Free Casting the Gods Adrift by Geraldine McCaughrean Page B

shouting prayers and reciting the crocodile spell. But father went on righting cages, apologising to the animals, hardly noticing as they bit the fingers gripping their cages. The cheetah was a ball of golden muscle and fur, clawing at her cage, chewing at the slats, spitting and arching her back into a shape as unnatural as the broken boat’s. The ibises, in a cage by my feet, were beating themselves ragged against their bars, against each other, handfuls of slender feathers bursting out around my ankles.
    â€˜Let them go, fool! Let them go!’
    I realised Father was speaking to me, telling me to unlatch the cage and loose thebeautiful birds he had so painstakingly trapped, before they broke all their wings or drowned along with the boat. I did it.
    The ibises burst out around me, battering my face with their scarlet wings, so that my world turned red. They fountained into the sky, piping shrilly. But the tethered falcons were past help. They were being pulled under the water as the boat settled lower. Their struggles brought the crocodiles in, slowly, glidingly. They were in no hurry. Their feast would not escape them; this basket of assorted meats that was gradually breaking up in front of their noses.
    Father opened cages with trembling, hasty hands. ‘Hold on, Ibrim!’ he told my brother. ‘Get up higher, boy! Good boy!’ But he went to help the animals first. The reeds that made up the deepest part of the boat were sodden now, awash with river water. One by one, he opened the cages. His baboons lumbered out to sit on the sides of the boat, feet tucked up, backs hunched, long arms dangling, like miserable old men.
    The crew would not let father loose the cheetah. They threatened to knock himoverboard if he so much as went near the frenzied beast. Bad enough to drown, without being savaged, mid-river, by a wild cat. The boat shivered and hissed, and began to break apart.
    Suddenly, a shadow flowed over us all like spilt ink, and a ship twice our size glided alongside. Had the Ship of Heaven indeed been watching us from the sky and swooped down to help us? I truly thought it had.
    The baboons leaped in huge elegant bounds over our heads and into the rescue ship. The crew scrambled clumsily to safety over its smooth, painted sides. I edged my way round to where Ibrim was clinging to the steering paddle, and with my arm around his shoulders waited for help. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry.’ Only afterwards did I realise it was I, not he, who was crying.
    Two oars, painted blue with pure white blades, reached out to us from the other vessel. I wrapped Ibrim’s arms tight around one and, hugging the other myself, was lifted out of the
Palm of Thoth
by a huge, black-skinned, Nubian steersman. As I crossed the yawning gap, I looked downand saw a crocodile open the yellow shutter of an eye, startled to be robbed of his meal.
    My father, too, was offered an oar’s end to lift him clear. But he refused to be rescued until he had opened every cage, loosed every animal. At last, with his feet splashing through black, silty water, sinking deep into the fabric of the boat, he struggled aft towards the cheetah. But in her panic and fury, she hurled herself at him, overturning the cage which rolled through a gaping split in the boat and sank out of sight into the river. Crocodiles moved in under the hulk. Only then did my father allow himself to be lifted to safety with the blue-and-white oars.
    The top-spar of the beautiful rescue ship was now alive with baboons swinging by their hands and feet, grimacing at the people below. I saw several little girls huddled together in the prow, pointing up at them and laughing uncertainly. The ship’s rowers were now easing the barge upstream, away from the sandbar, leaving the
Palm of Thoth
foundering in midstream like a bale of straw pulled apart by rats.
    Rather than watch ours sink, I lookedaround at the boat that had come to our