Something nibbled his leg. He jerked and thrashed in the water. A croaker let out the mournful call that gave the fish its name, then splashed away. The things were cowards and scavengers and not worth eating if anything better was available. Alexios was glad to be rid of this one.
It could have been worse. It could have been a dragonfish. Dragonfish did not usually attack boats or people in the River. When they did, the people attacked usually reappeared on a new stretch of River.
Another grailstone, another town of Rhomaioi. This one was called Thessaloniki, after the second city in Alexios’s empire. The people had lit a bonfire; Alexios saw men and women dancing around it. Faintly, the music of turtlefish lyres and upraised voices reached his
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ears. He smiled. He would sooner have been dancing around that fire himself than where he was.
In the middle of the next stretch of quiet dark, another croaker swam snuffling up to Alexios, hoping, no doubt, that he was a piece of offal. He hit the fish with his fist. It nipped him on the leg before it fled. He hoped he wasn’t bleeding. Blood in the water would draw a dragonfish to him if anything would.
The last town of Rhomaioi before the frontier with Bornu was Nikaia. More fires blazed at the frontier; a detachment of Rhomaioi kept watch against the infidels. Less than a hundred yards farther on, the black men had then* own frontier garrison, of similar size to the one Alexios had posted.
The Bornu capered round their watchfires to the beat of bamboo-stalk drums with redfish leather skins. They brandished flint-tipped spears and shouted threats across the border to the Rhomaioi, most of whom, perhaps fortunately, could not understand them.
Alexios looked ahead. Before long, he spied torches on the River. The Bornu, he had learned since resurrection, came from a desert part of Africa; they did not take naturally to the water. But they were not stupid, either— they knew that if New Constantinople wanted to cut a deal with Shytown, the River was the logical avenue for emissaries.
The Basileus slid all the way under the water. He tried to get as far under the trunk of the yew as he could. Only the tip of his hollowed-out bamboo stuck up above the surface. The other end was in his mouth. He took deep, slow, steady breaths. A military manual from hundreds of years before his own time which he’d once read told how the Sklavenoi used this very trick to avoid detection by
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the Rhomaioi. Now, he thought, a Basileus of the Rhomaioi was turning it against barbarians.
He kept his eyes open, though the night-dark water all around him might as well have been ink. Then, through the crazily shifting mirror of the surface, he saw a flickering torchflame. He knew the black men were peering down into the River. If they saw his pale skin despite the gloomy kilts he’d draped round himself, if by some disaster they recognized his breathing tube for what it was… if either of those things happened, Isaac would become Basileus. Alexios just hoped the Bomu would eventually kill him, instead of torturing him almost to death, letting him heal, and starting over again.
The torchlight receded as the uprooted yew tree drifted on. Alexios sighed relief through hollow bamboo. He stayed submerged for some time, lest the noise of his emerging betray him to his foes.
But before long, he had to put up his head. He needed to watch the land by the River flow past, so he’d know when he’d gone by Bornu and entered the territory of Shytown. He also needed to keep an eye out for more rafts in the River. He would not have contented himself with a single line of pickets had he been Musa ar-Rahman, and he dared not assume the Sultan was less cautious than he.
Sure enough, he had to go under and breathe through his tube twice more. But the men of Bornu apparently found nothing suspicious about a tree floating downstream after a storm. Though once their torches seemed right overhead, they never probed the water with their spears.