Water Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  A footstep scraped in the sawdust, and Seth stepped into the dim light of the lantern. Shivering, she put her coat on the floor, and Clement unbuttoned and removed hers for them to share as a blanket. With the dogs pressed against their feet, they sat huddled together with their backs against a dividing wall, on the other side of which someone uttered an occasional snore. Seth’s shivering gradually eased. Time crept slowly forward.

  In a while, Emil arrived and sat on Seth’s other side. “Listen, Seth,” he said in a low, rough voice. “This is not Zanja’s final death.”

  Seth’s head lifted. “How many times can a person die?”

  “The first time, anger kept Zanja alive though she should have died from that crack in her skull. The second time, Karis made her heart continue beating while she healed her. The most recent time, I killed her spirit with my own hand, and I knew in my heart she was dead. This time I know she is alive.”

  Seth said, “I nearly grabbed her hand. But she slipped out of reach. She went under the ice. She did not come up again. She has drowned.”

  “I know what happened. But feel my heart.”

  Clement heard clothing rustle as Emil endeavored to lift Seth’s hand to his chest. “This is not my logic,” Seth protested.

  Karis’s distinctive voice spoke in the shadows. “But by earth logic Zanja isn’t dead either. Not one hair of her head, not one flake of her skin, no part of her, however minuscule, has touched the river bottom.” Karis came out of the darkness and, despite her massive size squatted easily among them. “She simply isn’t here.”

  Emil said, “She has crossed another boundary.”

  “What boundary could she cross that would cause her to physically disappear?”

  Suddenly, Clement could hear the quiet ticking of Emil’s watch. She leaned forward, expecting to see him peering at it in the lantern’s dim orange light. But he was merely holding it.

  “Time?” said Clement. “Time is a barrier, I suppose. But how can it be crossed, except by remembering?”

  Karis tilted her head back. “That dimwitted twit of a seer had better be awake,” she said, apparently addressing the rafters.

  A raven dropped down from the darkness. “Medric has just opened a window for a raven,” it said. Then it added, “He agrees he’s a twit. But don’t call him dimwitted.”

  Chapter 8

  Zanja was ice: lungs, blood, and bone. Her will was ice; the flame of insight was frozen; she floated in a mindless, timeless darkness, dead again.

  “Not again!” she tried to say, but choked on ice. “I’ve died enough,” she tried to protest, but the words froze into silence.

  “Hush. Hush. There’s naught to fear.”

  It was a singing voice, that sang so lovingly and soothingly that Zanja’s rage and terror could not persist. “Hush. Hush. There’s naught to fear,” sang the voice.

  You hear the gale wind,

  The river flowing near,

  The reapers in the glen . . .

  A lullaby. Karis sang it to Leeba as she rocked her by the kitchen fire. That was in their old house, soon after the seven of them became a family. A family, a tribe, an order, a confederacy, a circle formed around Karis as much as it was around Leeba.

  This was not Karis’s broken, raspy voice, though. And Leeba had become a willful, active little person with no patience for lullabies. And Karis was the G’deon now.

  I must be alive, Zanja thought. For time has passed and is still passing.

  “She’s trying to speak,” creaked a voice.

  “She’s terrified, I guess,” the gentle voice said.

  Each unexplained utterance was folded between leaves of silence. Zanja began to see a flickering light. The ice had turned to fire. Her body burned upon the pyre. She cried out with pain.

  Dearest, I am always near.

  Hush! Hush! There’s naught to fear.

  A fresh log flung sparks across a gray stone hearth. A baby uttered an impatient cry and then began to suckle noisily. Knitting needles clicked rhythmically.

  A dark, knife-scarred hand lay half-open, the fingertips gray with frostbite.

  “She’ll kill us all,” the grim voice said. “Her kind has no laws.”

  The hand flexed. The wool blanket burned. Zanja tried to lift her head, but the ice froze closed again.

  The grim voice made a disgusted sound. “She’s puking.”

  “Hold the baby.”

  A rough cloth wiped Zanja’s face. The kind voice said, “You tried to swallow the river, but I guess it disagreed with you.” Zanja saw a swirl of features: a plain, round face, a thick plait of hair, an opened shirt and milk-heavy breasts. The baby uttered a frustrated, demanding cry. “Can you lie still?” the woman asked Zanja. “Until this little one is satisfied? Then I will help you.”

  The other voice said impatiently. “She’s not our kind. She will not understand us.”

  Zanja said, “Yes. I can.” She coughed for breath. Black spots swirled. There was a far-away murmur of surprised conversation. Ice and fire filled Zanja’s chest; her limbs burned with hot cold.

  “Keep coughing,” said the nursing woman. “That water in your chest, it could make you sick.”

  “I’m alive,” Zanja rasped.

  “Some people were down at the bend. A farm there is getting flooded—”

  The other voice interrupted. “People warned that family they’d get washed out, didn’t they? But they couldn’t resist living right on that good soil, could they? And now their stupidity causes nothing but trouble for their neighbors.”

  “I doubt she cares about that,” said the nursing woman. She continued to Zanja, “So someone spotted you half-drowned, hung up on some rocks, and you were pulled out and brought here.”

  “Another mouth to feed, too ignorant to work . . .” The voice faded to a grumble.

  “I guess you fell in the river and got swept away somehow.”

  “I am Zanja na’Tarwein.”

  “You’re what?”

  “My name: Zanja na’Tarwein.”

  “Well why don’t you have a name that can be pronounced!” exclaimed the crabby one.

  Zanja turned her head quite cautiously. She lay on the floor of a small, windowless room walled with mortared stone. A brightly painted baby cradle swung gently from the roof beam. In a plain, narrow bed was propped a skeletally thin man with a wool cap on his hairless head. He knitted unceasingly without looking at his hands. In fact, he looked at nothing, for he was blind.

  The nursing woman had begun chafing Zanja’s hand. Her own hand was rough with work, and chapped with cold. “It must frighten you to be so far from home. But never mind him! He’s always like this.”

  “Zanja na’Tarwein,” Zanja said again. Perhaps they had not understood because her lips were stiff with cold.

  “Well, my name’s Mari.”

  “Karis will be frantic—”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure.” The rough hand patted hers.

  “If you’ll go outside and tell a raven—”

  The old man snorted. “Deranged!”

  “Tell a raven? I will if I see one.” The nursing woman patted her again. “You shut your eyes and rest, now.”

  The house was quiet when Zanja awoke. She hazily remembered the sound of the family coming home, stomping loudly in the adjacent kitchen to clean their boots. Now, it was much later, the middle of a very quiet night. Zanja disentangled herself from the heavy wool blankets that wrapped her and crawled across the stone floor to a latrine bucket. Then, following the faint glow of coals, she crawled into the kitchen and used a chair to lever herself to her feet. Among the coats and clothing that hung on pegs by the chimney, she found her shirt and trousers, stiff but dry. Her coat, belt, and shoes were still damp, though, and s
he turned them so they would dry evenly. She found her dagger in its sheath and the glyph cards in their pouch. She went to the door barefoot, lifted the latch, and stepped outside.

  No starlight glimmered there. In the unrelieved darkness Zanja could not guess where she was, or which way lay the river. “Raven?” She called quietly. She felt her way down a stone path. When she stepped off it by accident she found herself standing in ice-cold mud. How could a thaw have happened so quickly? “Raven!” she cried. But no large bird flew out of darkness to dig its claws into her shoulder and speak reassuringly of how quickly people would arrive to bring Zanja home. Even if Karis had lost track of Zanja in the water, she would have found her again when she was dragged to dry land. But there was no raven.

  She made her way back to the open door and scraped the mud from her feet before stepping inside. She built up the kitchen fire and spread the glyph cards on the hearth to dry. Many hand-drawn cards had been added to the pack over the years, and on these the ink had now run, so that on some cards only a ghost of the design remained, and on others the design had become a smear. However, the original cards of the pack had survived another misadventure intact. Zanja’s knees were giving out; she sat on the hard floor. Her vision filled with glyphs flickering in firelight.

  “Oh, are you awakened then?” said Mari cautiously from the shadows. The baby in her arms grunted fretfully. Even Mari’s words were disorienting, for she pronounced them strangely and with a lilting rhythm that made her seem to be about to sing again.

  “Thank you and your family for saving me.”

  “Oh, it’s what anyone would do, I guess.” The young woman approached. “Are you feeling much improved? Perhaps you’d like something to eat?”

  “Yes, but let me serve myself.”

  Mari sat in a chair by the hearth and nursed the baby while under her direction Zanja lit a candle and found bread and butter. It seemed a poor household, without even a spice cupboard or tea tin, and Zanja cut herself only two slices of the coarse bread, though she could have consumed the entire loaf.

  She returned to the hearth to find Mari looking curiously at the glyph cards. “This one would be you.” Zanja touched a finger to a damp, blurry card. “You can’t read it now because the ink was washed away but the glyph was ‘Nurture’ and it had a drawing of a nursing mother sitting by the fire, just like you. It’s a very lucky card.”

  “Perhaps you’ll tell my fortune when the cards are dry.”

  “I’m not a fortune-teller.”

  “What are you, then?”

  Hadn’t Zanja answered this question already? She said, “What is this place?”

  “This is Vinal’s Farm, and we fished you out of the River Corber, down by the bend. Long Bend, most folks call this place.”

  Zanja knew of no place known as Long Bend. “Is this the north bank, or the south?”

  “The south, of course.”

  “How far away is Watfield?”

  “Watfield?” The baby uttered a complaint. Mari switched the infant to her other breast, and there was peace again. “Oh, I guess you mean Waet’s Field? Upriver, on the north bank? I’m not certain, though.”

  “Why not?”

  Mari seemed puzzled. “We don’t know them. And it’s not easy to get across. In this flood—”

  “Flood! The ice hasn’t even broken up yet.”

  “It broke up fifteen days ago.” Mari’s shy glance was more than a little bewildered. “Have you forgotten the entire season?”

  “No, I remember it clearly: a cold winter and a late spring.”

  “You’re a bit addled from your accident, maybe. It was a warm winter and an early spring.”

  After a moment Zanja asked, “Is the bridge out at Lit Narrows?”

  “Bridge?” said Mari. “There’s no bridge. Just the one to the west, for the highway. I understand it’s a long way from here.”

  Zanja gazed a long time at the glyph cards. They were warping as they dried, and she finally roused herself to turn them over. Perhaps her confusion and lethargy was from a head injury. She felt her skull but found no bleeding or swelling. Perhaps the cold and shock of nearly drowning had so confused her that she now remembered facts about Shaftal that were not true. But was her entire life not true?

  She said, “You’ve never heard my name? Zanja na’Tarwein?”

  “Oh, we don’t hear much of the border people here in the Midlands. They stay in their own place, I guess, just like we do.”

  “I’m Karis G’deon’s wife!”

  “Karis G’deon?” said Mari. “Well, I’m sure he’s worried about you.” Her voice sharpened. “Tadwell G’deon died so young? This is dreadful news!”

  No matter how remote the farmstead or how reclusive the farmers, any six-year-old could recite the names of the G’deons and the years of their service. Tadwell had died old, after thirty-eight years as G’deon. That had been some two hundred years ago.

  As Zanja set forth from Vinal’s Farm, the light was rising though the sun was hidden. The fields surrounding the farm were mud, churned up by frost, not yet dry enough to plow. The track Zanja followed, which Mari assured her would take her to the riverbank, did not go north at all, but due west. Yet the river did appear, though in the wrong direction, and it was not frozen, but sloppy with flooding on the near bank. Even though Zanja could see that its big bend folded it back on itself, so that the water lay to the west instead of to the north, and its east-flowing water turned northwestward, she persisted in feeling that she stood on the north shore with Watfield to the right of her. She walked to the left in a direction she kept telling herself was southwest, with the sprawling river usually in sight though she had to climb to high ground to avoid the flood.

  All day the landscape remained unfamiliar. Zanja’s disorientation persisted until midday, when the landscape began to seem less alien, and her reversed sense of direction abruptly righted itself. She must be near the farm where she and Seth had gotten the dogs. She believed they had crossed this brook, though it had been frozen then. Now she should see an orchard. But the slope that yesterday had been planted with apple trees today was uncleared woodland.

  Finally, Zanja felt certain she had passed the place she had fallen in. Unable to cross the flood, she continued along the south bank, fighting her way through wild woods now, until at midafternoon she stood directly across from Watfield.

  Watfield was a perfect site for a river port, with the flood plain on the south bank, and the north bank safe on higher ground. The sun had burned through the clouds, and Zanja should have been able to see the city’s clutter of docks and peaked slate roofs even at this distance. But on the far shore the cleared land was scattered with farmsteads. Watfield wasn’t there. Where Zanja looked for a city there lay only a field that belonged to a family named Waet.

  Chapter 9

  Living in uncertainty is what makes the marvelous possible, Emil had said to Clement more than once. That night, in the bitter cold of the barn, surrounded by sleeping soldiers, with the snowfall extinguishing all sound, for a little while Clement understood why Emil, a man of extraordinary rationality, could subscribe to such a mystical philosophy.

  “We think the past is over,” said the raven, speaking Medric’s words. “To us that’s fact. But by water logic, the past is present.”

  “You know as little of water logic as I do,” Karis snapped. “You’re reciting from a book.”

  “Reading, actually—the book is right here on my lap,” said the seer. “And it’s a good thing I know how to read.”

  Emil said, “Medric, please don’t test Karis’s temper tonight. Has Zanja been taken by water magic? Say yes, or say no.”

  “Yes,” said the Medric-Raven.

  “A water witch is meddling with my business, and you didn’t see fit to tell me?” Karis s
aid in outrage.

  “No.”

  Medric seemed to have given his entire answer. By the dim lantern light Clement saw Emil lay a hand on Karis’s forearm. “I assume you’re unwilling to explain why, or you would have done so already. But will you tell us where, or what?”

  “She lies not too far from here, in a cottage on the south shore, near a horseshoe bend of the river, where there’s an old man who’s blind and knits. She’s been mostly drowned and nearly frozen, but to her that’s not much worse than a hiccup.”

  “There’s no such place,” Karis said. “And she certainly isn’t there.”

  The Medric-Raven said, “No, not now. But two hundred years ago there was. And she is.”

  Their dreary wait for daylight became an impatient one. Karis wanted to travel north to find a water witch she had met once in a border tribe, and she and Emil argued about the wisdom and practicality of this venture. With Zanja gone, he pointed out, no one in Shaftal could even speak the Otter Elder’s language, even if the old man was still alive. And he reminded her, several times, that an air witch was trying to assassinate her. “Zanja will find her own way back to you,” he said. “After six years with her, how is it possible you don’t trust her to do so?”

  At dawn, Herme rousted his company and set them to work at clearing snow. The farmers served pot after pot of porridge, as quickly as they could cook it. By the time the sixty of them began the march to Watfield, columns of sunlight supported a cracking ceiling of clouds. They walked from sunlight to shadow to sunlight, and weary people grumbled in two languages that they didn’t know whether to sweat or shiver.

  Clement found Seth with the dogs at the rear of the column, plodding wearily in the trampled snow. They walked together for half the morning without saying a word to each other. Once only, Seth glanced sideways at Clement, and her expression was so full of contradictions that Clement could make nothing of it.