Brother Horse seemed rapt, nodding here and there with enthusiasm and dismay, but utterly taken by the story. Only toward the end did he seem troubled.
"That city you dream about," he said a bit later, after they had eaten some fish soup. "I have been there, you know."
"So it is real, then?" Perkar wondered. It wasn't something he really questioned, more a prompt to keep the old man on the subject.
"Oh, yes, Nhol is real. It is the greatest city in the world. I went down there once, when I was very young, with a party of warriors. We had some very unrealistic ideas about raiding the city." He laughed at the memory. "In any event, when we got there, we saw how hopeless it was, how pointless. Instead we got drunk in one of the portside taverns, gambling with boatmen. They took everything we had, including our swords. But it was a wonderful sight, that city. It was also frightening."
"My dreams of it frighten me."
"The city is wholly of the River," Brother Horse went on. "There is nothing else. There are no little gods in the houses, no Fire Goddess in the flame, no spirits in the trees. They have killed them all. Even the River doesn't have that kind of power, not by himself. He can eat what comes near him. But for scores of leagues on either side of the River, in the whole empire Nhol rules, there is not one god but the River." He shook his head dolefully. "It's beautiful, but it's dead, haunted by ghosts from the River and his children."
"What do you mean, his children?" Ngangata asked.
"I say there are no gods," Brother Horse said. "I can see them, you know—I was given the sight by my totem god Yush very early on. In Nhol, I could see only the River, except—except there were certain people, the rulers of the city. They looked to me something like gods."
"They killed the gods in the land and on the land," Ngangata declared, "and the River made gods of the Human Beings who helped him." He turned to Perkar. "As I told you once," he reminded him. "The River simplifies things."
Perkar shook his head. "They pray to these half gods?"
Brother Horse nodded. "The Waterborn, they are called."
"In my dream, there is a girl," Perkar said thoughtfully. "I am supposed to do something for her—or to her, perhaps. The farther down-River we go, the more clear that seems."
Brother Horse grimaced. "I don't know about these matters," he grumbled. "If it were not Nhol you were being called to, I would suspect that your dreams were sent by a goddess. But there are no goddesses in Nhol."
"But what of these Waterborn? You say they are like gods."
"Like gods. They resemble gods as anger resembles love. Both are strong emotions, both can make you kill, but they are very different, with different ends. I think the Waterborn are just walking, talking aspects of the River. He sleeps, you know. He is more wakeful now than I have ever known him to be—this may be the result of your adventures. But I think it is really through those Waterborn that he is wakeful."
"Do you know this?" Perkar inquired.
"No. It is only a feeling. I was only there once, long ago. It is just that I have been thinking about the River and Nhol a lot lately."
"Since you've been on the island."
"No, only in the past few months. Your story makes me think."
"Makes you think?"
Brother Horse dusted off his bandy little legs, stood, and stretched. "Makes me think of a god so huge that his head doesn't always know what his feet are doing. Of messages traveling up and down the River, like an old, old man talking to himself, do you see? And me, sitting here with Heen, hearing just a little bit of that senile mumbling."
"And what is he talking about, this old man?"
Brother Horse fixed Perkar with a strange gaze. "You, perhaps."
Perkar shifted the bundle of firewood in his arms, wondering how far upstream the branches had drifted from. Above him, the familiar stars were dwarfed by the splendor of the Pale Queen, and for the first time in many days, he was struck almost physically by a longing for his native pastures. How long had it been since he departed them? Months, but he didn't even know how many. Already that life of his was gone, become the story Ngangata had told today. He felt prepared to add another observation to Ngangata's pondering on songs. They were lies, yes, but they were also corpses, dressed in finer clothes than they had ever worn in life.
Preparing to return to the camp, Perkar's gaze was suddenly drawn up-River by something odd. Caught from the corner of his eye, it took a moment before his strained vision could make out what it was.
Shafts of moonlight, walking on the water. Walking. The surface seemed dimpled, an amorphous constellation of stars winking on and off, coming slowly and deliberately downstream. Perkar wondered if it might be some school of fish—or ghost-fish—that glowed beneath the waves, swimming toward him, for the River had held no moonlight since that moment in which he awoke. Was he sleeping again?
Perkar watched, the single eerie call of a whippoorwill the only companion to the rasp of his breath. He could see the tex-ture of the lights now, and they were clearly on the River's surface, not beneath it. Concavities appearing and vanishing in the current, cups of moonlight first here and then gone. It was nothing he had seen before, but it was familiar…
"Do you want to see?" Harka asked as he furrowed his brow in concentration.
"See?"
"I can show you, if you want."
"Show me," he breathed. And his vision changed, blood running tingling up his back, stroking his heart and lungs with shock.
The dimples were hoofprints. There were horses, walking upon the water. Formed of water, flanks of glistening moonlight, whirlpools of darkness for eyes. Nevertheless, he knew them instantly. Ngangata's old mount, and Bear, the Kapaka's stallion.
The Kapaka sat astride Bear. His face was a hollow, featureless, but Perkar could not mistake him, the way he sat his horse, the relaxed hold on the reins. The nothing beneath the helm turned to Perkar, and suddenly he was cold beyond belief, cocooned in water. All of his pain and fear chilled dull, faded, the sharp angles of his crimes coated in layers of muck and sand. For that instant, he was a tree made of ice, motionless, without passion, watching the ghost of his king as if it were nothing more unusual than a flight of geese.
The head turned from him, and fire rushed back into Perkar's belly. Everything: pain, remorse, hatred. He groaned hoarsely, flung himself savagely into the trunk of a willow, the firewood he had gathered flying about him. He reeled but did not fall, spun to look again upon his king. But the image was gone, the faint spackle of moonlight fading even as he watched. Snarling, he drew Harka, dashing at the line of trees, hacking at the branches clumsily until finally he dropped the sword and began hitting the trunks with his bare knuckles, pounding until bones cracked and blood smeared up to his wrists. At last, clumsily embracing the trunk of an oak, he slid down to the ground, sobbing.
"I hate you!" he cried, out at the water, but it was unclear even to him whether he meant the River or himself—or both.
Why? Why had the River shown him those ghosts? It could not be an accident, not with everyone and everything the River had swallowed in his time. The bones of a hundred kings must lie in his depths, a thousand steeds.
His hands were aching now, balls of flame, but he forced himself to think, to confront. What did the River want of him?
"What?" he shouted, but no answer came save the distant sound of the nightbird.
"Father, help me," he sighed. "Mother!" He reached up to finger the little charm his mother had given him, and he felt a familiar spark there, the same life that had entered him at birth. Touching it, he touched the place where his caul was buried, and for the beat of a bee's wing he saw that place: a mighty oak, limbs spread like a big man yawning and stretching, and near its roots a silver stream, laughing and lovely. In that instant, the distance between him and his father's damakuta dissolved; it stood just beyond the star-flecked horizon. There sat his father and mother, wondering what had become of him. A day's travel from there was Apad's family, and not much more distant, Eruka's. At his masterless damakuta in Morawta, the grandchildren of the Kapaka might be wondering where the old man was, why he hadn't returned.