A fact of which I was reminded when the causeway over the delta, the causeway upon which we’d been walking for the better part of twenty miles, a causeway that had been safely suspended on wooden pilings fifteen feet above the rushes, groaned with a strong gust of wind. Until that moment, the day had been still as a painting, the bridge like bedrock beneath all the thousands of feet. When it shifted, the people around us—travelers and muleteers, tinkers and wagon drivers—glanced uneasily down at the swirling currents. A worried mutter sprang up like new fungus after a rain. Some people stopped in their tracks. Others moved faster, hurried unknowingly into Ananshael’s waiting arms.
“Does it always do that?” Ela asked, turning to me. She didn’t look concerned. During the whole thousand-mile trek from Rassambur, she had not once looked concerned. Although we’d been marching down the causeway since dawn, she looked like a lady out for a summer stroll in her light sandals and bright silk ki-pan, a parasol of waxed red paper tossed idly over her shoulder to keep the sun off. During the first days of our trip, her packing had struck me as impractical. Soon enough, however, I’d come to envy her sartorial choices—on hot days, those short dresses looked enviably cool; when storms came, the parasol kept her head and torso dry while the rain ran harmlessly down her long legs and off the sandals.
“I don’t remember,” I confessed. “It’s been more than fifteen years since I was here.”
The wind gusted again, raking the rushes, making the great, tar-soaked posts of the causeway creak. Beneath my feet, the wood shuddered.
Kossal ignored it, just kept stomping along in his bare feet and gray robe exactly as he had every day since Rassambur, indifferent to rain or hail, washed-out sections of roadway, or even the immensity of the Shirvian delta spread silently beneath and before us as far as the eye could see.
“These people,” Ela said, waggling a finger at the crowd around us, “look nervous.”
She was right. A few paces in front of us, a basket-packer bent almost double beneath his load had quickened his pace, muttering something that sounded like a prayer. Beyond him, a woman was urging her husband to walk faster, pointing vaguely toward the east, where hot white clouds scraped over the sky. I felt my own pulse quicken, which was strange.
I’d made peace, during the long years in Rassambur, with my own impermanence. My god’s mercy and his justice didn’t frighten me. I had learned to face the prospect of my own unmaking with equanimity, even with joy. At least, I thought I had. I discovered, standing on that pitching, swaying causeway, that coming back to the place where I was born had rekindled something inside me, some childhood instinct deeper than any epiphany. My mind might have been calm as the people around us mounted panic’s swaying ladder, but my body knew we had come back, my bones and blood recognized the thick reek of mud, the hot salt air.
“I will confess,” Ela went on, “that I will be vexed if this marvel of Annurian engineering suddenly becomes less marvelous.”
Kossal shrugged. “We live until we die.”
“And yet,” Ela added speculatively, “the best beds and finest plum wine in Dombang wait at the end of this causeway. It would be a shame to miss out.”
“You do understand,” the old priest replied, glancing over, “that Rassambur’s coin is not for the spending on frivolities and idle luxury.”
“Life is an idle luxury, Kossal. Before I go to the god, I intend to enjoy wine and a soft bed at every available opportunity, hopefully in the company of someone very beautiful and very naked.”
Then, before he could respond, as though in rebuke to Ela’s hopes, the wind kicked up again, and the world lurched. Women and men hoisted their screams into the air, ten dozen bright pennons flapping madly above us as the quarter-mile span on which we stood twisted, shrieked, broke away from the causeway at either end, listed toward the west, and then, with a snapping of old wood, collapsed.
It was a soft landing—all water or mud—which somewhere else might have been a comfort. Not here. When the fishers of Dombang who ply the delta channels talk about someone who has died—died in any way, alone in bed, at the tavern, stabbed in some back alley—they always use the same expression: he flipped the boat. To be boatless in the waters of the delta, the wisdom goes, is to be dead.
Of course the wisdom isn’t quite right. Funny how often that happens. The Vuo Ton live in the delta somehow, well beyond the boundaries of Dombang. Occasionally, someone from the city itself survives. I remember Chua Two-Net walking out of the delta, bleeding but alive. It doesn’t happen very often.
All of which might suggest that the Shirvian delta would be a terrible place to build a city, but that, after all, was the point. According to the stories, Dombang’s first settlers—the women and men who arrived among the house-high reeds thousands of years earlier—didn’t come for the fishing or the sunsets; they came to hide. Harried by the Csestriim near the end of those ancient wars, they fled into the rushes. The Csestriim—some of whom had lived five thousand years and more—died trying to follow. It could have been the snakes or crocs that killed them, the qirna or the spear rushes, but those earliest settlers told a different tale, one of gods built like humans but faster and stronger, impossibly beautiful. It was these, the story goes, that killed the Csestriim, and so it was to these that the human survivors, eking out their tenuous survival deep in the delta, began to offer sacrifice. For thousands of years something seemed to guard the people of Dombang, shielding them as the hamlet grew to a village, the village to a city, something in the delta promising death and protection both.
Then the Annurians came.
When the empire invaded, it did so with its typical mixture of breathtaking vision and plodding determination. Instead of trying to thread the hidden path through the delta’s hundred thousand deadly channels, the Annurian legions arrived on the north bank of the delta, established their camp, and started building.
A million trees were felled to build the causeway, some hauled from a hundred miles off. Ten thousand soldiers died—some taken by disease, some bitten by snakes or crocodiles, some devoured by schools of qirna, some simply … gone, lost in the shifting labyrinth of reeds and rushes. Not for nothing did the people of Dombang believe that the gods of the delta would protect them once again. To the city’s horror, however, the Annurians accepted their losses and simply kept on building. When the Annurian commander was told the causeway would be the largest structure in the world, he shrugged and said, “One more reason I’ve never been much impressed with the world.”
In the end, the gods failed.
When all the bodies had been burned or washed away, when Dombang’s ancient worship was finally crushed, when the old ways had been nearly scrubbed out by the invaders, the causeway remained, a forty-mile spear lodged in the city’s heart. Wagons and muleteers replaced soldiers on the huge wooden bridge. A tool of war became just another piece of infrastructure. Built more than a dozen feet above the water and the rushes below, it provided the only safe passage for travelers mounted or afoot over the deadly morass.