The Midnight Reed-Hymn

Did a dozen dried ox-hide thongs matter when thirty feet of black water answered to a hollow marrow-bone? Menyhért the Driftwood sat with his heels tucked into the greasy silt of the cypress hummock, staring through the midnight fog at the sleeping warband. His wrists remained looped in rawhide, and the dried smear of cannibal blood Rozsa had drawn across his collarbone still pulled at his skin like dried sap. Ten paces away, Rozsa's bedroll lay beside the smoldering embers of a damp peat fire, her stingray-spine dagger laid across an oiled otter pelt. She had ordered him to sleep within arm's reach of her blade, but sleep was poor sport when the night air hung heavy and ripe for a lesson.

He slid his hands into his sedge satchel and drew out the narrowest of his three crane-bone pipes.

The hummock was a mound of decayed willow bark and tangled cypress roots rising two spans above the bayou. Around it, four forty-foot war-canoes floated in the stagnant creek, tethered to swollen tree trunks with braided marsh-grass. Dense delta mist clung to the stagnant water, thick as curdled milk, swallowing the moon and muting the croak of bullfrogs. On the thwarts and across the mud-shelf, twelve coastal paddlers slept beneath stiff turtle-shell shields, twitching at every splash of a falling acorn.

Menyhért lowered his belly to the sodden bank. He eased the tip of the crane bone beneath the black film of the river, leaving only the embouchure above the scum.

He did not blow air into the night. He rested his bottom lip against the cut edge of the bone and hummed, releasing a sustained, guttural drone from the back of his throat.

The vibration traveled down the polished marrow channel directly into the current.

Water carried sound four times faster than air, and river muck carried it deeper still. The tone was not music; it was the acoustic pulse of a bull wels catfish dragging its belly through deep silt to scrape winter parasites from its gills. A heavy, rhythmic tremor rippled through the creek bed.

Across the dark water, the cedar hull of Csente's dugout let out a sharp, groaning shudder.

Tiny bubbles broke across the surface around the war-canoes, carrying the smell of rotten marsh gas from the disturbed mud. The water began to churn with subterranean ripples, concentric rings pulsing outward from the submerged roots. Fifty paces out in the bayou channel, something immense rolled lazily along the bottom, its broad back grazing the underwater anchor-vines until the lead canoe rocked on its mooring.

A muffled curse rose from the mist.

Csente bolted upright on his bench, knocking his turtle-shell shield into the bilge with a loud hollow clatter. The giant steersman reached instinctively for his basalt war-club, his bare feet splashing into the cold water as he stumbled onto the hummock.

"Wake!" Csente's harsh voice cut through the fog. "Get your spears up! The deep muck is walking!"

Paddlers scrambled from their bedrolls in blind confusion. Flint daggers scraped against bone scabbards. Two warriors dropped their javelins into the mud, their hands trembling as the peat hummock beneath their heels vibrated with another subterranean thrum. Men who braved thirty-foot ocean breakers on the open sea shrank before the unseen depths of the inland delta, their faces pale and their javelins shaking above the bubbling mud.

"It circles the keels," one paddler hissed, backing toward the center of the hummock until his spine struck a cypress trunk. "Look at the foam. It is the Mud-Devourer. The river smells the blood we spilled at noon!"

Menyhért remained sprawled near the bank, his cheek pressed against the mud, lips still humming softly across the bone stops.

He lifted his mouth for a fraction of a breath, letting a dry chuckle slip into the mist. It was magnificent theater. Men who could crack a man's skull with a slab of knapped rock were now shrinking from the harmless grunting of half-asleep mud-feeders.

He shifted his fingers, flattening the tone to draw another shudder from the water.

The lead canoe groaned as an unseen bulk bumped the keel from below.

"It is the priest!" Csente roared, his eyes catching the ember-light as he spotted Menyhért lying by the water's edge. The steersman crossed the hummock in three heavy, mud-spraying strides, raising his basalt club high above his shoulder. "He calls the water-serpents to drown our fleet! Cut his throat and toss his carcase to the deep, or we will never see the morning!"

Four warriors surged forward behind Csente, their shell-tipped javelins leveled at Menyhért's ribs.

Menyhért did not scramble away. He rolled onto his back, crossing his bound hands over his belly, his dark eyes gleaming with insolent amusement as the club hovered above his skull.

"Strike hard, Oar-Boss," Menyhért said, his voice smooth and untroubled. "The wels catfish have sensitive bellies. A cracked skull might sour their appetite, but your liver will make a tender breakfast when they splinter your cedar rafts."

"Die, swamp-leech—"

A shape blurred through the mist between them.

Rozsa stepped over the peat fire, her movement silent as an owl's wing. The flat of her basalt war-club cracked hard against Csente's forearm, knocking the steersman's blow aside with a dull thud of bone against stone.

Csente staggered back two paces, his teeth clenched as he cradled his bruised arm. "Warlady! He is charming the water to sink us! The hulls are shaking!"

"Back to your bench, Csente," Rozsa commanded.

Her voice was low, flat, and absolute, cutting through the panic like an oyster knife through muscle. She stood barefoot in the cold silt, her otter pelt hanging loose over one bronze shoulder. Her hair was unbound, dark strands whipping across her collarbones in the damp river breeze. In her right hand, the double-edged stingray dagger pointed toward the ground, its serrated milk-white teeth catching the red glow of the dying peat.

"He will call every demon from here to the Great Lakes," Csente snarled, though he did not step past her reach. "We cannot fight what sleeps under forty feet of mud!"

"Then do not look into the mud," Rozsa said, never turning her head toward her steersman. "The watch is yours until dawn. Double the lines on the canoes. Anyone who drops a spear in the water dives to retrieve it, or feeds the current himself."

Csente glared past her shoulder at Menyhért, his broad chest heaving with frustrated fury. After a tense silence, the big warrior spat into the embers, turned on his heel, and stalked toward the beached dugouts, barking harsh orders to the trembling paddlers.

Rozsa turned slowly.

She stood over Menyhért where he lay stretched out on the mud. Her amber eyes held no trace of sleep, only a cold, sharp appraisal that made the hair on his arms prickle. The tip of her stingray blade hovered three inches above his throat, exactly where she had pressed it that first morning at his stilt-hut.

"You grow reckless with your wind, singer," she said, her voice dropping into a dangerous whisper.

Menyhért did not flinch from the bone barb. He tilted his chin upward, leaning his neck toward the serrated edge until the chill of the venomous bone brushed his skin.

"I grew bored of listening to your coastal oxen snore, Warlady," he murmured, lifting the crane-bone pipe between his bound fingers. "A little river-music keeps the blood warm. Besides, your paddlers needed reminding that the bayou belongs to those who know its language."

"My paddlers carry clubs," Rozsa said, stepping closer. The hem of her damp otter tunic brushed against his bare shins. "One word from me, and Csente would have beaten your head into catfish paste."

"Yet you did not give the word," Menyhért answered softly.

The silence hung between them, thick with peat smoke and the cold breath of the fen. Rozsa looked down at him, her jaw hard as basalt, before she sheared through the tension with a sharp jerk of her wrist. The stingray dagger slid back into its wooden sheath.

She caught the center of his rawhide cord and hauled him upright, dragging him three paces across the hummock to dump him beside her peat embers.

"Sleep," Rozsa said, dropping onto the otter pelt between his body and the open camp. "Before I decide Csente was right."

Menyhért settled back into the warmth of the gray ash, curling his bound hands beneath his chin. She had chosen her pilot over her blood-brother, and he had learned the boundary of her leash.

When the deep water answered his bone pipe again, he would take far more than her patience.