A Succession of Bad Days

by Graydon Saunders

  “It’s hard to believe that works.” Chloris, in a very small voice. Works well enough.

  “There was someone once, it took them a thousand years to die. In the end, they thanked me.” Halt says this in completely conversational tones. Goes right on knitting.

  “They thanked you for killing them?” Zora says this hanging on to tone of voice with both metaphorical hands.

  “That they had suffered so nearly as much as they deserved.”

  Halt says this so matter-of-factly that it takes thinking to hear what was actually said.

  “Which was not at all their opinion at the start of the process.” It’s not a twinkle, I don’t know what that expression is.

  “They don’t teach you these things in school, perpetuation of trauma isn’t helpful. For an Independent, even, the notion that the point to the Commonweal is to prevent that sort of thing from happening isn’t helpful.”

  “It’s not?” Zora, shocked.

  “It’s not untrue, but it’s not really useful.” Halt waves a hand, gently, something that looks totally unlike your expectations of any kind of spell. Must have practised that. “You haven’t done anything atrocious. You get the fear of it, all the same.”

  “We could,” Chloris says. Very quietly.

  Halt’s head shakes. “It is proper that you are concerned, but, no, Chloris dear. You would have to be someone else entirely.”

  “We’re turning into someone else.” Dove’s noting this for, completeness, I think. It’s not an argument.

  “The Shape of Peace is important.” Wake’s dry benevolence is familiar. Not reassuring.

  “The important thing, children, truly, is not that absence of atrocity. That — ” a pause while Halt does something with a loose end in the knitting — “is a pleasant side-effect.

  “All the founders of the Commonweal really knew was that they weren’t going to have anything like slaves and no sorcerer would rule them.” Dove says this formally, it’s something the Line takes really seriously, it’s the basis of about half the civil law, it’s important.

  Halt smiles. It’s, I think it’s real. Not something done with intent, to convey what Halt means, it’s just Halt smiling. Happy, amused, something.

  I think if you’d just met Halt you’d never stop running.

  “Then, children, they had the same problem everything has, how does it get into the future?”

  “Fitfully.” Wake’s benevolence takes a sardonic tinge. “I know my straight lines.”

  Halt looks benevolent at Wake. It’s what’s meant, anyway.

  “The school answer is you pass it on to children, to incomers, if there are any incomers,” Chloris says.

  People do join the Commonweal, not anywhere near the Creeks, but it happened up to the north-west in the Old Commonweal pretty regular, one small sorcerer-holding at a time.

  “But I’d be passing it on to myself, just a little in the future, it’s not the same, kids, you’ve got your sisters and your mother, mother’s brothers, your aunts and cousins and everybody in your gean, there’s other experience, lots of people have done it. You can talk to them. People write books, there’s lists, what to expect when your child is two, all that stuff.” Chloris takes a deep breath. Wake looks benevolent, Halt’s knitting needles go right on ticking, Spook’s looking at Chloris as though Spook isn’t sure everything is as it should be.

  Not five metres away, the stream is gurgling, it’s a fair-enough day in a, well, it’d be pleasant if I was looking at the wild from further away.

  “Turning into a necromancer, there’s just me, and if I knew who I was this wouldn’t be so miserably difficult. How do I know I’m not becoming someone arrogant and ruthless?”

  “Nothing wrong with ruthless, Chloris dear, so long as you start with yourself.” Halt’s tone is almost placid, calm over the clicking needles.

  “That’s my straight line.” Blossom’s voice comes quietly amused and conversational from fifteen metres away. “Note that it would be utterly unethical, several crimes, to turn somebody into what I turned myself into. Entirely fine to do it to myself.”

  “Given a plausible expectation of success.” Grue murmurs this into our hearing, I don’t think it’s actual sound. We’re all, the students are, getting much better at the Independent social rules. You can almost always hear the thought, it’s telling when you acknowledge having heard that’s the tricky bit. Having it added to your hearing’s probably meant as a hint.

  I don’t think Grue found that expectation of success easy to believe at the time.

  “The world is full of creatures that have yet to die,” Halt says.

  “And the Commonweal, this Commonweal, is one of them.” Dove doesn’t think that’s a question.

  Wake nods, Halt smiles the practiced smile of approval.

  “Ed?” Chloris doesn’t sound overwhelmed, this sounds lost. “Help me out?”

  “Works is not an axiom, remember that? You can’t just claim something works, you have to show it’s true, say what you think works means, and for who?” Show that you’re distributing any costs fairly. Lots of what helps you hurts someone else.

  Chloris nods. If you don’t argue like that, someone has to take authority in a gean, and that’s, well, it’s better than people going hungry but not by a whole lot, something’s gone bad wrong. All that effort to do the opposite of being ruled by the whims of sorcerers works, but it isn’t always natural. People have to think about what they’re doing.

  “I think — ” I am entirely certain, but that’s not the same as correct — “that there’s three claims going on. One is that the Commonweal works better than anything else we know about, that anybody’s tried.”

  Which really is true, so far as I can find out. Ask Dove what it’s like over the borders headed north of here.

  “Two is that this is because the whole point of the Commonweal isn’t to keep us from turning a fellow citizen into a newt, it’s to make sure everybody gets to make as many of their own decisions as possible, in practice, not some sort of long-odds theory.” Since even in the Bad Old Days sometimes someone born in a barn wound up really powerful. Never the way to bet, but it happened, which is why so much of the Commonweal is about making sure no one gets born in barns. “All the politics is collective, there’s all that effort — ” including our maybe-fatal examination by the Shape of Peace — “to keep anybody from having any personal authority, it’s all offices derived from groups.”

  Chloris nods at me.

  “Third thing is we’re being told that sociability isn’t the important part, that following the rules is necessary but not what makes it work, not even the rule about never, ever using sorcery to get your own way. The thing that makes it work is to give up the fewest choices.”

  “Like not needing to eat people’s hearts.” Zora sounds nearly cheerful. “Binding yourself to one spot’s pretty bad, too.”

  “Like not making your family detest you,” Chloris says.

  “It must be a real choice, Chloris dear,” Halt says. “Not something outside your control.”

  “Legitimate control,” Halt adds.

  Like not deciding anything you don’t have to decide, is what I’m thinking.

  By the time we’re in the canoes and moving, Spook’s done everything short of back flips to cheer Chloris up, and it’s mostly worked.

  Then we get into the bugs. We’re trying, per Blossom, to work east, if we can, off to our left somewhere. Wake produced, I don’t understand how, some information about where what we’re looking for is least unlikely to be. Apparently finding anonymous bone magically gives it a name, so they can’t be direct. Blossom and Grue turned that into a physical location, or at least directions, via some ferociously indirect process.

  We’ve still got the one stream, it’s fairly quick, not completely overhung by trees, there’s open sky up there, and there’s still a plenty of bugs. Really glad of the bug net.

  Then we hit, it’s more of a sluice th
an rapids, Dove says, it looks rapid enough to me. It’s a lot of work to even not go backward, narrow banks is more current, and then we’re all, it feels like floating. Not quite clear of the water. Hard to paddle, but I don’t think we have to, we’re moving, single file, up the sluice.

  “That was not a suitable place for a portage,” Halt says. Dove spends the next minute snickering because Halt’s assertion is so completely true. Dense brush into the water over wet rocks slick with something green, no place to even try to land.

  I’d be more inclined to chuckle if we weren’t in, it’s only a couple hundred metres, well, maybe five hundred, before there’s no current to speak of, this is a vast dismal swamp. No trees, but the reeds are five metres high most places.

  Green, there’s a few floating flowers, turtles, it’s not lifeless, it’s spring. Birds sing, we get a long slow baleful look from a heron, Grue notes that those ducks gliding away are flame-winged teal, it’s very much alive. Dismal, well. Nobody says middle of the channel, but there we all are, single file, Blossom and Grue, than Chloris and Zora, then me and Dove, and Halt and Wake trailing. No sense giving anything a better chance than we have to for a nice lunge from the reeds. It’s a swamp. Something is going to lunge from the reeds, if we give it enough time.

  Even more bugs. We’re managing to head sort of east-ish, working our way further into the swamp, but the bugs are bad. Bug nets or not, gloves, long sleeves, it doesn’t really do enough. I can see Spook trying to decide if swimming under the water isn’t a better idea every few minutes, even though nothing’s trying to bite a ghost. The swarm’s that thick. Chloris is having an especially bad time.

  Something nasty gets Dove back of the ear. Presumably chewing through the net, it takes steady pressing into the top wale to kill it. Dove’s not saying anything, no change of expression, but it hurt. Plus the hole in the net, and you can’t paddle and shift the bites away.

  Thou worms, thou biting things; go thou elsewhere. Be apart from me and these my people.

  I know they’re not worms, not nematodes, it’s much more an assertion of relative standing than any kind of classification. Which might be why it doesn’t work, I have trouble believing I can correctly refer to arthropods as worms.

  Blossom looks incredulous and Wake looks appalled. I look, I’m not sure, but I’m grimacing. It felt just as frustrating as the bag flopping while you’re pouring sand out of it, or tent flap not rolling straight, the whole thing swirled away from my intent.

  My, Halt says. The-people-of-whose-tribe-I-am.

  I say it back, and Halt nods.

  My, Halt says. Those-people-kept-of-my-power.

  Didn’t use that one. Good. I say it back, a little tentative, it feels extremely silly, but Halt still nods.

  My, Halt says. The-people-whose-company-they-permit-me.

  Did use that one. Whups. I say it back anyway, it’s still part of the lesson.

  My, Halt says. The-people-who-are-of-particular-concern.

  Dove doesn’t blush, quite, when I say that one. Grue looks appalled, and Wake starts chuckling as though unable to prevent it. Zora and Chloris are looking increasingly annoyed that they have no idea what is going on.

  Edgar’s put that in our joint knowledge. Would it be unwise for me to try? Dove says.

  Try talking to a fire, first, Dove dear, Halt says. Preferably with Blossom nearby.

  Forewarned, Blossom says. It’s not quelling, but it’s serious.

  “Edgar, thou, for entities lacking language from other domains of life.” Halt is not looking the least appalled. Halt looks pleased.

  So it should have been Thou worms, thou biting things; depart, and be apart from me and these my people.

  That works. I can feel that working, it doesn’t have that sense of swirling back at all.

  Chloris turns around to look back at me. Bug net or not, repellent or not, Chloris always gets bit. It’s stopped. Thank you, comes through, fervent.

  “I wonder how long it’s going to be before a mosquito bites a Commonweal sorcerer here,” Wake says, around a last few straggling chuckles.

  Halt looks back at Wake. “Edgar is young. It will breed out.”

  “Breed out?” says Chloris.

  “New blood,” Halt says, smiling. “In a hundred generations, the injunction Edgar laid on their kind will be gone.”

  A hundred generations isn’t very long to a bug. Five years? Three?

  “Is there a word for shelter?” Dove asks.

  It pops into my head, and I nod. Shelter, general, shelter-against, shelter-metaphorical, shelter-intentional, shelter-inherent, the condition of occupying shelter for all of those, shelter remembered in stories, shelter existing elsewhere, shelter not yet existing here, it goes on.

  “Could we enchant that go-away?” Dove asks. “It’s a command, couldn’t just bind it.”

  “Not just like that,” Grue says. “Same reason you shouldn’t kill all of something with limbs or eyes over a wide area, even some weeds, which these aren’t, you put holes in the web of life.”

  The weeds get complicated. Nothing says they can’t embed into the local ecology and become essential, just because they’re trying to keep you from farming. Why we didn’t pick what we weeded out in the spring.

  Halt looks thoughtful. “Knitting bug-netting would prove tedious.”

  “Call it shelter and the principle is sound.” Blossom doesn’t sound entirely convinced.

  “Is that, language, it sounded like a language, is that hard to enchant?” Zora’s looking nearly as cheerful as Chloris with no biting bugs.

  Blossom’s head tips back and forth. “Halt doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.”

  “There’s a lot of those aluminium marker tags,” Dove says. “Any reason not to enchant the words into one of those?”

  Halt’s head shakes no, and Wake, who may think experimental enchantments aren’t what you try in a canoe, subsides. Zora and Chloris come alongside and Chloris and I do the topwale-grab. There’s a tiny bit of current here, but only a tiny bit, we’re not going to get pushed back very far the wrong way. Still good to have someone there to steer us well clear of reeds while we’re being sorcerous.

  It takes three tries, one of which produces a fizzy green light that smells like the hope of victory, but we get it. I can say the words and Dove can make an enchantment out of them, our whole shared mind together. Then we make one for everybody. Blossom accepts with a little bow to Dove. Dove looks startled. “I couldn’t do it,” Blossom says. There’s a pause, and Blossom’s eyes widen a bit. With Blossom, you can’t say ‘light up’ unless you mean it, but it’s what anybody else would be doing when you said their eyes lit up. “It’s unworthy, but could you make another one? I want to send it to Ongen.”

  “Now, Blossom dear, you have to send it with a letter,” Halt says, smiling.

  Blossom nods. “I have to send it with a letter.” Still smiling.

  Paddling’s a lot better after that.

  Swamp’s still dismal, delicate gold and purple floating flowers or not.

  Got my own work project, Dove says. Or maybe we do. Figure out some way to get those widely produced, come up with something anybody with a bit of talent can use, not any tougher than lights if we can. Then make sure all the focus-makers know the pattern.

  That’d be a substantial public service. Blossom sounds wry. You’ve got a sound project if you can make, by yourself, something someone who isn’t Edgar or Halt can use.

  I can feel the startle from Dove. Everybody here can use their little aluminium tag, they all checked, even Wake and Halt.

  That language is really tough, Blossom says. I can understand some of it, Wake can understand some of it, I had never heard of anybody but Halt who could speak it with force until, oh, sixteen minutes ago.

  It’s spring, it isn’t raining, we’re not being bit by bugs, there are birds singing, the cloud doesn’t look like it’s about to start raining, there’s no wind down here, even if the
reed-tops are tossing, it ought to feel peaceful instead of edgy.

  I don’t think it’s anything out there, I think it’s unhappy students.

  “Halt?”

  “Yes, Chloris?”

  “Why did you kill that person, so, so painfully?” Horribly, sits there, it’s not as though Chloris thinks Halt can’t hear it, Chloris is trying to be polite.

  “So other people would fear to disobey me.” Halt almost twinkles. “It works much better with demons.”

  Chloris produces enough confusion Spook walks up the top wale on the non-paddling side and tries to touch noses.

  “Chloris,” Grue says, “it really is impossible to understand. That’s a good thing.”

  There’s a couple strokes of the paddle go by, the reeds, the reeds all look the same, even the turtles look the same, you could be stuck in this swamp for an eternity.

  “I don’t understand, Dove or Blossom don’t really understand.” Grue’s voice is calm, quiet. “People who grew up in the Bad Old Days, it’s this gulf. Even one of the really gentle ones like Ongen or Mulch, there weren’t any non-combatant sorcerers back then, not really. Someone would have enslaved me, if I was this old, long ago, or I’d have turned into someone dreadful, or I’d be living in the wild, changing shape fifty times a day, and trying to be unfindable.”

  Or you would have had time to think, and for a thousand kilometres in any direction, nothing would move but bees. Blossom’s thought is full of affection.

  “It’s all about who’s in charge, who makes decisions. The Commonweal does that by asking everybody, everybody adult, and doing a lot of arguing and agreeing that there’s limits to what you can do to someone for not agreeing, or even not working.”

  You can not work in the Commonweal, and you won’t go hungry. You’re going to eat a lot of raw turnip, if it’s won’t work, but you won’t starve and you won’t sleep in the rain.

  “The Bad Old Days, well, it was all some variant on obey or be a newt.” Grue’s voice is light. Newt, well, mostly you got stabbed by somebody with a spear who worked for the sorcerer, because you weren’t weeding fast enough. Or a weed got you. Or the sorcerer changed your brain. This all seems to have slid off Chloris, or maybe there’s less of it in school in the Creeks.