A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “The trick is to push on the rope.” Wake says this the same way as everything else. I’m willing to try, Kynefrid, who is wobbling a little, looks like an opinion will arrive in just a second, and Zora says “You can’t push on a rope,” like you’d say ‘the sun is a star’.

  Chloris is nodding vigorously, and Dove nods just once, but it’s got more certainty behind it than Zora and Chloris put together.

  “Barge towing,” Dove says.

  Wake nods, grimaces, says “Imagine winding on one ply, each of you, to make a larger rope,” and starts walking.

  I haven’t wound rope, but I think I’m the only one who hasn’t. It doesn’t take much watching before I figure it out. All the individual colour-sensations blend into the deep cold dust of what must be Wake’s warding.

  We walk, not very fast, all the way around; it’s bigger than the space we staked out, maybe a bit bigger than the thirty hectares Wake seemed to think was our reasonable limit.

  It’s strange; the trees go right up to the edge of the new space, and stop. There isn’t an understory, there isn’t an edge where there’s a bunch of bushes because the trees can’t shade them from the side, it’s straight in all the way around. The trees have all the good dirt, and thousands of years of fallen leaves, and outside that it’s the broken crumbly rock that can’t grow much.

  So it doesn’t, and there are trees seven or eight metres thick and eighty metres tall over the back of a hill that’s changed shape, it’s higher and steeper and there’s full-on meadow right up on top of it now.

  I remember the meadow rustling against my legs. Don’t remember what’s in it, don’t really remember starting to walk. It’s all breathe, step, breathe. The effort of using the Power has no thought itself, but makes it hard to think.

  Adding to the ward, it has to be a ward, while walking is a good reason to go pretty slow. I can do it, everyone can do it, but it’s like trying to walk in a straight line when you’re really tired. You have to think about it, and not stop thinking about it, or you stagger. Staggering makes the rope wiggle, strangely, as though it was both heavy and wet.

  No water, not that I can see. The bottom of the little wood, the southern, lowest edge, isn’t all the same trees; they’re not as tall and the bark looks like it spirals.

  Back up the hill is hard; Wake’s fine, no change of pace, it’s the same deliberate stride it was all the way around, but it’s hard work to keep up on the uphill, and to keep winding Power into this rope-thing, the wind against me getting stronger.

  Up toward the crest of the hill, there’s what’s almost a small cliff, three metres of nearly vertical hillside; we go around it to the east, going up, as we went around it to the west coming down, though I didn’t notice it then.

  Breathe. Step. Breathe. Bind, to the texture of dust.

  The top of the hill is meadow, low meadow, not much past knee-high, but it’s thick turf, you can feel the cushion underfoot.

  Wake stops, turns, looks at us one by one, and we all follow along with the gesture when Wake raises both hands and grabs across, hands on forearms, hands at face height.

  There’s a snap, somewhere back of my eyes, and I sit down again. The world feels like it’s spinning, but I think that’s just my head.

  I hear Wake say “Well done,” quiet with satisfaction.

  The next thing I notice is a clank sound, as Steam sets down a couple of buckets and the yoke-chains rattle off the lids.

  Steam doesn’t look the least bit put out at having carried two twenty-litre buckets up the hill, yoke or no yoke.

  Full ones, one of them is stacked ten-litre cans, one water and one…I don’t know what it is. It tastes of citrus and happiness, in a terrible clear way, the way you probably feel if your enemies are dragged before you in chains. Dove makes some implausible faces drinking it. So does Kynefrid.

  The other bucket is food.

  It’s mostly potato salad, along with some mutton sausage and a couple apples each. I keep having to make a conscious effort to chew.

  Right around when I start the second apple, I realize there’s sounds that weren’t there before. It’s quiet, you have to stop and listen.

  Dove stops dead, stops chewing, when I go still and listening.

  Zora leans over and taps Chloris. Chloris produces an affronted look back, but they both go quiet. Wake is nearly always quiet. Certainly doesn’t look worried. Kynefrid is lying down flat, no snoring, but I doubt Kynefrid’s awake.

  Steam gets up and takes two steps towards the trees. Steam’s been an amiable sort, smiles a lot, if not as utterly cheerful as Wake. This looks different, it feels like cold glass.

  I’m not supposed to get the feel of cold glass through my eyes.

  The sound comes again, faint and high. Three clear notes and a trill.

  “Bird?” says Steam.

  “Bird,” Wake says.

  Dove starts chewing again. Zora’s looking intent, back and forth, Chloris is looking at Steam and looking worried.

  Steam, it’s not like straightening up, but it’s something. No cold glass, no unnatural smoothness of motion. Steam shrugs with one shoulder.

  “Shifting the past around like that brings live things through.” Steam sort of waves at the forest. “Some ways, that’s always been there now. Other ways, it just happened. It’s too big to be sure there’s nothing hungry in there. So we’re cautious.”

  Chloris nods, slowly.

  “You deal with hungry things?”

  Steam smiles, gently. “Big ones.”

  “We have to deal with the small ones?” Chloris doesn’t sound like the prospect appeals. I certainly don’t want to, though I would be pleased to get a better look at the bird. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that song before.

  Steam’s head shakes, stops, so chin pointing will work. “Wake does.

  “Whatever that other history uses for sheep could have sneezed a disease all over this meadow, and we’re all dead without knowing it, from sitting in it to eat lunch.” Steam doesn’t sound like someone who particularly cares, one way or another.

  Wake’s eyes narrow. “Not the most likely outcome, even without the warding. With the warding, I should describe it as surpassingly unlikely.”

  Steam nods.

  “So that’s why no one uses it for farms.” Zora, sounding subdued.

  “One of the reasons, yes,” Wake says. “One of the others is that sometimes there are big things in there. Crunchers may well have come into our present world by that means.”

  “Is the ward active?” Dove sounds like someone asking a technical question, maybe not their skill but something they’ve done. My brain doesn’t want to work, it’s making ‘digesting, go away’ noises at me, but I figure I should know, too, and try to pay attention.

  Wake nods. “Any disease-causing organism able to significantly infect the inhabitants of the Commonweal, their commensals or cattle, will be dead in a few hours. Similarly anything able to produce widespread ecological change in the wild portions of the Creeks, even the tiny wild places under the hedges. Certainly before it is time to leave for dinner.”

  I’m pretty sure I’m staring at Wake, too. Everybody else is, well, not Steam.

  “The ward will persist; weed species will not be able to get in, while the wholesome natives of the new area will be able to pass in and out.” Wake goes right on sounding cheerful.

  “Rough on birds full of seeds.” Dove doesn’t sound especially worried.

  “Rough on the seeds.” Wake stands up, gestures broadly with both arms. “This is a remarkable result. I should be remiss to permit it to come to harm.”

  “Couldn’t you do something like that for weeding?” Zora, but Chloris is nodding. Dove is prodding Kynefrid in the bottom of one foot with their toes.

  Wake smiles at Zora. “There are just more than two hundred Independents in this Second Commonweal; there’s precisely one of me, and of those two hundred Independents, less than thirty are as strong or stronge
r than any of you five.”

  “If we six did nothing else, you could, with two years’ practice, ward perhaps a hundred hectares like this in a day, every day. You could not maintain each ward, once made, as you shall maintain this one; they would fade, fade to uncertainty in a season and to nothing in two seasons. So perhaps ten thousand hectares, doing nothing else; no increase in skill, no general service, no responses to crisis or alarm.”

  “You, you couldn’t do that yourself?” Chloris, sounding shocked.

  “Not every day.” Wake makes a gesture I cannot interpret. “The five of you are untrained, but you are strong. More of the strength of the ward is yours than mine.”

  “Not more than fifty thousand,” Dove says, quietly. People who that much land could feed, I’m pretty sure Dove means.

  Wake nods. “Though there are things that might be done, if weeds were no concern, still certainly not warded land sufficient to feed a fifth of the Creeks no matter what skill might be applied. Which is a tenth the Second Commonweal.”

  There’s that little catch in everybody, even Steam, thinking about it. Half a million Creeks, half a million displaced, everybody really worried about food next year. We moved all the stored food when we displaced, away from the unceasing tide of horrible things from across the Dread River, let loose when the Iron Bridge dropped and a ward the Commonweal didn’t know anything about collapsed with it. This year isn’t the problem. It’s getting farms and houses and roads and I’m told canals into the Folded Hills, and it’s figuring out how to do that really fast, without getting too many people who know how to farm killed doing it.

  Being able to make the weeds, all the weeds, just die would be extremely useful.

  “Could you teach people the ward?” Chloris, tentative and thoughtful.

  “There were,” Wake sounds very dry, “in the Commonweal as was, eight Independents who could cast that ward, five of whom could do it reliably. The Second Commonweal has one of the five and three of the eight.”

  Wake stands up, looks a good deal more cheerful. “I shall be delighted if I am able to teach it to one of you.

  “In the meanwhile, shall we see what there is to learn of this new land?”

  Chapter 7

  We stay out from under the trees. Dove sums it up for everybody by saying “It feels holy in there.” It does, even after carefully sorting out that none of us think holy involves gods, that known-to-be-inefficient way to concentrate more of the Power than one person can raise.

  Still, it does feel holy in there. It doesn’t feel old, which is odd, given the trees, but it’s deep and peaceful and clean.

  Wake has Steam run us through some different breathing exercises, ones about sensitivity rather than power. Trying to imagine breathing out through my fingers is bizarre, but it starts to do something after awhile.

  “Why fingers?” from Kynefrid, gets met with “Touch is the most basic sense,” from Wake, and the real problem is that the answer nearly makes sense. You can see it go through everyone’s face, that shouldn’t make sense, it’s not like we’re actually going to be able to put our hands on stuff buried metres deep, but sorcerer logic is leaking into everyone’s brain.

  After we’ve about got the breathing-out part, which feels strange enough that I carefully don’t think about it, we spread out into a wider line and squat down and do it with our finger tips touching the ground. All this breathing stuff is circles, out comes back in, it’s purely mystical — breathe the actual air you just breathed out back in and bad things happen pretty fast — but as mystical it works.

  Thirty hectares of immense trees, sure, I’m in the shadow, and the birdsong, and the strange sharp smell, of the immense trees. The trees that just couldn’t have grown, before, not if the best life-mage sorcerer you ever heard tell of had sat there for a thousand years and pushed.

  Loose dirt isn’t much heavier than water, call it a fifth. So a hectare of the loam under the trees is twelve thousand tonnes for the first metre. Times thirty hectares, times however many metres it goes down before it hits the bedrock.

  No way it’s not much more than three metres deep but that first three metres is saying 'a million tonnes’ into my mind very persistently. It’s not like we really lifted it, or created it, or even precisely made it, and I certainly didn’t do it myself.

  I keep telling myself that, and my brain keeps saying 'a million tonnes’ as though it isn’t millions and millions of tonnes. My no-talent brain’s stuck on the first million.

  The bit that knows it has a talent, because it’s exhaling through its fingertips and getting something back, it’s not really helping because I can feel stuff down there. I don’t know what it is, but the sensations change, the top bit has to be actual turf, then there’s something less squirmy, and then a lot more of something slidey that feels like the taste of salt, and then something that goes down deeper than I can reach, stiffer and cold and feeling more bitter than the salt.

  Steam motions stand up at all of us, and we do, and shake out our arms. The tingling in my fingers isn’t like they’ve fallen asleep.

  “It’s practice, isn’t it?” Zora sounds like someone who should have known better. “You have to have felt things before to know what they are.”

  Nothing alters in the general benevolence of Wake’s expression. “Considerable practice is required for confident identification by this method.”

  “Is it like having to do some long seams by hand before you’re permitted to use the sewing machine?” Zora asks this in entirely calm tones, they’re not plaintive at all. It cracks Wake’s expression anyway.

  “No.” Wake says it firmly.

  “Consider it to be like kneading bread; you must do so until you know what dough that has been kneaded enough feels like. Only with this, the analogy breaks down, because instead of the one thing which is bread, there are a very great many.” Wake makes a specific gesture, seemingly at the sky.

  “Many other tests for the nature of a substance exist; the entire discipline of chemistry and all manner of particular tests making use of the Power. This means is not precise, it takes a lifetime of practice, but it is also extraordinarily difficult to mislead. Even if your experience suffices only to say ‘a rock, that is a rock there’, you can be confident that it is indeed a rock.”

  “Not certain?” Chloris, who sounds entirely certain of the answer.

  “Nothing is entirely certain.” Wake says it with a complete absence of doubt.

  “So there might not be water around here somewhere?” Steam still doesn’t sound like anyone who cares a whole lot.

  “With those trees?” Kynefrid sounds stuck between appalled and disbelieving. “There’s a lot of water down there somewhere.”

  “Might not be anywhere it’d be decent to dig for it.” Dove sounds brisk. “Never mind where we put the sewage pond.”

  “One thing, then the other thing,” Wake says. We do at least know that the pit latrine by the tent is still there, everybody visited after lunch. It might have been a much more urgent question, otherwise.

  The two most-uphill tent pegs aren’t, the guy ropes are fine but the pegs aren’t there, at least not so as you could see them. Maybe breathing-fingers will be a way to find them.

  The one thing, the first thing, turns out to be standing in a line and walking, east to west, and writing down what we feel. Well, Wake writing down what we feel.

  It’s squat, reach, try to figure out what words to use for things like relative depth or mass or the horrible cold squelch, like the ghost of something rotten, I run into a few times. Then it’s a couple metres forward, and do it again.

  It takes a surprisingly long time to get across the whole new meadow that way. There are a few ripples in it, too, dips I wouldn’t call a dell, but the stone underneath isn’t perfectly smooth and the meadow isn’t, either.

  Then we come back, closer to the trees.

  The whole line of the ridge, the thing that was there before we changed it, slopes dow
n to the west, getting lower toward the West Wetcreek. The meadow is over something glittery; under that is something dark, and denser. It wasn’t lying in anything like the same way, before, except the slope, and even that’s higher, you can see the hump in the ridge-line where it got higher. The dark stuff dives down northward more steeply than the hill slope; presumably that’s what gives room for the trees.

  Trying to think of this makes my head hurt. From the faces, I’m not the only one. The important thing seems to be that the dark stuff is practically at the surface on the east side; it doesn’t just tip north, it’s northwest, and the place it came from, or its heap of chances, I don’t imagine there’s a sudden hole in some other world somewhere, or we’d get vast sudden pits appearing here at least occasionally.

  Though if the dirt just switches, who would notice? It’s not like someone lives on most dirt.

  Probably shouldn’t think about that much.

  Wake motions us off the meadow, off to the east and a little north and down off the curve.

  “Reach down,” Wake says, gesturing.

  I do, we do: the…original, unaltered, something, standing on the stunted forb within reach of the meadow grass makes the whole thing suddenly real, I’m awake, this is really happening, and down there I can feel the angle of the heavy dark stuff, dropping away down but not vertically, it splays, out to the east and tipped a little westward so if the face of it was a wall it leans back and in. It sloshes down there, all the free-draining rock has to be piling water up against the wall-face of the terrain we added.

  It sloshes not very far down. Feels like it’s barely half my height.

  “Tomorrow is digging out a spring,” says Wake.

  Chapter 8

  It’s like being hungover, the ache doesn’t seem to be a muscle thing.

  Steam handed every one of us a pair of ten-litre cans after the post-breakfast sluicing; no yokes, just advice to avoid thinking of them as heavy.

  We don’t go to the sandpit, we go back up toward the tent and the new meadow.

  If it was a hangover, I would’ve had to have drunk something except water and altered beets. If it was a hangover, I’d be feeling better for the amount of water I got into me at breakfast. Also the salt. I don’t, so that’s not what it is.