by Ken Liu
The expedition was small—only Professor Wayel and Dalochs the gardener, along with more porters than Leehm would have guessed they might need. The gear they dragged along seemed the entire contents of a school laboratory, as far as Leehm could imagine such a thing. What need for so many containers, so much paper, such strange devices for heating and mixing the samples they found?
When they stopped at the base of the escarpment, though, the use became clearer. The coastal plain marked a sudden shift from the humid slopes to much sandier country. Their leaders wanted to spend time studying that change.
Few trees grew here, and those that did were thin. But it wasn’t like the land above the escarpment. Here there were no fallen giants to hint at a different past. Instead, everything was as it might have always been. And yet...at the same time, it wasn’t. Through the smaller trees, Leehm caught glimpses of old walls that must have marked off fields. A hint of a cart trail disappeared into tall grasses. A feral chicken squawked and half-flew away, no doubt the distant descendant of some coop that had survived the storm and broken free to live wild.
Professor Wayel set to work sampling the soil at precise intervals, marking the slope of the land for the different soils types. The tests he ran involved a good deal of equipment, with flasks bubbling here and watered soil settling into layers there.
He corralled the porters into the tests with simple tasks. Leehm spent a good chunk of the morning monotonously turning a crank to spin sample after sample through one device. Every few minutes Wayel called out his findings for one of them to write down for him. Numbers that basically boiled down to ‘very salty’ as far as Leehm could tell.
By contrast, Dalochs wandered. She took samples, of the bark of the scraggly trees, the dune grass, the multi-colored lichen which shifted seamlessly into the moss of the hillside. She made no use of the porters, and kept jealous guard of the notebooks in which she cataloged her findings, more from Wayel than them, but the two largely ignored each other, each focused on their own tasks.
When the porters were able to snatch a break from these tasks, they rested in the shade of a clump of low bushes, stretching out on the ground to keep below the edge of the shadow. Leehm massaged his crank arm as he joined them.
“...not so far from where my parents lived, I think,” the porter Alshen was saying. “They must have been somewhere around here.”
The others nodded, as if they could see the old homestead right there. Timan, who was as young as Leehm, asked, “Will we see much, do you think? What should we look for, streets and fallen walls? Or what?”
Leehm listened close. His parents had talked all the time about the coast, but never in a way that let him imagine what it must have been like.
“Probably not. I mean, not like you might be picturing,” Alshen said. “Nothing like the city walls around Ormenna, anyway.”
“Right,” Mishnar continued. She was younger than Alshen but old enough to remember some things. “There were a lot of us living there. Here. But no cities really. Not even villages exactly. Just scattered houses.”
“And the real city was the sea,” Leehm said without thought. When the others looked at him questioningly, he added, “Sorry, just something I remember my parents saying. That the sea was a city, or something like that.”
“Where were your parents from, Leehm?”
He shrugged. “Right on the coast, somewhere. They were pretty simple folk, fishing and clamming.” He trailed off. No skills that got them solid work in Ormenna, that was for sure. Only a tent in the refugee camp, and eventually a little shack.
Well, at least being a porter might earn him enough money to step up from that.
The expedition lingered for several days, testing—or so it seemed—every possible plant, checking each foot of soil. Finally they left, heading toward the shore itself. Salt became directly visible, until it became a layer of white on the ground that grew thicker the closer they drew, choking out more and more of the plants. Vast stretches of lichen lent their pale green to the ground. Soon they could see far ahead as they walked, with so few large plants to block their sight, but they often had to search for a good while to find any usable water.
They paused when they came to a large group of interwoven gardens, circles of rock borders that intersected each other. Nothing grew within. But once, magic had.
This barren soil hit Leehm as the empty land hadn’t. The great city of Ormenna was known far and wide for its plant magic, but the coast had once held a reputation second only to that city, perhaps even its rival. Where were the famous spells now? Where were the glorious plants even simple fisherfolk like his parents spoke of with such pride? The hurricane had destroyed not just their homes, but their heritage.
Dalochs took charge. “Take your samples and all that, but we’ll find there isn’t much here to work with. I do have one plant that will grow anywhere, but its effect is powerful, so everyone will have to stay back once it’s planted.”
“Not what you wanted to see, was it?” Wayel asked Dalochs.
She shook her head. “No, but it’s what I expected. Some of the gardeners back home were hoping to find some surviving plants. They think we need to learn from what was here, or our own magic might begin to weaken.” She shrugged, noncommittally. “I’m not optimistic on that count.”
The professor moved briskly off, observing the condition of the walls, mapping out the types of rocks used to build them. Dismissed to rest, the porters unburdened themselves, then poked around the periphery of the site.
“This was a great garden once,” Alshen said quietly. Everyone felt the same gloom of loss, with a hint of fear, that the hurricane could still leave such devastation behind, after so many years.
As the others stretched out tight or tired legs, Leehm unloaded supplies and watched Dalochs. She dug a shallow trench in the garden soil. The dirt flaked away in her fingers and a harsh smell rose up, carrying all the way to the porters. Not salt, not rot, but something more chemical, like the thick air in an apothecary’s tent. She sprinkled some pollen into the trench, spat upon it and walked away.
Leehm organized the objects of his pack, setting out the various beakers and jars—the professor would be irritable should he want something and not find it to hand, and his mood would be improved by the opportunity to order them to pack up when it was time to move on. To his left the trench began to sizzle, gave off a thin line of what looked like smoke. He hesitated, then edged for a closer look. The soil at the bottom was turning black, but without any scent of charring. It had the look, rather, of long rotten wood. Leehm chewed a good luck leaf as he stood over it.
After the smoke had stopped rising, Dalochs returned and knelt down. When she noticed Leehm watching, she gestured for him to kneel beside her. Another porter stood on the other side of the low wall, directed to pick from an array of plants at her order.
She handed her loaded workbelt to Leehm. “Hand me the tools I indicate,” she said, and he bowed.
The spell she cast was a complicated one, so far as Leehm knew gardening. He’d always pictured spell growers as earning their reputation by knowing the right seeds to plant and sitting back to let the spells work. Maybe a muttered word or two, but the rest was waiting. The work Dalochs had done on the escarpment and before had reinforced this notion.
Instead this involved real physical labor: a complex scouring of the soil, patterns scraped, smoothed over and then repeated. She planted a seedling, made a precise count, then yanked it back out to repeat the process elsewhere. Leehm looked up to see the other porters and even Professor Wayel had approached to observe.
Dalochs scooped soil from a bag the other porter held open over her original trench. Last, she laid a fibrous network of thin roots over the trench and the plants that remained, pulling the roots out as far as they would reach as all three of them moved away.
“What will that do?” Leehm finally dared ask once Dalochs dropped the last of the roots.
“Restore the soil c
ompletely.” She muttered something else under her breath. He thought it was, “I think.”
He stared at it, lying there over the lifeless ground. So simple? Such power, and she’d had it all along? “That’s...that sounds like a great spell. You can use it anywhere there’s been some sort of problem?” He was silent for a moment. Did he dare to ask the question that was on his mind, he a simple porter? To think, he might have been able to return as a child, might have grown up here and scarcely known the refugee camp. Wonder warred with anger at the loss.
He struggled to keep any bitterness from his voice. “Why not just do it all over the coast, years ago?”
Dalochs wiped the sweat from her head. “First, I only recently discovered how to use the roots to spread it over a bigger area. Before that, it was too localized. But second...” She paused to glance at the face of her timepiece. “Second, it’s an extreme measure. All things already managing to grow here will die, healthy or not. Plants, worms, the fungus that lies underground. It might take a year for anything to grow at all, a generation for the gardens to be truly healthy. I wouldn’t do it if it were recovering on its own.”
Dalochs snapped her watch shut and stepped hurriedly around the mat of roots, sprinkling it with some powder. When she’d made a complete circuit, she called, “Now everyone back. Quick.”
Leehm scrambled back with the other porter and took shelter behind the pile of packs and gear. He peeked over the bags in time to see a sudden cloud of spores explode outward. There was hardly a sound but the professor, hiding beside him, pulled him down before the spores could reach them. “Don’t breathe it in,” he snapped, then muttered something dismissive about magic, though Leehm couldn’t catch the exact words.
After a dozen heartbeats, Dalochs called from behind another pile of gear, “Should be all clear now.” She stood up and approached the gardens. “Come on out.”
A shimmer of light lay over the network of roots, an odd glow that somehow repulsed Leehm. He edged as close as he dared and looked at the strange movement of that glow. It pulsed, shifted, as though emanating from something unseen that moved between the roots and under the soil. He turned away.
“Well,” Wayel said, “I suppose that’s all we can do here. Let’s head closer to the ocean and see what we find there.”
After two more stops at inland gardens, each of which needed and received Dalochs’s extreme restoration, they came at last to the sea. Leehm could only stare. He’d seen the ocean from the top of the escarpment but it was different from this close, with the smell of salt so strong it impinged on the other senses, prickling in his eyes, flavoring his tongue. The sound and sight of the waves bled into each other, and the dim line of the far horizon opened up his mind to things he’d never thought. The world was bigger and stranger than he knew.
Had his parents truly grown up with this view every day? The salt made his lungs feel heavy, more full of air than they’d ever been. Or something more than air.
Here at last were identifiable buildings, or identifiable remains. They spent several days examining the structures, sifting through the debris for the details of life on the coast, things already forgotten or distorted only a generation later. When he had free time, Leehm searched in vain for smaller buildings that matched the stories of his parents. Not that he should expect to find any. There must have been a hundred miles of inhabited coastline that took the full force of the storm, they might have lived anywhere along that stretch.
When he wasn’t wandering on his own, Leehm kept close to Dalochs to see what she would do. She spent most of the early days exploring the spell gardens, always on the inland side of the buildings. Noticing his interest, she had him assist her with the spells and other work, though she still kept her notes to herself, never dictating as was Wayel’s wont. They cast several restorative spells, each one taking longer to set up and get right because of the depth of the damaged soil.
After a few days, she finally approached the sea itself, took the winding, corroded metal staircase Wayel had found down the last bank to the water’s edge. Now, unable to deny his own nervous interest any longer, Leehm approached as well.
The gardens beside the water were even deeper in salt than the inland ones, a full finger’s depth covering the soil, and even then the dirt itself was a mixture of salt and sand no matter how deep they dug. Nothing would grow there—he didn’t need to wait for Dalochs or Wayel to do any tests to know that.
Dalochs considered. “This will take more than I have prepared. Maybe even more than I can set up. We’ll see. I’ll have to take a couple of days just to see what I can pull together.”
While she worked, Leehm explored the salt gardens alone. They were more extensive than they first looked, winding and twisting along the shore, between rocky outcrops and islets. The further he went, the deeper the salt became, and the more the surface of the salt was rippled with something like waves.
He walked until the tide’s return forced him back—something else his parents had described and he’d been unable to credit, that waters of such volume could not only exist, but could leave and return. It rose quickly at first, followed him, growing more shallow step by step, until only the slightest sheen lay over the salted sands like glass.
On the second day, Leehm went farther, around a grouping of rocks. The high tide filled part of the ground between them, so while it was out he rushed around. The salt crunched beneath his sandaled feet. On the far side of the furthest rock, he found another garden extending out into the deeper, permanent sea, an arc of protected beach several paces wide.
What he found made Leehm catch his breath. This arc was not a flat space of salt. Not even an expanse of rippled waves of salt. Instead, complex structures of crystallized salt filled the area between rock and garden wall, not quite tall enough to be seen from beyond the rocks but rising over the garden’s edge.
Inside, they were an iridescent mesh of delicate crystal forms, criss-crossing the garden like the guidelines of a tent, or a spider’s silk, then combining with geometric precision to form miniature spires and obelisks that glittered in the sunlight. From outside, their walls were featureless, yet not so sturdy that dragging a fingernail across them didn’t break away crystal clumps to fall onto the salty sand—how could the returning sea not wash them away in minutes?
And, if it did, how could they have been rebuilt only an hour or so after the tide went out? And by whom? What kind of creature constructed buildings such as these?
Not daring to walk in among the salt for fear of knocking something over, Leehm climbed up onto a ledge of the rock outcropping. He scooted along above the salt to get a better view.
The more he looked, the less they seemed like buildings. Rather they had a plant-like aspect, stems and branches and flat planes of larger crystals reflecting the sunlight. A faint smell rose up—not salt, or not only that; nor dead sea-life, though such natural smells came from all around too.
What did it remind him of? He took a deep breath of it…and then he knew.
Good luck plants.
Or rather not the plants themselves, but the taste of them taking effect when he chewed. The smell that hung over Dalochs when she planted her spells.
Dalochs dug her trench in the salty sand, so close to the water’s edge that it seeped in to fill the bottom. Leehm again assisted with the tools. His supply of the good luck leaves was running low, so he decided to preserve what remained. He’d done the work enough now that he shouldn’t need any magical help.
His thoughts were full of the salt structures on the far side of the rock. What did they mean? Did someone live here, and build them? Then where were they hiding? Could such fragile looking shapes have withstood the hurricane itself as well as years of tide and waves and wind? He wanted to accept that they were a connection to those who’d lived here before, but he couldn’t believe it. Such delicate things couldn’t have withstood the elements for years. But then what? Did the wind blindly build them, or did they grow by them
selves? Were they salt, or plants, both, or something else entirely? The scent of magic surely implied something far beyond what he could even think to ask.
Dalochs sprinkled in the first powder, and the pooled water smoked and fizzed—he realised that she had prepared for a much more powerful spell than before, one that would not just combat the contamination of the garden but extend well beyond its border. What would Dalochs’s magic do to the salt forms? If they were plants of some sort, or even just like plants, this spell would destroy the structures. The garden would be restored, eventually, able to grow the plants his people had once grown, but…
Much had been lost here. No doubt there were all kinds of spells even the people of mighty Ormenna didn’t know, plants they might learn of from the spell growers among his own people before they grew too old to share their lore. He’d overheard Dalochs talk about that very thing. What might they learn by planting new varieties here on the shore? That was a noble and important goal.
But what they were doing now might mean sacrificing any chance to learn from the salt structures, if there were something to learn. That wasn’t right, couldn’t be right.
Maybe, if he dug a trench further out from the garden, it might keep this spell from harming them. A border, seashells and driftwood and wave-smoothed stones, sunk deep to block the magic’s progression. That might be enough by itself. If not, he could talk it over with Dalochs, see how it might be preserved.
If she agreed with the necessity. Surely she would. She had to. And he had to do it now, before it was too late.
He stepped forward to build the wall—forgetting that Dalochs was in the middle of her spell. He stumbled into the hissing, fizzing trench. Water splashed around his foot, and the gardener shouted for him to get back.
The powder in the trench rose up his leg, the smoke coiled around him, squeezed his calf muscles, pulled him down. As he pitched over he just had the presence of mind to throw himself forward, landing in the undisturbed garden instead of the trench itself.