Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Then came the inevitable: “Clear your mind of such distractions or we will fail in our task. Contemplate water; allow it to flow into your thoughts, your blood. You will begin to know it instead of fear it. Take care what you say in the same breath as the word, for water will hear; you will offend.”

  And the crops, Garner thought, will wither on the vine. The sea will open the gates, plunder the ships in the harbor. He blinked salt out of his eyes and contemplated the floating market, the swift, narrow boats drawn close to the banks, decked with flowers and bright ribbons in welcome. The procession was passing through the heart of the city. Ancient stone river houses, interspersed with equally ancient thatched cottages whose garden walls were moldy with bygone floods, offered intervals of shadow cast by the sudden jut of high roofs. Then light, as the rooftops dropped. Then again the welcoming shadow.

  Garner’s cousin, who had been a Knight of the Well longer than any of them, and who liked the sound of his voice, was still proffering the benefits of his experience. “Our minds must be as waters flowing into one another, pellucid and free of the twigs and sodden leaves of earth. The debris of language. Water speaks; we must listen. Water hears; we must beware.”

  “I can’t hear,” Garner murmured finally.

  “What?”

  “Over the debris of language. A word the river is saying.”

  Edord paused. The pause was weighted with significance. Garner heard the standard-bearer’s breath quiver with suppressed laughter. The oar master, reprovingly, struck the gong a sharp, meaningful stroke. Edord began another word. From the bridge arching across the river just ahead, someone tossed a handful of flowers into the boat.

  Garner looked up. For that moment, his face was visible to the world: his dark hair and eyes, his restless, brooding, quizzical expression. He revealed himself as human within the hood, within the solemnity of his status. The young woman who had thrown the flowers flashed a surprised grin at him. The standard-bearer gave a sneeze of laughter, bending to conceal it. The barge rocked; the gong gave a hiccup between beats. For a moment oars flailed; the knights froze. The shadow of the bridge fell mercifully over them.

  Then they slid again into light, water lapping with little, agitated river-words against the boat. Garner, standing stolidly, could feel it under the soles of his boots: the thin, thin boundary between wood and water, between dry and wet, between profundity and disgrace.

  Even the standard-bearer was silent, the long pennant whipping reproofs into the air, which was stirring suddenly as the river quickened to meet the sea.

  Edord opened his mouth.

  Garner tried to shut him out, his fair-haired, handsome, humorless cousin with his irritatingly reedy voice that made Garner want to swat at it, as though it had wings and would bite. Edord was the oldest of the twelve, and entirely confident of the mage’s choice of him to help balance the powerful, mysterious forces of earth and water. Her choices were varied; at times they seemed wildly arbitrary. Garner, for instance, would not have chosen himself. Despite his good intentions, he was more prone to muddying the waters than placating them. The standard-bearer, affected by nerves and fearful of water, seemed inexplicable. But the mage’s ancient, sunken eye, weirdly nacreous, had seen in them both something she needed.

  The blunt, craggy walls of the castle guarding the jut of land where the river met the sea revealed themselves above the houses, inns and warehouses along the tangle of city streets. The pattern of the oldest streets in Luminum resembled a wad of thread that had been shoved into a pocket and forgotten. Some said the early roads followed animal tracks, others that their loops and switchbacks were an attempt to confuse the floodwaters, the raging winter tides. Across the Halcyon, where land was diked and drained of marsh water, the younger city was flat as an anvil. Sea walls, gates and sluices, canals and locks, added over the centuries, had tamed much of the flow, trained it into fields, and, more recently, into pipes. But even on the most tranquil of nights, no one completely trusted water not to possess a will of its own. The impulses, secrets, history, the sprites and elementals who swelled beneath its surface, were understood most completely by the mage, who spoke all the languages of water. The rulers of Obelos would sooner have left a sea gate open to a wild winter tempest than neglect the Ritual of the Well.

  There was a flourish of brass as the trumpeters in the high walls saluted the king. Edord fell mercifully silent. The castle walls were shrugging out of the city, growing sheer, stark against the blue sky and the sea. Garner could see the stone sea walls curving along the path of the river to front the tide. Tide was turning now, tugging the boats along with it. Ahead, the king’s barge began to angle toward the royal dock, along which so many banners and standards and pennants flew that, in a better wind, they might have lifted the dock into the air.

  The oar master spoke, slowing the ritual barge until it wallowed, waiting for those ahead to disembark. It took a while. The canopied stairway up the bank to the back of the castle was crowded with courtiers. The oarsmen plied oars expertly, pushing against the tide, then letting the boat creep a little closer as a barge pulled away. They emptied quickly; no one lingered on the dock after the long journey from the west, and all baggage had been left on the wagons coming down the coast road to the castle. Garner’s thoughts drifted. He stared at the flowers at his feet, not daring to look up, knowing that his eyes would search for a phantasm, a dream. Petals the color of bright new blood reflected a sudden bloom of pain in his heart. She could have written, he thought. She could have sent word to him privately at the king’s winter court, instead of word traveling carelessly from anyone to anyone before it reached him. He hadn’t realized, until then, that in her eyes he was just anyone as well. In spite of himself, he raised his head slightly, looked up from under his hood to search the knots of courtiers along the stairs. The scallops along the windblown canopy hid too many faces; he could not find her. He lowered his eyes, found her face again in memory.

  Much his return to the summer court mattered to her now, she with her betrothed with his great barking brass horn that bayed so deep it could have drawn whales to the surface to mate with it. She with her head full of water pipes and fountains. No room now for one who had loved her since she was six. Garner made an incautious, despairing movement. The barge shivered; an oar caught a crab, splashed.

  “Peace,” the oar master pleaded. “Peace. We’re nearly there.”

  “Peace,” Edord echoed abruptly, jarringly, “is what we must impress upon the waters of Obelos with our minds, our breath, the rhythms of our hearts. From us it will learn; from us it will—”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Garner shouted, exasperated. Somehow he was facing his cousin, not an easy thing to do in a boat crammed with men. Turning, he had shouldered a couple off-balance; they reeled into others; the barge rocked one way and then the other. And then the great crowds on both sides of the river watched with astonishment as the Knights of the Well staggered out of the sides of their barge and tried to walk on water. The wallowing barge scattered its oars, then its oarsmen. The oar master, clutching his gong, fell in last and disappeared entirely as the barge flipped over on top of him.

  Garner, descending among the riverweeds, thought he should just settle on the bottom with the snails and stay there. But someone was descending faster than he was within the streaming thicket of weeds. The standard-bearer, he thought in horror, and kicked hard upriver toward him, losing both his boots to the tide. A school of tiny fish flashed past his eyes; it was suddenly hard to see. What he thought was a cloak seemed darker, a cloudy gray shadow fading into the green. He pushed downward. Someone else’s falling boot careened off his shoulder. The cloak, billowing and flapping in the current like a live thing, seemed empty as he grew closer, and it began to rise. So did he, with relief, tearing the clinging water weeds away as he pulled toward the light and air and churning bodies above him, beginning to hear his heartbeat in the surging wash of his blood.

  He saw the cloak agai
n, suspended in a long, motionless shaft of light. Still it seemed empty, his eyes told him as he passed it. It twisted slowly among the weeds, the hood turning, turning, until its limp emptiness, shaped by the current, opened to Garner’s transfixed gaze.

  He saw the face in it.

  Breath bubbled out of him. He caught himself desperately before he took in water, felt the aching impulse all through his body. Still he hung there, treading water to keep from beginning the long, slow, irrevocable slide, unable to look away from the strange eyes, shell-white and expressionless in a shifting face as green as waterweed.

  A struggling mass of boot and wool and limbs came between them. Garner, started again, lost the last of his breath. Then he recognized the standard-bearer, trailing bubbles and looking terrified. Garner reached out, grabbed his hood and drove them both, with a couple of furious kicks, to the surface. Coming up under the overturned barge, he bumped his head on the edge of the oar master’s seat.

  He held onto it, heaving for breath. The standard-bearer grabbed hold of an oarsman’s plank. Garner, his vision clearing, found himself face to face with the indignant oar master. They were surrounded by the swirling cloaks and churning legs of men outside clinging to the bottom of the barge. The weltering tide pulling them toward the sea, the constantly shifting weight on the barge bottom, made breathing difficult for those caught under it. The oar master, gripping his gong with one hand and an oarlock with the other, looked as though he wanted to shove Garner back under the water himself.

  “What,” he barked, “possessed the mage to choose you?”

  Someone outside hoisted himself higher up the barge bottom; the plank the standard-bearer clung to dipped abruptly. He inhaled water, coughing; flailing again, he seized Garner’s hair, pushed him briefly down.

  Garner hauled them both up again, answered between his teeth, “My cousin would say that I exemplify the chaotic aspect of water.”

  “Which it is your duty to guard us against!”

  “Then the mage must have made a mistake.”

  “Impossible!” the oar master snapped unreasonably.

  Garner rolled an eye at him, still grappling with the standard-bearer, whose sodden hood had slid over his eyes, blinding him. “Then she didn’t,” he said succinctly. He saw a pair of legs kick away from the side of the barge, and then another. The empty barges must have come to their rescue, he realized with relief, and added, “I might be your greatest hope.”

  The oar master snorted, inhaled a sudden splash as someone tried to turn the barge over and failed.

  “Let go,” Garner urged the standard-bearer, who had a death grip with one hand on an oarlock and with the other on Garner’s hair. “They’ve come to help us.”

  The young man shook his blind head mutely, emphatically.

  “Just leave him,” the oar master suggested, and vanished under the side of the barge.

  Garner treaded water and waited, wondering if the oar master would bother sending anyone to rescue the pair of them.

  A little later, as he sat dripping in a fishing boat that had come out to help with the rescue, he saw Damaris finally, on the dock, talking to his sodden cousin, who was gesticulating forcefully. Green, she was wearing, the soft pale green of the waterweed dangling over Edord’s shoulder. He would be making very clear to her exactly who had caused the Knights of the Well to become one with the river, of that Garner had no doubt. He sighed noiselessly, regretting the absurd incident, except for dunking Edord. Then, beneath the weave and break of light on the water, he saw the strange, rippling underwater face again, the pale eyes alone unmoved by currents, looking back at him within the waterweeds.

  He blinked. The face or the memory of it vanished.

  One of the water sprites, he guessed, drawn by the odd commotion in the river. The mage would know its name. He raised his eyes from the water again, and saw Damaris and Edord turned away from him, walking up the steps to the palace together. He watched that green until it disappeared within the walls.

  In the small, private chamber allotted to him by his rank as knight both of the king and of the Well, he found his baggage and his young squire Inis, who had been attached to him, presumably to learn from Garner’s knightly example and experience. Sweet-tempered and capable, he was too polite to comment on Garner’s dripping garments, simply helped him out of them and handed him dry clothes. He looked more doubtfully at Garner’s bare feet. Garner’s family could trace its lineage, in the northern mountains, back past the naming of Obelos. But what with one thing and another, including some disastrous battles with a reigning monarch or two, whom Garner’s ancestors considered usurpers, the family had lost its wealth over a century ago.

  “Your boots, sir?”

  “Water-logged,” Garner answered tersely. “The river ate them.”

  “Your best boots?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Inis said, rummaging. “There’s your shoes in here somewhere. Ah, and here’s your old patched pair of boots, right under them.”

  Someone pounded at the door.

  It was not what Garner expected: his annoyed cousin, or worse, a summons from the king. It was the impossible, what he would have chosen if he had a say in the various possibilities knocking on his door. It was a request from the Minister of Water for his immediate presence.

  Lady Damaris Ambre.

  Dazed, he put on the boots Inis handed him and followed the messenger.

  The minister was in her official chamber, a lofty corner room just beneath the battlement walls. The side casements overlooked the vast gardens behind the castle, the cobbled path leading down the back of the hill to the city below, with its eccentric tangle of streets cautiously edging closer and closer to the river where it curved around the sudden upthrust of land. From the adjacent wall, the view was of the harbor, the sea walls, the immense gates that protected the inner harbor, the brilliant, unending sea. An enormous table filled most of the room, covered with papers with seals and ribbons dangling from them, letters, lists, meticulous drawings of water projects, maps, schedules, sketches of everything from plumbing pipes to gargoyle-headed water taps. A tray holding pitchers of wine and water and cups stood swamped in the clutter like a drowning island.

  Damaris had thrown a black work-robe over her gown; its sleeves were shiny with ink stains. The long, white gold coil of braid at her neck was beginning to sag, too heavy, too silken for restraints. Leaning over some paperwork on the table, she looked up as Garner entered. The sudden flash of green, the color of river moss, under her heavy, hooded eyelids and pale brows, took his breath away.

  She gazed at him a moment, her ivory, broad-boned face the way he remembered it from childhood, open, curious, just beginning to smile. Then she remembered what he was doing there, and the smile vanished. She straightened to her full height, nearly as tall as he, slender and so supple her bones seemed made of kelp.

  “Garner,” she said in her deep, lovely voice that cut easily through any flow of water or words, “your cousin told me you nearly sank the ritual barge.”

  “I was told by rumor,” he answered recklessly, “that you were betrothed.”

  “And that has what to do with half-a-dozen gilded oars that went sailing out to sea, and which must be replaced before the ceremony of the fountain?”

  “Fountain?” he echoed bewilderedly, wondering how she could be thinking of such mundane details. “What fountain? Of course I didn’t mean to overturn the barge.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “I was provoked—”

  She held up a hand before he could go on; helplessly he watched a familiar dimple deepen in her cheek as her lips compressed, then quickly vanish. “Never mind. I don’t need to know. The water-mage wants to see you. You can explain to her.”

  Heat surged through him, then, as he remembered the precise moment. His mouth tightened; his eyes went to the sea, where a gull as white as Damaris’s brows angled over the dark blue water.

  “I was look
ing for you,” he said bluntly, and felt her go abruptly still. “You drew my eyes. You always did. Since I first saw you coming so carefully down those same steps when you were a child, and so was I, come downriver to court in my uncle’s company, just docking where you were about to step. You wore green that day, too, and your hair was in the same braid. We met there on that dock. Ever since, I have looked for you there. I was looking today, though I have no right.” He looked at her finally, then, found her face as stiff, her eyes as distant, as he expected. “My cousin was lecturing. I lost my temper, and unbalanced the boat. For that, I’m sorry. Is this what I must tell the mage?”

  Color flushed over her, swiftly and evenly, from collarbone to brow. “That it was my fault?” she asked with some asperity. “Because I forgot—No, because I didn’t know how to tell you?”

  “No. Of course not. Let’s blame Edord.”

  “I don’t understand. What has Edord to do with this?”

  “He opened his mouth,” Garner said dourly, “at the wrong time.”

  She studied him a moment, a line as fine as gossamer above her brows. “I love Lord Felden.” Her voice had softened; her eyes shifted away from him briefly. “I discovered that he loves me, too. His music has always enchanted me. We have much in common.”

  “His horn and your pipes?”

  She met his eyes again. “You and I have been friends for many years. Can we keep it that way? Or will you swamp boats every time you pass that dock?” He couldn’t answer. The unfamiliar secrets within the green, the fine, clean bones beginning to surface in her face since he last saw her, rendered him wordless. She made a sudden, exasperated gesture, trying to brush away his gaze. “Stop that.”

  “What?”

  “Stop looking at me like that. Just stop looking at me. Garner, just go away.”

  “Why,” he asked her with simple pain, “could you not love me like that?”

  She swallowed, whispered, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe—you were too much my friend. My brother. Maybe nothing more or less than that.”