“What do they look like?”
I forced myself not to lean forward. Memory slammed into me like a fist, obliterating the present. All over again I saw the leopard coiled snare-still on the bank, saw it gather, then leap, jaws open. Felt myself raise my useless hand to fight a little longer, and then witnessed, as I had in a thousand dreams, that woman who could not have been a woman burst from the water, naked and perfect, saw her catch the cat by the neck with one effortless hand, saw the creature jerk, go limp as she snapped its neck. It had to weigh a hundred pounds, but she tossed it aside easily, almost negligently, the way a woman at the end of a long meal might toss one final, well-cleaned bone onto her plate. I could feel again my heart scrambling desperately in my chest as she leaned over me, could see those eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me ever since, cold and golden, framed in that perfect face. I could hear my voice in my ears: Are you here to save me? I could see her bare teeth, the sharp incisors, as she smiled, then shook her head.
“They are beautiful.”
For half a heartbeat, I thought the words were my own, though I had not opened my mouth.
Then I realized it was the Witness. Slowly, my memory faded. The real world bled across my sight once more—Vuo Ton seated on the rafts of rushes, the severed head of the crocodile gazing at me with lazy eyes, Ruc, still but ready at my side, Ela’s fingers lingering on the chieftain’s arm, and the Witness himself, his gaze gone impossibly distant.
“Like people?” I found myself asking.
“They are to us,” he replied, “as we are to the shadows we cast.”
On the raft before us, the dark shape of my own shadow shifted beside Ruc’s, twitching with the lantern’s fire, as though something inside both of us was restless, as though something beneath or behind our bone and skin rejected the stillness of our bodies.
“That’s pretty,” Ela said, trailing her hand along the chieftain’s arm. “I like the part about the shadows. But I don’t know what it means.”
“They are like us,” I said, the words too hot and urgent to remain inside of me any longer. “Like us, but faster and stronger. More perfect. More full of whatever it is that makes us alive.”
From across the platter of cooling food, Kossal narrowed his eyes.
“You have seen them.”
It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t answer it. I turned instead to the leader of the Vuo Ton.
“What color were her eyes?”
He smiled at the memory. “Like the last light of the sun.”
“Golden?”
He nodded.
“And the scar?” I went on, my heart thudding painfully, “right here?” I raised a hand to my cheek, traced the line down along my chin.
“So you have seen her, too.”
I hesitated, then nodded. I could feel the eyes of all the Vuo Ton upon me, steady and grave. I ignored them. The only gaze that mattered belonged to Ruc, who was studying me with a mixture of anger and open disbelief. I turned to him.
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe you now.”
I started to object, found I could not. My whole life, I’d carried the memory of those golden eyes, the casual, awful might with which that jaguar had been tossed aside. Most of the time it seemed like a vision, a dream, the phantasm of a mind baked too long in the sun.
“Of course you don’t,” I replied finally. “I hardly believe it, and I’m the one who saw her.”
I turned away from Ruc to find Chua leaning toward me, her weathered face intent. “When did she find you?”
I stared at her, uncertain how to relate an encounter that I’d spent almost two decades denying. The fisher stared back, hands clenched in her lap. The Witness watched me with his singular stare, as did Kossal. For once even Ela was silent. I could try to hide, to stuff the memory back into whatever part of my mind had carried it all these years, but I was tired of holding it, tired of hiding. The somber faces of the Vuo Ton twitched with the flickering lamplight. The moon had climbed free of the reeds; it hung overhead, a single, impossibly distant lantern almost lost in the immensity of the night.
It happened, I told myself, trying to feel the truth of those words. It was real.
Though he was the only true skeptic, perhaps because he was the only skeptic, I turned to Ruc, took a deep breath, then began slowly to unfold the story.
“I was eight when my mother tied my arms and legs, then paid a priest to leave me in the delta.”
“You told me this story.”
“Not all of it.”
Ruc opened his mouth to object, then shook his head and clamped it shut. Whether that was an invitation to continue or a refusal to engage in the topic at all, I couldn’t say. It didn’t matter. I had thrown myself from the cliff—there was no turning back, no choice beyond the plunge.
“My mother thought that sacrificing a child to the delta might reverse my father’s fortunes, might save them both, and so she gave me to the priest. He drugged me and took me to the delta.
“I woke up on a mud flat, my vision swimming, head throbbing. I couldn’t see the city, couldn’t even see the smoke. Just reeds all around, and the slow, brown water swirling at my feet.”
I glanced over at the Witness. “The priest had untied me.”
He nodded. “Scraps of the truth remain, even in the city.”
“The hunt,” I concluded quietly.
He nodded. “Kem Anh and her consorts would never hunt a child of eight. Those in your city who call themselves priests have forgotten that. But even they cannot forget that the Three are hunters.” He cocked his head. “Did he give you a weapon?”
“Hardly a weapon,” I replied quietly. “An old knife.”
I could still feel it in my hands, the weight, the rough wood, the nicked steel of the dull, rust-spotted blade.
“A mockery,” the Witness said, shaking his head.
“Maybe,” I replied. “But that knife saved my life.” I stared into the swirling currents of my memory. “For a while I didn’t move. My head ached and my legs felt like lead, but the reason I didn’t get up, didn’t try to do something, was terror. My own blind panic pinned me to that mud better than any steel shackles. The priest might as well have left me tied. I lay there all morning, wondering when I would die, and how. The day was hot, my tongue swelled in my mouth, but I didn’t dare approach the water, didn’t dare twitch. I was horrified of qirna, of snakes, of crocodiles, of everything.