“Up, I say,” Yau said, and Aralim opened his eyes. The sun, though blocked by the winding tree branches overhead, blinded him. He raised his hand to block it, like a second canopy. Light spilled through his fingers as his eyes grew accustomed. He sat up and stretched his arms sorely, before looking around.
The near-dozen inhabitants of their raft were all awake, save Kil’nar’s wife and another young woman who was travelling on her own. Aralim was a few years past his fortieth name day, and after years of sleeping on the ground, his body was stiff and sore most of the time.
He looked for Miresh; she sat with her legs crossed. In her hands, she held Aralim’s parchment and a small piece of charcoal. She noticed Aralim and smiled, and then went back to her drawing.
Yau was still standing over him. He had a slightly rounded belly, displayed between the open-fronted brown tunic he wore. His skin was only a shade darker than the article of clothing—Aralim and Miresh were the only ones of their ethnicity on the raft. The boat-master had a small moustache, barely reaching the sides of his lips, and a wide nose. “You’re next on,” the man said, shoving a small thumb in the direction of Hayan and one of the navigation poles.
Aralim groaned and climbed to his feet. He left his lantern staff with his pack. Hayan thanked him for the relief. The man promptly laid down nearby and shut his eyes for a nap after being up for half the night. Quietly, Aralim pulled the pole forward and pushed against the bottom of the river. They had passed through a number of rocky and narrow waterways the last few days, but the Ake’ma had widened and deepened again, after they left a small river town in a lake the day before.
They passed a kapok tree that was very near to the water. After seeing some such giants in the distance, he had asked Hayan about them, and the Numa man had explained that the kapok trees were the largest in the rainforest, sometimes towering twice the height of all the canopy around them. He had yet to see the base of one’s trunk. As they neared it, he looked eagerly in that direction—the roots of the tree rested above the ground like lazily dropped blankets, folding and layering until the soil claimed them. A small deer-like creature was foraging at its base; it was no larger than a wolf, with small nubby antlers and a black and dark grey pelt. It paid them no mind, and kept eating some of the trees silky seeds that had fallen at its feet.
“My turn,” someone said. Aralim blinked; the other rower, a man named Ay’kurn, surrendered his pole to the young woman who had been asleep when Aralim awoke. She nodded to Aralim, as she joined his task. “Good way to wake up I guess.”
“I suppose,” he replied. “Look at that tree. How high is it, a hundred feet? Two?”
“Probably close to two,” she replied.
“What a great spirit,” he said. In his homeland, any tree that large would have been surrounded by members of the Path’s precepts.
She smiled. She had good teeth, though her eyes looked a little yellow and her black hair was thin. “The tree has a spirit?” she asked.
“Everything has a spirit or is part of the great world spirit,” Aralim replied. “We are spirits, the elements are spirits.”
She laughed now, but in an open way, not a mean way. A massive butterfly fluttered by between them. “A bug spirit,” she said. “So… do you believe in not harming anything, like the Priests of Maga?”
“What? No,” Aralim said. “Violence is another form of power, of course. All spirits must seek enlightenment through any means they are capable of.” The young woman seemed caught off guard by his statement. Before she could react, Aralim asked, “Who are the Priests of Maga?”
“Who are you?” she questioned, instead. “I’ve heard you talking to your friends about your beliefs and I’ve never heard of such a religion before.”
Aralim grinned. He pushed his long pole off a rock, to keep the raft moving away from the nearby bank. Next it was the woman’s job to push it forward. “I am Aralim,” he told her, “A Walker of the Path. Many men and women in the land south of the Stormy Sea seek the Path to advancement, but some of us wander in search of it.”
For a while they kept pushing the raft in silence. Yau and Donbrick were discussing favourite drinks near the front of the raft, and their voices drifted downstream quietly. Miresh was still drawing away, and Aralim finally noticed what she was working on; it was a more-detailed illustration of the knife from her first vision, which he realized had also appeared in her second dream, but lit up like the sun.
“What does your religion say about bad people?” the nearby woman asked quietly. “Can they change?”
Aralim nodded. “Change is one of the most powerful tools to enlightenment. All the world must change,” he said.
“But can we?” she asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “Do you want to?”
She nodded, gently, then looked back at the river and moved her oar. They listened to Kil’nar sing a traveller’s song quietly. It was about a man sailing up and down a river looking for iron—Aralim decided this land was unlike any he’d travelled before.
“My name is Naeen,” she said. He looked back at her, to find her looking at him with a small smile. She looked hopeful. “I got on this boat with no idea where I was going. I don’t know anyone who will be in Rema, save Aralim, and I don’t have a hope in the world except your Path. Will you let me walk with you?”
“Of course,” Aralim said, without thinking. Naeen sighed in relief, as Aralim continued pushing his pole against the bottom of the Ake’ma River. “I’ll introduce you to the others.”