Water Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Zanja’s heartbeat was thudding in her throat, but not from the effort of freeing and moving the thing. She said, “There’s never been a lock Karis couldn’t open.”

  “We aren’t going to wake her up!”

  “Oh, she’ll fall asleep again.”

  They carried the box in stages to the grass den. Karis lay naked, sound asleep, with a blanket pulled across her face to block the sunlight. The bright light cast curved shadows along the muscles of her back as though she were a breathing sculpture. Zanja’s love, tested and tempered though it had been through these six years, rose up in her heart as fiercely as if it were brand new. Seth said in a hushed voice, “But look how tired she is.”

  “She’ll wake up to eat, and be glad of it.”

  They left and returned sometime later, bearing a pan of fried fish, a salad of vinegared seaweed, and a basket of steamed buns that smelled unpleasantly like fermenting ale. Karis had awakened and was sitting among the blankets, wearing her filthy shirt, with the massive box pulled into her lap. “What an odd thing you’ve found,” she said.

  Zanja said, “That’s the box the assassin stole from Seth’s house.”

  “Stupid man. Is that breakfast?”

  She reached for the frying pan scarcely before Zanja set it down, and began eating steaming fish with her fingers. Zanja tried a bite of the bread, which was gummy but tasted much better than it smelled. “Seth, tell Karis about the box—I told her only a part of its story last night.”

  While Seth recounted the adventures of the stolen box, Zanja and Karis ate everything but the fish bones. The story ended with Damon’s death, and Seth began to weep, and Zanja saw that she couldn’t speak of it without reliving it. Most memories become old and faded, but some do not—and this one, Zanja feared, would remain fresh forever. Karis reached out a greasy hand, then lowered it. She would not try to fix this pain: that lesson she had learned from what happened with Clement. Yet she had not learned it soon enough, for catastrophe seemed inevitable now. Clement might be made whole again, but Karis had squandered too much time in her mad rush across Shaftal, and now it was impossible for either repair or recovery to happen before the convening of the commanders.

  Soon, Karis must tell Seth what she had done to Clement. It would be a good rehearsal for equally difficult explanations she must make in Watfield: to Gilly, Ellid, Emil, and, worst of all, to Norina. Then they must reconcile themselves to accomplishing whatever they could with whichever general was chosen instead of Clement. Although none of those commanders were as notorious as Heras had been, still it seemed likely they would find themselves again at war.

  Seth wiped her face with her hands. “And what’s in that cursed box? And how, in Shaftal’s name, did it wind up under the guest bed at High Meadow Farm?”

  Karis glanced expectantly at Zanja, for apparently she, too, knew the answer to Seth’s question, though by her own less arcane methods.

  Zanja said, “The Basdowners couldn’t be convinced to live properly on the land and stop killing each other.”

  Seth protested, as she had before on the boat, “How can this be true? Nobody even remembers such a thing!”

  Zanja continued, “Because of their intransigence, Tadwell was in Basdown, and Arel with him. Arel told me they had visited High Meadow Farm. The people of your farmstead were unforgiving and hot-tempered, he said to me.”

  Seth uttered a snort of disbelief.

  “And I told Arel I had a friend from High Meadow, who’s nothing like that. Do you understand what I’m saying, Seth? Arel thought I belonged in the past, not the future, but Tadwell knew the truth, and if Arel told Tadwell what I had told him, Tadwell would be able to—”

  Seth gazed at her, blank-faced.

  “—to leave this box there for me,” Zanja said.

  “What?” cried Seth.

  Karis had put her hand on the box, which lay between her and Zanja, and now Zanja heard the quiet click of its latch popping open. She lifted the lid. There lay the lost lexicon, preserved by librarians, rescued from destruction by water magic, protected for two hundred years by earth magic.

  It looked exactly as it had looked when Zanja first unwrapped it, outside of Kisha. Its leather-bound cover was still gilded with patterns of interwoven vines; the leather itself, though unbelievably old, was still soft to the touch. Zanja opened the cover, turned a few thick pages, and held the book open to the glyph that means Water. In the illustration, a woman leapt up joyously, flinging water from a shell. The water became waves, which curled around her, repeating in their curves the graceful curve of the dancer’s back, arms, and flying hair. Water logic: beautiful, and beyond explanation.

  Seth said in outraged tones, “You stole that book on impulse, Tadwell chased you because you had stolen it, that witch used him to save her people because he was chasing you, and then he gave it to you?” Her voice gained volume. “He left it for you at High Meadow, and Jareth stole it on impulse, then we chased him because he stole it, and he killed Damon? All this because you like pictures?”

  Seth’s version of events misrepresented a few things, but to correct her would not solve the problem.

  “Throw that monstrous thing in the ocean!” Seth cried.

  Karis said quietly, “That book may be the oldest thing in Shaftal.”

  “But how is it worth so much? It’s unreadable—Zanja says so!”

  “Oh, she’ll read it eventually. She and the other glyph-obsessed people will not rest until they understand every symbol.”

  “But even if it makes a thousand people happy—”

  “It might make us wiser,” said Zanja.

  “Will it give us what we really need now? Fairness, or justice, or peace?”

  “Oh, don’t you know?” said Karis. “The healers have created a tisane for that. We just have to steep some herbs and drink it down.”

  In a moment, Seth uttered a reluctant laugh. “Yes, I’m being unreasonable.”

  “It’s the water glyph,” said Zanja. “I should have known it would have a bad effect on you.”

  “You certainly should have known that!”

  Zanja turned a few more pages of the lexicon, saying, “Well, this one will also befuddle you, but without making you angry. Look at these two illustrations.” They were on adjacent pages, of course, for they were the glyphs East and West, and the illustrations were similar to those with which Zanja was familiar. In one, a woman in a rowboat fished in the ocean and the sun lay near the horizon, and in the other a man traveling in the mountains gazed towards the peaks and at the sun that rested upon them. Neither Seth nor Karis seemed to notice what was so strange about these, so Zanja tapped a finger on the glyph that marked the illustration known as West, and said, “This is the glyph for East. And this—” she turned the page, to the woman in the boat, “—this is West.”

  Seth and Karis stared at the pages as Zanja flipped back and forth from one illustration to the other. Finally, Karis said, “How could anyone not know which way the ocean lies?”

  “A tired copyist made a mistake,” said Seth doubtfully.

  Zanja said, “But there are so many strange things in these illustrations, the copyist would have to have been tired all the time. Here’s one odd thing I think I do understand, though it’s very surprising. Do you remember, Karis, when I told Clement that her glyph-sign is Blooming?”

  Karis nodded, and Seth said, “Clement mentioned it to me, but I’m not familiar with that glyph.”

  “Because I invented it.” Zanja leafed through the massive book, then spread it open again. “But there it is!”

  The kneeling woman in the illustration wore clothing that seemed to be a length of rich cloth that was wrapped and draped around her, leaving a breast exposed. Her hair had been coiled atop her head and was pinned there with an ornate comb. Seth s
aid, “That woman never did any work, not in that outfit. How muddy that dragging hem would get in the rainy season! But she’s outside in her garden.” Seth examined the plants and vines that filled every bit of the illustration, the limits of which were defined by an ornate, arching arbor. “Each flower is stranger than the next!”

  Karis also leaned over the book, which was upside-down to her, and they began discussing, arguing about, and dismissing as entirely fanciful every one of the illustration’s blooming flowers. Then Seth said, “But this one is real.” She pointed at the flower growing out of the woman’s lovingly cupped hands: a long, graceful stem that dangled bright blue, bell-shaped blossoms. “It’s that forced bulb Clement gave you, which smelled so marvelous. You put it in my room.”

  “It grows in every garrison, I think,” said Karis.

  “Damon told me the soldiers dig the bulbs every autumn and store them indoors. If they are left out in the cold they turn to mush by spring. I asked him how any self-respecting bulb could be so dependent on a gardener for its very survival. He said that it was a bulb from Sainna, where the ground never freezes. This picture—from four hundred years ago . . . !”

  “Longer than that,” said Karis.

  They both became speechless. Zanja realized that for once she was sharing with earth bloods rather than with fire bloods the sensation of knowing without words, without reason, an inarticulate and momentous truth. All three of them stared at the alien woman in her alien garden.

  “It’s a Sainnese woman,” said Seth. “It’s a Sainnese garden. It’s a Sainnese book.”

  Zanja said, “They brought this book with them, the first time they came to Shaftal—the first time they tried to conquer this land, only to be conquered by it. After that, they became Shaftali.”

  Karis and Seth both looked at her, still baffled. “The Sainnites became you, Seth,” said Zanja. “They became you and everyone who looks like you. All Sainnites are Shaftali, as Karis said at the council—but it’s also true that all Shaftali are Sainnites.”

  Once again, Karis slept. Seth declared she would not think any more impossible thoughts that day and returned to her mundane task of dismantling Damon’s shirt. Zanja went into the water and swam out to the village, where a woman nursing her infant upon the rocking water pointed in the direction of Silver’s boat. When Zanja had reached the correct row, people told her to climb up into a boat, and then she was able to walk from house to house, forging a trail of mirth as she balanced her awkward way from the edge of one boat to the next. Children, dogs, old people and young, all greeted her with friendliness, offering a joke, a song, a wagging tail, or food. Zanja’s progress would have been much faster had she continued to swim, but during this inefficient journey she learned many new words.

  “A warm day,” she declared as she stepped into Silver’s boat. “Too warm for work.”

  “Who is working?” asked the woman there, whose bare feet, tucked into loops of rope, supported a loom so simple that the weavers of Zanja’s people would have found it as laughable as these people had found her sense of balance. Yet, with her hands free because the loom was also looped around the back of her neck, the weaver wove upon it at a brisk pace using a shuttle made of transparent bone.

  “Where are you going?” asked another woman, who with one hand continuously plucked dried and shredded seaweed from a basket, while her other hand managed a spindle that dropped steadily from her fingers, spinning an ever-lengthening cord.

  “I am where I am going, I think. If you’re not working, then you are playing. Who is winning your game?”

  “I am!” the women both said, and laughed. The spindle hit upon the deck and the spinning woman stepped up onto a stool, clinging to it with her toes, which these people used as nimbly as fingers. Almost immediately, the spindle hit wood again, and Zanja bent to pick it up and wind the yarn. Among her people yarn-winding had been a child’s task, but despite the many years since she had been a child, her fingers remembered exactly how to do it so the spindle wasn’t unbalanced. Then the weaver protested that Zanja’s help was giving the spinner an advantage, so Zanja wound an empty shuttle with fresh yarn for her.

  The door into the low house was of child’s height, but when Silver appeared there, he climbed up from a much lower deck, so she first saw the top of his head. “Oh, Zanja, you have come visiting. Would you like to have some soup?”

  “I am not hungry, but perhaps you can answer a question for me.”

  “Climb down, then,” he said.

  Entering the boat’s interior was like climbing inside a piece of furniture. Light sprayed from glass prisms in the ceiling, and Zanja could see dim cupboards, from floor to ceiling and even overhead, and a swaying hammock in which hung a child-sized shape. A cat appeared in the shadows and gracefully climbed up the ladder into the bright light of afternoon. The windows all were propped open, and a sea breeze blew in through some, and out through others. The small room smelled of spices.

  Zanja said, “You have a way to summon Grandmother Ocean, don’t you?”

  Despite the shadows, she could see Silver’s eyebrows lift. “I thought you would inveigh me again to go with you to this city, Watfield, which I have already told you is too far from the ocean. But this question you ask I will not answer, Zanja na’Tarwein.”

  “I don’t expect you to say anything that’s forbidden. But I must speak with her before we leave this place.”

  Silver said, “I will not summon her, and she would not come.”

  Zanja squatted in the dim room. “She thinks she has managed her great project so the only alteration is the one that matters, but she is wrong. She has balanced the differences between present and past, but she has not balanced the differences between present and future. Her meddling has caused problems we can’t resolve, which will lead to worse problems. I know this is true, because it affects a pattern that has been foreseen. What she has done will damage the future. Is that not important enough that you should summon her?”

  “She left this with me to give to you.” Silver opened one of the cupboard doors and took out a wooden vessel. He handed it to Zanja. It was a heavy container very like a barrel, with a cork in the flat lid. The liquid within sloshed softly.

  Zanja pulled out the cork and sniffed the vessel’s contents: Water. She corked it carefully.

  “Are you satisfied?” asked Silver

  “I am,” she said.

  Chapter 35

  The Paladins arrived by boat, the falling tide pulling them eastward out of the wetland, just as the water people who went out the day before to meet them had been carried westward on a rising tide. Seth was sick to death of water and water logic, and gladly left behind the floating town, the lovely harbor, and the cheerful people. Soon their small company struggled through woodlands so dense they often had to cut a path for Karis’s litter. The Paladins had chased after Karis with nothing but whatever they happened to be holding, and it was fortunate that one of them had been holding a hatchet.

  At least Karis was behaving herself, Zanja commented during that first grueling day. The Paladins had chased their G’deon the entire width of Shaftal, and arrived with sore feet and raw tempers. Karis was apologetic and obedient, though in an obviously insincere and utilitarian sort of way. At the Han Road, when they finally reached it, two Paladins who had gone ahead by boat now awaited them, with the lexicon safely stowed in a wagon confiscated from a farm family. Karis meekly crawled into the wagon bed and lay down in the straw. “Deliver this baggage to Watfield in twelve days,” she said.

  The Paladins took turns driving the wagon, and the rest of them walked. This far south, the road was in terrible repair, and those who went afoot suffered much less than those who banged and bounced all day across displaced cobbles and through potholes. After two days of slow, bone-jolting travel, Karis sat up one afternoon. “What happened to
the road?”

  Seth, surprised out of a daze, noticed the smooth stretch of road before them. “Oh, we’re in Basdown.”

  “Basdowners take good care of the highway.”

  “Of course we do. It’s our only road.”

  Some time after sunset had given way to full darkness, Seth heard the High Meadow cow dogs begin barking in the distance, but when the small company reached the wagon track to the farmstead she was tempted to pretend she had missed it in the darkness. They turned down it, though, and the dogs rushed out and surrounded them. A horse kicked at an agile cow dog and missed, of course. “Hold up!” said Seth. “Land’s sake!” The wagon rolled to a stop.

  The lead dog immediately stood on his hind legs and began scrabbling noisily at the side of the wagon. “What is wrong with you?” Seth asked. “Tell the pack to let us in—we’re hungry and our feet hurt!”

  He barked excitedly at her. “Karis, he wants to meet you.” Seth leaned over to boost him up into the wagon bed, and he rushed impetuously into Karis’s lap, put his paws on her chest, and cried an eloquent welcome with his nose nearly touching hers.

  “Greetings, sir,” said Karis. “Your whiskers are quite tickley. Did you know you’re a magical dog?”

  The dog uttered a sharp bark, then returned to Seth to be hoisted out of the wagon. He and his pack sped into the looming darkness, barking with the kind of enthusiasm that was certain to bring out the entire household. Seth hoped they wouldn’t stare at the G’deon of Shaftal as though she were a two-headed cow.

  “Our dogs are magical?” said Seth as the wagon started down the track, which was too narrow to allow people to walk beside it.

  “Get in,” Karis said. Seth did so and encountered Zanja on the other side, doing the same. Every time Seth saw Zanja unexpectedly her heartbeat paused, for she would remember buying the longshirt and breeches for Damon, the shopping trip he had designated their first adventure.