Men and women in colorful clothes watched him go by curiously, perhaps wondering if the stranger in his little boat could really be as pale as he seemed from a distance. He laid hard on the rudder, though he suspected the uselessness of it, was rewarded only by warmed muscles as Wun slid along beside him, shrank to small clusters of houses again, was gone, leaving him to wonder, from his brief glimpses of color and life, what the people might be like, what they might hope and dream, consider good food, teach their children.

Paradoxically, though he had never seen more people or buildings in one place—perhaps in his entire life—Wun still seemed small to him. His vision of "city" was a dream one, dominated by buildings that dwarfed even the largest in Wun.

Passing Wun, he crossed the mouth of a river flowing down from the north. He surveyed it curiously, speculating about from whence he or she flowed, whether it suffered as much as the Stream Goddess did, where she entered the Changeling. It almost seemed that the tributary spoke to him, not in words or even like Harka, but in signs. In its thick turbid waters, swollen by some far-off rain, Perkar seemed to catch evanescent images of distant mountains, storm clouds, raven black, encasing bones of silent lightning. Rain falling for days on end. The mud the tributary brought fanned out into the Changeling, trailed darkly along his northern edge, thinner with each downstream moment but still visible. Perkar considered the tributary's resistance, its unwillingness to immediately die, and a vague hope gathered courage and became an idea. Once more he put his weight on the tiller, hoping to enter the fading brown stream, to reach a place where the hold of the Changeling might not be absolute. When that failed, he lifted up his pack and sword and prepared to jump.

"Don't," Harka warned him. He ignored the sword and leapt anyway.

He believed, briefly, that he had succeeded. His strokes took him cleanly toward the bank, and the current, while mightily strong, was not swift. Almost he reached the brown streak and its promise, the gift of some storm cloud far away, but then the current took him like an immense fist, and his pitiful Human strength was nothing. Exhausted, he soon found himself back against the boat.

"It was worth a try," he told Harka later, his shirt drying in the sun.

"I thought you had resigned yourself to this," the sword chided him.

"I have," he told it, and did not further explain himself.

A day passed, and a night, and then a new morning. The River in the past few days had swollen to an enormous size, so huge that, even in the center of the channel, Perkar had to strain to see that southern shore, a fine line of green against the yellow haze of endless desert. The Changeling was still meandering east, but the sunrise was still farther to his left each morning, and so he knew they—the boat, the River and he—were gradually turning more southward, toward an ocean he had only heard the vaguest rumors of and could not imagine at all. Surely the River held all of the water there was in the world. How could the "ocean" be larger? His own language did not even have a word for such a thing; he could only call it the Big Lake. But the language in his head, with its strange vowels and clattering short consonants, did have such a word. They could imagine it.

Bemused, Perkar wondered if, as the Changeling ate streams, the ocean could eat the Changeling. That might be worth knowing, a way of eventual escape even, except that whatever could eat him might be worse, more powerful still.

Toward midday, he noticed another vessel approaching him from the northeast bank. It grew quickly in his sight, a lean, long craft with a lateen sail, a white triangle fragment of the overhead sun.

He drew Harka, gazing off in the distance at nothing in particular. His regard was drawn inevitably back to the approaching craft. Twice more he tried looking away, and twice more he found himself staring at the ever-closer sail.

"They are a danger to me, then?" he asked the sword.

"So it would seem," Harka replied.

He took the tiller and guided the boat toward the opposite bank. The Changeling let him; he knew from experience that he could get close to shore if he wanted, though when the River deemed him too close he would stop him. Despite this maneuver, the approaching sail drew nearer and nearer. In a short time, the strange boat was just to the left of him. As he watched, the canvas came down, and two men began paddling furiously as a third watched him impassively from the bow.

"What do you want?" he called to them, when he judged them near enough to hear.

The man in the bow replied in a language Perkar had never heard before, but understood well. It was the language taught him by his dreams.

"I don't know that barbarous tongue, westlander," the man shouted back. "But if you can understand real speech and have any sense, you won't make trouble for us."

Perkar opened his mouth, and alien words licked off his tongue, first thickly, but swiftly learning more grace.

"I have no desire to cause you trouble," he declared.

"Well, then," the man retorted, as the two boats pulled almost within reaching distance. "In that case, you will abandon your ship now and save us the trouble of throwing you off. If you jump, too, you can leave your boat in a single piece rather than with your head and body separated."

"I have nothing of value to steal," Perkar said reasonably. "And I have no wish to fight you." Both statements were more than true. Though strange-looking, these men were Human Beings, not gods who would wing home to their mountain and be reclothed. They were men, and if they died the River would swallow their souls. Perhaps they would end like the watery fish he had speared, far back at the headwaters, memories of themselves in the current. Like the Kapaka.

Fury sparked at that. He realized they might well kill him, too, and that he no longer wished.

The man in the bow scowled, fiercely ridged eyebrows bunching above a hawklike nose, piercing black eyes. He held up a curved sword—heavy-looking, more like a giant cleaver than something to fight with. "Jump off or die," the stranger warned. One of the other men produced a sword, as well, while the third maneuvered the boat closer still.

Perkar drew Harka and stood, too. A month and a half in the boat had left him more than adept at standing in a rocking vessel.

"Please," he pleaded, though in him the anger was growing. "There is no need for this. I have nothing."

"You have your boat," the man countered easily, "and that will fetch a price worth fighting for. In fact, it might fetch a very high price as a curio. The Waterborn down in Nhol like curious things." His eyes narrowed. "And that sword; quite odd. Furthermore, you are clearly from far, far away. Why would you travel so far unless you have something to trade?"

It wasn't really a question, and Perkar realized that the man was not negotiating, but only trying to convince him to jump. Despite his belligerent attitude, he seemed reluctant to attack, even given the advantage he and his men had in numbers. He was perhaps thirty-five or forty, old enough to have experienced a few nasty surprises, to know that even the most promising situation could end in disaster. His men were young, younger than Perkar, though they had a hard look about them and numerous scars. The man's sons, perhaps?

"You can see I have nothing, or you are blind," he pointed out. "Let me go in peace. I can't jump in the River; he won't let me." Why wouldn't they listen to him?

"The River doesn't care about you—or anybody—except the Waterborn," the man asserted. He spat. "That for you. Get out of your boat or die."

He hesitated, wondering what would happen if he did jump overboard. Surely the Changeling would not let them take the boat. But if it did…