Deep Water

by Pamela Freeman

  “I’ll never see him again, Snapper!” Piper wept.

  “Better that than seeing him as a corpse,” Snapper replied. “At least you know he’s safe. Him and the other young ones. You’ve still got this little lady, Searose, to look after, remember. That tall one with the golden hair said we had until sunset to bury our dead and get out of the town. Lucky to get that much time, I reckon.” She put her hands out to the baby and the baby launched herself happily into her arms.

  “Your son is safe on the boat,” Snapper said. “Time to deal with the dead.”

  That quietened Piper, which Bramble was glad of — and then realized that preferring to deal with dead bodies rather than living emotions showed how many dead bodies she’d seen lately. She was getting used to it. She wondered how much more used to it Acton’s men were. After all, she merely dipped into their lives, while they kept fighting when she was not observing. Perhaps they were so used to it that death didn’t even mark them anymore. Perhaps they just didn’t notice it. Was that true of Acton?

  That was a disquieting thought, and she pushed it away and made herself concentrate on Piper as she and the crowd of women who had watched the boat leave walked slowly away from the harbor, up the hill which cupped Turvite. This wasn’t the place of Bramble’s imaginings.

  Where was the great and glorious city of Acton’s triumph? The songs all talked about Turvite’s magnificence — except that really old one, that just talked about the ghosts. There was no magnificence here. Turvite was barely more than a village. Bigger than her home village of Wooding, admittedly, but not by much, and different from it mainly in the number of trees that grew among the houses.

  Down by the harbor there were no docks. The boats — small fishing smacks with a single mast — had been drawn up on the narrow shingle beach. There were some timber houses, some huts, a few shanties close to the beach, but no large buildings and seemingly no center to the town.

  Piper and Snapper and the other women walked through an open space surrounded by oak trees. Trees that must have been carefully tended to grow here, in the path of the salt sea breezes. Bramble felt the call of the gods in her mind. The women dipped their heads to an altar in casual familiarity, although one at the back of the group spat on the ground as she passed.

  “What shagging good are they?” she asked angrily, when the other women looked askance. “Didn’t keep our men alive, did they?”

  “Not their job, Crab,” Snapper said. Bramble felt the attention of the gods center on Snapper approvingly. “People die,” she continued. “Everyone dies. What do they care then? Months and years don’t make any difference to them. Their job is to make sure that rebirth happens. That life continues.”

  “Easy enough to say,” Crab snarled, and then pushed past them and strode up the hill. The women watched her go.

  “She’s carrying,” a thin, older woman said. “And she’s lost husband and brother and father this day.”

  “So have we all.” Snapper sighed.

  They kept walking, passing through the screen of oak trees back into the main street of the town. Some of the women were weeping quietly, others had set faces. Some had the blank look of shock, and were shepherded along by others. Halfway up the hill, a door opened and a woman came out. Dark-haired, of course, and a bit stout, maybe fifty or more. A woman who moved as if surety of her own competence was so deep that she couldn’t imagine failing at anything. She had a knife in one hand; a black stone knife that she gripped as if she would never let it go.

  “Tern!” Snapper said gladly.

  Piper’s heart gave an odd kick as she looked at Tern, as though frightened. But she came forward with the other women, murmuring greetings. Bramble noted that they kept a clear space between themselves and Tern. There were no embraces, no shared consolation with this woman.

  Tern raked them all with a glance and moved up the hill, walking briskly. “Come!” she said. “It’s time to take back what is ours.”

  Ah, Bramble thought, the enchanter who raised the dead. Good. I’ve been hoping for this.

  The hill was steeper than it looked and Snapper had to hand the baby back to Piper. Piper began puffing as they climbed higher and the baby thought it was a game. Every time Piper forced out a breath, the baby laughed. Instead of making Piper happier, each laugh brought her closer to tears.

  “Searose doesn’t know what trouble we’re in,” Piper gasped to Snapper as they reached the top of the hill and started down the other side.

  Snapper smiled grimly. “As it should be. Pray to the gods that she keeps unknowing.”

  Just over the ridge there was a haphazard pile of bodies. There had been no attempt to lay them out. They sprawled, with limbs askew. Blood was turning brown on their clothes and skin. A couple of severed arms had been tossed on top of the pile, like an afterthought. The smell, of pierced gut and vomit and blood and old urine, was horrible. Crab stood there, staring. Piper gagged, and then ran forward, pushing past Tern to reach one of the bodies, whose face could barely be seen under another man.

  She pushed the body on top away and wailed, “Salmon,” as she took the corpse’s head in one hand. The other still gripped Searose fiercely. Grief rose up in her like vomit, unstoppable, and Bramble was shaken by the strength of it — true grief, untainted by fear for her own future or by anger or confusion. Pure as snowmelt, hot as fire. It seared Piper into scalding tears and Bramble found it almost unbearable. The strength of it brought back all her own grief, every grief she had ever felt, but particularly the newest one, for Maryrose. She almost envied Piper’s ability to let it loose; to surrender to it as to a huge wave.

  Around her, other women were discovering the bodies of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. Sobbing, wailing, choking tears, swearing, praying… Bramble felt breathless under the onslaught.

  Then Tern touched Piper on the shoulder. “Sister,” she said, “hold your tears. Wait, and watch, and listen.”

  She drew Piper up and passed her back to Snapper, who held her while Piper blinked at Tern in confusion. The other women moved away also, as though afraid of Tern.

  As she passed, Tern looked closely at each woman. Bramble hurriedly drew her attention back from Piper’s mind, trying to make herself invisible to the enchantress. Another encounter like the one with Dotta would be too unsettling. Something in her didn’t want to be seen by Tern, whom she was rapidly coming to dislike, perhaps because, although she looked again and again into the eyes of women distraught with grief and fear, she showed no sign of compassion.

  Tern stopped at last when she reached the woman who had spat at the altar. “You,” she said. “Crab, isn’t it? I need you. I need your anger. Will you give it?”

  “What do I get for it?” Crab asked.

  “Revenge.”

  Crab nodded decisively, and Tern smiled. Bramble thought, that’s what we’re fighting. That look. That’s the look the enchanter Saker must have, just before he kills. The look that thirsts for blood. Yet, when I was a child and Granda told me the story of the enchantress of Turvite, I thought she was a hero. She felt a great sadness that was separate from her share of Piper’s grief; the same kind of sadness that she had felt the first time she had realized that her father was not the strongest, wisest man in the world; that her mother was not the best woman in the village. The sadness of reality intruding on a dream. Of certainties melting.

  Tern stood by the bodies, the women in a semi-circle watching her. She held the knife high, and began to speak.

  “Gods of field and stream, hear your daughter. Gods of fire and storm, hear your daughter. Gods of earth and stone, hear your daughter.” Bramble knew this incantation. For the first time since she had understood that the gods were translating for her, she was sharply aware of the doubling of meaning, because these were words that she knew. She heard them in both languages, her own and Tern’s.

  “Gods of sky and wind, hear your daughter,” Tern said. She took Crab’s hand in her free one and held tightly.
Crab became pale, but she kept her expression of anger and determination. Tern continued to ask the gods for something, but for the first time, the gods failed to translate. It was as though they didn’t want Bramble to hear these words, to understand them. Bramble tried frantically to remember, but the words were too alien to her — and to everyone else, she realized, because Snapper was staring in puzzlement. Bramble caught a sound here and there, but understood nothing and was as surprised as Piper when Tern raised the black rock knife and cut her hand open, swinging her arm wide so that the drops of blood fell on all the corpses.

  The ghosts rose, stepping up from their bodies to stand unsteadily, confused, next to them. They had died clutching their weapons, so they had them in death: a few swords, some cleavers, mostly hunting spears. They were far clearer to see than any ghost Bramble had ever witnessed quicken. She couldn’t see through them. They were solid. Real.

  Bramble felt Piper’s throat clench, her whole body tense, as Salmon rose and looked around, and saw her. The upsurge of love that poured through her was overwhelming. It shook Bramble. Salmon was an ordinary man, medium height, plain face, pockmarks. He held a sword, and his throat was cut through, the dark gash showing horribly. His eyes were kind, though, and it was in his eyes that Piper searched for something; whatever it was, she found it, because she relaxed and sighed a long, tremulous sigh.

  Salmon started to move toward Piper, but Tern waved him back. “You are dead,” she said. “I have raised your ghosts to take your city back from the invaders. You cannot die again, but they can. Follow me. Destroy them, and your wives and children can still be safe.”

  Salmon reached out a white hand and tried to touch her, but his hand went right through. Tern didn’t even shiver, and that was when Bramble knew she was mad. She remembered that feeling, and only someone living completely inside the world in their head could stay unaffected by it.

  Salmon looked at his hand in puzzlement, looking questioningly at Tern. “I will give you strength,” she reassured him. “My death will give you bodies to fight with.”

  The other ghosts were raising clenched fists in the air, shouting words of defiance that no one could hear. Their wounds showed up clearly; some were missing arms, others had guts hanging out of their bellies.

  Salmon nodded, then looked across at Piper and smiled, or tried to. His face was full of difficult and deep emotion, and Bramble understood that the same torrent of love was pouring through him. For the first time, she envied another woman. To feel so strongly, and be matched in that feeling… Well, she could let that dream go, too. A demon who had stolen a human body had told her that, at an inn in Sandalwood. Thee wilt love no human never, he had said, and she thought she had accepted it. Must accept it. But it was hard, even though she knew that love had brought the great grief she felt still pulsing through Piper. The baby shifted in Piper’s arms and Salmon’s eyes went to it and grew soft. Their love had brought Piper the baby and that, too, was no small thing.

  Motherhood was not something Bramble had yearned for, but she was no stranger to the appeal of looking after something small and soft and vulnerable — she had nursed too many poddy calves and kids not to understand. Piper looked at Searose and truly saw her for the first time since the vigil on the beach. Bramble felt her fill immediately with a complex intertwining of emotions: a softer, warmer kind of love, pity, grief for the father Searose would never know, and a great, bone-shaking fear that the baby would die, too. Which wasn’t unreasonable, Bramble thought, remembering River Bluff and the children who died there.

  Around them, women were going up to the men they had loved, saying things to them in low voices, the things they hadn’t had a chance to say before they died. At least Tern had given them that. All the women seemed to care so much that Bramble wondered for a moment whether there were no unhappy marriages in Turvite. But as Tern led the ghosts up over the hill and down through the town, followed proudly by Crab and then the other women and children, she realized that the women who did not care were busy packing their belongings, getting ready to leave. Handcarts stood outside many houses, bags were ready in doorways, women were ordering children to gather what they could. Only the truly grieving had gone to bury the dead.

  As the ghosts went by, the women came out of their houses, snatched their children back from the procession, made the sign against evil and then, as though enchanted themselves, fell in behind the other women and followed. They marched silently up the hill that led to the cliff. Some women walked beside their men, others behind.

  Acton saw them coming. Although his men had taken barrels of beer and were drinking freely, he had still set lookouts. He was standing a little way off, talking to — arguing with — Asgarn. Baluch stood nearby, listening. Seeing Baluch gave Bramble a strange feeling — as though he should be aware of her. She knew him well enough by now to tell that he wasn’t happy with whatever Asgarn was saying. She had felt that particular frown often enough. When the lookout called, the three men turned as one and suddenly had swords in their hands, glinting in the midday sun.

  At first there were shouts and alarms as Acton called his men to order. They sprang up a little unsteadily from where they had been sprawled, but Bramble saw that they were not really drunk, just a bit merry. They were certainly sober enough to kill. They clutched their swords and presented their shields, although they clearly weren’t sure what was happening.

  Then the first rank of soldiers realized what was facing them. “Ghosts!” they screamed. “The dead are come back!” They backed away, their faces white, until they stood at the edge of the cliff, and had to stop. They were terrified. Some crouched to pray, some cast around wildly for a way out.

  The women held back, but Tern and the ghosts moved forward. One of Acton’s men screamed, “I killed you, I killed you, you’re dead!” and jumped from the cliff. His fellows barely noticed.

  As they neared Acton, Bramble was struck by how small the ghosts seemed. Much shorter and slighter. They looked almost childlike compared to the tall, strongly muscled fighting men.

  “Who is the leader here?” Tern demanded.

  Acton stepped forward. In contrast to the ghosts, he seemed full of color. His blue eyes were bright, his hair shone deep gold, his skin glowed with health. Even the simple dun and cream of his clothes seemed rich in comparison to the whiteness of the Turvite men. He was vividly alive; more alive, it seemed to Bramble, than anyone else there, even Tern. She felt relieved to see him, which was ridiculous, because she knew the gods always brought her to him, in every time she visited. He wore the brooch on his cloak. Baluch stood at his shoulder; paler hair, paler eyes, but fully there, listening as he always did.

  “I am Acton, son of Asa. I am the lord of war,” he said.

  “Go from here,” Tern declaimed, “and you will be spared, as you spared the women of Turvite. Stay and be slaughtered.”

  Behind Acton, his men shifted uncomfortably, muttering among themselves. Some were praying. Acton tilted his head, listening to them, and turned to face them, smiling.

  “Lord,” one said, “let us go from here.” It was the man Red, whose friend had been killed by the water sprite. He looked shaken and tired. The other men murmured agreement, watching the ghosts with terror and fascination.

  “We faced these men when they were alive, and killed them all,” Acton reassured them. “Why should we fear them dead?”

  Then, without warning, he laughed, spun, and swung his sword straight at the nearest ghost. Salmon. Salmon raised his own sword, but of course it was futile — Acton’s blow went right through his sword and then through him as though he were not there, leaving Salmon unharmed, untouched — and no threat at all. All the women made some kind of sound: gasp, cry, moan. Acton’s men whooped and cheered. They yelled, “Ac-ton! Ac-ton!” and beat their swords on their shields.

  “You’ll never scare our lord of war, bitch!” a man yelled. “Our lord fears nothing!”

  Tern moved aside, toward the cliff.
At first Acton let her go, assuming that she was retreating. Then she turned to face him again, and he saw her face. His laughter died, and his eyes narrowed. Bramble, through Baluch, had seen him look at enemies like that. Tern raised her hand and pointed at him.

  “I curse you, Acton son of Asa. You shall never have what you truly want.”

  Bramble had known what she was going to say, and yet the words cut through her. It was her reaction, not Piper’s. Piper was watching, but her attention was mostly on Salmon, who was staring bleakly at his useless sword. She didn’t care what Tern said to the blond man. But the curse seemed to drain strength and warmth from Bramble. She felt shaky, as though her own body were close to fainting. She had felt like that a couple of times before, when she had been thrown from the roan and had the breath knocked out of her; panicky and shaky with shock. She didn’t understand it. Why would she react like that to something she had heard in stories a dozen times before?

  But Acton clearly felt none of her disquiet. His face lightened and he laughed again, eyes creasing up in genuine merriment. His hand went out, gesturing toward Turvite.

  “I already have it,” he said gaily. Bramble felt the shakiness begin to leave her. Acton’s strength seemed to steady her as well as his men. His laughter was comforting. She felt vaguely ashamed of that.

  Tern shook her head. Bramble felt the gods flow around Tern, but she couldn’t tell if they were arriving or leaving.

  “Never,” Tern said. “Brothers of mine, I give you my strength.”

  The gods were leaving Tern. Something was missing. Bramble felt that Tern should have given something else — other words, some other action. No — feeling. That was what was missing. Feeling. Tern didn’t really care about the dead men, and her words were only words.

  Baluch had moved forward at the first moment that the gods had begun to move, instinctively reaching out for Tern, but he was too late. She stepped over the cliff and dropped out of sight. It was so sudden that even Bramble was startled. Piper and the other women cried out. Acton’s men shouted, half of them jubilant, half appalled.