I hauled in a deep breath and dove. The lake was too murky with blood and kicked-up mud to see anything but my own pale hands, groping against the water’s meager purchase. I debated drawing my own knife, but I needed both hands to swim. Ruc and the croc had gone down just a few paces away, but for a long time all I could see was bubbles, the slanted shafts of sunlight, the filaments of trailing reeds. Then, suddenly, I was on them, the croc like a huge rock sunk to the bottom, Ruc the vague shadow pinned beneath.
I couldn’t see anything beyond the outlines, certainly not well enough to stab for the eye. For agonizing moments, I groped in the gloom. I found Ruc’s chest first, warm in the warm water, muscles bunched with his struggle. He went still when he felt my hand, aware enough, even with his arm lodged in the croc’s jaws, to understand that someone had come, to resist the urge to kick and scramble, to go limp while I searched for the creature’s eyes. Once I found the thing’s snout, the eyes were obvious enough—small, tough bulges an arm’s length back from the tip of the nose. Air burning in my lungs, forcing myself to go slow, I drew the knife from the sheath at my thigh, wrapped an arm around the croc’s neck, then drove the blade home, forcing my arm in and down even when I felt the knife lodge on some bone inside the head, twisting it, ripping it free, then plunging it in again.
The beast twitched, reared, then went utterly still.
Done, I thought.
Then I realized Ruc was still trapped in the jaws.
I worked my way along the serrated teeth, tried to haul them open. They wouldn’t budge. In the end, Ananshael takes the strength from all creatures, but my god is patient, and Ruc didn’t have time to wait. I dragged on the jaws again, failed again, forced myself to pause, to think, then found Ruc’s face. Washed in the croc’s warm blood, I pressed my lips to his. He stiffened at the touch, started to draw back, but I wrapped a hand behind his head and drew him close, exhaling the meager air remaining in my lungs into his own. I took his free hand in my own, squeezed it, then empty, aching for air, stroked hard for the surface.
Eight times I filled my chest to bursting. Eight times I swam back down, found him, emptied my lungs, made my breath his own, then worked at the croc’s jaws with my knife. The hide was tough as tree bark, the muscles beneath knotted as old rope, but I kept at it, sawing, slicing, stabbing, rising to the surface, sucking in another breath, then going down again.
In the end, Ruc had to carry me up. I’d waited too long, spent too much time hacking through tendon, misjudged what little air I had left. The blackness closed over me like a fist. I had time for a single thought: My god … and then I was gone.
I woke to Ruc’s green eyes over me.
“Wake up,” he growled, then ground his bleeding palm into my stomach.
I choked, puked out the brackish water, rolled onto my side, groaned. When I rolled back, he was still there, bleeding, watching me. Something hot and violent blossomed in my heart.
Love? I wondered.
Eira, as was her way, did not respond.
20
The crocodiles watched with grave, lifeless eyes as we feasted on their flesh.
Butchers had cut off the heads, laid them on clay platters longer than my arm, then piled the fresh-carved meat around them, river garlic and boiled sweet reeds layered between the steaming slabs. All of the Vuo Ton had gathered for the feast, the adults sitting cross-legged on the wide rafts—there were no tables, no chairs—while the children made do with whatever space they could find. Surviving the day’s ordeal had earned the four of us a place on the centermost barge, right beside the Witness. The women and men flanking us weren’t necessarily the oldest or the most obviously strong, though they seemed to have more scars, and they carried themselves with the confidence of those who had faced their own death many times over.
Night seeped up silently from the surface of the water, from between the reeds, leaking between the floating houses until it filled the sky. Off to the west, the low moon glowed like tallow, tangled in the swaying rushes. Smoke from the cook fires smudged the stars, but fish-scale lanterns hung from the ropes overhead, swaying with the warm breeze, illuminating food and faces alike with a ruddy glow. I could feel Ruc at my side, a still form in all the motion, a fixed point in the ever-shifting delta.
I looked over to find him watching me, his green eyes nearly black in the lamplight. A tiny old woman with hands like spiders had treated the punctures on his arm with some kind of ointment, stitched them shut, then slathered the whole thing with more ointment squeezed from tubers I didn’t recognize. When she insisted that he lie down, he shook his head.
“I’ve had worse.”
The wounds didn’t seem to bother him during the meal. He used his bloody left hand as often as his right, though he flexed his fingers every so often as though to check if they still worked. None of us had escaped from the water unscathed. I could feel a furious bruise bleeding beneath the skin of my cheek; it felt as though the bone might be fractured, but I couldn’t tell. A pair of slices ran half the length of Kossal’s leg, and even Ela, whose battle had ended almost before it started, bore a set of painful-looking welts across her bare shoulder, although like Ruc she didn’t appear to notice them. All in all, it seemed a mild reckoning. Mild for us. Less so for Dem Lun, whose body the butchers had hacked out of the massive croc.
As we ate, his remains and those of Hin as well waited on a raft of floating rushes a few dozen paces out into the lake. The night’s feast was both funeral and celebration. Ruc hadn’t objected—he had something of my own order’s practicality when it came to corpses—but once or twice throughout the meal I caught him staring at the floating shadow, as though the wrecked flesh held the answer to some unspoken question, and when the Witness finally gave the order to light the pyre ablaze, he didn’t take his eyes from the tongues of flame.
As the sodden body turned to ash, the Vuo Ton sang a simple, plangent melody in their own language.
“What does it mean?” I asked Chua quietly.
“It is a celebration,” she replied, “of his bravery.”
“Strange practice,” Ruc said, his voice sanded perfectly flat. “Murdering a man, then praising his bravery.”
The Witness turned toward us. “We asked no more of him than we do of our own children.”
“What kind of people feed their children to crocodiles?”
“They are not food. They are fighters.”
“Not if they die.”
“If they die,” the Witness replied evenly, “they die with a knife in hand. What pride could they have, spending their lives in hiding?”
“More than a hundred thousand people in Dombang,” Ruc said. “Most of them live, laugh, thrive. No one throws them naked into the delta to fight crocs.”
“And this is why the people of Dombang are weak. You have forgotten your gods.”
Kossal, who had been gnawing the meat from a rib, paused, wiped his face, then poked the bloody bone at the leader of the Vuo Ton.
“Tell us about the gods.”
The one-eyed man nodded, as though he had expected this. “You are not from Dombang.”
“She is,” Ela cut in, nodding at me. “We’re Kettral.”