even I, six years old at the time, knew it to be an image of Surat-Kemad, the God Who Devours.
When the wind blew, the image writhed and spoke. Mother screamed and fell to the floor. Later, the thing was merely gone. No one would tell me what had become of it. When Mother recovered she could not recall anything that had happened to her.
One evening by a late fire, she explained that it had been a kind of prophecy, and when the spirit has departed, the seer is no more than an empty glove cast aside by some god. She had no idea what it meant, merely that a god had spoken through her.
I think even Father was frightened when she said that.
He told me one more installment of the story of the heron boy the same night. Then the spirit of that, too, left him.
* * * *
Father must have been the greatest magician in all Reedland, for our house was never empty in the early days. People came from all over the city, and from the marshlands; some journeyed for days on the Great River to buy potions and philtres or have their fortunes told. Mother sometimes sold them hevats, sacred ones for devotions, or memorials for the dead, or just toys.
I didn’t think of myself as any different from other boys. One of my friends was the son of a fisherman, another of a paper-maker. I was the son of a magician, just another child.
But in the story, the bird-boy thought he was a heron—
As I grew older, Father became more secretive, and the customers came no further than the door. Bottles were passed out to them. Then they stopped coming.
Suddenly the house was empty. I heard strange noises in the night. In the earliest hours of the morning, Father began to receive certain visitors again. I think he summoned them against their will. They did not come to buy.
Then Mother, my sister Hamakina, and I were locked in the bedroom, forbidden to emerge.
Once I peeked out between two loose panels in the door and saw a bent, skeletal figure in the dim lamplight of the hallway outside, a visitor who stank like something long decayed and dripped with the water from the river below our house.
Suddenly the visitor glared directly at me as if he had known I was there all along, and I turned away with a stifled yelp. The memory of that horrible, sunken face stayed with me in my dreams for a long time.
I was ten. Hamakina was just three. Mother’s hair was starting to go gray. I think the darkness began that year. Slowly, inexorably, Father became, not a magician who worked wonders, but a sorcerer, to be feared.
* * * *
Our house stood at the very edge of the City of the Reeds, where the great marsh began. It was a vast place, which had belonged to a priest before Father bought it, a pile of wooden domes and sometimes tilted boxlike rooms and gaping windows fashioned to look like eyes. The house stood on log pilings at the end of a long wharf, otherwise not a part of the city at all. Walk along that wharf the other way and you came to street after street of old houses, some of them empty, then to the square of the fishmongers, then to the street of scribes and paper-makers, and finally to the great docks where the ships of the river rested at their moorings like dozing whales.
Beneath our house was a floating dock where I could sit and gaze underneath the city. The stilts and logs and pilings were like a forest stretched out before me, dark and endlessly mysterious.
Sometimes the other boys and I would paddle our shallow boats into that darkness, and on some forgotten dock or rubbish heap or sandbank we’d play our secret games; and then the others always wanted me to do magic.
If I could, I refused with great and mysterious dignity to divulge awesome mysteries I actually knew no more about than they. Sometimes I did a little trick of sleight-of-hand, but mostly I just disappointed them.
Still, they tolerated me, hoping I would reveal more, and also because they were afraid of Father. Later, when the darkness began, they feared him even more; and when I wandered in the gloom beneath the city, paddling among the endless wooden pillars in my little boat, I was alone.
I could not understand it then, but Father and Mother quarrelled more, until in the end, I think, she too was afraid of him. She made me swear once never to become like my father, “never, never do what he has done,” and I swore by the holy name of Surat-Kemad without really knowing what I was promising not to do.
Then one night when I was fourteen, I woke up suddenly and heard my mother screaming and my father’s angry shouts. His voice was shrill, distorted, barely human at times, and I thought he was cursing her in some language I did not know. Then came a crash, pottery and loose wood falling, and silence.
Hamakina sat up beside me in bed.
“Oh, Sekenre, what is it?”
“Quiet,” I said. “I don’t know.”
Then we heard heavy footsteps, and the bedroom door swung inward. Father stood in the doorway, his face pale, his eyes wide and strange, a lantern in his upraised hand. Hamakina turned to avoid his gaze.
He remained there for a minute as if he hadn’t seen us, and slowly the expression on his face softened. He seemed to be remembering something, as if he were waking up from a trance. Then he spoke, his voice faltering.
“Son, I’ve had a vision from the gods, but it is your vision, by which you will become a man and know what your life is to be.”
I was more bewildered than frightened. I got out of bed. The wooden floor was smooth and cold beneath my bare feet.
Father was forcing himself to be calm. He clung to the edge of the doorway and trembled. He was trying to say something more, but no words came, and his eyes were wide and wild again.
“Now?” I asked without realizing what I was saying.
Father strode forward. He seized me roughly by my robe. Hamakina whimpered, but he ignored her.
“The gods don’t send visions just when it’s convenient. Now. You must go into the marshes right now, and the vision will come to you. Remain there until dawn.”
He dragged me from the room. I glanced back once at my sister, but Father merely closed the door behind me and barred it from the outside, locking her in. He blew out his lantern.
The house was entirely dark and smelled of river mud and worse. There was a trace of something burning, and of corruption.
Father raised a trapdoor. Below floated the dock where all our boats were moored.
“Down you go. Now.”
I groped my way down, fearfully, shivering. It was early in the spring. The rains were nearly over, but not quite, and the air was cold and full of spray.
Father closed the trapdoor over my head.
I found my boat and got in, and sat there in the darkness cross-legged, my feet drawn up under my robe. Something splashed nearby once, twice. I sat very still, clutching my paddle firmly, ready to strike at I knew not what.
Slowly the darkness lessened. Out beyond the marshes, the moon peered through thinning clouds. The water gleamed silver and black, waves and shadow. And it was then that I made out what seemed to be hundreds of crocodiles drifting in the water around me, their snouts barely breaking the surface, their eyes sparkling in the dim moonlight.
It was all I could do not to scream, to keep silent. It was the beginning of my vision, I knew, for these beasts could easily have tipped over my boat and devoured me. In any case, there were too many of them for them to be natural creatures.
It was as I leaned over to slip off my mooring line that I saw, quite clearly, that they were not even crocodiles. Their bodies were human, their backs and buttocks as pale as the flesh of drowned men. These were the evatim, the messengers of the river god. No one ever saw them, I’d always been told, save when he is about to die, or else when the god wishes to speak.
So my father had been telling the truth. There was a vision. Or I was