“That my god is everywhere, and one day he will gather even the ministers of his mercy into his patient hands.”
No one spoke. The current flowed on, opening its throat beneath the boat’s sharp bow. Half crouched on my bench, I wondered at the snake’s perfection, the way it had slipped silently into the boat and killed a man before the rest of us even noticed. It was only a beast, of course. It killed to eat, not to worship, but the thing’s humble grace made me feel foolish and ungainly. I straightened finally, slid my knife back into its sheath, then turned to look at the wrecked flesh that had been Hin. While I plotted and fretted and schemed, while I spent days trying to fall in love, to pass my Trial, to become a priestess, Ananshael had a million servants like the snake—patient, unordained—going about the work, unmaking lives and the misery and confusion woven through them. What need did the god have of me, of my clumsy devotion? What did it matter, finally, if I loved Ruc and killed him, or if, when I failed, Ela took my throat in her long, perfect hands and held it until I was gone?
There is an inexplicable hubris in any decision to serve a god.
I turned to look at Ela. During the whole frantic episode, she hadn’t stirred. Even as Hin screamed, twitched himself to stillness, she’d remained asleep, bare feet kicked up on the rail, brown legs glowing in the sun, hands folded behind her head. Now, though, as though she felt my gaze upon her, she opened a single, lazy eye. Without moving she glanced over the boat, the small, floating tableau of death, then closed her eye again and sighed.
“Does this mean I have to row?” she asked.
19
We reached the village of the Vuo Ton just before dusk.
At first, I thought Chua had lost her way. The channel in which we’d been traveling tightened, then tightened further, spear rushes leaning over our heads until we drifted through a brown-green tunnel, cut off from the sky and sun. When there was no more room for Dem Lun to ply the oars, he shipped them silently, secured them inside the hull, then picked up a wooden paddle from the boat’s bottom. The hot air was heavy with the sweet smells of mud and rot. Hidden in the stalks to either side, invisible creatures hissed and chittered. I kept seeing, out of the corner of my eye, flickers of motion, quick slitherings, but every time I turned there was only the wall of rushes, the still green water.
“This,” Kossal observed mildly, “reminds me of a chute where animals are slaughtered.”
The prospect didn’t seem to bother him. Ruc, however, was scanning the rushes, one hand on the tiller, the other holding his loaded flatbow. He shifted to aim the weapon at Chua.
“If you have betrayed us,” he said, “the first quarrel goes through your throat.”
The woman glanced at the weapon, then turned away to prod at the reeds with her fishing spear. “If the Vuo Ton wanted to kill us, we would be dead.”
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
For a while, she didn’t respond, just kept testing the rushes, sliding her spear between them down into the muddy bank, then pulling it back. Finally, she found a place where the forked head came back dripping water instead of covered with mud.
“We go through here.”
I eyed the rushes. “Looks like a perfect place for more widow’s kiss. Or snakes.”
Chua shook her head. “The Vuo Ton scatter ash and salt on the water. The spiders and snakes stay away from it.”
Salt and ash seemed like meager shields against the predators of the delta, but we had come this far under Chua’s protection. Ruc studied the reeds for a while, then nodded to Dem Lun. The Greenshirt—his eyes still wide and blank with the horror of Hin’s death—began paddling once more, and the boat nosed into the rushes, parting them, gliding up the hidden channel until we were surrounded by the swaying stalks, the open water behind us lost. No one spoke. Bright-winged birds—red, flame-orange, blue—flitted back and forth, vexed at the encroachment on their nests, but no snakes slipped into the boat. No spiders dropped from the reeds above. Then, between one paddle stroke and next, we broke from the rushes and into the open.
It took a moment for me to realize what I was seeing.
Backwaters dotted the delta, spots where the current slowed or disappeared, places that seemed more like ponds than the forgotten channels of a great river. This was no pond. It was a lake. Open water stretched away for hundreds of paces in every direction. After weeks hemmed in by the walls and alleys of Dombang, by the ranks of rushes flanking every channel, I’d forgotten the size of the sky. Instead of a fragment of cloud, a glimpse of the sun wedged between the rooftops, I could see all of it now, the huge, unbroken blue. After the dappled shadow of the rushes, the sunlight shattering off the open lake was so dazzling that for a moment I could see nothing but light and space. I shaded my eyes with a hand, and slowly shapes began to resolve from the brilliance.
Near the center, ringed by open water, was a village, if village is the right word for a settlement in which nothing is settled. The Vuo Ton seemed to have built everything—their homes, their barges, their walkways, even a few of their boats—from rushes. Narrow sheaves served as posts or railings. Larger bundles—waist thick, cinched with cord—took the place of beams and posts, holding up cleverly thatched roofs. At first I thought the Vuo Ton had built on one of the delta’s lowlying islands, but as I stared at the settlement, I realized it was flexing, rising and falling with the water, as though the whole thing were alive, breathing.
“It floats,” I said stupidly.
Chua nodded. “Every home is a boat.”
Dugout canoes ringed the village, two or three tied off to each structure. Half a dozen small children were playing in one, chanting a song in a language I couldn’t understand while they danced bafflingly complex steps on the gunwales, leaping from one side to the other just as the boat started to tip. In another canoe, two girls balanced on the rails as they did battle with fishing spears, stabbing and blocking, each rocking the hull in an effort to topple the other. A few old folks sat on a floating raft a few paces away, sipping something from clay cups and heckling.
Behind me, I heard the crack, then groan of a cask being opened. I turned to find Ruc tossing aside the wooden cover. His shoulders flexed as he hefted the thing up onto the rail, then dumped the contents. Gray-blue ropes of tangled intestine slopped into the water, buoyed up by pockets of gas caught inside. Blood spread in a dark slick beside the boat. Ruc watched it for a moment, eyes unreadable, then went to work with his belt knife on the second cask.
“What are you doing?” Chua asked.