1.5
Kingdom was ruled over by three gods, represented by stone figurines at the Temple of the Hill of Stars. Manuah, who tried to stay out of religion in the same way he tried to stay out of politics, thought of them privately as The One With The Arms, the One With The Hair, and The One With The Big Dick. Such sacrilege had never bothered him before, but now he wondered if it were part of why the gods were so crapped off. Not because of him personally, but because religion did not play as big a part in the affairs of Kingdom—and particularly the affairs of The City—as it had in times past, and the gods were widely scorned.
But which god would be angry? The One With The Big Dick seemed least likely. What would a fertility god want with a drowning world? It must be one of the other two, or perhaps some god Manuah had never thought of. Some powerful, vengeful god? The people of Surapp worshipped a god like that; a single god who would allow no others, and who was somehow his own mother and his own daughter, and was also the sun itself. That was some god! And it made a kind of crazy sense, because if the sun were conscious, it could certainly melt snow if it wanted to.
Such thoughts plagued him all through the afternoon. He let Hamurma man the sail along with Kop, and he let Letoni steer the boat, while he simply stood around and brooded, gnawing occasionally on a chunk of hard sailor’s bread, wearing away at it bit by bit. To his disquiet, the greatfish reappeared as they rounded the Cape of Thorns, and stayed with them for the rest of the afternoon. Or perhaps it was some other solitary greatfish who liked to follow boats around?
When evening finally came, and sun slipped down into the ocean again, he allowed himself a small breath of relief. At least that god wasn’t watching them now. But it wasn’t long after that, when the celestial spray of the greatfish rose. In the constellation of the hand, at the very opposite end of the sky from the supposed sun god. And what could that mean? That two gods were at play here? That two gods were warring, and human beings were simply caught between them? That starry smudge seemed bigger, too. He knew one thing: he needed to consult with his brother as soon as possible. Adrah knew more about these matters than Manuah could ever hope to. For a priest he was not especially godly; he still sometimes talked like the sailor boy he once had been. But he knew his figures, yes indeed.
Manuah slept fitfully that night, and passed a groggy, surly morning watching rainclouds gather. Not storm clouds per se, but enough to cause them trouble if they were caught out. And the wind was against them again. Finally, Manuah took the steering oar, if only to keep himself busy.
When they finally returned to The City, his son Sharama was at the mouth of the harbor, standing atop one of the sea walls and calling out instructions to the nearby boat under his command. The tidy rectangular block wall had been broadened and heightened into a ridgeline of rubble, but right away Manuah could see what a big job this was going to be. In three days of (presumably) diligent work, the heir to the Harbormaster title had added perhaps two feet of height and ten feet of width to a twenty-foot section of one of the harbor’s four sea walls. At that rate, even if Sharama worked every day at the task, it would take a year or more to complete. Assuming The City’s masons even produced enough rubble! Well, at least the boy was starting in the right place.
“Ho, Sharama!” Hamurma called out. “How goes it?”
“Ho!” Sharama called back. “Just a moment, here. Basri, haul that rope! You’re drifting!” Then, to Manuah, as they made their closest approach: “Hello, Father. We ran out of rocks, so we’re dredging buckets of sand up against the wall.”
“Ah,” said Manuah. “Well, let’s see if it holds.” If it did, it could keep the rubble wall from leaking too much, and improve its ability to break the backs of approaching waves. Not a bad idea. Manuah steered past the lip of the wall, and around into the gap that would lead them into the harbor proper.
As the distance between them started increasing again, Sharama called out, “Will I see you at dinner? I have two matters to discuss.”
“Maybe!” Manuah said over the rising wind. “But I have to meet with Adrah first!”
That turned out to be easier said than done. First he had to guide the boat into dock against an unruly tide and an unruly wind and then, once they’d tied off securely, he had to unwrap the bale of byssa cloth and take a cubit of material from it, then command one of the men to wrap it all up again. Then he did the same for the bale of golden fleeces, and gave both the cloth and the fleece to Hamurma, telling him to deliver them back home to his mother. Then he had to track down both the cloth merchant and the fleece merchant who’d agreed to receive these shipments, while the men stayed with the boat and guarded against thievery.
Then, once the merchants had been brought and the bales carried away, the men quite reasonably wanted to be paid for the journey, and so they all had to trek over to the bazaar, where he vouched for each man with the Master of Markets. It was an annoying process, and he wished (not for the first time) that he could simply write a note on a plank of wood and send that instead. But that would have been an insult, even assuming the Master of Markets could read, which Manuah was fairly certain he couldn’t.
And then he needed to go back home anyway, to take a healthy shit in private, and by then it was nearly dinnertime. Today dinner had been prepared not by Emzananti, but by Chatrupati, who was Manuah’s aunt and stepmother and the mother of Adrah. And because Chatrupati’s hands and mind were not as deft as they once had been, the dinner consisted mainly of oranges and biscuits, with a single dried sardine for each person seated around the dining rug: Manuah and Emzananti, their three sons Sharama, Hamurma, and Jyaphethti, plus Sharama’s wife Telebabti, and Chatrupati herself. This was Manuah’s entire family; his mother and father were long in the ground, his two daughters had died before the age of five, and Telebabti had yet to bear Sharama any children. Seven people did not make for a very large family, but it did make it easier for them all to fit under one roof, which was something. They even had room for two servants: now a married couple named…Floopy and Poopy Gubgub or something. He was always forgetting.
“Eat and pray,” Chatrupati instructed slowly. “You spend your days busy and your nights asleep, but the body and soul require nourishment.”
“Father’s sea walls require nourishment as well,” Hamurma noted, clearly thinking the comment was funny. No one else seemed to think so, but Hamurma didn’t seem to mind.
Sharama said, “I’d like to buy one of your boats, Father. The one I’ve been using, if that’s all right. It’s your oldest, and one of the smallest.”
“Hmm,” said Manuah. “And how do you propose to pay for it?”
“The crab vendors owe me a considerable debt—twenty baskets. I’ll transfer this to you. In addition, I will share half my profits with you for two years’ time.”
Manuah couldn’t help laughing, because twenty baskets of crabs were in no way worth as much as an operational sailboat with two paddling benches, and also because he was already getting all of the profits from all of his boats, less the small wages he paid to his sons for crewing them. And yet, Emzananti was right: Manuah had owned a boat at the age of nineteen. It was old when he got it, and it had rotted away within just five years, but when he closed his eyes he could still see it, could almost feel the gnarled surface of it where its edges curled up. He’d inherited his second boat when his father died, and had earned all the ones that came after that. But yes, that first one had been given to him by King Sraddah’s father, King Nunuktah, as a wedding gift. Sharama had received no such gift, because he was quite a jerk growing up, and was being particularly jerky the month he and Telebabti had tied the knot. Their gifts had mostly consisted of the forgiveness of small debts.
“It’s not a fair offer,” Manuah said. “The boat’s worth more than that.”
But Sharama was being polite now, and he was the heir to the Harbormaster title, and anyway Manuah wasn’t convinced the whole world wasn’t about to wash away. So he said, “I’ll simply give it to you, on condition that you continue to repair the seawalls. Half your time for the next two years. Does that sound fair?”
“It does, Father. Thank you, Father.” Sharama was uncharacteristically quiet after that, red-faced and sweating with what Manuah supposed must be gratitude.
“What was the other thing?”
“Huh?”
“You said you had two things to talk to me about. What was the second?”
“Oh, uh, Telebabti and I would like to paint the walls of our room.”
“Blue-white,” Telebabti said, “Like the sky at midday. It’s a lucky color, and a soothsayer told me it would bring us children.”
“Huh. What do you think, Emzananti?”
“I think it’s an excellent idea, as long as you pay for it yourselves. Blue-white is a lucky color.”
And then, with dinnertime business settled, the family broke out into song.
* * *
At the Temple of the Hill of Stars, Manuah brushed past the gate attendants with a few mumbled comments, and soon thereafter found Adrah in a contemplation room, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the light of an oyster shell lamp, with a plank of wood in his lap and a charcoal pencil in his hand. He didn’t look up.
“Brother?” Manuah said.
“A moment, please.”
A minute later: “Adrah.”
“Just a…just…” Finally, Adrah sighed and looked up. “Ah, Harbormaster. Back from Surapp already?”
“Yes, I hurried. What are you doing?”
“Attempting to predict the movements of the Evening Planet. Without much enlightenment, I’m sad to say. The venerable Goxgatar is our champion predictor, and I don’t think I’m ever going to replace him. I’m not sure anyone is. Anyway, how is your darling family this evening?”
“They’re well,” Manuah said impatiently. “I just gave Sharama his first boat.”
“I’m so glad to hear it. And Emzananti?”
“Wonderful. You really should get a wife of your own.”
This was by no means the first time Manuah had made this recommendation. The priesthood didn’t forbid it, but the life of a priest and the life of a family man were not particularly compatible, so the parents of potential wives were unlikely to make the match. Some women married priests anyway, either for love or for some supposed spiritual benefit, and Adrah could probably do pretty well for himself if he put in the effort. But he’d always seemed weirdly uninterested.
“And how did Hamurma do on his first voyage? Did those twig arms get the job done? I imagine he’s about ready for marriage.”
When Manuah grunted instead of answering, Andrah finally set aside the plank and pencil and said, “All right, all right, you look like you’re going to burst. What can I do for you? Is the water still rising?”
Manuah nodded. “Pook, I saw a greatfish spout all the way up into the stars. It left a mark in the sky. And yes, the water’s still rising. The tide in Surapp was a full hand deeper than I’ve ever seen it.”
“Slow down,” Adrah said. “One thing at a time. You saw a greatfish? You know there’s one in our harbor right now. I saw it from the tower an hour ago, spouting and diving.”
“Oh, gods, it followed me.”
“It did?”
“It followed me all the way to Surapp and back, but if it’s in the harbor, if it’s diving in the harbor, then the water must be deeper than ever. Don’t you see?”
“And this fish spouted a mark onto the sky?”
“It did. I saw it myself.”
“In the constellation of the hand?”
Manuah paused. “Yes.”
Adrah smiled comfortingly. “All right, yes, we’ve seen that as well. It’s called a comet, and it’s nothing to worry about. Or rather, we assume it’s nothing to worry about. Manuah, the sky isn’t a solid object like a curtain; it’s just empty air, all the way up. And the stars are very far away. It’s literally not possible for a whale to spout that high.”
Manuah was surprised to hear this, first of all because he’d seen it with his own eyes, and second because it irked him to think he might be more superstitious than a priest. “You sound awfully certain,” he said.
Adrah smiled again, more genuinely and a bit condescendingly, and Manuah could see how much it pleased him to know something his big brother didn’t. “It’s easier to show you than to explain. Come with me to the tower, and we’ll do some stargazing.”
Grumbling, Manuah stood with Adrah and followed him out into the corridor, where young acolytes were igniting tallow lamps to combat the growing darkness.
“There’s a pattern to the sky, and a rhythm,” Adrah said over his shoulder as Manuah trailed behind him. “It all clearly means something, but right now we don’t know what. Are the planets our gods? Are they little spherical lamps set into eddying currents of air?”
They came to the interior of the tower’s base, and Adrah mounted the first ladder. “The moon and the sun are the same size in the sky, but they’re not the same distance away. Did you know that? The gods have set it up very carefully, so that it’s possible for the moon to cover the sun exactly. And yet it rarely does, and that has to mean something as well.”
“Which god?” Manuah asked, trying not to look up his brother’s robe as they climbed. “The one with the arms?”
“Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Adrah said, as though the thought had never occurred to him before. “Lots of arms to hang lots of ornaments. Perhaps to dance and spin and move them around. But it still doesn’t answer why, and without that—without understanding the gods’ intentions—it’s quite difficult to be sure what they really want from us. Or if they even notice us at all.”
Manuah was pretty sure priests weren’t supposed to talk that way, but the Cleric Astrologers were a small group, and held themselves somewhat aloof from the priesthood proper.
“On the other hand,” Adrah continued, “Certain things are very well understood. The solstices, the equinoxes, these predict the coming of the seasons. The lunar calendar is crap, and we should by all means expel it into the nearest chamber pot. Months wander with time; they don’t predict the seasons. They don’t synchronize, as we like to say.”
“We use that word too,” Manuah reminded him with some annoyance. Synchrony was what kept sailors paddling together, for maximum thrust and minimum drag. Adrah had known that long before he’d known any of this celestial nonsense.
“Of course, of course,” Adrah said, unembarrassed. “And perhaps it’s the same kind of thing; the events that synchronize have power over the Earth. The ones that don’t…”
They arrived at the top of the tower, under a nearly cloudless sky of deepest purple, where stars faded into view one by one, with almost visible speed. Each moment both darker and brighter than the moment before it, the purple sky dividing itself into black and white.
Adrah finished: “The ones that don’t, aren’t helping. They might even be hurting.”
“You sound like a wise old man,” Manuah said, not entirely without respect.
“Not wise enough. Predicting the motions is difficult. The dance of Kalishiva.” He laughed. “The one with the arms. All right, well, Kalishiva is both creator and destroyer, both male and female. The name means Darkness and also Destroyer of Darkness, which is as good a description of the sky as I’ve ever heard. So why should her dance be simple?”
Still impatient, Manuah said, “You wanted to show me something?”
“Indeed. Look over here at your comet.”
With a sky-blue sleeve now as black as the sky itself, he pointed toward the constellation of the hand, where the “comet” hung. The smudge was a little bit larger and brighter than it had been last night, and its position and orientation had changed slightly as well.
“It moved!”
“Yes. They do that. They come from very far away, and approach, and then dance away again. Usually over a period of weeks.”
“You’ve seen one before?”
“I’ve seen two, although neither one could be made out this clearly without a pair of burning crystals.”
He produced two clear discs from a pocket in his robe, and held them up in a line between his face and the sky.
“This is secret magic, Manuah. I’m trusting you with it. It brings the sky closer to me, so I can observe it better. Still very far away, but closer.”
“I don’t see anything changing.”
“No, you have to be behind the crystals, looking through. It’s strange, I know.”
“I don’t like this,” Manuah said, and was unhappy with the way his voice sounded—like a frightened boy. But when exactly had his brother become a wizard?
“Relax. It’s not harmful.” Adrah moved the crystals back and forth a bit, grunting and harrumphing, and finally said, “All right, there. I see it clearly. It has a bright head and a fuzzy tail. The tail of a comet always points away from the sun, presumably so the head can look at it.”
“It’s alive?” Manuah asked, his voice still quavering with superstitious dread.
“Possibly. Or some kind of spirit—a visiting god, from some other celestial realm. Personally, I think it’s something like a boat, moving fast enough to leave a wake behind it in the empty air. Manuah, relax. What’s the farthest you’ve ever sailed?”
“Twenty-five days out, thirty days back.”
“All right, so about four sixties of yojana. That’s a good, long distance. But this comet is probably sixty of sixty of thirty yojana away. Maybe more. It’s not going to reach out and grab you.”
“How do you know all this?”
Adrah sighed. “Can you keep a lid on more secret magic?” When Manuah didn’t answer, he went on anyway: “Sound and light are physical substances, like wind, except that wind can travel at any speed, slow or fast or anything in between. Sound and light can’t do this. They’re a different sort of substance, and they travel at fixed speeds.”
“What?”
“It’s true. Clap your hands.”
Reluctantly, Manuah did so, half afraid this would trigger some new, even more disturbing revelation. But no, just a clapping sound.
Adrah said, “Did that sound occur in a single instant of no duration?”
“Um, no?”
“No, of course not. You couldn’t hear it if it did. Now clap twice, as quickly as you can.”
Manuah did as he was asked. Clapclap!
“That sound, that pair of sounds, from the silence at one end to the silence at the other, lasted about a nimisha.”
“All right,” Manuah allowed. These were words he’d heard, words people used sometimes to describe very long distances and very short times.
“Well, now here’s where it gets interesting, because from the method of drums and mirrors, we know that sound—the physical substance of sound—traverses half a yojana in two sixties of nimisha. Measurements like ‘kos’ and ‘foot’ and ‘moment’ and ‘khyama’ are subjective. They never mean the same thing twice. A month is at least a real measurement of time, but it doesn’t synchronize, so it doesn’t help. But the yojana and nimisha are precise, and repeatable. They mean what they mean, because they relate to the cosmos itself.”
“Um, all right,” Manuah said, his head spinning. “What’s that got to do with a comet?”
“Comets don’t make sound, but they do make light, and by the method of eclipses we know that in the span of one nimisha, light travels a distance of sixty of sixty yojanas, or exactly one spakta, which is a new unit created by the venerable Goxgatar for this purpose. And Goxgatar has assured me that the moon is twelve spakta above the ground—quite a distance!—while the sun is much higher, at sixty of sixty spakta. And the stars are higher still—so high that even Goxgatar can’t figure the distance. If it will ease your mind, I’ll ask him if he can learn the range to this comet. It might not be possible; he might need months of observations, by which time the comet will likely be gone anyway. But I’ll ask, all right?”
Manuah sat silent for a long while. He’d had no idea the world was this complex. Why would it need to be? It didn’t make any sense. He’d also had no idea just how smart his half-brother was, or how much he knew that Manuah himself did not. Manuah had noticed, more than once, that from a boat on the water, he could sometimes see men waving and shouting on the shore, and that their waving and shouting didn’t…synchronize. It seemed at times that the sound lagged behind. He’d never known what to make of that, and he hadn’t really thought about it all that much. He certainly hadn’t seen it as a doorway into to these vast numbers and distances, these bewildering movements and visitations.
* * *
Here, Harv Leonel’s consciousness broke through for a moment, and he had time to marvel at this sort of gobbledygook science—wrong in so many particulars, and yet right (or rightish) in so many others. These cave men knew the speed of light! Whoever this Goxgatar was, he had managed to uncover secrets that had eluded even the Greeks. And without any sort of sensible mathematics! Math savants often reported “seeing” numbers and figures without having to calculate them directly, and he supposed Goxgatar must be one of these, or else he really was in contact with some sort of divinity. Was there even a difference?
And telescopes? Galileo had insisted the idea was not original to him, that he was merely reinventing something well known to “the ancients.” But what had he meant by that? Where had he gotten that information? Harv had to wonder just how many times secrets like these had been discovered, or at least hypothesized and approximated, only to be forgotten later on? And that thought filled him with apprehension, because if these people’s knowledge had been lost, surely that didn’t say anything good about the fate of the people themselves. Manuah was right to worry!
And suddenly it hit him: this was the Ice Age. This was the end of the last great glaciation, when millions of gigatons of ice had melted off in rapid bursts—sometimes only a few hundred years each. And this thought filled him with superstitious dread, because if these visions were real at all, then Kingdom and The City had existed more than twelve thousand years ago. As remote from the ancient Sumerians as Sumer was from modern America. The Romans maintained continuity longer than any other civilization—eleven centuries long—and yet they could have risen and fallen ten times over since Manuah walked upon the Earth.
Was Harv just dreaming after all? Could civilization possibly be that old?
* * *
Finally, Manuah told Adrah, “I want to ask what all this means, but you’ve already said you don’t know. You say these things aren’t harmful, but that’s just wishful thinking, isn’t it? The truth is, you don’t know.” And when Adrah didn’t answer right away, he pressed on: “The water is rising here, and in Surapp, and all up and down the Great River. Can you honestly tell me that’s not harmful?”
With obvious reluctance, Adrah answered: “No.”
“I’ve seen storm surges raise the water ten feet, for day or more. If high tide were to strike in the middle of something like that, what do you think would happen?”
Again, reluctantly, “I suppose the water would come all the way up into the streets of The City. But then it would retreat again, yes?”
“Perhaps,” Manuah said. “And perhaps building the seawalls a little higher will help, although it’s going to take time. And money, whether or not His Majesty cares to admit it. But if the water keeps on rising, all on its own, then how are we to stop it?”
The two of them were silent for a time, and then Manuah added, “Plus, there’s this greatfish, appearing at the same time as the comet, and following around the very person who’s warning you about rising water. Perhaps, as you say, the fish didn’t create the star, but even if that’s true, they still happened at the same time. Are you seriously going to tell me that isn’t an omen of some sort?”
“I don’t believe in omens,” Adrah said, clearly trying to sound reassuring.
“Here’s hoping the Cleric Portenters never hear you say that.”
“Hmm. Yes, well, doesn’t it sound a bit arrogant, to think these grand events have been staged, somehow, for your own benefit? To help you make your point?”
Manuah answered the question with another question: “Have you ever known the gods to lean down from the sky and speak directly to human beings? In a voice we can all understand? If they exist at all, and care about human beings at all, then how would they get our attention? What would that look like?”
Adrah didn’t have an answer to that.
After another long pause, Manuah asked, “Is there anything you can do to help me?”
“I don’t know, brother. I really don’t. I can talk with the other clerics, but the problem is, nobody knows what these things mean, including you. It won’t be easy to persuade people.”
“Hmm. Assuming you even believe me.”
“You have raised some interesting points.” Another pause, and then: “There is some indication that the moon synchronizes with the tides in some way. Some complicated way. Perhaps the Cleric Astrologers could take that on as a task. That would be less controversial, I think, and it would help you know when the greatest flood risks would occur. Is that helpful?”
One of Manuah’s hereditary titles was “Counter of Tides,” but other than a very loose sense that high tide and low tide each came approximately twice per day, he’d never really lived up to that name. The problem was, sometimes the tides came early or late. Sometimes they were higher than expected, or lower, and he had been to some places where the tides came in and out only once each day. It didn’t make sense, and so he had never wasted much thought on it. Instead he just stood on the decks of his boats, feeling the water surging under him, telling him whether it was headed in or out.
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s a start.”
* * *
In another moment of lucidity, Harv Leonel—more as an act of whimsy than anything else—thought very hard at Manuah: THE DANGER IS REAL. In response to which, to Harv’s great surprise and distress, Manuah screamed.
* * *
“Aah! Aah! Did you hear that?”
In the darkness, Adrah looked more concerned than he had all evening. “Hear what?”
“A voice,” Manuah insisted. Then, even more certainly, “A voice. Telling me the danger is real.”
Adrah laughed sourly. “Well, that’s a bit convenient. The gods speak after all? Brother, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Don’t spoil it.”
And Manuah realized that Adrah merely thought he was kidding. Which was bad enough. But if he pressed the point any further, Adrah would think he was crazy, and that would be much worse.
Rattled to his core, Manuah told his brother, “Look, you can ask my men about the fish. And yes, if you could predict the tides it would help a little.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. But he knew that strange, otherworldly voice was right: the danger was real, and Manuah was the only one who seemed to know it.
* * *
Over the next several weeks, Sraddah completed his invasion of Surapp. To Manuah’s relief, the Surappi offered minimal resistance, losing only about two sixties of men before throwing down their spears and capitulating unconditionally. Their “president,” a woman named Penelebab, relinquished her office, agreed to marry her daughter to Prince Raddiah when he came of age in seven years’ time, and meanwhile promised to seek employment among the byssa cloth weavers—that being one of Surapp’s most lucrative industries, and therefore perhaps the one that would allow her the greatest continued influence in a conquered nation.
Surprisingly, Sraddah also demanded a tribute of stone blocks, which Manuah was free to go pick up—not entirely at his own expense, but with a slight reimbursement from Kingdom’s own debt logs. It would take him a year to transport all that stone, and even so it wasn’t enough—Manuah wasn’t sure any amount of stone could ever be enough!—but it was a concession. Clearly, Manuah wasn’t the only one concerned about the coincidence of the greatfish which continued to dwell in City Harbor, and the comet which continued to grow larger and larger in the sky. First it was the size of the full moon (though not nearly as bright), and then the size of a whole constellation, and then large enough to stretch from one horizon to the other.
“You said it would approach and go away,” Manuah told Adrah. “It isn’t going away.”
“It’s a big one,” Adrah agreed, trying to brush off his brother’s concerns. “But it can’t stay indefinitely. That’s not in its nature. Also, we’ve determined that it’s not affecting the tides. So you can rest easy on that score as well.”
That was a relief of sorts, but even Adrah was starting to look a bit concerned. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and of course nobody knew what it meant. Was it good luck? Was it bad luck? Was it any sort of luck at all? The greatfish was something that had never happened either, but it was less of a concern to most people, except in the purely practical sense that it was eating up all the fish in the harbor, and fouling nets and buoys as it churned restlessly from one bank to the other. Was it lost? Unable to find its way back out? Or was it indeed trying to communicate, or was the greatfish itself a communication from one of the gods? In any case, its antics were forcing timid fishermen out into the much rougher water beyond the sea walls. Manuah dared to hope this would get more people talking about how high the water was getting, but alas he was developing a reputation in The City as a bit of a crank.
“Here comes the Lecturemaster,” people would say. “Quick, cover your ears!”
And so he learned that the more he talked about the danger, and the more urgently he talked about it, the less people believed him. He wasn’t sure what to do about this, because not talking about it also didn’t result in people believing him. At times, it seemed the best he could do was wrap it into a trio of concerns, in order of their perceived importance: the comet, the greatfish, and the rising water. That, at least, kept the concept alive without actively turning people away. But how could that be enough?
While Sharama stayed behind to work on the sea walls, Manuah and Hamurma took another voyage to Surapp, along with all five of his other boats, to retrieve stone blocks. To his relief, things were not all that different in Surapp Great Town, at least along the docks and warehouses. People still did business in the same way, and while they didn’t seem particularly happy about suddenly being subjects of Kingdom, they didn’t seem to be directing any of this ire toward Manuah and his crews.
Of course, they didn’t want to hear about the rising water, either. For them, the three big concerns were: the invasion and its attendant tributes and taxes, the war casualties and their attendant funerals, and the comet presiding above it all like an enemy banner. Here, there was no doubt that the message in the sky was an unlucky one, although perhaps not that unlucky, since they were all mostly still alive, and their businesses still mostly unaffected.
“You’re a cousin of our new king,” said one laborer as he loaded stone blocks onto the deck of a boat.
“Not a first cousin, but yes.”
“Are you here to inspect us? Make sure we’re up to standard?”
“What? No. I’m here to receive a shipment, same as always.”
“Hmm.” The laborer wasn’t sure about that one.
The voyage back was slow, and the boats rode so low in the water that Manuah told all the crews to keep them close to shore, and beach them at the first sign of a rough sea. But luckily they had smooth water and adequate wind.
Once back in The City, he tasked all his crews and boats with sea wall work, gently lowering and stacking the new blocks, making sure they fit together as durably and seamlessly as possible. For nearly a week they labored, and when all the new blocks were gone, they used rubble, and when it seemed all the rubble in Kingdom was exhausted, they used Sraddah’s meager stipends to buy several boatloads of gravel. This meant, of course, that Manuah’s hardworking sailors were going without pay. Which meant that about half of them didn’t show up for work the next day, which was their prerogative, of course. But the other half did show up, and Manuah was grateful for it. They, at least, believed in this cause, in the seriousness of it. They had been at sea with him, during storms, during rip currents when they had to paddle for their lives to avoid smashing onto a reef, and when they were menaced by giant squid beneath the water, and that one time when eagles swooped down from the sky and attacked them for no apparent reason. At all times, their own safety was Manuah’s primary concern, and they knew it.
“You know how to read the sea,” Kop told him. “You always have, as long as I’ve known you. If you say it’s rising, then it’s rising.”
“Any fool can see it’s rising,” Letoni added. “If you say it’s dangerous, then I believe you.”
But even the gravel, bought at the cost of some sailors’ loyalty, lasted only a few days, and after that the crews were reduced to dredging the sandy bottom up against the existing walls, making them broader even if, at the moment, they couldn’t make them any taller.
Manuah thought about going back to Surapp for another load of blocks, but he did still have to make a living, and his sailors certainly did, so finally he decided to take on six loads of salt and kelp and dried fish (actually seven, for Sharama opted to sail with them), and travel upriver to Shifpar, the northernmost of the mud-brick towns. Never mind the stink of fish; goods from the ocean brought a hefty price there, and Manuah’s boats could return laden with apples and plums and leather and unspun wool.
This mission brought back about half of his missing crewmen, who quietly resumed their positions on his boats. The other half, including all three of the women, had perhaps decided to seek their employment elsewhere, either with Dolshavak (Manuah’s main competitor, who focused mainly on the river trade and owned only three boats), or with fishermen, or else on land somewhere. Well, perhaps they’d be safer there.
In any case, Manuah’s crews were shorthanded on the tricky sail upriver, and every man had to work extra hard and pay extra attention. Shifpar was about sixty and twelve kos upriver (or perhaps, as Adrah would describe it, twelve and three yojana), and although the winds along the river blew northeast or northwest or even true north much of the time, the river’s current moved swiftly in the opposite direction. When the paddles were stowed, they progressed perhaps one yojana inland per day. With paddles engaged for as long and as often as the men could stand it, they could double their progress, but Manuah was wary of this on account of morale. The days were hard enough, tacking back and forth into sidewinds and against the current, oftentimes feeling like they were sweating their balls off just to stand still, and yet also running the constant risk of crashing the boats together. At least the river was wide enough to tack against, or most days it wouldn’t be possible to sail inland at all. Too, the winds at night were unreliable, and as the quarter moon faded to a crescent, they had to beach every night at dusk, when it became too dark to navigate safely, even by the light of the comet, which every night grew larger and brighter in the sky.
It was already long enough to stretch from one horizon to the other; how much larger could it get? The answer was, the head of it could set in the west, and the tail could fill the sky for another hour after that. And then two hours, and then four. The tail broadened as well, going from the width of the moon to the width of two moons to the width of a spread-out hand, held at arm’s length. What were the Cleric Astrologers making of that?
“No one knows what this means,” Manuah assured his men, night after night. “My brother and his people are counting and measuring and practicing secret magic, and yet all they can tell us is that the moon is farther away than any of us have ever voyaged, and the comet is higher than that, and does not affect the tides. And if that’s as much as the wisest men can learn, then really you know as much as they do.”
And the men’s voices would come back with, “Maybe it’s a giant cock, come to fuck us.”
Or: “Maybe it’s Min, the fertility god.”
Or: “I still think it’s a greatfish. They say the sky is the mirror of the Earth, and we have a greatfish down here. Why shouldn’t there be one up there as well? It has more room to grow, for one thing.”
Or: “Maybe it’s a rip in the sky.”
To this one, at least, Manuah could say, “The sky can’t rip. It isn’t a material object, like a curtain. It’s just empty air.”
“Forever? Just up and up and up?”
“I suppose so, yes. The stars are higher up than the Cleric Astronomers can measure.”
“Well then, how do they know it isn’t a curtain?”
Manuah sighed. “I’m not sure. But even if the sky were a curtain, it’s much farther away than this comet.”
He didn’t know how such a remark could be in any way comforting, but it did seem to mollify the men.
On the third day, they passed the little town of Erituak, and on the fifth, they passed the larger town of Larasha. Both were made of mud and straw and gravel. To be fair, a sun-dried, mud-straw brick was nearly as hard as a fired clay pot, and nearly as light as a wooden beam, so as building materials went, it wasn’t entirely awful. But unless you could afford paint (which few of the townies could), it literally looked like shit. Neither town had proper rain gutters down the sides of the streets, either, so both of them smelled like shit, even from the safety of the river. Both had been added to the Kingdom by Sraddah’s ancestor Kagresh, at the cost of considerable bloodshed which the townies here had never fully forgotten. This made them a bit surlier than the other peoples Manuah had met in his travels, and so he tended to avoid these towns, leaving their trade for men like Dolshavak. They were, in Manuah’s mind, the Big Shit and the Little Shit. And then, on the seventh day, they passed the Least Shit—a town whose name Manuah couldn’t even remember, because he had never bothered to stop there.
For several days after that, they saw nothing but tree-lined riverbanks, uninhabited save for the occasional hut of grass or animal hides, almost like something the wildmen would build. The men took to calling out different wild animals they saw. This was difficult, because traveling by river made for a narrow journey, with usually not very much to see. Nevertheless, the men called out:
“Bear!”
“Eagle!”
“Leopard!”
“Three wolves!”
“Six deer!”
But then boredom set in, and the callouts became more fantastical:
“Giants!”
“Dragons!”
“An army of turtles waving the Surapp Presidential Banner!”
And then, inevitably, they became obscene.
“Your mother!”
“Your grandmother!”
“Your sister, in deepest embrace with a pair of oxen!”
Manuah put a stop to it there, before the word daughter could be mentioned. And morale suffered accordingly. More than once, he heard a sailor muttering, “I see Manuah in congress with a pair of oxen.” He got them started on bird colors instead, and that kept them busy for a few hours.
On the eleventh day they passed the little mud town of Tesk, which had been conquered by Sraddah’s father Sretekan, and once that was behind them they were in the North Kingdom, which held a special place in people’s hearts because everything there had been conquered by Sraddah himself, with almost no loss of life.
“We could have walked here by now,” complained Hamurma.
“Oh, wise little worm,” Letoni answered. “It might even have been quicker, but could we have carried all this fish? Ah? Anyway, on the trip back we’ll be like songbirds. Woosh! Woosh! You’ll like that.”
Finally, on the fifteenth day, they arrived at Shifpar. It was the largest of the river towns, and while it too was mostly constructed from mud brick, there were some nice wooden buildings as well, and three (the governor’s mansion and a pair of temples) that were actually fashioned partly from painted stone. Shifpar had proper docks as well, fashioned from flat wooden planking and stood up on heavy wooden piles driven deep into the riverbed, and nestled in a little backwater cove that made getting in and out a lot easier than it might have been. These features cemented Shifpar in Manuah’s mind as a civilized place, albeit barely.
And with his newfound sense of urgency about rising water, Manuah now also noticed that Shifpar was built on a series of hilltops, set well back from the river and significantly higher. If a flood were to strike, Shifpar would weather it better than any of Kingdom’s other towns or cities. It was an interesting thought, but he didn’t know what to do with it.
Once the boats were securely tied and the cargo sold off, Manuah granted the men a night of shore leave. Not because it was a good idea (it certainly wasn’t), but because he feared a mutiny if he didn’t. And so, while the little town of Shifpar tried to absorb the appetites of thirty men, and tried even harder to figure out a reliable way to charge them for it, Manuah took Hamurma to the house of Qitsturt, a man with whom he’d done frequent business, and who had offered him hospitality in the past. This disappointed Hamurma, who wanted to hit the town with his fellow sailors, but Manuah figured that on the brink of his fifteenth birthday, Hamurma was better off with disappointment than he was with sailors on leave.