The women stood up, and as they did, their clothing seemed to change, to move, to become something else. They were definitely women, and naked, and the clothing wasn’t clothing at all. It was another creature, one on each woman, which rode them like a mantle, and changed shape to fit on them in different ways. It draped when they were sitting, but now it furled like the sails on a ship, rising up out of the way across their shoulders, so they could fight or run if need be.
And their hair was hair, but it had looked wrong because it was growing as much out of the other creature as out of their heads. No, it was growing entirely from the creature. While it rode atop their heads, the hair seemed to be in the normal place. But now they were bald, and the hair had been furled up in the creature.
“Let me guess,” said Larex. “You’re the folks from Ramfold who crossed the Wall into Vadeshfold a few weeks ago. What brings you here? And what brings you now, for that matter, since as far as I know you’re still in Vadeshfold, heading for Odinfold.”
“We are,” said Rigg. “We made it to Odinfold, learned many interesting things, and then came back to a time only a few weeks from now to come through the Wall into Larfold. And then we shifted in time to here, because I saw the paths of these women.”
“Bet you didn’t see mine,” said Larex with a smile.
“You know that I can’t,” said Rigg. “There’s not much about the Larfolders in the logs of the other ships.”
“Because we know how the Odinfolders blab,” said Larex.
“So you can conceal what you know from the shared logs?” asked Rigg.
“Of course,” said Larex. “When there’s a compelling reason to.”
“And what would that reason be?”
“When you take control of all the ships and expendables, then I imagine I’ll be forced to tell you,” said Larex, still smiling.
“So why not tell me now?” asked Rigg.
“You’re the man from the future,” said Larex. “Why not tell me whether I ever tell you?”
This was a game with no point. Rigg’s instinct to like him had been wrong; his instinct to mistrust him, absolutely right. “We’re here to meet the Larfold people,” said Rigg. “And it seemed practical to meet them first when they happened to be on shore.”
“I saw where your eyes went,” said Larex. “You’re fascinated by their naked bodies.”
“I’m fifteen years old, I think,” said Rigg. “My eye goes to naked women. But I’m more interested in their living clothing.”
“But don’t you recognize it?” asked Larex. He looked pointedly at Loaf.
“They’re wearing facemasks?” asked Rigg.
“A related species,” said Larex. “Let’s say that what lives upriver, in Vadeshfold, is the primitive version. What the first colonists found here in Larfold was a much more evolved cousin.”
“So you helped Vadesh develop this?” asked Loaf.
“Not at all,” said Larex. “I never told him anything about these symbiotes.”
“Why not?” asked Umbo.
“He was having so much fun developing his own,” said Larex.
“You’re a renegade,” said Rigg.
“Not at all,” said Larex. “We all lie to Vadesh.”
For the first time, it occurred to Rigg that this statement might itself be a lie. The one certain thing was that the expendables all lied to humans. It was far more doubtful that they actually lied to each other. Much more likely they lied to humans about lying to Vadesh.
But that was too complicated to sort out now. “Do you have any objection to our talking to these women?” asked Rigg.
“Would it matter if I did?” asked Larex.
Rigg made no reply. It was obvious that Larex stood between the women and the Ramfolders, and that neither group was going to come any nearer to each other than they were, until the expendable made some gesture.
Larex smiled, then strolled off to the side, so he was no longer between them. Then he nodded his head, and waved the two groups together.
The Larfold women moved hesitantly toward them. They were staring as curiously at the Ramfolders as Rigg and his party were at them.
“Hi,” said Umbo.
“Oh, what a diplomat,” murmured Param.
“They’ve never been through the Wall,” said Olivenko. “They don’t understand this language.”
“Until they speak,” said Rigg, “we can’t tell what their language is.” He held out his hand in an open gesture, somewhere between begging for food and offering a handshake.
They took it the first way—or maybe offering food was how they shook hands. One of the women reached into a pocket in her living mantle and drew out—something. Something raw and shiny and moving. Rigg let her put it in his hand, but she did not let go.
She said something.
Rigg didn’t understand at first. And then he did. She wanted him to close his hand. Because the thing was alive, and if he didn’t, it would get away.
So he enclosed it in his fist, and only then did she slip her fingers out of his grip.
Then she gestured toward her own mouth, pantomiming dropping the creature into her mouth and swallowing.
“It’s a hospitality ritual,” murmured Param.
Or else a clever way to introduce their symbiotes’ larval form into his body. But Rigg did not speak the thought aloud. Instead he smiled, lifted his fist over his open mouth, and dropped the creature in.
It skittered up his tongue as if trying to escape. For a tiny fraction of a second, Rigg thought of biting down hard on the thing in his mouth to keep it in place, to kill it. But then he thought of a cockroach or small frog exploding in his mouth, filling it with the flavor of guts and death and animal poo, and so instead Rigg simply swallowed the thing whole.
It wiggled all the way down.
At least it had no claws to catch at him, or jaws to bite the inside of his gullet.
The woman who had given him the bug nodded. “Can you talk?” she asked.
“A little,” said Rigg. They’d have to say a lot more than this before the language of the Wall made him fluent.
“You are naked,” she said, indicating his body.
By this Rigg understood her to mean that he had no symbiote. He looked at Loaf.
“He is half naked,” said the woman. “He has an ugly on his face.”
“That he does,” said Rigg. “But it wasn’t all that pretty before.”
The woman seemed mildly perplexed. Clearly Rigg did not understand the context well enough yet to make a joke.
“We come from beyond the Wall,” said Rigg.
The women looked at each other in astonishment, and then at Larex, who smiled and nodded, giving that slight bow of his head that Rigg had never seen Father do, but which Vadesh had done all the time.
“You came through hell to speak to us,” said the woman, and the others echoed the sentence. To Rigg, it seemed that this was some kind of quotation. Maybe a bit of scripture or an adage or a ritual greeting.
“Hell stepped aside to let us pass,” Rigg answered. Yes, they had sort of passed through hell, or parts of it, when they first crossed the Wall into Vadeshfold. But they had only heard faint echoes of hell when they came through the Wall to Larfold just now.
The woman came and enfolded him in an embrace that was anything but ritualized. She meant it with her whole body. And in a moment the other two women had embraced him as well.
“I told them you were coming,” said Larex.
“How did you know?” asked Rigg.
“When the Odinfolders made you,” said Larex, “the purpose was to make Wall crossers who would visit every wallfold. Eventually you’ll get everywhere.”
“That’s not an answer,” said Rigg.
“The knife is a communicator,” said Larex. “I’ve been following your movements.”
The women released him from their embrace—then stroked his body, his hair, his face.
“You live in the sea,” s
aid Rigg to the women.
“The sea,” they answered, saying nothing but that word, several times, and meaning different things each time they said it. Rigg understood all the meanings: Home. Dark-and-dangerous. Eating place.
“Why did you come on shore?” asked Rigg.
“Why don’t you come into the sea?” she asked in reply.
“I would die there,” said Rigg. “But your body was made to walk on land.”
“My body on land,” she said. “And my mantle in the sea. Two friends made one by blood.”
This last phrase seemed alien to Rigg, as if he were incapable of understanding some nuance that he had no mental preparation to receive. Clearly she was indicating the mantle when she spoke of friends made one, but Loaf didn’t speak of his facemask as some kind of friend.
“Hard to believe it’s a facemask,” murmured Olivenko.
“Something like it,” said Rigg. “I think we’ve answered the question of how they breathe.” He said this in the language of Odinfold, which they had spoken so long in the library that it was the first that came to mind.
Loaf stepped forward. “Can you show us how this mantle lets you live in the water?”
“You don’t know?” asked a woman.
Loaf shrugged.
“Then what is that for?” she asked, pointing to his face.
“Ugly. Ugly,” murmured the other two women, as if they were captioning a picture of Loaf’s facemask.
And it was true. Where Loaf’s facemask made him misshapen, replacing his eyes with asymmetric imitations, their mantles seemed to blend seamlessly into their bodies. When they moved, it was as if the women’s own skin moved. And maybe it was part of their skin now.
The woman who had fed a bug to Rigg passed her hand up the front of her body and closed her eyes. At once her mantle shifted, rising up her neck like someone pulling off a sweater. It covered her whole head, then suddenly sucked in and clung as if to a skeleton. New eyes—bigger ones—extruded from the sides of her head, like the eyes of a fish. And when she opened her mouth to speak, a membrane covered her mouth. It deadened her voice, though she could still speak through it.
“I can go in the water now,” she said. “But I know that I am not myself a waterbreather. My friend breathes the water, and passes the result to me in my blood.” She looked at Loaf. “He can’t go in the water, not with that one. It’s only an animal.”
“And your mantle is not?”
“It is the companion of my heart,” she said. “It is the sister of my soul.”
“Air in the water,” chanted another.
“Light in the darkness,” murmured the third.
“So you all have these mantles?” asked Rigg.
“Without them we would die,” said the leader.
“So why did you murder my father?” demanded Param.
So much for diplomacy, thought Rigg.
“Your father?” asked the woman who led them.
“Knosso, king of Stashiland,” said Param.
“He crossed over far to the west of here,” said Olivenko. “Then you dragged him out of his boat and drowned him.”
The women backed away, puzzled by the accusation and by Param’s vehemence in saying it.
“Do you mean the man who dances on water?”
To Rigg that seemed as apt a description of travel in a small boat as these people were likely to see it. “Yes,” said Rigg.
“But he isn’t dead,” said one woman.
“Should we fetch him?” asked another.
“Yes,” said Rigg. “In our wallfold, we thought him dead.”
“Why should he be dead?” they asked. “Was he deserving of death?”
“No,” said Olivenko, perhaps a bit too fervently. “So are you saying that this man-who-dances-on-water is still alive?”
“Of course,” said the leading woman. “Shall we bring him now, or do you have more questions to ask us first?”
“Please bring him, yes,” said Rigg.
“I thought you’d want to see him as soon as I saw you,” said one of the other women.
“I know he’ll want to see you,” said the third.
“Let me send out a call for him,” said the leader. Without further discussion, she ran to the nearest water—the river, in this case—and ducked her mantled head into it. She stayed a long time—at least it seemed long to Rigg, who instinctively held his breath as if his own head were also underwater.
Then she lifted her head out of the water, dropping a spray of water that caught the sunlight like stars.
She sat on the riverbank and laughed. “He’s very happy,” she called out. “He’s coming now.”
“Knosso,” murmured Olivenko. “Is it really possible he didn’t die?”
“They must have had a mantle waiting for him,” said Loaf.
“Of course we did,” said one of the remaining women. “Didn’t the Landsman tell us he was going to float to us on the waves?”
“So when you dragged him under the water—”
“It was to keep his evil wife from killing him,” said a woman.
“And he had so many questions saved up for us,” said the other woman.
“I can’t wait like this,” said Param, sounding distressed. “I can’t. I won’t.” And then she disappeared.
Of course, thought Rigg. By slicing time until she sees Father Knosso come out of the water, she will spend only moments waiting, while we might spend hours.
But it wasn’t hours, it wasn’t many minutes, until, out of the waves of the sea and the currents of the river, there arose a host of hundreds of mantle-wearing people, men and women, striding out of the water, their mantles receding from their faces, eyes appearing where they should be in human faces, mouths opening, smiling, calling greetings to the women, who called out in reply. Here, meet these people from overWall.
Then the Larfolders turned and parted and made a way for one man who strode laughing from the waves and fairly ran up the beach toward them. “Where’s my Param?” he cried. “They said my daughter was here!”
Rigg knew that Param couldn’t hear when she was slicing time, but she didn’t have to. She must have recognized his face as soon as it emerged from under the receding mantle, and she became visible again, running across the sand to embrace her father.
He held her for a long time, stroking her in the gentle way the women had stroked Rigg after their embrace. “Param, Param,” he murmured, and other words that Rigg could not hear at a distance. He did not want to interrupt their reunion, but this was Father Knosso, and he could not stop himself from walking tentatively nearer.
The man looked up from his daughter’s hug, and then managed to step from the embrace without quite breaking it. Instead he gathered her into his forward movement as he strode to Rigg and then stopped only a couple of meters from him.
In Fall Ford, Rigg had rarely seen himself—only a few people owned mirrors, and since he didn’t shave, there was no reason for him to consult the mirror in Nox’s house. But once they arrived in O and later in Aressa Sessamo, Rigg had many opportunities to see his own face looking back at him from the glass; in Flacommo’s house, there were so many mirrors that one could hardly escape from the sight of oneself.
So Rigg knew what he was seeing when he looked for the first time into his father’s face. There were no images of him in Aressa Sessamo—a dead male from a female-centered royal line that was utterly discredited by the People’s Revolution? It would be twice-over treason to treasure his visage.
Still, someone might have told Rigg how perfectly he resembled his dead father. Especially since he wasn’t dead after all.
Umbo came up between them, looking back and forth. “No wonder my father hated the sight of me,” said Umbo. “Never once, when he looked into my face, could he see his own face looking back at him like this.”
“He said you would grow up to cross the Wall,” said Knosso.
“He never told me you existed, or that I was your
son,” said Rigg.
“He wasn’t supposed to. How could a child keep a secret like that? Better for you not to know until it was time.”
“And is it time now, Father?” asked Rigg.
“Oh, and past time.” Knosso opened up his arms and Rigg stepped into the embrace that Ramex, the Golden Man, had never given him, though Rigg had always called him father, and had loved him. But that love had been misplaced. This was the man, and Rigg was his son, and he belonged inside these arms the way these Larfolders belonged inside their mantles. I am a part of him. I was made from him. I am his. He is mine. And Rigg wept against his father’s shoulder as his father’s hands stroked and stroked him, and Knosso murmured again and again, “Rigg Sessamekesh, my son, my son.”
CHAPTER 21
Companions
What surprised Rigg was how quickly it faded, the emotion he first felt in his father’s embrace. It was pleasing, of course, that the man was so moved to see him. But while Rigg had longed for a father’s affection, this was not the father from whom he had wanted it. The man he knew by that name had been unaffectionate and demanding, but he was also brilliantly intelligent, difficult but not impossible to please, and full of knowledge and wisdom about every aspect of the world. For months at a time, Rigg had had that father’s undivided attention, had lived in constant dialogue with him.
Knosso had Rigg’s face, but who was he, who had he ever been in Rigg’s life? His presence here was the answer to some interesting questions from Rigg’s time in Flacommo’s house. There would be much to talk about. But for Rigg, that was all he could ever be. A resource, a person of interest. The lost opportunity of childhood was still out of reach. Rigg could go backward in time, but not in age. He was too old to need the sort of fatherhood that Knosso’s arms were promising.
The embrace ended. Knosso held him at arm’s length, to look at him again. It made Rigg feel uncomfortable, fearing just a little that the quick fading of Rigg’s affection might be visible in his face.
“Here’s your old apprentice Olivenko,” said Rigg, turning to include the scholar-soldier in their conversation.
Olivenko came forward, but not with his usual bold stride. He was diffident, almost shy. “Sir,” he said.