I went on staring at her until she began to smile. She said, “That’s not true, Soukyan. The truth is that last night I was very happy with you. Happiness like that is rare for me, and I do not ever want to get used to it, because right behind it there comes trouble, always. So I said what I said about the river for luck, in a way. Do you understand me?”

“I was happy, too,” I said. There was more I wanted to say, but just then the front of the boat went up while the water dropped away under it and a wave thumped into us from behind, so that the front went down and down. I flattened myself out on the deck and closed my eyes. Lal said, “Ah. Now it gets interesting.” She sounded quite happy to me.

It did get interesting, very quickly. The little boat rocked and pitched ceaselessly; with my eyes shut, we seemed to be blowing over the water in every direction, completely out of control. Whenever I managed to look around for a moment, I realized that we were still somehow heading downriver, almost as straight as ever, only much faster; and that the waves were actually quite small for the power with which they slammed and pounded the boat. But they were all white now, white as ice-flowers, raw white as sangarti blubber when the great sheknath rip them open. And there were the rocks, black, ragged, there and there and everywhere, flying by so close that I could see the green and red mosses on their sides, waving dreamily in the rushing water. It was like racing forever down a long, foaming gullet, and I tried not to think to the belly at the end of the run.

“It’s an old river,” Lal called to me once, “and full of tricks. Deep old bed, any number of sly little sideways currents. We’re lucky it’s not in flood.” They are true, those stories about Sailor Lal. Crosslegged as always, drenched with bitterly stinging spray, her neck and shoulders so bruised yet that she could only look ahead, she eased our boat through that wildness like a needle through folds of silk. Sometimes she would sit absolutely still, neither hand moving at all on the tiller or the lines; again, she might lean back slightly or twitch her fingers as though coaxing a pet, and the boat would lilt this way and fall off that way and wriggle between two green-gummed rocks: a jaunty morsel eluding the teeth of the river one more time. Most often the bow was completely under water, and me with it—up and down, down and up, like the little prayer rags that boatmen in the west tie to their oarblades. Yet I will tell you that for once in my life I was shocked by my own excitement, and that I can understand better now why there are those who love to sail the bad water. I have never told Lal this.

For all that my Man Who Laughs had told us about Arshadin’s house being no castle but as plain as a shepherd’s hutch, we came very near to missing it altogether. In fact, the only reason that we did notice it was that we both saw the dharises, as Lukassa had seen them before us: there, circling near the windows of a reed-thatched cottage, a full dozen or more, where the sight of one in twenty years can have an entire village abandoned— fields, houses, and all—by nightfall that same day. They are smallish blue-gray birds, fish-eaters, rather plain except for the deep blue slash across the chest; and why, rare as they are, they should signify ill luck, disaster, and horror in every land I know, I cannot say. But there they were, crowding each other to roost on Arshadin’s sills, and I felt my face grow cold. When I looked back at Lal I saw her making a sign in the air with her left hand that I know now is meant to ward off evil. I would have done the same.

Lal threw the tiller hard left and shouted, “Hold it there,” as the boat veered against the wind and the current, laboring toward shore. I hung onto the tiller as she wrestled with the sail, but suddenly it bellied out hugely, unnaturally, and tore the lines from her hands. The boom swung around, caught my shoulder as I ducked, and smashed me overboard. I heard Lal cry out as I fell, but her voice was lost in the cold piping of the dharises as they came wheeling and fluttering above us. An instant later, the boat went over—the mast came down beside my head even before I had started sinking, and the hollow sections that fitted so perfectly together came all apart and whipped away past me. Poor little boat. I swear I remember thinking that.

What I also thought was, Well, Lal won’t be able to save you this time. Because there was no chance of her finding me in that boiling gullet; I hoped she had at least enough strength left to save herself. The river was slamming me into one downstream rock after another, and I was trying to catch hold of each one and not succeeding—the moss was too slippery, the current too strong. I asked—I do not pray—I asked to drown before I was beaten to death. I tried to say certain things that I was taught to say before dying, but the river dashed them back down my throat, and I went under again. After a while it stopped hurting. I felt as though I were falling asleep, moving slowly away from myself toward rest.

Then my feet struck the bottom.

If you want to hear anything more, be quiet and try to imagine what it is like to be certain that your body is lying when it tells you that you are alive. I tell you, standing there on firm ground, looking down to watch the water dropping to my chest, my waist, my knees, I knew beyond any question that I had died. At the monastery, we were absolutely forbidden to speculate on the afterlife (it was enforced, too, that prohibition), but when I turned and saw Lal a hundred yards upstream on a growing island of muddy riverbed, with nothing between us but a strip of water a baby could have splashed through— well, what could I think but this is how it is, after all, walking away with your friends into a world made new and new again with every step you take? And maybe that is exactly the way it will be. Like you, I hope never to find out.

The river had not parted for us, as in the old stories: rather, like a pet scolded by its master for bringing its bloody, wriggling prey indoors, it had recoiled, dropping us and shrinking away against the opposite bank, pretending it had never been interested in us in the first place. Listen to me—I know very well that rivers cannot behave like that, that no wizard you ever knew of could ever make a river do such a thing. I am agreeing with you, man—you have no idea how much I agree with you. I am telling you what happened.

Very well, then. I waded through the mud to Lal, and we stood together looking back toward the farther shore where the river cowered in less than half its bed as far as we could see. I think it was not even flowing; sunlight glints and bounces off moving water, but what Lal and I beheld was a silent, lifeless greeny-brown mass that might have been earth as easily as water. I was not frightened when I thought I was going to drown—I was frightened, terrified, of this, of the wrongness. Lal and I stood there: soaked, shivering, exhausted, up to our ankles in stony ooze, holding hands like children without knowing it. Neither of us dared to turn toward that wattle-and-daub cottage that we could feel looming behind us as high as a castle now, not even when the laughter began.