Seren Pedac had been kind and gracious. She had permitted Kilava’s ritual ensuring a safe birth. But she had also made it clear that she desired nothing else, that this journey would be her own, and indeed, she was strong enough to make it.
Yes, women could be frightening. In their strengths, their capacity to endure.
As much as Onrack would have treasured being close to Kilava now, to treat her with gifts and morsels, any such attempt would have been met with ridicule from the shoulder-women and a warning snarl from Kilava herself. He had learned to keep his distance, now that the birthing was imminent.
In any case, he had grown fond of Udinaas. True, a man far more inclined to edged commentary than Trull had been, prone to irony and sarcasm, since these were the only weapons Udinaas could wield with skill. Yet Onrack had come to appreciate his wry wit, and more than that, the man had displayed unexpected virtues in his newfound role as father-ones that Onrack noted and resolved to emulate when his time arrived.
He had missed such an opportunity the first time round, and the man who was his first son, Ulshun Pral, had been raised by others, by adopted uncles, brothers, aunts. Even Kilava had been absent more often than not. And so, while Ulshun was indeed of their shared blood, he belonged more to his people than he did to his parents. There was only faint sorrow in this, Onrack told himself, fragments of regret that could find no fit in his memories of the Ritual’s deathless existence.
So much had changed. This world seemed to rush past, ephemeral and elusive, days and nights slipping through his hands. Time and again he was almost paralysed by a sense of loss, overwhelmed with anguish at the thought of another moment gone, another instant dwindling in his wake. He struggled to remain mindful, senses bristling to every blessed arrival, to absorb and devour and luxuriate in its taste, and then would come a moment when everything flooded over him and he would be engulfed, flailing in the blinding, deafening deluge.
Too many feelings, and it seemed weeping was his answer to so much in this mortal life-in joy, in sorrow, in gifts received and in the losses suffered. Perhaps he had forgotten all the other possible ways of responding. Perhaps they were the first to go once time became meaningless, cruel as a curse, leaving tears as the last thing to dry up.
Udinaas and Silchas Ruin drew closer.
And once more, Onrack felt like weeping.
The D’rhasilhani coast looked gnawed and rotted, with murky silt-laden rollers thrashing amidst pitted limestone outcrops and submerged sandbars overgrown with mangroves. Heaps of foam the hue of pale flesh lifted and sagged with every breaker, and through the eyeglass Shield Anvil Tanakalian could see, above the tideline where crescent pockets of sand and gravel were visible, mounds of dead fish, swarmed by gulls and something else-long, low and possibly reptilian-that heaved and bulled through the slaughter every now and then, sending the gulls flapping and screeching.
He was relieved he was not standing on that shore, so alien from the coast he had known almost all of his life-where the water was deep, clear and deathly cold; where every inlet and reach was shrouded in the gloom of black cliffs and thick forests of pine and fir. He had not imagined that such shorelines as he was seeing now even existed. Squalid, fetid, like some overripe pig slough. Northeastward along the coastline, at the base of a young range of mountains angling south, what must be a huge river emptied out into this vast bay, filling the waters with its silts. The constant inflow of fresh water, thick and milky-white, had poisoned most of the bay, as far as Tanakalian could determine. And this did not seem right. He felt as if he was looking upon the scene of a vast crime of some sort, a fundamental wrongness spreading like sepsis.
‘What is your wish, sir?’
The Shield Anvil lowered the eyeglass and frowned at the coast filling the view to the north. ‘Make for the river mouth, Captain. I gauge the outflow channel lies upon the other side, closest to that eastern shore-the cliffs seem sheer.’
‘Even from here, sir,’ said the captain, ‘the barely submerged banks upon this side are plain to our sight.’ He hesitated. ‘It is the ones we cannot see that concern me, Shield Anvil. I am not even appeased should we await the tide.’
‘Can we not withdraw, further out to sea, and then make our approach closer to the eastern coastline?’
‘Into the head of the river’s current? Possibly, although in the clash with the tide, that current will be treacherous. Shield Anvil, this delegation we seek-not a seafaring people, I assume?’
Tanakalian smiled. ‘A range of virtually impassable mountains blocks the kingdom from the coast, and even on the landward side of that range a strip of territory is claimed by pastoral tribes-there is peace between them and the Bolkando. Nonetheless, to answer you, sir, no, the Bolkando are not a seafaring people.’