in gauze. The priests had removed his eyes and placed amulets like huge coins in the empty sockets. I knew this was because they were afraid he would find his way back otherwise.
Hamakina and I had to get him down to the funeral boat. There was no one to help us. It was a terrible struggle. Hamakina was, after all, only eight, and I was fifteen. More than once I was afraid we would accidentally drop him.
One of the gold amulets fell out. The empty socket gaped like a dry, red wound. I was almost sick when I had to put the amulet back.
The funeral boat was hung with gauze and charms. Incense rose from a silver cup set in the prow. One of the priests had painted a symbol, a serpent swallowing its tail, only broken, on the stern.
In the twilight of evening, Hamakina and I towed the funeral boat out into the deep water beyond the city, among the crooked masts of the wrecked ships, and beyond.
The sky faded gently from red to black, streaked with the purple tatters of the last few storm clouds. An almost frigid wind blew out of the marshes. The stars gleamed, multiplied upon the rippling water.
I stood in my shallow boat and recited the service for the dead as best as I knew it, for my father whom I still loved and feared and did not understand. Then Hamakina let loose the line, and the funeral boat began to drift, first downstream toward the delta and the sea; but in the darkness, just before it disappeared, it was clearly going upstream. That was a good sign. It meant the boat had caught the black current, which carries the dead out of the world of the living, into the abode of the gods.
I thought, then, that I had time to mourn. When we got back, the house was merely empty. For the first time in many years, I was not afraid. It was almost bewildering.
I slept quietly that night. I did not dream. Hamakina, too, was quiet.
The next morning an old woman who lived in one of the first houses at the other end of the wharf knocked on our door and said, “Children? Are you well? Do you have enough to eat?”
She left a basket of food for us.
That, too, was a good sign. It meant that the neighbors would eventually forgive us. They didn’t really think I was as my father had been.
I took the basket inside slowly, weeping half for joy. Life would be better. I remembered my promise to my mother. I would be different. The next day, surely, or the day after, Velachronos would take us back and we could resume our lessons.
Only that night Father came to me in a dream, and he stood before my bed wrapped in gauze, his face terrible behind the golden disks. His voice was—I cannot truly describe it—oily, like something dripping, something thick and vile; and the mere fact that such a sound could form itself into words seemed the greatest obscenity of all.
“I have delved too far into the darkness, my son, and my ending can only come with the final mystery. I seek it. My studies are almost complete. It is the culmination of all my labors. But there is one thing I need, one thing I have come back for.”
And in my dream I asked him, “Father, what is it?”
“Your sister.”
Then I awoke to the sound of Hamakina screaming. She reached for my hand, missed, caught the edge of the bed, and fell with a thump, dragging the covers onto the floor.
I always kept a lit lantern on the stand by the bed. Now I opened the little metal door, flooding the room with light.
“Sekenre! Help me!”
I stared incredulously for just an instant as she hung suspended in the air, dangling, as if an invisible hand had seized her by the hair. Then she screamed once more and seemed to fly through the window. For a second she grabbed hold of the sill. She looked toward me. Our eyes met. But before I could do or say anything she was yanked loose and hauled through.
I ran to the window and leaned out.
There was no splash; the water below rippled gently. The night was still. Hamakina was simply gone.
II
In the morning, the third after Father’s death, I went to see the Sybil. There was nothing else to do. Everyone in the City of the Reeds knows that when the great crisis of your life comes, when there is truly no alternative but surrender and death and no risk is too great, then it is time to see the Sybil.
Fortunate is the man who has never called on her goes the old saying. But I was not fortunate.
She is called the Daughter of the River, and the Voice of Surat-Kemad, and the Mother of Death, and many other things. Who she is and what she is, no one has ever known; but she dwelt, fearsomely, the subject of countless terrifying stories, beneath the very heart of the city, among the pilings, where the log posts that hold up the great houses are thick as any forest. I had heard of the terrible price she was reputed to demand for her prophecies, and that those who visited her came away irreparably changed if they came away at all. Yet since time immemorial she had dwelt there, and for as long people went to listen to her words.
I went. For an offering, I had my father’s sword, the silver one the temple matron gave me.
It was in the earliest dawn twilight that I slipped once more through the trapdoor beneath our house. To the east, to my right, the sky was just beginning to brighten into gray, but before me, toward the heart of the city, night lingered.
I paddled amid the wreckage left by the recent storm: planks, bobbing barrels and trunks, and, once, a slowly rolling corpse the evatim had somehow overlooked. Further in, a huge house had fallen on its supports, now awash and broken, its windows gaping like black mouths. Later, when the gloom lessened a bit, I came upon a capsized ship jammed among the pillars like a vast, dead fish caught in reeds, its rigging trailing in the black water.
Just beyond it, the dark, irregular mass of the Sybil’s dwelling hung suspended, undamaged by the storm, of course.
There’s another story they tell about her: that the Sybil was never young, but was born an old hag in the blood of her mother’s death, and that she stood up in the pool of her mother’s blood, in the darkness at the world’s beginning; and she closed her hands together, then opened them, and columns of flame rose up from her palms.
My father used to do that trick, and once he grew terribly angry when I tried it, even though I’d just sat staring at my hands, opening and closing them without understanding or results. It was enough that I had made the attempt. He was perhaps even frightened at first, at the prospect that I might try again and eventually succeed. Then his face shifted from shock to cold fury. That was the only time in my life he ever beat me.
But when the Sybil made fire with her hands she rolled the flames into balls with her fingers. She breathed on one to make it dim, and released them both—the Sun and Moon. Then she drank long and deep of the Great River where her mother’s blood flowed into it, stood up by moonlight, and spat out the sparkling stars. And by starlight the multitude of gods awoke along the banks of the river and beheld the Earth for the first time.
As I gazed upon her house, I could almost believe the story. No, I did believe it.
The Sybil’s house was more of an immense cocoon, like a spider’s web filled to overflowing with debris and dead things, spun and accumulated since the beginning of time. It hung from the underside of the city itself, its outer strands a tangle of ropes and netting and vines and fibers stretching out into the darkness in every direction until I could not tell where the enormous nest began or ended.
But the core of it hung down almost to the water, like a monstrous belly. I reached up and tied my boat to it, slipped Father’s sword under my belt, bound my robe up to free my legs, and started to climb.
The ropes trembled, whispering like muted thunder. Mud and debris fell in my face, splashing all around me. I hung on desperately, then shook my head to clear my eyes, and continued climbing.
Higher up, in complete darkness, I squeezed along a tunnel of rotting wood, sometimes losing my grip and sliding backwards for a terrifying instant before I found another hold. The darkness