Chapter Nine
Nut and Inni, are led along an overgrown path beside a sluggish stream. They have their arms bound behind them. If they look up or speak they are beaten. Soon the land becomes a marsh.
They wend their way through a dense thicket until arriving at a hut built on stilts at the edge of a broad river. They are given to a short, thin man with an angular face. He walks around them and pokes them with a stick.
“He is young and strong,” he says. “She has charm. And all of her teeth. Not bad.”
Nut and Inni are taken onto a floating bundle of reeds fashioned into a crude wharf. The little man hoists a flag on a pole.
There they sit until a small boat approaches and paddles alongside. Two tall, dark-skinned men embark — a trader and his henchman. Nut and Inni are presented to the trader. He slowly walks around them, scrutinizing them closely. He nods to his companion who hands the short man a basket.
The little man wobbles under the weight, then drops it at his feet. He crouches down and removes the lid. The basket is filled with glittering chunks of copper. He grins as he picks through the pieces, then looks up. “It is agreed,” he says. “But see, how far you must carry the copper to me. I give you something that can carry itself to market.”
They both laugh.
* * *
Nut and Inni are flung into the boat. They are paddled out into the river to a ship rigged with a tall mast and a billowy triangular sail. Moored behind the ship is a large raft of floating logs.
Nut and Inni are yanked up onto the deck.
The trader climbs up behind them. He points to Inni and signals to his men. They drag her to the edge of the ship. They cut her bindings and hold her over the water. She screams like death.
The trader nods. The men toss her back onto the deck. “Very well,” he says. “She cannot swim. Now, let’s see about the boy.”
* * *
The ship is laden with piles of copper ore, baskets of tar, and coils of rope. Goats wander the deck. The men are told not to lay their hands on Inni. Nut and Inni are fed with fish. As the days pass they gaze at the endless procession of reeds as the current takes them down the ever-widening river.
Occasionally, the ship comes to a small village of floating huts made of reeds. They anchor nearby and the trader barters tar in exchange for food. For a basket of tar, which the villagers use to coat their roofs and boats, the trader can get a string fat carp, several ducks, or a basket full of eels.
At night Nut and Inni gaze at the stars. Nut tells Inni about Erdu, and he recounts the blind man’s stories of the tree with breasts. Then he tells Inni of his dream of an island where the sun never sets. The more he talks about this island, the more he can see it. And she can too. They hold each other tight as they sleep on the deck.
* * *
As Nut and Inni drift downstream the river continues to widen. The reeds and the marshes give way to cleared fields. Strange beasts drag plows across the land, or turn bizarre contraptions that lift buckets of water into ditches. The ship glides past tidy groves of date palm trees and vast fields of grain waving in the breeze. There are endless meadows of stunning red poppies.
Looking downstream toward the broadening horizon, by day they see a column of smoke, at night a faint glow. One morning they round a bend in the river and the view opens dramatically. There, in the distance, is a towering city.
* * *
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