The medicine remained inside her tiny hand.
Standing, Mere said nothing. From the corner of an eye, she saw Rococo watching her slow walk. Maybe Amund watched her, too. She didn’t look back at the man. She was done trying to decipher him.
The sun was nearly set when she entered the cabin that Amund had already chosen. His boots were waiting inside the door, self-cleaned and new heels generated for the next hike. The room was dark and felt small and smelled a little like blood agar. She left the door open. A woven bed was waiting in the back corner, the mattress pulpy and soft and just a little damp, and it would be awful sleeping. Mere wondered if she could ask their protector to speak to the river, give the creature a little helpful instruction about making people comfortable.
Entering the cabin, Amund was greeted by soft laughter.
To the blackness, he said, “Hello.”
“Here,” she answered.
He closed the door, and that was all he did for the time being. Standing opposite her, Amund was breathing loudly enough to be heard over the creaking river. The lack of windows did nothing to isolate them. Every motion beneath them was felt, the twitches and shivers and the rising sensation as they were carried aloft, accelerating downstream. Mere shivered out of fatigue and fear, and then she laughed once again, louder this time.
“What’s funny?” Amund asked.
He still stood beside the closed door. Two thin lines of starlight managed to slip past. Mere’s eyes had totally adapted, but mortals had lousy night vision. And Amund wasn’t young anymore.
“You and the river,” she said. “The two of you were having a conversation on the hillside.”
Her companion shifted his weight from one leg to the other.
“While we were being useless, you and it were achieving important diplomatic overtures.”
“She.”
“Okay. She.”
Amund took one blind step forward.
“I have something for you,” Mere said.
The river shuddered and creaked, but the larger sound was a deep breath being taken and then held.
“Medicine,” she said. “For your elbow.”
“Is that what you did in the kit?”
“Yes.”
Amund didn’t speak.
“What did you think I was doing?”
“Making poison,” he said. “Or some kind of madness pill. You know. So you can enslave my will and all.”
Interesting, paranoid ideas.
“I wish I’d thought of that,” she said.
Amund broke out laughing, but not for long and not hard. Then he crossed the room until his feet blindly hit hers.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what part of this?”
The man sat beside Mere, but a good deal of the bed was between them. “She and I talked, sure. She told me what she thinks about you. And Rococo. She was ready to kill both of you, just as soon as she thought of the best way.”
“But you stopped her.”
He didn’t respond.
“You saved us.”
He sighed. “Apparently so.”
“Hold out your hand,” Mere said.
Amund reached for the voice, and she grabbed his hand with her empty hand. His skin was cool and damp, rather like the bed was cool and damp. But she suspected that Amund would make a far more comfortable mattress.
Mere held three of his fingers inside her five.
He pulled back until he felt pressure, and then he relaxed.
“If I say, ‘No,’ to sex,” she said.
He said, “Well.”
He said nothing.
“Open your mouth,” she said.
His face was in profile, and in that very poor light Mere saw the mouth obey her command, his entire body alert and blind and very hopeful.
She dropped two pills onto the tongue.
“Sweet,” he said.
“You’re right, it’s poison,” she said. “And it takes only forty years to work.”
Then Amund was laughing and not quietly. He laughed until he sobbed, and Mere wasn’t certain when she began to chuckle at some of this or all of this.
Sitting like that, they stayed awake half the night, gradually moving closer on the unappealing mattress, and Mere kept hold of those three fingers while both of them pulled reasons to laugh out of nothing at all.
10.
Amund was making love to one god when a second god called to him. He didn’t dress or bother to let his erection die. A happy fleck of naked water, he hurried off to speak with the river. This would be a pivotal conversation. He had that sense from the beginning, and the human felt a little omniscient when his premonition came true. Among her many promises, the river claimed that they would reach the coast tomorrow, around midday, and the waiting streakship wasn’t far beyond the horizon. Great news was heaped on top of great news. Amund practiced what he would say first and next and last. Returning to the nonboat, the human was wishing that smiles could be infinite. How enormous would his face and mouth have to be to capture this transcendent joy? Then he noticed the two gods standing behind the railing. They watched him, and Amund let his finite face drop for a moment, watching his bare feet crossing the blue flesh. Then he looked up again. Mere and Rococo were standing close to one another, perhaps a little closer than before. Amund was still in an exceptionally good mood, and Mere was smiling too. But at Rococo, and not just politely smiling.
Humans, genuine mortal humans, were less than brilliant. But even ordinary middle-aged men had the innate genius to find the meaning in faces.
Amund looked at those faces. Tenderness and acceptance and a new chain of possibilities were on display, and
