The Shadow tormented him with visions of destruction for the rest of that night. It showed him people combing through the ruins of cities in the midst of driving rainstorms, ships swept inland, piles of drowned animal and human corpses. It showed him the crater on the nearside shore of the Great River where Prefect Corin’s machine had struck, a circular sea rimmed with swales of half-melted rock and shrouded in the smoke of the great fires that burned all around it. And then, when he was at his weakest, streaming with fever sweat as he lay naked in a bower of woven leaves, the Shadow finally revealed itself. It was faint and insubstantial, its form melting and changing from Derev to the Aedile or to Telmon or to others of the dead. So many dead.
All your work, Child of the River. Will you save the world by destroying it? But you cannot destroy me. I will be with you always. I can help you, if you will let me.
“No. No more.”
“Hush, master,” Pandaras said. “Try to rest. Try to sleep.”
“It is in my dreams, Pandaras.”
I will always be with you.
Pandaras tended Yama all night, and in the morning tried to make his master eat fruit he had collected from the margin of the forest. But Yama would eat only a scant handful of ripe figs and drink a few sips of rainwater. He was still gripped by the terror of his fever dreams.
“Those people, Pandaras! Those poor people!”
“Hush, master. Be still. Rest. I will fetch you more fruit. You must eat and get well.”
The forest frightened Pandaras. it covered the top of the plateau, dense, dripping-wet, full of shadows and strange noises. Everything was predicated in the vertical, dominated by giant trees which gripped the thin soil with buttress roots, sucked up water and precious minerals from the stony laterite, and spread vast rafts of foliage high overhead. There were cottonwoods with feathery foliage and pendant strings of hard-hulled nuts, silkwoods and greenhearts and cedars, stands of fibrous copal trees. Vines and lianas threw up long loops, gaining holds on branches and throwing up yet more loops as they scrambled for light. Parasitic orchids clung to bark like splashes of paint. Smaller trees grew in the dancing spangles of light that filtered through the canopies of the giants: sago palms with scaly trunks; palmettos with saw-toothed leaves; acacias defended by ferocious red ants as long as Pandaras’s thumb; balsams seeping sticky, strongly scented sap; the spiny straps of raffias which caught at his clothes and flesh. And in the dense shade beneath the secondary growth were ferns, bamboos and dark white fungi shaped like brains or vases.
Pandaras saw no animals bigger than a butterfly as he picked his way between the mossy buttress roots of the soaring trees, but he was convinced that at any moment he might confront a manticore or dragon or some other monster that might swallow him in a single gulp.
Although everything was verdant, a riot of greenery struggling upward for light, fruiting trees and bushes were rare. Toward the end of the second day Pandaras went farther then he had dared to venture before, following a narrow path between stands of long-stemmed plants which raised glossy green leaves high above his head. It was close to sunset, and the level rays of the sun were beginning to insinuate themselves beneath the high canopy of the giant trees. In the far distance something was making a noise like a bell rung over and over; the electric sizzle of insects was all around.
By now, Pandaras had been bitten by mosquitoes so often that he thought nothing of the sudden stabbing pain in his chest. He brushed at it reflexively and then stared in astonishment at the little arrow, a sliver of bamboo fletched with blue feathers, that fell at his feet.
The tall grass around him parted. Men smaller than himself stepped onto the path and the world flew up and struck him hard.
At first, Yama thought that the people who lifted him out of the bower and laid him on a litter of woven banana leaves were part of the fever dreams sent to him by the Shadow. They carried him a long way through the twilight forest. There seemed to be a hundred of them, men and women and children. They ran very fast, crossing from one side of the plateau to the other in a few hours, to the clearing in the shade of a grandfather kapok tree where they had made a temporary camp.
They treated Yama’s wounds with moss and fungus, and bathed him with infusions of willow roots to reduce his fever. They were an indigenous people, and called themselves the bandar yoi inoie, which meant the forest folk. They were small and stout, with disproportionately large heads and coarse black hair which they tied back with thread and feathers or stiffened into spikes with white clay. Some wore torcs of beaten copper enameled with intricate patterns of ultramarine and beryl. Their brown skin was loose and hung in folds, and they pierced the folds with intricate patterns of thorns and decorated themselves with mud or pigments from crushed flowers and berries daubed in spirals and zigzag lines. They peopled the forest with monstrous gods; each useful plant or animal had a story concerning the way its secret had been stolen or tricked from these deities. Like the fisherfolk, they used poison from the glands of certain frogs to anoint their hunting arrows. The various troops communicated with each other by drumming on the resonant buttress roots of the great trees of the forest, and when certain trees came into flower three or four troops would meet up and hold marriage contests. They feared lightning more than anything else, for it killed several of them each year, uprooted beloved trees, and sometimes started devastating fires. They had many taboos against inviting thunderstorms; for instance, they were forbidden to hunt monkeys, or even to laugh at their antics.
Although they lived freely in the forests, the bandar yoi inoie were slaves of a Shaped bloodline, the Mighty People. The Mighty People had fought a Change War recently, the chief of the troop of forest folk told Yama. The old ways had been overthrown by new ideas from the sky and had been burnt up so that they could never come back. The temple had been desecrated and its priest and hierodules killed. Many of the Mighty People had been killed in the war too, and those who survived no longer lived together in their city of communal long houses, but were scattered across their lands.
“They have changed,” Yama said.
The chief nodded solemnly. He was a strong man, ugly even by the standards of the bandar yoi inoie. He had pushed porcupine quills through his cheeks and the folded skin of his chest. The tip of his long nose rested on his swollen upper lip. His name was Yoi Sendar.
“We know about the heretics,” he said. “Don’t look so surprised, man. We travel all over the forests to find food for ourselves and for the Mighty People. We talk to many travelers. We know the heretics take their ideas from a forgotten clutch of the larvae of the Preservers who recently stepped down from the sky. The ideas are old and bad, but they are as sweet as honey to our beloved Mighty People.”
“But you were not seduced by them.”
“We are an indigenous people, man. It was ordained by the Preservers that we can never change. We can only be what we are.” Yoi Sendar tapped the tip of his pendulous nose. “But these are strange times. All things change, it seems. Perhaps even the bandar yoi inoie. We love the Mighty People, but they have grown strange and harsh. They are no longer our kind dear masters of old. You will see for yourself, when we return. Although we wish long and hard that things might be otherwise, I fear the changes are written in stone.”