Water Logic (21 page)

Norina spoke again, a voice in darkness, a voice as blank and flat as a whitewashed wall, “It is appreciated. When Zanja died last time, Karis removed herself. This time she remains with us.”

“I lost a wife and two babies all at the same time. I fell out of that family and could never join another one.”

“It is apparent to me that you can learn from pain, so I’m not surprised by this history. Of course, the situation with Karis is different, but not that different. Karis has married herself to a crosser of boundaries, a hinge of history, and from the first moment of that affair I thought it was the worst possible match.

“In all of Shaftal, children are precious, but the children in Lalali are thought of as vermin, and if they survive they grow up to be slaves. There Karis was monstrously betrayed, from her first breath. By the time we found her she was damaged, distorted, stunted, subverted, addicted—and that is what Harald filled with the power of Shaftal. No one thought Karis could ever be worthy of that power. I never thought so—the Fall of the House of Lilterwess ended my training, and I hadn’t yet been taught how to compensate for the great weakness of all air bloods, that we easily become only able to see flaws. But Zanja—she sees possibility, and when it can’t be seen, she feels it, and when she can’t feel it, she can act in blind ignorance, for any movement at all in any direction can become a way to enlightenment for her.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Seth said. “And it’s the same problem I’m having everywhere I go and in everything I do. I’d conclude that I’m incapable of being a councilor except that everyone on my committee is as confused and overwhelmed as I am.”

“I’ll say it in one sentence, then: Zanja is Karis’s trailbreaker—and without her, Karis can’t trust the unfolding moments of her extraordinary life—but Zanja cannot be what she is without abandoning Karis, and Karis cannot hold onto her except by letting her go.”

“So what?” said Seth, for she was beginning to feel very crabby. She didn’t like being trapped in this dark clutter of a room, and the Truthken’s arrogance in confining her here and lecturing her like this was more than aggravating. “Karis has an awareness of the world that makes my own seem childish. How could she understand so much, and have so little faith?”

Seth then felt the full power of a Truthken’s silence. That, too, gave an absence of information in which a person’s anxieties might begin running wildly about, squeaking with terror, like mice who suddenly become convinced that a cat is in the room.

“What did you hear,” Seth asked her, “in what I just said?”

“That there is nothing feigned about you.”

“Of course not. I’m as dull and honest as any earth blood.”

“So you don’t realize how much you’re influenced by air. You have an unusual elemental balance, with almost as much air as earth, informed by fire—that would make you highly adaptable, able to see all sides of things, while the fire saves you from indecisiveness.”

“Air?” said Seth, having hardly even heard the rest of it.

“Yes.”

The silence again, and Seth said, “Well, I guess I’m doomed to learn all kinds of things about myself that I’d rather not know. What else did you hear?”

“In Basdown you have been protected from the worst that people can do to each other. I suppose it’s a result of that unshakeable Basdowner
decency. You are aware that you’ve been protected, yet you don’t realize the extent to which it limits you.”

“I had to ask,” Seth muttered. The pig’s snout banged on her back, and she was tempted to give the headboard a good kick.

Silence can work in two ways, she realized after a while. Norina, by holding this conversation in darkness, had deprived herself of information she might have gained by merely watching Seth’s face. So Seth said, “I’m trying to figure out how anyone could come to know what they lack.”

“We stumble across it, of course, and some of us recognize it and some do not. It’s a problem of perception; a problem of how one sees, and how able one is to accurately see what is there.”

“You learned all this about me from—what was it, two sentences?”

“One sentence followed by one question, actually. Yes, Seth, I did. And in our conversation since then I have learned how quickly you change. Observe.”

Norina opened the door. Now Seth could see her again, the scar that slashed across her inexpressive face; the hair that was shorn even closer than Clement’s, so close that her scalp looked very much like the chin of a man who has gone two days without shaving; the eyes, the coldest and sharpest thing about that extraordinarily cold and sharp woman.

A moment passed. Seth realized the pig wasn’t poking her in the back. Norina, able to see her face now, said, “I am not so frightening as you thought.”

She walked away, leaving Seth feeling quite dazed.

Later that same day, Karis clasped Seth’s hand, and it was like being licked by a tongue of lightning. Seth yanked her hand away.

Karis said, “I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking. I intrude on people in my family all the time without asking permission first.”

“And that’s why they’re all so healthy, I suppose.”

“That’s why Emil grew some new teeth, and Norina got pregnant—
just the one time, though.”

They were in the bedroom, and when Karis retreated there she had always lost her sense of humor. Seth laughed, though she was laughing alone. “I’m not offended, Karis—I was just startled. I wouldn’t mind a new tooth or two.”

Seth offered her hand and Karis clasped it again, but it was just a handclasp. Karis said, “I feared there was something wrong with you. But no, you’ve just been talking with Norina.”

Later, Seth peeled turnips with T
am, a member of the Peace Committee who was an apple farmer from the north, near Kisha. At first he had been living with a distant cousin who was a clerk in a business that Tam didn’t understand well enough to describe. But he had moved to Travesty when he realized that the backache that had nagged hi
m for years disappeared entirely when he was in that building. He had moved into one of the chilly room
s in Seth’s wing, which no doubt would be sweltering by summer. He had an easy way about him and was a good neighbor. They frequently
wandered into each other’s rooms, asking each other for definitions of words or help with understanding a particularly unreadable sentence.

That morning’s meeting of the Peace Committee had aggravated him as much as it had aggravated her. He said, “Emil writes us those notes, which I’m sure he intends to be helpful, and we try to answer him, but no matter what question he asks we keep saying the same thing: We must change the Sainnites into Shaftali. As if saying it would make it happen somehow.”

“I constantly feel like I don’t know enough,” Seth said.

“But how much more can we possibly know? My eyes hurt from those mountains of books we’re reading. My ears hurt from all that talking people are aiming in our direction. Yet the more I learn, the stupider I feel.”

“It’s odd,” said Seth, “that we have a good four hundred years of knowledge between the ten of us, and yet that doesn’t seem to be enough.”

He glanced sideways at her, and it occurred to her that turnip-peeling might be quite clarifying. Maybe the entire committee should start meeting in the kitchen. “All this knowledge,” Seth said, “maybe it’s just a lot of clutter. When I was learning what to do when a calf is coming out backwards—”

“I’m getting tired of your cow stories.”

Tam could peel a turnip without hardly looking at his hands, and the peel came spiraling off in a uniform piece, which was all the more remarkable considering how difficult turnips were.

“Like peeling a turnip without knowing what a turnip is, without having ever seen one, without having seen anyone else try to peel one. You could tell someone how to do it—you could waste a whole year on it, probably. But that person still wouldn’t be able to peel a turnip.”

Tam said, “It’s closer to five hundred than four hundred years, I should think. You’re a bit younger than most of us.” The peel spiraled away and then he glanced at his hands and said, “If I even think about it, I can’t do it.”

“You’ve peeled a few thousand turnips, I expect.”

“And we’ve seen plenty of Sainnites, all of us have.”

Seth thought for a while about how they all thought they knew what a Sainnite was. Then she considered how all this might be a failure to perceive. She had thought Clement was a farmer in soldier’s clothing; she had been surprised by Damon’s friendliness and good humor; she had been affronted by the blood spilled in the hallway, as though the assassination attempt had been a failure of etiquette. People had seen their families butchered by a friendly and good-humored soldier just like Damon, who was acting on the orders of an intelligent, lonely, contradictory commander just like Clement. That was the sort of thing Seth thought it was important to understand.

“We have to know all sides,” Seth said, “but especially the inside.”

“What?” said Tam, who thanks to Seth appeared to have lost the knack of turnip-peeling.

“We’re trying to put it inside of us, but we need to put ourselves inside of it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Seth said. “I don’t know what I just said. But still, we should consider that we might be doing this thing the wrong way.”

Two days later, she went back to Watfield Garrison. This time she had a letter from Emil, written to Commander Ellid, which Gilly had to translate. Ellid didn’t speak Shaftalese at all.

Seth feared she wouldn’t be able to learn their language, either. But neither would most Shaftali, so that was a problem they needed to find a way around.

Ellid said something in a tone that certainly sounded doubtful, if not disbelieving. She had an extraordinarily neat office, unlike Clement’s. Gilly said, “The commander finds it difficult to understand why you wish to do this.”

“It’s because I don’t know the right things, in the right way. I thought this might help. If it does, all the Peace Committee members might do something like this—in different garrisons, of course.”

Gilly translated, Ellid responded, and Seth could tell that she was even more skeptical now. “There are practical problems,” Gilly said.

“I’m sure there are, but I’m a practical person.”

“But a soldier’s life—!” Gilly paused, as Ellid was speaking again. Before he could translate, though, Seth said, “For just one day and one night, then.”

He seemed surprised. Seth said, “I’ll come back to Commander Ellid, of course, and ask her to allow me another day—I guess you should tell her that’s what I intend to do. But after one day, she’ll know I’m not going to die of whatever she thinks I’ll die of, and she’ll let me stay another day. And if I’m still alive then . . .”

Gilly gave her a cool look, and it occurred to her that he might actually be angry with her—angry for Clement’s sake. How long had he worked with Clement, his hand in her glove? How had a Shaftali man become a general’s secretary, and what was it like for him, to be in-between? Was Clement his family, and was he hers?

Seth had a great deal to learn, that was certain. But she could feel herself sorting things out, by that method Norina had urged her not to pay any attention to, because it worked without thinking, like turnip-peeling did. Right now, she thought, I just need to go into a solder’s barracks, and put my satchel onto an empty bed—or whatever they sleep on—and look around to see who’s next to me, and tell her my name. That’s all I need to do.

She ended up in Prista’s company, which of ten possible companies
was the best she could have hoped for, though she didn’t even realize it until various soldiers began yelling for Damon. The young, good-natured soldier eventually appeared in the barracks mud room, though he didn’t step into the sleeping part proper, due to some kind of rule, Seth supposed, about men going into the women’s barracks, which she assumed would also apply the other way around.

“Councilor?” he said, clearly astonished to see her there.

“Just Seth. I’m spending the night here. Ellid’s orders.”

His eyebrows rose comically, and he spoke to the confused women, then said, “But there are bugs in the beds.”

Seth began laughing so hard she finally had to sit down on the bed, lest she fall over. The women liked her much better then, and even more when she went out into the city and convinced the greengrocer to talk to the herbalist down the street, who was as mystified as everyone else, but let her have a big bag of strewing herbs, which took care of all the bugs in all the beds. So her life as a soldier began.

Chapter 15

In Clement’s childhood, her mother’s company had scarcely left the coastal region of Hanishport. Here, in Shaftal’s only safe port, many of the first influx of refugee soldiers had landed, and here they had built their first garrison. As a youthful foot soldier she had fought on the leading edge of the occupation, into the Midlands and southward to Han, but not until the death of Harald G’deon and the attack on the House of Lilterwess did the Sainnites, reinforced by a new influx of refugee soldiers, move north and west. But Clement had never been far enough west to see the mountains, and although Saleen told her they could be seen anywhere beyond the Reestown crossroad, the clouds never lifted to let her see the view.

The Corber Valley had narrowed, the river ceased its meandering, and the flood finally lay behind them, to the east. They could follow the road again, and the road even was in reasonable condition, but still their progress was slow. They had taken a day’s respite in a settlement near Haprin, but that rest had done little good. Day after day they hobbled westward, with the brown river on their left and the brown hills on their right, so hemmed in by the weather’s gray horizon that Clement felt dislocated for days. Still, though her companions certainly were more than eager for the tedious journey to be over, she was not.

One evening they spotted some travelers at a distance, coming towards them through the drizzle. “Paladins,” said Saleen. “Who else would travel in this weather?” He trotted forward to greet them.

He returned with a man Clement’s age, whose lively face lost all expression every time he looked at Clement. Two gold earrings marked him as a true Paladin, Saleen’s equal in rank, whatever rank meant to the Paladins. However, like his irregular followers he wore plain homespun the brownish gray color of very dirty sheep, the preferred color of the irregulars, whose strategies depended so much on their ability to melt into the landscape.