The Gold Eaters (2 page)

1

H
e is first on the beach, as he loves to be, alone in the foredawn light where the dunes fall down to the flump of the sea and the rippled foam gleams dimly at its edge. Only pelicans are there, dark shapes along the tideline gazing seaward, hunched against the morning chill, awaiting light enough to show the glint of fish. The breeze wafting listlessly ashore is salty on his lips. Later the sun will give it strength as the desert warms, drawing it onto the land.

The boy is happy with thoughts of an easy paddle to deep water, filled nets, a freshening wind to bring him home by noon. He walks to the boats—fifty slender shapes, sharp prows in the air, flat sterns on the dry sand—a row of fangs against the sky. Today, for the first time ever, one of them is
his
.

A few weeks ago his grandfather told him to gather tall reeds from the irrigation canals. “That boat of your father's is sitting too low,” he said. “Rot at the heart. I can smell it. I doubt she'll last till he gets back. Whenever
that
may be.” The old man spat gloomily onto a pile of sweepings in the sunbaked yard. “For now, you're the man of this house. You're big enough to need a boat of your own. Bring me the makings and I'll build it. New britches, new boat—that's what I say.” He smiled and gave a little sniff, a sudden uptake of breath, his sign he was done speaking. The boy ran to a canal right away, coming back in a sweat with the first of many loads, spreading
them in the sun. Every day he watched his grandfather's old hands stook and trim and bind the dry reeds into a sturdy, unsinkable craft.

It is there, waiting for him, its pale new body standing out from others in the gloom. As he grasps it by the waist and lifts—so light!—he breathes in sun and earth. Smells of the land not the sea. How long will it take, he wonders, to become a sea-thing of salt and fish.

The dawn begins to show behind the highland wall beyond the desert, silhouetting the dark rim of the lower range and blushing the snowfields far above. He turns his back to the light, takes off his clothes—a plain cotton shirt and the new breechclout—grown-up wear to go with his grown-up name. Waman. Like his grandfather. It still sounds too big for him, a name he must learn to make his own. He folds the breechclout carefully, smoothing the soft white fabric, admiring the even weave and elegant design—bands of blue cormorants and red fishes along each border—done by his mother's hands. Sometimes he saw his cousin Tika take a turn. A deft weaver too. He thinks of her slender fingers working the mysteries of the loom.

A less happy thought clouds his mind: Is Tika becoming so accomplished that her weaving might take her away? They are almost the same age, he older by six months. Since he now has his manly name, she will soon be grown enough to follow the womanly arts at a House of the Chosen in some distant city, to weave and sing and brew for the Empire, for its temples, its lords. Not long ago they spoke of this. “Why not?” she said. “I don't want to stay in this village forever. I want to see the cities, the highlands, the jungle. Don't you? And”—her voice faltered and the exuberance drained from her face—“and I want to see where I lived before. Before I came here. That will be hard, I know, but one day I must.”

Waman asked her how she could go there, go anywhere, if she became cloistered with the Chosen women. “Oh, they let you out now and then,” Tika said brightly, recovering her spirit, as if she'd
looked into it. “And if I were to do well there, and tend my looks”—she cocked her head, running a finger along the edge of her jaw—“I might marry a great man.”

An old man, more like, Waman answered tartly, burning with jealousy and a sense of his youth, his rustic simplicity.

He sighs, leaving the clothes under a stone. He carries boat, paddle, and net down to the ocean, wet sand spreading his toes.

Besides a gourd of drinking water and a small bag of toasted corn which Mother and Tika give him every morning, for this special day he has brought a small pot of his grandfather's beer. Filling his mouth with the yeasty drink (he is still too young to like it, though he wants to) he purses his lips, spraying boat, sea, and the first bulge of sun rousing from its sleep under the earth.

Father Sun, Mother Sea, he says aloud, may this be a good day. The first of many. Let it be so.

One by one the pelicans take flight.

—

The new craft rides lively and high between his legs, cresting the swells, tossing its prow, gliding into the troughs. Like a dolphin. Or like Drum, the big old dog he used to ride over the fields when he was little, named for the taut hide on her back, her deep bark. A good name for a boat.

Far out to sea he fastens the paddle and lets himself drift, casting the net, watching it sink, hauling it in, casting, scarcely feeling the sun on his chest and the chill of the deep around his feet. The fishing is good, though he has to drive off gulls who swoop in with fierce cries whenever he stows a catch in the keep-net under the boat. At mid-morning he stops to chew some corn and drink from the gourd. His mind lifts from sea to land. The sun is nosing into a thin overcast that builds above the desert at this time of year, robbing the
sands of contrast. The mountains seem to have drawn back, mere suggestions of bulk behind a dusty scrim. Up there somewhere is his father, toiling in the thin air and hard light of the highlands. Making the Emperor's roads, perhaps, or building houses in the Emperor's great cities of stone. Or fighting in his wars on the northern edge of the World.

That is the worst, the fighting.

The boy looks at the water again and becomes aware of his smooth brown legs astride the neatly woven reeds, salt drying on his thighs, shiny black whiskers sprouting above his cock. He is changing, becoming a man. Fighting is a manly thing. But these wars are not our wars, his father used to say. What need do we have of roads and empires? Here we have the sea and good earth, the green valley to grow corn for food and beer, cotton for cloth and nets. We travel by sea. We eat from the sea. And when we eat from the fields it is the fish buried with the seed that makes the land bear. We are blessed. Never forget that. And never forget the mountains. Like the sea, the mountains give water and life. Though at a price. For the highland lords come down and meddle in our lives. They hold the strings of the World.

His mother, Chaska, would laugh at such talk whenever she heard it. “Come, now, Mallki. I'm a highlander myself. It didn't seem to bother you too much when we were younger.” And she'd wink at the boy and the girl. And Grandfather would smile and give his little snort.

Something out on the horizon. One, two, three . . . seven sails. Two pairs and three alone. Five ships, then: three small and two big freighters with twin masts. All hull-down, showing only the rig, their deckhouses hidden by the curve of the seaworld. Heading north to lands beyond the Empire? Or following the current until they stand westward twenty days to the Tortoise Islands?

The sight always stirs him. This is what he will do as soon as he's old enough. He will go to sea, where there are no emperors, no wars. Where he can become a man, and a man can become what he may. Soon.

The sun is still high when he carries his boat up the beach, sets it on end, and heads home with a full net over his shoulder. The path winds between dunes and rocky hillocks; soon the valley is below him, the crops a startling green under the arid hills, fields fanning out from the river between silver threads of channelled water. In thanks for a good day's work, Waman adds a stone to the cairn that marks the highest point on his way. The town comes into view—Little River, the only place he knows—its flat-roofed houses the hue of the desert from which they are made, brightened by red and yellow awnings over doors and patios, by striped blankets draped on washing lines, and some by a band of ochre paint where the walls rise above the rooftops. Here and there are seated figures of women in white shifts, weaving at back-strap looms tied to posts or fruit trees. The wind brings children's voices, bird and animal cries. The family dog—one of old Drum's puppies—runs to greet him, sniffing the swollen net. Tika gets up from her work, clasps his shoulders and congratulates him on the haul. The neighbours' little ones are playing outside, chasing ducks in the narrow canal that runs along the street. His mother puts steamed corn and soup with avocado before him, leaving him to eat on the bench below the awning while she and Tika sort the fish into those they will cook, those they will salt, and small bony ones to set aside with the offal for feeding the land.

Having eaten, he lies down on the cushioned bench and drowses until the heat relents. He feels too tired to go to the little schoolroom on the square, where a teacher gives lessons in the Empire's general language, in counting, and in the related art of the quipu, by which numbers and words are tied on strings. Waman finds the system
hard to grasp; so far he has learnt the knots for one to a hundred and his own name, nothing more. Today his mother does not press him. She seems weary herself, overcome by a sadness that settles on her sometimes. For the first time, he has seen a white hair in her braid, and spidery lines beneath her eyes. The girl's face, though, is clear and lovely. Tika catches him staring and frowns, fluttering a hand as one does at a bee. Waman looks away. He is shy and dares not look that way at other girls. But why should Tika mind?

She came to Little River not long after his eighth birthday. There was a postal runner, announcing an urgent message with a trumpet blast. There was also a woman, older than his mother, a Chosen lady of importance, who came to the door leading Tika by the hand. Surely the runner must have come before the lady, weeks before? Yet in his memory it's as if they arrived together on that day. The terrible news, his mother wailing and pounding the wall, crying for her lost sister; and the silent, bruised survivor, the thin, shrinking child—like a little fish herself. He had never met his cousin or her parents. They had lived far away, more than a month's journey over many high mountains, somewhere in a province called Huanuco. There had also been another child, a younger brother. Tika seldom speaks of them, even now, and when she does she becomes tearful and withdrawn. Later Waman's mother told him how Tika came to be here, speaking in whispers after she'd regained composure by busying herself with the poor girl's care. The Earth had stirred in her sleep one night, Chaska said, burying people in their homes, drowning others in a flood of ice and clay that swept down from a mountain lake with a roar that could be heard in the next province. She called it a
pachakuti
—a word new to him—an earthquake, a catastrophe, the world turned upside down. The Empire's men came quickly in teams with llama trains and spades and crowbars. They set up tents,
kitchens, and they dug and dug. One corner of Tika's house had not fallen, and there in freezing mud they found her, blue and barely alive. “That's how Tika was born to us,” Chaska concluded, “pulled like a baby from the womb of Mother Earth.”

An odd way to put it, Waman thought, but his mother has always had a way with words. And he recalls that she'd lost a baby girl of her own a year or two before, stillborn and unnamed, a small mummy wrapped and taken to the Town of the Dead in the desert beyond the fields.

He watches his mother and his cousin talking softly as they sort and clean the catch. Never has Tika seemed so dear to him, so lovely. There is grace in her upright back and the deft movement of her fingers as she slits and guts a fish. He will marry her. They will be together always. After all, she's a cousin not a sister (though often she seems like one). Only an emperor can take a sister for a wife. But anyone may wed a cousin.