The Waters Rising (2 page)

Chapter 1

The Woman Upstairs

“I
f you look over your left shoulder,” said the horse, “you can see the towers of King Gahls’s castle on the highlands.”

The wagon driver replied, speaking very softly, “Blue, if you look over your right shoulder, across the water, you might catch a glimpse of a dozen or so of Hulix’s archers with arrows nocked.”

“Ahhhh,” murmured the horse, plodding resolutely forward. “That would be Hulix, Duke of Kamfels, son of Queen Mirami.”

Abasio, the driver, resolutely keeping his eyes forward, yawned and stretched, giving no indication he had seen the archers. Among Abasio’s former friends and companions it was generally supposed that archers who had taken the trouble to paint their hands and faces to match their leafy surroundings were less likely to shoot a passerby if the passerby didn’t notice them. Being noticed could be considered an insult. “He is indeed the son of Queen Mirami.” Abasio yawned again, loosening his jaw, which had been tightly clenched. “In order to allay suspicion, I am about to sing something pastoral and suggestive of bucolic innocence.”

“Something half-witted and full of tra-la-las,” sneered the horse, sotto voce, “and hey-nonny-nonnies.”

“Very probably,” said Abasio, clearing his throat.

Hey—oh, the wagon pulls the horse,

Or else the horse the wagon,

And no one really knows what force

By which the which is draggin’.

For time can run from front to back

And sometimes even sidewise,

And oceans have the liquid knack

Of often running tidewise. . .

“Neigh, neigh,” offered the horse, “ti-i-idewise.”

The singer continued:

Though who does what and what was where

Are matters that can lure us,

With riddles so arcane and rare

That none know how to cure us,

Let’s not waste life deciphering,

Let lore and logic scatter,

Let love and beauty rapture bring,

And meaning will not matter!

His voice, a pleasant baritone, after engaging in a number of fal-de-lals and triddle-de-dals, faded into a silence that did not so much fall as insinuate itself.

“Are they gone?” the horse whispered.

“Seemingly,” replied Abasio, throwing a surreptitious glance across his shoulder where the water-filled gap had widened considerably between them and the archers. “Either they or we have gone, yes.”

“It was all those neighs that did it,” the horse said, approaching a curve in the road. “They decided we were not dangerous because I kept de-neighing it. Whaagh?” Blue snorted in astonishment, stopped dead, glaring ahead in dismay. What had been a road was, for a considerable distance, underwater.

Abasio heaved a sigh and leapt from the wagon seat. Once level with the horse he could see that small stones emerged from the water’s surface here and there. Fallen branches at the edges lay partly submerged but not afloat. “It’s shallow,” he said, leaning away from the wagon to look ahead. “The road comes out of it just at the end of the curve.”

“I suggest you wade,” the horse remarked. “Let’s keep as much weight off the wheels as possible.” He put his shoulders into the collar and heaved, moving briskly through the swale, the wheels making ripples that sloshed against Abasio’s boots as he moved alongside, ready to push if necessary. They came out of the water onto an uphill road freshly cut from the forest. Rounds of new wood, sawed off flush with the ground and scarred with wheel and hoof tracks, showed where trees had been. Branches, some still with leaves attached, were piled in the forest on the uphill side, though the large timber had been hauled away. Downward to their right—where the old road had been—water rippled softly under the stroke of the wind, its shivering surface flecking the valley with darting glints of sun gold.

“It’s the waters rising. So they say,” Abasio commented resentfully.

“We should have gone down the other side of the fjord.”

“Where we’d definitely have encountered the inimical duke himself. If we’d survived the encounter, we’d have had to take the ferry to get to Krakenholm,” said Abasio. “You may recall what happened the last time we put you on a ferry.”

“It was windy. There were waves.”

“You were seasick,” said Abasio. “I was only thinking of your welfare.” He tugged very slightly on the reins to signal a momentary halt and did a few knee bends to give the appearance of a man stiffened by hours of driving, though he had been asleep inside the wagon until recently. Big Blue had slept the previous night while Abasio had kept watch, so today the horse had followed the road while the man slept. The lands of both King Gahls and the duke of Kamfels were reputedly unfriendly to travelers, but there had been no alternative to trespassing on one or the other.

“How much farther to Woldsgard?” the horse asked.

“Not far. You can see a couple of fingers of the Hand of Wold just over the rise, a little to the left.”

The horse raised his head, peering. Indeed, above a jagged sawed tooth of stone, four slightly separated fingers thrust monstrously into the air. One could imagine the rest of the hand, a right hand, palm forward, thumb jutting to the north, the whole conveying the word “stop” as clearly as though it were being shouted.

“It’s only one big tower,” remarked Abasio, who had taken the halt as an opportunity to pee into the brush at the side of the road and was now rearranging his clothes. “One big one with five smaller ones at the top. No one knows if the architect intended it to look like a hand or whether it just turned out that way.”

“Unfriendly, either way,” said the horse around a succulent tuft of grass.

“Not according to what I hear,” Abasio replied, making a quick circuit of the wagon to be sure all the baskets, pots, and vats were tightly attached. Usually they hung loosely, the whole equipage jangling like a kitchen in a high wind. Coming through the king’s lands and those of Hulix, his stepson, horse and driver had chosen quiet. “The Duke of Wold is said to be a good, kind, and honorable man, though a very sad one.”

He climbed into his seat once more and they proceeded westward along a road that continued to edge upward wherever the terrain made it possible. Below them, on the right, the water-filled fjord had grown too wide for a bowshot to be of any consequence; on the left, the mountainside into which the road had been cut became steeper. By late afternoon, they rounded a final corner and moved out from among the trees onto a flat, square monolith half a mile across. Abasio leapt down to inspect the vaguely rectangular outcropping beneath them, like some monstrous gravestone. They had entered a third of the way down the eastern side of the rock. The high point was ahead, a little to their left, the southwestern corner, buried in the mountain, and from there the massive pavement sloped diagonally all the way to the northeast corner, which was marked only by a cluster of small tiled roofs, wavelets shuddering along their eaves. A good bit higher and farther west, a shabby cluster of newer buildings crouched uneasily beside a floating pier where a dilapidated ferry teetered on the wavelets, certainly empty, perhaps abandoned.

“Krakenhold,” said Abasio in some wonder. “I thought it was larger.”

“It was larger,” the horse snorted. “The larger part is now drowned. I don’t see anything on the other side.”

Abasio stared slit-eyed across the water. “That’s Ragnibar Fjord, and there used to be something called Ghost Isle on the far side. Evidently it’s drowned, too. There’s still the ferry, though, so there must be somewhere on the far side it can tie up.”

A line of ashen clouds edged across the western sky; the northern shore, if there was any, lay very low upon the waters. Abasio kicked at the black rock beneath them: basalt, virtually immune to the elements. The western edge plunged into a vertical wall, blocking any farther travel to the west. Anyone going on from here would have to go north on the ferry or south, where a narrow, topless tunnel had been cut through the jagged upper edge of the tilted slab they stood upon.

“I was told about this,” Abasio remarked, striding toward the cut, horse and wagon following. “It’s called the Stoneway. It seems to have acquired a few more stones along the way, fallen from the mountain.” He went ahead, kicking small rocks away from the wheels and protecting various items of the wagon’s paraphernalia that threatened to be brushed off by the uneven walls on either side. “The woman who first built Woldsgard had it built. Her name was Lythany. She was Huold’s daughter.”

“That would be Huold the Heroic.”

“Very probably.” Abasio stopped for a moment, looking at the tool marks on the sides of the cut, following their lines upward to the sky, considering the work involved, the years it must have taken. The shadowed, stony pipe itself would be well lit only when the sun was directly above, though it rose steeply into sunlight at the far end. Several hundred paces later they rattled across the last of the rock and emerged onto a gravel road.

“Grim in there,” said Abasio, not looking back.

“Blood in there,” replied the horse. “People died making that cut.”

“Dwarves, do you think?”

The horse shrugged and rested his chin on the man’s shoulder when Abasio came forward to assess the view. Mountains closed from either side behind them. They stood at the narrow end of a widening green valley that fell away into the distant, hazy south. With Abasio walking beside him, the horse tugged the wagon into easy, downslope movement. Several chattering streamlets trickled toward them, joining at either side of the road into brooks plunging away to the south. Before the sun had sunk much farther the right-hand stream had found a rocky culvert and ducked under the road to join the left-hand stream, which gradually became a modest and rather talkative river. The great hand they had seen earlier, somewhat less forbidding when seen from the side, was surrounded by greenery and its fingertips were identifiable as the conical roofs of five separate towers. Within another hour, as the sun dipped behind the mountains, they approached a rustling crowd of fruit trees behind a low stone wall, the tree shadows mottling the roadway before them.

“Apples,” said the horse, breathing deeply and approvingly. “I smell apples!”

Directly before them a particularly old and massive tree leaned across the wall, and Abasio pulled gently on the reins as they approached it.

“Hello,” he said to the tree. “What are you doing there?”

A brown branch uncurled itself and peered at him between two lower limbs. “Watching.”

“Not for me,” Abasio said. “I didn’t even know I was coming.”

“I was watching for what I was waiting for.” The small brown person uncoiled herself further and stepped onto the wall. “Your horse talks.”

“Ah, yes,” said Abasio. “Strictly speaking he is not
my
horse, though we do travel together. And though it’s true that he speaks, I’d prefer that you not mention it to anyone. Talking animals are more or less customary where I come from, but I don’t notice many of them around here.” He blinked. He saw a child. But he also saw something . . . as though the child stood within some larger, older embodiment, crystalline, barely visible . . . invisible. He blinked again. It was gone. One of those temporal twists that sometimes proved true? Or not?

The child murmured, “I wouldn’t talk about it. People would just laugh at me.”

“Do they do that a lot?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. He wasn’t in the habit of seeing things, but he had definitely seen something.

“No,” she replied after a moment’s consideration. “Mostly they don’t talk to me at all. My teacher, the Great Bear of Zol, says you have to be very careful of some horses, especially their back ends, but yours seems nice.”

“His name is Big Blue, or just Blue. My name is Abasio.”

“Abasio. I’m called Shoo-lye,” she said. “It’s spelled with an X in front, but in our language that’s pronounced like an SH. Xulai.”

“Your language. And what might that be?”

“Tingawan.”

“Ah. From over the Western Sea. And how do you happen to be here in the land of Wold, so far from the Ten Thousand Islands?”

She stared at him wonderingly. “Not many people know about Tingawa. I was sent from there. I am the Xakixa, soul carrier, for the Woman Upstairs. You probably don’t know what that is . , .”

Abasio smiled. “As it happens, I do. I have read of the custom. Yours is a very responsible duty. And the Woman Upstairs? That would be the wife of the Duke of Wold, am I right?”

The girl went suddenly rigid, as though overcome by a sudden awareness of guilt. “I shouldn’t have told you. Why did I do that! I’m not supposed to talk about . . . I never talk about . . .”

“It’s all right,” snorted the horse. “Don’t worry about it. Everyone tells him things, but he doesn’t tell people’s secrets. He just goes hither and thither helping out . . . orphans?”

“Blue!” said Abasio, somewhat discomfited. “Really!”

“Well, you do,” said the horse in a strangely puzzled voice. He stared at the person on the wall. “You do.”

“Oh,” cried the girl, her face lighting up in joyous wonderment. “Then you
are
the one I was waiting for! I prayed to Ushiloma, protector of the motherless, to send me someone!”