still, he reflected, when he did build his own house, there could be no better model than his father's. The sturdy walls had protected his family and cattle from more than one attack by jealous chieftains and once, even, the fierce horsemen of the eastern plains. The longhouse within the walls was tightly built, warm in the harshest winter, airy and cool when the windows were unsealed in the summertime.
Perkar came lightly back to his feet and fairly bounced up the hill. The outer gate was open, of course, and Apiru, one of his father's bondsmen, waved down at him from the watchtower.