Water Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Bloody hell,” Zanja said. “Nine curses of the nine gods. Shit.” She would have cursed in the water language also, had she known how to do it. Her ear hurt as if it had been torn from her head; her ribs felt like they had been hit with a club; and now the rocks of the deranged earth seemed to be embedded in her skull. She’d have a G’deon’s finger marks on her throat, too, if she survived this day.

  Tadwell loomed over her, breathing heavily, his big hands poised to clutch her throat again. “Tad,” said Arel quietly. “She threw her dagger out of her own reach, so she couldn’t harm you.”

  The G’deon made an irritated movement, as if a fly were buzzing around him. Arel said, “She stole a book—this seems beyond doubt. But why? She can’t sell it, and it contains no secrets. She is drawn to glyphs, but there are no obstacles to studying them. She could even have stolen a smaller book! What she did is no more reasonable than what you’re doing.”

  Arel squatted, wisely keeping his distance. From head to foot he was covered with dirt. Zanja’s dagger dangled from one hand, and she saw the ripples in the metal as if she had never set eyes on that beautiful weapon before. Karis had invented the technique of folding the steel and pounding it flat, fusing the layers, over and over. The best metalsmiths in Meartown had been unable to imitate her work. Two hundred years in the future, this dagger would still be unique.

  “Fire logic compels,” Arel said. “Its compulsions are beyond explanation. But they are never wrong.”

  Tadwell’s head moved, just a small amount. He said to Zanja, “That old woman demanded the book?”

  That old woman? At least Tadwell was belatedly guarding his tongue, but he had recognized his adversary. The water witch had deliberately communicated her presence to him by sitting upon the stones of the riverbank. Tadwell’s extraordinary rage had been inspired by Zanja, and by his anger at himself for trusting her. But only water magic could taunt an earth witch into such a massive act of destruction, and surely Ocean had known that.

  Zanja said, “I was brought here so I would steal the book. But not because she wanted it. Because she wanted this—this cataclysm.”

  “Rock man!” cried a voice from the river.

  Though Tadwell certainly did not understand the water tongue, he turned sharply. Arel hastily rose and helped Zanja to her feet, murmuring in their language, “Your warning was inadequate, my sister! Why did you take that book?”

  “Because I wanted it,” she said.

  He uttered a strangled sound, as if the struggle between bewilderment and amusement were choking off his breath.

  She took her dagger from him.

  “That blade—!” he said.

  “If Tadwell does kill me, bury my dagger in a place no one will find it.”

  She looked towards what had been the river. The water witch, standing in her rocking boat, was holding up the massive lexicon. Her necklaces flashed and glittered in the light of the rising sun. Other survivors of the catastrophe waded dazedly towards her, towing boats or carrying oars. A man who had already reached Ocean helped her to dangle the book over the confused, muddy water.

  Zanja said, “Tadwell, the lexicon must be ruined already, for it fell in the water, when—”

  He grabbed Zanja’s arm, crushing flesh to bone. “The book has no value, then. It’s a fair trade!” He took a step towards the water, hauling her with him.

  “You need not force me, sir.”

  To her surprise, Tadwell let go of her and allowed her to turn back to Arel. A bleeding scrape on Arel’s high cheekbone was caked with dirt. His warrior’s braids, which Zanja had rebraided for him when she was imprisoned in his room, had begun to come loose from the bindings.

  When Tadwell exiled her, as he certainly was about to do, she would never see any member of her tribe again. She felt the old loss, familiar, no more or less endurable: her people were gone, and had been gone, for nearly six years.

  She said, “Farewell, my brother. The mountains shelter you, the waters nurture you, the gods remember you.”

  He replied as was customary, in the language of Zanja’s dreams, and they embraced. He felt very real.

  She turned away and walked beside Tadwell, back into the soupy mud. She stripped off the sodden Paladin’s waistcoat and dropped it behind her. Tadwell, a walking boulder beside her, began to speak.

  “I know I can’t return here,” she said, interrupting him.

  He splashed forward two more steps. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Perhaps I seem stupid—”

  “Somewhat,” she said.

  He uttered a harsh snort. “Zanja na’Tarwein, your tribe is gone. I had wondered if it might be true, and now I’m certain. But you didn’t tell Arel.”

  Each step Zanja took felt like sinking into a quagmire—there was no solidity here, just a morass. She said at last, “My people, these water people, the giants of the south, the other mountain tribes—the western tribes—we all will be extinct some day. For to be alive is to change, and to fail to change makes death certain.”

  “What is that? A poem?”

  “It is a poem not yet written, by a poet people will always suspect might be crazy.”

  Tadwell snorted again. “Aren’t all poets crazy?”

  They were more than knee-deep in mud, now. Grandmother Ocean stood in her boat waiting for them. The boat’s prow was gashed, scarred, and dented by the objects the maddened river had catapulted at them. The ancient woman gazed down at them without expression. The water man who held the bowline was mud-brown from head to knee. He grinned, and some of the mud on his face flaked away. Then he knelt, not in respect to the G’deon, but to offer Zanja his knee as a step into the boat. Tadwell stopped her with a hand on the shoulder. “The book first,” he said.

  Ocean’s boat rocked as the book’s great weight was transferred, from her arms to the kneeling man’s hands to Tadwell’s massive shoulder. The lexicon was not muddy at all—it didn’t even look wet. Tadwell would take it back to its vault and lock it safely away, to be burned by the Sainnites.

  Zanja stepped up onto the man’s knee and stepped into the boat. Pain stabbed her side. Gasping, she stumbled to the bench. Holding her ribs, she turned to watch the G’deon return to shore, carrying the book on his shoulder.

  All around him, the landscape seemed to be resolving its elemental confusion: the earth was settling out of the water, and the water was separating from the earth. Mudflats were appearing, crisscrossed by tiny, eastward-flowing streams and channels.

  Arel met Tadwell on firm ground and offered his hand. Zanja thought Tadwell would not take it, but he did.

  Ocean dug in her oars.

  Chapter 31

  The G’deon and the Speaker had disappeared from sight. Ocean rowed laboriously through the soupy water, until she seemed to find a sluggish current and shipped her oars. Though Ocean was an unbelievably old woman, Zanja didn’t offer to help with the rowing. The chill lifted under the influence of the rising sun. The devastated landscape ceased to be amazing and become only wearying. The pain in Zanja’s ribs grew worse, and she moved to the boat’s bottom, seeking a position that eased the pain. Blood from her torn earlobe stiffened on her neck as it dried; it seemed too much trouble to wash it off.

  With her head leaning against the boat’s wooden edge, carefully positioned to avoid pressing the bruises in her skull, Zanja closed her eyes against the brilliant, dust-suffused sunshine.

  “What did you do to me?” she asked, remembering the water she had drunk from Ocean’s shell. She would have complied without being bespelled, had Ocean bothered to explain what she was doing. But perhaps water witches couldn’t explain, like Karis couldn’t. Earth bloods know what they know, and gods help anyone who gets in their way . . .

  Zanj
a chuckled and woke herself up. Sunlight glared, and she shaded her eyes with a heavy hand. She still couldn’t see Ocean. “Grandmother, why have you done these things? How will you recompense me?”

  The boat creaked softly, the muddy water splashed heavily, and the witch gave no answer. The oars lay where she had placed them. Her bench was empty. Zanja was alone again—utterly alone.

  She shut her eyes and slept.

  Someone was calling. Zanja opened her eyes and sat up slightly. She saw a wide, smooth stretch of blue-green water that reflected the sun. Her unguided boat had drifted into the harbor.

  “Traveler, the tide turns!”

  She looked in the direction of the voice and found herself an armspan from the tarred hull of the Ocean People’s ship. A man dangled from the ship’s side, one foot on a flimsy rope ladder, and the other heel hooked over the skiff’s edge, tethering it. “Climb, traveler!”

  She fought herself to her feet, breathing fast to diffuse the pain. Her wet clothing hung from her, and her boots were heavy with water. She discovered that the leather boot fastenings had become too gummy and soft to be untied, so she took her small knife out of the boot sheath, sliced the straps, hacked loose the sheath, and flung the boots into the puddle at the bottom of the boat. Holding the sheathed knife in her teeth, gasping with pain, she began climbing the rope ladder. The man’s weight at the bottom of the ladder held it steady.

  At the deck rail, she hesitated. The ship’s deck was in such tumult that she feared another disaster might have occurred while she slept. The men below her on the ladder said, “We must hurry—the wind will soon turn.” She heaved herself over the rail, lost her balance, and was crashed into by a running sailor. She clutched the rail, gasping. Her helper hopped to the deck and hauled in, rolled up, and stowed the ladder. He pointed towards the stern and gave her a push.

  She went where he pointed. She found a place to sit among coils of line and bundles of canvas.

  To the west lay a vast stretch of devastation. Dust floated over the churned landscape like brown fog. The new, far more distant cliffs looked raw and unfinished. Tracts of trees lay on their sides, their roots grasping at air. The lovely waterfall was no more. Upon the new shore, some of the water people were salvaging logs and cut firewood from the pileup of debris, while in an improvised pen, their youngest children rolled and shrieked in the mud. In the water, rowboats clustered around sinking houseboats, from which people threw everything they could salvage. On rafts of logs lay piles of rescued objects: cushions, baskets, barrels, and bodies. Zanja’s heart hollowed out. What disaster had she brought upon these people with her passion for a book of lovely pictures?

  A body stirred. Another rose up and staggered to a cask to get a drink. She shut her eyes, relieved. Ocean had warned her people, of course, and they had been prepared for the cataclysm.

  The ship creaked like the knees of an old person climbing a stair. Zanja opened her eyes to find that her view had shifted; the ship was turning on its anchor, and the sailors replied with an enthusiastic, bellowing chorus that resolved into a song. In clusters they began heaving at ropes. At the sound of flapping canvas, Zanja looked up and saw a sail being raised. The canvas sighed and then cupped like a hand. The ship came alive. Astonished, Zanja watched the wrecked village begin to recede. The ship moved like a living creature, but with muscles of wind. How quiet it was!

  But as the ship neared the opening to the sea, the booming, pounding crashes of the waves against the rocks became deafening. A woman far aloft in the rigging screamed instructions. People yanked on a great wooden wheel. The ship plunged into chaos. It bucked and groaned, and the lookout’s precarious perch swung wildly back and forth as the vessel wallowed in troughs and reared over breakers. Then they slipped through the fissure, and the ocean opened up before them.

  Yesterday morning, from that very cliff, Zanja had observed the ship’s arrival. Since then the earth had shifted its foundations, but her situation was in no way improved. The stolen lexicon had been taken from her. The water witch had disappeared, and Zanja was an exile. Karis and the rest of her family remained two hundred years out of reach. Zanja understood nothing.

  Zanja did not know where she was being taken, but to travel like this was marvelous. She stood at the rail as they flew away from the grasping waves of the coastline. A stark, water-rounded stone island slipped past them, and several dozen gigantic, slug-shaped creatures raised their whiskered faces to bark at them like a pack of angry dogs. They passed a larger island, where dwarfed trees clung to bare rock. After that, there were no more islands; just open sea.

  While Zanja marveled, some sailors set up a sunshade and went to sleep. Others worked on the rolling deck, checking and coiling the lines, mending fish nets and hanging them in the wind to dry, while some played a music game with tiny, piping flutes.

  No one spoke to her. They did not seem oppressed by catastrophe, though perhaps their loud laughter was their own way of screaming at the elementals whose war had wrecked their peaceful village.

  The land and landscape that had shaped Zanja’s life began to seem small, and its remoteness made her feel quite unmoored. When the Sainnites first spotted—or would spot—Shaftal, it would look like this: a dark line of land, a promise that their terrible voyage would soon end. By the time they had realized—would realize—what a dangerous shore they approached, they would not be able to turn away, and most of their ships would be wrecked. They would resent and hate Shaftal for good reason.

  The sun sank behind that deceptive promise, turning Shaftal gold, which faded to purple. The land melted into the sea. A sailor brought Zanja a supper of boiled fish and slimy seaweed. She lay on her back, floating in wonder as the universe filled up with stars.

  She awakened to the sound of raucous whistling. A few sailors at the bow made that happy racket as the sun’s edge lifted above the horizon. Others awoke, and some stamped a rhythm on the deck, and the stamping became dancing as the swollen sun escaped the sea.

  One of the dancers was Grandmother Ocean.

  Zanja stood up, then staggered like a drunk. The ship had begun to climb and descend steep swells that came at them from the northeast. But the dancers made the rolling deck part of their dance, and the old woman walked towards Zanja as if on solid ground.

  “Where have you been, Grandmother?” Zanja asked. The water language had no words for greeting or farewell.

  “I have been to a good salt marsh filled with birds, crabs, and clams.”

  “But your people—!” Yesterday’s dreamy acceptance had dissipated. A pain struck Zanja, and she cried out, “My people—!”

  “The ocean is great,” the old woman said, irrelevantly.

  The witch gestured, and Zanja looked across the restless waters, all the way to the horizon. The horizon made the edges of a vast bowl, filled to overflowing. Above it lay another bowl, the sky. The sun and this arrogant ship were the only sailors in two parallel seas without shores.

  Zanja’s gaze returned to the old woman, who continued to rock peacefully with the ship’s tossing. “I admit I’m insignificant,” Zanja said. “But—”

  A sailor gave a shout, and people swarmed up the rigging as a wave rose up before them like a looming giant. The ship boomed hollowly, and water sprayed across the deck. Flung off balance, Zanja clung to the rail, baffled by this rough sea beneath the sunlit sky.

  The water witch, who ignored all Zanja’s important questions, answered a trivial one she had not asked. “The water feels a distant storm,” she said.

  Some people had drawn near, five bare-chested sailors whose muscular arms and shoulders belied the seeming ease of the ship’s movement. “Throw her overboard,” Ocean told them.

  And they did.

  Zanja came to the surface, gasping, in the hollow between two moving hills of water. One hill came at her and she slippe
d up its side. From the top, she saw the ship flying away from her on a freshening wind. Though its rigging was crowded with sailors, they were preoccupied. No one was even looking at her. Water splashed in her face, into her open mouth, and some entered her lungs. It burned. She began coughing helplessly. Sliding down the watery hillside, she went under. With a panicked kick of her legs she rose to the surface, where she again climbed a wave. This time she turned her face away from the crest so it would not break in her face. The ship sailed briskly out of sight.

  Her belt hung from her hips, dragging her down. She unbuckled it and let it go: the two blades Karis had forged for her, the glyph cards Emil had given her in the early days when none of them even suspected how these new friendships would reshape their lives. How could she let these treasures go? But they were gone already. She tore off her clothes, her fingers already numb with cold. Naked but more buoyant, she climbed up and slid down the waves, over and over, until it began to seem like the waves were standing still, while she moved over them by a power she could not control. Soon she shuddered so violently from cold that she could scarcely continue to swim. She became desperately thirsty. Her legs hung from her, heavy burdens dragging her under, and she could not undo them and let them go.

  A wave enveloped her. She emerged into a froth of wind-whipped water. Black clouds stamped towards her and let loose a torrent of harsh rain. A distant lightning bolt stabbed into the sea. Water mixed with wind; rain raised more water as it fell; and Zanja began to drown even as she swam desperately to keep her head in the air.