“I’ll cut a creature open,” he replied. “I’ll take out what’s inside. I’ll hang the carcass up to dry. All part of our devotion. Just don’t see where the romance comes into it.”
Ela shook her head, then turned to me and rolled her eyes. “Hopeless,” she said, lowering her voice, as though in confidence. “He’s hopeless. Always has been.” Then, turning back to him, extending her arm and unfolding a hand, as though the whole city were a web of jewels and hers to offer up, she said, “Forget the romance. Can’t you just admit that it looks beautiful?”
“In the dark. From a distance.” He shook his head. “Stand half a mile off and a pile of steaming shit looks pretty in the moonlight.”
“Kossal,” Ela demanded, “is there any place in this wide world that you actually like?”
“Rassambur.” He raised a finger as though prepared to enumerate further possibilities, seemed to consider his options, then put the hand down. “Just Rassambur. Quiet. Not so ’Kent-kissing humid.”
“If you love Rassambur so much,” I asked him, “then why are you here?”
He didn’t bother looking at me. Instead he scowled at the marvel of light and water that was Dombang. “Because I love my god more.”
I shook my head. “The god is everywhere. Someone else could have taken your place as my Witness.”
“There may be other work than witnessing to be done here.”
Ela raised her brows, surprised for the first time. “Let a lady in on the secret.”
For a while he didn’t respond, glaring down silently at the city. Finally, he looked over at us.
“Something that needs killing.”
“And so you had to come all this way?” Ela swatted him. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it would have died on its own.”
“Maybe,” Kossal replied. “Maybe not.”
*
Well before we reached the city proper, we began to pass clusters of flat-bottomed barges tethered together on either side of the final stretch of causeway, ranks of lean, long delta skiffs tied rail to rail. Each had a small tent thrown up in the center—just a scrap of canvas to keep off the worst of the mosquitoes, really—but no one seemed to be asleep. Red lanterns hung from the stern of each boat, pushing back the night, bloodying the water’s black. On each makeshift, tenuously tethered island, the boats’ owners tended to congregate on a single deck, where they could spend the hot evening drinking with their neighbors. The thick smell of smoke and grilling fish and reedfruit hung in the air. Despite the hour, even the children were up, clambering between the hulls, laughing and screaming. Every so often one of them tumbled into the water with a splash. The rest would jeer and shout and then haul their companion from the current and the game would resume.
The ease with which those children climbed free of the water reminded me of the woman earlier in the day who hadn’t, of the way she’d screamed as she tried to escape the mud, as the qirna closed in to feast on her legs. Most of the delta’s most dangerous creatures wouldn’t venture this close to the city; the water was too filthy, the air too loud. The children were safe enough, as safe as children anywhere. I’d spent countless days in Dombang’s waters myself, and yet it was impossible not to look at that slick, black surface without imagining some unseen menace lurking beneath, razor-toothed and patient.
The music distracted from the water’s implacable silence. In Dombang there was always music. That, too, I remembered from my childhood, flutes and drums, mostly, the former made from the thick-walled spear rushes of the delta. Those flutes were built for slow, haunting melodies, but the measures of Dombang were anything but—raucous tunes for rowing or dancing, quick, heavy drums always urging the song on and on, louder and larger.
“I plan to dance,” Ela said, pausing to listen to one particularly lively tune, tapping her folded parasol against her heel, “until my feet bleed.”
For just a moment, I heard the music through her ears, clear and unsullied. For just a moment, and then, all over again, it was impossible not to hear that music as I’d heard it years ago, not the night’s carefree focus, but a mask, a racket drowning the quieter, more intimate sounds of violence. More movement, and darker than dancing, had always waited on that music.
For all the laughter and lanterns, Kossal was right. As we moved into the city proper, I remembered the truth: Dombang was uglier close up. Lanterns and lights hung from the carved teak of the high-peaked roofs, blousy women leaned from the balconies, men in their bright evening finery—vests over bare chests, long sashes at the waist—called out greetings to one another, but below, in the shadows where the light never reached, rot gnawed constantly at the pitch-soaked pilings. The gutted carcasses of fish, flensed of their soft flesh until only the spines, fins, and heads remained, clogged the backwaters. Where the current was strong, the water ran clear and fast and dark, but in the thousands of eddies where the wide weirs trapped the flow, strange shapes rose slow, awful, dreamlike from the dark, revolved lazily a moment in the light, then disappeared. Rassambur had taught me much about death, but this wasn’t death. It was dying. Even as a child I had sensed this. Especially as a child.
I was so lost remembering the rhythms of the city that I almost walked directly into Ela when she stopped.
“Lady and gentleman,” she announced theatrically, “I give you Anho’s Dance.”
With a flourish of her arm, she indicated a tall, wide-windowed building to our left. A narrow canal separated it from the causeway itself, and a small but elegantly carved bridge spanned the water, arcing from the causeway to a broad deck fronting the structure, a deck packed with tables and patrons.
Kossal grimaced. “Why am I not surprised?”
“You are not surprised,” Ela proclaimed, “because I promised when we left Rassambur to bring us to the liveliest inn in the city, the establishment with the best music, finest wine, and the most shapely patrons. Which I have, in fact, done.”