Yama climbed over the edge of the cliff, strode through the circle of forest folk, and pulled the strip of cloth from Pandaras’s eyes. The boy showed his sharp white teeth. Blood, fresh and bright, matted the sleek hair on top of his head and trickled down his face. He said, “I will kill whoever it was that struck me. I swear it.”
“We will only do what we need to do,” Yama said. He took the sharp stone blade from Pandaras’s shirt pocket and sawed through the rope which bound his arms, then turned to the forest folk and told them, “I am your master now. Do you understand? I took the Mighty People’s treasure and gave it to the air.”
Yoi Sendar stepped forward and said humbly, “You must kill me, for I have failed my masters.”
“I am not going to kill you,” Yama told him, “but you will be changed. You will go back to the village with Pandaras and bring the rest of your people. Do it, or I will kill all of the Mighty People. The others will come with me.”
Pandaras said, “How will I find you, master?”
“You will be with the chief of the forest folk. He will know how to find me. Go now, as quickly as you can!” When Pandaras and Yoi Sendar had run off into the darkness, Yama went to the edge of the drop and shouted down to the Captain. “When I saw your treasure I knew what to do at once!”
The Captain howled and brought up the rifle and shot at Yama, but he was shaking with rage and the pellet went wide. Recoil swung him like the clapper of a bell and he dropped his torch when he slammed back into the cliff. It tumbled away, dwindling to a point of light that suddenly flared far below and went out.
Before the Captain could aim his rifle again, Yama said, “If anyone tries to kill me or to climb up I will cut your rope.”
“I will kill you! My slaves will kill you!”
Two or three of the other Mighty People got off a few pistol shots, but the angle was too difficult and the pellets hit the rock-face beneath Yama’s feet or whined off into the sky. The Captain shouted at them to stop and a woman said loudly and clearly, “You did this. You are not my husband. You are not the father of my children. You are nothing, Tuan Ali.”
It was the Captain’s secret name. He screamed with rage and swung around on his rope and tried to aim his rifle at his wife, but she was quicker and shot him twice with her pistol. He dropped from the rope and vanished into the darkness below.
There was a silence. At last the Captain’s wife said, “Are you there, cateran?”
“I do not want anything from you except your slaves.”
Some of the Mighty People began to shout threats, but the Captain’s wife shouted louder than any of them. “Try and kill him if you want, but he’ll cut your ropes before you get halfway up.”
The Mighty People could have easily overwhelmed Yama by swarming up their ropes all at once, but he had guessed that it would never occur to them to act together. He said, “I am freeing you too. I free you from the past. Do you understand? When I have gone you can go back to your village and take up your lives.”
“Tuan Ali was a fool to trust you,” the Captain’s wife said. “I had eight children by him, but I am glad he is dead. You have started a war, cateran. We will need slaves, and if we cannot hunt you down we will take them from our enemies. Pray that we do not find you. I am crueler than Tuan Ali.”
“I am going where you cannot find me,” Yama said, and turned away and led the remaining forest folk into the forest.
Chapter Fifteen
Three Sleeps and a Miracle
Pandaras and Yoi Sendar, leading the rest of the forest folk, found Yama soon after dawn. It was already hot. Threads of mist hung between the dense stands of bamboo which grew along the edge of the forest. Pandaras told Yama that he had set fire to the treasures which the Mighty People had kept in their huts, and this diversion had allowed them all to escape.
“But I had to kill someone, master, the man the Captain had shot. It was the only way to make his slaves come with me.”
“I think that the Mighty People will be more concerned about the loss of their treasure and their slaves,” Yama said. “They do not care for each other, only for what they own. But in any case they will not follow us here. The forest is taboo to them.”
“Well, I’m sorry I killed him,” Pandaras said, “even if he would have killed me if I hadn’t done it.”
“I fear that it will not be the last death,” Yama said. He went over to Yoi Sendar and greeted him. The chief of the forest folk bowed his head and said formally, “All we have, master, we give with open hands and open hearts.”
Yama raised his voice so that all the forest folk could hear him. “I want nothing but your friendship, Yoi Sendar.”
The small, ugly man did not look up. He said stubbornly, “We will gladly give all we have, but we cannot give what we do not have.”
“Perhaps I can change your mind,” Yama said. “It has been a long night. We will find a place to rest, and in the evening we will speak again.”
Although they had returned to their home amongst the tall trees of the forest, the bandar yoi inoie were muted and forlorn. They made no attempt to decorate themselves, and still wore their loincloths. They lay down in groups of three or four between the buttress roots of the big trees, talking quietly.
“I will watch you while you sleep, master,” Pandaras said.
“They will not harm us,” Yama said, although he was not really sure what would happen once he had freed the forest folk.
“I have caught the disease of mistrust,” Pandaras said. “Sleep, master. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”
It was not exactly sleep, but more like a kind of swooning fall inside his own self. Yama had performed this miracle before, on the baby entrusted to him by the mirror people, although he had not known then exactly how he had done it. He had thought that the aspect of Angel had guided him, but he knew now that she had been drawn there because she had hoped to glimpse the root of his power.
Now he had to discover it for himself.
He fell deeper than any ordinary dream, plunging down as he had so often swum toward the bottom of the river as a child. Away from the sunlit mirror where kelp plants trailed their long green fronds, following the stipes which dwindled away into darkness, the muscles of his throat and chest aching and the need to draw another breath growing and growing until at last he had to turn back to the sunlight. He had never been able to reach the river bottom then, but now he felt that he could fall forever. And as he fell he became aware of finer and finer divisions of the world, of machines smaller than the single-celled plants which were the base of most river life. Those tiny plants were so small that they could only be seen when they stained the water red or brown in their uncountable billions, but the machines were smaller stilclass="underline" ten thousand of them could have been fitted on one of the motes of dust which had swarmed in the beam of sunlight which had illuminated the Aedile’s room when Yama had broken into it, on the morning of the siege of Dr. Dismas’s tower.
He had thought then that his adventures had just been beginning, but he knew now that they had begun long before he had been born.
He turned his attention to one of the minuscule machines, and it opened up around him like the stacks of books in the library of the peel-house. He half-expected to find Zakiel around a corner as he wandered through the serried rows, but it soon became clear that there was no thought here, only information. So much information, in so small a space! Zakiel had taught him that the information which encoded the form of his body could be contained in a speck of matter smaller than the least punctuation mark in a finely printed book. There was less information here than that, but it was still overwhelming. He took down a book at random. Its pages were covered with neat lines of zeroes and ones: a single long number, a single set of instructions. And there were thousands of books.