Child of the River

Book 0: Confluence

by Paul McAuley

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Dystopian

Synopsis

Confluence - a long, narrow man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater-strewn desert. It is a world at the end of its time, a place of savagery, bureaucracy and war, inhabited by countless flying micro-machines and ten thousand bloodlines ruled by devotion to absent gods. It is the home of a singular young man named Yama. An infant who was discovered in a bier on the river, he was raised by the prelate of Aeolis until it was learned that his ancestry was unique. Yama appeared to be the last remaining scion of the Builders, closest of all races to the worshipped architects of Confluence. Now, awed and fearful of his increasing ability to awaken the machines the Builders left behind, Yama searches for his identity and a history that is both his and his world's.

Release date: May 29, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 288

Sample

The Constable of Aeolis was a shrewd, pragmatic man who did not believe in miracles. In his opinion, everything must have an explanation, and simple explanations were best of all. ‘The sharpest knife cuts cleanest,’ he often told his sons. And: ‘The more a man talks, the more likely it is he’s lying.’

But to the end of his days, he could not explain the affair of the white boat.

It happened one midsummer night, when the huge black sky above the Great River was punctuated only by a scattering of dim halo stars and the dull red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers, no bigger than a man’s hand and outshone by the heaped lights of the little city of Aeolis and the lights of the carracks riding at anchor outside the harbour entrance.

The summer heat was oppressive to the people of Aeolis. For most of the day they slept in the relative cool of their seeps and wallows, rising to begin work when the Rim Mountains clawed the setting sun, and retiring again when the sun rose, renewed, above the devouring peaks. In summer, stores and taverns and workshops stayed open from dusk until dawn, fishing boats set out at midnight to trawl the black river for shrimp and noctilucent jellyfish, and the streets of Aeolis were crowded and bustling beneath the flare of cressets and the orange glow of sodium-vapour lamps. On summer nights, the lights of Aeolis burned like a beacon in the midst of the dark shore.

That particular night, the Constable and his two eldest sons were rowing back to Aeolis in their skiff with two vagrant river traders who had been arrested while trying to run bales of cigarettes to the hill tribes of the wild shore downstream of Aeolis. Part of the traders’ contraband cargo, soft bales sealed in plastic wrap and oiled cloth, was stacked in the forward well of the skiff; the traders lay in the stern, trussed like shoats for the slaughter. The skiff’s powerful motor had been shot out in the brief skirmish, and the Constable’s sons, already as big as their father, sat side by side on the centre thwart, rowing steadily against the current. The Constable was perched on a leather cushion in the skiff’s high stern, steering for the lights of Aeolis.

The Constable was drinking steadily from a cruse of wine. He was a large man with loose grey skin and gross features, like a figure hastily moulded from clay and abandoned before completion. A pair of tusks protruded like daggers from his meaty upper lip. One, broken when the Constable had fought and killed his father, was capped with silver: silver chinked against the neck of the cruse every time he took a swig of wine.

He was not in a good temper. He would make a fair profit from his half of the captured cargo (the other half would go to the Aedile, if he could spare an hour from his excavations to pronounce sentence on the traders), but the arrest had not gone smoothly. The river traders had hired a pentad of ruffians as an escort, and they had put up a desperate fight before the Constable and his sons had managed to despatch them. The Constable had taken a bad cut to his shoulder, cleaved through blubber to the muscle beneath, and his back had been scorched by reflection of the pistol bolt that had damaged the skiff’s motor. Fortunately, the weapon, which probably predated the foundation of Aeolis, had misfired on the second shot and killed the man using it, but the Constable knew that he could not rely on good luck forever. He was getting old, was ponderous and bumbling when once he had been quick and strong. He knew that sooner or later one of his sons would challenge him, and he was worried that this night’s botched episode was a harbinger of his decline. Like all strong men, he feared his own weakness more than death, for strength was how he measured the worth of his life.

Now and then he turned and looked back at the pyre of the smugglers’ boat. It had burned to the waterline, a flickering dash of light riding its own reflection far out across the river’s broad black plain. The Constable’s sons had run it aground on a mudbank so that it would not drift amongst the banyan islands which at this time of year spun in slow circles in the shallow sargasso of the Great River’s nearside shoals, tethered only by fine nets of feeder roots.

One of the river traders lay as still as a sated cayman, resigned to his fate, but his partner, a tall, skinny old man naked but for a breechclout and an unravelling turban, was trying to convince the Constable to let him go. Yoked hand to foot so that his knees were drawn up to his chest, he stared up at the Constable from the well, his insincere smile like a rictus, his eyes so wide with fear that white showed clear around their slitted irises. At first he had tried to gain the Constable’s attention with flattery; now he was turning to threats.

‘I have many friends, captain, who would be unhappy to see me in your jail,’ he said. ‘There are no walls strong enough to withstand the force of their friendship, for I am a generous man. I am known for my generosity across the breadth of the river.’

The Constable rapped the top of the trader’s turban with the stock of his whip, and for the fourth or fifth time advised him to be quiet. It was clear from the arrowhead tattoos on the man’s fingers that he belonged to one of the street gangs that roved the wharves of Ys. Any friends he might have were a hundred leagues upriver, and by dusk tomorrow he and his companion would be dead.

The skinny trader babbled, ‘Last year, captain, I took it upon myself to sponsor the wedding of the son of one of my dear friends, who had been struck down in the prime of life. Bad fortune had left his widow with little more than a rented room and nine children to feed. The son was besotted, his bride’s family impatient. This poor lady had no one to turn to but myself. And I, captain, remembering the good company of my friend, his wisdom and his friendly laughter, took it upon myself to organise everything. Four hundred people ate and drank at the celebration, and I counted them all as my friends. Quails’ tongues in aspic we had, captain, washed down with yellow wine a century old. And mounds of oysters and fish roe, and elvers in parsley broth, and carpaccio of wild duck served with blood sauce and pickled reed heads, and baby goats whose flesh was as soft as the saffron butter they’d been seethed in.’

Perhaps there was a grain of truth in the story. Perhaps the man had been one of the guests at such a wedding, but he could not have sponsored it. No one desperate enough to try to smuggle cigarettes to the hill tribes could afford to lavish that kind of money on an act of charity.

The Constable rapped the skinny trader on the head again, told him that he was a dead man, and dead men had no friends. ‘Compose yourself. Our city might be a small place, but it has a shrine, and it was one of the last places along all the river’s shore where avatars talked with men, before the Insurrectionists silenced them. Pilgrims still come here, believing that the shrine’s avatars are still able to listen to confessions and petitions. We’ll let you speak your piece before the shrine after you’ve been sentenced, so you’d be better off thinking of how to account for your miserable life rather than wasting your breath by pleading for mercy you don’t deserve and won’t get.’

‘I can be as generous to you as I am to my friends, captain,’ the trader said. ‘If you need money I can get you money. If you have enemies, I know people who can make them disappear. A single word from me, and it will be as if they were never born. Or I could help you win promotion. I have friends in every department. Why risk your life protecting the ungrateful citizens of your mudhole of a city when you could live like a potentate in Ys?’

The boat rocked when the Constable stood. He stuck his coiled whip in his belt and drew his knife. His sons cursed wearily, and shipped their oars. The Constable planted a foot on the trader’s neck, bore down with his considerable weight. The man gasped and choked; the Constable thrust two fingers into his mouth, caught his tongue and sliced it off, and tossed the scrap of flesh over the side of the skiff.

As the trader gargled blood and thrashed like a landed fish, one of the Constable’s sons cried out. ‘Boat ahead! Leastways, I think it’s a boat.’

This was Urthank, a dull-witted brute grown as heavy and muscular as his father. The Constable knew that it would not be long before Urthank roared his challenge, and also knew that the boy would lose. Urthank was too stupid to wait for the right moment: it was not in his nature to suppress an impulse. No, Urthank would not defeat him. It would be one of the others. But Urthank’s challenge would be the beginning of the end.

The Constable searched the darkness. For a moment he thought he glimpsed a fugitive glimmer, but it could have been a mote floating in his eye, or a dim star glinting at the edge of the world’s level horizon.

‘You’re dreaming,’ he said. ‘Set to rowing or the sun will be up before we get back.’

‘I saw it,’ Urthank insisted.

The other son, Unthank, laughed.

‘There!’ Urthank said. ‘There it is again! Dead ahead, just like I told you.’

This time the Constable saw the flicker of light. His first thought was that perhaps the trader had not been boasting after all. He said quietly, ‘Go forward. Feathered oars.’

As the skiff glided against the current, the Constable fumbled a clamshell case from the pouch hung on the belt of his white linen kilt. The skinny trader was making wet, choking sounds. The Constable kicked him into silence before opening the case and lifting out the spectacles. Shaped like bladeless scissors, with thick lenses of smart glass, they were the most valuable heirloom of his family, passed from defeated father to victorious son for more than a hundred generations.

The Constable carefully unfolded them and pinched them over his bulbous nose. At once, the hull of the skiff and the bales of contraband cigarettes stacked in the forward well seemed to gain a luminous sheen; the bent backs of the Constable’s sons and the bodies of the two prisoners glowed with furnace light. The Constable scanned the river, ignoring flaws in the ancient glass which warped or smudged the amplified light, and saw, half a league from the skiff, a knot of tiny, intensely brilliant specks turning above the river’s surface.

‘Machines,’ the Constable said, and stepped between the prisoners and pointed out the place to his sons.

As the skiff drew closer, he saw that there were hundreds of them, a busy cloud of tiny machines swirling around an invisible pivot. He was used to seeing one or two flitting through the air above Aeolis on their inscrutable business, but had never before seen so many in one place.

Something knocked against the side of the skiff, and Urthank cursed and feathered his oar. It was a waterlogged coffin. Every day, thousands were launched from Ys. For a moment, a woman’s face gazed up at the Constable through a glaze of water, glowing greenly amidst a halo of rotting flowers. Then the coffin turned end for end and was borne away.

The skiff had turned in the current, too. Now it was broadside to the cloud of machines, and for the first time the Constable saw what they attended.

A boat. A white boat riding high on the river’s slow current.

The Constable took off his spectacles, and discovered that the boat glimmered with its own spectral light. The water around it glowed too, as if it floated in the centre of one of the shoals of luminous plankton that sometimes rose to the surface of the river on a calm summer night. The glow spread around the skiff, and each stroke of the oars broke its pearly light into whirling interlocking spokes, as if the ghost of a gigantic machine hung just beneath the river’s skin.

The mutilated trader groaned and coughed; his partner raised himself up on his elbows to watch as the white boat turned on the river’s current, light as a leaf, a dancer barely touching the water.

The boat had a sharp, raised prow, and incurved sides that sealed it shut and swept back in a fan, like the tail of a dove. It made another turn, seemed to stretch like a cat, and then it was alongside the skiff, pressed right against it without even a bump, and the Constable and his sons were inside the cloud of machines. Each burned with ferocious white light; none were bigger than a rhinoceros beetle. Urthank tried to swat one that hung in front of his snout, and cursed when it stung him with a flare of red light and a crisp sizzle.

‘Steady,’ the Constable said, and someone else said hoarsely, ‘Flee.’

Astonished, the Constable turned from his inspection of the glimmering boat.

‘Flee,’ the second trader said again. ‘Flee, you fools!’

Both of the Constable’s sons were leaning on their oars, looking at their father. They were waiting for his lead. All right. He could not show that he was afraid. He put away his spectacles and reached through the whirling lights of the machines and touched the white boat.

Its hull was as light and close woven as feathers, moving under the Constable’s fingers as the incurved sides peeled back with a sticky, crackling sound. As a boy, the Constable had been given to wandering the wild shore downriver of Aeolis, and he had once come across a blood orchid growing in the cloven root of a kapok tree. The orchid had made precisely the same noise when, sensing his body heat, it had spread its fleshy lobes to reveal the lubricious curves of its creamy pistil. He had fled in terror before its perfume could overwhelm him, and the ghost of that fear crept over him now.

The hull vibrated under his fingertips with a quick, eager pulse. Light poured out from the boat’s interior, rich and golden and filled with floating motes. A shadow lay deep inside this light, the shadow of a body, and at first the Constable thought that the boat was no more than a coffin set adrift on the river’s current. The coffin of some lord or lady no doubt, but in function no different from the shoddy cardboard coffins of the poor, or the painted wooden coffins of the artisans and traders.

And then a baby started to cry.

The Constable squinted through the light, leaned closer, reached out. For a moment he was at the incandescent heart of the machines’ intricate dance, and then they were gone, dispersing in flat trajectories into the darkness. The baby, a boy, pale and fat and hairless, squirmed in his hands.

The golden light was dying back inside the white boat. In moments, only traces remained, iridescent veins and dabs that fitfully illuminated the corpse on which the baby had been lying.

It was the corpse of a woman, naked, flat-breasted and starveling thin, and as hairless as the baby. She had been shot, once through the chest and once in the head, but there was no blood. One hand had three fingers of equal length, like the grabs of the cranes of Aeolis’s docks; the other was a monstrously swollen and bifurcate pincer, like a lobster’s claw. Her skin had a silvery-grey cast; her huge, blood-red eyes were divided into a honeycomb of cells, like the compound lenses of certain insects. Within each facet lived a flickering glint of golden light, and although the Constable knew that these were merely reflections of the white boat’s fading light, he had the strange feeling that something malevolent and watchful lived behind the dead woman’s strange eyes.

‘Heresy,’ the second trader said. He had got up on his knees somehow, and was staring wide-eyed at the white boat.

The Constable kicked the trader in the stomach and the man coughed and flopped back into the bilge water alongside his partner. He glared up at the Constable and said again, ‘Heresy. When they allowed the ship of the Ancients of Days to pass beyond Ys and sail downriver, our benevolent bureaucracies let heresy loose into the world.’

‘Let me kill him now,’ Urthank said.

‘He’s already a dead man,’ the Constable said.

‘Dead men don’t talk treason,’ Urthank said stubbornly. He was staring straight at his father.

‘Fools,’ the trader said. ‘You have all seen the argosies and carracks sailing downriver, towards the war. They are armed with cannons and siege engines, but there are more terrible weapons let loose in the world.’

‘Let me kill him,’ Urthank said again.

The baby caught at the Constable’s thumb and grimaced, as if trying to smile. The Constable gently disengaged the baby’s grip and set him on the button cushion at the stern. He moved carefully, as if through air packed with invisible boxes, aware of Urthank’s burning gaze at his back. ‘Let the man speak,’ he said. ‘He might know something.’

The trader said, ‘The bureaucrats are so frightened of heresy consuming our world that they will try anything to prevent it. Some say that they are even trying to wake the Hierarchs from their reveries.’

Unthank spat. ‘The Hierarchs are all ten thousand years dead. Everyone knows that. They were killed when the Insurrectionists threw down the temples and silenced the avatars.’

‘The Hierarchs tried to follow the Preservers,’ the trader said. ‘They rose higher than any other bloodline, but not so high that they cannot be called back.’

The Constable kicked the man and said, ‘Leave off the theology. What about the dead woman?’

‘Some say that the bureaucrats and mages are trying to create weapons using magic and forbidden science. Most likely she and the baby are fell creatures manufactured by some corrupt and unnatural process. You should destroy them both! Return the baby to the boat, and sink it!’

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘I’m a bad man. I admit it. I’d sell any one of my daughters if I could be sure of a good profit. But I studied for a clerkship when I was a boy, and I was taught well. I remember my lessons, and I know heresy when I see it.’

Unthank said slowly, ‘Heresy taints everyone it touches. Whatever these things are, we should leave them be. They aren’t any business of ours.’

‘All on the river within a day’s voyage upriver or down is my business,’ the Constable said.

‘You claim to know everything,’ Urthank said. ‘But you don’t.’

The Constable knew then that this was the moment poor Urthank had chosen. So did Unthank, who shifted on the thwart so that he was no longer shoulder to shoulder with his brother. The Constable put his hand on the stock of his whip and met Urthank’s stare and said, ‘Keep your place, boy.’

There was a moment when it seemed that Urthank would not attack. Then he inflated his chest and let out the air with a roar and, roaring, threw himself at his father.

The whip caught around Urthank’s neck with a sharp crack that echoed out across the black water. Urthank fell to his knees and grabbed hold of the whip as its loop tightened. The Constable gripped the whip with both hands and jerked it sideways as if he was holding a line which a huge fish had suddenly struck. The skiff tipped wildly and Urthank tumbled head first into the glowing water. But the boy did not let go of the whip. He was stupid, but he was also stubborn. The Constable staggered, dropped the whip – it hissed over the side like a snake – and fell overboard too.

The Constable shucked his loose, knee-high boots as he sank through the cold water, and kicked out towards the surface. Something grabbed the hem of his kilt, and then Urthank was trying to swarm up his body. Light exploded in the Constable’s eye as his son’s elbow struck his face. They thrashed through glowing water and burst into the air, separated by no more than an arm’s length.

The Constable spat out a mouthful of water. ‘You’re too quick to anger, son. That was always your weakness.’

He saw the shadow of Urthank’s arm sweep through the milky glow, countered the thrust with his own knife. The blades slid along each other, locking at their hilts. Urthank growled and pressed down. He was very strong. A terrific pain shot up the Constable’s arm as his knife was wrenched from his grasp and Urthank’s blade sliced his wrist. He kicked backwards in the water as Urthank slashed at his face: spray flew in a wide fan.

‘Old,’ Urthank said. ‘Old and slow.’

The Constable steadied himself with little circling kicks. He could feel his blood pulsing into the water. Urthank had caught a vein. There was a heaviness in his bones and the wound in his shoulder throbbed. He knew that Urthank was right, but he also knew that he was not prepared to die.

He said, ‘Come to me, son, and find out who is the strongest.’

Urthank’s grin freed his tusks from his lips. He threw himself forward, driving through the water with his knife held out straight, trying for a killing blow. But the water slowed him, and the Constable was able to kick sideways, always just out of reach, while Urthank stabbed wildly, sobbing curses and uselessly spending his strength. Father and son circled each other. In the periphery of his vision, the Constable was aware that the white boat had separated from the skiff, but could spare no thought for it as he avoided Urthank’s frantic onslaught.

At last, Urthank gave it up and kicked backwards, breathing hard. ‘You aren’t as strong as you thought, are you?’ the Constable said. ‘Surrender to me now and I’ll grant you a quick and honourable release.’

‘Surrender to me, old man, and I’ll give you an honourable burial on land. Or else I’ll kill you here and let the little fishes strip your bones.’

‘Your end will be neither quick nor honourable, then,’ the Constable said. ‘Because someone as weak and foolish as you can be no son of mine.’

Urthank lunged with sudden, desperate fury, and the Constable chopped at him with the side of his hand, striking his elbow at the point where the nerve travelled over bone. Urthank’s fingers opened in reflex; his knife fluttered down through the water. He dived for it without thinking, and the Constable bore down on him with all his strength and weight, enduring increasingly feeble blows to his chest and belly and legs. It took a long time, but at last he let go and Urthank’s body floated free, face down in the glowing water.

‘You were the strongest of my sons,’ the Constable said, when he had his breath back. ‘And you were faithful, after your fashion. But you never had a good thought in your head, and couldn’t see more than five minutes into the future. Even if you had managed to defeat me, someone else would have killed you inside a year.’

Unthank paddled the skiff over, helped his father clamber aboard. The white boat floated several oar-lengths off, glimmering against the dark. The skinny trader whose tongue the Constable had cut out lay face down in the well of the skiff, drowned in his own blood. His partner was gone; Unthank said that he must have slipped over the side in the middle of all the excitement.

‘You should have brought him back,’ the Constable said. ‘He was bound hand and foot. He wouldn’t have given a big boy like you any trouble.’

Unthank returned the Constable’s gaze and said, ‘I was watching your victory, father.’

‘Watching how I did it, eh? So you’ll know what to do when your turn comes. You’re a subtle one, Unthank. Not at all like your brother.’

Unthank shrugged. ‘The prisoner probably drowned. Like you said, he was bound hand and foot.’

‘Help me with your brother.’

Together, father and son hauled Urthank’s dead weight into the skiff. The milky glow was fading from the water. After the Constable had settled Urthank’s body, he looked up and saw that the white boat had vanished. The skiff was alone on the wide dark river, under the black sky and the smudged red whorl of the Eye of the Preservers. On the leather pad by the skiff’s tiller, the baby grabbed at black air with pale starfish hands, chuckling at unguessable thoughts.

One evening early in spring, with the wheel of the galaxy tilted waist-deep at the level horizon of the Great River, Yama eased open the shutters of his room’s arched window and climbed out. Any soldiers walking their beats in the great courtyard or the gardens might have seen, by the galaxy’s faint light, a sturdy boy of some seventeen years on the broad ledge beneath the eaves of the red tile roof, and recognised at once the pale sharp face and cap of black hair of the Aedile’s foundling son. But Yama knew that three of the regular garrison were standing guard over the labourers at the Aedile’s latest excavation, and Sergeant Rhodean was leading the rest on a patrol through the winding paths of the City of the Dead, searching for the heretics who last night had tried to firebomb a ship at anchor in the floating harbour, leaving only the pack of watchdogs and a pentad of callow youths under the command of old one-legged Rotwang, who by now would be snoring in his chair by the kitchen fireplace after finishing his usual glass of rice brandy. So there was little chance of being spotted by the night watch, and Yama knew that he could persuade the watchdogs to allow him to pass unreported.

It was an opportunity too good to be missed. Yama planned to hunt frogs with the chandler’s daughter, Derev, and Ananda, the sizar of Aeolis’s temple. They had agreed on it that afternoon, using mirror talk.

The original walls of the Aedile’s peel-house were built of smooth blocks of keelrock fitted together so cunningly that they presented a surface like polished ice, but at some point in the house’s history an extra floor had been added, with a wide gutter ledge and gargoyles projecting into the air at intervals to spout water clear of the walls. Yama walked along the ledge as easily as if on a pavement, hooked his rope around the ruff of a basilisk frozen in an agonised howl, and abseiled five storeys to the ground. He would have to leave the rope in place, but it was a small risk.

No one was about. He darted across the mossy lawn, jumped the ha-ha, and quickly and silently threaded his way through the dense stands of rhododendrons which had colonised the tumbled remnants of the peel-house’s outer defensive wall. Yama had played endless games of soldiers and heretics with the kitchen boys here, and knew every path, every outcrop of broken stone, all the holes and hollows which had once been guardrooms or stores, and the buried passages between them. He stopped beneath a mature cork-oak, looked all around, then lifted a mossy brick to reveal a scrape lined with stones and sealed with polymer spray. He pulled out a net bag and a slender trident from this hiding place, replaced the brick, and hung the bag on his belt and laid the trident across his shoulders.

At the far edge of the rhododendrons, an overgrown demilune breastwork dropped away to a barrens of tussock grass and scrub. Beyond, bordered on either side by patchworks of flooded paeonin fields, the dark gleam of the Breas wound away through shadowy ranges of hills crowded with monuments and tombs, cairns and cists: league upon league of the City of the Dead stretching to the foothills of the Rim Mountains, its inhabitants outnumbering the living citizens of Aeolis by a thousand to one. The tombs glimmered in the cold light of the galaxy, as if the hills had been dusted with salt, and little lights flickered here and there, where memorial tablets had been triggered by wind or passing animals.

Yama stuck his trident in soft leaf-mould, took out a slim silver whistle twice the length of his forefinger and blew on it. It seemed to make no more than a breathy squeak. He blew twice more, then squatted on his heels and listened to the peeping chorus of the frogs that had emerged from their mucus cocoons just a week ago. They had been frantically feeding ever since, and now they were searching for mates, every male endeavouring to outdo his rivals with passionate froggy arias. Dopey with unrequited lust, they would be easy prey.

Behind Yama, the peel-house reared above black masses of rhododendrons, lifting its spiky freight of turrets against the galaxy’s blue-white wheel. A warm yellow light glowed near the top of the tallest turret, where the Aedile, who rarely slept since the news of Telmon’s death last summer, would be working on his endless measurements and calculations.

Presently, Yama heard what he had been waiting for: the steady padding tread and faint sibilant breath of a watchdog. He called softly, and the strong, ugly creature trotted out of the bushes and laid its heavy head in his lap. Yama crooned to it, stroking its cropped ears and scratching the ridged line where flesh met the metal of its skullplate, lulling the machine part of the watchdog and, through its link, the rest of the pack. When he was satisfied that it understood it was not to raise the alarm either now or when he returned, he stood and wiped the dog’s drool from his hands, plucked up his trident, and bounded away down the steep slope of the breastwork towards the barrens, and the flooded fields beyond.

Ananda and Derev were waiting at the edge of the barrens. Tall, graceful Derev jumped down from her perch halfway up a broken wall cloaked in morning glory, and half-floated, half-ran across overgrown flagstones towards Yama. Ananda kept his seat on a fallen stele, eating ghostberries he had picked along the way, pretending to ignore the lovers as they embraced and whispered endearments. He was a plump boy with dark skin and a bare scalp, wearing the orange robe of his office, saying as if to no one in particular, ‘I remembered to bring the lanter