“Kettral and Greenshirts,” Chua said after a long pause. “It might be fish shit, but it’s not boring—I’ll give you that.” I felt her let go of the spear. There was a clattering and scratching, as of multiple latches being undone, and then the door swung open.
When I’d left Dombang, Chua Two-Net had been somewhere in her middle thirties, which put her around fifty now. The woman I remembered had been black-haired, brown-skinned, brown-eyed, like most people native to the delta. The resemblance to her fellows ended there. Where most citizens of Dombang wore their hair long and glossy, Chua kept hers shaved to a dark stubble. She’d caught me once watching her as she dragged a long knife again and again over her oiled scalp. You want to stay alive out there, she’d said, you don’t want hair. Just another place for the spiders to hide, another thing to tangle in the net.
Coiled around her shoulders and arms—her body was muscled like the ropes used to tether ships in New Harbor—someone had inked dozens of serpents, red and green and black, all writhing upward, ringing her throat with a necklace of slit eyes and bared fangs, each tattooed viper arrested in the attempt to reach her face. According to the stories, she inked another every time she killed a snake, a claim that, judging from the species, meant she should have been dead a dozen times over. Chua, however, had always been defiantly alive, a character too large for the narrow alleys of the Weir, like one of the heroes who stepped straight out of the songs the old folks sang nightly around the embers of cook fires, someone as fierce and terrifying and glorious as the gods we had forsaken.
She looked like a god no longer. I recognized the snakes, of course, still hissing silently at her neck, but she’d grown her hair halfway down her back and her wide shoulders were slumped, the muscle cording her arms half melted away. The old scars from when she fought her way free of the delta raked her skin into puckered welts. Half of her face was badly discolored, a red stain spreading beneath the brown—the reminder of a fang spider bite that would have killed someone weaker. Aside from her eyes, she looked like an old woman who might have trouble on the city’s more rickety walkways. Those eyes, however—bright, defiant—were the eyes I remembered.
“Never them,” I said, nodding to her.
She blinked. Until that moment, until seeing her standing there before me, I’d forgotten Chua’s unique salutation. In any situation, greeting or farewell, she would say those two words: Never them.
“Evening, Two-Net.”
“Never them.”
“Luck out there in the rushes today.”
An incremental nod. “Never them.”
No one seemed to know if it was a promise, or a warning, or a curse. No one I knew was ever brave enough to ask. I’d forgotten all about it in my years at Rassambur, but it came back to me now, as so many things had come back since returning to Dombang.
“I don’t know you,” she said, studying me.
“I grew up here.”
“Said that once already.”
“I saw you win the New Year boat race three times.”
“Eight times.”
I nodded. “I was too young to remember the first five.”
Chua glanced over at Ruc, chewed at her lip for a moment, looked past me, over my shoulder, then back at me and nodded. “Come in and close the door. The dead will choke you, if you breathe them long enough.”
The small shack was comprised of a single room. A rush mattress lay in the corner. A woven mat, thinner, but of the same rushes, covered the rest of the floor. There was a clay bowl, half filled with the congee I’d smelled, a pitcher of water, also clay, an empty basin, half a dozen salted fish hanging from a low rafter, along with a bundle of dried sweet-reed tubers. A fire pit sat at the center of the room, but when I glanced up, I saw the smoke hole above it was closed.
The older woman followed my eyes. “I get my fires finished before they start theirs.” She nodded through the wall toward the crematorium.
The space was cramped, grimy, unkempt, save for the wall immediately behind the mattress. Two fishing nets hung neatly from a series of pegs. Above them, horizontally on a wooden rack, lay a series of spears—forked, barbed fishing spears like the one I was holding. In Dombang, fishing spears are as common as fish. Every child has one. You can see women and men on the bridges and docks any time of day, chatting idly while they wait, arms cocked, for the right moment. The spears on Chua’s wall were not like those. I wasn’t a fisher, but it was obvious from the smooth, clean grain, from the qirna teeth laid into the head as barbs, from the patterns painstakingly burned into the shafts, that these were, in the way of tools passed down from generation to generation, sacred. In a small rack below them, sheathed in snakeskin, hung three gutting knives, bone handles carved for the best grip.
The rush mats hadn’t been changed in weeks, maybe months. The fire pit needed digging out. The fish stew was starting to congeal in the bowl. Those spears and knives, however, were meticulously oiled. None of the ash that had settled around the rest of the room had touched them.
“The bottom two belonged to Tem,” Chua said, settling herself cross-legged on the mat by the burned-out fire.
“Who is Tem?” Ruc asked.
“My husband. He died.”
And that, of course, was the part of the story I’d forgotten. Everyone had been so shocked to see Chua Two-Net come in from the delta after twelve days missing that it was easy to forget that her husband, Tem, had not come back. Part of the problem was that he had never fit easily into Chua’s legend. Everyone knew that she’d been born outside the city, raised and trained in the hidden village of the Vuo Ton, that that was where she’d learned to row, to fish, to survive in the delta. It made sense.
What did not make sense was the next part. According to the story, she’d crossed prows with Tem one day, fallen in love, forsaken her home and her people, and come to Dombang. We might have believed it if Tem had been something other than what he was … a reed-slender fisher with a pronounced limp and no particular renown. He could sing, he could tell a tale that would make children squeal in horror or delight, but he seemed a small person beside Chua—he was even known around the Weir as Small Tem—and so when he died, it seemed only right. Of course Small Tem couldn’t survive in the delta. Of course Chua Two-Net came back. When people told the story, they forgot him.
Chua, evidently, had not forgotten.
“My condolences,” Ruc said.
“Are worth less than a holed canoe,” Chua replied. “Where is the gold?”
Ruc glanced at me. “My friend gets ahead of herself sometimes.” He rummaged in a vest pocket. “I have a handful of silver. The gold is at the Shipwreck.”
“And the fish are in the river,” Chua replied, face souring.
“He’s good for it,” I said.
Ruc’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything. I passed the spear across to Chua, then sat down. After a moment, Ruc joined me.
“So,” the woman said, studying us. “Doom comes for Dombang.”
“You don’t sound concerned,” Ruc observed.