Waterborn

Brother Horse nodded. 'The Waterborn, they are called.'

'In my dream, there is a girl,' Perkar said thoughtfully. 'I am supposed to do something for her—or to her, perhaps. The farther down-River we go, the more clear that seems.'

Brother Horse grimaced. 'I don't know about these matters,' he grumbled. 'If it were not Nhol you were being called to, I would suspect that your dreams were sent by a goddess. But there are no goddesses in Nhol.'

'But what of these Waterborn? You say they are like gods.'

'Like gods. They resemble gods as anger resembles love. Both are strong emotions, both can make you kill, but they are very different, with different ends. I think the Waterborn are just walking, talking aspects of the River. He sleeps, you know. He is more wakeful now than I have ever known him to be—this may be the result of your adventures. But I think it is really through those Waterborn that he is wakeful.'

'Do you know this?' Perkar inquired.

'No. It is only a feeling. I was only there once, long ago. It is just that I have been thinking about the River and Nhol a lot lately.'

'Since you've been on the island.'

'No, only in the past few months. Your story makes me think.'

'Makes you think?'

Brother Horse dusted off his bandy little legs, stood, and stretched. 'Makes me think of a god so huge that his head doesn't always know what his feet are doing. Of messages traveling up and down the River, like an old, old man talking to himself, do you see? And me, sitting here with Heen, hearing just a little bit of that senile mumbling.'

'And what is he talking about, this old man?'

Brother Horse fixed Perkar with a strange gaze. 'You, perhaps.'

 

 

Perkar shifted the bundle of firewood in his arms, wondering how far upstream the branches had drifted from. Above him, the familiar stars were dwarfed by the splendor of the Pale Queen, and for the first time in many days, he was struck almost physically by a longing for his native pastures. How long had it been since he departed them? Months, but he didn't even know how many. Already that life of his was gone, become the story Ngangata had told today. He felt prepared to add another observation to Ngangata's pondering on songs. They were lies, yes, but they were also corpses, dressed in finer clothes than they had ever worn in life.

Preparing to return to the camp, Perkar's gaze was suddenly drawn up-River by something odd. Caught from the corner of his eye, it took a moment before his strained vision could make out what it was.

Shafts of moonlight, walking on the water. Walking. The surface seemed dimpled, an amorphous constellation of stars winking on and off, coming slowly and deliberately downstream. Perkar wondered if it might be some school of fish—or ghost-fish—that glowed beneath the waves, swimming toward him, for the River had held no moonlight since that moment in which he awoke. Was he sleeping again?

Perkar watched, the single eerie call of a whippoorwill the only companion to the rasp of his breath. He could see the tex-ture of the lights now, and they were clearly on the River's surface, not beneath it. Concavities appearing and vanishing in the current, cups of moonlight first here and then gone. It was nothing he had seen before, but it was familiar…

'Do you want to see?' Harka asked as he furrowed his brow in concentration.

'See?'

'I can show you, if you want.'

'Show me,' he breathed. And his vision changed, blood running tingling up his back, stroking his heart and lungs with shock.

The dimples were hoofprints. There were horses, walking upon the water. Formed of water, flanks of glistening moonlight, whirlpools of darkness for eyes. Nevertheless, he knew them instantly. Ngangata's old mount, and Bear, the Kapaka's stallion.

The Kapaka sat astride Bear. His face was a hollow, featureless, but Perkar could not mistake him, the way he sat his horse, the relaxed hold on the reins. The nothing beneath the helm turned to Perkar, and suddenly he was cold beyond belief, cocooned in water. All of his pain and fear chilled dull, faded, the sharp angles of his crimes coated in layers of muck and sand. For that instant, he was a tree made of ice, motionless, without passion, watching the ghost of his king as if it were nothing more unusual than a flight of geese.

The head turned from him, and fire rushed back into Perkar's belly. Everything: pain, remorse, hatred. He groaned hoarsely, flung himself savagely into the trunk of a willow, the firewood he had gathered flying about him. He reeled but did not fall, spun to look again upon his king. But the image was gone, the faint spackle of moonlight fading even as he watched. Snarling, he drew Harka, dashing at the line of trees, hacking at the branches clumsily until finally he dropped the sword and began hitting the trunks with his bare knuckles, pounding until bones cracked and blood smeared up to his wrists. At last, clumsily embracing the trunk of an oak, he slid down to the ground, sobbing.

'I hate you!' he cried, out at the water, but it was unclear even to him whether he meant the River or himself—or both.

Why? Why had the River shown him those ghosts? It could not be an accident, not with everyone and everything the River had swallowed in his time. The bones of a hundred kings must lie in his depths, a thousand steeds.

His hands were aching now, balls of flame, but he forced himself to think, to confront. What did the River want of him?

'What?' he shouted, but no answer came save the distant sound of the nightbird.

'Father, help me,' he sighed. 'Mother!' He reached up to finger the little charm his mother had given him, and he felt a familiar spark there, the same life that had entered him at birth. Touching it, he touched the place where his caul was buried, and for the beat of a bee's wing he saw that place: a mighty oak, limbs spread like a big man yawning and stretching, and near its roots a silver stream, laughing and lovely. In that instant, the distance between him and his father's damakuta dissolved; it stood just beyond the star-flecked horizon. There sat his father and mother, wondering what had become of him. A day's travel from there was Apad's family, and not much more distant, Eruka's. At his masterless damakuta in Morawta, the grandchildren of the Kapaka might be wondering where the old man was, why he hadn't returned.

What would his father tell him to do? What would he say?

Finish what you begin, he would say. Piraku is more than having, it is doing.

But do what? He had believed that there was nothing good he could do now but die. Anger surged again, and he spat out into the River, glared across his now-quiet waters.

'Yes!' he hissed. 'Yes, take me where you wish. I will go with you. Do you hear me, Changeling? I resist you no more.'

Damn Ngangata for reminding him, for making it all clear. He had begun a story and resisted ending it. There was still a chance to redeem his failures, make the saga come out right. It didn't matter that he wasn't worthy. It didn't matter that he hadn't un-

derstood where his actions would lead him. He had no choice, that much was clear. Piraku demanded that he go on, and if he had betrayed his people in everything else, he could at least not betray them in that.

'I warn you,' he told the water, voice flat. 'I warn you that if you let the bit slip from my teeth—if you give me the slightest opportunity—you will rue the day that you set me on this task. If it is this girl I am to seek—what do you want of her? But if you want her alive, I will kill her. If you want her dead, she shall live.' He shook his fists, and droplets of blood made rain-circles in the stream. 'Take more of my blood,' he said, almost without volume. 'Take all of me you want, but one day we will reckon things, you and I.'

Harka tingled as he took the sword in his hand.

'I was beginning to wonder about you,' he said. 'Wonder if there was anything in you besides remorse and self-pity.'

'Oh, yes,' Perkar told his blade. 'I just found it.'