Water Logic (25 page)

She turned her face away from him. She heard him rise, giving her the distance and privacy that her gesture had requested. His movement across the room was nearly soundless. He stepped into the water closet and shut the door. He didn’t come out until she was no longer weeping.

“I will sleep somewhere else tonight,” he said.

“No, my brother—not for my sake. I enjoy your company.”

He squatted again—at a distance. “I will tell you something: I have a lover here, among the Shaftali, and he has asked me to come to him.”

“I am shocked,” she said.

“Of course you have managed without a lover all your years of wandering.”

Zanja met his gaze, and they both began to laugh.

Only after he had left did it occur to her that his lover was probably Tadwell.

The rain stopped falling two days later. News arrived that the Corber River had flooded. Tadwell would not attempt to return to the south until he could cross the Corber by bridge, and that would not be until the flood waters subsided.

As soon as the rains ended, a gentle wind began to blow almost constantly through the rooms and hallways of the House of Lilterwess, for every door and window was left open by day, and often by night as well. There began a cleaning revelry, a scrubbing and airing and washing that included every stone and even the skin, for people and even animals were bathed and combed. Laundry lines were strung in the open courtyard below Arel’s one window, and there began an amazing beating of carpets that lasted from dawn to nightfall for several days. All of Arel’s carpets were hauled out, and while he was taking his turn with the carpet-beaters, Zanja wore out a scrub brush and used up an entire cake of soap.

Then Arel left for the Asha Valley, without her. She had told him she must consider whether it would be wrong for her to bring into the valley those alien influences he had noticed when they first met. “We all carry our histories with us,” she said. “But I am a Speaker—and like you, I am to be changed without causing change.” She might go home with him in the autumn, she added. But she regretted even that modest promise when she said it, for such a wound of yearning opened up that she feared it might cause her intuition and judgment to become unreliable.

Choose insight, Medric had said: absurd advice, when insight pierces like arrows of light from the stars, or drops down out of an empty sky like an owl upon its prey. Yet a person does choose to climb the hillside towards the stars, or make oneself available to the owl. In this Shaftal, Zanja must live each moment like a casting of glyph cards, be able to ask any question and to accept any answer. By no other method would it be possible for her to slip through without destroying or undoing the Shaftal in which she did belong. She must desire only to return there—nothing else.

She began to be glad of her solitude, then. The days passed, and she danced her katra alone. She did not try to converse with the glyph master when he visited every day with a new painting, nor with the Paladin novices, Orna among them, who brought meals and carried away the waste. She did not even look out the window anymore. She meditated on the glyph paintings, and, gradually, all else ceased to matter.

At last, Tadwell came into the room and closed the door. Zanja had been meditating on a particularly difficult glyph painting, and her flesh felt like it had woven itself into the carpet. “Greetings, Tadwell. Please excuse me—I am somewhat befuddled.” She hung the leather cover over the painting so it could not distract her.

As she turned back to Tadwell, he said abruptly, “Can you pretend to be a Paladin?”

Zanja made a long study of her bare feet, which she had absent-mindedly placed so they were harmonious with the carpet’s pattern. “Lately I wish I had a Paladin’s ethical training,” she said. “And I doubt I can pretend to love speech as they do. But the greatest obstacle would be my appearance.”

“I asked the Paladins if there’s a reason a border person can’t join them, and they say there isn’t.”

The answer would have been different, Zanja suspected, had she been a genuine aspirant. But she said neutrally, “I will pretend to be a Paladin. But I will not be one.”

“Is there a difference between acting and being?”

“To a fire blood there’s almost no difference at all, which is why I must defend the distinction so carefully.”

Tadwell uttered a disgusted snort. “And in the meantime, the Paladins are convinced that permitting an impostor will denigrate the value of the reality. They did consent—but the integrity of the order must be defended. I promised them that if you violate their principles, I will personally hunt you down and . . . punish you.”

“Would you kill me?”

There was a silence.

“I would expect you to,” Zanja added.

“I have never killed anyone. But I would have to, I suppose. For if you prove to be unable to keep a simple promise, then I certainly can’t trust you to guard yourself in the manner necessary to avoid an even greater harm. I have tried to imagine what could happen if you set some small event in motion . . . but all I feel certain of is that it must not happen. Therefore, I will kill you with my own hands if I must. You cannot hide from me, Zanja na’Tarwein—you are too singular for that. If you flee, I will chase you across the nearest border and let the desert do my killing for me—or the mountains—or the sea.”

“I choose the mountains, then—and I will go willingly.”

He said after a moment, “It would be your own life you’d be destroying if you were to fail. So you feel the importance of this more keenly than I do, don’t you?”

“I am trying not to,” she said. “Fear is no better than desire in my situation.”

He turned away from her and opened the door. The house commander
and the novice, Orna, who had been waiting outside, came in. Orna hauled an impressive load of clothing and gear, and appeared to be stifling a delicious amusement. The house commander avoided even looking at Zanja. She laid a gold earring in the G’deon’s hand.

Zanja knelt so Tadwell could pierce her left ear with a needle, and rose with the gold depending heavily and distractingly from her stinging earlobe. Orna helped Zanja to change into a Paladin’s rough wool clothing—she was allowed to keep her underclothing, her boots, and her belt—and then stood back to look critically at her. Her forehead creased. She opened her mouth, but said nothing.

“Do I look so strange?” asked Zanja.

The young woman said rather helplessly, “Commander, it’s just a piece of jewelry, a few articles of clothing. It should not make such a difference!”

The commander finally looked at Zanja. She made a study of her. Then she said to the novice, “Everything is framed: everything we know, everything we see. What has no frame cannot be seen at all. Yet the frame also shapes what we see, and even determines what we can see. To change the frame changes the thing itself. So now we have here a Paladin where there used to be a vagabond.”

The girl protested, “I cannot believe that! I think she was—is—a Paladin in her heart. The clothing just makes her heart’s truth visible.”

Zanja said, “You are both wrong. I have been a katrim since I was twelve years old, and I am a katrim now. But a katrim is similar to a Paladin, and it is easier for you to see me as familiar than as strange.”

“Apparently none of you realize how weary I am of philosophy,” said Tadwell grumpily.

The two Paladins walked ahead, showing the way to the front door. A few people began to trail behind them—perhaps curious, or wishing to speak to Tadwell should there be an opportunity. They kept a polite distance, and Tadwell and Zanja managed one last private conversation. He said, “ If there are any water witches in Shaftal, they are very secretive and they are invisible to me.”

“There’s a lake northwest of Kisha that I know as Otter Lake. I once met a water witch there, in an entire tribe of water people. It was an excellent place to live, so perhaps that tribe is also there now. I speak their language somewhat, so I’ll go there first.”

“You won’t find any farms in that region,” said Tadwell. “It’s rough country.”

“I’ll live off the land, then.”

“Only if you have the right gear!”

Tadwell called Orna back and quizzed her on the contents of Zanja’s pack. Soon she ran off to find fish hooks, rabbit snares, and a light bow for fowling. When they reached the exit Tadwell gave Zanja some coins, irregular blobs of silver or copper stamped with the assayer’s mark. In Zanja’s time some of these ancient coins would still be in circulation, for, primitive though they looked, their weight would still be accurate. She stood with Tadwell in the balmy sunshine, waiting for Orna. By the time the young Paladin arrived, out of breath, her arms loaded with gear, Tadwell’s face had softened with pleasure in the glorious day.

And why not be glad? Zanja was being set loose in a marvelous land that history had turned its back on during her lifetime. The earring meant that she would no longer suffer from hostility and suspicion. The foul weather was over and would not return until autumn. This adventure might well have a terrible ending, but why should she not enjoy it while she could?

“Farewell, Orna. Farewell, Tadwell.”

“Safe journey,” they both replied.

Suffused by eager curiosity, Zanja started down the road.

Chapter 18

When Clement isn’t screaming, and isn’t unconscious, she demands that her officers be brought to her, for she knows they will give her the last mercy. But the stranger who looks after her refuses.

“Endure,” he says. “Endure for the G’deon, and for Shaftal.”

“Shaftal’s arse!” Her voice has broken like the frayed rope of a catapult.

Sound: horrific, monotonous, unrelenting. It tortures her, reminding her she has not managed to die.

A lukewarm broth is dribbled into her mouth. She closes her throat against it.

“Swallow.”

She spits it out.

“It will help the pain,” he says. “Swallow, Clement. I beg you.”

How strange that her torturer has been weeping.

A warmth is rising in the back of her throat. Her jaw goes slack. He spoons more broth into her mouth. The warmth spreads from neck to shoulder to arm to fingertip. But the rhythmic, humble, horrid sound continues.

She wakes up, screaming. As in a nightmare, her torturers hold her down. The stranger’s hands are bloody. “Give her more,” he says.

The broth. The warmth.

The ordinary factuality of the horrific, rhythmic sound.

“Clement, endure. You’re stronger than you know.”

“How long?” she cries. “How long?” But she makes no sound.

Thud-thud. Thud-thud. The clockwork jerks mindlessly on. Each second lasts an hour.

Her guts are rotting. Her heart spreads the poison throughout her body.

The clock ticks on.

Clement heard someone breathing. She heard a wagon rolling past on a cobbled street. The faint, far-away carol of a rooster. The sturdy, rhythmic ticking of a distant clock. A baby yelping joyfully in her ear.

She opened her eyes in startlement. Scarcely a hand-span away, her son gave her a toothless, helpless, utterly joyful grin.

“You smiled!” Her voice sounded like tearing paper. “Gabie!”

She raised her hand with great difficulty, but then it seemed to float away, gaunt and bloodless, tethered to her heavy body by a wasted arm. She dragged her floating hand downward. It flopped nervelessly onto Gabian. He grabbed her finger, brought it to his mouth, and began sucking it happily.

A weight shifted. A sweat-sticky body, she realized, was pressed against her—the entire length of her. The hand that had been a weight on Clement’s belly moved to her throat. Clement coughed, and coughed again.

A voice only somewhat less hoarse than hers said, “That son of yours will suck anything.”

“Karis,” Clement said. Her voice had become clear.

The hand moved down again to Clement’s belly. “No more pain,” Karis said. “Go back to sleep.”

Clement’s boy sucked her finger ecstatically, drooling, kicking his splayed legs. His tongue was soft as melted butter, but his suckling had amazing strength. Clement shut her eyes, and milk flowed from her fingertips in her dreams.

When Clement awoke next, the distant clock was still ticking, and muffled voices were shouting at each other. Gabian and Karis both were asleep. With much trouble Clement extricated herself from between the giant and the helpless infant. Then she fell off the bed. Her legs were so weak she could scarcely sit upon the chamber pot. She dragged herself into a cushioned chair and sat there, panting from effort.

She occupied a plain room with unpainted plank walls that were orange with age. Its one window was shuttered, though the air smelled quite foul. On the floor lay gray wool, shredded, black with old blood: her uniform. Beside it was a pile of blood-rusty bedsheets and bandages, and a quarrel with its iron head removed.

She looked down at her flat belly. A few flakes of dried blood were there, but no wounds and no scars.

She breathed deeply. Her heart beat. She felt the horror that crouched in the shadows.

The door opened. The stranger from her nightmares entered silently. He tucked the baby under Karis’s arm and pulled the sheet to cover her. Clement noticed the soggy pile of Karis’s discarded clothing. The bottoms of her cast-off boots had so little leather left that they hardly looked like boots at all.

The stranger asked, “Would you like to wash, General Clement?” His voice was quiet, respectful, gentle: not the voice of a torturer.

“Master healer,” she said, “I must talk to my people.”

“They will be glad of it, I think. But I’ll take you to another room so the G’deon can rest.”

He lifted her skillfully and walked her out the door, into a hall, where the shouting became very loud, and through another door into a room as plain as the last, but where the air smelled of rose petals and mold, not of death. He sat her in a chair and brought a bedsheet for her to wrap herself in. The sheet had been scented by wind.

“The rain has stopped?” asked Clement.

“The sun has been shining for two days now.” The healer left.

The shouting ceased, and Clement heard booted feet hurrying down the hall. Soldiers filled the doorway and froze there, staring as though she’d risen from a bier with her rotting flesh sliding off her bones. Then Herme flung himself forward, clasping her hand in both of his and crying, “General! General!”

They crowded in after him, taking turns touching her, grinning crazily, furtively rubbing their eyes.