Jo Clayton - Drinker of Souls

He went into the Temple, moved past the Godalau and her companion gods and stopped before one of the smallest figures, the little luck whose belly was shiny from the hundreds, no, thousands of hands that had rubbed it, a mostly naked little man/woman with fat big-nippled breasts and a short thick penis, left eye winking in a merry face. Taguiloa bowed, patted the round little belly, dropped coins in the offering bowl and lit a handful of incense sticks. Feeling more than a little drunk from contemplating the possibilities in his future, he poked the sticks in the sandbowl, squatted and watched the sweet smoke swirl up about the god. After a moment he laughed, jumped to his feet, did a wheeling run, a double somersault, flipped into a handstand then over onto his feet, then he was running from the Temple, laughter still bubbling in his blood, the luck god still riding his shoulder, giggling into his ear.

Jaril materialized from the fog, walked down the Temple Way stairs beside him, saying nothing, just there. Taguiloa nodded to him and continued his careful march downward; the steps were slick with condensation and worn by generations of feet. To break a leg here would be thumbing his nose at the god on his shoulder and an invitation to a cascade of evil luck. When he reached the bottom, he smiled down at his small silent companion. “Ladji and Blackthorn offer Linjijan, Ladji’s grand-nephew as our flute player. Blackthorn wants to meet Brann.” He hesitated, lifted a hand, let it fall. “I told them a little about her and you. They won’t say anything, Jaril. Oh yes, there’s a foreign woman too, a musician and the daughter of a mage. She’s joining the troupe. I think. Tomorrow, two hours after midday. Would your companion be willing to come? I’ve found a house. A few steps from mine, a maid there for Brann if she wants to keep her. The girl will be discreet. We can get your companion moved in tomorrow morning if she decides to take the house. You want to see it? Come along then.”

BRANN CAME THROUGH the wall-gate, not at all the woman he’d seen that morning. Obviously she’d decided not to show forth as Hina, wisely so, he thought. The Shipmaster was right, Hina ways weren’t easily acquired. Her hair was hanging loose, not curling but undulating gracefully out from her face, black as night, cloud soft. She wore a cap of linked gold coins with strings of coins hanging beside her face, a long loose robe of black silk embroidered with birds and beasts from Hina tales. Her skin was darkened to an olive flushed pink on the cheeks, her mouth a warm rose, her green eyes wide and gemlike, her face as devoid of expression as the godmasks in the Temple. A brindle hunting bitch pranced beside her, prickears twitching, crystal eyes filled with a dancing light that said Yaril was enjoying herself.

For a moment Taguiloa felt uneasy before this trio, though he was used to ghosts fluttering about and gods roaming the world. Now and then someone would see the Godalau swimming through the waters of the outer bay, her long fingers like rays from the moon combing the waves, her fish tail like limber jade flipping through air and water, churning both. Or Geidranay big as a mountain squatting on a mountainside tending the trees. He’d seen a dragon break a long drought, undulating laughter it was, flashes of reds and golds as the sun glittered off its scales, a memory of beauty so great the ragged boy digging for clams forgot to breathe. The little gods, Sessa who found lost things, Sulit the god of secrets, Pindatung the god of thieves and pickpockets, all the rest of them, they scampered like cheerful mice from person to person, coming unasked, leaving without warning, a capricious, treacherous and highly courted clutch of godlings. You could make bargains with them and if you were clever enough even profit from them. If you weren’t clever enough and brought disaster on yourself and your folk, well that was your fault; if you got greedy and overstepped or fearful and failed to keep your wits honed you might find yourself reduced to night-soil collector or beggar with juicy sores to exploit.

Taguiloa walked in silence with the woman, boy and bitch; contemplating his choices. When Tungjii gave, you used the luck or lost it and more. The time he was still fussing about being obligated to a Temueng, Gerontai impressed that on him and to underline the lesson told him Raskatak’s story.

Raskatak was a fisherman with a small boat and miserable luck who brought in just enough fish to keep him from abandoning the craft and seeking some other kind of work. One bright day he was out in his boat alone on a becalmed sea, his lines overboard while he patched his sail. It had nearly split up the middle in the sudden squall that separated him from the other boats and left him wallowing between swells that rapidly flattened out as the.wind stopped dead and the sun rose higher and higher until it was beating remorselessly on the ocean. There was nothing touching his lines, they hung loose over the side, even the boat sounds had died away until the noise the awl made punching through the canvas seemed as loud as a large fish breaking water, though none did for miles about.

Overhead, sundragon burned and undulated, white and gold, great mother-of-pearl eyes turning and turning. And on his forward shoulders Tungjii rode, hisser plump buttocks accommodated in a hollow the dragon made for himmer. Waving a fan gently before hisser face, heesh looked down at the wretched little boat and grinned suddenly, broadly, reached into the glitter about the dragon, twisted hisser dainty hand in a complicated round, opened hisser fist and let a scatter of gold coins drop into the boat, watching with casual interest to see if they would hit the fisherman on his head and kill him, miss the boat altogether and be lost in the sea, or land beside the man in a clinking shining pile. Tungjii had no leaning toward any of those outcomes, heesh was merely watching to see how chance would work out.

The coins came clunking down, heavy rounds that landed in a little pile beside Raskatak’s bare feet, one of them bouncing off his big toe, crushing the bone. He gaped at the coins, his big bony hands stilled on the rotten canvas. After a minute he put the canvas aside and scowled at his reddened toe. He lifted his foot and put it heavily on his knee. He touched the toe with clumsy fingers, grunted at the pain. Still ignoring the gold, he searched around in his sea chest, drew out a flat piece of bone, broke off a bit of it, bound it to his toe with a bit of rag, then a twist of line.

He put his foot down with the same heavy care. Only then did he pick up one of the coins and look it over, test it with his teeth. He sat staring at it as if he didn’t understand what it was. Moving with the same stolid deliberation he picked up each of the coins, tested each of them the same way and put it away in his sea chest. When he finished that he looked up, searching the sky for the origin of the shower of gold. What he saw was the glitter and burn of the noon sun. He hawked and spat over the side, went back to sewing up the sail. Gold or no gold, he wasn’t going to get home without a working sail.

He finished the seam and raised the sail, but the wind was still absent. The canvas hung limp, not even slatting against the mast. He sat waiting, his eyes half shut, dreaming of what he was going to do with the gold.

As if to prove that miracles never occur singly, a school of fish struck the hooks on his lines and he spent the next two hours hauling them in, dropping the lines back until his boat was alive with flopping glistening silversides and the moment the school passed on, a fresh breeze sprang up and set the wretched little boat racing for Selt. For the first time ever he came in early and alone and got premium prices on his fine fat fish. He went back to the tiny hovel he’d built of ancient sails and bits of driftwood on a handful of land he rented from a distant cousin. He counted the coins over and over, even when it was only by feel after his fish oil lamp sputtered dry. And he counted the silver and copper coins the day’s catch had brought, ten times the sum he usually made. Fearing that the gold might disappear as strangely as it had come, fearing too that the thieves that lived around him might smell it out and steal it from him, forgetting no thief of reasonable intelligence would come poking through his bits and pieces, he buried the gold under the agglomeration of sticks and rope he used for a bed, then spent a good part of the night nursing a jug of cheap wine and trying to ignore the pain in his toe while he dreamed of great feasts and high-class dancing girls and fine silk robes and his cousins bowing respectfully before him and seeking his advice and begging favors of him which he granted or refused with gracious nobility.