Her hand, which had been framing each component of the Essikret’s rich world as she spoke, paused now, a frozen gesture that contained nothing. “She rescued her people. All this was for them, to secure the future for them. She could have done the same for mine!”
She looked ill, Seth realized—ill with anger. But then she seemed to take control of her rage, and her breathing slowed. “By the gods, I’m weary with trying to understand that water witch!”
She turned then, so sharply she dug at Seth with her elbow, and didn’t even seem to notice. She shouted something in the water language, something so shocking that every sailor on the ship stopped working and stared at her. Seth noticed this appalled, shipwide stillness as she turned. Then she saw the old woman, who had not been on the ship since the lifting of the storm.
The water witch now wore dozens of shell necklaces, and her skirt seemed new, as though she had merely gone home to put on fresh clothes. Yet she looked, Seth thought, years older. Skeletal, her shoulders had lost muscle; her skin and breasts sagged wearily.
The water witch spoke. Zanja cried, “What?” She turned back to the rail, digging Seth with her elbow again. Seth turned also, feeling the rigidity in the body beside her, frustrated that she understood so little. Zanja breathed heavily, openmouthed, staring intently at the beach, eyes moving rapidly, hands clenching the rail as Seth’s had earlier. “Dear gods,” she breathed. Her muscles jerked into movement, and she began to climb over the rail.
“Zanja, what are you doing?” Seth cried. She grabbed at her, but Zanja had already leapt off, and seemed to float, with her long, slim braid whipping through air, her seaweed skirt billowing, her necklace lifting up to hit her in the face. Then she was gone. Stunned, Seth leaned over the rail and saw the ship’s shadow undulating far below. Foamy ripples marked the place Zanja had entered the water, and there she suddenly emerged, tossed her wet hair from her eyes, and began to swim.
Towards what? What had she seen? Seth looked where Zanja had been looking towards the beach. Sunlight flashed on water, nearly blinding her. But there was something lying on the sand, a shape—a person maybe, sculpted of sand, with shadowed folds that could be clothing, and a sunburnt shrub of hair.
Karis.
“That iron woman on the beach,” Ocean had said, “is little wiser than the rock man by the river.”
Zanja had not thought of how jumping into the water would feel like falling into a pile of boulders, or how pain in her bruised ribs would weaken her, or how swimming would call forth the fatigue that lingered after her last ordeal in the water.
A man laughing in his boat rowed to her and hauled her aboard, to sprawl among a half-dozen splint baskets that were black with age and smelled unpleasantly of fish. Zanja pointed towards shore, unable to catch her breath enough to speak. He began rowing in that direction, lazily.
The massive, sand-colored form on the beach had not moved. Karis lay on her side, as though she had escaped drowning, or suddenly fallen ill, or quite abruptly died. The boatman shouted at Zanja and she found she had begun to stand up. She squatted down again, and he commented reasonably, “Your hurry will only make you slower.”
“That woman on the beach is my wife! How long has she been lying there?”
“It was dark when she arrived,” said the boatman.
“What is she doing here? Seth said she’s in the west! Why is she all alone?” The boatman shrugged. But, as sometimes happens, Zanja immediately knew the answers to her questions. Two hundred years and three days ago, she had dropped her indestructible knives into the sea. And now Karis thought that she had drowned.
“Row faster, can’t you?” Zanja cried.
The boatman grinned. “You have been gone from your wife a long time?”
“Hundreds of years.”
“Then you will survive a little longer,” he said, and pulled steadily, no faster than before. Zanja peered over the boat’s edge and saw the sea bottom, dark, glittering sand, patches of sea plants, flickering fishes, an odd and dangerous looking creature walking sideways on spidery legs. The bottom seemed scarcely an arm’s length away. Zanja looked up again at her beloved’s sprawled form, so close now, so close she could see scarlet blood on the bottoms of her feet.
She flung herself towards the shore, and she went under—the bottom was not as close as it looked. She came up, gasping, and the boatman had shipped his oars and gestured at her in good-humored exasperation. He began bailing—she must have swamped the boat.
She swam towards shore. The water felt thick as gruel. Her feet finally touched bottom, but that helped little. She fought the water, splashing high fountains around her, calling, “Karis! Karis!”
Karis still did not move.
In the more shallow water, Zanja tried to run and fell onto her face. When she got up, choking on salt water, Karis was lifting her head, turning, heaving herself to her knees.
Zanja splashed to dry sand and fell again, but this time Karis caught her.
When Zanja first knew she loved Karis, then, too, she had happened upon her, unexpected and unlooked for. Over a year after the massacre of her people, Zanja had felt something she thought forever lost to her: a centering, a certainty; not just desire, though that was powerful, but knowledge. With Karis, she might live with purpose again.
So she lay now as she had landed, and the hard ridges of a blacksmith’s hand scraped her bare shoulder blade. Zanja felt the rise and fall of Karis’s startled breathing several times before the G’deon of Shaftal stirred and murmured against her ear, “I told myself I would not despair of you—I need not think at all until I had rested. You began shouting though, and I thought I was dreaming.”
“You’re much too filthy to be dreaming,” Zanja said.
“Oh, do I stink?”
“Very much.”
“Tell me, dear wife, why are your knives on the bottom of the ocean?”
“Because I was in the ocean with them, and had to let them go, or drown.”
Karis raised her head. Her fatigue-reddened eyes were glassy with tears. “You have become quite feral,” she said quietly. “And this here—it must hurt.” Her fingertips stroked Zanja’s bruised ribs, and the pain went away.
Zanja caught Karis by the disastrous tangle of her hair and kissed her, and kissed her again. She felt a shudder in her wife’s muscular back. “Will we make love here,” Zanja began, “or—”
Karis pulled back from her. She set her roughly aside and got to her feet, staggering, showering sand from her clothing.
“Gods,” Zanja muttered. She didn’t have to look to know that the water witch was approaching. “Karis, she’s older than your oldest powers! You’re like a child to her!”
Karis hobbled needlessly towards the water’s edge.
Out of patience with earth bloods, Zanja said to her back, “At least leave the firmament be!”
Karis paused. “What?”
A boat made a grinding in the sand. Seth tumbled out, crawled through the shallow water, and fell face down onto the sand with her arms flung out, as though she were trying to hug it. The water witch disembarked and stood in the water. The enraged earth witch seemed of little interest to her.
A wavelet washed over Karis’s bloody feet. She uttered a cry and fell to her knees. Zanja ran to her, saying, “Get out of the water!” At least Karis heeded her now—she crawled to dry sand and huddled there, rocking with pain. “Fresh water!” Zanja cried. Silver leapt out of the boat and ran towards a wooden tank and a clutter of buckets.
Ocean commented, “The G’deons never like me.”
“Have you done them any favors?” Zanja said.
“Many, many times,” said Ocean.
Karis’s voice, harsh with rage, smashed through the witch’s melodic water words. “Does she think she isn’t flesh? That
I can’t tear her limb from limb?”
Zanja rested a hand on Karis’s tense, powerful shoulder. “Grandmother, what favor have you done this G’deon?”
“When you understand, traveler, so will she.”
The ancient woman looked out at the vast wetland, and then she turned towards the vast harbor. How long had Ocean planned this extraordinary act of water magic? Only now did she seem certain of her success, now that she was there in the midst of it, with Seth and Zanja on dry land. And now she walked into the water, and when she was hip-deep, she dove. Light fractured, and when the pieces joined together again, the witch was gone.
“In another time, she is walking back to shore,” said Zanja.
“It better not be in my lifetime,” Karis muttered.
Silver arrived with a bucket of water, and Karis dipped a foot into it, hissing with pain. Seth, apparently unable to stand—perhaps feeling, like Zanja, as if the solid ground were swaying underfoot like the deck of a ship—crawled to Karis, yanking off her shirt for Karis to rest her wet foot on. “What have you done to yourself?” Seth cried. “Where are your shoes? Silver, can you get some bandages? And healing herbs?”
Karis sighed. “Dear heart—save me.”
Zanja murmured, “She’ll leave you alone sooner if you just let her fuss some. Then tell her how tired you are—that you need to sleep.”
Tears of pain were leaking down Karis’s cheeks—her other foot was in the bucket now. But her hand rested on Zanja’s—warm, strong, hungry. “Where can we go?” she asked.
Zanja studied the stiff, waist-high grass of the wetland, thousands of green swords jammed by their hilts into the sand. But . . . even if they did cut Zanja, those pains would be worth enduring. “I’ll make a house for us. It won’t take very long.”
“Then I’ll come to you,” Karis said. “If I must crawl on my belly.”
Chapter 33
Karis uttered a hoarse cry. She had kept Zanja riding on the crest of that wave for a long time—but now Zanja plunged wildly over. In a tangle of limbs, hands, mouths, they both climaxed.
Zanja’s fractured thoughts were slow to become coherent again. By then, Karis had fallen asleep. Her big, coarse, powerful hand lay between Zanja’s thighs. Zanja could have sworn that her lover had orgasmed through her fingers, but to whom could she ever tell such a marvelous thing?
The grass walls of their trampled den rattled in a passing breeze. Karis lay still, breathing deeply, her fatigue-shadowed face having given up its sorrows. Zanja kissed her, and Karis smiled in her sleep. Zanja felt around for their scattered clothing and haphazardly covered them with it.
Later, feeling Karis awaken, she awakened with her. The sun was setting, and from the village could be heard friendly shouts and laughter. Closer, but still remote, an axe chopped wood, then fell silent. The grass rustled dryly, and a long-legged white bird as tall as Zanja stepped through the green blades and glanced around their trampled den in surprise. Its black legs were thin as twigs. It raised one foot and paused, as though considering, then it continued onward, stepping neatly between their legs and slipping into the grass again.
Karis let out her breath. “What a place!”
“It seems enchanted,” Zanja murmured.
“It’s too wet, though. And there’s something unsettled about it.”
“Tadwell ceded this part of Shaftal to her, the water witch. He didn’t know it as her plan—he was trapped in his own anger and would have done anything to punish me.”
“I see,” said Karis after a moment. Her warm, rough fingertips stroked up Zanja’s throat. “These bruises are his work?”
“Yes.”
“And this?” Zanja flinched reflexively as Karis took her torn earlobe between her fingers, though her touch could not give pain, not now anyway.
“Yes.”
“Shall I fix it properly? Or do you want a ragged earlobe?”
“You couldn’t endure that,” Zanja said.
“I couldn’t. Not at all.”
Zanja lay quietly, her head tucked in the hollow of Karis’s shoulder. She felt a pressure on her ear, as though her flesh was being glued together like two pieces of wood. Somewhere in this salt marsh, the earring lay where Tadwell had flung it, buried in mud, tangled in plant roots, or decorating the home of a crab. “I pretended to be a Paladin,” she said, “after I nearly froze and starved to death.”
“And now here we both are, freezing and starving together.”
“I’ll go foraging,” said Zanja.
She didn’t have to forage far. At the entrance to their den were two buckets, one full of water, and the other containing several dried fish, a tin of hardbread, and a crisp wad of hairy seaweed. There also lay a pile of neatly folded blankets. They ate everything in the bucket, which then became their toilet. Wrapped in blankets, they talked until they slept again.
In dead of night, Zanja awoke to find Karis’s mouth upon her breast. She tilted her head back and the wheeling stars filled her vision until they exploded.
Chapter 34
The sun was climbing rapidly up the western slope of the sky by the time Zanja felt inclined to get up and emerge from the grass den. For hours, the sounds of the Essikret village had imposed on her dreams: crying babies, ringing axes, shrieking children. Below these sharper noises flowed an undercurrent of laughter and singing, and the distant booming of the ocean. Now she saw the harbor, a blue jewel within which floated white clouds, across which people scooted in rowboats. The tide had pulled the water back, exposing a long stretch of black sand, upon which naked children roamed. Did Tadwell ever realize what a beautiful place he had created in his extraordinary fit of temper? Zanja took a breath of salty air and let it go: perhaps she could not think of these people of the past as dead, but she must accept that they were gone, and that these unanswered questions she had been left with would remain unanswered.
She spotted Seth, sitting cross-legged in the shade of the water tank, and walked over to her. Seth had combed her wind-tangled hair and tied it back so it revealed her face, sunburned and chapped by wind, and her eyes, red and puffy with weeping. Using a wooden needle, she was picking apart the seams of a longshirt and wrapping the salvaged thread around a spool she had improvised out of a small piece of water-polished driftwood. Zanja squatted beside her in the shade. “Thank you for the supplies last night. But you should have looked after yourself, after all you’ve endured.”
“I’m fine,” said Seth. And, despite the ravaging voyage and exhaustion of sorrow, she had a dogged look that Zanja knew well from seeing it so often in Karis: Seth would fix what was broken, or die trying.
“Is that your friend’s shirt? Damon’s?”
“It was, but now it will be yours.”
Zanja glanced down at her bare breasts, glittering necklace, and seaweed skirt. “What, is this outfit not acceptable?”
Seth managed a smile. “You look rather good in it, but I want my necklace back. Is Karis still asleep?”
“Yes, and I hope she sleeps for days.”
“Well, we aren’t going anywhere until her feet heal. She might as well sleep.”
“No, we’ll leave much sooner than that, for she says that Paladins are chasing her. Once they arrive, they’ll be able to carry her out of here. We must go to Watfield.”
“Don’t you mean Waet’s Field?” Seth had reached the knotted end of the thread she was reclaiming, so she cut the thread with the knife that lay beside her. She set her project aside. “I want to show you something.”
Zanja felt a movement within, a tidal shift. After all, would something be explained? She stood up hastily. Seth also stood up, saying, “Oh, you and Emil perk up in the same way! Like dogs hearing something important but too far away for ordinary people to hear.”
She led the way through
the boatyard, where busy carpenters greeted her by name. Beyond the boatyard, a cluster of dry land houseboats was tucked against the cliff. Their hulls were painted with stylized waves where the water level would have been, and the painted creatures that frolicked above and below the water were so strangely shaped and brilliantly colored that they hardly seemed like fish at all except that they had fins. One of these house boats had a door cut into its side at ground level, and Zanja followed Seth in. It was a tool shed, where hazy light that flowed in through open hatches dimly revealed rough shelves crowded with hand tools carefully wrapped in oilcloth. Here, an old man who was painstakingly sharpening a chisel scarcely seemed to notice them.
Seth said, “The water people took Damon’s gear with them in their boats, that night. This is where I found his knapsack when I went looking for it this morning, to get that shirt for you.” She squatted at a set of rough-hewn shelves that were crowded with indistinguishable bundles, took hold of a large knapsack on the bottom shelf, and heaved it out. Underneath it, half covered by adjoining objects, nearly invisible in the shadow, lay a very large box.
“The box Jareth stole!” said Zanja. “The one you thought was destroyed and lost!”
“But I couldn’t get it out by myself—it’s too heavy.”
Even with the two of them working on it, removing the box was a tricky business: it was indeed heavy, and difficult to get hold of, and it was wedged in by other objects that themselves resisted being moved. Eventually they pulled it off the shelf and managed to carry it between them, outside into the light. They dropped it on the sand, and Seth rubbed at its dirt and salt stains with the tail of her shirt. The revealed wood gleamed as though it had been polished with wax. “It isn’t even scratched,” said Seth. She looked up at Zanja and added with concern, “You’re panting.”
Water Logic Page 36