Waterborn

Sleep came with some difficulty. She kept reliving the evening's experience over and over in her head, thinking of all the things she should have done. She had felt the thing in her—the River part of her. She could have struck at him, just as she had done before, and yet she felt instinctively that using that power was very dangerous right now. Even so, without her even asking, it had made her stronger, filled her arm with enough might to best Wezh; the muscles still tingled, even itched a bit. Actually, that arm had been itching for a few days, now that she thought of it. Over and over, she reviewed the scene, her anger staying alive and keeping her awake. Finally, deep in the night, an odd thought struck her. She imagined the situation again, but this time, in place of Wezh, she imagined that Yen was her suitor. A ridiculous thought—he was much too far beneath her station. And yet, when she imagined the scene with Yen, it came out differently, somehow. When he placed his hand on her leg, she stopped him, as well. But Yen just smiled kindly, his offending hand gripping hers briefly, and he leaned forward to kiss her forehead. Then the two of them rose and walked, hand in hand, back to her apartments where he bid her good night.

She ran it through her head like that a few times and finally drifted off to sleep.

She awoke to a gray dawn, just drizzling in from the courtyard. Something had awakened her, something annoying, but it took a moment for the sleep-fog to lift from her senses enough to localize it. It was her arm, itching furiously. Sleepy and annoyed, she reached to scratch it. That felt better, in the way that scratching does. In the same way, when she stopped, it itched more than before. Grunting, she scratched even harder.

Her nail caught on something, like the edge of a scab. Picking at it again, she wondered when she had injured her arm. Had Wezh wounded her? Curious, she stood up. The apartments were quite silent, and cloaked in that stillness she padded effortlessly out into the courtyard. The sky was slate, with a promise of coral just appearing eastward. A little mouse, surprised at her early entry into its night domain, scuttled into the patch of sage. A cool wind paused in its flight above the palace, just long enough to drop into the courtyard, swirl about her once, and set back on his way.

There, in early light, her life changed once again. No scab on her arm, no injury, no rash. Instead, just above the crook of her elbow, tiny but perfectly formed, grew a scale. Blue, with a hint of iridescence.

V

The Bit Slips

Days began to matter again. Perkar first noticed it a short time after he left Ngangata. Impatience was the root of it. It wasn't so much that he cared about days themselves, but that there seemed to be too many of them, too many between him and his destiny. He began marking them, each passing sun a score in the tough wood of the boat.

'What I cannot do,' Harka explained to him, 'is cut through days as if they were curtains. I cannot cut them open and let you walk on through to where you want to be, not even I. You must brush each drape aside, one at a time, just as anyone would.'

Perkar snorted. 'What good are you then?'

'Without me, you would be long dead, piles of shit in a cave.'

He didn't reply; he still wished sometimes that he had died. He clung now to what the goddess told him long ago. Live with what may be, what is possible, and not what you childishly wish. He was not dead, that was a fact. The goddess was right; remorse and guilt were indulgences, candy to console a troubled child. A man who could not rise above self-pity was useless in any capacity.

He could tell himself that, anyway. But if he had learned that lesson long ago, then his king would still be alive. Apad and Eruka… he still saw their faces each morning. Apad's ruined features, Eruka's sightless eyes—the Kapaka as Perkar had last known him alive, ashen, his dreams dead and his own ghost yearning for oblivion. Or worse, the cold, faceless spirit in the moonlight. But he could tell himself that grief was pointless, get on with things. He had a purpose now, though it was vague. He had something more to do.

If only he could do it soon, before he lost this new resolve, before the memories and the dreams dragged him into madness. The wounds on his knuckles were already merely scars, and the tedium of the boat trip made it difficult to sustain his anger. Still, it was there, waiting, at least for the moment.

Five days after he began counting suns again, he passed by the city of Wun. He knew that it was Wun because Brother Horse had told him that Wun was the first city he would encounter. He knew that it was a city because he had never seen anything like it save in dreams. There was nothing astonishing about the first cluster of houses he went by. Though the dwellings were willow and reed rather than of stout planks with shake roofs, in size and number they were much like the village near any damakuta. The people, despite their dark skin and exotic features, were familiar, too, seemed to go about life the way villagers did. A woman filling a water jug, boys swimming in the River, waving at him as he passed, a man watering his sheep. But as he drifted along, the houses grew denser and denser, larger, and the people more numerous. Some young women, bathing in the River, giggled and pointed at him, and one even motioned him toward them, to the mock dismay of her companions. Perkar waved and drifted on, eventually passing houses made of stone, wooden docks thick with ships, some larger than any he had ever imagined, clustered at the planked walkways like fish feeding at the edge of a stream.

Men and women in colorful clothes watched him go by curiously, perhaps wondering if the stranger in his little boat could really be as pale as he seemed from a distance. He laid hard on the rudder, though he suspected the uselessness of it, was rewarded only by warmed muscles as Wun slid along beside him, shrank to small clusters of houses again, was gone, leaving him to wonder, from his brief glimpses of color and life, what the people might be like, what they might hope and dream, consider good food, teach their children.

Paradoxically, though he had never seen more people or buildings in one place—perhaps in his entire life—Wun still seemed small to him. His vision of 'city' was a dream one, dominated by buildings that dwarfed even the largest in Wun.

Passing Wun, he crossed the mouth of a river flowing down from the north. He surveyed it curiously, speculating about from whence he or she flowed, whether it suffered as much as the Stream Goddess did, where she entered the Changeling. It almost seemed that the tributary spoke to him, not in words or even like Harka, but in signs. In its thick turbid waters, swollen by some far-off rain, Perkar seemed to catch evanescent images of distant mountains, storm clouds, raven black, encasing bones of silent lightning. Rain falling for days on end. The mud the tributary brought fanned out into the Changeling, trailed darkly along his northern edge, thinner with each downstream moment but still visible. Perkar considered the tributary's resistance, its unwillingness to immediately die, and a vague hope gathered courage and became an idea. Once more he put his weight on the tiller, hoping to enter the fading brown stream, to reach a place where the hold of the Changeling might not be absolute. When that failed, he lifted up his pack and sword and prepared to jump.

'Don't,' Harka warned him. He ignored the sword and leapt anyway.

He believed, briefly, that he had succeeded. His strokes took him cleanly toward the bank, and the current, while mightily strong, was not swift. Almost he reached the brown streak and its promise, the gift of some storm cloud far away, but then the current took him like an immense fist, and his pitiful Human strength was nothing. Exhausted, he soon found himself back against the boat.

'It was worth a try,' he told Harka later, his shirt drying in the sun.

'I thought you had resigned yourself to this,' the sword chided him.

'I have,' he told it, and did not further explain himself.

A day passed, and a night, and then a new morning. The River in the past few days had swollen to an enormous size, so huge that, even in the center of the channel, Perkar had to strain to see that southern shore, a fine line of green against the yellow haze of endless desert. The Changeling was still meandering east, but the sunrise was still farther to his left each morning, and so he knew they—the boat, the River and he—were gradually turning more southward, toward an ocean he had only heard the vaguest rumors of and could not imagine at all. Surely the River held all of the water there was in the world. How could the 'ocean' be larger? His own language did not even have a word for such a thing; he could only call it the Big Lake. But the language in his head, with its strange vowels and clattering short consonants, did have such a word. They could imagine it.

Bemused, Perkar wondered if, as the Changeling ate streams, the ocean could eat the Changeling. That might be worth knowing, a way of eventual escape even, except that whatever could eat him might be worse, more