Water Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Coles gestured vaguely.

  He would write a glyphic poem about this night, a poem that Zanja would one day transliterate. And she would quote it to Emil as they climbed some stairs to discover a huge store of books that one brave librarian would rescue from the fire. She felt the vertigo again.

  She couldn’t find the way by reason and began to take her direction from intuition alone. Her candle showed only the next step, but that was enough. The students’ lights disappeared. She made her way past the dim, unrelenting secrecy of the shelves, the ambiguous, glittering glyphs, the heavy darkness that only grew heavier. The boys behind her became memories; she only knew that what she wanted became more achievable with every step.

  She looked up. The books were not so grand here: small but fat volumes bundled up in bleached linen like so many packets of flour.

  She stopped with her hand on a bundle, neatly tied up with cloth ribbons. She undid the bows and opened the cloth, and there lay Gerunt’s Decision. She had last seen this book on Emil’s worktable: not this exact book, of course, but a later edition from the time that printing presses came into general use and any plowman or barber or blacksmith could afford a book. But Emil’s copy, which had needed much repair, had been saved from this very library. This handwritten book was as direct an ancestor of his printed copy as Zanja could hope to find.

  This book was beautifully, ornately bound in dyed leather, with gold leafing and painted decorations. Zanja folded the letter to Emil into a slim packet and slid it carefully into the spine. Then, she wrapped up the book again and tied the ribbons, and, with a feeling like one gets when shooting into darkness, left the book as she had found it. To send a letter in this manner was ridiculous.

  She followed her feet again, and gradually the murmur of voices and the light of four candle flames emerged from the heavy silence and darkness. All four students knelt at the corners of a map they had unrolled onto the floor, with their hands cupped to catch the dripping wax as they illuminated the contorted coast of Shaftal. Even at this distance Zanja could see the extraordinary detail of a Truthken’s map. But she felt indifferent to whatever they had discovered.

  During her entire time in this Shaftal, she had engaged in wrongdoing when she had to, while striving to avoid doing any real harm. In order to sustain this contradictory balance she must now leave, promptly and quietly, with the library and its contents undisturbed. She had achieved what she needed to achieve. But she was not finished.

  “Hist!” Coles had noticed her standing there. “Are they coming?” he whispered.

  Zanja could not recall who he referred to. “No one is coming,” she said.

  “Well, come see the map.”

  His nervous impatience brought her back to the world, and suddenly she did care what the map revealed. For she needed to return to where she belonged; she needed to be part of the land and not merely a visitor. And she needed to escape this constant disorientation, this unrelenting sensation that nothing anyone did was trivial. She knelt beside the young men, added her candlelight to theirs, and examined the coast of Shaftal. Where might she find a water witch? Among the water people. Where were the water people?

  Briefly pointed. “Here.”

  “And here.”

  “And here.”

  They were pointing at places that major rivers met the sea. Those regions were bordered red and labeled with the G’deon’s glyph: protected lands, lands where no one may plant, gather, hunt, build, cut, or dig.

  “But not at Hanish Harbor,” Speck commented.

  Zanja thought she might safely skip visiting the tribe that supposedly lived at the mouth of the Otter River. The mouth of the Aerin River lay due west of Shimasal, farther away from Kisha than Otter Lake. And the third place, where the coastline looked like shattered piece of pottery on a blue tablecloth, was far in the south, between Basdown and the Juras grasslands. That place had a name printed in the same careful hand that had added information to the map over many years of travel: Secret.

  “No matter where you go, you’ll wish you had a horse,” Legs commented.

  Zanja sighed, for her feet were sore and her legs aching already. “Well, little though the information pleases me . . .”

  “Why aren’t there any border people at Hanish Harbor?” Speck asked. “It’s a good place, with good farmlands, good weather, access to the sea. Of course we would have no seaport or water road if Hanish were inhabited by . . .”

  “Oh, stop your mumbling,” said Legs. “You sound like a professor.”

  “Briefly, what is the history of that region?” asked Speck.

  “Long gone,” Briefly said.

  “Were border people living there once, but a long time ago?” asked Zanja.

  Briefly nodded.

  “But why—” began Speck.

  Legs and Coles forced him to his feet and put away the map. Zanja herded them out: back to the workshop, where Coles relocked the door; up the ladder, through the trapdoor, across the roof, and down the stone ladder, where they seemed more than willing for Zanja to be the one who climbed down last, without a rope. As she hauled up the rope, their faces as they looked up at her seemed like children’s—so far below her, so mischievous, tired, and naive.

  She lay the coiled rope beside her on the rooftop. “I’m going to stay here a while.”

  They continued to stare at her.

  “It’s peaceful up here,” she said. “I need to do some thinking.”

  “Surely you won’t sleep up there,” said Legs.

  “When I come to get my gear from your house, maybe I’ll see you. If not—well, thank you, and farewell. This has been a fine adventure.”

  They wandered rather reluctantly away. Zanja, squatting at the edge of the roof, knew that when Coles looked back he would see that she was keeping watch alongside the building’s stone guardians, as solemnly, fiercely, and determinedly as they. But Coles did not look back. She had reminded them that tomorrow the exams would begin, and they needed to get some sleep.

  Zanja had slipped Coles’s lockpick out of his pocket. She returned to the library. The lock was not as easy to open as Coles had made it seem, and Zanja struggled interminably before she finally got the trick of it. Intuitions often lose their intensity over time, but this intuition—or impulse—returned with renewed vigor as Zanja again entered among the books. She followed insight through the library like a string through a maze: across the second floor, down the stairway to the first, and among even more crowded shelves to an archway guarded by stone beasts that reared up to grasp her in their claws. The massive door was strapped with iron, and the keyhole in its middle was as big as two fingertips. Coles’s bit of metal rattled uselessly inside the works of the lock.

  Might this be the rarely opened vault that housed the Mackapee manuscript? The Sainnites, probably expecting to find something wonderful behind such a door, would break it down with great effort and then vent their frustration on the ancient, to them valueless, documents. Of the vault’s contents only the Mackapee manuscript would survive the destruction.

  But something locked behind that door cried out to Zanja, piercingly and insistently. She was locked out, and it was a fact she could not accept.

  The librarian who kept the night watch was young and vigorous and equipped with an alarm bell should she need to summon help. But she succumbed to force, it seemed, from astonishment alone. Zanja cut the bell rope and used it to bind the woman to a chair. Then a belated fit of bravery sealed the librarian’s lips, but the keys were not difficult to find, in a cabinet with a latch Zanja could break with a twist of her dagger point. The vault key, a monstrous, heavy thing decorated with an ornate silk tassel, was impossible to mistake. Zanja took it, along with a vial of oil and a feather. With a last threat to enforce the librarian’s silence she returned to the vault and oiled and
unlocked the door.

  Her flickering candle revealed what the Sainnites would also see: A polished mosaic floor of astonishing beauty, its radiating geometric pattern centered on the carved stone pedestal on which lay the Mackapee manuscript in its plain wooden box. The candlelight picked out elements of the fresco with which the high walls were painted: A person riding the back of a great fish; all the fruits of the land ripening on a single tree; a grinning, catlike creature with a snake in its jaws. Waist-high cabinets ringed the room. Zanja broke another latch with her dagger. Within she found mute packages: some of linen and some of wood, precisely placed upon dust-free shelves. She put her hand upon the largest and sighed with exasperation.

  It was a book—she could feel its end boards through the cloth—and it was massive, one of the biggest she had seen in the library. When she got her hands around it to lift it, she found it heavy as a hod of bricks. She staggered to her feet with the book braced against her hipbones, tilting herself backward to counterweight it. She could walk like this, but not while carrying a candle, which didn’t matter because the book blocked her vision anyway. With her snuffed candle in her pocket she shuffled across the vault and bumped her way out the door. Partly by the instinct with which all creatures can retrace their steps, and partly by bumping blindly around obstacles, Zanja made her way to the foot of the stairway. Climbing it was nearly impossible; three times she lost her footing.

  When she reached the roof ladder she had to abandon her prize to get the rope. The tome came through the trap door diagonally, scraping and catching on the frame. Had the opening been only slightly smaller, her escapade would have ended with the book stuck there. Then, with the help of the snarling guardians, she crossed cracking slates, bowed over by the weight of the book that was now slung onto her back. As she lowered the book to the ground, she thought she could hear the librarian calling for help now, but it was a muffled, distant sound swallowed up by the vast, paper-filled spaces of the library.

  Finally Zanja climbed down the convenient stone ladder. At the bottom, Coles was waiting for her.

  “I brought your gear,” Coles said. “I wish I hadn’t.”

  Zanja stood with her back against the stone building. The massive book lay on the ground beside her. “Coles, I do respect and like you—in a way much different from those silly friends of yours, who just think of you as a good playfellow. I hate to harm or humiliate you. But I will escape Kisha with this book.”

  “I wish I had never met you.”

  “And I wish you had done as you were told, for once, and gone to bed.”

  “I never do what I’m told to do.”

  The young man’s agitation quieted. Now he would bargain with her, Zanja feared, and thus waste what remained of the night, costing her what chance she had of escaping Kisha while the theft was still undiscovered. She could not take him hostage, for she could not manage both him and the book. And if she trussed him and left him helpless, as she had the librarian, he would just become a compass to point her pursuers towards her. And there would be pursuers, lots of them, for she was not merely a thief, but a rogue Paladin.

  She said, “Well, you’ve carried my gear this far—keep carrying it, will you?”

  To her surprise he shouldered her pack and bedroll, muttering, “What do you need all this stuff for, anyway?”

  Zanja heaved the book across her back. They wound through Kisha, Zanja going northward by the signs of the stars and the direction of the shadows. The book burdened her with more than just its weight.

  At the northern edge of Kisha, the warrens of crowded lodgings and dingy shops gave way to finer habitations that had gated yards, stables, and turrets from which the residents could view the picturesque countryside. Here the town abruptly gave way to the rough landscape of the northern borderlands, where in Zanja’s time far-scattered hamlets marked the few fertile areas, separated by wide stretches of rocky heath. But the farmers of this time probably hadn’t ventured far to the north. She would only find shepherds’ shelters and flocks of sheep.

  “You’re not going to haul that wretched book into the wilderness!” said Coles. “You don’t expect me to go with you!”

  “I’ll hardly be able to feed myself in this season. Go back, Coles. Go to bed, or alert the librarians and Paladins, or write a poem—or whatever else suits you.”

  He dropped her gear with a noisy thump and stood scraping a foot unhappily in the gravelly soil. “How can I know what suits me, when you have not allowed me to understand you?” He added, self-pityingly, “This night is no longer amusing.”

  “Names of the gods! It is past time for you to grow up!”

  Zanja could scarcely bear to contemplate the physical effort that lay ahead of her. Even Karis, who could easily carry a burden of four stone or more, would hesitate to haul both book and gear. Zanja would somehow do what she must. First she must do something about this young man, who had helped her and deserved some courtesy.

  She said, “I would explain myself to you, but I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know when I will understand why I’ve done this, if I ever do understand it. I don’t even know what book I have stolen.”

  The young man sat where he was on the stony ground. “Let’s take a look at it, then. Too bad there is no moonlight.”

  Zanja took the candle and matchbox out of her pocket. She had not thought to buy more matches and she lit her last one reluctantly. But if she were about to be forced to strip her gear down to a few tools and a blanket, the inconvenience of a flintstone would be the least of her problems.

  Coles unwrapped the book, careful to keep it out of the dirt. “Oh, it’s very old. It’s not made of paper at all, but sheepskin, and the boards are wooden.”

  “No wonder it’s so cursed heavy.” Zanja held the candle carefully over the book as Coles opened and delicately turned a gigantic page.

  “By the land!” Zanja breathed. She was looking at a glyph illustration as ornate and complicated as those she had studied at the House of Lilterwess. It showed a woman on her knees, with a tree growing in her cupped hands. She was framed by climbing plants and attended by birds and beasts, and under her knees were the various soils and minerals of the land.

  “Earth,” said Coles unnecessarily. “And the next page will be fire.”

  “Then water and air,” said Zanja, still breathless with surprise.

  “Then the four directions, the four implements, the four passions, . . .” Coles turned the pages as he spoke, giving Zanja glimpses of gorgeous, overpowering pictures, and of the facing pages that were crammed with glyphic text in the same ornate style as had been used in the library.

  “It’s a lexicon? I’ve stolen a lexicon?”

  “Yes, an incredibly old one. I wonder why the explanations are written in glyphs rather than in letter form. What is the sense of that? A person who can read glyphs doesn’t need a lexicon!” He paused in his page turning to examine an illustration unfamiliar to Zanja. “What are those creatures who are contending with each other? It’s supposed to be two men fighting. And why is that wagon axle broken? It changes the entire meaning—perhaps even reverses it . . .”

  Zanja firmly but carefully shut the book and lay it in its wrappings. Coles, gasping like a landed trout, cried, “The illustrations have changed over time? I’ve studied them for years, and yet my masters never even mentioned that fact?”

  “What does it matter?” Zanja’s hands burned as she folded the linen carefully over the book. Unlike Coles, she felt abruptly, relievedly at peace.

  “What does it—?” Coles began to repeat, in outrage.

  “Your people will have no more opportunity to make sense of it.”

  “That lexicon belongs to the scholars!”

  “No, it belongs to the future.” Zanja had to calm his passion or he would certainly send pursuers after her. “
Coles, I am not stealing this book. I am rescuing it.”

  “The difference between one verb and another is a matter of merest opinion.”

  “Master Poet—”

  His head jerked sharply, as if he were a hooked fish.

  “Master Poet, take my hand. Just take it! Stop thinking like those scholars you have so little respect for!”

  She felt his fingers touch her palm, and, as Tadwell had done, he flinched away with a gasp. Zanja knew that Coles had not felt in her the solid traces of earth power, but the fierce heat of fire: his own element. “You don’t have to trust me,” she said. “Trust the elemental fire. People will think you’re mad, just as you think of me. But if you can’t trust that fire, what are you? A boy who likes glyphs.”

  He sat back on his heels. Zanja struggled into her gear and heaved the mighty book over her shoulders. He observed her thoughtfully. “You are correct,” he finally said.

  “Farewell, Coles.”

  He stood up then and clasped both her hands in his. For a few moments he held onto them as grimly and stolidly as a warrior enduring a rite of initiation. Then he let go.

  Chapter 25

  The workers left early for the fields, Jareth among them, while Seth and Damon were still eating their porridge. “Oh, I meant to bring a hat,” Seth said to Damon and to anyone else who might not be entirely preoccupied with feeding children or kneading bread dough.

  Upstairs the big house seemed deserted, for no matter how early the sun rose or how late it set, the days were never long enough during the warm season, and no one ever lounged late in bed unless they were sick. Seth took a straw hat from its hook in her bedroom and continued down the hall and up the attic stairs, to the room where Jareth’s narrow bed was crammed among the clothes chests and broken pieces of furniture. The High Meadow farmers were as unwilling as anyone to get rid of things that might later prove useful, and these attic rooms were crammed with the junk of generations. All Jareth’s belongings seemed to be in the knapsack tucked under the bed. Seth pulled it out and went through it but found only clothing and commonplace travel gear: a tin porringer, a match case, a sewing kit, a spare shirt. There was nothing in the bedding or tucked under the mattress, nothing secreted above the door frame or underneath a loose floorboard. But it looked as if the dust under the bed had recently been disturbed, and Seth began pulling things out.