The Waters Rising (10 page)

“I don’t understand
‘Pontos potentos . . .’
at all,” Xulai had grumbled long ago.

“Oh, you really do,” the princess had responded. “Suppose I need to know something about horses. Do I go out onto the parapet and shout into the air, ‘I need to know about horses’?”

“No. You would go find Horsemaster.”

“And where did you find that name, Horsemaster?”

“In my head.”

“Right, and if you had not known that name, you would have known some other name of someone you could ask. Instead of sitting about saying ‘I don’t know,’ you can always start with something you do know to find out things you don’t.
‘Velipe vun / em euxati nun / corusus apun / zusa paflotun.’
‘All wisdom grows / from curiosity seeds / planted in pots / full of ignorance.’
Paflotun,
ignorance, is far better fertilizer than false certainty, which allows nothing to grow at all.”

“What about that other one, about connecting nothings?”

“Suppose I lost a bracelet. Then I saw a certain page flush deep red and begin to sweat when it was mentioned. Then later I saw him sneaking into the stable and coming out with dirt on his hands; what would you suppose?”

“That perhaps he took it,” said Xulai. “And hid it in the stable somewhere.”

“I am so glad you said
perhaps
. You would not know that for sure, but
devo,
piling,
duxa devo duxa,
little bit on little bit, assembles possibilities,” said the princess. “One should explore all the possibilities, though one may neither accuse nor exonerate until one knows for sure . . .”

There were years of the princess’s
fumitos
in Xulai’s head. Even when the princess could no longer speak aloud, Xulai had visited, sitting close, stroking the princess’s single long braid as it faded over the years from jet, to ash, to silver. She had spent hours chattering like a magpie about utterly boring and inconsequential things: the kitchen cat’s latest kittens in their box beneath the stove; the tree in the orchard she had climbed to pick fruit so Cook could make a tart for dinner; the new surcoat Nettie Lean, the seamstress, was making for her. Her mouth had grown numb with chatter designed to bore the serving woman sitting nearby, bore her until she fell asleep or went for a walk or decided to visit the privies. If Xulai babbled long enough, the watchers always did one or the other.

Then Xulai could lean forward to the woman’s ear and say what she had really come to say.

“I have done as you asked, Xu-i-lok. The Duchess of Altamont went by today in her carriage. I watched from a tree in the orchard. When she had gone, I collected dust from the tracks the wheels of her carriage had made. I have it with me.”

“Cast it on the red coals of the fire and say the words I taught you.”

Xulai took her handkerchief from her pocket, fluttered the dust that it held onto the fire, and murmured the words. At once, the room lightened and the air lifted as though a gentle breeze had blown through to make the fire burn brighter. Xulai returned to the bed and leaned forward until her forehead touched the forehead of the sleeper, making her mind empty as a broken bowl so the woman’s words could come into it.

“Take the little knife I gave you and gather some rosemary from the kitchen garden, some yew from the cloister. Get a bit of chalk from your classroom. Put them in my hands. Tonight, before dark, take them from my hands, draw a line from side to side on each windowsill and threshold in this room; lay a sprig of rosemary at one end of each line, a sprig of yew at the other.”

That evening, while the footman was having his supper downstairs, Xulai sneaked into the woman’s room and did as she had been told. On the following morning, she heard Dame Cullen say to Cook, “The nurse says
she
had a good night last night, free of those terrible dreams that make her tremble and moan. Her face is quite peaceful this morning.”

Then Xulai knew she had helped create barriers against a harassing evil that came through windows and doors. Were these barriers merely symbolic? Perhaps. Did they have intrinsic efficacy? Perhaps. Whichever it might have been, she learned quickly and applied what she knew relentlessly,
“duxa de duxa,”
piling little thing on little thing to make a larger understanding. Chalk, for example. Chalk was made up of the shells of millions of tiny creatures that had lived in the Far Before Time. Chalk’s very essence was one of attenuation, of existence stretched over time. The essence of rosemary was healing. The essence of yew was threefold: power in the wood, poison in the berry, panacea in the bark. The essence of chalk and herbs together weakened evil intentions and kept them at bay, though whether this was intrinsic or merely a conduit for some other power, she didn’t know.

She had learned how to defeat evil by putting bits of image-bound mirror at windows where the evil would be trapped by its own reflection and held there until Xulai gathered the shards in a basket of osier (itself emblematic of life) and cast them surreptitiously in the farrier’s forge. There, the glass melted into lumps with the evil trapped inside. The lumps could later be scratched out of the ashes and put somewhere as remote and unreachable as possible, for they could be destroyed only by a power greater than that held by the sender. The princess, in her weakness, no longer held such potency. Still, she said, even a mountain may be worn away by a constant fall of rain. Each bit of foulness was worth catching and hiding away, day after day, for even these tiny shards reduced the power of the sender over time.

Almost always it was a woman who was an Evil Sender (though the princess used the Tingawan phrase,
um zagit-gao
)
.
The
gao,
the sender, expected her
zagit
to return to her strengthened by the accomplishment of its work.
Zagit
meant evil, or pain, or death. Whichever the sender intended might return if it had been unsuccessful, just as it went, with no loss to the
gao.
If it did not return at all, however, the
gao
was weakened, if only a tiny bit. Each time Xulai gathered the melted bits of glass and dropped them into an unused well, or into some bottomless crack in a rock, she received comfort and love from the Woman Upstairs. Each time, she could scarcely believe in receiving such kindness from someone so ill.

Xulai had never before spoken to anyone of what happened between herself and the princess. She had never asked anyone what the illness was. She had heard the curse whispered of, but no one in the castle had spoken openly of it—not until now, after the curse had killed and was done with.

“Well. Presumably done with,” Abasio had said doubtfully when she told him of it. “I would like to know more, much more, about it. Who would I ask?”

“Precious Wind,” Xulai had replied. “She might know.”

Now, leaving the kitchen with Abasio, Xulai thought it would be a good time for him to meet Wind and Bear. She had planned to meet them in the solar this morning, for things were changing, Bear had said, and they had to make plans.

Upstairs, in the little corner room that always caught the morning sun, she introduced him without preamble. “This is my friend Abasio.” Having mentally tried to explain him to herself, she had decided not to try to explain him to anyone else.

The two Tingawans looked him over without expression. Abasio merely stood, perfectly relaxed, neither fidgety nor presumptuous, awaiting their verdict.

“Where from?” asked Bear eventually.

“Some years ago I was east of here, past the first range of mountains, past the desert that lies east of them, over the second range of mountains, the Great Stonies, and down onto the plains beyond. There were cities there then.”

“And now? What happened to them?”

“Gone, mostly, struck by a plague. The restorers have been busy since. They’re still planting trees where the cities were. They’ve brought back animals and birds. The plague killed most of the warlike people; the ones who are left are peaceable. The Edges are still there. Those are places around the old cities where the Old Sciences are still understood.”

“Dangerous?” murmured Bear.

Abasio shook his head. “I think not. The people in the Edges have a noninterference doctrine. They know what they know; they pass it on to their children; they preserve their knowledge, but they don’t bother anyone else with it. They have one unbreakable rule: they must understand everything a discovery is capable of before they use it in any way. If it can hurt, they don’t use it.”

“There’s been a lot of talk about the waters rising.”

Abasio shrugged. “The Edgers told me the waters will keep coming. They said that when the earth was formed, the aggregation included several huge ice comets. They were mixed and surrounded by a lot of stone, so there were reservoirs of water deep inside the planet that nobody knew were there. Recently, they’ve found a way out. There’s a country called Artemisia, south of the mountains. The Big River used to run through there and the land went on south a long way before it came to a part of the ocean they called the Gulf. Now over half that land is gone. Of course, it was lowland to begin with. I haven’t been to the East End of this continent, but I’ve heard about it. All the cities that used to be along the eastern shore are underwater now, or with their tops sticking out. There’s people living in the tops of the old buildings. They go back and forth in boats. Down below, in the parts below water, they farm oysters and mussels.”

Bear snorted. “We hear about other places. I’m not sure I believe it.”

Abasio regarded him thoughtfully. The people in the courtyard had told him that Bear disbelieved most things he hadn’t seen for himself—except that the winning card was destined for his hand. Bear was said to be a dreadful and losing wagerer. “You don’t need to go far to learn the truth of it, just to Ragnibar Fjord, between Wold and Kamfels. I’ve seen old maps, really old maps. You know there’s an ocean west of the Icefang Mountains where there used to be farmland stretching westward for hundreds of miles?”

“We do know that,” said Precious Wind, quelling Bear’s snort before it sounded.

“An earthquake went right down that whole side of the continent, split a piece of it off, and the ocean came in. What’s now Ragnibar Fjord used to be a river canyon flowing to the west, into the sea. The river made a dogleg north for a way, then went west to the ocean. The ocean flooded up that river canyon, kept coming south, around the bend, then it’s turned east for a few miles.”

“Where Krakenholm is,” said Bear.

“No.
Past
where Krakenholm
was,
” said Abasio. “I was there a few days ago. Now the buildings at Krakenholm are underwater. Somebody’s built new ones on the higher rock, but they don’t look permanent to me.”

“How far?” asked Precious Wind, her eyes wide. “How far east have the waters gone?”

“Miles back into the hills. The track I followed was above the river, but they’ve built a new road for some miles east of Krakenholm. Before I got quite that far, I was watched by some nervous bowmen. Hulix’s men, I’d guess. The Stoneway, the way through the wall . . .”

“What about it?”

“When the water gets to the top of the Stoneway, you’ll have ocean running down the valley instead of a river.”

“Except that most of Wold will probably already be underwater as the sea moves east from Wellsport.” Precious Wind stared out the window. “I have been told that this happened in the Before Time, this great surge of waters, shortly before the hot times came, before the Big Kill and the Time When No One Moved Around.”

“I’ve been told the same,” said Abasio. “Back then, it was a matter of ice melting and then freezing again. This time there’s a lot more water, and as it flows out of the deep caverns, the earth will collapse into them, leaving only water, that’s all.”

Bear made an impatient gesture at what he regarded as so much nonsense. “So, how’d you come all that way?”

“The old maps say the desert is a low place. When I started out, I figured if water got that far, it had filled the desert, so I didn’t go that way. I went north, along the east edge of the mountains, until there was nothing but forests. People call it trackless, but it’s not. There’s trails there, even roads some places. People still trade and travel and wander. There’s blowholes and hot springs jumping out at you, true, but most places people have put up warning signs. Other places there’s signs saying which trails are safe. People are generally helpful; they’re eager for news, always.”

Precious Wind asked, “Do you know which of the old lands are gone?”

“On this continent, by the old names? Some. There was a place called Florda, and it’s gone. There were three places along the water west of Florda and they’re all gone. George’s and Mispi’s and Albambas, something like that. The ocean comes way up into the land along there, and there’s fish! My heaven, are there fish! Conkrodiles, too. Or maybe alley gators. Never did know the difference. Both eat you as soon as say good morning to you. The way we know about them and the fish and all is from the boat people, and there are more of them every year. They’ll decide on a place, maybe a hundred boats or more of them. They’ll link themselves together with ropes and give the place a name. They’ll live there for a year or two, until the fishing gets slim, then one night they’ll untie the ropes, pull up anchors, and go off in all different directions. Later they’ll gather up in different sets of boats and call it something else. Some say it’s a courting move, to remix their families genetically every so often.”