The Water Road (39 page)

The Degans either had not noticed
the cannon fire at all or were ignoring it, thinking it was poorly aimed and
harmless. They had no cannon of their own, having left them in reserve on the
other side of the lake. It took a third volley for the Degans who were near the
rear of the fighting, still standing on the ice itself, to figure out what was
happening. They turned and saw huge holes of freezing water opening behind
them, cutting off their line of retreat.

This was the crucial point of
Antrey’s plan. She needed the Degans to do the sensible thing and try to run.
If they disengaged and tried to retreat, her warriors would not pursue them.
But the Degans would quickly learn they had nowhere to go. Trapped between the
icy waters and the superior forces confronting them, they would surrender.

It appeared to be working. Antrey
could see panic beginning to take hold among the Degans. They did precisely what
she expected. They began to turn and run, trying to flee back across the frozen
lake, either too frightened to see the breaks in the ice or unable to stop
themselves. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of Dagan warriors plunged into the water.
Battle cries turned to the anguished shouts of the drowning. Men thrashed in
the water, shocked by the ferocity of the cold, literally freezing to death.

“You three, come with me,” Antrey
said to the archers who remained behind the fallen tree. The other was gone,
but she did not dwell on what might have happened to him. They nodded and
followed her as she hopped over the tree and walked briskly to the water line.

“Stop this!” Antrey yelled in the
most commanding Neldathi tone she could muster. She had been practicing this one
phrase for just this moment. It appeared to be working. Not only did her own
warriors stop fighting in the small pockets where they were still engaged, but
the Degans did as well. Perhaps more due to surprise than actual obedience, but
Antrey didn’t care. She turned to her own forces. “Your brothers are drowning,”
she called out in another well-practiced Neldathi phrase. “Save them!”

Her warriors flew down off the
beach, skittering over the ice to the water. She hoped the speed would impress
the Degans. In truth, her warriors knew this was coming and were prepared to
act when told. That it might look like a spur-of-the-moment action, undertaken
voluntarily and with such swiftness, helped to make an impression. Regardless,
Antrey was proud of her warriors for executing the plan with such skill.
Hundreds of men who had just moments before been engaged in fatal combat now
plunged into the icy waters to save the lives of men who were, just moments
ago, trying to kill them. If this did not make Antrey’s point to the Degans,
nothing would.

Antrey turned back to the water, to
the Degans standing there, too stunned to move. “Who leads you?” she demanded,
but was given no response. She asked again. The question must have registered
the second time, as several Dagan warriors pointed towards a man standing on
the ice, icy water sloshing around his feet. He stood with sword in hand, but
his body was loose and without tension. The frenzy of battle had faded,
replaced by confusion and fatigue.

Antrey walked over to him, her trio
of new bodyguards on her heels. “Are you in command?” she asked him. Either he
did not hear her or could not process the question again. Antrey asked again,
in the most careful and precise Neldathi she could. He turned slowly to face
her.

“I am War Leader Yimir of the
Akan,” he said, his voice unsure not of the answer but of what difference it
might make. “Command is mine.”

Antrey introduced herself, which
led Yimir to nod slowly, but say nothing. “There’s no need for that,” she said,
pointing at his drawn sword. “You may put it away. You are no longer in any
danger.”

Yimir complied slowly but without
protest. Everything about him was slow and halting, as if he was unsure whether
what was happening to him was real. After a moment of silence between them, he
said, “So you are the woman who would dare lead us.”

“Yes, I am,” Antrey said, calmly
but forcefully. “A woman. A halfbreed. But as you can see, I can lead.”

He nodded again, turning to watch
Antrey’s warriors pull his drowning men out of the freezing water. “This was a
clever trap that was laid for us,” he said, gesturing towards the confusion.
“It was yours?”

“It was.”

“How did a woman who grew up in a
northern city devise such a plan?”

She smiled. She had given
variations of this speech many times. “Cities are filled with books. Every one
like a Speaker of Time, collecting the wisdom of the ages. The lessons of
history. Do you know of the War of Unification?”

Yimir shook his head, as she knew
he would.

“The Kingdom of Telebria, one part
of the Triumvirate, used to be separate nations called Greater and Lesser
Telebria, which lay on either side of the River Teleb. The two nations fought
each other over the years, before people on both sides began to see the value
of working together.” She shifted around Yimir to remain in his sight. “But
there were those, like you, who did not agree. They would lose status and power
if the two nations became a single kingdom. And so there was a war. A brief
one, as these things go, but a war nonetheless. Needless blood was shed.
Needless divisions were sown. I had to find a better way.”

“And this is it?” he asked,
gesturing round the battlefield, still shrouded in some places by a fine layer
of fog.

“I tried to convince you otherwise.
Your leaders did not listen. They were too blinded to what must be done,
blinded by the fear of being led by a halfbreed woman. Now she has shown you
that she can defeat you on the field of battle. Yet she does not, because
victory between us is not important now. Unification is what is important.
Wouldn’t you agree that I have shown today that I am capable of bringing our
people together and striking back at the Triumvirate?”

Yimir was silent, in thought, for a
long while. All around him his warriors, who had once looked certain to drown,
were being warmed by campfires and tended to by their former combatants. “I am
not certain,” he finally said. “But I cannot bring myself to argue otherwise.”

“Come, my brother,” Antrey said,
extending her hand. “Meet with my advisors. Dine with us. We will drink to the
memory of our brave brothers and sisters who have fallen today and pray that
their lives will not have been lost in vain. If, after our discussion, you
still cannot argue otherwise, what else will be left to say?”

He looked out over the lake for a
moment, as if to find one last bit of guidance from the opposite shore. Then he
turned and took Antrey’s hand. “Very well, jeyn.”

~~~~~

Two days later, Antrey’s column and
the Dagan army that once sought to destroy it made camp together at the southern
end of the lake. It would have been naive of Antrey to expect the camp to feel
truly unified in such a short period of time, particularly after the loss of
life in battle. As it happened, the Dagan army was just that—an army, without
any of the other parts of those clans involved. Antrey’s column, on the other
hand, had always been a complete entity, just like the clans themselves, only
so much larger, made up of soldiers, hunters, mothers, children, and every
other part of society. It made certain charms of home available to the Degans
for the first time in months and helped to soothe their eager nerves.

Though short, the battle had been
fierce. Almost four hundred of Antrey’s warriors had been killed, with three
times that number wounded. The Dagan losses were similar, but felt worse, given
their expectation of easy victory. Antrey knew, both from the stories of the
Speakers and of Alban’s books, that it would not go down in history as a
particularly bloody clash. Regardless, she felt the sting of every death and
maiming. She wished it had not come to this.

Goshen had proven very useful in
the aftermath of the battle. Strangely, the Degans seemed drawn to his ideas
about the Maker of Worlds as the one true god. Goshen presided at a massed
memorial service, one that honored all of those who had died in the fighting.
It had been Kajtan’s idea, and Antrey was grateful for it. Ceremonies and
rituals always felt pointless to her, but she was coming to see their value, if
only as an organizational tool. The service brought the two groups together,
recognized what they had done to one another, and galvanized those present into
believing that something better must come out of it. It was a start, Antrey
realized.

Once the service was complete and
some measure of peace had settled over the camp, there was no longer any reason
to remain at Lake Neyn. As the column broke camp, Antrey sent one last group of
emissaries out to the clans whose theks were not already with her. She bid them
to come, once more, to a meeting site. Only theks this time, however, for only
they could approve what she had planned.

As the weeks passed in Oberton,
Strefer realized that, aside from the nervousness inherent in waiting for the
council’s decision, the time had served them well. It had not passed quickly,
however.

They had been given accommodations
in a building that, in any other city, would be an inn. However, in Oberton,
instead of being run by a surly older couple with bad teeth, it was apparently
run by the city itself. The staff was friendly and made an extra effort to make
Strefer and her company welcome. Strefer had her own room, a luxury about which
she had almost forgotten. Rurek had one too, or rather he would once he was
released from the city infirmary. Forlahn and Malin shared a room just down the
corridor. It settled Strefer that Forlahn had decided to stay. He had a
financial incentive, of course, but he also knew what he was doing in this
world. Right now he was backing her, which gave her a great shot of confidence.

Strefer had taken Gillem’s advice
and used the time to begin working on the book. At first she procrastinated,
worrying outwardly about how best to organize the material, how to present her
firsthand account versus the historical documents. Finally, Rurek convinced her
that, regardless of the final format, the final order in which things were set
down, it would have to be written first. Properly chastised, she went away and
started writing.

It was slow going, which frustrated
Strefer greatly. After all, she was a member of the Guild of Writers. She had
been raised to do just this thing. By this point in her life it should come
naturally to her. For years she had spent the wee hours banging out stories to
meet deadlines for the
Daily Register
. Only on rare occasions did she
have the chance to finely craft them through endless revisions. Perhaps it was
the extra time she had now that was the problem. She was used to writing under
stress, with a scowling Tevis looking over her shoulder, casting nervous
glances at the clock on the wall. She needed that pressure, but was hesitant to
ask Gillem to give it to her.

Part of the problem was that
Strefer was not used to writing about herself. Regardless of the deadlines at
the
Daily Register
, she was always writing about someone else’s
problems. They became characters in a story to her, except that they wouldn’t
do as they were told. It was easy to go back through her notes of several
interviews and reconstruct an incident, or even a particular conversation.

Writing about herself was an
entirely different matter. Although she knew that she needed to do no more than
tell the world what happened, what she did, and what she found, Strefer could
only proceed in chunks of one or two paragraphs. It brought back memories of
the cliques that formed during her time at the Guild school.

All the young writers in a
particular city attended the same school, but rifts developed among them based
on various areas of interest. The largest division, naturally, was between
those who wanted to write fiction and those who did not. Beyond that, in the
nonfiction group where Strefer had found herself, there was another divide
between those who wanted to write about themselves, for the most part, and the
historians and journalists who were more outward focused. The would-be writers
of memoirs, for example, were looked down upon as selfish whiners. At least
poets, who stood altogether apart from the fiction
–
nonfiction schism, took their angst
and forged it into something purely artistic. To Strefer, writing a memoir took
scant talent and little more than an unseemly willingness to talk about
yourself in public.

Strefer fell into a habit. Sometime
in the midafternoon, when she had gotten to the point of complete frustration
with herself, she went to visit Rurek. He was making a steady, if slow,
recovery. For two weeks he did nothing but lay in bed, much to his dismay. Now
he was up and moving around, albeit with the aid of a sturdy walking stick. He
had initially insisted that he be able to use his pikti in that role, but was
vetoed by his nurses. They found him a wonderfully carved stick of dark wood to
take its place, with carvings that told the mythical tale of Oberton’s
founding.

As Strefer understood the tale,
Elom was a public speaker and philosopher in Vertidala. He had a particularly
argumentative style and few friends, even among those who agreed with his
positions. He became the most outspoken critic of the oligarchy that ruled the
city at that time. The precise nature of his disagreement with the oligarchs
varied depending on who was telling the tale. Regardless, he was charged with
treason and sentenced to be hanged, all without trial or public hearing. A
student whose father was in the party that would be dispatched to arrest him
told Elom of the plan. Elom fled into the depths of the Arbor.

To his surprise, Elom was followed
out of town by Gabril. Gabril was also a philosopher and often disagreed with
Elom. Nonetheless, he was appalled by the plan to hang Elom, particularly when
the decision to do so was made in secret. Traveling alone, Gabril caught up
with Elom. Perhaps inevitably, an argument ensued. Gabril tried to convince
Elom to return to Vertidala, confront the oligarchs directly, and fight the
charges against him. Elom was not persuaded by this, given the decision had
already been made to hang him. The two men bickered back and forth, the debate
turning to more fundamental questions about justice and how to change society.
At some point, they realized that if they remained where they were and kept
arguing, the forces from Vertidala would soon find them. Rather than seek
shelter in another city, Elom and Gabril agreed to climb up into the trees,
where they could continue their debate uninterrupted.

Nobody believed a word of it today,
of course, even in Oberton. Particularly in Oberton. It was odd to Strefer how
the city known for valuing truth more than anything else could let a myth like
that continue to flower. It was a good story, she had to admit, and the
citizens of Oberton took some pride in it. Rurek was greatly amused by the
story, and even more amused to have a permanent reminder of it.

Today, they walked out along the
walkway behind the infirmary. The clunk of Rurek’s walking stick on the wood
planks rang out at regular intervals. She told him, again, of her problems
writing. They paused for a moment and looked out over the forest canopy that
spread out before them.

“I know I’m not a writer, Strefer,”
he said, leaning heavily against his stick. “I’m barely a reader. But it seems
to me that you’re being much too hard on yourself. You’ve written lots of news
stories, right?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Those stories are about things
that happened in the recent past, right?”

“Usually. Most of them, at any
rate.”

“And when you write those stories,
you do your best to tell the truth and get the facts right.”

“Of course,” she said, somewhat
offended by the implication.

“To take all these different
sources and blend them together.”

“Yeah.”

“So why don’t you just treat
yourself like any other source?” Rurek asked. “Make notes from your own memory
about what happened, then write the story up based on those notes.” He seemed
hopeful, but quickly undercut his own idea. “It couldn’t be that simple, could
it?”

Strefer thought for a moment, then
started to laugh uncontrollably.

“Come on,” Rurek said, pulling
himself upright and starting to walk away.

She ran around in front of him and
faced him, walking backwards to keep pace. “I’m not laughing at you, I’m
laughing at myself. Not only could it be that simple, I think it probably is.
But I couldn’t see that for myself. Thanks!” She turned and ran back to her
work.

~~~~~

Once she took Rurek’s advice to
heart, Strefer found the writing came easily. More easily, at any rate. In the
weeks since that breakthrough, she had settled down into a pattern, like a
workman in a factory. She spent about two hours each morning writing new pages,
picking up wherever she had left off the morning before. After a midday meal
and visit with Rurek, who had made his own breakthrough by moving out of the
infirmary, she returned to edit what she had done in the morning and integrate
it with what had come before. Sometimes the afternoon session stretched well
into the evening and left her little further into the narrative than she had
been when the sun rose that morning. But it was progress.

The crisp winter had set in and
forced Strefer to move from the broad sunlit walkways of the city into the
small room in the inn that had become her home. It was, at this point, perfect
for her needs. It was warm, with a small fire crackling in the corner almost
constantly. The small space helped her keep her focus and made it an uninviting
place for visitors who might drop by unexpectedly. Even Forlahn and Rurek had
learned to leave her to her work when she disappeared into her room.

The knock that came on the door one
morning—slow, steady, and relentlessly firm—took her by surprise. She tried to
ignore it at first and keep working, hoping whoever it was would simply give up
and go away. It was too early for lunch, besides. But the knocking persisted,
so Strefer put down her pen when she came to the end of a sentence. “Yes? Who
is it?” she asked in her most annoyed tone. She was chagrined when the door
opened slowly and Gillem poked his head inside.

“I am very sorry to disturb you,
young lady,” he said. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” she said, trying to
stand up and show some formality to offset her earlier tone. Instead, she
slammed her right knee on the underside of the desk and cursed loudly.

“Oh my,” Gillem said, more amused
than appalled. “There is no need to stand on my account, please.” He gestured
for her to sit back down. “Trust me, I have heard much worse in my lifetime.
Besides, the truth is not always pretty, is it? And I could certainly not argue
with the truth of what you just said.” He laughed at his own joke.

Strefer smiled and sat back down,
rubbing her bruised knee.

Gillem pulled out a chair and sat
down across from her. “I have some news for you, at long last.”

She had waited so long to hear the
council’s decision, it did not immediately register in Strefer’s mind that this
was it. Once it clicked in her brain, she could barely stay seated, until her
natural pessimism got the better of her. “It’s bad news, isn’t it?”

“Why would you say that, young
lady?” Gillem leaned back in his seat, a puzzled look on his face.

“Because you came to tell me here,
in this tiny room,” she said, gesturing for emphasis. “In private. Why do so if
not to let me down gently?” Or, she thought, to let me get out of the city in
advance of an angry mob. “I assumed we would have to go back to the council
chamber for…”

“Oh, there will be a formal
announcement this evening,” he said, cutting her off. “My clerks are working on
the specific language of the announcement right now. But that is why I am here
now. We need to agree on some details before the decision is publicly
announced.”

Strefer felt a calm inside that she
had not enjoyed in much too long. “So you’re going to publish the book?”

“Yes, young lady,” he said with a
chuckle. “Of course we are going to publish your book.”

“Good,” she said, shooting for
intentional understatement. “So what are these details we need to get
straight?”

“For one thing, there is the matter
of when the manuscript can be finished. The council is of the opinion that the
quicker this matter can be undertaken the better. It is vital that the world
knows what you know, young lady. How goes your progress?”

She shrugged. “There isn’t too much
left to do, I guess. When you arrived I was writing about how I slipped out of
the Grand Council building with the red notebook.”

“Excellent!” The old man’s eyes
gleamed. “A little bit of adventure is a good thing. Do you think you could
finish up in a week?”

All of a sudden, the thrill of
working on a deadline returned to her. “A week? Yes, I can have a draft done in
a week. Can I have another week to revise? Two weeks total?”

He nodded. “Two weeks will be fine.
Although they have yet to see your red notebook, I have already assigned a
group of my historians to begin working on the broader contextual parts of the
book. Once they see the notebook itself, it will not take long to analyze it
and graft them together.”

Strefer was so excited by the
prospect, electrified after all this time waiting, that she couldn’t quite
think what to ask next. “After everything is put together, how long will it
take to have a final product?” she finally asked.

“In the normal course it takes
months for a new book to be printed. The printers here work generally on a
first come, first served basis, and they tend to have many projects in line at
once. However, the council has the authority to jump to the head of the line,
so to speak. The order this afternoon will make this book the printers’ first
priority.”

Strefer smiled. “You can really do
that?”