Waterborn

Changeling

I

On the Hungry Water

Perkar had long since relinquished the troublesome task of numbering days and their dark complements. Singly or bundled together like so many reeds, they held no sense for him; his sense was all the River. Not that the River was outside of time, for he remembered earlier and later times upon it. Earlier, when the boat thrashed through the rapids in clouds of argent spray, pitching like a child's toy. He remembered the sickening grinding of stone against wood, the vague wonder that even a godboat did not splinter and join the spume in ecstatic flight up and away from the rocks. Still early, after the frantic water, when he had made his first real attempt to bring the boat aground on an inviting shore in a gentle, forested valley, he recalled the bitter helplessness as the willful boat continued on in the channel, despite exertion at the tiller that left him with blistered palms and aching muscles. He knew that even if his arms had been stronger he could have pulled until his heart burst with no more effect.

'The River has us,' Ngangata told him once, when he was free of fever. 'He will never let us go.'

Perkar had ceased doubting that. Twice the boat had allowed them to make landfall, both times on islands in the channel. In each instance, he attempted to swim to shore, and always the current seized him and brought him, exhausted, back to the boat. On those occasions he had carried a rope with him, tied to the bow; he had no intention of leaving Ngangata.

It was later now. The mountains and even the hills were far behind them. They were more days than he could number—if he still counted them—from his home. A few times he had seen Human Beings; not his own folk, but dark, hard-faced men and women astride horses worth killing for. Many of the steeds were marked like his poor, dead Mang, striped with the hue of dried blood. The dark people and their horses watched him curiously as he drifted by. That had been later, when the River was no longer hurried, no longer gnashing through soil and stone with invisible teeth. Grassland rolled gently away from level banks thick with willow, tamarisk, and cottonwood. The sun was harsh, inescapable, burning their skin and then stripping it from them. Warning them to return to their softer land and then punishing them for not heeding the warning. Ngangata suffered the most. Though Perkar eventually stopped burning, his skin tanning a light coppery brown, Ngangata continued to be seared. His worst wounds had healed, and yet he never seemed much improved; he was weak, listless, spent much of his time in fevered sleep.

Perkar watched the halfling now as he turned uneasily, eyes closed but in constant motion behind swollen lids.

'It is the River eating him,' Perkar's sword told him.

'Why doesn't it eat me?' he asked.

'It does. I heal you, though not so much as I could if we were away from him. I have restored all hut two of your heartstrings, but it is a struggle. He is trying to eat me, as well, but that is one advantage to being enclosed in this form. It is like a seed too hard for him to digest. If you were to drop me into him, he could consume me, but even that would take time.' The sword seemed to hesitate, then went on. 'There is something else. The River seems to know you, somehow. Not the way you would know a person, or even understand something. He knows you as you might know a taste, a scent. I think even without me, he would not eat you yet.'

He nodded dumbly. The goddess had tried to warn him of this, told him that the River knew him, through her. He wondered if the blood he had loosed into the rivulet at Bangaka's damakuta had also gone to him, but of course it had. For the first time, he realized that his dreams—the dreams that now made it nearly impossible to sleep—the dreams had begun a handful of days after his sacrifice. Had they begun when his blood reached the River? It seemed likely.

Almost from habit, Perkar examined his crimes. They had hardened in his time on the River. They no longer raged in him, diffuse, but lay sharp and cruel, like odd crystals that he could turn over and over in the palm of his mind, seeing each terrible, glittering surface, each stupid mistake. He could easily see the first blunder, the root from which all the others grew. From the moment he had loosed that blood, he had not done a single right thing. Even killing the Kapaka had not been enough for him, had not nearly been the end of it. Now he had doomed even Ngangata.

Doomed the only one who knows what you did, the most evil part of him whispered, now and then.

Ngangata awoke that evening, his eyes bleary. Perkar gave him a bit of water and some raw fish. Obtaining food—so long as it was fish—was not a problem. A hook cast into the water, baited or not, was soon heavy with their next meal. They had no way of cooking it, of course, but one could become accustomed to raw fish easily enough. On the islands, Ngangata recovered enough strength to set snares, and they had eaten rabbit, squirrel, and even deer once. The longer they remained on the islands, however, the more vivid and constant Perkar's dreams became. Ngangata, though healthier on land, always returned them to the boat when Perkar became incapable of doing anything from lack of sleep. He begged the halfling to leave him, but Ngangata refused.

Today Ngangata was lucid, propped against the side of the boat. He drew a deep, weary breath.

'My fever is gone again,' he remarked.

'Good,' Perkar said.

'I'm not much company.'

Perkar frowned at him. 'I've been thinking,' he muttered.

Ngangata tried to smile. 'That has been a dangerous thing for you to do, in the past.'

He nodded his head in agreement. 'Yes. But I've been thinking about you.'

'Even worse,' Ngangata pointed out.

'I've been wondering if you couldn't stay on one of the islands—if we ever see another. You would get stronger, perhaps strong enough to swim. He might let you swim to shore.'

Ngangata nodded. 'I've thought of that. More likely he would eat me up right away. The River has no love at all for Alwat, and he would probably mistake me for one.'

'Ngangata, we've seen people bathing in the water, remember? They didn't seem to be in danger. It's me, only me he wants. It might not even be the River that abducts us; it might be this boat. It was, after all, a gift from Karak, not the most trustworthy of gods.'

'It is the River,' Ngangata replied. 'I can feel it. And I believe he will not let me go.'

'You could try. Otherwise, I'm afraid you will die. I don't want you to die, Ngangata.'

'Very good of you,' the Alwa-Man replied. 'But if I am to die, I doubt that you can do much about it. Tell me about your dreams again.'

Perkar was frustrated by this sudden change in topic. He wanted to argue longer, to convince Ngangata to try to leave the boat.

'I've told you already,' he answered shortly.

'Yes. But I've been thinking about them since. Tell me again.'

He sighed. 'I dream about this River. But farther down, much farther down. As wide as he is now, there he is so broad that one bank cannot be seen from the other. And there is a city there, a city with more people than in all of the Cattle-Lands, in all of the valleys.'

'You see them, these people?'

'Yes, I see them, massed along the bank, fishing in boats, bathing, so many of them.'

'But the one girl you dream about?'

'She looks to be about twelve years old. Dark skin, very black hair, black eyes. Pretty, in a foreign sort of way. She seems…' He knit his brow together in concentration. 'She is sad, worried. Frightened, I think. In my dream I always want to help her. I hear her call my name, but in some language I don't comprehend. Does that make sense?'

'It makes sense,' Ngangata replied. 'Of course it makes sense. It is a dream.'

'Yes,' Perkar muttered. 'Her language, though, lately I have begun to understand it, or… I don't know, this part