Thirteen Ways to Water

by Bruce Holland Rogers

  Khairt dreamed of butterflies. He dreamed of brief openings in the canopy, of spots of blue sky glimpsed between the leaves, rare and precious as sapphires.

  His arms and legs were leaden. He dreamed of fingers emerging from the tree he slept against, fingers that gently touched his iron rings of chain mail. He dreamed that he sat paralyzed and trusting as more fingers brushed his metal bootguards, worked the hinges of his visor down and up, and tested the weight of his sword.

  If this were no dream, his death might be at hand. If these fingers truly played about him, if this being wished him ill…

  He tried to move. He could not.

  With effort, he opened his eyes. Two green witchbeetles hovered before him, not a handsbreadth apart. Fingers gently traced his eyebrows, moved down to close his eyes. Those are no witchbeetles, he thought, drifting deeper.

  When next he opened his eyes, gray light had returned to the Heart of Shanodin. Daisilodavi, a lumpen heap beneath his oil cloth, began to stir.

  Khairt struggled to his feet. His knees this morning felt filled with broken glass. He grunted.

  “And to you, too, a good morrow,” said Daisilodavi.

  “We had visitors,” Khairt said, scanning the ground for tracks. He saw none, but dryads are light upon their feet.

  “We’re the visitors,” said the assassin. “Is it any wonder that they should want to inspect us?”

  Inspect they had. Khairt remembered the feel of hands upon his sword. How had he not awakened? How not risen and fought?

  Khairt walked stiffly to his horse, sheathed the broadsword, and said, “Let us go and do our killing, then be gone from here.”

  “Murder, murder, murder. Is pleasure all you ever think of? Oh, thou libertine!”

  “I think of getting from this place alive. Arise!”

  “Am I a zombie, that you would raise me?”

  “From your first words of the day, you prattle.”

  “From your first words, you are sour. I rise, my knight. Soon we are off to kill. Will you feel better once you have bathed your sword?”

  Khairt gave no answer, but bent to unhobble his horse.

  As he rode, Khairt concentrated on the purpose of their mission. Yes, the ivy creeping up the trunks was lush, and yes, trills and chatterings of the birds were rich and pleasing. But he must not think of that. He must only think of spilling blood, of the purifying sweat of battle.

  Let Glinham be well-armed. Let such men-at-arms who still served him be of great fighting spirit. To fight, to kill, that alone would bring Khairt relief. Damn these butterflies with their varicolored wings! Let these purple flowers fall and rot! May hawks dine upon these songbirds!

  But even as he cursed the beauties of the forest, so too did he enumerate them. He could not help but have eyes and ears.

  “We are very near the place,” said Daisilodavi, halting. “Back this way, I think.” He crossed a brook.

  The sound of water rushing by the horse’s feet was bright as bells. Khairt grimaced. Eyes half closed so that he might concentrate on purifying thoughts of blood, he followed.

  The entrance to the cave, once they neared it, was obvious. To say that it lay in a clearing would be to suggest an open sky and bright light shining. There are no clearings in the heart of Shanodin. But for some little space, the trees grew not so crowded, and in the center of that spot was a pile of rock overgrown with vines and creepers.

  Both men dismounted. Daisilodavi rummaged in his saddlebags for a lamp, flint, and oil rags.

  The opening between the rocks was narrow.

  “You’re too big a rat for this wee hole,” said the assassin as he ignited the rags to light the lamp. “Here is where we must part.”

  “I can get through,” said Khairt.

  “Mayhap, if you stripped off that chain mail and greased yourself in bear fat. That will take some time. First you must hunt a bear.”

  “Armor and all,” said the knight, “I can get through.”

  “And then what? Fight with a broadsword where there may not be a shoulder’s breadth to swing it? Nay. Stay here. Keep a watch. Perhaps I’ll flush the quarry out, and then he will be yours.”

  “If he is well guarded, what chance have you?”

  “I daresay he is not guarded well. No matter how many men-at-arms he brought with him here, I’ll wager that the one true soldier was that girl we slew. The rest will have deserted him.”

  “Why?”

  “You are ever slow to understand, Khairt. Stand you here a while and think on it.” With that, he disappeared into the hole.

  Khairt did not stand long, though. His knees ached. He sat on a stone and watched the entrance of the cave, listened for any sound from the assassin.

  From the black hole, he heard nothing. It was as though the earth had swallowed Daisilodavi up. But all around him, Khairt again heard the music of bird song. He inhaled the forest scents, and of a sudden the helmet on his head felt like a cramped, confining room. He pried it off. Fresh air against his skin felt as good as it smelled.

  Khairt looked again at the cave entrance. The hole might be no deeper than an oubliette. Then again, it might stretch for miles. Daisilodavi could be days in flushing the quarry, if, indeed, he did not simply kill Glinham where he found him.

  In an hour, it was clear that the hole was no oubliette.

  Khairt knew that he should wait here, helmet on, sword at the ready, like a sentinel. But his hair felt oily, and his skin was sticky with sweat.

  He bethought himself, then, of the brook.

  The narrow fracture that admitted Daisilodavi narrowed further, until he could just wriggle forward inches at a time. Then the crack widened, grew round, and opened gradually into a wide and level passage. The walls, though smoothed by the tumble of ancient waters, were dry, and the floor was dusty. This cave had long been dead. Here, no waters dripped from the ceiling to grow crystals or stalactites.

  The passage gave way to a large room. The sharp smell of guano told of bats crowding the far reaches of the ceiling, beyond the yellow glow of Daisilodavi’s lantern. His glow caught the glimmer of something on the floor, and he discovered a little mound of jewelry—a man’s heavy golden bracelet, rings set with fine stones. He slipped the bracelet onto his wrist and put the coins in the pocket of his cape.

  Then he listened.

  Silence.

  The tunnel continued on the far side of the room. This passage led to yet another, smaller room, but one that made Daisilodavi sit down and consider, for in this room, with his lamp raised high, the assassin could see no fewer than five openings that promised further passages.

  It would do him no good to sniff the air that issued from each. The spiced oil had been burning for some time inside the cave, and the smell had by now bled into every room and tunnel. Besides, the fumes of his own lamp were much the stronger smell. So which way to go?

  Then he heard the chanting.

  At first, Khairt had only splashed water on his face, rubbed the drops from his eyes, and looked warily at where his chain mail lay spread across a fallen trunk. Nearer at hand was his sword.

  When no one crept from behind a tree to fling a stone or rush him with a staff, he dared to lower his brow to the running stream. He rose. Cool water ran from his hair, down his cheeks and onto the back of his neck. His clothes, worn these many days beneath the armor, were filthy.

  Not far upstream, an emerald finch landed on the shallow bank, cocked its head to consider Khairt, and them began to bathe in a patch of sunlight. Droplets rolled from its back and shivered from its wings like diamonds.

  Khairt took a deep breath and began to strip. As he laid his black clothes down, as he gave himself over to the open air, it was as though he were laying aside a dream. Naked, he walked downstream until the found a pool deep enough to lie in. First he washed the sweat-crusted clothes. Then he knelt in the current, filled his palm with water, and dribbled it over the flower tattoos on his arms, over the varicolored bird tattoos on
his chest.

  He sank into the water. The hair on his legs obscured the brown tattoos, but it was still obvious enough that those lines were meant to represent tree bark. “Let my legs be like the oak,” he had told the tattoo master. And there had been prophecy in his choice. In every match, his legs had been rooted to the ground. He’d been impossible to move, no matter how the other wrestlers might kick at his knees. Immobile he had stood, waiting for his opening, waiting for the shift that would let him drop and pin his opponent or spin him out of the ring.

  Like the oak, he was unbending. And like the oak, when at last he must yield, since he could not bend he must break. In one match, two body blows to his knees ended his career.

  Khairt rolled in the water, letting the stream rush over and around and through. He stretched, luxuriated, and at last rose, dripping.

  If before the flowers in the underbrush were colorful, now they were brilliant. If before the thrush’s song had seemed beautiful, now it was enthralling. Butterflies danced in vibrant clouds.

  “Eyah!” Khairt cried three times, an Oneahn exultation. He shook his head, raining water and delight. He stamped his bare foot down on the leaves, ignoring the protest of his knee. “Koy!” he called out. “First approach!” And he stepped across the ground in the first gait of his school, the first balanced walk that he had learned.

  “Izza!” he cried. “First turn!” He turned three quarter turns, always rooted to the ground.

  The more complicated moves then came to him as easily as breath, though he had not practiced them for long years. These steps, The Dance That Breaks Bones, were not truly a wrestler’s moves. Within the court, they were forbidden, for these moves were not sport, but the warrior’s art.

  Khairt took a running step, leaped into a winged side kick, and landed on one leg.

  His knee quivered. He bit back the pain, but remained standing. He managed to pivot, and then he was into the next move, the sweeping gestures that made him think of waves. Ah, he was dancing. He began the Walk of Spinning Pins, turning and turning as he crossed the forest floor. Now he was alive as long he had not been. Ittono Khairt ni Hata Kan, Grand Champion of the Court, dances once more, and in his dancing lives the Court of a Thousand Thousands…

  Green eyes.

  One turn more, and one turn more, and…

  Green eyes.

  He stopped turning. Someone was watching him.

  Khairt turned around in the other direction, a little dizzily, and with his knees now throbbing with pain.

  There. Across the brook, in the shadowed ivy there, between those trees. Two lights shone like the green glow of witchbeetles, not a handsbreadth apart.

  She blinked, stepped forward, and only when she moved thus did he really see her. It was as though she’d been invisible, though now he knew he’d seen her all along, yet not known her feet from roots nor her arms from branches. He’d not known how to see her.

  The more she moved, the more plainly he saw her. Her arms did not end in branches at all, but in hands like his. Her feet were feet, not roots. How had he seen her skin as tree bark, when it was only tattooed in that pattern, like his legs?

  Her eyes, in truth, did not glow like witchbeetles. They were green, though, and filled with ordinary light. She smiled, and Khairt did not know if ever he had seen a woman so beautiful. Not even the courtesans of Oneah had been her like.

  Beautiful, yet dangerous, also, should he give offense. He watched her warily.

  She turned a circle, stopped, then looked at him, a question in her eyes.

  Khairt shrugged. She repeated the motion.

  “Ah!” he said. “The Walk of Spinning Pins!” He smiled. “No, no. Not at all like that. Your knee must rise to the level of your hip. And point your toes, so.” And he turned for her, then watched as she repeated the move. “Yes,” he said. “That’s better. Now, mind your hands.” He turned for her again, and then she turned as he had shown her, and soon the two of them were dancing The Walk of Spinning Pins on either side of the brook. They danced as far as the place where Khairt’s black clothes lay drying on a bush.

  “Gods and gashes!” he cried, remembering his nakedness and snatching up the clothes. At that, the dryad vanished.

  Khairt gazed at the spot where she had been. Then he laughed and shook his head. “My apologies, lady of the wood,” he said. “I am unaccustomed to dancing without a breech-cloth.” He tore his wet tunic to fashion one, but she did not soon reappear.

  Daisilodavi stopped now and then to listen to the sound of a man’s voice as it rose and fell in the rhythms of a prayer chant. The sound had been growing steadily louder, and now the assassin could sometimes hear something about the quality of the sound. The voice was echoed, and not with the sharp echo of a tunnel. This was the resonant, droning echo of a great room.

  And he was almost there.

  He stopped for a moment to lower the wick of his lamp so that only the tiniest blue flame flickered on the tip, then crept forward a little distance without the light.

  At the end of this tunnel, he could just make out an orange glimmer. He went back, raised the wick, and checked to see that all his needles and blades were where they should be. When he continued, he went whistling the tune of a merry drinking song at a much faster tempo than the chant.

  The chanting stopped.

  Daisilodavi went on whistling. Just before he entered the great cavern, he broke into song:

  “If the maid be merry,

  and if the maid be strong,

  and if she’ll fetch and carry

  then I’ll marry her anon,

  hey, marry her anon.”

  Then, as he stepped into the open, he laughed giddily. “Marry her! Sooner drown myself!” Then he laughed again.

  The great room was even larger that the first he had passed through. At the far end of it, high atop a mound of boulders, there burned a lamp, but there was no one to be seen nearby.

  “Ho, did my ears deceive me, or did I hear prayers issuing from here? Hey and hullo, is there a holy man about?”

  No answer came.

  Daisilodavi squinted. He could make out a ledge, a sort of shelf that ran around the great room at the level of the lamp.

  “What do you want?” asked a voice. Because of the echo, Daisilodavi could not tell where it issued from.

  “I want wine,” Daisilodavi said. “I have been days without wine. Have you any?”

  “‘Wine is the bane of reason.’ So spake the Prophet Eziir.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, of course it would be unreasonable to expect you to have any, then. Beer, then? Ale?”

  “‘Drink not of strong spirits, nor of wine, nor of any fermented drink, lest in body and in spirit ye shall die.’” The voice echoed. “So spake the Prophet Haprina in her sermon to the kings. So accounted are the Words of the Prophets.”

  “Ah, I see how matters stand, then,” Daisilodavi said. “I’ve little hope of wine. Well, then, Lord Glinham, you’ll not object if I ask only to sit and rest, will you?”

  “You speak a name that has fallen away.”

  “Of course, of course. You’ve a new name now, I suppose. A hermit’s name.”

  There was no answer from the voice. Daisilodavi scanned the ledge above, but he could see no sign of exactly where Glinham might be.

  “Why have you come?” asked the voice.

  “Would you believe,” said Daisilodavi, “to do murder?” And he giggled into his sleeve. “Oh, I found this bracelet and other baubles.” He let lamp light play over the gold. “But I ought not tell you, for then you’ll want them back, will you not?”

  “Those are like the skin of the snake, shed with a former life. I do not want them.”

  “Turned ascetic, have you?” Daisilodavi set his lamp down on the floor of the cave. “From fat merchant to hermit?”

  “‘The riches of the earth weigh to a holy man as stones weigh in the pockets of him who drowns.’ So spake the Prophet Pringle in the Age of the Silver Sun.�
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  For a long moment, Glinham was silent. Then he asked, “Have you still come with murder on your mind?”

  “The Heart of Shanodin changes a man,” Daisilodavi observed.

  “It makes him true,” Glinham agreed.

  “So spake the prophets.”

  “In truth, no. The prophets were silent upon matters of the Shanodin Forest. But the Seer Odamulus wrote of this place. ‘In Shanodin’s Heart,’ wrote he, ‘a man lives his heart of hearts and follows the path that he wills not or dares not. In Shanodin’s Heart, all hearts are revealed.’”

  “And thus, when you offended Amjad, may his name be cause for drinking, you came here. Whosoever Amjad would send must become his true heart in the Heart of Shanodin. A wise choice. A merry choice. A strategy worthy of toasting!” Daisilodavi looked about the floor of the cavern. “Did you not, perhaps, discard some wineskins as you discarded your jewels? Is there nowhere hereabout a drop to drink?”

  “No wine,” said the priestly voice of Glinham. “And as for the wisdom of my choice, aye, there is wisdom to it, but folly as well. Here I have discovered my true heart as a man who would walk the path of the prophets. But what do the prophets demand? ‘From him who has seen the light, let shine forth the light, that it may fill not his eyes alone.’ Thus spake the Prophet Eziir.”

  “The words of the prophets are too subtle for me.”

  “It means that I must shine forth. I must go out into the world and show the light of the prophets to others. But if I leave Shanodin, my former nature will be reborn. Out in the world where I must bear witness to the light of the prophets, my eyes will dim again. My concerns will return to gold and sweetmeats and silken clothes.”

  “I see,” said Daisilodavi. “As the pendulum swings from side to side, so do you swing between prophets and profits.”

  Glinham did not laugh. “Outside of Shanodin,” he said, “I shall be no more priestly than you shall remain a wine-thirsty harmless fool.”

  With that, Glinham stepped out of the shadows. He had been near his burning lamp all along. He wore a silken tunic, the edges ragged where he had tom away the fine embroidery. There was deep gloom in his voice when he said, “If I leave, I can not remain true to the prophets. Yet if I would remain true to the prophets, I must not stay.”