Water Logic (46 page)

“Who is working?” asked the woman there, whose bare feet, tucked into loops of rope, supported a loom so simple that the weavers of Zanja’s people would have found it as laughable as these people had found her sense of balance. Yet, with her hands free because the loom was also looped around the back of her neck, the weaver wove upon it at a brisk pace using a shuttle made of transparent bone.

“Where are you going?” asked another woman, who with one hand continuously plucked dried and shredded seaweed from a basket, while
her other hand managed a spindle that dropped steadily from her fingers,
spinning an ever-lengthening cord.

“I am where I am going, I think. If you’re not working, then you are playing. Who is winning your game?”

“I am!” the women both said, and laughed. The spindle hit upon the deck and the spinning woman stepped up onto a stool, clinging to it with her toes, which these people used as nimbly as fingers. Almost immediately, the spindle hit wood again, and Zanja bent to pick it up and wind the yarn. Among her people yarn-winding had been a child’s task, but despite the many years since she had been a child, her fingers remembered exactly how to do it so the spindle wasn’t unbalanced. Then the weaver protested that Zanja’s help was giving the spinner an advantage, so Zanja wound an empty shuttle with fresh yarn for her.

The door into the low house was of child’s height, but when Silver appeared there, he climbed up from a much lower deck, so she first saw the top of his head. “Oh, Zanja, you have come visiting. Would you like to have some soup?”

“I am not hungry, but perhaps you can answer a question for me.”

“Climb down, then,” he said.

Entering the boat’s interior was like climbing inside a piece of furniture. Light sprayed from glass prisms in the ceiling, and Zanja could see dim cupboards, from floor to ceiling and even overhead, and a swaying hammock in which hung a child-sized shape. A cat appeared in the shadows and gracefully climbed up the ladder into the bright light of afternoon. The windows all were propped open, and a sea breeze blew in through some, and out through others. The small room smelled of spices.

Zanja said, “You have a way to summon Grandmother Ocean, don’t you?”

Despite the shadows, she could see Silver’s eyebrows lift. “I thought you would inveigh me again to go with you to this city, Watfield, which I have already told you is too far from the ocean. But this question you ask I will not answer, Zanja na’Tarwein.”

“I don’t expect you to say anything that’s forbidden. But I must speak with her before we leave this place.”

Silver said, “I will not summon her, and she would not come.”

Zanja squatted in the dim room. “She thinks she has managed her great project so the only alteration is the one that matters, but she is wrong. She has balanced the differences between present and past, but she has not balanced the differences between present and future. Her meddling has caused problems we can’t resolve, which will lead to worse problems. I know this is true, because it affects a pattern that has been foreseen. What she has done will damage the future. Is that not important enough that you should summon her?”

“She left this with me to give to you.” Silver opened one of the cupboard doors and took out a wooden vessel. He handed it to Zanja. It was a heavy container very like a barrel, with a cork in the flat lid. The liquid within sloshed softly.

Zanja pulled out the cork and sniffed the vessel’s contents: Water. She corked it carefully.

“Are you satisfied?” asked Silver

“I am,” she said.

Chapter 35

The Paladins arrived by boat, the falling tide pulling them eastward out of the wetland, just as the water people who went out the day before to meet them had been carried westward on a rising tide. Seth was sick to death of water and water logic, and gladly left behind the floating town, the lovely harbor, and the cheerful people. Soon their small company struggled through woodlands so dense they often had to cut a path for Karis’s litter. The Paladins had chased after Karis with nothing but whatever they happened to be holding, and it was fortunate that one of them had been holding a hatchet.

At least Karis was behaving herself, Zanja commented during that first grueling day. The Paladins had chased their G’deon the entire width of Shaftal, and arrived with sore feet and raw tempers. Karis was apologetic and obedient, though in an obviously insincere and utilitarian sort of way. At the Han Road, when they finally reached it, two Paladins who had gone ahead by boat now awaited them, with the lexicon safely stowed in a wagon confiscated from a farm family. Karis meekly crawled into the wagon bed and lay down in the straw. “Deliver this baggage to Watfield in twelve days,” she said.

The Paladins took turns driving the wagon, and the rest of them walked. This far south, the road was in terrible repair, and those who went afoot suffered much less than those who banged and bounced all day across displaced cobbles and through potholes. After two days of slow, bone-jolting travel, Karis sat up one afternoon. “What happened to the road?”

Seth, surprised out of a daze, noticed the smooth stretch of road before them. “Oh, we’re in Basdown.”

“Basdowners take good care of the highway.”

“Of course we do. It’s our only road.”

Some time after sunset had given way to full darkness, Seth heard the High Meadow cow dogs begin barking in the distance, but when the small company reached the wagon track to the farmstead she was tempted to pretend she had missed it in the darkness. They turned down it, though, and the dogs rushed out and surrounded them. A horse kicked at an agile cow dog and missed, of course. “Hold up!” said Seth. “Land’s sake!” The wagon rolled to a stop.

The lead dog immediately stood on his hind legs and began scrabbling noisily at the side of the wagon. “What is wrong with you?” Seth asked. “Tell the pack to let us in—we’re hungry and our feet hurt!”

He barked excitedly at her. “Karis, he wants to meet you.” Seth leaned over to boost him up into the wagon bed, and he rushed impetuously into Karis’s lap, put his paws on her chest, and cried an eloquent welcome with his nose nearly touching hers.

“Greetings, sir,” said Karis. “Your whiskers are quite tickley. Did you know you’re a magical dog?”

The dog uttered a sharp bark, then returned to Seth to be hoisted out of the wagon. He and his pack sped into the looming darkness, barking with the kind of enthusiasm that was certain to bring out the entire household. Seth hoped they wouldn’t stare at the G’deon of Shaftal as though she were a two-headed cow.

“Our dogs are magical?” said Seth as the wagon started down the track, which was too narrow to allow people to walk beside it.

“Get in,” Karis said. Seth did so and encountered Zanja on the other side, doing the same. Every time Seth saw Zanja unexpectedly her heartbeat paused, for she would remember buying the longshirt and breeches
for Damon, the shopping trip he had designated their first adventure.

“They won’t offer us seaweed for supper, will they?” asked Karis, as Seth and Zanja settled beside her. The wagon bed, despite its carpeting of straw, smelled strongly of onions.

“No, sand porridge,” said Zanja.

“Or roasted bugs,” Karis retorted.

Seth supposed that these were private jokes. The dogs barked wildly in the distance. A branch scraped along the side of the wagon, and the Paladin who drove them muttered an apology, though she wasn’t certain whether he apologized to the wagon or to the branch. The other Paladins trailed wearily behind them.

Zanja said, “Seth, what is it about the Basdown cow dogs that makes them famous?”

“They have very rigid ideas. I know what you saw in the past, but I can’t believe the Basdowners once fought each other over their farm boundaries, for the dogs would never have permitted that.”

Karis grunted, covered her face, and began rocking from side to side uttering muffled choking sounds.

“I guess I have made a mark on history,” said Zanja.

“You two are conspiring to tease me.”

Karis lowered her hands from her face. In a strangled voice, she said, “Tadwell resolved the problems in Basdown by working magic on the cow dogs. Those dogs have been herding the people of Basdown for two hundred years.”

“What?” said Seth.

Karis seemed to have gotten her mirth under control, but Zanja was holding her breath. Seth supposed she should be offended and outraged, but she felt something unexpected erupting in the hollow of her sorrow. “We need more dogs, then,” she said. “A lot more. One for every person in Shaftal. To bite their ankles every time they misbehave.”

Karis began heaving with stifled mirth again, then gave up. All three of them were roaring with laughter as their wagon trundled into the yard, where the entire family had come out of the house, and the children danced in the dirt with the joyful dogs.

Seth slept in her old bedroom, with her familiar old quilt and the cushioned bench where she had first put her hand on Clement’s knee. She awoke in early dawn, hearing the creak of stairs as people began going out to milk the cows. Last night, Mama had agreed to bring the news of Damon’s death to Ten-Furlong Farm, and Seth awoke to a sensation of relief. She also felt Clem’s ghost awakening slowly in the bed beside her, blinking in sleepy surprise as though Seth were no more strange to her than the stranger inside her own skin. Perhaps, thanks to Karis, Clement would always be a ghost: a hollow imbecile, a devastated wraith. In neither state could she have the peace she deserved.

For peace, thought Seth, is not merely an absence of war. It is all the things that war displaces, the things that war makes not merely unachievable, but unimaginable. Only peace makes peace possible.

She got up, dressed hastily, and went to the room that had the biggest bed, where a Paladin dozed in the hall. Zanja opened the door before Seth tapped on it. “I’m glad you’re here. You can help put the mattress back on the bed.”

“The bed wasn’t big enough?”

“It was, except that Karis kept hitting her sore feet on the footboard.”

Karis yawned prodigiously, sitting in a chair by the cold fireplace. Seth and Zanja wrestled the mattress back onto the bed frame. Karis, who seemed to find it a trial to watch others struggle to accomplish something she could have done easily, loudly reminded herself that she was just baggage.

“You’re too unwieldy and willful to be baggage,” said Zanja.

Seth said, “Karis, can you undo the magic of the cow dogs?”

“Why, when it has worked so well?”

“Because people who are accustomed to being herded become cows. When the Basdowners made me their councilor, they wanted peace with the Sainnites. Then Jareth came, and immediately they hated Sainnites and wanted war. People who just do what they’re told aren’t being good—they’re being cows.”

Karis began working her fingers through her hair, which every day seemed even more wildly tangled. Bits of straw and chaff floated from her head. “Maybe,” she said finally. “Maybe it was Tadwell’s error of mercy.”

Zanja picked up the wooden water vessel she had carried with her from Essikret, and slung its seaweed cord crossways over her shoulder. “Ten days,” she said.

Karis nodded.

“I’ll tell the Paladins you’re ready to go.”

“I need to think about this,” Karis said.

Seth realized Karis was talking to her. For a moment, she had been heeding something else, the creak of Clem’s ghostly foot in the hallway.

Karis added, “Perhaps you’re right about the dogs, but I need to fix my old mistakes before I start making new ones.”

“The Basdowners have been like this for two hundred years,” Seth said. “So there’s no reason to hurry, I guess.”

Seth’s family had offered to load the wagon with fodder for the horses and food for the people, for by tomorrow they would be in the Barrens. “I’ll go make certain the wagon is ready,” Seth said. She went out, following a ghost.

Clement is in her quarters. She sits on the bed. Occasionally, she can hear the soldier in the hall, shuffling her feet, clearing her throat. Some soldiers stand guard quietly. Some are never quiet. This room is frigid in winter and sweltering in summer. It contains a chest of proper size and shape, in which is stored everythi
ng Clement owns. On the windowsill are the remains of the bulbs she forced into bloom when the garrison was still buried in snow. The rest of her bulbs, Gilly told her, were planted at the correct time and are now breaking ground. Every year she has watched for that first growth. Why? She has been pondering this question for hours. She has not gone to the garden, and now it is dark.

Gilly ran to greet her, and then he did not smile. Ellid clasped her hand and called her “General.”  Ellid said that seven of the garrison commanders had arrived, then looked at Commander Euphan and her face became quite still. Euphan had talked to Clement a great deal during their journey to Watfield. She still could not remember why she had not trusted him.

Ellid said, “The rest are expected tomorrow. What are your orders?”

Sevan murmured to her. Sevan had not gone to Appletown Garrison—she had returned to Watfield with her officers. She said it was the G’deon’s orders.

“Pardon me, General,” said Ellid. “Of course you must rest.”

“I must rest,” Clement said. She is the general. She knows she is, for people address her as general. A general’s duties are a general’s duties. Now she waits in her quarters for someone to tell her what a general’s duties are.

She hears something in the hall. The soldier clears her throat. She shuffles her feet. She says loudly, “The general is not to be disturbed!”

Why? Clement wonders. She stands up. Perhaps whoever is coming will explain why she has always looked at the garden every day to see if her bulbs have broken ground. She goes to the door and opens it. The hall is dark, and full of people.

“I’m sorry, General,” says the noisy soldier. Her face is not right. The soldier turns to the crowded people and begins to argue with them. Zanja na’Tarwein is talking to her. Zanja used to be dead. She used to be in history. She is not dead or in history any longer. Her voice is quiet and steady. “I understand this,” she says. She is fluent in Sainnese, and this is a very useful thing. “However, this is Karis G’deon. She is your general’s general. She goes where she pleases.”

The soldier breathes. “I am ordered—”

“Commander Ellid’s orders, I assume. Karis outranks her.”

It is wrong for these people to arrive without warning. Clement feels certain of this. She looks up, and up further, for Karis has pushed the soldier out of the way, and it is proper to look into a person’s eyes no matter how tall she is. Karis puts her hand on Clement’s shoulder. Clement is in the room. She is walking backwards. Other people come in behind them. Clement is sitting again on the bed. Karis’s hand is on her shoulder. Clement realizes that Karis has pushed her across the room, which certainly must be improper. She begins to object.

“Be quiet, Clement,” says Karis. Clement’s shoulder hurts. She is quiet. “Zanja, go find them.”