Thirteen Ways to Water

by Bruce Holland Rogers

  “I don’t know what to…I’m sorry.” Wolf rubbed his forehead. “This can’t be happening.”

  “Life is like that. Death, too. Things that can’t be happening happen all the time.” He pursed his lips. “It’s going to take a long time for me to leave this place now. It’s going to take a long time for people to stop speaking my name.”

  “Seattle. Chief Seattle. I…” Wolf stood up. He sat back down. “Seattle! It’s an honor!”

  “Mmm.” The ghost frowned.

  “Oh, your name. I’m sorry. It’s just…I admire your words.”

  “No you don’t. Not my words. But all night you were saying my name and sticking it onto words that someone else said. That was the first thing that made me mad.”

  “‘Continuing to contaminate his own bed, the white man will one night suffocate in his own filth,”’ Wolf quoted from memory. “Didn’t you say that?”

  “No! Some poet said that and mixed my name up in it. Ever since I died, this has been going on. Every time white people change their ideas about what they want Indians to be, someone makes a new speech for me.”

  Wolf swallowed. “But…” He rubbed his head. Could he really be having this conversation? “But we’re trying to take back the land. Maybe the words aren’t exactly what you said, but what my friends and I want is a return to the old ways. Your ways.”

  “My ways? You don’t know anything about my ways.”

  “I mean your people. Living off the land.”

  “Mmm.” Another frown.

  “See, the world is going to turn back to simpler ways of doing things. It has to. We don’t need bulldozers and skyscrapers to be happy!”

  “Those digging machines are pretty good for digging.”

  “We have our hands. We can make stone tools.”

  Seattle grunted dismissively. “I remember my first iron ax. Now that could cut!”

  “Okay, but iron comes out of mines and mines gouge out the earth. Mother Earth, Chief! We need to live in a way that respects Mother Earth!”

  “Mmm.” The Indian deliberately looked away from Wolf and said very carefully, “Respect.”

  Wolf felt uncomfortable. Had he said something he shouldn’t have? He thought about it. “Ah. Okay. So maybe you’re thinking that what I was doing to those machines wasn’t respectful. But, see, I respect the people who run the machines. They don’t know they have any choice. It’s the corporations. It’s the system. It’s the system that I’m at war with.”

  “Young men always like to make war. It’s the first thing they think of.”

  “I’ve got to do something.”

  “When word came to me that the young men were planning a raid, I would go to the Bostons and warn them.”

  “Warn them? Against your own people?”

  “Mmm. Young men make trouble.” He looked at his feet. “This floor is cold.”

  Wolf had a thought. He didn’t like it. “Did you…Chief, you aren’t the one who…”

  “Called the Boston soldiers. Mmm.”

  “The Boston soldiers? You mean the police? You called them? You?”

  “I got inside the wire. There are things you can do when you’re dead. Like this.”

  And he was gone. Vanished. The edge of the bed was still wet, though. Puddles still glistened on the floor.

  Wolf sat thinking for a while. His cell mate still snored. The man had slept through the whole conversation. When the puddles dried, there would be no evidence that Wolf had really spoken to the ghost. But he had. What should he do now?

  Raven would never believe this. But Peach might. Maybe, just maybe, there was something in what the Chief had said that would help Wolf figure out what to say to her when the time came. Maybe.

  Wolf had some hard thinking ahead of him.

  But the one clear lesson was this: Ghosts were real. They were bound to the earth by their famous names.

  Wolf went to the door of the cell. He gripped the rigid bars. “Houdini,” he whispered. “In the name of Harry Houdini.”

  Introduction to “Heart of Shanodin”

  “Heart of Shanodin” is traditional high fantasy. I was hired to adapt this story as a stage play and assured that production was definite and right around the corner. Over time, I have learned that far more scripts for screen or stage are paid for than are actually used. Money for production of “Heart of Shanodin” vanished overnight as the corporate sponsor had a change of heart. Happily, I was still paid for the script. Unhappily, I never got to see the special effects that the director assured me he would be able to pull off.

  Heart of Shanodin

  There was no path. The two riders—the heavily armored one astride a great black charger, the gray-clad one upon a leggy horse that looked half like a deer—wove among the towering trees. They rode parallel, but kept at least a sword’s reach between them. The gray rider spoke almost without ceasing, and the armored one not at all.

  When the knight for once glanced at his companion, he saw a wisp, a snicker, a joke of a man who hid every thought he had behind a grin. What was Daisilodavi but a self-made mystery? You could not know a man like that, who, for all his talking, never came to utter a serious remark. Yet for all his dither and dance, for all his jabber jabber, for all the distracting whirl that kept the real man invisible, Daisilodavi was efficient at his craft. King Amjad, may his name provoke trembling, found the little man indispensable. That was the thing that nagged the knight most of all, that he should have a rival for his lord’s dark heart, and that the rival should be one so airy as this.

  Daisilodavi, when he looked at the knight riding beside him, saw a lump, a grunt, an iron statue that hid all its secrets in silence. What was Khairt but a stubborn cipher? A man who would answer no questions about his past was not unknowable. Some things about a man’s history might be writ, like ciphers, upon his body. But on Khairt, most such signs were hidden beneath his black chain mail. The ragged scar on his cheek spoke of battle, and what was the surprise in that? There was the grindingly slow way he walked, the grunts he made when he must bend his legs. That might have some interesting cause, but what? Khairt would never say. And if Daisilodavi must have a rival for the patronage of Amjad, may his name cause jaundice, why must it be so unreadable a rival as this? Daisilodavi could tease an opinion or an argument out of the man from time to time, but never anything revealing. Even the knight’s accent was strange, such a blending of accents that even the place of the knight’s birth remained uncertain.

  But soon the knight would reveal something of himself. He would have no choice. Smiling, Daisilodavi rose up in his saddle and waved his hand at the deep forest. “Like stars at the end of time,” he said.

  Khairt, riding beside him, turned his helmeted head neither to the left nor to the right. He knew what the smaller man was talking about, but he made no reply. Like stars littering the forest floor, spots of sunlight flashed here or there among the black and musty leaves. Such glints of sun had been rare enough when the two horsemen first entered the Shanodin Forest. Now Khairt and Daisilodavi had ridden two days among the enormous trunks, and the trees grew ever taller, the high canopy ever thicker, and sunlight ever weaker with every step that brought them toward the Heart of Shanodin. Scattered spots of sunlight grew still more sparse—stars winking out at the end of time.

  “Ah, but such a phrase has too much poetry in it for you, does it not?” said Daisilodavi. “You are all glower and doom and words of one syllable and sentences of one word.” He lowered his eyebrows in mock seriousness and scowled. “Aye,” he said as deeply as he could. After a long pause, he added, “No.” Then he laughed. “And when you have something more than that to say, what is it but some opinion that things are bad and getting worse? You make too much of the name of knight, I think, for you are ever thinking night thoughts. It is daylight! Birds sing! Khairt, don’t you ever raise your black eyebrows? Don’t you ever open your eyes?”

  Still, Khairt said nothing.

  “Fah, what
a traveling companion you are,” said Daisilodavi. “Knight, you’re as chatty as a brass man.”

  It was an apt comparison in more than one sense, for Khairt was armored head to toe. He was so big that even unarmored he’d have needed a heavy mount. With sword and shield and chain mail, he must weigh three times what his companion did. His black charger was two hands taller than Daisilodavi’s mount, and stocky as a draft horse. His raised visor showed but a little of his face, which was dark and blunt, the face of a man accustomed to absorbing, unblinkingly, the shocks of battle. His eyebrows were indeed black.

  As everything about Khairt suggested heaviness, so did the other man embody the airiness of an elf. The cape covering his slender shoulders was silvery gray, and it billowed in the slightest breeze. Daisilodavi’s hair was yellow near to white. His face, smooth and courtly, was young seeming, though there were fine lines etched about his eyes and mouth, and not all of these came of grinning. There was no sign of any weapon on him, no small dagger at his belt, no odd fold in his tunic where a poisoned needle might be tucked. To most he would seem as harmless as he was talkative.

  “Perhaps you are indeed a conjured thing,” Daisilodavi continued. “That would explain much, for I have never seen you naked of your iron sheath. Perhaps you are empty chain mail with an enchanted head atop.” And he reached as if to rap the knight’s metal boot and hear if it rang hollow.

  Khairt’s gauntleted hand closed around Daisilodavi’s wrist like a vice, and only when Daisilodavi winced did Khairt release him. The knight said only, “We are watched.”

  “Of course we are watched,” said Daisilodavi, rubbing his wrist. “Eyes have been upon us since the moment we entered the Shanodin, though they are not eyes that have a care for our mission here.”

  He kicked his horse into a trot, dodging branches as his mount sped him through the trees. “Oh, you watchers!” he cried. “Have you ever seen the likes of me? Has a more graceful rider ever passed among these trees?” And then, with the elegance of a dancing centaur, horse and rider wheeled about and faced Khairt. “Ha!” he cried. “They watch that I might melt their wooden hearts!”

  “Take care how you speak,” said Khairt.

  “Do you fear the ladies of the wood?” Daisilodavi grinned. “Or do you pine for them?” He laughed at his own joke.

  Khairt turned his head. “You capering fool,” he said, and his voice was hard and cold as the iron chains that keep Yyelor, the ice giant, bound to the frozen north. Even so, Khairt’s voice was not so hard and cold as King Amjad’s. Nothing, Daisilodavi thought, was so hard and cold as their lord’s voice when he was displeased.

  Khairt’s gauntlet closed tight upon the pommel of his saddle. “Why does this take two of us? Why did Amjad, may his name be feared, not send me alone to slay this Glinham?”

  “Shadowy are the ways of Amjad, may his name cause nosebleeds,” said Daisilodavi. “Though perhaps the answer is obvious. I have been to the Heart of Shanodin before. You have not.”

  “I can find my way without you bounding at my side like some not-weaned pup. And I don’t need your help.”

  “Indeed. And I hardly need you along to dispatch this Glinham. Do you think I desire your company? Do you imagine that I pleaded with Amjad to send us out together? You lumber like a plow horse and drag your shadow behind.”

  “All men drag their shadows,” said the knight.

  “I mean your sulky silence, your dour words, your second skin of black steel. In short, you are as obvious as an ugly assassin. You are the very thing a man fears. The quarry sees you gallumphing from a distance and readies himself for attack. Whereas I come to him with smiles, find him where he is resting, reassure him, encourage him…”

  A blade flashed in the Daisilodavi’s hand, sliced the air before him, then vanished before Khairt could guess where it had come from.

  “To ride with you,” Daisilodavi went on, “is to send out runners before me crying, ‘Beware! Trust not this gentle stranger! He comes in the company of death!’”

  “Then depart. Go your own way. I will find the one we seek, and when I have finished him, I will find you by the sound of your prattling.”

  But neither one could leave the other. Amjad’s commission had been explicit. They were together to follow this Glinham to the Heart of Shanodin—the man had left broad clues of where he meant to hide—and together kill him. But why together? Was there any reason for Amjad to doubt that either of them, alone, could undo this man, this mere merchant? No reason that Khairt could see, and so he was uneasy with a thing he could make no sense of.

  The brambles began as a wild rose here, a stem of blackberry there, widely scattered, but as the riders pressed on, the thorny stems grew thicker and more frequent, until all the ground beneath the trees was woven thick with briers. Daisilodavi’s horse shied half a step for every step he coaxed it forward.

  Khairt dismounted and unsheathed his broadsword.

  “We near our destination,” Daisilodavi said. “These brambles guard the Heart.”

  Khairt stepped slowly forward, then raised the heavy sword and swung. Thorn and leaf flew. He took a step and swung the other way, and soon there was a rhythm to his cutting, a march of stroke and step that tumbled prickly stems like waves before a prow. His knees hurt him, but then they always hurt when he was afoot, and the pain gave him a focus, helped him to concentrate.

  Though the stems grew thicker, higher, and tighter woven as Khairt went, there was pleasure in this work, as there was in battle. If he did not turn around, he could imagine that no one stood behind him but his horse. Every so often, Daisilodavi destroyed the illusion with some loud and foolish joke. “And to think I called you witless! Yet here you deal so cuttingly with the barbs set against you!” But Khairt ignored him, considered him gone, and soon again felt peacefully alone in his labor.

  Alone but for the eyes of the forest. Even when he imagined that the assassin was not at his back, Khairt could not stop feeling the gaze of the woods upon him.

  In the Shanodin, of all the world, a man never walks unseen. That was the saying.

  Khairt’s shoulders were sore and his breathing labored by the time he broke through the thickest part of the brambles. Now, though, the hewing and hacking grew easier with every step, and soon he was enough into the clear that even Daisilodavi’s thin-skinned colt could step between the sparse stems.

  Without a word, Khairt leaned a moment on his sword, taking the weight from his aching joints, then returned the broadsword to its scabbard.

  “That was well done,” said Daisilodavi, “but is not done long.”

  Khairt did not take his meaning until he turned and saw how the brambles grew and twined to reknit the barrier behind them.

  “We’ve no easier way out than the way we came in, I fear,” said the assassin.

  “Glinham is trapped. If he is here.”

  “Oh, he’s here,” said Daisilodavi. “Rely upon it. He thought this place would save him.”

  “With so mild a wall of thorns? The man’s a fool.” Khairt put his hands on armored hips and gazed at the brambles. The stems bore blossoms—white and red and pink. How was it that he had not noticed them ’til now? In the trees above him, a thrush sang sweet a song that minded him of evening, and he found himself thinking of stars crowding in a purple sky…

  “Fool indeed,” said Daisilodavi, looking hard at Khairt.

  The knight, not quite knowing why, dropped his visor before his eyes. Shaking himself, as if from sleep, he took to his horse again. He did not raise the visor until he had ridden a little ways before Daisilodavi, and raised it then only because the forest floor was shot through with flowers. He wanted to see all of them at once.

  Above his head, the thrush still sang. Rare sunlight sparkled among the leaves. How had Daisilodavi put it? Like the last stars at the end of time? More like diamonds. More like fires burning on a night sea.

  Khairt had slept, and now at last was waking. For how else to explain that n
ow he saw and now he heard? The world was alive with bird song and blossom. How had he forgotten?

  Daisilodavi began to sing, and it was not an unpleasant sound, nor even an irritating one, as Khairt usually found it. The assassin sang of green meadows and bright sun, of a maid with spring flowers in her hair. Of a sudden, the singing stopped.

  “So thaws the black ice around Khairt’s heart,” said Daisilodavi, coaxing his horse to draw alongside the knight. “There’s a bit of sunlight ashine within his iron breast.”

  Khairt lowered his brow. It took some effort. He did not feel stony and distant, but he mastered himself enough that his words tolled like a funeral bell when he said, “More nonsense.”

  “None at all!” said his companion. “You betray your heart, or shall I say your heart betrays you? As I was singing just now, you were nodding your head in time.”

  “I was not,” Khairt said.

  “You were. And in a moment you’d have sprung from your horse to dance!”

  “If I spring from my horse, it will be to run you through,” Khairt said through his teeth.

  Daisilodavi laughed and reined his horse, letting Khairt again take the lead. Again he began to sing.

  This time, Khairt gritted his teeth and concentrated on thoughts of battle in order to block out the song. He tried to remember all the machines of war he knew and to consider the weaknesses of each. He thought of tactics for single combat, posing himself questions: if armed with a mace, how to proceed against a swordsman? If unhorsed and disarmed, how then to deal with a pikeman? Caught without armor or weapons, how to close with a dagger-wielding foe? With these thoughts, he ignored singer and song, ignored flower and leaf and dappling sun. He concentrated so well on imagined enemies that a true one was upon him before he knew it.

  “Blackguards!” cried the blur that sprang from the bushes.

  As Khairt turned in surprise, groping for the pommel of his sword, something struck him high. Had the blow come half a second later, he’d have found his balance, readied himself, but instead he slipped from his saddle and tumbled toward the leafy ground.