living, but other funeral boats. We came alongside a long, sleek barge, its pointed ends rising high above the water, a lantern flickering inside its square cabin. The evatim crawled into this cabin and the barge rocked. I could hear them thrashing in there.
At last something huge and dark loomed before us, like a mountain, blotting out the stars. On every side I saw drifting funeral boats following our course, some of them twisting and turning among reeds. One caught on something, or else the evatim tipped it over. A mummy slipped into the water and drifted by, bandages trailing, so close I could have reached out and touched it.
The darkness closed around us very suddenly, shutting out the stars. I heard water rushing, and boats creaking and banging against one another.
“Mother!” I whispered. I reached forward and tugged at her gown. A piece of it came away in my hand. “Is this it? Is this the mouth of Surat-Kemad?”
“No, child,” she said softly. “We have been in the belly of the beast for some time now.”
And that, somehow, was even more terrifying.
IV
Nothing was clear any more, the whole adventure no more than an endless continuity of dream and waking, stark images and featureless mist, pain and terror and dull discomfort.
I had been on the river I knew not how long—hours, days, weeks—and at times it seemed I was inexpressibly weary, and at others that I was back home in my bed, asleep, that all of this was some crazed nightmare. But then I reached out, turning and stretching as one does when awakening—and I touched my mother’s cold, wet, ruined body.
And the stench of decay was gone from her, and she smelled only of the river mud, like some long-sunken bundle of sticks and rags.
Sometimes there were herons all around us, glowing dimly in the utter darkness like smoldering embers, their faces the faces of men and women, all of them whispering to us, imploring, speaking names—and their voices blended together like a gentle, indistinguishable rustle of wind.
Mostly, we just walked in the darkness, alone. I felt the cold surface of the river beneath my feet, but there was no sense of motion, for all my legs moved endlessly.
Mother spoke. Her voice was soft, coming from the darkness like something remembered in a dream.
I don’t think she was even addressing me. She was merely talking, her memories, her whole life rising into words like sluggish bubbles: scraps of unfinished conversations from her childhood, and, too, much about my father, and me, and Hamakina. For what might have been a very long time or only a few minutes, she sang a lullaby, as if rocking me—or perhaps Hamakina—to sleep.
Then she was silent. I reached out to assure myself that she was still there, and her bony hand found mine and squeezed gently. I asked her what she had learned about the Land of the Dead since she had come here, and she replied softly, “I have learned that I am forever an exile, without a place prepared for me, since I have come unprepared and unannounced into Surat-Kemad’s domain. My place of exile is the river, along which I must wander until the gods die and the worlds are unmade.”
I wept for her then, and asked if this was Father’s doing, and she said that it was.
Then she asked me suddenly, “Sekenre, do you hate him?”
I had been so confident just then that I did, but I could not find an answer.
“I don’t think he meant to do any harm—”
“My son, you must sort out your feelings toward him. That is where you have lost your way, not on the river.”
Again we walked for a long time, still in utter darkness, and all the while I thought of my father and remembered my mother as she had once been. What I wanted, more than anything else, was merely for everything to be restored—Father, Mother, Hamakina, and myself, in our house by the edge of the City of Reeds, as all had been when I was small. Yet, if I had learned any lesson in life thus far, it was that you can’t go back, that our days flow on as relentlessly as the Great River, and what is lost is never restored. I was not wise. I understood very little. But I knew that much.
The father I longed for was merely gone. Perhaps he, too, longed to be restored. I wondered if he knew it was impossible.
I tried to hate him.
The darkness and the silence of the river gave a sense of being in a tunnel, far underground, but were we not more than underground, deep in the belly of Surat-Kemad? We passed from darkness into darkness, always beginning, as if through countless anterooms without ever finding the main hall.
So with our days. So with our strivings, I thought. Whatever we seek to understand yields only a glimmer, and a vast mystery.
So with my father—
Very suddenly, Mother took both my hands in hers and said, “I may only guide you a little way, my son, and we have come that little way. I cannot go where an exile is not welcome, where there is no place prepared—”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I am not permitted into the god’s house. I must leave you at the doorstep.”
“But you said—”
“That we have been deep within his belly for some time. Yet we are at the doorstep of his house—”
She let go of me. I groped frantically for her, then found her again.
“Mother!”
She kissed both my hands very gently, and her lips, like the Sybil’s, were so cold they burned.
“But you are a hero, my son, and you may take the next step, and the next. That is what it is to be brave, you know, merely to take the next step. I have always known that you were brave.”
“Mother, I—”
Then she sank down into the water. I clung to her. I tried to hold her up, but she sank like a thing of stone, and I lost my grip. At the very last I found myself crawling absurdly about on the cold surface of the river, sliding my hands from side to side like a blind child who has lost marbles on a smooth floor.
I stood up, suddenly shivering, rubbing my arms with my hands.
She was wrong, I told myself. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t brave. I merely had no choice. The Sybil had seen that much.
Yet I never once thought of turning back. The road behind me was impassable, in more ways than one.
I wanted to call on the Sybil again, to tell her I had once more lost my way. In the darkness, without any point of reference except the sensation in my feet to tell me which way was down, I couldn’t even tell if I was facing the way I was supposed to be going, or the way I had come.
In the end, it did not matter. I don’t think direction is a physical thing in the belly of a god. Instead, it is a matter of degree.
Things began to happen swiftly once more. Lights rose around me, like lanterns drifting up from the surface of the water, then above me like stars. The water itself rippled, frigid, oily waves washing over my feet.
I started to run, afraid that whatever magic had held me up was leaving me, now that Mother had. Nothing, it seemed, could be more horrible than to be immersed in that river, there, in the belly of Surat-Kemad.
I ran, and the points of light moved with me, turning as I turned, swirling about me like burning motes on the wind. There was a sound. I thought it was indeed the wind, but then I realized that it was breathing, spittle hissing through teeth, and the lights were eyes, not reflecting light as a dog’s will by a campfire, but actually glowing, like living coals.
The darkness lessened and I saw that I had indeed emerged from a tunnel. Jagged, fissured cliffs loomed on either side of the river, towering to unknowable heights. Far above, the grey stars of the deadlands shone once more.
And the evatim stood around me by the thousands, on the river, scrambling up the cliffs, some of them