Keeper of Dreams (14 page)

Finally he saw the mountains that separated the Derku lands from the Salty Sea, rising from the plain. “Those will be islands,” said Naog, realizing it for the first time. “The highest ones. See? They’re higher than the shelf of land we’re walking on.”

Zawada nodded wisely, but he knew that she didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

“Those are the Derku lands,” said Naog. “See the canals and the fields?”

She looked, but seemed to see nothing unusual at all. “Forgive me,” she said, “but all I see are streams and grassland.”

“But that’s what I meant,” said Naog. “Except that the grasses grow where we plant them, and all we plant is the grass whose seed we grind into meal. And the streams you see—they go where we want them to go. Vast circles surrounding the heart of the Derku lands. And there in the middle, do you see that hill?”

“I think so,” she said.

“We build that hill every year, after the floodwater.”

She laughed. “You tell me that you aren’t gods, and yet you make hills and streams and meadows wherever you want them!”

Naog set his face toward the Engu portion of the great city. “Come home with me,” he said.

Since Zawada’s people were so small, Naog had not realized that he had grown even taller during his manhood journey, but now as he led his ugly wife through the outskirts of the city, he realized that he was taller than everyone. It took him by surprise, and at first he was disturbed because it seemed to him that everyone had grown smaller. He
even said as much to Zawada—“They’re all so small”—but she laughed as if it were a joke. Nothing about the place or the people seemed small to
her
.

At the edge of the Engu lands, Naog hailed the boys who were on watch. “Hai!”

“Hai!” they called back.

“I’ve come back from my journey!” he called.

It took a moment for them to answer. “What journey was this, tall man?”

“My manhood journey. Don’t you know me? Can’t you see that I’m Naog?”

The boys hooted at that. “How can you be naked when you have your napron on?”

“Naog is my manhood name,” said Naog, quite annoyed now, for he had not expected to be treated with such disrespect on his return. “You probably know of me by my baby-name. They called me Glogmeriss.”

They hooted again. “You used to be trouble, and now you’re naked!” cried the bold one. “And your wife is ugly, too!”

But now Naog was close enough that the boys could see how very tall he was. Their faces grew solemn.

“My father is Twerk,” said Naog. “I return from my manhood journey with the greatest tale ever told. But more important than that, I have a message from the god who lives in the Heaving Sea. When I have given my message, people will include you in my story. They will say, ‘Who were the five fools who joked about Naog’s name, when he came to save us from the angry god?’ ”

“Twerk is dead,” said one of the boys.

“The Dragon took him,” said another.

“He was head of the clan, and then the Great Derku began eating human flesh again, and your father gave himself to the Dragon for the clan’s sake.”

“Are you truly his son?”

Naog felt a gnawing pain that he did not recognize. He would soon learn to call it grief, but it was not too different from rage. “Is this another jest of yours? I’ll break your heads if it is.”

“By the blood of your father in the mouth of the beast, I swear that
it’s true!” said the boy who had earlier been the boldest in his teasing. “If you’re his son, then you’re the son of a great man!”

The emotion welled up inside him. “What does this mean?” cried Naog. “The Great Derku does not eat the flesh of men! Someone has murdered my father! He would never allow such a thing!” Whether he meant it was his father or the Great Derku who would never allow it even Naog did not know.

The boys ran off then, before he could strike out at them for being the tellers of such an unbearable tale. Zawada was the only one left, to pat at him, embrace him, try to soothe him with her voice. She abandoned the language of the Derku and spoke to him soothingly in her own language. But all Naog could hear was the news that his father had been fed to the Great Derku as a sacrifice for the clan. The old days were back again, and they had killed his father. His father, and not even a captive!

Others of the Engu, hearing what the boys were shouting about, brought him to his mother. Then he began to calm down, hearing her voice, the gentle reassurance of the old sound. She, at least, was unchanged. Except that she looked older, yes, and tired. “It was your father’s own choice,” she explained to him. “After floodwater this year the Great Derku came into the pen with a human baby in its jaws. It was a two-year-old boy of the Ko clan, and it happened he was the firstborn of his parents.”

“This means only that Ko clan wasn’t watchful enough,” said Naog.

“Perhaps,” said his mother. “But the holy men saw it as a sign from the god. Just as we stopped giving human flesh to the Great Derku when he refused it, so now when he claimed a human victim, what else were we to think?”

“Captives, then. Why not captives?”

“It was your own father who said that if the Great Derku had taken a child from the families of the captives, then we would sacrifice captives. But he took a child from one of our clans. What kind of sacrifice is it, to offer strangers when the Great Derku demanded the meat of the Derku people?”

“Don’t you see, Mother? Father was trying to keep them from sacrificing anybody at all, by making them choose something so painful that no one would do it.”

She shook her head. “How do you know what my Twerk was trying to do? He was trying to save
you
.”

“Me?”

“Your father was clan leader by then. The holy men said, ‘Let each clan give the firstborn son of the clan leader.’ ”

“But I was gone.”

“Your father insisted on the ancient privilege, that a father may go in place of his son.”

“So he died in my place, because I was gone.”

“If you had been here, Glogmeriss, he would have done the same.”

He thought about this for a few moments, and then answered only, “My name is Naog now.”

“We thought you were dead, Naked One, Stirrer of Troubles,” said Mother.

“I found a wife.”

“I saw her. Ugly.”

“Brave and strong and smart,” said Naog.

“Born to be a captive. I chose a different wife for you.”

“Zawada is my wife.”

Even though Naog had returned from his journey as a man and not a boy, he soon learned that even a man can be bent by the pressure of others. This far he did
not
bend: Zawada remained his wife. But he also took the wife his mother had chosen for him, a beautiful girl named Kormo. Naog was not sure what was worse about the new arrangement—that everyone else treated Kormo as Naog’s real wife and Zawada as barely a wife at all, or that when Naog was hungry with passion, it was always Kormo he thought of. But he remembered Zawada at such times, how she bore him his first child, the boy Moiro; how she followed him with such fierce courage; how good she was to him when he was a stranger. And when he remembered, he followed his duty to her rather than his natural desire. This happened so often that Kormo complained about it. This made Naog feel somehow righteous, for the truth was that his first inclination had been right. Zawada should have stayed with her own tribe. She was unhappy most of the time, and kept to herself and her baby, and as years passed, her babies. She was never accepted by the other women of the Derku. Only the
captive women became friends with her, which caused even more talk and criticism.

Years passed, yes, and where was Naog’s great message, the one the god had gone to such great trouble to give him? He tried to tell it. First to the leaders of the Engu clan, the whole story of his journey, and how the Heaving Sea was far higher than the Salty Sea and would soon break through and cover all the land with water. They listened to him gravely, and then one by one they counseled with him that when the gods wish to speak to the Derku people, they will do as they did when the Great Derku ate a human baby. “Why would a god who wished to send a message to the Derku people choose a mere
boy
as messenger?”

“Because I was the one who was taking the journey,” he said.

“What will you have us do? Abandon our lands? Leave our canals behind, and our boats?”

“The Nile has fresh water and a flood season, my father saw it.”

“But the Nile also has strong tribes living up and down its shores. Here we are masters of the world. No, we’re not leaving on the word of a boy.”

They insisted that he tell no one else, but he didn’t obey them. In fact he told anyone who would listen, but the result was the same. For his father’s memory or for his mother’s sake, or perhaps just because he was so tall and strong, people listened politely—but Naog knew at the end of each telling of his tale that nothing had changed. No one believed him. And when he wasn’t there, they repeated his stories as if they were jokes, laughing about riding a castrated bull-ox, about calling a tree branch his brother, and most of all about the idea of a great flood that would never go away. Poor Naog, they said. He clearly lost his mind on his manhood journey, coming home with impossible stories that he obviously believes and an ugly woman that he dotes on.

Zawada urged him to leave. “You know that the flood is coming,” she said. “Why not take your family up and out of here? Go to the Nile ourselves, or return to my father’s tribe.”

But he wouldn’t hear of it. “I would go if I could bring my people with me. But what kind of man am I, to leave behind my mother and my brothers and sisters, my clan and all my kin?”

“You would have left me behind,” she said once. He didn’t answer her. He also didn’t go.

In the third year after his return, when he had three sons to take riding on his dragonboat, he began the strangest project anyone had ever seen. No one was surprised, though, that crazy Naog would do something like this. He began to take several captives with him upriver to a place where tall, heavy trees grew. There they would wear out stone axes cutting down trees, then shape them into logs and ride them down the river. Some people complained that the captives belonged to everybody and it was wrong for Naog to have their exclusive use for so many days, but Naog was such a large and strange man that no one wanted to push the matter.

One or two at a time, they came to see what Naog was doing with the logs. They found that he had taught his captives to notch them and lash them together into a huge square platform, a dozen strides on a side. Then they made a second platform crossways to the first and on top of it, lashing every log to every other log, or so it seemed. Between the two layers he smeared pitch, and then on the top of the raft he built a dozen reed structures like the tops of seedboats. Before floodwater he urged his neighbors to bring him their grain, and he would keep it all dry. A few of them did, and when the rivers rose during floodwater, everyone saw that his huge seedboat floated, and no water seeped up from below into the seedhouses. More to the point, Naog’s wives and children also lived on the raft, dry all the time, sleeping easily through the night instead of having to remain constantly wakeful, watching to make sure the children didn’t fall into the water.

The next year, the Engu clan built several more platforms following Naog’s pattern. They didn’t always lash them as well as he had, and during the next flood several of their rafts came apart—but gradually, so they had time to move the seeds. The Engu clan had far more seed make it through to planting season than any of the other tribes, and soon the men had to range farther and farther upriver, because all the nearer trees of suitable size had been harvested.

Naog himself, though, wasn’t satisfied. It was Zawada who pointed out that when the great flood came, the water wouldn’t rise gradually as it did in the river floods. “It’ll be like the waves against the shore, crashing with such force . . . and these reed shelters will never hold against such a wave.”

For several years Naog experimented with logs until at last he had the largest movable structure ever built by human hands. The raft was as long as ever, but somewhat narrower. Rising from notches between logs in the upper platform were sturdy vertical posts, and these were bridged and roofed with wood. But instead of using logs for the planking and the roofing, Naog and the captives who served him split the logs carefully into planks, and these were smeared inside and out with pitch, and then another wall and ceiling were built inside, sandwiching the tar between them. People were amused to see Naog’s captives hoisting dripping baskets of water to the roof of this giant seedboat and pouring them out onto it. “What, does he think that if he waters these trees, they’ll grow like grass?” Naog heard them, but he cared not at all, for when they spoke he was inside his boat, seeing that not a drop of water made it inside.

The doorway was the hardest part, because it, too, had to be able to be sealed against the flood. Many nights Naog lay awake worrying about it before building this last and largest and tightest seedboat. The answer came to him in a dream. It was a memory of the little crabs that lived in the sand on the shore of the Heaving Sea. They dug holes in the sand and then when the water washed over them, their holes filled in above their heads, keeping out the water. Naog awoke knowing that he must put the door in the roof of his seedboat, and arrange a way to lash it from the inside.