A Succession of Bad Days (41 page)

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.

“So why are there any sorcerers in the Commonweal?” Zora, who isn’t perplexed, but who might be suprised.

Wake shrugs, somehow, still paddling. “Can’t weed with a battle-standard. Can’t cure anybody. Can’t
make another battle-standard, nor even so simple a binding as a light.”

Wake points with a raised paddle. Blossom nods, and we’re all working, carefully, the channel’s only three or four metres wide, it’s not likely all that deep, toward that direction. Something big takes off, leaping out of the water, rows over us on broad wings. Wicked stabby beak, long legs.

“Grand heron.” Grue sounds pleased.

“Nor did anyone then know how well the battle-standards would work. There have been many clever ideas prove of little use once they were known things, and not surprises.” Wake’s voice is purely conversational.

Dove is nodding. Chloris is looking worried and Zora says “But.”

“Someone smart figures out how to make a battle-standard, any useful focus is necessarily voluntary, but there’s lots of
individual ways. Then they make graul, something like graul, that innate loyalty. Then we’ve got a problem.” Blossom’s, Captain Blossom’s, tone is purely conversational, too.

“Being good is really hard.” Chloris, it’s not despairing, it’s not mournful.

Immense frustration.
Dove’s thought is kind.
Good children don’t shout, or take a big hammer out back and break rocks.

That comes with an image
of, Dove might be four, really hard to judge from a memory of infant hands, head in a too-large wire mask, whaling away, well, it’s actually fairly controlled, especially given the relative size of the hammer, on some big slabby, slate-y stuff. Grackle, I’m pretty sure it’s Grackle, perspective’s all wrong, is well clear, but looking approving.

“Good is an end, Chloris dear, not a means. We ought
to teach you some sufficient means.” Halt, Halt really can do kind. There’s nothing but kind in this.

There was that snow,
Dove knows what I mean, Chloris going outside to scream.

Utterly terrified, and just us. This is being good in front of grownups.

Yeah.
Two canoes of kids, one canoe of big kids, and a canoe with one grownup and Halt.

Blossom flicks a paddle-tip worth of water at me, with
a grin I can feel from ten metres behind. I’m so surprised Block’s teaching works, and
sphere
holds water as well as it does blobs of the Power.

“Blossom,” Halt says, in a voice that has layers, the top layer sounds stern. There’s a lot of history and something like a chortle under that.

I drop the ball of water back into the swamp, complete with startled water-bugs.

“I’ll be good,” Blossom says,
with just as many layers.

Grue, with a terrible brightness, says “Is it much further?” and Wake, immensely calm, says “Six or seven hundred metres.”

It’s a ziggurat, not a huge one, but the stepped pyramid shape is square and monolithic, there don’t seem to be stairs anywhere. It’s on top of dry ground, not very high ground, but it’s definitely not swamp. Not with actual trees like that.

Little
trees. Lots of water, not very far down, nothing with big roots, I know that much.

We drift to a stop, still about fifty metres from shore, beside each other, instead of the canoes being in single file. The little trees run right to the edge of the water, there are branches with green leaves that dip
into
the water. Not obvious how to land.

If I use the Power, is that bad, unhelpful?
Zora says.

No,
says Wake.
If we must try again, we shall do so in the morning, after any disturbance has had time to dissipate.

Zora sits up in the stern and doesn’t so much as wave a hand or say a word, but the trees for a five-metre stretch lean away from the water, each other, what looks like it was a ramp. I don’t think the place was built to be flooded this deep, not a boat ramp.

Might even have been
stairs. It’s really old stonework, and the roots have been at it.

It’s not really a landing, it’s a clamber-out, unload, pull the canoe out behind you, sort of place. There are a few spots into the trees where there aren’t any trees, no dirt, no cracks, patches ten metres by twenty or so of glassy surface. Must have been higher than the rest of the plaza, square, meeting place, can’t really tell
without knowing what the stuff around the ziggurat looked like when they built it.

It’s been a long time. The ziggurat feels solid, immense blocks of something metamorphic, I think, it’s all one dense even colour but it doesn’t have any grain structure, one smooth thing inside each big stone block.

Can’t feel any interior spaces.

The blocks are big, two metres thick by five metres square, it feels
like, laid like slabs.

There are some, terse nods? Eighty-five might be practically a baby, but it’s more than long enough for work-related communication to get really sparse.

“Children, can you lift the whole ziggurat from the level of the ground?”

It’s not that big. We’re very careful to get the whole bottom course of stones gripped as a single whole thing, but it’s just not difficult. Up it
goes, slow and careful.

“Well done,” Halt says, voice absent, not much Grandma Halt at all. Some of those nods were deciding Halt had front.

We stop lifting.

Wake walks under the floating mass of stone and does something.

It involves a, probably about an eight-litre jar, plain glazed pottery, and a lid that hurts to look at with the Power.

Ow.
It’s all of us, not quite accidental eerie unison,
but close.

There’s a pattern, square blocks, neat ones, obviously larger and square in the cobbles and gravel we lifted the ziggurat off, each half a metre or so on a side and set to make outlines of much larger squares. Sixteen round the outside, four corners, three between on each side, more inside, a square of nine, then four, then one in the centre.

Anything stirring?
Blossom, to, no, not
us, we can all hear it, but specifically asking Dove.

Still a rock.
Dove’s pulled up from the link a bit, more attention free. Dove sounds amused.

Fire has a sense of humour. Things you learn by going to sorcery school.

Thirty-one’s in the ziggurat, isn’t it?
Zora, not precisely nervous.

Right on top.
Grue, who is sort of half-melded with Blossom, it’s ready to go.

Blossom’s got, you can feel
the idea of it already there, the bubble.

Wake’s doing whatever’s planned to happen.

One of the square stone blocks rises, one of the square of four. It’s a cube, probably a precise cube, and rises about head-high. Head-high on me. The teachers are, you can’t say
relaxed
, more serene? Halt stops feeling like an imminent cataclysm. The cataclysm’s still there, but it’s
if
now, not
when
.

The jar
goes into Wake’s satchel, and a cloth bag comes out, half-sack size, what you’d use for sandbags. That gets a whole dry skeleton, not articulated, but I think everything is there, rising out from under where the cube was.

The skeleton crumbles, crumbles again. Even fine dust goes into the bag.

Sacking ought to leak dust. It doesn’t.

The cube sinks down, back to flush with the surface.

Wake comes
back out from under the floating ziggurat, hands the sack to Blossom. Blossom says thanks, puts the sack into a metal jar, really a jar, the lid unscrews. That goes, I don’t know, Blossom’s travel case is back with the canoes. It goes somewhere.

Another bunch of terse nods, and “Set the ziggurat down gently, children.”

Which we do, slowly enough it takes five minutes.

Can’t feel it when we let
go, nothing, no ground shake, no thump, no kind of noise.

We grin at each other.

“Are we done?” Zora asks.

Wake nods, Blossom says “Yes,” Halt says “Quite done, Zora dear.”

“So we’re not spending the night here?”

“A splendid setting for ghost stories,” Wake says, “but no.”

Canoeing back we paddled the whole way.

People don’t know if they should wave or not, when they see canoes full of sorcerers. We wave. No ambiguity from our teachers there; Halt sets their knitting down every time.

Nothing to do except paddle for two days, most of two days, it’s relaxing.

Wake cooked dinner the first night. Wake is most emphatic there’s no elemental fire in any of it,
that, beyond the cooking-fire substitute, it doesn’t involve any use of the Power except in the abstract sense of the food’s ancestors having been preserved as seeds while Wake was travelling to this continent.

I liked it. Zora mostly didn’t. Chloris may be a month deciding. Dove asked if there was a hotter version of a few things.

The way Wake had nodded
yes
to that could disturb someone.

Halt
provided breakfast, by saying four soft words. A mist rose off the canal and conformed itself to memories.

We’ve been in a story for awhile,
floated out of Dove’s thoughts, gently declarative.

We’re in a story where Halt is
nice, came back from Zora, the thought full of a conflict between observation and expectation.

“A triumph of the Commonweal, Zora dear,” Halt says, and hands Zora a scone.

Zora winds up torn between strawberries and some other kind of berry called currants, but not like any currants any of us have had, as the leading candidate for recreation. If Chloris gets a vote, it’s currants. Dove is ambivalent about the berries, wants whatever breed of goats are responsible for the goat cheese, a thriving crop of all the leafy things in the salad, and widespread cultivation of
the orange melon.

Well, and the tea. We all want the tea. Halt’s notion of special occasion tea leaves you glad you’re awake. Subtly, it’s not an obvious stimulant.

I got a slab of smoked fish, among lots of other food.

I think it tastes wonderful. It doesn’t taste like fish, not any fish I ever had. Dove, who tried a tiny flake, makes one amazing distressed face, stops there, stops there long
enough that Blossom’s starting to look like someone thinking about being concerned, and then Dove’s face smooths out.

“Why is it so hard to borrow Ed’s sense of taste?”

Dove may not be expecting an answer. There might not be an answer, or one we could understand yet.

“Distance,” Halt says. “You are reaching for another chemistry, Dove dear, and no close one.”

Halt twinkles more than usual. “Doubly
distant, it’s not all arrived at Edgar yet.”

Hatching.

Current theory is that I’m incapable of worrying about my inability to worry about it.

Dove gets admonishing when I start thinking like that. Worrying about my inability to worry doesn’t get anything done.

I don’t worry the whole way home.

Blossom hugs Grue and vanishes. How Blossom
carries
things when disappearing like that, I’ll maybe know
eventually but I surely know not now.

Grue’s off to the hospital at a rapid walk. The kid in the glass tank shouldn’t have come conscious yet. Grue wants to make sure the illusion of an environment is working properly, it was, it should still be, there’s almost no way for anything to go wrong, but growing someone’s whole body back is not any sort of regular thing, even for Grue.

Halt is met with
a delegation, seemingly half-composed of people who are greatly desirous that Eustace, a whole flock of Eustace, should come eat large established weeds near to where they live, and half people who would greatly prefer that the eustacen go nowhere, and certainly not without Halt to mind them every hour of the day.

You can tell how it’s going to end. The eustacen are going to go exactly where and
how the plan agreed between one of the Food-gesith’s fylstans and three or four township-clerks says they ought. Can’t blame folks for trying. Five-tonne sheep would be off-putting even without the stories about Eustace’s dietary preferences.

Halt, it’s too slow to even call a stroll, Halt heads off in a cluster of delegates, all being very polite and taking turns to speak. Like as not Halt’s
going to have to go round everywhere that’s getting eustacen and be reassuring.

Halt enjoys that.
Dove, it’s not precisely amused. Affection, maybe? Not a simple feeling. Dove’s memories of Halt being stern give a different view than any of the rest of us have got.

Entirely.
Wake’s feelings about Halt aren’t simple either.

We’re standing by the racked canoes, we’ve agreed to put them into general
use, Chloris gives their canoe, Chloris and Zora’s canoe, a pat, it’s not as easy as it ought to be to agree, but I suppose if anyone dents one badly we can un-dent it. Provided we can get a grownup to run the ward.

Spook’s sitting on Chloris’ feet, Spook has been very clear Chloris’s feet should stop moving so much, and washing a front paw. Lots of tail, it goes all the way around Chloris’ ankles
and then some. A few wrinkled brows, no one’s said anything. I don’t think it’s obvious Spook is dead, not unless you’ve got some active talent. Not sure you can see Spook at all without some talent, though. May be some discussion about whether Spook is there at all.

Wake’s looking, I think it’s pleased, on top of the benevolent.

“Block’s name’s due dread and harbinger has been borne away into
the Folded Hills this décade,” Wake says. “Some trouble of gaunts.” It’s not mockery, Wake thinks Block is respectably dread, put it that way. One who might well have had their kingdom in its centuries.

We’re not really comprehensible to them, either.
Zora.

You are young and strong and eager to learn,
Wake says.
Nor need I fear the increase of your knowledge whatsoever.

We get a moment or two
of Wake’s view of walking under that floating ziggurat.

That is comprehension enough.

Wake’s appreciation for the Peace Established is real, but it’s not belief.

I think Halt’s is belief, full-on emotional belief.

If ever you should discover how Halt has done that, tell me out of kindness,
slides into my thoughts, only my thoughts, I don’t think even Dove’s.

“Which leaves me alone, and I am asked
to wander east and manage some matter of spiky trees beguiling travellers.”

Almost all the Independents are in the Folded Hills, where there’s no end of work. The Creeks have been used to dealing with matters without any, it’s working well enough, especially considering that those they do have are our teachers.

“I choose to believe you might be left some days without provoking a conflagration.”
Wake smiles. “Nor would a chance at some introspection do you any present harm.”

The sense between the four of us is something like
probably
, and Wake’s smile gets wider. “Do your exercises, write, think, practise your perception. By all means tote heavy objects as you are bid to do.”

We all nod. Not much wrong with feeling useful.

“An actual emergency?” Zora’s not sure where to go with the question,
who
or
where
or
what
.

“Blossom will be home.” Wake says this with an utter lack of emphasis, the-weather-should-be-nice tones.

Brave emergency,
Dove thinks, and we’re all nodding, even Wake.

There’s a pause, we all sort of nod, and start walking up toward the Round House. Wake starts walking south, the value of east with the problem is away south-east, into the edge of the really dry stuff, and
I lose perception of Wake pretty quick, there’s this swirl in the Power that’s Wake, and it goes step, step, big step, bigger step, gone. Too far away, unless I really reach, and that’s just long enough for one more step and there’s a fading swirl and quiet nothing.

“Think it’s time?” Zora says, and Chloris says “Not today!” and we all nod. Chloris catches Spook up, who says “Mnorp?” very solemnly
from the level of Chloris’ shoulder.

Not today. Today is walking home, sluicing off, listening, it’s like listening, to the spectral cat feet charging up and down all the stairs, changing clothes, carrying all our laundry down to the host-gean laundry, apologizing several times, the combination of vapour deposition in a blast pit and various wet organic things from the wilderness is exceptionally
wretched, and going in for dinner.

Can’t really remember what it was, it was hot, there was lots of it, it was good. Nobody expects us to be social, I suppose it’s obvious we’re all a bit lost. Don’t say anything to each other, it’s not even words in the undertone, just awareness. You pass the potatoes or the water pitcher without realizing why, it works, it’s comfortable.

Explaining that Spook
is spectral, can’t possibly contribute to uncleanliness, that was awkward, but Chloris managed it. Managed it without any cloud of lamentation. Spook attempting to nudge the refectory manager and failing completely, head passing through their hand, I think that helped on the whole.

Helps not to think about how it would have seemed a year ago.

A year ago’s too far away to imagine easily.

Hasn’t
been a year.

We say thank you for dinner and tolerance and take our dishes to the scullery and wander back up to the Round House and soak in the tub for four solid hours. Floréal, Floréal and a bit either side, it wasn’t as busy as we’d have been if we were Independents already, I don’t think.

We make the first sitting of breakfast, nearly early, and put off work on the garden for an hour because
we’re asked to move a barge to a builder’s yard. No one will say ‘float’, they’re careful to say ‘move’. There’s something wrong with the enchantment part of the driving focus and no one wants it failing more anywhere near Westcreek Town so the barge is moored more than a kilometre upstream. There’s probably a specific term for the side-on square pool with a dry-dock on each non-canal face, it’s
off the south side of the Western West-East Canal, still in Westcreek Town proper, and they’d like us to put the barge in the southern dry dock if that’s not too much trouble?

You get really odd looks walking over a bridge when there’s a big cargo barge floating five metres over your head.

No upset, not much taken aback. Lots of startle. A bunch of waves and nods and one very hearty “Good morning!”.
We smile back as well as we can, it’s not heavy, not functionally, but it’d be really embarrassing to drop it, so we’re concentrating.

The garden gets us into afternoon, and there’s a sort of general pause. “I don’t feel like I’ve caught up with myself yet,” Chloris says, and Dove nods. I feel like I’m the part left behind, the Edgar I ought to be still way out in front, but close enough.

Zora
says “That tree wasn’t there before.”

It wasn’t, it’s, I don’t know, grey bark, the leaves are mostly oval with jagged edges, and not the same shade of green as the sad forb, deeper. It’s maybe fifteen metres high. Certainly wasn’t there before, we’ve put in a bunch of marsh but it’s still all the same sad forb where it isn’t pond or garden.

“It’s inside the Peace.” Dove, sounding contemplative.
Dove’s angry about missing the tree, but you couldn’t tell from outside.

“It’s Mulch.” A stiff, fibrous version of Mulch, but the feel is the same. Might be checking on how the ponds came out, we’ve been following Mulch’s advice, as best we wrote it down. Not the same as the centuries of experience behind the advice.

Not the same as a tree’s view of the groundwater.

“Do we say hello?” Chloris
says, full of doubt.

Dove’s head shakes. “How’d you spot Mulch, Zora?”

“Groundwater,” Zora says. “Trying to feel the flow under the garden, if we got the clay layer right. There was a draw.”

Dove nods. It’s not hard to tell Mulch is there, not if we think about it. There’s still something trying to shove your attention away, of course that tree’s always been there. Good argument against saying
hello.

“Next year,” Chloris says. Chloris thinks Mulch has been rude. Not sure I disagree, but anyone Grue holds up as an example of eccentricity, it’d be an interesting conversation to watch, if Mulch and Chloris ever started talking manners.

Next morning, the tree is still there, we pass it both ways, down to breakfast and back.

We don’t go into the Round House, we start walking, carefully,
north, into the Tall Woods.

Best weather we could hope to get, sun and clear sky and only warm. We’ve all got the white ponchos, Grue did something to the original bindings for us, sort of the idea of the braided grass is around the opening of the poncho hoods like decoration.

We’re not wearing them, but there’s a truism about being prepared for rain.

I don’t like woods.

Trees are all right, I
mean, shade, food, some of them, something to turn into doorknobs and drawer pulls, something for someone else to turn into doors, trees are important, but woods, wild woods, wild woods from some other world?

All my experience of woods is being displaced and the stuff before the swamp where we helped rob what I wish was a grave. The first one had a lot of misery and an anti-panda in it, the second
one would have been a fatal bad place on our own.

“Inhale a bit, Ed, would you?” Dove says.

I try. There’s a lot of, it’s not really spring underfoot, your feet don’t come back up, they do sink down, the leaves are
deep
and they smell like nothing else, old and patient the way coffee smells dark.

It’s dim. I like the dim, it’s honest dim, all the leaves up there are eating the light.

Dove reaches
over and ruffles my hair.

We’re not moving quickly at all. Chloris is caught between whatever around us asks attention and Spook, who can’t decide between mad with glee or terrified. Zora’s eyes are closed and arms wide out, standing in the idea of a tree reaching up for the sun.

Dove, Dove is listening for birds.

There are some remarkable birds. There’s one large one, all cyan and vermilion with
a great shaggy head crest that’s a ripply green in the shade and a blue that smells of ozone in the full light.

How did — ?
I’d had the view of the thing as though I was standing maybe a metre away from it. Not the light-bending distance view that’s using the Power like a telescope.