Lizards the size of two-year-old children sat on stones to watch the bargaining, often conducted in sign language, the tall Shansars and Zakors, the shorter, chunky Otts, with playful wicked eyes. The parrots screeched and scratched.
Before sunset all but one of the Zakors had deserted. One of the Shansarians had gone down once more with fever and been taken in at a hospice by a holy jetty. The Karmian, who was related to this man, became woebegone and was therefore released by Kuzarl to cook for the sick one and save his stomach from Putish “muck.” Next morning, when the parrots were barely stirring, the four remaining men of the expedition went out of Put with a slender rowboat slung on their backs.
The river won fifteen miles upstream in a skein of purple lilies that gave suddenly on muscular brown water.
Like a dream the mountain banks of western Thaddra came floating toward them as they rowed.
The mountains stepped down and walled them in. On the sloping plain between the mountains and the river-course, the forests pushed and crowded nearer to the water, and in parts invaded it. Massive trees had rooted in the river, which clashed and hurled itself about them, foaming with rage. But the peaks of the mountains stood in the forest like giants in a meadow, staring away into the past and future indifferently.
Clogged by the jungle, the river had split in strands and narrowed. Conversely it was very deep. They made their journey that day by thrusting off with oars against the boles of trees and great ferns. Overhead, the boughs met to form a tunnel.
From noon onward there began, beyond the noises of their exertion, the boat, the water, the forecast stillness of approaching storms.
The air itself became another hindrance, another block against which to drive the unwilling vessel.
Near sunset a royal sky was erected miles off behind their sunshade of leaves. The atmosphere boiled slowly over.
For an hour thunder tuned itself among incredible distances, growling like cruel hunger around the valley’s hollow belly, striking the mountains and struck aside. From the forests things answered with squalls and cries, brilliant, snuffed-out flickers of wings. Then the silence returned, weighing like lead.
The men let down their oars, laid them over the planks. The water along the channel crinkled, flattened, and grew thick as agate; only where it rocked against the boat did it move, and this seemed half illusion.
Lightning speared across the leaf-eyelets of the sky.
It pierced a distant crag, or seemed to, exploding. Then the thunder boomed as if the heavens fell in masonry blocks.
Wind like a scythe tore through the valley of the river, bending the trees, making the boat jump in the solid water. The men crouched down. The Var-Zakor was unnerved, agitated, the Shansar servant looked on in a trance.
The wind shrieked unknown words. Lightning passed once more with a tearing hiss.
This lightning hit the top of the tree-canopy, about thirty feet away from the boat.
The world turned inside out as a sheet of living flame threw itself upward. The agate river was changed to gold. A deluge of burning leaves and branches, a fire-howl, enveloped everything.
As the boat ignited, Rehger pitched himself into the river.
Beneath three or four incendiary surfaces, darkness filled the deep narrows. There was no bottom, only here and there blind shelves and obtrusions of the land.
Presently Rehger rose for air. The boat lay some way off, alight and flaring in a cage of flaming elements, wood, reflections. The fire was all around, and above him. Of the other men there was no sign. He dived again.
Red light filtered down to him now, and the river gods sank their fangs into his heels.
He rose a second time, much later. The fire was in turmoil, upstream, but flashing out, catching, hurrying after him.
One of the gods under the river took hold of Rehger by the waist and pulled him, with iron human hands, down again deep under the water.
There, in the opaque reddish dark, he saw the pallor of the Shansar’s clothes, flesh and clouding hair. Kuzarl’s pale eyes were wide, his paler teeth clenched, grinning, while the scintillant breath escaped grudgingly between them. Letting Rehger go, he hovered before him, like a sky creature resting at midflight, in the levity of the water. Kuzarl had no weapons in his grasp, was revealing the emptiness of his hands. He would use only himself, like one stadium-trained.
To Kuzarl’s mind, apparently, the goddess had devised and provided. There was to be combat—
As the Shansar curled over to grapple him, Rehger swung beneath him, lunging up under Kuzarl’s body, flinging him off and off and away, a knot of torso and limbs twisting capriciously in the medium of liquid.
Each man shattered the surface once more, perhaps twelve feet from each other, here the limits of the channel. The fire lashed at them, and smoke drifted from their hair as from the water. The atmosphere was spoiled, but they gulped it in. The Shansar laughed, without noise or breath, his eyes blazing like the forest. Tradition: A berserker. He plunged in a vast diving spring, like a leaping fish, straight up and across the channel, falling on Rehger, bearing him down, one of the ringed hands clamped on the Lydian’s throat.
As they sank again, Kuzarl’s fingers pressed for the life in the neck veins, to bring on sightless confusion, or unconsciousness, but the neck of the Swordsman was armored in muscle, a statue’s neck, like the rest of his physique. As Rehger began remorselessly to detach Kuzarl’s clasp, the Shansar broke of his own accord and tried to turn to kick his adversary away. But Rehger it now was who secured Kuzarl, forcing back his grinning face, using legs and arms to detain him, and at the same moment angle his body into an agonizing spinal arch.
But the medium of liquid, yet again, advantaged and misled.
The Shansarian abruptly tossed himself backward, a voluntary description of the arch, and hurled both men over in a series of spinning wheels, from which in turn they loosed, and so from each other, to hang suspended there, unappeased.
Certain burning stuff from the forest above, not immediately extinguished, was now arrowing down past them through the river, like flaming comets. Between their lips the silver flames of their breath escaped.
They were not merely flame-breathing sky creatures. Dehumanized, the Shansar was now equally submerged in the fighting-madness of homeland ritual. Nothing was in his eyes but starvation, greed. Buoyed in fluid, his eloquent hands were taut and ready. To Rehger, the blood-lust of Saardsinmey had come back. It was not genuine, or even entire, for through it he thought quite cleanly: This was a substitution, a surrogate, scapegoat for the unbearable itch of hatred.
The crimson comets seared by, going out like old wine in the abyss beneath. How far might they fall?
The two men, strong lungs still lined by a little air, forgetful, eager to renew their contact now as two lovers separated, drove forward, slammed into each other, grasped, would not let go.
Kuzarl, his mouth stretched in a grimace like joy, started to rip, to gouge, to dismantle his enemy. But Rehger, speedlessly, with a terrible expressionless power, had commenced to wring, with one arm alone, the last of the air from the Shansar’s lungs. The left arm of the Shansar was pinned. He had discovered it to be so, and redoubled the efforts of the right arm—but Rehger now had the right arm also, and propelled it, slowly, graciously, aside and backward—
The awful complaint of this right arm, rotated from its orbit, almost from the socket, penetrated Kuzarl’s madness only in order to heighten his murderous frenzy—but a kind of screaming, part berserk fury, and part sheer pain, shot his lungs of the last air. His ribs caving under Rehger’s crushing vice, a helpless spasm, like a ghastly hiccupping, sucked the water in instead.