Tides of the Titans Page 15

  They entered the close margin of the mangrove forest. Leaper had seen the round-leafed, short-trunked trees with their dense, arching, stilt-like roots carved on the Gates of the Garden; that was how he knew what they were called. In the depiction, the mangroves’ roots formed labyrinthine sanctuaries for pearl-producing oysters and giant crabs, their branches providing perches for egrets and sea eagles.

  Yet whatever edibles were to be found clinging to the roots, they were well hidden by the floodwater covering the river delta, which reached the level of the lowest leaves.

  “Yran. Once you’ve traded your sword, along with whatever other valuables you’ve got in that bundle, where will you go?”

  He expected a boast about wives, mothers, or queens.

  “I don’t know,” Yran said instead, sounding somewhat desolate. “Where should we go?”

  Before Leaper could even try to answer that question, four extremely tall, thin, warriors, all men, dropped, shrieking, from the trees. Their short bows were drawn, their stances wide and steady on the tilting raft.

  So much for the trees not being able to bear a person’s weight.

  Leaper, kneeling, held his empty hands in front of him, thinly lidding his left eye, trying to read the men’s expressions. His hair and beard had grown out during his more than a hundred days on the raft. Yet the distance from Airak and his magic meant that the spell that usually turned Leaper’s hair half white was as faded as the lantern. Would these strangers know what one white iris meant? Would they see the seams where his forearm spines were, or only the burn scars? Leaper’s skin was a lighter brown than theirs. Would that make them more or less likely to misidentify him? And in which language should he address them?

  “We are peaceful traders,” he called confidently to them in words which he knew magically were in the language of the Bright Plain, answering his own silent question, though he’d never seen anyone wearing clothes like theirs before. They had knee-length trousers and sleeveless blouses, striped vertically with white or green strings of dried seeds. Woolly brown wraps were around their hips, and red-beaded caps covered their hair.

  The arrows they’d nocked bore crescent-shaped steel heads with the cutting edge on the internal curve. Their bare feet were muddy to the knees.

  “You are a Servant of Airak,” the foremost of the men replied, “and must die.”

  Leaper opened his eye and threw himself into a desperate roll. Arrows flew, missing him. Yran seized Leaper by the back of his climbing harness and threw him; he was strong for a little man. Leaper landed in the water sideways. It wasn’t deep. His fingertips brushed the muddy bottom.

  “Go with her!” Yran’s voice sounded strange in the one ear above water. Leaper couldn’t be sure he’d heard him properly at all.

  He had time to suck in a breath before his carrysack hit him in the face and pushed his head under. Muddy water filled his nostrils. His arms reflexively circled the carrysack.

  Crocodile jaws closed over his legs.

  Go with her.

  Leaper didn’t kick. He didn’t fight. Instead of completely closing her jaws and breaking his bones or going into a death roll, the enormous crocodile gently pulled him through the water. Feet first in the dark. Holding his breath. He could hardly believe that Yran was helping him.

  You’d be good for trading. A most excellent slave, Yran had said, but also, We share the same liver.

  The crocodile deftly changed direction. Leaper’s face broke the surface. He gasped for breath and glimpsed Yran dangling from a mangrove tree while the bamboo raft fell apart in the water below. The little man had loosened the lashings just as he’d loosed the crocodile.

  “The crocodile has broken free,” Yran yelled at the seed-striped warriors sinking through the separating rods of the raft. It was their own language; he’d taken Leaper’s lead. “The monster wants revenge!” There was no sign of Yran’s precious bundle. Yran didn’t look behind him in the direction he’d sent the beast; didn’t give any sign that he knew his companion was escaping.

  With a surge in speed, the crocodile dragged Leaper under and away once more.

  How far away, Leaper wondered, do we have to get before Yran loses his ability to control the beast?

  And then: What good is it to be away from those warriors if I drown for want of a breath?

  Before he could drown, the crocodile hauled herself and Leaper onto a floating, woven mat. It was half a pace thick. Ten paces long, like the crocodile. The mat sagged under the great weight of her front half, but didn’t submerge.

  The mat was oval-shaped with a raised rim like a lily pad. It connected by a long, snaking path of smaller, floating mats to a thicket of wooden stilts with woven ladders hanging down.

  Leaper realised he was seeing the underside of the floors of human houses. It was the outskirts of the City-by-the-Sea. Faint glows of candles or lamps made flickering patterns in the water.

  He lifted his legs gingerly out of the crocodile’s gape. There were puncture holes. He was bleeding. Not heavily. Estuarine waters dribbled from his nose and mouth. There’s the salty taste of crocodile tears that I was expecting.

  The crocodile looked at him with one unblinking eye. He looked back. She was utterly still. Presumably Yran still had command of her.

  “What am I supposed to do now?” he whispered.

  Get away from her, some part of him answered, before she really does get free and seek revenge. We ate every single one of her eggs. We made her drag us all the way to the sea.

  He tottered along the floating mat. Hopped lightly across the gap onto the next one. When he reached the closest wooden stilt, he leaned against it for a while, trying to gather his thoughts. A ladder dangled in front of his face, but he couldn’t use it yet. The strangers had recognised him. He couldn’t go amongst them looking the way that he looked at that moment.

  Opening his carrysack, he pulled a pane of glass from the frame of his thieves’ lantern, which seemed unlikely to come to life again, and broke it over a bronze corner. With the resulting sharp edge, and using a lather of wattle leaves he’d been given in Airak’s Temple, he shaved his head and his face. Then he wrapped the glass in chimera skin and restowed it. It might still be valuable, or come in useful a second time. He bent over the water to rinse his naked skin completely clean.

  Next, he broke some shellfish away from the wooden stilt of the closest house. When he smashed them open with the heel of his hand, he could feel slime and muscle amongst the broken shells.

  I shouldn’t put it in my eye. It might make me blind, for all I know.

  Leaper used the slime to glue the lids of his Airak-given white eye together. He smeared a bit more of the dead animal on his cheek, to make it look like an infection was keeping that eye closed.

  Sounds of splashing water and crocodile jaws snapping together made him glance back towards his steed. She was in the water. Circling towards him.

  Leaper flew up the ladder to the closest stilt-house.

  There, he sat cross-legged on the platform for a while, looking down at the hungry, circling shape. The crusting of shellfish gave the impression that the wooden stilts were more solid than they truly were. If the crocodile had known that her formidable strength could have knocked down both stilts and house, that her jaws could shear through the wood and deliver Leaper to her, she might have struck.

  But without Yran’s intelligence animating her, she was left stupid and small-minded; calculating structural strengths was beyond her.

  With the night deepening around them, she gave in and floated away.

  Have they killed you, Yran?

  Is that why she’s free? Or are you curled up somewhere, sleeping? A guest of the green-and-white striped men? He didn’t know how to feel about the Crocodile-Rider who had saved him, threatened him, and then gone ahead and saved him again.

  A clothes-drying line was strung behind the house where Leaper had climbed. He crept along the platform, trying not to make any of the boards
creak, and took a semidry garment from the line. At least, he hoped it was a garment. It was rectangular, with a hole for the head, and seemed of a suitable size to fit a man. A belt seemed to have been incorporated into the sheet of beaten, twisted reed fibre, at waist level. Shoulder line and belt were trimmed with hanging shells.

  Surely a carpet or a wall hanging wouldn’t have coincidentally human proportions?

  Leaper untied his climbing harness, stowing it with his robes in the carrysack and putting the strange garment on over his loincloth. It made his silhouette a rectangular one, covering him from shoulders to knees, open at the sides and only slightly gathered at the waist by the belt.

  He felt naked beneath it, so long had he worn his harness. For a moment he felt too afraid to move. What if he fell?

  Then he wanted to laugh. If he fell, he’d fall into the water. Hopefully there would be no crocodiles. More important was finding food. Without encountering any more tall, thin, seed-trousered archers.

  Leaper looked back at the clothesline, wondering why there were no seed-trousers hanging there.

  He’d hardly crept by a dozen houses before a woman backing out of a doorway, wide wooden platter in her arms, collided with him, bottom first. She straightened immediately, blocking his path, her expression startled but not afraid.

  Light from the open doorway showed she had only one eye. Its iris was streaked blue and brown. Leaper had never seen an iris that colour before. Skin had grown over the other, empty socket, its depths crisscrossed with scars. Scars aside, her brown face was young and lovely. Two black braids hung over her breasts; the rectangular garment didn’t show much of their shape.

  He looked from her blue-and-brown eye to the platter. It held a pyramid of pointy-ended yellow fruit, slathered in honey and sprinkled with smaller, red, translucent fruit.

  His first thought was Thank Airak, she’s wearing the same hairy costume as me. It is clothing, after all.

  His second thought: I haven’t had honey for a hundred days.

  “Can I have some of those?” he asked pathetically in the language of the Bright Plain.

  The woman with one eye laughed. Out of the corner of his eye, Leaper saw children curiously peering at him from the doorway.

  “They’re a gift for the queen,” the woman said. “But you can have one. Just one, to match your one eye.”

  NINETEEN

  THE ONE-EYED woman’s name was Mitimiti.

  Taking pity on Leaper, she allowed him more than one honey-covered fruit. Most of them, in fact. Then she led him back to the house where he’d stolen the garment, and gave the owners something from her purse as payment for the thing.

  A windturner. That was what the hairy garment was called.

  “In the night,” Mitimiti explained, “when it’s cold, you stand front on, facing the wind, so the tight weave blocks it and you can stay warm. In daylight, when it’s hot, you stand side on, like this, so that the breeze enters under the arms and passes through, keeping you cool.”

  She demonstrated and Leaper imitated her, thinking, I wonder how much standing around these people do.

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

  “We’ve each lost an eye. That makes us siblings-under-the-sky.”

  First a liver. Then an eye. Will I still be her sibling once she sees I’ve still got mine?

  “Won’t the queen be angry about her plate of honeyed fruit?”

  Mitimiti’s laugh tinkled in the dark.

  “Come with me, and we’ll ask her.”

  She spun like a leaf flipped over by the breeze, and he had no choice but to follow her hairy block-shape past the little square stilt houses, along a raised boarded path over the wavy tops of bulrushes. They came to an arrangement of long, rectangular stages lined with what Leaper thought were canoes. When they came closer, he realised they were troughs half filled with brine, white with salt and dirt- flecked at the waterline.

  “Where we were,” Mitimiti said, pausing and turning back to face him. “That precinct is called Reeds. This precinct is Saltdeck. When the tide is in, we fill these wooden ponds, bring them up, and set them in the sun for the first stage. Second stage means washing the slurry to get the mud out. Third stage is roasting the salt fourteen times in bamboo to produce our truest treasure. We call it two-week salt, but perhaps you know it by another name. Outsiders, including the men of Cast, call it Coin-of-the-Sea.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Did you come to find coins? Because no matter how you fill your pockets with Coin-of-the-Sea, when you jump in the water and swim away, your coins will vanish as if you never had them.”

  Even siblings-under-the-sky need to be watched. Leaper shivered at the thought of jumping back into the sea. He remembered how Middle-Mother had made a special cake for Ylly to celebrate the occasion of her first bleed, and how he had eaten it and blamed ants. Airak’s bones, it was the most delicious thing I ever tasted. But I certainly haven’t come here to steal from my sisters, new or old.

  “The early monsoon caught me,” he said. “It brought me here while I was seeking my lover’s killer. I’ve never heard of Coin-of-the-Sea.”

  Mitimiti squinted at him with her single eye.

  “You’re telling the truth,” she said. “I can always tell when someone is lying. Do you mean any harm to my queen or her people?”

  “No.” The strong salt smell was making him thirsty. “Do you mean any harm to me? It doesn’t seem that we’re taking a direct route to that tower, which my travelling companion told me was the palace.”

  “It would be best if you didn’t meet the Master of Cast. His city, broken up by the flood, is trapped by trees near the Mooring. We of the City-by-the-Sea offer succour to all who require it, no matter where they have come from, but though you nourish them both alike, it is folly to keep the injured osprey caged with the injured fowl. Do you have a name?”

  “Leaper.”

  He thought a flutter of wary recognition passed over her face, but she said only, “The monsoon marks a new beginning, and so it is with you. While you stay here, you will answer to Lee, which is the sheltered side of a craft, and our queen will shelter you from harm.”

  “Do you mean the kind of harm,” Leaper asked, licking his lips, “that wears green and white seeds sewn into its clothing? That kind of harm?”

  “The men of Cast are confined to their own city, and to the Mooring, by our laws. Did you see them in Reeds? Did they set foot upon our boards?”

  “There was no foot-setting,” Leaper conceded. Have they taken Yran to their broken-up, flood-swept city? Is he a slave? He told me translation was a useful slave skill.

  “All is well, then. Do you have any more questions before we go to the palace?”

  To the palace.

  To see the queen.

  How could he make himself useful to her? What adapted persona, what bargaining or flattery, would earn him a position of security so far from all the power structures he knew?

  He had a hundred questions.

  A thousand.

  “What does it mean, ‘when the tide is in’?”

  She laughed again.

  “Stay with us a season or three, and you will see.”

  “A season or three?” Leaper shook his head in bewilderment. “Is this something like monsoon-right, where all are offered safety in a time of danger, or do you really intend to clothe, feed, and house me without knowing anything about the kind of man I am, my history, or what possible contribution I might make to your society?”

  “I know there are those in Canopy who want you dead, Lee,” Mitimiti said soberly, shocking him, “but I intend to defy them. Canopians, like our guests of Cast, require obedience as requisite for life. If Cast had caught you on your way to us, you would have been enslaved by them, or oath-bound to serve their Master. I will defy the men of Cast, too, but I will not defy them with violence. I will not defy them with rage. I will defy them with my love and my protection. That is
what Wetwoodknee is. What it means. To our queen, and to me.”

  “You’re not real,” Leaper said with wonder. “I’m still on the raft with Yran. I’m dreaming.”

  “I am real,” Mitimiti said, “and like I told you, I always know when someone is lying. If a mother eats a certain type of mangrove killifish while pregnant, her child can always tell the difference between falsehood and truth. If not pregnant, well. She will start spouting truths herself, for as long as the effect lasts.”

  “Are you the goddess of this city?”

  “I am no goddess.” She prodded him with one finger between the eyes. “And that rubbish about the raft is the first falsehood you’ve uttered since we met.”

  * * *

  VOICES APPROACHING down the otherwise empty spiral stair seemed to give Mitimiti pause.

  She’d thrown off her windturner at the back door to the palace kitchens. Beneath, she wore a finer, sheerer, clingier version of the single-piece garment in purple, trimmed with strings of pearls. From a pocket in the windturner, she extracted a pearl and lace cap, pulling it snugly over the crown of her head.

  One larger, pinker pearl dangled down from the cap on a silver chain, positioned over the sunken, scarred socket where her other eye should have been.

  Leaper and Mitimiti had passed by larders, boilers, and briquette-fuelled ovens in a wide, windowless yet airy maze of grey coral chunks. Coral formed a sturdy artificial island on which the rest of the palace was built. The kitchens, storerooms, and clay-sealed freshwater cisterns, in turn, formed a platform for the tower. A discrete servant’s entrance hung with iridescent seashells had opened into the tower’s main spiral stair.

  Mitimiti had hardly taken two steps before the voices reached them. Her head gave a little jerk; she held up one hand and turned to Leaper.

  “We shouldn’t be seen,” she murmured. “Go back.”

  Leaper hardly heard her. Passing through the seashells had transported him back to the palace in Airakland. He floundered amongst the memories.

  Sneaking through sumptuous corridors. Mirrors and music. Silks and pearls. Slaves and courtiers in their immiscible clusters.