“In the late afternoon, a red-bill duck landed on the bank near the reeds. Just as she started pecking for bugs, a brown-back uncoiled from the reeds, caught her in a long loop of its body, and began to squeeze. I couldn’t move. I just watched. The duck twitched and struggled. Her feet scrabbled at the mud. It seemed to go on forever, and then, just like that, she was dead. Still.
“I thought about killing myself then, about stabbing the knife into my stomach. It looked so much more peaceful to be dead, but the getting dead—that looked hard. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wanted to be away from that duck, away from the snake slowly swallowing the body, and so I made my way down the mud bank. When I reached the end, I had two choices—swim to an island on the far side or go into the reeds. I swam, forcing myself to go slow, not to thrash, not to do anything that might draw a school of qirna. When I reached the island, I climbed partway into a low tree and fell asleep.
“I woke up lost and baffled, unable to breathe. At first I thought my father had his broad arm across my throat, choking me, then realized I wasn’t in my home, that there was no stink of quey on the air, no cursing. A moment later I tumbled from the tree, and when I hit, I remembered: the priest, the mud bar, the island. I scrabbled at my chest and found a boa wrapped tight around me, squeezing, squeezing. It was dumb luck that I still had the knife, luck that the hand holding it was free. I went at the snake with a mad fury, stabbing over and over so viciously I cut myself in half a dozen places. Finally, just as the strength drained out of me, I felt it loosen. I dragged it off, hurled it away as well as I could, retreated shaking into the tree. I stared half the afternoon at that dead snake, then made myself climb down, skin a portion of the body, and eat the meat, which was still warm.
“I’d been on that island for three days when the jaguar came. Maybe it was the snake’s blood smeared over the dirt, maybe my own blood, oozing from the cuts that broke open any time I moved, or maybe my luck was just done. It caught me standing by the bank, a makeshift spear in hand, trying to take one of the river eels. I noticed it only because everything went suddenly quiet behind me, the insects and tiny birds instantly and perfectly mute. I remember turning, seeing that mottled pelt, those wide eyes, the teeth, and thinking first, It’s beautiful and then a moment later, Now is when I die.
“I managed to hold it off for a little while, my knife in one hand, my spear in the other. It was wary, but it had me trapped on the island. It was a better swimmer than I was, and I was exhausted, sick, too hot. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to flee. Each time it came at me I was a little slower, and then it got inside my guard, sliced open my arm with a claw, knocked my spear spinning into the water, darted back, circled around, then paused before the kill. When it leapt for me, I was dead, would have been dead except that, just as its feet left the ground, a woman who could not have been a woman, a naked woman with golden eyes, exploded from the water, caught the cat in midair, snapped its neck, then tossed it aside.”
“Kem Anh,” the Witness said quietly.
I looked at him a long time, then shook my head. “Why?”
He shrugged. “The ways of the goddess are strange. I cannot speak for her, but I would say she saw your future in you: a girl of eight, three days alone in the delta, who killed a constrictor, who fought a jaguar. She could see what you might become. She did not want to waste it.”
“Waste what?”
“A woman,” he answered with a smile, “who might one day be worthy of the hunt.”
I shook my head. “She couldn’t have known I would come back.”
He spread his hands, as though to embrace me, the feast, the village, the entire night. “Yet here you are, years later, searching for her.”
*
The drinking went on late into the night. I remembered thinking at one point, drunkenly, how strange it was that the same people who had eyed us askance then tried to feed us to crocodiles should become so welcoming, so generous, so voluble. The jugs of quey went around and around and, as children cleared away the remnants of the feast, people began drifting from raft to raft, leaving one conversation to join another. I couldn’t understand the language, but from the fingers pointed our way and the vigorous miming, it seemed that the most popular topic was the afternoon’s struggle. The old people nodded knowingly, as though they’d seen it all a thousand times. The children, those too young to have faced the crocodiles themselves, spent the night rehearsing every point, searching for some insight, some advantage, that might give them an edge when the moment came for them to swim naked into the lake.
The Vuo Ton seemed fascinated by all of us. They studied Ruc’s arm, debated volubly about the welts on Ela’s shoulder, and eyed Kossal with obvious, if wary, interest. A few approached Chua, women and men old enough that she might have known them before she abandoned the floating village for Dombang. The fisher didn’t seem pleased to have returned to her childhood home, and slipped away just as people began producing clay pipes, packing them with some pungent leaf I didn’t recognize, inhaling smoke from the tiny glowing fires.
Most of all, the Vuo Ton seemed interested in me. When I finished my story, the Witness had spoken at length to the village. When he was done, the townsfolk turned to me, nodded their heads in deference. By the time the drinking and smoking were well underway, people were crowded around me, draping necklaces over my head, pressing pipes or bottles into my hands, urging me to drink, smoke, dance. What I wanted to do was sleep, but as the quey seeped into my blood, I found myself stumbling through unfamiliar steps to the pounding of a dozen hide drums set in a semicircle on the largest barge.
Ruc found me in the press of bodies, dragged me momentarily clear, to the edge of the wide raft. The water trembled with the music, each beat shattering the moonlight glazed on the surface. I had not seen him drink or smoke all night.
“You realize,” he growled at me, “that drunk people are easier to kill. They sleep so much more soundly.”
I stared into his dark eyes, then gestured past him, to the celebration. Kossal had vanished, but Ela was whirling from partner to partner, long limbs already fluent in the new music. Children sang with the drums and those too old to dance tapped the rhythm on their knees with gnarled hands.
“Do you really think that is what this is?” I asked.
His jaw tightened.
“Look,” I said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and turning him. “Look. Don’t you think this would be a strange way to give us to the god?”
“What god?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.