Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Two metres of snow on the ground makes staying inside to study seem like a good idea.

  We did all the drainage projects for the Tall Woods, everywhere around that’s part of the school’s domain and a bit past last year, when there was just as much snow. Overdid, really, Chloris is taking civil engineering courses through the post and pointed out the relevant constraint was time, not effort, what could we do to secure the drainage in the number of days we had?

  It was a busy winter, and mostly fun. I could have done with less of Ed and Chloris flirting by arguing about water-gate design.

  I don’t think Pelōŕios has much opinion of being inside, the Round House is large enough, ceilings tall enough, and unicorns don’t have any trouble with stairs. Most definitely not horses, it’s enough like goats I am not sure I’ll never see a unicorn in a tree. Whatever’s in the main floor ceiling works on unicorns, too, it didn’t seem to upset Pelōŕios but the attention-grabbing only happened once. Which is doing better than any of us about that glorious ceiling.

  In order to know just what our guest thinks of being inside, I need to be able to converse. Which means learning Unicorn, half out of politeness and half out of practicality. It’s a lot easier for a human-style person to find a fipple whistle than it is for a unicorn to acquire a larynx or a syrinx or whatever that kind of human-style person happens to use.

  I don’t even need the whistle, thinking at air molecules works. It’s easier than the whistle, too, which is good, because Unicorn as a language isn’t easy at all. You can’t even say “hello.” It’s completely impossible to say anything without assigning relative status and there’s no notion of agency. I don’t think any Unicorn anywhere has ever said “The cabbage of renown commands the ubiquitous sunlight to increase an already-extensive possession of greatness,” but that’s a completely grammatical and much shorter sentence in Unicorn.

  It has taken me four days to explain the difference between people verbs and thing verbs to Pelōŕios, even admitting I started trying a day or two sooner than I ought to have, and when I finally managed to do this, I found out that unicorns can weep.

  Weep, and get snorfly, and then embarrassed, and finally fall asleep.

  Then your classmate Edgar walks up the stairs, looks across the main floor, and hands you the image you’re making, being studious in a sun-filled window with a unicorn asleep at your feet.

  It’s a marvelous image, but I don’t recognize that person.

  When you don’t recognize yourself, I suppose you keep teaching the unicorn.

  If the unicorn’s awake.

  If the unicorn isn’t awake, you keep learning what you can.

  Hyacinth, Clerk Hyacinth, has a stack of books on unicorn languages, Hyacinth understands five of them and can say things in three of them. Hyacinth came through the day after our gean voted to have musicians at meals and offered me the loan of the whole stack. I said thank you and pointed out that I could just eat them then and there if Hyacinth didn’t mind skipping the usual ritual observance of taking the books away and bringing them back with the metaphysical devouring part happening in between.

  Got me a smile and approval, which it wouldn’t from everybody. Being eaten like that never hurts the original book, but it still sometimes bothers people to watch, even librarians who are used to the idea of sorcerous copies.

  The books were a huge help. It was a personal kindness, too, not a matter of duty to Parliament, so I sent Hyacinth an especially compact desk-device in invar and corundum and gold, chronometer, multi-intensity light, pen case, and four small and absolutely leak-proof inkwells, Halt’s ancient binding design for the inkwells that has held on bottles dropped in a penstock and run through a big power turbine. Practice piece, but it’s pretty and it took me so much less time to make than the books are going to save me learning how to talk to Pelōŕios, it’s technically not enough of a thank-you.

  I could maybe learn to speak in all five known unicorn languages: the one with the colour constructs is reported as being straightforward to do with illusions and the olfactory one would take lots and lots of practice, but if you can follow along with with a reasonably sensitive nose and thirty-one kinds of chemical detector I ought to be able to manage.

  It almost can’t be more difficult than selectively filtering airborne pollen. Even if some of the thirty-one things are hard to distinguish, two orders of magnitude fewer has to matter. Plus the first Commonweal person to figure out Unicorn Three did it with reactive paper strips, there’s a limit to how hard it can be.

  Still, I don’t have to worry about that; Pelōŕios talks. I can talk back, it’s the meaning that’s the problem. Whoever created Unicorn Four thought they were, well, no, I don’t know if that’s fair. It might have been just as interrupted and accidental as whatever the jewel-teeth were supposed to be for, there’s no way to tell now. What’s actually there is a woeful incompetence, it makes them more likely to fight but not well, nearly unable to fight well, they’re fighting for personal status. The idea that there’s anything else to do is absent, it leads to a lot of incomprehension and I worry I’m going to miss something, and then it will prove important.

  Instead of worrying about how I don’t think opinions of military organization that aren’t really mine, that’s coming from Dove, and at one remove from Blossom. Who really ought to know, both are legitimate experts, I don’t have to go ask a standard-captain. I have to get into serious introspection to notice where the knowledge comes from, and that’s another way to stop recognizing myself.

  Mustn’t get stuck on trying to be whomever I think I’m supposed to be now. There’s lag, there’s no way to escape the lag, turning into an Independent’s not subtle but it still does things that are hard to notice.

  Like writing your sister about maybe being able to save a unicorn and getting the whole letter written without ever remembering that four years ago you’d have wanted to know why anyone would want to, unicorns are dangerous.

  Chapter 9

  Zora

  No flood emergencies this whole winter, there isn’t anything left that can flood, we’ve fixed it all, anywhere on the West Wetcreek. It’s generally agreed that the other three watersheds aren’t our problems as students. They’re not getting as much extra snow, either, though the upper Blue and everything above Old Lake had problems last year, not terrible ones, mostly the kind that keep people awake with worry more than flooding the stores cellars. There have still been a lot of dredge and digger teams from the West Wetcreek watershed off helping along Blue Creek and Slow Creek these past few years.

  Watercourses are one of the safest things to do when the rest of us start to get bored. If they get bored enough to be creative it’s too late, safe has to involve teachers and large wards and being far away from everything. Watercourses are just moving dirt, but I really don’t think any of them got enough time as children to just play with dirt. Or little boats on a big puddle, or anything like that. I know I never felt like I got enough, and I got more than any of them ever did, maybe all of them together.

  It’s challenging to remember Dove’s nearly forty, or that Edgar used to be dull, or that Chloris struggled with being proper. Proper works fine when it’s voluntary, all this year mothers in the refectory have been citing Chloris’ behaviour to children to resolve disputes about table manners or posture.

  Last year was a wet year, not as bad as this spring, but notable. Just because we mostly ignore getting rained on doesn’t mean all the mud isn’t boring, or that steady rain isn’t fairly boring itself after the first décade or so, there’s just that much less variety in the world.

  Wake says the big impermeable igneous plug under the Tall Woods is still accumulating water on the uphill eastern side, it has to be, the scope of the working was smaller than the whole length of the ridge. The next little stream over, the slosh gets back to it and it runs deeper, it might start being useful. Closer to the West Wetcreek’s dryer while overall flow down to the Creek is the s
ame. More of the water coming by the Western West-East Canal doesn’t bother anyone.

  We would mind flooding our sanitary ponds, that’s ineffective and embarrassing and while there’s not enough that we’d be contaminating down to the Creek it would still be excruciating to have something basic fail.

  So we put in another pond early last year, between weeding trips, only a big one, nearly as big as the woods, two kilometres by two hundred metres, sixty metres deep on the south edge. More volume than we thought we’d really need, but you do that, better too deep than flooded. It’s the Long Pond, we already had a Big Pond, no matter how much smaller Big Pond is, and the Long Pond is close enough to full this spring.

  Some curve, to match the hillside, but not enough for Curved Pond. Lots of digging, complex digging, not just hurling dirt about. Three clay layers, two under the terrace to the north, not just the pond, those took half a décade to do. Wake knows a lot about terracing, and offered that we’d made this one perhaps sturdier than it needs to be, even considering that it’s a re-arrangement of the whole slope and out wide enough and deep enough along the north edge to support real trees. Trying with some of the Tall Woods trees, just to see, as well as some local, pin oak, chestnuts, blue beech, trees that will tolerate being a bit shrubby. Willow doesn’t root deep enough to really help hold the shallow edge dirt up here, willow wants to be down in a valley, so the water edge is all reeds and tall grasses. Have to be careful with that, tree-reed and bamboo might prefer wet and shallow soil, but not enough to keep them from trying to starve the trees of sunlight.

  There are aversions against moving too far from the water for the grasses, aversions around each tree to discourage nibbling teeth, aversions to keep Grue’s careful selection of ants and soil-fauna here, and not wandering away into the sad forb and maybe getting far enough to be a surprise to something else planted. Aversions are one of the few things I can learn from Wake and use that isn’t petrology. Not a ward, not an illusion, just a way to put “think again” into an approximately tangible form. It works, it’s worked all last summer and all this winter, nothing’s been nibbling on the small trees, the bamboo is where it ought to be. Could, it would even be good practice, link up and get everybody else to push and put ten or twenty year’s growth on the attempt at a forest, but we wouldn’t really know what had worked, then, the planting or the Power. Better to let it grow. Everybody’s been careful about recording just what we’ve done. The clay layer was part of one of Chloris’ civil engineering courses, the report got some looks at the post office. Chloris, very sensibly, sent it as illusions bound into a chunk of quartz in silver. Clerks have that done for large reports, and this one would have been eight centimetres thick on paper. Colour illusions for diagrams, it was extensively thorough.

  Our little forest will grow, it wants to grow, I can feel that, not really sleeping anymore, the ice is off the pond, wasn’t yesterday, snow’s not all gone over the ridge, yesterday there was only the one beginning dark line of water between the broken ice, and then we got a whole day of clear sky and direct sunlight. We cut the reeds, no leaves, all the buds are still closed, and I’m still taller than most of these trees. The chill blue mirror of the water’s there to the south, flinging back the dawn.

  Flinging back the flying mirror of a swan.

  Two swans. I should have been looking up.

  Can’t hear the wings until they’re passing over.

  Two kilometres the long way is enough pond for a pair of swans, only just but they’re young, their primary tips are transparent, not all white yet. And they’re circling, coming lower.

  It’s not an established forest! It’s not even close, they shouldn’t want it, there aren’t even reeds showing, it’s …

  Clear water, cold and deep. Nothing like a weed.

  Never run from swans.

  Never approach swans, either, never have anything to do with swans. Not much advice about getting away from swans, they’re faster than you are, even running.

  There’s the hiss and the little splash as they slow enough to fall off their feet, both landed. Neatly, for all the doubt they look like having sliding on their feet. Much too big to just land. Much too big to fly if someone hadn’t altered them. Two bright white birds on deep blue water, the sun’s not all the way over the horizon yet, have to get up early to see something as pretty as this.

  The swans are swimming this way.

  No one else is awake, it’s twenty-four, twenty-five hundred metres, back to the house, exactly two thousand four hundred and seventy, ten minutes at least. Power’s not the problem, I have enough Power, and no amount of Power will make me suddenly militant, suddenly able to let Death reach through me.

  Almost could, maybe, with Chloris. Constant Strange Mayhem, no. I can trust the terrible glory and the endless chill dark, but I can’t contain them. Easier to die.

  Dying still not wanted.

  Waking everybody up isn’t going to be enough help.

  Swans were a large aquatic bird before someone got to them. The ones Wake remembers from the Northern hemisphere still are, someone might have got to them a little but they’re still birds and not creatures. None of the originals of these swans are extant, not anywhere we know about. Territorial, elegant, loud, just what a certain kind of pre-Commonweal sorcerer would want in the moat around their tower. They’re larger now, and what were feathers are not precisely illusion, the follicles make stable structures out of some sort of force. Anything material, up to at least catapult shot, I don’t know if anyone’s tried modern artillery, bounces off. Very brave people have broken big axes on swan necks, just before being brave didn’t keep them alive.

  Swans ought to be too big to fly, you can make a creature strong, but there are rules about flight, so much wing for so much mass gives you a minimum speed. Swans would be too fast to launch or land if they only had the bird-wing with which to fly.

  Something in the wings makes the ghost of a blade, longer than the wing, a decimetre deep or so, and no thicker than a thought. It does something to the airflow, lets a swan fly slow enough to land or launch, more complicated than just making the wing wider.

  They’re glittering, and still, can’t see the feet moving, it’s all gliding with a little bow wave, swans float front-heavy, all the wing-muscle. Black bills, all black, regular bird beaks are covered with something like horn. Swans, it’s the same idea as the feathers, they have to be able to preen.

  Swans take bites out of granite with beaks that will close through the blades of weapons. A strong illusion of something durable might stop the beak.

  The wings, though, nothing material stops those. If I knew how to make a ward, that would work, but no material thing, and I know that. It makes believing in a sufficiently tough material illusion difficult. Cob swans go into rages and chop up trees, rock outcrops, cast-iron plates on bridge timbers, steel bollards, it’s some sort of territorial display. The display goes with loud calls like a brass instrument, there used to be military trumpets made to sound like swans, to be intimidating.

  These are at least quiet. Twenty metres, maybe, getting much less. Anything under ten is lunging range.

  Whirlwinds full of gravel won’t hurt swans. Not much gravel here anyway. Bad for the saplings.

  Someone made you.

  Someone who wasn’t an idiot, because it’s been so long we have no least idea who they were, and you migrate, you’re coming back in the spring, you’re a successful creature, you get yourself into the future.

  Even if you do make a habit of mincing bears and crunchers and incautious sorcerers, even if the giant fire-breathing ducks want hundred-to-one odds to keep insisting it’s their water, someone made you to put in the moat and be pretty. They knew wards, they were tough enough they had time to make you, but they wanted you pretty and not squashed. So there was something in you that let you know who you weren’t to mince into liquid, and maybe it’s still there.

  I’ve got a pair of swans, well, almost delicatel
y, no broken skin, taking bits of cold pancake out of my hand.

  The feathers glitter, the edges refract, all those delicate tiny neck feathers. You’d pet knuckles off your fingers if you tried, and bleed down an infinity of tiny rainbows.

  Disappointed looks, because I have only one pancake.

  Explain who lives here, who the teachers are, explain that it can be their pond, that nests have to be away from paths. Explain that there’s a strict trumpet-first policy, that being left in peace depends on not being a danger.

  There has to be something to guard, more than the nest, it can’t just be that. Can’t be an abstraction, they’re not that smart. I’m surprised this set of rules is all still here but it’s connected, it can’t breed out, there isn’t a nervous system if this isn’t here, there’s not much of the evolved ancestor in these swans, has to be something to do with water, their water from a swan’s perspective.

  Let none who are not us, or whom we bring not freely, pass over the water in arms.

  Two great slamming wing-claps, there’s a whistle under the slam, trumpet noises, and bowing necks, glorious bright curve of tiny razors.

  Then two swans swimming away, not as quickly. There’s a set to their necks and something deliberate about the swimming that suggests settling in. I don’t begin to know enough about swans to know that, but it’s there, and real.

  “She shenes as sweet as ony swan,” Blossom says, smiling, with the old vowel sounds and archaic pronunciation proper to the quote. I would never have thought Blossom liked pre-Commonweal poetry.

  Wouldn’t have believed Blossom could be hard to notice, swans or not.

  “That the Power cannot hide itself,” Blossom says, “is only strictly true.”

  There’s a bench, wasn’t even a gesture. Blossom’s been pretending less this last year or so. Anything Blossom really needs to gesture for you want to be two watersheds over on a reverse slope with six décade’s sealed food and water.

  That gets me a surprisingly gentle smile.