Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Damaris—”

  “No,” she told him firmly. “Go. The mage is waiting for you.”

  “How much of this do I tell her?”

  She shook her head slightly, picking up a piece of chalk, worrying it through her long fingers. She didn’t look at him again.

  “I think she must already know. She sent for you through me. Now I understand why. Whatever she wants with you, it won’t be about the mistakes and mysteries and messiness of love, but about the waters of Obelos. Go and find out.”

  So he did, feeling as shaken as if he had been bellowed at by the king.

  Someone opened the door. Damaris, staring blindly at the chalk in her fingers and contemplating the messiness and mysteries, flashed a wide, incredulous stare at it. But it wasn’t Garner back again with his obstinate, tormented eyes to demand impossible explanations from her. It was a stranger, gestured in by a footman.

  “Master Tabbart Ainsley, Minister,” he murmured.

  “Yes?”

  “The composer from Sucia.”

  She blinked. “Why didn’t you take him to Lord Felden?”

  “I couldn’t find the musicians, my lady,” the man explained apologetically. “Everything is chaos with the king’s arrival. Master Ainsley said he wrote some water music, so I brought him to you.”

  Speechless, Damaris gazed at the composer, who looked miserably back at her. His face, framed by windblown chestnut hair, was colorless as curds; he swayed a little under the weight of her regard.

  “You are welcome,” she assured him hastily. “Please. Sit down.”

  “Thank you,” he said faintly, and the footman closed the door. Master Ainsley crept into the nearest seat, which was her drafting stool, and dropped his face into his hands. Damaris, alarmed, poured a hefty cup of wine, brought it to him.

  “Are you ill, Master Ainsley?”

  He lifted one hand, eyed the wine glumly, covered his eye again. “I could be cheerfully dead.”

  “Ah,” Damaris said, enlightened.

  “In Sucia, I was dragged up a canal in a barge. And then floated down a river along with some goats and chickens and a great many noisy children. When we finally reached the ocean I thought, with all that blue space, it would be peaceful.”

  “But no?”

  “But yes.” He came out from behind his hands finally, and winced at the sight of the sea in the window. “But how could I enjoy it? The ship tossed me this way, threw me that; my bed fell down; my dinner came up. I was never so happy to see land. Your port looks so calm. It barely breathes.”

  “We struggle for that,” Damaris told him a trifle grimly. “That’s why we celebrate our victories so lavishly. And why you’re here.”

  The young man reached for the wine, took a cautious sip. The damp fungal sheen on his face brightened to a healthier shade of white. He looked slight but muscular within his untidy traveler’s garb; his eyes, going seaward again, had a blue-green hue much like it.

  “Look at it,” he said bitterly, nodding toward the spiky forest of masts rising over waters separated and calmed by sea gates and walls. “Somewhere among those stripped tree trunks is my torment. Now they hardly move. Like ships in a painting.”

  “Would you like to rest awhile?” Damaris asked him with sympathy. “Lord Felden is one of the musicians, as well as the director of the court orchestra which is to play your music. I’ll find him; he’ll know where you’ll be lodged.”

  He smiled at her, a fleeting but genuine effort that brought even more color into his face. “If I’m not needed, I think I would like a walk first. I’ve been so confined, these past days. Perhaps you could direct me to the object of your celebration? I would like to be sure that my music is suitable. I’ve only seen and heard this wonderful fountain in my imagination. And you know how different they are, all the voices of water.”

  She found herself smiling back at him, and trying to remember what Beale had said about his music. She made a sudden decision, removed her work-robe. “I’ll take you there. I want to be sure it will be finished in time, that there are no unexpected problems. I’m afraid you must continue to imagine the sound of it, since the water won’t begin to flow until the day of the celebration. Nor has it been seen except by invitation. It’s been shrouded in mystery for weeks.”

  The brisk walk through the royal gardens and out the back gate revived the composer even more. By the time they descended the gentler northern slope behind the castle and reached the streets he grew animated, viewing with energy and curiosity the flower boxes in the windows, the brightly painted doors of houses and shops, the costumes of other visitors. He brought to Damaris’s attention tapestries from his own country in a shop window, and stopped now and then to exclaim over one or another of Luminum’s renowned arts: delicate glass, lacework, water clocks of elegantly painted porcelain.

  “You tell time by water?”

  “Everything in Luminum is translated into water. It is the first and last sound we hear.”

  He made another of his fitful stops at the far end of one unusually straight street, glimpsing another blue horizon, another thicket of water traffic. He turned confusedly, walked backward a pace or two, gazing at the castle on the cliff around which the river curled. “Is Luminum an island?”

  “Only on three sides.”

  He righted himself, gestured down the street. “And that?”

  “The Halcyon River.”

  “More water,” he breathed, making Damaris smile again.

  “That, we worship. It waters our fields, our animals, our city. We dedicate monuments to it, build shrines, offer gifts to those who dwell in it. Your music will be among those gifts. It is finished, isn’t it?” she asked practically, and was reassured when the composer nodded.

  His eyes were on the concealed object in the square ahead of them, where four streets ended at a broad bed of cobbles. Flowering chestnuts shaded the people hurrying under them as intently and single-mindedly as fish pursuing dinner in the deep. It was a motley mix at this end of the city, where ancient cottages shared the waterfront with houseboats and barges flying pennants of laundry, and the market-boats darted and hovered like dragonflies over the water to sell a loaf of bread, a dozen oranges, before they flitted away to answer the next summons along the bank.

  As they grew closer to the hidden object, Damaris heard the sound of hammering. The shrouds, great lengths of sailcloth, bulged briefly and oddly here and there, poked by mysteries within. The work must be finished, she realized, pleased. The scaffolding around the fountain was being dismantled.

  “Minister,” murmured the guard, rising from the stool on the cobbles where, with the aid of a book, he was defending the shrouds from entry. There was a shout from within; a sudden ridge in the canvas marked the path of a falling plank, which narrowly missed his head. He ducked, breathing a curse. “Are you sure, my lady, that you want to go in there?”

  “You’re wearing a helmet,” she answered briskly. “Go in and tell them to stop for a moment.”

  The guard slipped between shrouds. Another plank clattered down; they heard laughter among indignant shouting. Then all was silent. The guard reappeared, held apart the shrouds for them.

  “Be careful. There are perils everywhere.”

  There were indeed, Damaris saw: downed tools, swaying planks hammered half free, clinging to others by a nail, the rubble and dust of the sculptor’s final touches to his masterpiece. He was still there, tinkering with the very top of the fountain, while he knelt in the basin below it. He grinned down at the minister, saluting with a brush, half his face masked with marble dust.

  There were four broad basins, all scalloped and festooned with carvings. The largest, at the bottom, was a twenty-foot platter of pale yellow marble veined with cream. Three mermaids rose to their scaled hips out of the water in the center of the basin, their upraised arms holding the second basin, smaller by five feet. The exuberance of their poses, their alabaster breasts and dancers’ arms, was mitigated b
y taut muscles the sculptor had chiseled to surface beneath the smooth skin. He knew how hard they worked to hold that ton of marble. Their serene smiles made nothing of it. The basin they held was sea green. Three porpoises, slightly smaller than the mermaids, danced upon the surface of the sea, balancing on their noses the third basin, a pale sky blue. A single rosy fish leaped out of its center, a carp by the look of the sinuous fins, standing on its tail and bearing the highest basin on its head. That carried the emblem of Obelos: the white fluted pillar with the water-blue orb upon it. The carp basin also held the sculptor, who was carefully cleaning the ring of holes in the orb, out of which water would rain in a perfect halo to overflow its basin and cascade into those beneath it.

  Master Ainsley, who was staring at the massive stonework, closed his mouth with a click of teeth and lowered his head. The sculptor, blowing softly into the holes, had an ear cocked, Damaris noticed, toward their voices.

  “Big,” the composer pronounced finally, and added, after considering the matter, “Very big.”

  “As you noticed, we have a lot of water. Will your music be up to the task?”

  “I think—” he paused again, finished cautiously, “I think so. I hadn’t expected anything so ornate. I’ve seen such work in the courtyards and gardens of the rich in Iolea, but never so far north in a city square surrounded by chestnut trees.... The water will come from the river?”

  “No. The source is the pure water of the Well itself. Water was guided from the underground river into a large holding tank; from there, pipes were laid across Master Greyson’s hop fields, with concessions for use as irrigation, along a stone archway across the river, and then buried beneath the banks and run under various gardens and streets, and finally the square. Once the fountain is open, the water can be piped into houses all around the square. So you can see why we planned such an elaborate celebration. Many in Luminum still get their water by lugging a bucket down to the river.”

  She gazed at the great conduit head, the fountain, with satisfaction a moment longer, remembering months and even years of discussions, plans, legal contracts over property, endless papers she read requesting funds to pay for directors, engineers, pipe-makers, ditch-diggers, shovels and hoes and wheelbarrows, the ceaseless trail of problems into her office, annoyed citizens, leaky pipes, stolen equipment, miscalculations and miscreants.

  All finished. Even the carp standing on its tail seemed to be smiling...

  A halo of water shot out of the orb the carp carried. In a heartbeat, the sculptor’s face and hair were drenched. A mask of wet marble dust opened its mouth in a silent, astonished O. Damaris, her own mouth open, noted dazedly the single clogged hole in the orb. The water, oddly striated, filled the smallest basin quickly and began to run over its scalloped edge in three orderly cascades around the frolicking carp and the sculptor.

  The sculptor shouted an incoherent word that freed Damaris from her transfixed state. She drew a sharp breath and whirled.

  “Where is the engineer?” she demanded of the staring workmen.

  “What is it doing?” Master Ainsley asked confusedly. “Should it be running now?”

  “He went up to the castle to see you,” one of the workmen told her. “Said he needed to check something. I thought that’s why you came here.”

  She was silent, pulling a vision of the project plans out of memory. The water had filled the carp basin and was flowing cheerfully down among the dolphins. The sculptor, on one knee in the water and clinging to the carp, was groping for a ladder behind him with his foot. It careened as he kicked. The workmen caught it, steadied it for him. He descended finally, cursing ceaselessly, wet as the carp.

  “Go down to the river,” Damaris said to one of the men. “Make sure no one is in the discharge drain, and that it is covered. When this starts gushing out the flow will be strong. And you—”

  “Why,” the sculptor demanded, interrupting his own steady stream, “is the water that color? It should be coming directly from the source waters of the Well.”

  It was, Damaris saw with horror, turning as brown as mud, or worse: as streams running beneath schools sometimes turned in summer when the water grew shallow and the waste from a hundred students tumbled into it from their simple wooden water-closets.

  The guard was peering through the opening now, drawn by the noises of water and the sculptor. “Stay here,” Damaris told him tersely as his eyes widened. “Don’t let anyone in.”

  “What—”

  “Don’t say a word about this to anyone.”

  The composer asked helplessly, grimacing at the murk, “Should I revise my music?”

  “Of course not.” She seized his arm, tugged him away. “It’s a temporary problem. A bit of soil in the water main. Most likely. The engineer will fix it easily. Come back to the castle with me; we’ll find Lord Felden so he can begin practicing your music.”

  “I wrote water music, not mud music,” he muttered with one last incredulous glance at it before Damaris pulled him out of the shrouds. “Maybe your Well is running dry.”

  Damaris closed her eyes briefly. Behind them, she caught an unexpected glimpse of the mage’s eyes, the swirling hues of mother-of-pearl opening to look at her, and she felt the skin prickle painfully at the nape of her neck.

  “Not possible,” she told him adamantly, hurrying him along the ancient, colorful, bustling streets. “Human error. The engineer will find it. All will be well. You needn’t mention the incident to the musicians. It might weigh heavily on their playing and your music.”

  “Water,” he sighed. “It plagues me still, even on bone-dry streets. Is it cursed, this fountain?”

  “I hope not,” she breathed. “We would be forced to revise our lives.”

  “But it is possible?” he asked so shrewdly that she could not answer, only rush him even more ruthlessly uphill until he had no breath for words.

  Within the castle, she delivered him gratefully into the care of her betrothed.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Beale Felden told Master Ainsley. “They told me you had arrived and vanished.”

  “Lady Ambre kindly took me to see the fountain,” the composer answered, and did not elaborate, to Damaris’s relief.

  “Ah.” Beale smiled at her amiably but absently. She could almost see the notes and instruments, the faces of musicians crowded behind his limpid blue eyes. As he, if he noticed, might have seen the pipes and conduits in hers, as well as something of her terror. Fortunately for her, he was not particularly perceptive. That was one of the reasons, along with his fair hair, his amiable temper, his ancient title and wealth, that Damaris had permitted him to court her. He added to the composer, “The musicians are all eager to meet you, and see what you’ve brought us to play for the ceremony.”

  “I only hope it will be suitable,” Master Ainsley sighed; his own eyes seemed to fill with visions of mud.

  “I’m sure it will be wonderful,” Lord Felden answered. “This will seal your reputation in Obelos.” He bore the speechless composer down the hallway. Damaris watched them a moment; Beale seemed to be doing most of the talking. She turned away. She couldn’t guard every word the composer said, and, anyway, Beale, if alarmed, would be convinced by the simplest of explanations. A little dirt in the conduit pipe. Easily flushed out. He wouldn’t think to wonder who had started the appalling flow in the first place.

  She found the engineer pacing as she entered her office; turning abruptly, he nearly bumped into her. They both spoke at once.

  “Did you see—?”

  “Have you heard—?”

  They stopped, studied one another’s perturbed faces. The engineer, a lean, muscular, balding man apt to grab a shovel and leap into a trench if work on a project seemed slow, asked tersely, “Is it about the fountain?”

  “Yes. Yours?”

  “Yes. I was at the river, early this morning, making sure the discharge drain was completely clear before the guard-gate was locked over it. You remember where it
is? Parallel to the conduit at that point where it arches across the river near the central bridge—”

  “Yes.”

  “It was just near my head, coming down off the stone archway. So I could hear what was going on inside.”

  Damaris blinked. “Inside.”

  “The conduit pipe.”

  “Nothing,” Damaris said after a moment. Her voice shook. “Nothing should have been going on inside the conduit pipe. Why are you here? Why are you not checking the pipe at the source?”

  He gazed at her, his brow furrowing. “For what?” he demanded. “What did you see?”

  “A great deal of very murky water coming out of the fountain. Isn’t that what you heard? Water in flow?”

  “No,” he said soundlessly. Then he cleared his throat. “I heard voices.”

  “What?” She stared back at him in horror. “Someone inside the pipe?”

  “Singing.”

  “Inside the pipe?”

  “And laughter. Some banging—”

  “Children,” she whispered, her fingers icy.

  “They didn’t sound like children. And I couldn’t understand a word. Sometimes the pipes themselves seemed to sing. I sent one of the workmen to the Well to check the cap over the conduit pipe, make sure no one had broken the locks on it.”

  “If anyone had opened the cap to enter it, they would have drowned long before they crossed the river. No one would be laughing.”

  They were silent again; their eyes slid away from one another, neither wanting to glimpse the doubt blooming there.

  “Mud,” the engineer said heavily.

  “Or worse. I couldn’t tell. At least it didn’t smell. But where could it possibly be coming from? What did the workman say?”

  He shook his head. “The cap was sealed in the water as we left it. Nothing seemed amiss.” He paused again, asked her diffidently, “Any word from the water-mage?”

  “No. Not for me, at least.”

  His face loosened slightly. “An accident, then, along the pipeline. I’ll have the workmen follow it, check for wet or sinking ground. I’ll take a look at the source myself.”