Paul Mcauley: Shrine of Stars

“My master says that stories are the only kind of immortality achievable without the grace of the Preservers. Certainly, they are the lifeblood of my people. We are so very short-lived, yet live long in memory because of our skill in making stories and songs. A good story can be handed down through a hundred generations, its details changing but its heart always the same, and the people in it live again each time it is told. So might we, Tibor, for surely this is the greatest story the world has ever known.”

“All the world is a story,” Tibor said, after paddling silently for a while. “Who can find the single droplet which falls from a leaf-tip into the flood of the Great River? Who can say where one story ends and another begins?”

Pandaras thought that Tibor was quoting from an obscure sura in the Puranas and, having no wish to argue theology with a hierodule, for once held his tongue.

The nights were dark and still, lit only by the dim red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers. The Eye rose slightly earlier each night, and each night reached a slightly higher point in the black sky above the river’s black plain before falling back toward the far-side horizon. In the vast stillness of the night, Pandaras felt most acutely the emptiness of the unpeopled shore, and he was relieved when at last the song of birds and monkeys and the whistling chorus of millions of frogs greeted the dawn. The days quickly grew hot, but Tibor did not seem to mind the heat. He said that he had grown up in a far hotter land, near the midpoint of the world. A little sun like this was nothing.

Without salt, the antelope meat went off before they could eat more than a quarter of it, but there was food all around. There were always ripe fruits waiting to be plucked from strangler figs or banana plants. Tibor plaited nets from fibers scraped from the fronds of the big ferns which clung to the mangroves, and trawled for catfish and lampreys in shallow backwaters, while Pandaras nimbly climbed about the canopies of banyans, taking eggs from bird and lizard nests. Tibor ate insects too, often catching them on the wing with his long red tongue.

Occasionally they glimpsed the flash of a sail far out in the middle of the river, an argosy or carrack heading for the war, and one day a machine circled the raft before rising up and flying straight toward the misty line of the nearside shore. It had a long, wasp-waisted body, a decad of paired, shimmeringly fragile vanes, and a cluster of bright red eyes. Pandaras cocked the arbalest while the machine dipped overhead, remembering the machines which Prefect Corin had sent out to search for Yama. But Prefect Corin must be dead, drowned when his ship had been torn apart by the giant polyps Yama had called from the deep river-bottom. There were many machines on Confluence, Pandaras told himself. It signified nothing.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, they reached the house of an itinerant trader. It was tucked away in a backwater shaded by tall mangroves, a ramshackle shanty built in the branches of a banyan, with walls and a peaked roof fashioned from panels of woven grasses. A decad of small boats were strung out along an anchor line on the still, black water below. Little glowing lamps shone everywhere amongst the tree’s glossy green leaves, like a horde of fireflies. Music from a cassette player came clearly across the water as Tibor paddled the raft toward the shanty, and a bird set up a harsh clamor, warning of their approach.

The trader was a crafty old man named Ayulf. He was of a bloodline familiar to Pandaras, the bloodline of half the ruffians who smuggled cigarettes and other proscribed trade goods to indigens, or otherwise scraped a living on the wrong side of the law along the docks of Ys or on the Great River. Ayulf wore only a dhoti around his scrawny waist, in which he habitually rummaged to scratch or rearrange his genitals. His arms and legs were long and stringy, and his small head was crowned with a dirty, half-unraveled turban from which greasy spikes of hair stuck out in every direction. His eyes were yellow, like flame or bits of amber, and he hissed softly to himself when he was thinking; he did that a lot as Pandaras told a highly edited version of his story while devouring a salty mess of rice and fish.

Ayulf traded with the local fisherfolk, exchanging cigarettes, cheap cooking pots, fish hooks, nylon netting and leaves of bronze or iron for lizard, snake and cayman skins, the hides of marsh antelopes, the feathers of bell birds and birds of heaven, and rare spices and medicines extracted from plants and lichens which grew on the banyans and mangroves. The shanty was cluttered with bales of cigarettes wrapped in black plastic, wooden cases and machines or bits of machines. Some kind of large gun was in pieces on the floor by the large, flat stone which served as a hearth. Salted hides were slung beneath the roof, layered with aromatic tar-bush leaves to keep off insects. A pentad of fisherfolk women and more than twice that number of their children moved about in the dusky evening light, lighting lamps, mending clothes, stirring the cook-pot in which fish soup perpetually simmered, chattering in their dialect and casting covert glances at Pandaras and Tibor. A half-tame crow hopped about, too. It was big, half Pandaras’s height, and looked beadily at him as if wondering whether it would be easy to kill him, and what he might taste like. The crow’s white droppings spattered the floor and the stacks of plastic-wrapped bales, and it was given to crying out hoarsely and jumping here and there with an abrupt dry flutter of its black wings. It was always just at the corner of Pandaras’s sight. It made him jumpy, and he kept one hand near the hilt of his ivory-handled poniard. The arbalest was slung at his shoulder. He did not trust the trader.

“You don’t mind my bird,” Ayulf said. “He’s never seen no one like you before and he’s curious.” He had been cuddling the youngest of the women to him; now he dismissed the girl with a slap to her haunches and said, “They are animals, not men, but someone like me must make a living as best he can, and take what company he can, too. You understand, eh? You being in the same line of business as me. Don’t deny it. I know a man that lives by his wits when I see him.”

Ayulf was staring at Tibor when he said this, but then he seemed to recollect himself and winked at Pandaras. “I can see that you make a good living here,” Pandaras said.

“There’s a lot that washes downriver,” the trader said, “and a lot that makes its way back from the war.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That culverin, for instance. I’d sell it to you, except I’ve promised it to a good friend of mine who’ll be along to collect it once I’ve fixed its firing mechanism. But I have other guns. I’ll take that arbalest off you in part exchange for something with a bit more bite. You need heavy weapons around here. The Preservers don’t see so well in this part of the river, if you get my meaning.”

Ayulf’s friend was probably a pirate, Pandaras thought. The trader must pay a good deal of tribute for protection. He said, “You are generous to your friends, dominie.”

“It helps to be generous out here,” Ayulf said. He plucked a bit of gristle from his gappy teeth and tossed it to the crow, which snapped it from the air with its bone-white beak and swallowed it whole. “Favors bring business and keep trouble away.”

“I can see that your business is good. You have a good place here, many women, many things to trade. Why, you even have an abundance of boats.”

“You need a boat to get about. How does that raft of yours handle out on the river?”

“Well enough, for a raft. My friend here has a lot of experience with rafts.”

Ayulf’s yellow gaze flicked toward Tibor. “Friend, eh? With a friend like yours, you are a rich man indeed, and deserve better than a raft, I would think.”