and slammed me against the wall so hard that blood poured out of my nose and mouth.
I could only nod to my left, toward Father’s workroom.
Later, when I returned to consciousness, I heard the two of them screaming. The screaming went on for days behind Father’s door, while I lay feverish and Hamakina wiped my forehead but could do nothing more. It was only when the screaming faded to distant murmurs, like the voices I’d heard that one time before, like the voice that might have been Mother’s, that Father came and healed me with his magic. His face was ashen. He looked very tired.
I slept and the barefoot man in the silver mask knelt on the surface of the water, sending ripples all around my bed. He whispered to me the story of the heron boy who stood among the flock in the dawn light and was left behind when the birds took flight, standing there, waving his graceless, featherless arms.
A few weeks later, Velachronos threw us out. I don’t know what happened with him at the end. Perhaps it was just a rumor, or a culmination of rumors, or he might even have heard the truth about something I did not know, but one day, when Hamakina and I came for our lessons, he stood in the doorway and all but shrieked, “Begone! Get out of my house, devil-spawn!”
He wouldn’t explain or say anything more. There was nothing to do but leave.
That night a vast storm came up from the mouth of the river, a black, swirling mass of clouds like a monster huge enough to smother the world, lumbering on a thousand flickering, fiery legs. The river, the very marshes, raged like the frenzied chaos-ocean that existed before the Earth was made, while the sky thundered light and dark; and for an instant you could see for miles across froth-capped waves and reeds lashing in the wind; then there was only utter blackness and stinging rain and the thunder once more, thunder calling out my father’s name again and again.
He answered it, from within his secret room, his voice as loud as the thunder, speaking a language that did not sound like human speech at all, but shrieks and grating cackles and whistles like the raging wind.
In the morning, all the ships were scattered and half the city was blasted away. The air was heavy with the cries of mourners. The river ran beneath our house muddy and furious where before it had been mere shallows.
Many people saw the crocodile-headed messengers of the Devouring God that day.
My sister and I sat in our room, almost afraid to speak even to each other. We could not go out.
From Father’s workroom there was only silence that went on for so long that, despite everything, I began to fear for him. I met Hamakina’s gaze, and she stared back, wide-eyed and dazed. Then she nodded.
I went to the workroom door and knocked.
“Father? Are you all right?”
To my surprise, he opened the door at once and came out. He steadied himself against the doorway with one hand and hung there, breathing heavily. His hands were gnarled, like claws. They looked like they had been burned.
His face was so pale, so wild, that part of me wasn’t even sure it was Father until he spoke.
“I am going to die,” he said. “It is time for me to go to the gods.”
And, again despite everything, I wept for him.
“Now you must be a faithful son for the last time,” he said. “Gather reeds and bind them together into a funeral boat. When you are done, I shall be dead. Place me in it and set me adrift, so that I shall come, as all men do, to Surat-Kemad.”
“No, Father! It isn’t so!”
When I wept, I was remembering him as he had been in my early childhood, not as he had become.
He squeezed my shoulder hard and hissed angrily, “Quite inevitably, it is. Go!”
So Hamakina and I went together. Somehow our house had lost only a few shingles in the storm, and the dock below the trapdoor was still there. My boat was too, but sunken and dangling from its line. We struggled to pull it up, dumped it out, and set it afloat. Miraculously, not even the paddles had been lost.
We climbed in and paddled in silence for about an hour, far enough into the marshes that the waters were again shallow and still and reeds as thick as my arm swayed against the sky like trees. With a hatchet I’d brought along for the purpose, I cut down several, and Hamakina and I labored throughout the day to make a crude boat. In the evening, we towed it back to our house.
I ascended the ladder first, while she waited fearfully below.
For the first time I could remember, the door to Father’s workroom was left open. He lay inside, on a couch amid shelves of books and bottles, and at a glance I knew that he was dead.
There was little to do that night. Hamakina and I made a cold supper out of what we could find in the pantry. Then we barred the windows and doors, and pushed a heavy trunk over the trapdoor, lest the evatim crawl up and devour the corpse, as they sometimes do.
I explored the workroom only a little, going through Father’s books, opening trunks, peering into coffers. If he had any treasure, I didn’t find it. Then I picked up a murky bottle and something inside screamed at me with a tiny, faraway voice. I dropped the bottle in fright. It broke and the screaming thing scurried across the floorboards.
The house was full of voices and noises, creakings, whispers, and sighs. Once something heavy, like a huge bird perhaps, flapped and scraped against a shuttered window. My sister and I stayed up most of the night, lanterns in our hands, armed with clubs against whatever terrors the darkness might hold. I sat on the floor outside the workroom, leaning against the door. Hamakina lay with her face in my lap, sobbing softly.
Eventually I fell asleep, and Mother came to me in a dream, leaning over me, dripping water and river mud, shrieking and tearing her hair. I tried to tell her that all would be well, that I would take care of Hamakina, that I would grow up to be a scribe and write letters for people. I promised I wouldn’t be like Father.
But still she wept and paced back and forth all night. In the morning, the floor was wet and muddy.
Hamakina and I rose, washed, put on our best clothes, and went to the priests. On the way, some people turned their backs to us while others screamed curses and called us murderers. In the square before the temple, a mob approached with knives and clubs, and I waved my hands and made what I hoped looked like magical gestures until they turned and fled, shouting that I was just as bad as my Father. In that single instant, I almost wished I were.
A whole army of priests followed us back to the house, resplendent in their billowing gold-and-silver trousers, their blue jackets, and their tall, scale-covered hats. Many of them held aloft sacred ikons of Surat-Kemad, and of the other gods too: of Ragun-Kemad, the Lord of Eagles, and Bel-Kemad, god of spring, and of Meliventra, the Lady of the Lantern, who sends forgiveness and mercy. Acolytes chanted and swung smoking incense-pots on golden chains.
But they would not let us back into the house. Two temple matrons stood with us on the wharf, holding Hamakina and me by the hand. The neighbors watched from a distance, fearfully.
The priests emptied out Father’s workroom, breaking open the shutters, pouring bottle after bottle of powders and liquids into the river, dumping many of his books in after, then more bottles, then most of the jars, carvings, and strange specimens. Other books, they confiscated. Junior priests carried heaps of them back to the temple in baskets. Then it seemed the exorcisms went on for hours. They used so much incense that I thought the house was on fire.
In the end, the priests marched away as solemnly as they had come, and one of the matrons gave me a sword which had been my father’s, a fine weapon, its grip bound in copper wire, its blade inlaid with silver.
“You may need this,” was all she would say.
Fearfully, my sister and I ventured inside the house. The air was so thick with incense that we ran, choking, our eyes streaming, to open all the windows. Still, the burners hung everywhere and we dared not remove them.
Father