“ ⦠no good. Never any good when God ⦔
“Hot! Hot! Hot!”
She touched his arm, and Hethor opened his eyes to see Arellya, whom he already knew was there, offering him something baked in a banana leaf, smiling with all her teeth. He took the food. Amid the buzzing of the beetles and the deep, roasting smell of the festival-rite fire, Hethor greeted her in the language of the correct people.
“Hello, Arellya, and my thanks.”
She wasn't the least surprised. “Why did it take you so long to find our words?”
MORNING BROUGHT
a red-stained sun, a clearing full of gently snoring correct people, and the heavy, breath-choking
smell of ashes. Hethor awoke sprawled on the ground just outside his hut, mere feet from his cot. His body ached due to the roots and rocks on which he had slept. He itched from the attentions of various night-dwelling insects. He wished he had William of Ghent's razor to set upon his face.
He didn't mind.
At this moment, Hethor was satisfied. He felt as happy as he could ever remember feeling in his life. Arellya slept nearby, curled up like a cat. The correct people woman was not someone he could court, or even love, but there was a species of affection between them previously unknown to him, all the more so as it had developed in the absence of words. They had talked for hours of small thingsâthe beauty of the beetles, the colors of the jungle, the height of the Wall, how well this one danced and that one drummed. All that sort of idle chatter that had always eluded Hethor, tying his tongue, in the days of his youth back in New Haven.
Last night, somehow, he had found a way of listening to the world that finally allowed things to make sense once more. Not only was he happy, but he felt centered, like he belonged. Not since Gabriel came to him had Hethor known that kind of peace.
The thought of the archangel made his right hand itch. Hethor looked. The little key-shaped scar was prominent once more, standing out from the more recent wounds and insults that limned his palm in angry red and callused white.
“It is not my place to be happy, is it?” Hethor asked his hand, speaking to the uncaring scar. The Key Perilous awaited.
Arellya awoke at the sound of his voice, as did some of the other correct people. She smiled at Hethor. “Good morning, Messenger.”
Last night she had told him her people thought “Hethor” was his word for “Messenger.” She had insisted it was his name, even if Hethor himself did not know that.
“Arellya,” Hethor said, somewhere between politeness and affection. The clicks and whistles coming from his own mouth still sounded and felt strange, but in his head the correct people's language was already as natural to him as his own Queen's English.
Her name, of course, sounded very different in her own language than it had in his mouth when she first taught him to say it. Sort of a rising whistle, with a silent pause at the top, and a liquid ell sound that was also a click.
Hethor liked that version better than his Anglicized “Ar-el-yuh.”
“When will you take to the water road?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“The river.” Arellya's voice was patience itself. “When will you take to the water road?”
“I'm not sure what you mean,” Hethor said.
“You already know the perils of walking in our jungle. The water road is the only path that can carry you as far as you need to travel.”
Hethor sighed, smiling. “I don't know if I want to leave. Your jungle is hot, the air heavy and dense, but this is a kindly place to those who know how to live in it. I would guest as long as you allow me to.”
“Messenger, God did not send you and your wonderful gold plate to us.” Arellya managed to sound exasperated, even through her clicks and whistles and the underlying clatter of gears. “He intended something else. The correct people are like the ants beneath the jungle floorâwe are a part of our place, and neither we nor our place would survive without one another. God does not send us messages except in the fall of rain and the heat of the sun. Your message, it is for something grand, for someone in a distant city of stone and colored wood.”
“I ⦔ Hethor knew perfectly well that Gabriel had not sent him on a quest to find a jungle home south of the Equatorial Wall. Even if he was tempted to be faithless to the charge that had been laid upon him, the resurgent scar
pulsing on his hand was reminder enough of what was at stake. “You are correct, Arellya.”
“Of course,” she said with a small smile.
“I must go on.”
Kalker settled next to them, groaning his age. “May you both dance in the shadows of the sun.”
“Good morning,” said Hethor. Arellya nodded.
“So you have found your spirit-magic,” Kalker said to Hethor.
“No ⦔
“Yesterday, we were so many whistling savages. Today we are the correct people, with a different standing in your eyes. Did you come to wisdom on your own in the dark of the night?”
“Magic is ⦠ungodly.”
“Magic is.” With that, Kalker was content to sit and gaze at Hethor, neither worshipful nor confrontational.
“I need to take up the golden plate,” Hethor said, nodding at the group of guards sleeping in a circle, sitting each with their backs to the thing, spears on their laps. Even in the height of the previous night's frenzy, there had always been a watch. “I must carry it toward the sea and find a man named Malgus. Then together we will seek other men of greater wisdom to direct me.”
“Wisdom is,” said Arellya.
This time, Kalker nodded.
“Can you put me on the water road?” asked Hethor.
At his own question, he shuddered. Already the day was growing hot. Mosquitoes and blackflies whined; larger things rustled in the trees. The thought of the river was more threat than comfort, dangers in the water, falls and floods and huge crocodiles lurking in the muddy depths.
“The young males have been working,” said Arellya. “In the woods, they have been making barkboats and rafts, carving paddles and steering oars.”
“There is only one of me,” Hethor said mildly.
“Many will come.”
“I will not take them.”
Kalker frowned. “You cannot refuse.”
“Who speaks for the correct people?” Hethor asked.
“I do,” said Kalker, “those times when it is not sufficient for each correct person to speak for themselves.”
“You are the headman?” Somehow, this was not surprising.
“No, but I speak.”
“The correct people have no headman,” said Arellya. “Each is their own.”
“Well, Speaker,” Hethor said to Kalker, “tell your young males that they are brave and full of fire, and my respect for their dedication knows no limits. But this is my journey, and I must undertake it alone. So far my travels have not been lucky for those around me. I do not expect improvement.”
Arellya touched his arm, her grip firmer, more possessive, than it had been. “You cannot stop them. If you take to the water road, they will follow. If you stumble into the jungle, they will follow. It is not you, Messenger. The word of God passes by not once in a dozen generations, perhaps not a dozen of dozens. Let them follow the word. If the word leads them to the limits of their life, that is their choice.”
“So it is to be a river progress?” asked Hethor. “With the correct people in the flow?”
“By the will and want of everyone who comes.” Kalker reached out, touched Hethor's knee where he sat. “Most of all, your will.”
AS THE
days passed, the correct people assembled a flotilla of canoes and rafts. They tied each little craft to the knobby knees of trees that grew out of the water like amphibious sentinels. Vines hung heavy there, and monkeys with green-tinged fur prowled close by to watch the correct people launch their fleet. Logs in the water moved
against the current, crocodiles, a great gold-brown eye rolling open from time to time, but they did not approach the impromptu port.
Standing on a mound of clay to watch the effort, Hethor found that the river smelled much different from the jungle village nearby. More of mud and less of growth, with an unhealthy reek as if great monsters rotted in the watercourse's dank bed. The flow still had the coffee-colored, flooded look Hethor remembered from his first encounter weeks ago.
He discovered that though his sense of the passage of time moment to moment was as strong as ever, his sense of the days had vanished somewhere on the Equatorial Wall. It had not yet returned to him. Hethor shruggedâhe was moving as fast as he could, at least while maintaining life and limb intact. The world would fare as it did until he could unwrap Gabriel's mystery.
Not for the first time, he wished the archangel had gone straight to the queen and all her armies. On the other hand, all her armies would not have been enough to pass over the Wall.
All of life was a puzzle,
Hethor thought,
his own no more or less than anyone else's.
The other thing he had lost, besides his sense of the passage of days, was that feeling of happiness with which he had awoken after the festival-rite. The Key Perilous was back in his thoughts, itching in the scar on his hand.
“I am ready,” Hethor said to Arellya suddenly. “Tell the young males to take up their spears and supplies and join me on the water road.”
Though she was only chest-high to him, Arellya reached up and hugged Hethor, placing her arms around his neck as she hitched herself higher to kiss his lips. The closeness of her face made his new mustache prickle and fold, while the pressure of her lips was something entirely new to him.
He stood, the taste of sweetgrass and clay in his mouth, and marveled at what he didn't understand while shouts
and calls echoed around him. The correct people moved to their watercraft.
THE FLOTILLA
of canoes and rafts put out into the brown flood accompanied by little banana-leaf boats filled with flowers, spice, and even tiny oil wicks aflame. Hethor sat near the back of the largest canoe, a steersman behind him, six paddlers before him, his feet overrun with blossoms. He held the golden tablet upon his lap, but today there was no nonsense of worship or chanting. Various of the correct people had bowed to it, or him, loading up their boats, but all the ceremony of his first days among them had given way to an almost anarchic sense of informality.
Most importantly, Arellya sat just before him, her hips buried in the flowers. Hethor had lost that argument before it ever started. She had simply looked at him and said, “You follow the message. I follow the Messenger.”
Hethor was relieved that old Kalker hadn't thrown himself into the canoe as well. “Someone here is sane,” he had grumbled on boarding, but Kalker had just shaken his head, mimicking one of Hethor's gestures.
“Old age is not sanity.”
With that, they had pushed away.
Now the sun was high, morning already lost to their journey in the course of Hethor's early vacillations and late decision. The water road was more humid and miserable and insect-ridden than even the jungle, making Hethor wonder what it was he had seen in this place.
The little banana-leaf boats made more sense now, their odors of fruit and spice drawing some insects away from the travelers, while the trails of guttering oil smoke drove others off from the area. But the little boats spun away on every whim of the current, so their utility was limited.
Still, it was a proud flotilla that headed downstream to the dip of paddles and the ragged airs of singing and
drumming on hulls. Hethor might have lost his sense of profound happiness, but this was no mean substitute.
He took the golden tablet from beneath its bed of flowers and studied it, trying to hear the language of Heaven beneath the clattering gears of all the world in the same manner that he had managed to hear Arellya's language.
The difference was, he feared, that Arellya had wanted him to understand, and the tablet was at best indifferent to him.
Spirit-magic,
Kalker had said.
Hethor only wished he had such a thing, to ease his path and make him a happier man every day.
THAT NIGHT
they did not stop to camp as Hethor expected. Rather, Arellya called the boats together with a series of nonsense cries that must have been some code Hethor did not yet understand through the secret of his spirit-magic, or the gift of divine hearing, or whatever he had been blessed with. Slowly, almost effortlessly, the flotilla drew together, closing up to a sort of floating island of wood and bark. A surprising number of the little banana-leaf boats were still with them.
Lines made of dried and woven vines were drawn through little knots in the wood, or even oarlocks, though Chief al-Wazir would have been appalled at both the indifferent discipline of the flotilla's sailors and the almost aggressively random result of their labors. The thought of al-Wazir brought Hethor's mind whirling back to
Bassett.