Tides of the Titans Read online

  Jagged, pale teeth stick out of the creases of its long snout even with its jaw closed.

  We’re going to ride on its back, he thinks with awe. She’s a Crocodile-Rider.

  “He’s going to let you sit on his back?” he asks. “How, without magic?”

  Ootesh ducks into a wood-and-straw hut that sits on the bank of the stream. When she comes out, she’s holding a pole with a dangling string and something on the end that smells rancid.

  “Your friend Aurilon,” she says, “was one of many husbands to our Greatmother. A famous hunter, fighter, and crocodile tamer. Aurilon trained this crocodile. The men marked her as one of their own. But one day she went away.”

  “She went to serve a god, if that helps.”

  “It does not,” Ootesh says, bending over the crocodile’s collar, fastening ropes to either side. “If the men had known as much, they would have broken our law against climbing to bring her back, to cut her hair, and to burn her alive on her boat.”

  Yes, very peaceful, Leaper thinks. Nothing like Gui.

  Leaper doesn’t see the point in telling her about the barrier that would have blocked their way.

  “In that case, no need for me to mention it to anyone else.” No need for me to mention the god I serve, either.

  “The men wished to treat Aurilon’s desertion as a death, to cut down the honey kiss tree that was planted when she came to us, eat the fruit, and build Aurilon’s soul-boat from the sap-wet wood. But the Greatmother somehow knew Aurilon was still alive. She felt it in her liver.”

  “Alive until last month, anyway,” Leaper says, stepping lightly in a circle, avoiding the crocodile’s head.

  “I do not know months.” Ootesh straightens. “Ants moved their nests into the trees a few sleeps past. We began moving the village away from the Crocodile Spine. We have no wish to be washed out to sea. That is when we found Aurilon’s pollution. The man who found her is polluted forever and has gone to be a slave of the Rememberers. Come. Step onto the boat.”

  Leaper sees at last that the hut by the stream is a flat-bottomed boat. Two long poles with corresponding ropes harness the boat to the crocodile’s collar. When Leaper’s feet find the lashed beams half buried in mud, Ootesh flicks the rancid meat that dangles from her pole over the right side of the crocodile’s head.

  The beast turns in the direction of the meat. The boat shudders. Leaper leans against the upright beams of the hut, throwing his arms out for balance as the crocodile writhes towards the stream.

  Then they’re moving, in surges and lulls, along a watery path whose ripples glimmer in the feeble blue-white light escaping from Leaper’s lantern; it occasionally glints off the crocodile’s eye.

  So, more than a few hours, Leaper thinks, refraining from checking his pocket-clock. So what? I’ve still got plenty of time.

  * * *

  ALONE AT last, the ceremony for Aurilon over, Leaper rakes through his carrysack in search of the pocket-clock.

  Fighting to stay calm, he shines the unshuttered lantern on the clear glass face of it.

  The pocket-clock has stopped.

  Twelve hours gone.

  Or more. He’s got no way of knowing how long he’s been down on the forest Floor.

  The taste of honey kiss fruit still sweetens his tongue. In contrast, the sting of the sour, astringent rind lingers on his lips and under his fingernails. The ritual for Aurilon went on and on, and now he has no time to find what he’s wanted to find since Ootesh said the words: We already had need to avoid the east bank … the speech splinters came to rest there at the end of the last monsoon …

  He should climb as fast as he can. Right now. The monsoon has begun. His aura is fading. The barrier is closing to him.

  Yet the monsoon flood is sure to shift those bone fragments from the east bank of the Crocodile Spine. He’ll never have this chance again.

  Ootesh has left him beside one of the small streams, a blossomcarrier. They all run into the Crocodile Spine, she said. Leaper holds the lantern to the surface of the water, to be sure which way it’s flowing, and is forced back when a small crocodile lunges at him from the waterline.

  Leaper’s heart races. The animal’s barely as long as his leg, but its teeth gleam blue-white. The level of the stream creeps up towards him as he watches. It’s perceptibly rising.

  He runs along the bank, downstream.

  There’s no undergrowth here. No light. The ground is the hardest and driest it can ever be, layered in leaves, waiting for the floodwaters to come. Or for one of the giant trees to fall and let in the sun. Leaper’s relied on youth and natural fitness in his prior escapades. This is different. He needs to pace himself. He needs the easy lope of a long-range hunter.

  He can’t remember how. Wheezes like a choked flowerfowl. His feet hurt. His arm, holding the lantern out in front of him so that he can avoid the wall-like buttress roots of the great trees, aches.

  Then he realises the roaring in his ears isn’t the pounding of his blood; it’s the Crocodile-Spine. He’s standing on the east bank. The lights in front of his eyes aren’t sparks of exhaustion but light admitted by the wide body of the river, where no great trees grow. The arms of the figs and floodgums on either side almost meet in the middle, but not quite.

  Leaper laughs with relief to see the sky, angry and lightning slashed as it is. The night sky, curtained by monsoon clouds, barely brighter than lightless Floor, even with the moon behind them.

  Thick rushes and bamboos bar his way, here, but he finds the splinters of Old Gods’ bones by swinging his lantern about. The lightning inside the lantern flares wildly with proximity to unshielded magic, acting as a bone detector.

  Leaper sets the lantern on a grass tuft bent double by the driving rain. He blinks constantly and wipes his face with one hand to get the water out of his eyes. Calf-deep in mud, he digs a piece of chimera cloth out of his sack. He uses it like a potholder to break off a ladle-length splinter of what looks like a half-buried, empty-socketed jawbone the size of a house.

  As I told you, Ootesh had explained, we of the Crocodile-Rider clans do not use the speech splinters that the sorcerers and their slaves use.

  Meaning: These bones are a shortcut to learning the languages of all the peoples of Floor. What an advantage to have! Not just in service of the lightning god but of the kings and queens who can protect him and his life of luxury if any of his many misdemeanours ever come to light.

  Noble families, and wealthy ones, who can protect him if he’s ever expelled from the Temple, or demoted as his mentor, Aforis, was demoted.

  Any and all advantages will do.

  Opening the lantern pane, he thrusts the bone splinter inside. At first, it pushes back, seeming to resist, which tells him that the Old God who owned the jawbone is not the one who became the new god Airak. The magics are in opposition, not harmony.

  Still, eventually it goes through. Disappears. In Leaper’s room in the Temple, where the other lantern rests on his writing desk, the sliver of bone now waits for him.

  He shutters the lantern triumphantly. Wraps it in chimera cloth and stows it in the sack. Runs ahead of the rising tide to the closest great tree, a suntree, all its brushy, burnished flowers turned to brown carpet underfoot. He flings himself at the grey, fissured bark, spines extended for climbing.

  It’s a long climb.

  When he’s halfway up the tree, at the level of Understorey, he longs to simply dig his spines deeply and sleep.

  But there is no time.

  His aura is fading. Maybe already gone. Maybe he’ll have to find another way through the barrier. Beg a favour-owing god or goddess to open up the way. He is Canopian, after all. One of them. They’ll help him.

  Then again, Aforis might find Leaper’s bed empty. Airak, who warned Leaper not to disobey his betters, will know Leaper went his own way again. Without asking.

  I should have asked.

  Airak’s teeth!

  Leaper puts his hand out into empty a
ir. There’s no blockage to see there. Nothing but a trickle of water, carrying dust and debris down the side of the tree. The leaves seem to shiver and sigh, like a titan finally taking a shower after a long journey.

  Leaper’s fingers bend back against the barrier.

  It’s completely solid to him. His aura has vanished as though it never was. The city of Canopy has abandoned him to the lower levels, their dangers and demons. He has no gliding wings, and his rope’s far behind at Odel’s emergent. To get to a different tree, to ask his favours, he’d have to risk crocodile-infested waters.

  In desperation, Leaper unwraps his lantern. Wedges it into a bark-crevice in the side of the tree. He licks his lips. Looks at it.

  He’s never tried to put anything alive through it before. He doesn’t know if it can work. Whether a breathing creature would still be breathing on the other side. Even if it would, could a soul pass through?

  Leaper grits his teeth. The chance of dying seems less important than getting to his room before Aforis does, at this moment. You are rash, Unar the Godfinder told him once. One poor decision stacked up on top of another, until the whole tower falls. That is your life, Leaper.

  Like she can talk.

  Leaper opens the glass pane and forces his hand into the lightning. It doesn’t hurt. It feels like nothing. It goes in to the wrist, stops, and he thinks, It won’t work. This is as far as I can go. But then he realises his fingers aren’t touching the glass pane on the opposite side of the lantern. They’re touching the polished wooden surface of his writing desk.

  He pushes harder, and abruptly he’s in the lantern up to his shoulder, which is wider than the open pane should be able to accommodate. The world tilts. His hand feels heavy, like his arm’s hanging down from a tree. The rest of his body aches to follow.

  Leaper falls through the lantern.

  He lands, sideways and sprawling, on his desk, overbalances and crashes to the floor. When he untangles himself, his torn, strained muscles feel on fire and his collarbone is bruised. The light’s blinding. At the same time, the rush of his returning powers fills him, helping him to forget the physical pain: his mind is linked momentarily to the sheet lightning dancing from cloud to cloud over Canopy. He’s bashed his head against a pair of boots that he had left in the middle of the floor.

  No.

  They are Aforis’s boots.

  Aforis stands in the middle of the floor, looming and frowning in that frightening way only a craggy old Skywatcher with one white-irised eye can loom and frown.

  “What have you done?” he asks in the deep, authoritative teacher’s tone that makes lesser men wet themselves.

  “Testing,” Leaper says faintly, trying to get a grip on the room, the solid feeling of the tree that forms the floor. It’s carved floodgum over his head, not the glorious raiment of the sky; he is not the storm. He’s a man sworn to a god, sitting on his arse after squeezing himself through a magic lantern. “Just testing a thing I made.”

  “Two things?” Aforis arches an eyebrow. “Two linked lanterns? They are for—”

  “They are for the Shining One to make, I know,” Leaper gasps. He shivers, soaked to the skin. If he weren’t still dizzy, he’d gloat. The Shining One has never made anything like Leaper’s linked lanterns before! “Has the Holy One sent for me, Aforis? Is that why you’re here? How long have you been here?”

  Aforis holds up a splinter of bone, and the lantern on the writing desk flares. It’s the splinter that Leaper stole from the bank of the Crocodile-Spine.

  “Long enough. To whom does this belong?”

  “To—to Aurilon’s people! To nobody in Canopy, Aforis, I swear to you! Can I have it back?”

  “You can have it back,” Aforis says sternly, “on the condition that you immediately return the pocket-clock you stole to its rightful owner, the queen of Airakland.”

  The queen of Airakland. The one too high for Leaper to set his sights on.

  Leaper shivers again, not from the cold.

  PART I

  The Rememberers

  ONE

  LEAPER PRESSED himself flat to the wall inside the queen’s wardrobe.

  He was going to ask her. He’d waited long enough. He’d waited ten years, since he’d returned her pocket-clock. That was more than one third of his life. First he’d waited because he’d been too much in awe of her. Next, when he’d seen how they treated her, he’d kept silent because he didn’t want to complicate her life. Finally, once he’d witnessed her astounding capacity for forgiveness, he’d understood that complications were a thing they would just have to put behind them.

  Together. Later.

  I am going to ask her.

  Not right at that moment, though. It was a bad moment.

  Soon.

  Cloth lengths hung from four paces above the floor, on brittle obsidian rails over Leaper’s head. Metal and stone embellishments to the silk garments tinkled as he straightened them behind him. The smell of hollowed floodgum was almost physical, as though if he wished to escape, he’d have to swim through oil of eucalyptus.

  Beneath were her smells.

  The ones Leaper still found intoxicating after ten years of obsession.

  Ozone and sulphur, her royal right. Purest whale oil from seas so distant they might as well be imagined; marine behemoths so unlikely that it was easier to believe the oil some dead demon’s distillation instead. Snow cherry and mountain cedar, which were almost as mythical as whales.

  He was going to ask her to run away with him, if she came into the room alone.

  A slave’s child doesn’t ask a queen to elope.

  A slave’s child shouldn’t have asked a queen to bed him, either, but he had, after ten years of longing, and she had, and now, only a few weeks after their consummation, he was more obsessed than ever.

  She didn’t come into the room alone.

  Sentries, clanging hilts against breastplate buckles, chorusing Your Highnesses from outside the doorway, signalled the majestic couple’s return to the bedroom together. Leaper couldn’t see them, but he scowled, imagining them still resplendent in their evening feast clothes. Queen Ilik said something muffled to King Icacis, and he responded with a rough guffaw.

  Leaper risked a peek through one of the tree-shaped airing holes in the hinged calamander-wood doors. The queen preferred the cold blue light of the lamps, but her king insisted she have whale oil, insisted she burn it, both as a statement of wealth and because the warm, smokeless flame flattered her black skin.

  It’s useful for maintaining the clocks, she’d told Leaper last monsoon, and yet today her favourite clock was broken, whale oil or no.

  King Icacis’s turned back blocked Leaper’s view. The king, wrapped in silver-embroidered crimson, fancied shaving his greying head, followed by a charcoal-powdering of the stubble; skin rolls at the back of his thick neck made Leaper think of a shaved tapir.

  “Aren’t we getting too old for toys?” Icacis rumbled.

  And yet she loves him, Leaper thought.

  “Give it back, please, Icacis.” Her measured voice made Leaper’s heart jerk like a leashed gibbon, but the king was already raising his voice, speaking over her.

  “Don’t pull on it, woman. Let me look at it. If it means so much to you, let me fix it. Look, that spring is broken in half. A simple matter!” There came a clatter as he set it down on the side table. “In the meantime, I’ll have the slaves wind the clock twice a day instead of once. You see? You’ve been crying over nothing.”

  Leaper clapped both hands over his mouth to keep the ugly laughter inside. Ilik’s voice came again, sounding tired and patient.

  “I wish you hadn’t asked the slaves to wind it in the first place. Overwinding broke the spring.”

  The king’s remorse was immediate.

  “It seemed like a way to free you of a chore. I wanted to make things easier for you. That’s all I ever want.”

  “I know.” She sounded helpless in the face of his solicitude, w
hich made Leaper furious with both of them. She wasn’t helpless. Why pretend?

  Leaper fumed some more while Icacis rained kisses on his wife.

  Get on with it! Off you go!

  As usual, he waited for a slow count of one hundred after the king had departed. Then, a deep breath, another peek to make sure the queen wasn’t in danger of being caught by the swinging doors, and he pushed hard against them.

  “Twice a day!” he exclaimed, unable to contain his disdain.

  He spoke to her in the language of the Crocodile-Riders. It was their secret language. He’d taught it to her, a few words at a time, beginning with their first meeting a decade ago when, partway through returning her pocket-clock, he’d been seized by the aftereffects of the translation bone he’d swallowed. It had tasted like dirt, that sliver of stolen bone from Floor. A dozen different tongues had come bursting into his throat, and Leaper had needed to share them with somebody or choke. It had made for a memorable visit.

  Ilik turned reluctantly from the clock. She was short and plump with a perfect bottom and pert breasts. When she smiled, one endearingly crooked tooth parted the pronounced bow of her lips before the others did. His heart jerked again. She was self-conscious about that smile and rarely shared it; certainly he’d never seen it in the early days when he was Aforis’s pupil and she was a distant, jewelled thunderhead gazing serenely over a green, glass-floored royal audience chamber.

  Older than Leaper, she was not as old as the king. Her grey hairs went unnoticed in the magnificent tower of her royal coiffure. Grey stormbird feathers and strings of silver and diamond alternated with her long thin braids to form a glittering, open-throated flower shape, flowing up and back from the crown of her head.

  She kissed him. Gave him a warning look, which he ignored. He went straight to the clock, turning it over, cradling it along his forearm. A tree shape of green soapstone fronted the case. Slippery-smooth branches disguised the wooden cage where the mechanism was mounted.