People had noticed their arrival and were gathering: the sawyers with yellow wood dust stuck in their sweat, villagers in boats they dragged to the beach, others who didn’t bother with boats, but swam. The beach smelled unpleasantly of decay. Seth took a dry, twiggy branch from the lumberyard’s waste pile, lit it at the only fire on the beach, where a pot of stew was simmering, and brought it to the pyre. The wood caught quickly, popping and spattering from the fat they must have treated it with. Seth stood back, and from that slight distance, hazed with smoke, Damon looked very like himself, dressed in the plain work clothes Seth had purchased for him, with a love-knot tied in his hair.
A man began singing a song that seemed dreadfully sad. All the people joined in, and again many seemed to sing different songs that intertangled with each other in ways that were surprising to Seth’s ears. She sat on the sand and, her heart empty, watched Damon burn.
For several days, Seth only watched. She watched the tide come in and invade the many streams with seawater. People in boats rode the tide inland, and when the tide turned, they returned with fowl, rushes, roots, greens, and fresh water. Alila cut her houseboat loose, and her neighbors helped tow it to shore, so Seth could climb aboard without having to swim or be afloat. The boat’s deck was a workroom with table and stools. Three steps down a ladder was a cleverly organized one-room house, a kitchen complete with storage and fireplace, with beds that were like slings of canvas folded away in cupboards. Small holes in the roof were plugged with faceted glass that sprayed light everywhere; they had lanterns but never brought them below. It was a marvelous little house. But as soon as a wave made it shift and grind on the sea bottom, Seth fled for dry ground. There she sat on the sand and watched as the houseboat was towed back to its place. A cat sat on the rooftop, nonchalantly washing its face. Alila’s three children sat with Seth, showing her how to suck living snails from their shells. They ate theirs raw, but she cooked hers in a pan, then couldn’t eat them—they were awful—but a dog ate them, and followed her hopefully for the rest of the day.
The weather stayed calm, though the fog came and went, and Seth slept on the beach except for one cold night when she took shelter in the carpenters’ town, where in a row of grounded houseboats the ship-builders lived. Many were earth bloods, building boats they could not endure to travel or live in. In the chilly morning, the harbor steamed like a cauldron. An onshore breeze began to blow, and little swells sighed onto the beach. After the tide had turned, Seth heard a cry from the village. She saw bright silken scarves being waved by people on rooftops, as a single-masted ship sailed grandly towards them across the harbor. People crowded the rooftops, and the carpenters who had gathered at the water’s edge gave each other congratulatory nods. Children cheered when the ship dropped anchor, and then there was a great launching of rowboats, and with much shouting and laughter the ship was offloaded. First came many baskets of fish, and soon on every houseboat deck people were hard at work with their gutting knives. Next large bundles were lowered from the ship to the waiting boats, and all of these were brought to shore. There began an impromptu fair. The oilcloth wrappings were spread out and the contents displayed: tools, fabric of silk and of wool, bags of corn, and tins of lard, sugar, and paint. Throughout the afternoon people admired the goods, before everything was distributed. Every household received something, and all the children were given nuts and candies and toys.
As darkness fell, a bonfire was lit on shore, and kegs of sweet ale were tapped. Drums, flutes, and stringed instruments were brought out, and the villagers danced. Seth watched from the edge of the salt marsh. Tomorrow, she told herself, she would ask for provisions and take her leave. She could not bear to go back to Basdown—she would go directly to Watfield and tell Emil what had happened. After that—oh, there was nothing Seth wanted any more! This was grief—she knew it well enough. And it was responsibility. She had not killed her friend, but she had put him there, between her and the poison, and if she had not done this, he would not have died.
“Esset?” Alila approached, with a young man Seth did not recognize, who must have arrived on the ship. Looking unhappy, Alila gestured to him and said a word—his name, Seth assumed.
She said politely, “Greetings.”
The man said, “Greetings. Your people call me ‘Silver.’ ”
Seth stared at him, openmouthed, until Alila spoke. The man squatted down and said, “This woman—Alila, you call her—is brokenhearted from your sorrow. She wants to give you a gift.”
Seth clutched his hand in both of hers. “You must be the Speaker of the Essikret! Have you heard that there is a G’deon in Shaftal once again? Do you know—”
The firelit dancers beyond them were exuberant, but Silver was somber and said, “We will discuss these things later.” He turned towards Alila. She held out a hand, in which was cupped a string of shells, which flashed with light in all colors.
“These shells are precious to the Essikret,” said Silver. “A person must dive deeply, and only in certain places, to collect the shell with the living creature inside. It must immediately be treated or the colors will fade. Alila wishes you to have this necklace.”
Alila poured the string of shells into Seth’s hand, and spoke.
“She says, ‘Remember our friendship,’ ” said Silver.
Seth looked at the shells in her hand, and fear stirred. When she looked up, Alila had backed away, and several muscular sailors had stepped forward.
“I am very sorry, Esset,” Silver said. “You must come with us onto the ship.”
Chapter 30
In pale dawn, with the sun not yet risen, Zanja awoke to unendurable restlessness, and, leaving her things in the woodcutters’ camp, walked back to the river. The waterfall, invisible to her left, uttered a distant roar, but the water here seemed smooth as stretched silk except where it plunged over boulders. To her right, the river curved out of sight, into dense forest. In between the waterfall to the east and the forest to the west, there sat an ancient woman with her feet in the water, with the powerful current parting around her ankles.
The berthed boats of the water people were gathered here, pulled by the current, bumping each other hollowly as they strained against their tethers. Zanja felt she had a great deal in common with those boats: she need not even try to understand the current that pulled her, for she would go where it went, whether she understood it or not. She knelt upon the creaking mosaic of water-rounded tones. So she had once used to kneel before the na’Tarwein elders, but always on several layers of woven rugs. The patterns in those rugs had been complex, but not mysterious. These stones, though, seemed to have no pattern at all, nor were they comfortable to kneel upon.
Ocean held a large shell in her hands. Her fingers fit between the spines that ridged it, as though the shell had grown to match her hand. She sipped water from it as though it were a cup, and droplets spattered her bare knees. “Are you thirsty, traveler?” she asked.
She offered Zanja the shell. Perhaps it was foolish to accept a drink from a water witch, but Zanja sipped politely from the strange cup and handed it back to her. “I thank you, Grandmother.”
The old woman dipped her fingers in the water and scattered droplets in the sunlight. “You may ask me one question, granddaughter.”
Zanja said nothing. The water witch glanced at her—sardonic, amused, and possibly grateful. She uttered a laugh and splashed her feet in the rippling water. The shell necklace upon her breast flashed in the rising sunlight. “My brother of the lakes and rivers has taught you something!”
Zanja said, “I suppose he taught me that there are patterns I cannot see, and music I cannot hear.”
The water witch flung water in a glittering arc over her head. She turned her face upward. Water splashed upon her face and became tears. She was a glyph: past within future, sorrow within joy.
Then she bent over
and smashed the shell’s pointed tip to the stones, and put the shell to her lips and blew. In a spray of water, the improvised horn uttered a gurgling, melancholy sound. Ocean blew again, and now the sound reverberated: clear and sweet.
Zanja heard a cry. She stood up, and turned. The Ocean People appeared in the distance, bounding among the saplings. Four of them held the handles of a wood-carrier, in which was suspended the gigantic stolen book. And now Zanja saw their pursuer, thundering upon them like an avalanche: Tadwell G’deon.
“A fool has attracted the rock man’s ire,” Ocean commented. Now standing ankle-deep in water, she watched what avalanched towards them with amusement.
“It was for you I stole the book,” said Zanja.
“You desire the book. The rock man chases it. I do not care at all about books.”
The swift-footed people had nearly reached the river. Tadwell pounded hard behind them—slow, relentless. To become trapped in a confrontation between the opposing elements of water and earth seemed very unwise.
“I think I should get into a boat now,” Zanja said.
Ocean climbed into a skiff and set the oars into the locks. She pointed imperiously at the other bench.
Zanja undid the mooring, waded through water, stepped in, and sat hastily as the rocking skiff jumped forward on the swift current. Ocean’s white hair made a frame of light around her aged face. Her hands crossed at the wrists and put the oars into the fast-moving water. The boat jumped into the swift current. Whooping, the Ocean People leapt into their bright red and yellow boats.
Tadwell’s charge halted at the water’s edge. The water lay between Zanja and him, an ever-widening barrier. Yet they were surrounded by earth, and earth even lay beneath them. A fool has attracted the rock-man’s ire.
But now the shore fled out of reach.
In the other boats, the Ocean People were now yodeling mockingly and waving their arms or their scarves in farewell at the glowering earth witch. Zanja cried, “Tell them not to taunt him!”
“Hoo-hoo!” cried the old woman.
The skiff climbed a wave that flung it past a half-submerged boulder. The water witch dug her oars into air, teeth bared, and the rowers on either side of them shrieked. Zanja clenched the edge of the bench to keep from flying out of the boat. From shore, those waves had not seemed so high. Ocean’s oars dug in and whisked them neatly up the side of the next wave.
They flew in a spray of water. A wave fractured into droplets, which hung suspended before Zanja’s gaze. Each one contained the complete sky and the entire earth. Then the droplets coalesced, and became the wave again, and the boat was flying up a hill of water. Zanja felt something rising from her gut. She opened her mouth, and yelled exhilaration. They fell, and fell down the side of the wave.
“Oof!” The hard landing flung Zanja off the bench, nearly into Ocean’s lap. Water gushed in on both sides. Ocean knocked Zanja on the head with an oar. She scrambled out of the way and wrapped her arm around the bench, amazed that she was still in the boat. Ocean’s red-painted oars flashed in air, dipped in water. With her foot she indicated the bucket that was tied to the bench. Zanja let go and began bailing.
A breath hissed in the grinning woman’s teeth as she steadied the boat, which jumped this way and that like a confused rabbit. The other skiffs nearby jumped about also. The shoreline on each side behaved oddly—not slipping past, but remaining still. Yet at the same time, it seemed to be rippling, and the water’s surface rippled also, in an exactly contrary movement. Some of the Ocean People had been spilled into the water and were being hauled into boats again. Some were bailing, and others had stood up and were shouting a rhythmic chant while flapping their oars like wings.
Zanja looked wildly for Tadwell, but their mad voyage had left the angry figure planted on the bank out of her sight. The water grew more agitated. The witch cried a warning, and everyone shipped their oars and dropped to the decks. Zanja huddled in the cold water at the bottom of the boat, face to face with Ocean. The old woman’s expression was terrible: grim and desperate.
Zanja said, “The Otter Elder told me that you must return me to my place . . . or die with me.”
The water witch said nothing. The boat began to spin.
Zanja raised her head. A brown wave loomed over their spinning boat. Stones and logs flew along its crest as if from a catapult. The Ocean People were shrieking—a nearby boat flipped over.
Ocean reached one arm over the boat’s edge. Muscles bulged as she dug her hand into the water. The spinning stopped, and the boat sluggishly turned its bow to face the enormous wave.
They flew up. Zanja slid under the bench, braced her feet on the stern, and then found herself nearly standing, looking up at the serene, dawn-pink sky. The water witch clung to the bow like a spider, her toes and fingers somehow holding to the boat’s ribs. A dreadful thud of collision, and an entire tree flew past them. Stones rattled on the bow, and then it was raining gravel.
And now they were falling, and falling, and Zanja wanted to vomit, but there was no time for it. The jolt of their landing flattened her to the bottom. The boards warped. Water squirted through the cracks into her face. Then water poured in on both sides, and she struggled out from under the bench, lest she drown. The water witch already was rowing again. Zanja heard hoarse shouts and glanced at the shore. Sights flashed past, making no sense: a running man, flung up in the air like a toy; the trees of a woodland tumbling over like scythed wheat; the earth rippling as huge boulders were heaved up from the firmament; a cliff rising, or a valley sinking; dust rising like smoke into the rosy sky. She saw overturned boats, people clinging to floating logs in the swirling water. She saw water flow uphill. And now she saw Tadwell. They had somehow returned to where they had begun.
Ocean uttered a sharp command. Zanja shouted, “Take me ashore!” But the witch whacked Zanja’s leg with the bucket. As she began bailing again, Ocean leaned over the edge, and more water poured in. She grunted with effort, and dragged aboard—not a drowning person—the lexicon.
The boat began to spin again. The shoreline now seemed to be rapidly becoming more distant, even as the boat spun in place. A huddle of Ocean People clung to each other, thigh-deep in water. A few other boats were still afloat but unoccupied. In the distance, water began to flow downhill again, boiling, frothing, thick with dirt. Zanja retched from vertigo. But Ocean caught the crazy current with her oars, and the boat steadied.
What had been a clear, fast-moving river now seemed more like the muddy bottom of a nearly dry lake. Far to the east, where the sun’s red-flushed face had risen, Zanja could see what had been the harbor: the cliffs, the impossibly narrow entrance to the sea. Yesterday’s neatly arranged village had now been torn to pieces, the boats scattered across the heaving water.
They had not gone over the waterfall. They had not been flung into that pocket of ocean. Thus, it should have been impossible to see the harbor at all. But—somehow—they now were on a level with it.
Ocean’s boat ran aground.
Tadwell waded towards them through the thick water or thin mud and yanked Zanja out of the boat. Her shirt seams ripped. He dragged her through the cold soup, across shattered, sharp-edged stones, up a slope, the surface of which was cracked and fissured. He flung her down. He ripped the earring from her ear. He put his hands around her neck.
“You’ve done exactly what she wanted!” she gasped.
The hands closed around her throat. Zanja’s dagger had gotten itself into her hand. As Tadwell strangled her, she would fight him. That dagger, forged by earth magic far more powerful than his, might even be able to kill him. She flung the dagger away in a spasm of revulsion.
Then she realized, with no little irony, that she would die a hero after all—though no one would know it.
While she thought these things, she fought him for her life. Bu
t it was hopeless—he had the power of Shaftal in his hands.
“Tadwell! Let her go!”
“What are you doing here!” the G’deon roared.
“What are you doing!” the other man bellowed back at him. “You tear the land to pieces! You make yourself a murderer! For what?”
The back of Zanja’s head cracked on a rock. “Arel—go away,” she said, for she could breathe again. But her voice was like the scratching of a cricket, and neither of them noticed her.
“For Shaftal!” Tadwell shouted.
“For Shaftal? Only a madman could expect that to make sense!”
“This woman’s very existence threatens Shaftal! And yet I trusted—”
Zanja creaked, “Quiet!”
They both looked at her. Perhaps her rudeness had gotten their attention.
“Tadwell—kill me if you must. But don’t talk about it. Not to him, not ever.”
After a moment, Arel stepped back, and turned. He picked up Zanja’s dagger. He stiffened with surprise.
While Tadwell was flattening the landscape to make the river flow in reverse, Zanja had been on the water—not a restful place, certainly. But Arel had been riding the bucking back of the earth—it must have been him she had seen being thrown into the air. He had landed like a katrim, of course, and had kept running, directly towards the center of the madness, while trees fell and boulders exploded out of the soil all around him. The man certainly should be beyond surprise.
Water Logic Page 33