The laborers were walking down the path to Seth’s right in twos and threes, with their hoes on their shoulders, raggedly singing a question-and-answer song:
What will you do when the water flows
When the earth falls apart and the cold wind blows?
I’ll stay by the hearth when the water flows
When the earth falls apart and the cold wind blows.
For I’m no fool and I’ll never leave home.
Beyond them, beyond the southern edge of the farmstead, a distant patch of water glimmered, marking a low wetland where people sometimes went to gather rushes or try their luck at fishing. There were no more cow farms in that direction, nor any farms at all, as far south as Seth had ever traveled—just wilderness.
“By the land! Is that Seth?” someone cried.
She waved to the laborers. Among the familiar, dirt-stained, wind-furrowed faces she saw a young man with a bounce in his step and a guileless smile on his face. Seth gave him a nod, as she would greet any stranger, and looked away to answer someone’s query about why she had returned so soon. “I missed the cows,” she said.
“You didn’t!”
They were upon her now, jostling each other as they kissed and embraced her. Their hands were rough; their hats and headcloths sweatstained. They smelled of honest work in the warm sunshine.
“This is Jareth,” someone said.
Seth forced herself to clasp the young man’s hand. “Greetings. I’m Seth.”
“Seth is the Basdown Councilor!” someone said importantly. “She has been at the big meeting in Watfield!”
“You must have stories to tell,” said the young man.
“Why have you come home so soon?” asked Liralin, Seth’s favorite niece.
Seth gladly turned away to greet her. “Well, what are you doing here? Aren’t you married?”
Lira gestured as if waving flies from her face. “I didn’t like that farm after all. They couldn’t cook!” She tucked her hand into Seth’s elbow. “They had some strange ideas about cheese. And no one wanted to sleep with me.”
“You scared them, probably.”
“Oh, I guess.”
Even at High Meadow people found Lira difficult and irritating. She was a knowledgeable cheese-maker, but so inflexible that no one wanted to work with her. Seth had taken over the job of planning her future when Lira’s mother died of a fever three winters ago, but this was the second time a marriage Seth arranged had failed. Seth said, “Maybe you’ll spend your entire life at High Meadow, like I did.”
“What a horrible possibility,” said Lira.
In the company of these people Seth returned to the main house, with the assassin behind her and the skin of her back crawling in anticipation of a deadly pinprick. Damon stood alone on the porch. In his canvas breeches and travel-stained longshirt he looked like any other farmer.
“Who’s that?” asked Lira.
“My travel companion, Damon.”
“He hurt his back, did he?”
“No, all soldiers stand that way.”
“Oh, you’ve taken up with another Sainnite? How am I to keep up with you?”
“I like him, but he’s not my lover.”
Lira continued to tease her and could hear Jareth’s voice behind them, but not what he was saying. Silence followed. “You’ve brought a Sainnite to guest with us, Seth?” one of the young men asked.
Seth gritted her teeth, for after her day’s visits even that tone of voice could make her angry. “There’s a law against it?” she said over her shoulder.
“There should be,” said someone, possibly Jareth.
“Maybe we should return to how we used to be, turning away and even killing every stranger.”
No one answered, and Lira gave Seth’s arm a tug. “Now, Seth, it’s my job to be the most disagreeable person in Basdown.”
“I’m not sure of that any more.”
“You’re crabby with hunger, I guess. Of course the food will hardly be worth eating.”
“Come visit me in Watfield sometime. I know the perfect husband for you, except that he’s married to his kitchen already.”
On the porch, Seth left Lira and went to Damon to tell him which of the people was Jareth. “Shall I kill him?” asked Damon.
“You’re not serious!”
“No, no,” Damon said. “No, no, no.”
“It would not make you more popular, not at all.”
Damon shrugged. “It will not make me less.”
He had remained so cheerful all day that Seth had begun to think he was impervious to hostility. But now she felt a fresh fury. “What is wrong with these people!”
“What’s wrong with you?” someone said.
She turned around, and it was Jareth. She grabbed Damon’s arm, but the soldier seemed entirely relaxed. “Greetings! I am Damon,” he said.
Jareth made a sour face. Seth said, “I’m not going to explain to a stranger why I’ve brought a friend to meet my family. And I won’t apologize for being rude, since you’re being rude also.”
“Oh, I am sorry,” the assassin said. “Greetings, Damon. I’m Jareth. I think all soldiers should be treated as the criminals they are.”
“I will not always be a soldier.”
Jareth seemed dumbfounded. Even Seth was startled by Damon’s simple, perfect response to the other man’s belligerence. She managed to say something, making her voice loud so that everyone on the porch could hear her. “Maybe you haven’t seen that book, A History of My Father’s People, by Medric the seer. He writes that we should marry the Sainnites. The G’deon printed that book, every single page of it. Did you read it, Jareth?”
She wanted to make it impossible for him to argue with her, but he became even more angry. “It was written and printed by Sainnites! I would not go near that cursed book!”
“Goodness,” said Seth. “Did you mean to call the G’deon a Sainnite?”
“Of course she’s a Sainnite! Only a fool would think otherwise!”
“She was rescued by Dinal, Harald G’deon’s Paladin wife, and was raised by General Mabin and Norina Truthken. Are the three of them Sainnites also?”
Now people crowded forward to lay hold of Jareth. He yanked his arms out of their grasp without seeming to notice how his words had shocked them. They began crowding him away from Seth, and then he turned and went into the house. Soon Seth and Damon were alone on the porch.
Damon raised his eyebrows at her. “No killing, but wounding is good, eh?”
“Maybe he’ll bleed to death.” Seth leaned over the porch rail. “Are you there, raven? Did you see him?”
The raven flew out of the tree in which it had been hiding and landed a distance from the porch. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” the bird cried. It lifted off and disappeared again.
“I guess our mission is finished,” said Seth. “And I’m glad, because I don’t want to stay here at all.”
“Yes, Captain.” Rarely did Damon sound so unenthusiastic. And Seth wasn’t eager to make the return journey to Watfield without resting first.
“You haven’t been able to spy on any farmers yet,” she said.
“No, Seth. They don’t like me.”
“Jareth hasn’t been to every farm in Basdown.”
“You bring me to another farm, eh? But your family . . .” Damon seemed to run out of Shaftalese words, as happened sometimes.
“Oh, nobody expects me to do anything in the usual way. We can come back to High Meadow before we begin our journey back to Watfield, and hope that Jareth has left by then. Let’s go to Ten-Furlong Farm tomorrow.”
“Ten furlongs from what? Nobody remembers?”
“Ten furlongs from the highway. You might meet some people there who love
flowers.”
They went in, and Seth told Mama they would only stay one night. Mama had already heard about the altercation on the porch, and halfheartedly tried to convince Seth that their houseguest’s hostility to Damon wasn’t significant. “Oh, Damon’s not the one I’m worried about. I’m the one who can’t endure the man. I don’t understand why you don’t give him some food and send him on his way.”
Seth wanted to tell her everything, but Mama would never be able to keep such an important and frightening secret. Jareth must not think to look for the raven that he though he had evaded. Nor should he be taken into custody by outraged Basdowners, and thus be prevented from going wherever he was going.
But what if he were traveling with a supply of that deadly snake poison? If a person could kill the G’deon, wouldn’t he be able to kill anyone?”
“We need to steal his poison,” Seth said to Damon that night in her bedroom, “If I can think of how to steal it without him realizing it.”
From his pallet on the floor, Damon murmured sleepily, “Whatever you say, Captain Seth.”
Chapter 24
Young men were gullible, but Zanja had never before taken advantage of that fact. Had she gotten out of the habit of virtue, she wondered?
She wandered like a pleasure seeker through the crowded streets of Kisha. Like all northern towns, Kisha was built of stone. Its sturdy buildings, though they already seemed ancient, were familiar to Zanja. But the massive stone library, from whose wide steps spread the city square, would become in Zanja’s youth a roofless stone shell filled with the ashes of its books. Standing before that building, where she would first hear a herald reveal the disasters of Harald G’deon’s death and the fall of the House of Lilterwess, a vertigo came over her. None of those events had happened yet, but she was scarred, burdened, and changed by them. Her life might lie far in the future, but she had already lived a great deal of it, including the massacre of her tribe.
If she did decide to try to rescue them from their fate, how could it even be done? By contrast to the Shaftali people, who recorded and studied their past and worried or wondered about the future, the Ashawala’i had hardly thought about events from before their lifetimes, nor did they look beyond the next season. How could anyone, no matter how clever, send a message ten generations into their future?
She sat on a stone bench and turned her back to the doomed library. Now she looked across the city square, where several food stalls did a brisk business. Students moved, settled, rose, paced, left, arrived, and left again with seeming randomness. Yet there was a pattern to their movements: a dance, a massive, chaotic, and yet harmonious katra. The dancers, oblivious to the grand pattern, thought they were preparing to make a living or to take their exams. But the actual outcome of their energetic activity lay beyond comprehension, just as Zanja’s lay beyond hers.
Zanja found herself muttering the ancient axiom on which was based the ideology of the Paladins: “Evil may enter the world, but it will not enter through me.” To Zanja this goal now seemed not only simpleminded, but unachievable. No person could ever know the ultimate result of his or her actions, and no person could know whether that result might be good or evil or something else entirely.
She could not bear to sit still. She stood up and again wandered the narrow stone streets. Students seemed everywhere: scrawling equations, practicing recitations, rehearsing debates. They sat anywhere sunshine could be found: on rooftops, in windows, on stairways. Some paced with anxiety, and others lay peacefully asleep.
In Kisha, perhaps ideas were floating in the air like seed pods for anyone to capture and plant. Walking past a paper shop, Zanja realized that an idea had taken root in her own agitated mind. She stepped into the shop and bought a very expensive sheet of paper that the paper seller assured her would last a century under the right conditions. She took over a table in a crowded outdoor cafe and, using the reed pen, dry ink, and ink stone that were part of her Paladin disguise, wrote a letter to Emil.
After visits to the pie shop, the chandlery, and the rope shop, Zanja’s purse was nearly empty. She would soon regret her poverty, she supposed, but now it seemed of no importance. Night fell; students fled the chill. Zanja’s four conspirators traipsed rather noisily past the shuttered windows, shouting an occasional hilarious greeting to friends they suspected to be within. Sometimes a window opened in their wake and they went back to exchange trivial pleasantries. Zanja made herself invisible and wished she could have managed without their exuberant help.
The young men eventually quieted and occasionally seemed almost somber as they made their way to one side of the grand, looming library. At the building’s corners the fancy stonework included numerous carved projections whose regularity must have been aesthetically pleasing. But they also offered a stone ladder to the roof, albeit a dangerous one, and there the heads of bare-toothed creatures might offer sturdy handholds. The young men began to bicker over who would get the glory of climbing up first and hanging the rope for the others. Zanja pulled off her boots and climbed up. The screaming eagle and snarling bear that gave her handholds became belaying pins for the rope as, one by one the young men secured themselves and climbed up. Eventually, the five of them crept across the rooftop past numerous gables with windows of actual glass. Coles said that those windows could not be opened, and the ceiling was famously high. “But there’s an easy way,” he added.
This way proved to be a trapdoor for workmen, where a sturdy ladder dropped down into a dark pit, at the bottom of which was a door that opened into a lightless room that smelled of glue, paper, leather dressing, and lamp oil. Zanja lit a candle and saw what she had expected: worktables on which massive deconstructed books lay in various stages of repair. Legs managed to trip on a stool, and Speck accused him of being clumsy as an ox.
“Quiet!” said Coles, busy at the next door. It was locked, but the lock was not particular. Coles poked in it with a stiff piece of metal, and soon the door swung open. Beyond the door, the vast space of the library opened up like all possibility.
Zanja stood there, holding up her little flame so she could see the crowded bookshelves, row upon row, disappearing into the gloom, and seeming to continue forever. Medric or Emil would set up housekeeping in such a place and never set foot outdoors again. Still, they would be unable to learn everything, even if they remained here until the Sainnites set the building afire.
The boys also stood quietly, giddy no longer, seeming overpowered by the significance of that place. They stood in the presence of all knowledge, more than they could have learned if they studied here at Kisha for two hundred years.
Zanja surrendered the candle to Coles and mutely followed him down the narrow aisles. The linen-wrapped books on these shelves were very large, and in the unsteady light seemed poised to drop on her head in an avalanche.
“We do not belong here,” she whispered.
“No, of course not,” muttered Coles. “We presumptuous boys, who for the price of a pie are giving up the secrets of all history to a complete stranger.”
“I only need one fact, Master Student, not the secrets of all history. But where do we seek it?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said cheerfully. “How is your prescience?”
“It’s kept me alive a few times, but not always.”
“What is it like to die?”
“Lonely.”
“You warn us of skulking librarians, the suspicious bastards! And I will both seek and find, for I am a glyphologist, and I am never intimidated by Mystery!”
The three young men behind Zanja snorted sarcastically. But they all followed Coles’s light. From time to time he paused to shine his fluttering flame on the dark, carved side of a shelf upright, where one or two ornate glyphs were painted and illuminated with gold leaf so their shapes shimmered in the faint light. Their forms were fantastically decor
ated and to Zanja were unrecognizable, yet Coles needed only to examine them for a moment, and not only did he understand them but he also perceived a logic in the overall arrangement. First one way and then another he turned, paused, backtracked, and turned again, finding a way through the invisible labyrinth.
“Ah!” he gestured so extravagantly with the candle that he nearly blew it out. “Did I not promise you?”
His light revealed a map rack, which stretched into the gloom like the wall of a dark and not entirely unhazardous alley. In each of its pigeonholes resided a rolled up, linen-wrapped map: at least a hundred in total, though it was not easy to estimate in the uncertain light. Coles, trying to read a label pasted to the shelf’s edge, held the candle flame too close to the linen, and Zanja felt a sharp panic. “Do you want to become notorious for burning down the library?”
Coles made an exasperated sound but moved the candle. “If you had gotten a lamp—” He studied a paper label pasted on the edge of the shelf. “Lilter 45,” he read. “At least the labels are in letter form.”
Zanja handed out candles to the three others, admonishing each of them against carelessness. “Find me the most recent map of Shaftal.”
The young men lit their candles and moved to push back the darkness that filled the narrow space between the cases. Zanja could scarcely bear to watch their flames so near that dry paper.
The young men began reading labels out loud to each other. Legs drew out a map, at great hazard. Zanja said, “I’m going to go away on my own for a short while . . . I want to see what I can, as I doubt I’ll ever be here again. I think we’re safe enough from the librarians.”
Water Logic Page 26