Lal spoke of friends and playmates, all of whom she remembered perfectly, down to the way they dressed and the games they favored. I had no such companions, except my sister, but once I knew a woodcutter. He must have been middle-aged then: a south-country peasant, illiterate, superstitious, completely honest, completely ruled by petrified fears and customs. Yet he always shared his meals with me when we chanced to meet in the forest, and he told me long, long stories about trees and animals; and when the family of the man I killed hunted me to his door, he took me in and hid me and lied to them, though they would have burned us both in the house if they had known. I fled on the next day, not to endanger him further, and I never saw him again. But every morning when I wake, I say his name.
Out on the river we could hear the leeltis coming up to feed in the moonlight. They are sleek black fish with webby forelegs, and they splash the water to stir up insects—sometimes they even startle a fledgling out of its nest. Lal said, “Tell me about your parents.”
“They sold my sister,” I said. Lal put her arm over me. After a while I said, “I will hate them until I die. That must seem terrible to you.”
Lal did not speak for a long time, but she did not take her arm away. At last she said, “I will say something to you that I have never said aloud, even to myself. When I was sold and stolen, I was desperately frightened, truly almost out of my mind. All I had to cling to was my absolute sureness that my parents would come and find me; that while these—things—were happening to me, my wonderful mother and father were hours, minutes away, following, following, that they would never again rest until I was safe and home and avenged. Perhaps it kept me sane, believing that. I used to think so.”
I could barely hear the last words. I said, “But they never found you.”
“They never found me,” Lal whispered against my side. “Damn them, damn them, they never found me.”
Her eyelids were so hot to my lips. “They were looking for you all that time,” I said. “They hunted for you everywhere. I know they did.”
“They could have tried harder!” She turned her face away and muffled the one long howl in the sail, grinding her jaws on the fabric like a trapped beast madly determined to bite itself free of its own foot. Indeed, she bit me hard when I kissed her, so that her mouth tasted of dust and tears and my blood, and of the two of us sleeping under that sail for five nights. Yet we made love very gently, as we had to do, because Lal’s body could not bear my weight, nor her arms and legs hold me as she desired. It went on for a long, teasing, murmurous time, for that reason; and when it was over she said, “Bad water tomorrow,” and fell asleep on top of me with her nose in my left ear. And that was how I slept, too.
Three miles downriver, rather late the next morning, and the bad water began. I noticed the wind first: it became steadily stronger and harshly constant, not playful as it had been—Lal had less work to capture it and more to keep the boat in hand. It even smelled a little like a sea wind. The Susathi had been narrowing since the day before, the mountains on both sides closing over us as the canyon deepened. We had to look straight up now to see the sky. There were no rocks ahead yet, and no white water, except in the shadows; but the boat was beginning to pitch, and when I gripped the mast I could feel it straining under my hands. I asked Lal, “How did you know?”
“By the fish,” Lal said. I blinked at her. “The fish we ate last night. Fish that swim in rough water taste differently from what we’ve been eating. I don’t know why that should be, but it is.”
I went on staring at her until she began to smile. She said, “That’s not true, Soukyan. The truth is that last night I was very happy with you. Happiness like that is rare for me, and I do not ever want to get used to it, because right behind it there comes trouble, always. So I said what I said about the river for luck, in a way. Do you understand me?”
“I was happy, too,” I said. There was more I wanted to say, but just then the front of the boat went up while the water dropped away under it and a wave thumped into us from behind, so that the front went down and down. I flattened myself out on the deck and closed my eyes. Lal said, “Ah. Now it gets interesting.” She sounded quite happy to me.
It did get interesting, very quickly. The little boat rocked and pitched ceaselessly; with my eyes shut, we seemed to be blowing over the water in every direction, completely out of control. Whenever I managed to look around for a moment, I realized that we were still somehow heading downriver, almost as straight as ever, only much faster; and that the waves were actually quite small for the power with which they slammed and pounded the boat. But they were all white now, white as ice-flowers, raw white as sangarti blubber when the great sheknath rip them open. And there were the rocks, black, ragged, there and there and everywhere, flying by so close that I could see the green and red mosses on their sides, waving dreamily in the rushing water. It was like racing forever down a long, foaming gullet, and I tried not to think to the belly at the end of the run.
“It’s an old river,” Lal called to me once, “and full of tricks. Deep old bed, any number of sly little sideways currents. We’re lucky it’s not in flood.” They are true, those stories about Sailor Lal. Crosslegged as always, drenched with bitterly stinging spray, her neck and shoulders so bruised yet that she could only look ahead, she eased our boat through that wildness like a needle through folds of silk. Sometimes she would sit absolutely still, neither hand moving at all on the tiller or the lines; again, she might lean back slightly or twitch her fingers as though coaxing a pet, and the boat would lilt this way and fall off that way and wriggle between two green-gummed rocks: a jaunty morsel eluding the teeth of the river one more time. Most often the bow was completely under water, and me with it—up and down, down and up, like the little prayer rags that boatmen in the west tie to their oarblades. Yet I will tell you that for once in my life I was shocked by my own excitement, and that I can understand better now why there are those who love to sail the bad water. I have never told Lal this.
For all that my Man Who Laughs had told us about Arshadin’s house being no castle but as plain as a shepherd’s hutch, we came very near to missing it altogether. In fact, the only reason that we did notice it was that we both saw the dharises, as Lukassa had seen them before us: there, circling near the windows of a reed-thatched cottage, a full dozen or more, where the sight of one in twenty years can have an entire village abandoned— fields, houses, and all—by nightfall that same day. They are smallish blue-gray birds, fish-eaters, rather plain except for the deep blue slash across the chest; and why, rare as they are, they should signify ill luck, disaster, and horror in every land I know, I cannot say. But there they were, crowding each other to roost on Arshadin’s sills, and I felt my face grow cold. When I looked back at Lal I saw her making a sign in the air with her left hand that I know now is meant to ward off evil. I would have done the same.
Lal threw the tiller hard left and shouted, “Hold it there,” as the boat veered against the wind and the current, laboring toward shore. I hung onto the tiller as she wrestled with the sail, but suddenly it bellied out hugely, unnaturally, and tore the lines from her hands. The boom swung around, caught my shoulder as I ducked, and smashed me overboard. I heard Lal cry out as I fell, but her voice was lost in the cold piping of the dharises as they came wheeling and fluttering above us. An instant later, the boat went over—the mast came down beside my head even before I had started sinking, and the hollow sections that fitted so perfectly together came all apart and whipped away past me. Poor little boat. I swear I remember thinking that.