Water Logic (8 page)

That’s not today’s problem, Emil would have said, had he been there. Zanja said, “You’re not suited to the duties before you.”

“I’m not. Not at all.” Karis gazed out the window again, perhaps seeing what only she could: the waiting spring coiled beneath the ice, poised to break forth. “None of us are,” she added. “You, for example: your great accomplishment of the day is that you’ve convinced your stubborn wife to wipe grease off her face and change her clothes.”

Zanja laughed. “I’ve done other things. I told all those volunteers that you were grateful for them staying up all night, and that you’d tell them yourself except that you were still asleep. And I have arranged to get you some watchdogs. Or rather, I allowed Seth to arrange it.”

“Watchdogs?” said Karis. “That seems too simple. But—” She didn’t finish, but slowly began to smile.

“I like Seth,” Zanja said.

“I like her, too—she’s like me, only sane.”

Zanja leaned lightly against Karis, which was like leaning against a tree that happened to be warm, if not particularly soft, and Karis put an arm around her. “I do blame you,” Karis said.

“I know you do.”

“Loving you is an incredibly complicated and dangerous business.”

“You may be up to the task, though.”

The visit to the imprisoned assassin gained nothing, as Emil had predicted. Karis healed his broken arm, and he cursed her, calling her a pretender and an impostor even as she used the power of Shaftal to snap his shattered bones back into place.

Karis said to him, “Without my permission Harald G’deon vested me with the power of Shaftal. Then I did not exercise that power for twenty years, until councilor Mabin accorded me the right to do so. So in what way am I a pretender? Or are you blaming me for the fact that my mother was an innocent who fell into harm, and my father was a Sainnite who lay on her without caring to learn her name? Is it possible you think I’m at fault for my parents’ actions, though I never knew either one of them? Or do you think you blame me for having been forced to do sexual service to my father’s people when I was just a child? Or that I somehow chose to become addicted when they insisted I take their drugs? I’m just trying to understand why you are cursing me like this.”

The man offered no answers. Perhaps in his mind the foulness and contamination of the Sainnites was a real thing, like the murky mess below the hole of a privy, or the stinking putrefaction of a wound, which must be cut out before healing became possible. To convince the man that his belief was merely a metaphor, and a false one at that, was the work of the Truthken he had forbidden from his presence. Karis did not attempt it.

“You seem determined to die,” she said. “What would you have us say at your funeral?”

“Say that the people of Shaftal are sheep,” he said. “You have promised them healthy children and good harvests, and so they are following you. The destruction of Shaftal’s heritage, the thousands of dead, the widowed husbands and wives, the parentless children—they’re willing to forget these crimes. But we are not.”

“What justice do you have in mind, imposed on whom? And what difference would it make in the end?”

“Shaftal would be cleansed!”

“By killing all of us? Those like me, begotten by indifference or rape? The Shaftali-born Sainnites who have done nothing but help the cause of Shaftal? The people raised to be soldiers who were never given a chance to learn another way? The children of half Sainnites? The babies in arms?” Karis paused. “It seems like a lot of killing. But when we are all dead, you’d still be unsatisfied with what is left, and because you would be so accustomed to killing anyone who displeases you, you’d start killing each other. What a hell you’d make for yourselves—I’m half-tempted to let you have it!”

After they left him, they walked back to their bedroom, as sound of the city’s clocks tolling the hour sounded faintly and then were echoed loudly by the clock in Norina’s law school. When they were alone and Karis was changing her clothes, Zanja said, “I was wrong: you
are
suited for your duties.”

Karis did not reply, but she looked distinctly unhappy.

Chapter 4

Six years ago, when Clement was a garrison commander, she had not seen Gilly for a long time, for she had finally been promoted out from Cadmar’s shadow. When the old general died, it had not even occurred to Clement that Cadmar might be chosen to replace him, but when the commanders gathered and she saw Gilly again, he had been certain Cadmar would be chosen. “And he’ll ask you to be his lieutenant, and you’ll refuse. Before you do that, think what will happen if that man gets all the power he wants, and doesn’t have you to talk him out of his stupid decisions.”

“If he has any hope of being general, it’s because you and I made him look smarter than he is for all those years.”

“What else could we have done?” Gilly asked. “And what will become
of you, Clem, should you become subject to his idiotic commands?”

Cadmar was chosen general, and Clement had abandoned forever a position she was good at and accepted one she hated even more than she feared she would. Now she again offered herself for a position she did not want, and the garrison commanders did not want to give it to her, either. Wearisome day after wearisome day, she had explained her decisions to them, and they had rejected her justifications. They refused to be convinced—because they refused to forgive her.

In the death field outside the city, where hundreds of Watfielders had gathered to return the seven murdered people to the elements, the commanders clustered around Clement like gray fence posts in the snow. Some twenty garrison soldiers were also present, but they had dispersed into the crowd. Most of them were talking to Paladins now, expressing their condolences in phrases Gilly had drilled into them, or, if they knew enough Shaftalese, venturing into the unfamiliar terrain of conversation. Perhaps the soldiers would ask polite, bewildered questions, and would secretly conclude that these Paladins were simply crazy for examining so closely the natural, obvious, unquestionable fact that injury begets injury, and when one is hit, one hits back, harder. But later, soldiers and Paladins both might puzzle over their own incomprehension, and might take one more slow step towards understanding, just as Clement’s many bafflements were slowly becoming comprehensions.

These visiting commanders, however, did not even realize there was something they did not understand. They stood silent, giving Clement only their obedience.

“It is not nearly enough,” she muttered to herself.

Beside Clement stood Ellid, a wry, hard-working veteran, the only garrison commander whose friendship Clement could still rely upon. Misunderstanding Clement, Ellid said, “It seems like enough mourners to me. If the number of mourners determines the status in the afterlife . . .”

“Do the Shaftali even believe there’s an afterlife?”

“Well, why so many people, when these seven dead were strangers to the city?”

Gilly seemed to be getting tired of explaining the Shaftali to Sainnites. Perhaps he found his task too absurd, given that most Sainnites had lived among the Shaftali for most of their lives. He said somewhat impatiently, “I’m sure it’s out of sympathy for those who did know them.”

“It’s to shame the murderers,” said Clement. “It’s what Watfielders do with their anger.”

“You’re getting to understand them better than I do.”

She glanced at him and as always was surprised to see her twisted, crippled friend straightened by the G’deon’s hand. At least his ugly old face was the same.

For some time, people had been filing somberly past the seven biers, decorating them with flapping funeral flags. Gilly and Clement had made some flags that morning, and he had helped her to shape the Shaftalese words:
regret, senselessness, sorrow
. Now the afternoon bells rang, and nearby, people began whispering and craning their necks. Shaftal’s new G’deon was making her visible way through the parting crowd, with her vivid red coat unbuttoned to reveal an embroidered green tunic. Mabin and Norina walked at her right, and at her left trod Zanja, like a preternaturally alert, indescribably exotic black hound. Beside Zanja walked a Basdown cow doctor.

“Gods of hell,” Clement muttered.

“They’re coming towards us,” said Ellid.

Clement and Ellid stepped forward to clasp hands with these governors. Karis’s cold, bare hand conveyed a burning sensation that made Clement catch her breath. Zanja said quietly, “Ellid can introduce us to the commanders, can’t she?” She passed Clement to Seth.

Clement could hear Zanja talking to Ellid, in her clear, precise Sainnese, then greeting Gilly as they moved towards the gray posts of the commanders. Clement fumbled to take Seth’s ungloved hand.

Seth said, “You’re always walking away from me, it seems.”

“I apologize. Gilly told me I should write you a note at least, but I don’t know all the letters yet.”

“So you thought of me once,” said Seth.

Clement had thought of her—many more times than once—midsentence
sometimes, or lying awake on her hard bed, or snatching a hasty moment with her son. But her armor was the only thing keeping her standing right now; she could not take it off. She said, “I hope for my son that when he is grown he can choose his lovers freely.”

Seth gazed at her—and Clement couldn’t guess what she was thinking. She excused herself and returned to the commanders, who like stringed puppets each in turn looked startled and astounded as Karis’s palm pressed theirs. Norina, from behind the shelter of Karis’s broad shoulders, seemed to be assessing the character of these strangers. Perhaps she would be able to tell Clement something useful about them. Zanja and Gilly were translating, though all of the commanders spoke some Shaftalese, and some were as fluent as Clement. Some commanders managed to utter stiff compliments on General Mabin’s leadership, for which she was legendary, even among her enemies.

Seth had gone away. A cold line trickled down Clement’s cheek. She wiped it away casually, as if her eyes were just watering in the cold wind.

Finished, Karis held out a hand to Clement, and when she approached put a hand on her shoulder and bent to say in her ear, “Will it hurt you
if I make a show of my regard for you? Zanja says I should.”

“Regard—but not affection.”

“I actually do approve of you, but I hate performing. And I’m bad at it.”

Norina, apparently close enough to hear, said quietly, “You’ve done enough, Karis.”

Karis did not lower her hand, though. “You’re looking rather harrowed, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Clement said, “My commanders won’t accept me as their general, though my G’deon commands it. Try to imagine what a position that puts me in.”

Norina said, “Those officers are so angry with you, they can’t think clearly about what’s in their own best interests. But that Taram fellow is already more than half willing to change his alliances. You have a history with him? You can use that to win him back to your side. And he and Ellid could win over some three or four of the others, if there are no more disasters.” Norina then named the potential supporters, a surprising list of unsuspected friends. “That would give you six, anyway, six out of fourteen. Where are the other five?”

“The western commanders haven’t arrived yet.”

Norina glanced at Karis. “Are they on their way?”

Karis’s gaze became unfocused for a moment. Then she said, “They’re nowhere on the Wilton-Hanishport Road.”

They had entered the thick of the crowd. People slowly made way for Karis, until the first bier loomed. Shaftali words of pain flapped from the wooden frame and from the firewood piled beneath it. A funeral flag unfurled in Zanja’s hand. It seemed incredible that the cloth could float so lightly on the breeze when it was so burdened by the heavy black strokes of glyph signs.

Clement took a flag from her own pocket, but without paying much attention. What had become of the western commanders?

Karis pressed forward to gaze at a gray-haired dead man whose forehead and cheeks were marked with squint lines as though he had been peering in the dark all his life. Karis reached up and touched him briefly, as though to confirm that he was indeed dead.

A bridge had collapsed, a road was impassible. The western commanders had turned back, unable to even send Clement a message. That was all.

Karis had begun to weep. Clement tied a flag to a bier. The Shaftali words she had written with such difficulty looked like a child’s scrawl:
Regret. Senselessness. Sorrow.

Waste. Regret. Sacrifice
. Three nights ago, Clement had become confused about where her body ended and Seth’s began. In the warm hollow of their breasts, their hearts beat on both the palm and back of Clement’s hand. Seth had stroked her head, kissed her eyes, told her what she had been thinking since they last saw each other. Clement told Seth some small pieces of her history—important only because she had never before had anyone to tell them to. And there had crept over her a sense of rest and rightness that was deeper and more important than mere sleep.

Value. Suffering. Service.
A Paladin lay on the bier, peaceful, black-dressed, with a gold ring in her earlobe.

Thirty-five years ago, Clement had been a terrified nine-year-old, who with the other few children on the ship had been left to fend for herself while the adults battled a violent storm. Clement had comforted and been comforted by a girl she scarcely knew as the boat twisted and plunged. They had warmed each other when sea water soaked them. Years later, she and the girl had served their first year as soldiers together in Cadmar’s company, and had been devoted lovers until they became rivals. Their first disagreement had been over Gilly, whom Clement befriended when others were cruel to him. When Clement and Heras met again, both of them were commanders, and Heras had become notorious across the land when she razed the region of Reese. Now she commanded Wilton garrison in South Hill, a region that had proven impossible for even Heras to defeat.