Water Logic (43 page)

Two sailors dragged Seth to her, and one of them flung at them a length of rope. She couldn’t hear what the sailor shouted, but it made sense to use the rope to tie both of them to the mast. As she knotted the rope around Seth’s waist, she shouted, “How could they possibly get you on this ship? It must have been quite a fight.”

Seth muttered hoarsely, eyelids fluttering. A wave broke over the bow. Seth cried out and clutched at Zanja. The rescue boat had been lifted into sight and dangled from ropes. The water witch and an oarsman still rode in it. The ship’s roll brought the boat close, and the two of them leapt for and landed on the deck. Huddled sailors hooted appreciatively. The oarsman sauntered off.

Ocean turned and met Zanja’s gaze.

Zanja understood: months ago, when the current sucked Zanja under the ice, Seth’s hand had reached to save her from drowning, and for a moment it had seemed she would succeed. Zanja couldn’t imagine how it had even been possible for Seth to be here at the crucial moment, to succeed in saving her after all, and so complete the pattern that the witch’s intervention had interrupted.

The ship lifted its prow to meet a looming wave. Seth uttered a cry. Zanja put her arms around her as the ship rose up the side of the vast wave: sturdy, fearless, unsinkable. Zanja laughed out loud.

It was a glorious storm.

Chapter 32

Seth awoke and immediately wished she hadn’t. The old terror, which had lost none of its power during two nights and a day at sea, clutched at her again. There was no certainty, no stability, no safety here. The unrelenting nausea overwhelmed her again, and she retched out a nasty-tasting mucus.

A hand was laid lightly on her shoulder. “We’re going west,” said Zanja, “Towards home.”

“I can’t endure—” Seth began, but stopped to retch again. Her muscles ached with vomiting.

“Only you could have saved me from drowning,” Zanja said. “It had to be that way. And if you hadn’t succeeded, the water witch would have died with me. That’s why her people helped do this to you, and to me, because they need her magic.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” said Seth.

“Sarcasm! Well, I guess you’ll live.”

“I’d rather not.”

“If you can bring yourself to look up, you should. It will make you feel better.”

Seth shifted her head so she could see Zanja, squatting on the never-steady deck. Like the water people, Zanja now wore a loincloth made of spun seaweed, and her dark skin shimmered with white, dried salt. Her high cheekbones were a sharp ledge above dark hollows. Her ribs formed ridges in the surface of her skin and were marked by a large, black bruise.
Her earlobe was torn open, revealing bloodless, shriveled cartilage.

“You don’t look like the G’deon’s wife,” Seth croaked.

She sat up in increments. She turned her head. Sunlight blazed through a crack in the clouds onto the ship. The sailors shouted, and some flung themselves to the deck in a pantomime of relief and exhaustion. “These people are detestably silly,” she muttered, and Zanja laughed.

The beam winked out, but through fresh rents in the clouds new beams appeared, casting patches of blinding light upon the agitated surface of the sea. Seth moaned and covered her eyes. Zanja nudged her. “Not that way. Look to the west.”

Seth forced herself to look where Zanja pointed. A sunbeam revealed a distant stretch of rocky shoreline. Seth cried, “Shaftal!”

“Shaftal,” said Zanja. “My Shaftal.”

“How can you look like that? As if you belong on this cursed boat?”

Zanja said, “It’s a habit, I guess—looking like I belong.”

“But your disguise is incomplete.” Seth dug into a pocket, where Alila’s string of shells had been an uncomfortable lump, and offered Zanja the necklace.

Zanja put the necklace on and glanced with some bemusement at the bright decoration on her scarred breasts. Then the ship moved sharply and she fell onto her butt. Seth laughed, and then moaned. “Very pitiful,” Zanja commented. She stood up and staggered away.

Seth fixed her gaze on Shaftal, the only thing in this world of water that remained steady. More sunbeams broke through the roiling clouds. The storm is over, she told herself. But it made no difference.

Zanja returned with Silver, who carried a small pottery bowl. “I went seeking a remedy for your stomach, and this man began talking to me in Shaftalese,” Zanja said.

“My kidnapper,” said Seth. She had been bitter, but now she was too exhausted for any passion, even anger.

Silver squatted down and offered her the steaming bowl, a cloudy broth with herbs floating in it. “Esset, drink this.”

“You are mad.”

“A small swallow,” pleaded Silver. “A little drop on the tongue.”

So Seth had often begged sick animals to swallow their medicine, hoping to avoid the struggle of forcing it down their throats. She took the bowl and quickly sipped from it. It was not entirely revolting: a fish broth, intensely flavored by herbs, a flavor she recognized. The herbs might settle her stomach, and they would certainly make her sleepy. Perhaps she could finish the voyage unconscious. She quickly drank it all.

Zanja said to Silver, squatting beside him, “I want to ask you some questions. Would that be impolite?”

Silver laughed. “Your people must be stiffer than mine.”

Zanja looked sorrow-struck, as though she had lost her tribe only yesterday. And in fact she had, thought Seth. But she could not bear the disorientation of the thought and turned her gaze to the black line of cliffs.

She heard Zanja say, “How long has your tribe lived in this harbor, the place the Shaftali call ‘Secret’?”

Seth’s family had been in Basdown before history began, and it had not even occurred to her to wonder how long that had been. Silver said, “The Essikret used to live in Hanish Harbor, until the Shaftali waged war on us and drove us away.”

Seth felt too dull to be shocked by this outrageous statement, but she looked at the two speakers in time to see Zanja sit sharply back on her heels. “But G’deons have protected the border tribes for four hundred years!”

“It happened long ago.”

“Before Mackapee? Before the Law of Shaftal?”

“Long ago,” Silver said once again, “but we remember.”

Zanja was silent. At last she said, “Because Grandmother Ocean remembers? Because she was alive when it happened?”

Seth’s stomach gave a vile twist, and she said desperately, “Don’t talk about her! Please!”

Zanja said in surprise, “Talking about water magic makes you sick? I’ll be more careful.”

Soon Seth dozed. She half awoke when Zanja and Silver discussed a long-ago time when the cliffs to the west of Secret Harbor had collapsed. Then she dreamed that a cliff fell on her, but its rocks became water, and a monstrous wave crushed her, and she drowned. When she awoke, night had fallen, Silver had left, no lanterns burned, and the ship’s rocking seemed almost tolerable. No one moved across the starlit deck. Zanja stood leaning on the rail, though she must have been exhausted. She gazed northward, towards the mountains of her people.

Do you think I never felt responsible for someone’s death?

Clement had said those words, when Seth thought she couldn’t endure the horror of Zanja’s sudden, icy death. But Seth had not understood then what Clement meant by responsibility. Clement had sent her friends to die, even though she knew those deaths served no good purpose. So she had lived most of her life, until just a few months ago, when she finally made the fighting stop. Seth understood now, for she had brought Damon with her, and he had been killed, and she continued to watch it happen, over and over, trying to undo it, to think of what she should have done to save him. Yet Damon continued to be dead. As Zanja stood watch, looking towards the far-away mountains that were said to hold up the sky, did she see her people dying, over and over? Did Clement see every death also, each one unforgotten, each one a scouring wound across her poorly armored heart? So the habits of war destroyed them, even when the war left them alive.

“No more deaths,” Seth said. “Not even one.” This was the determination that drove Clement, that drove Zanja, that drove Emil, and that must drive them all. Not desire for justice, not yearning for understanding, nor any other passion.

Zanja’s head did not turn, yet she said, in that uncanny way of fire bloods, “If we are to desire anything, then we must accept failure.”

Seth sat up cautiously, her head spinning. But the ship’s deck had ceased its insane writhing and only moved gently. Seth lay her palms flat upon the oil-impregnated wood. This ship was made from the bones of trees, and the trees were made from earth. Here they floated, at the mercy of the sea and sky, on a ship that was Shaftal.

For two interminable days the ship lingered by the hazardous coast, waiting for the proper wind, tide, and light with which to enter the hidden harbor. In the meantime, the sailors cast their nets, gutted the catch, and preserved the fish in salt. Once, they brought in a single fish big enough to feed everyone on the ship, destroying the net in the process. Its red flesh tasted like nut paste.

The Speaker of the Ashawala’i and the Speaker of the Essikret talked with each other for hours at a time. Seth joined the fish-gutting crew, and then a sailor showed her how to mend nets. Every time a net was used, it must once again be mended, but Seth didn’t mind: some tools, to be useful, must be fragile.

She drank a great deal of water, which tasted strongly of the oak casks. She even ate solid food. Sometimes nausea returned, but she could dispel it again by reminding herself of the solidity of the ship. She told Zanja about Damon, about his death, and about her guilty grief. She wept while she talked, and Zanja sat beside her, holding her hand, saying none of the stupid things that people usually say.

“I didn’t save my people,” Zanja said later. “I couldn’t bear to do nothing, but knew I must. So I kept hesitating, torn between unendurable outcomes, until my time ran out.”

Seth also tried to avoid saying any of the stupid things that people usually say. “Two hundred years before the massacre, what could you have done?”

“My people remembered things through stories. I could have told Arel a story, for him to tell the next Speaker, and so on for ten generations, until it came to me. The Speakers are always fire bloods, and they would recognize the story’s importance. And perhaps when the story returned to me, I would realize it was a message to myself.”

“But if you were to succeed in preventing that catastrophe,” Seth said, “then you wouldn’t become who you are, so the water witch would never take you—” She stopped, feeling distinctly woozy.

“And my people would still be massacred, for I wouldn’t be brought back to tell that story.” Zanja shook her head, seeming scarcely less disoriented than Seth was. “And yet every day we believe we are responsible for the future! I suppose the difference is that we’re acting in hope, but not in certainty. Even Medric, when he dreams of the future, is only dreaming possibilities.”

In bits and pieces like this, they each recounted events the other didn’t know. To Seth, Zanja’s adventure seemed mostly miserable, and largely unbelievable, but her injuries were convincing enough. Seth’s own adventures had also been dreadful. As she recounted them to Zanja, she realized how uncertain she had been, and yet how stubbornly she had obeyed her common sense without any idea what she was pursuing. She had chased the stolen box, without ever knowing what it contained; she had reached out to grab the hand flailing in the water, without even suspecting it was Zanja.

And yet she felt, quite suddenly, that all this effort and heartbreak had been for a purpose, and that she had made progress. With the box destroyed and Damon dead, that sensation of progress was no easier to explain than Zanja’s theft and loss of the lexicon, or the water witch’s apparently deliberate goading of a G’deon into destroying her own tribe’s safe haven. What had, after all, been accomplished?

They both declared they were heartily sick of viewing the raw coastline and exploding surf, though it was a perspective on Shaftal that few Shaftali ever saw. The incessant barking of the sea dogs began driving Seth to distraction. At night she woke up in startlement, thinking something was dreadfully wrong to make the cow dogs bark like that. The sea dogs, though, if they barked for a purpose at all, did it for a purpose known only to them.

At last the conditions were right, the sails were unfurled, and the ship’s prow was pointed at the cliffs. Seth stood with Zanja at the rail, holding the wood so tightly it made her hands hurt. “How suicidal this seems,” Zanja said, in a tone of amazement.

“You enjoy things no sane person should enjoy.”

“I do,” Zanja admitted. “And yet somehow I have survived.”

Yet when the sailors had managed, by skill or magic or sheer good fortune, to slip between the rocks, and the ship’s sails sighed and went limp as the cliffs blocked the wind, Zanja sighed also, like Seth, with apparent relief. “Karis would never forgive me if I were to drown so close to shore,” she said.

Seth looked at her. The bright shells against Zanja’s skin seemed even brighter, for her skin had darkened in the sunshine even as Seth’s skin reddened. Her lean body stretched itself shoreward, though the cliffs were as forbidding here as they had been on the outside. Seth, too, yearned for solid land—but once she had achieved it, all the unresolved problems and difficulties would still await her: Basdown’s easy turn towards hatred, telling Damon’s lover he was dead, what to propose to the Peace Committee, how to save Clement.

“What?” Zanja murmured, and Seth realized she had given a start.

“I’m trying to save Clement,” Seth said.

“Someone should,” Zanja replied distractedly. “This harbor is huge! I didn’t realize—it seemed such a disaster.”

She fell silent, and they stood elbow to elbow for a long time, as the tide slowly carried them westward. The highest of the sails filled with wind once again, and even with the help of wind the sun was pierced upon a mast by the time the floating village came into sight.

“Oh, I see,” Zanja breathed. She turned and looked back at where they had come, then forward, beyond the village, at the beach, the vast salt marsh, and the remote cliffs that were just a blur of black at the horizon. “Filled with birds, crabs, and clams,” she said.

“You’re being mysterious, and it’s very irritating,” said Seth.

Zanja raised a hand, and with a gesture she put the big, busy village into a kind of frame. “That village is four times the size it used to be. The people are thriving, and so I realize that before, they were barely surviving. Now they have land on which to collect wood, and they can float entire logs down the river. They have plenty of water, both salty and sweet. If they are trapped in the harbor by weather, they can survive, without going anywhere. They can survive.”