Water Logic (34 page)

He sat back on his heels. Zanja struggled into her gear and heaved the mighty book over her shoulders. He observed her thoughtfully. “You are correct,” he finally said.

“Farewell, Coles.”

He stood up then and clasped both her hands in his. For a few moments he held onto them as grimly and stolidly as a warrior enduring a rite of initiation. Then he let go.

Chapter 25

The workers left early for the fields, Jareth among them, while Seth and Damon were still eating their porridge. “Oh, I meant to bring a hat,” Seth said to Damon and to anyone else who might not be entirely preoccupied with feeding children or kneading bread dough.

Upstairs the big house seemed deserted, for no matter how early the sun rose or how late it set, the days were never long enough during the warm season, and no one ever lounged late in bed unless they were sick. Seth took a straw hat from its hook in her bedroom and continued down the hall and up the attic stairs, to the room where Jareth’s narrow bed was crammed among the clothes chests and broken pieces of furniture. The High Meadow farmers were as unwilling as anyone to get rid of things that might later prove useful, and these attic rooms were crammed with the junk of generations. All Jareth’s belongings seemed to be in the knapsack tucked under the bed. Seth pulled it out and went through it but found only clothing and commonplace travel gear: a tin porringer, a match case, a sewing kit, a spare shirt. There was nothing in the bedding or tucked under the mattress, nothing secreted above the door frame or underneath a loose floorboard. But it looked as if the dust under the bed had recently been disturbed, and Seth began pulling things out.

In various crates she found an unlikely assortment of oddments: a broken spindle, a very bad poem, a sock, a curling lock of hair, several pewter spoons, a mouse nest. Having crawled entirely under the bed now, she found a last box, so heavy she could scarcely drag it out. By the light of the one unwashed window, she saw the dirt-stained wood and brass strapping that were nearly black with age. But there were handprints in the dust and bright new scratches in the escutcheon. Jareth had tried to force the lock, but he had failed. The snake poison would not be there.

Seth’s hand, the one with which she had grasped the box’s brass handle, was feeling peculiar, as though it had brushed across nettles. But the sensation was fading, and she fought back a rush of panic. She was not poisoned. But what was that sensation, and why did it seem so familiar? Was it earth magic? She ran her hand across the band of brass that reinforced the box’s hinged lid and felt the indentations of stamp marks. She blew away the dust and peered at the marks in the dim light. They looked like glyphs.

She had spent too much time here already. When she came back, if Jareth was gone by then, she would investigate this box further. She shoved everything back under the bed. The room looked no different than it had before. If Jareth had hidden poison somewhere else in this junk, it would take hours to find.

She heard voices in the distance and hastily left the room. As she crept down the stairs, the loud conversation turned to shouts, then a crash.

Seth ran the last few steps to the kitchen. There two chairs had been overturned, and Jareth, breeches smoking, was being hauled out of the big fireplace. Someone had apparently tossed a bucket of water onto the fire, and ashes floated everywhere. Damon was pinned into a corner by two mothers with shrieking babies in the crooks of their elbows. Old Sarna threatened the soldier with a gigantic porridge spoon. Mama had picked up a knife.

Seth said, “Damon, you promised you wouldn’t get into any arguments.”

“He called my mother a whore,” said Damon, sullen as a rebellious child.

Seth said to Jareth, “You did? Well you deserved it, then.”

Two people were brushing away cinders and tutting over the holes burnt in Jareth’s clothing. “I’m fine,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

Mama put down the knife on the table. “Seth, aren’t you ready to leave yet?”

Seth picked up Damon’s satchel and shouldered her own. Damon edged past the squalling babies and the upraised porridge spoon. He took the satchel from Seth, and she pulled him out the door into the sunshine. The ruckus had drawn people out of the vegetable garden to stand uncertainly near the house, rubbing dirt from their hands. Several dogs had also appeared. “It’s nothing,” Seth told this audience. She dragged Damon away by the arm before anyone could notice he was holding his breath to keep from laughing.

“Twisted his ankle, he said,” said Damon when they were well down the cart track. “I stopped him.”

“Did you have to push him into the fireplace? You should have cracked his skull with an iron pot instead.”

“Oh, Seth! I thought you were angry at me!”

“I couldn’t find his poison,” she said glumly.

“Maybe it is burned now.”

“I doubt that. I guess he came back so he could see us leave with his own eyes.”

Grinning, Damon tucked his hand into the crook of her elbow. “Now we retreat, eh, Captain?”

Their retreat ended at Ten-Furlong Farm, where Damon stopped short at his first sight of the cultivated fields. “But this is no cow farm!”

The furrows curved gently, following the undulations of the sloped hillsides. A line of bowed figures bearing baskets of seedlings to be planted stepped and stooped in cadence with each other—they certainly were singing, though they were too far away to hear. Closer by, a field of scarlet flowers was in full bloom. Damon gazed at this field in astonished silence, eyes wide open as though to see better. “But what do these farmers eat?” he finally asked.

“Flowers,” Seth said, laughing. “For that’s all they grow.”

“Why no cows?”

“They have no cow dogs, so they have no cows.”

“How have they no cow dogs?”

“It’s said that long ago the Ten-Furlong farmers killed their own dogs.”

“And no remembering why.”

“I’m afraid not.”

The Ten-Furlong family always found it difficult to gather new family members and were happy for the extra help in this busy season. They didn’t care that Damon was a soldier, and one of the farm wives even took a quick liking to him and kept him company in the room above Seth’s, where she could hear the bed scraping and thumping at all hours of the night. Damon, at first merely surprised, became confused, then dazed, and then happy. Seth had thought he was already happy, but this was a different thing entirely.

“That young man likes his flowers,” an elder commented to Seth
over breakfast. “He knows many, also: Nasturtium, Red-Seal, Flowering
Pea, Strawberry Up-Tuck . . .”

He named each flower with relish, and his list continued like a love ballad, through porridge and toast and a fresh pot of tea. Through the open window Seth could hear the remote cry of a falcon, the cackle of chickens, and the soft sigh of a breeze. Then she heard laughter as Damon and his new lover distracted each other from the work of turning soil in
the vegetable garden. Seth said, “All soldiers seem to love flowers.”

“I keep forgetting he’s a soldier. Must he return to Watfield with you?”

Seth had been wondering about that herself. Could she leave Damon here? He surely would want to stay. Had she inadvertently brought him to the exact place he belonged, or would he eventually start longing for his bunkmates? Did he even realize he was being tested as a possible husband?

She finally said, “When I go back to High Meadow in a couple of days, I’ll leave Damon here to see how he manages without me. When I come back, I’ll ask him what he wants to do. I think I could let him stay for the summer. In Watfield he’s just one of five hundred soldiers, and no one needs him.”

The day before she was to leave, Seth carried the midday meal to a flower field where Damon, with several others, was hoeing weeds and even tying young vines to trellises, for he was deft with his maimed hand. His shirt was sweat-stained, his face dirt-smeared, and his shorn hair covered by a white head-cloth. His back was even starting to bend.

They all sat on the rough stone wall that edged the field and started sharing out the food. “You are quiet,” Damon commented.

“I was thinking how I’d miss your company. Then I though what a marvel it would be, to come back for your wedding.”

She had thought Damon would be startled by this possibility, but it seemed his lover had already mentioned it. “I am not a good soldier,” he said with a grin.

“Well, I hope that you’re only the first. Maybe the Peace Committee will become matchmakers.”

Damon began telling Seth about the flowering peas, which were a unique variety grown only on this farm, that was much sought after for the vividly colored flowers. “But when people on other farms save their seed, the colors fade from year to year, until they are only pale pink. Why do they do that?”

Everyone within hearing engaged in a lengthy discussion of the importance of keeping a unique variety pure, which led to Damon’s exclamation, “And that is why Ten-Furlong Farm grows no common peas in the vegetable garden!”

“We’ll make a flower farmer of you, sure enough,” someone said.

Seth began to say something but stopped short with surprise at the sound of a dog’s bark.

The flower farmers were so astonished that some jumped to their feet to peer southwestward, where the sound had come from. It had been a peddler’s dog, some said. Others said it could have been a fox.

Seth said, “I’d swear that was a High Meadow cow dog.”

“But it’s impossible!”

Damon was standing beside her, tensely alert, a soldier again.

At the sound of another imperative, impatient bark, Seth shouted, “Come!” In a few moments, a group of four panting cow dogs came into sight, and the flower farmers cried out with surprise. But Seth could not utter another sound. The chief dog, leading the group, carried a limp black corpse in his mouth. He raced up to Seth and dropped the dead raven at her feet.

“I must go home at once!” Seth cried.

“I will fetch our gear.” Damon started for the house at a run. His lover followed, breathlessly asking plaintive questions.

The dogs all fell to the ground, scarlet tongues lolling, chests working like bellows. Seth picked up the water jug and went from one dog to the next, dribbling water onto their lapping tongues. Cow dogs were sturdy and agile, but their bodies were not shaped for running. Still, the chief dog had chosen young, vigorous dogs as his companions, and Seth’s quick examination revealed that they were tired and hot, but not injured. The farmers gave the dogs the meals they had been about to eat.

Seth examined the raven, then cut it open with her work knife. The bird had died of a broken neck. She sat back on her heels and looked around at the befuddled flower farmers. “Someone has killed a G’deon’s raven.”

“On purpose?” asked one stupidly, while others gasped.

“Of course it was on purpose,” said another. “Everyone knows not to kill or harm any raven!”

“Even the dogs know.”

The farmers’ confusion turned to sober astonishment, and then to outrage. “That’s the same as murder!”

“Or assassination,” said Seth. She wrapped the raven’s body in a sweat-stained head-cloth and the farmers buried it under a tree. Damon returned with the knapsacks and kissed his miserable lover farewell. The woman had managed to tie a small love-knot in his short-cropped hair.

“I hope you told her you would return,” said Seth, after the two of them had been walking for a while, with the tired dogs trailing behind them.

“A risky promise, Seth. I did not say it.”

It was evening when they reached the boundary of High Meadow Farm and were greeted there by the rest of the dog pack. Seth found the dogs’ ordinary enthusiasm reassuring. The farmstead seemed as always. The cows were being milked in the barn; shirtless people were washing off the mud and dousing each other with water by the well. Homely kitchen sounds and smells came from the propped-open kitchen windows. In the bright parlor, many of the adults had gathered as usual to wait for supper. But as Seth stepped in and was greeted with surprise, she sensed an unusual tension. “The chief dog came to Ten-Furlong Farm to fetch me here,” she said.

Then, of course, people must exclaim at and discuss the extraordinary behavior of the dogs. Everyone thought the dogs were not even capable of crossing farm boundaries. But when Sarna began to tell a rambling dog story, Seth could not restrain herself. “I am in a hurry! Where is that visitor, Jareth?”

Mama, approaching Seth and Damon with cups of tea, said, “Oh, he’s gone. He left in the dark of night, apparently. So put down your things and have a cup.”

“In dark of night?” said Seth.

“What did he steal?” asked Damon.

They gave Damon a startled look, then one said in a disgusted tone, “We just noticed the donkey is gone.”

“But Jareth had no reason to take the donkey,” declared another. He was one of Jareth’s friends, Seth supposed. “The donkey just wandered off, probably.”

“He could sell it.”

“A tired old animal like that?”

“The donkey just wandered off, I tell you.”

This must have been the argument Seth and Damon had interrupted, an argument fueled as much by hurt feelings and embarrassment as it was by desire to understand the event or to make a decision. Seth touched Damon’s arm and murmured in his ear, “I’m afraid this is my family at its worst. Everyone trying to be right for wrong reasons.”