Water Logic (10 page)

Months ago, when Emil told Clement he wanted her commanders at the council meeting, she had argued vigorously with him: the presence of the hated enemy at this significant event would make them targets for anger, she had said. She did not think that even she should go.

“That anger is our country’s largest problem,” Emil had said. “Shall we not say so? Should we make decisions based on our anger, rather than decisions about our anger?”

He had been right, thought Clement, as Emil began to review the history of the last thirty tumultuous, bloody years. He did not excuse the Sainnites’ stupidity, but he explained it fairly enough, and he did not excuse the Shaftali either, for their failure to offer hospitality to the invaders, allowing the land the time necessary for it to exercise its power upon them.

“Many people have talked to me in the last weeks about the reconstruction of Shaftal, as though we needed to just take up the stones of a fallen wall and mortar them back together again. It must be understood here, and across the land, what the Sainnites of Watfield Garrison already know: The walls cannot be rebuilt. What we seek, what we need, and what is right for Shaftal, is not merely reconstruction, but transformation.”

When the Paladins learned that Emil and Medric had collected many thousands of supposedly lost books, it had been the dead of winter, the time of killing cold. But a Paladin party had set forth to fetch the entire library. Ever since then, Clement had hardly ever seen a Paladin without a book. It had been explained to her why Paladins must be scholars, but only now, as Emil began the heart of his speech, did she truly see what a philosopher could do. Emil did not tell these newly promoted councilors what must be done, or how. He spoke, instead, of what mattered. Several times, to emphasize points that seemed likely to rouse people’s ire, he opened the box, leafed cautiously through the fragile pages within, and read directly from the Mackapee manuscript:

Community begins in simple acts of kindness. To be ethical is simple. Power is given, but never taken and never possessed.

Emil finished. People stood up and cheered. Clement also stood, and the commanders imitated her: Blank, bored, sullen. They looked at her as if to ask what her next unreasonable demand would be. They would never understand in time.

People were crowding towards Emil to shake his hand. In the rising din, someone shouted something about tea. Karis broke away from a fierce conference with the Truthken. A chair blocked her way. She yanked it aside and grabbed Clement by the arm. “Let’s go.” She dragged her irresistibly away, through angry and eager conversations, into and out of apparently impenetrable tangles of people, directly to a heavy, earnest, weathered farmer, around whom had gathered a number of equally earnest people, all talking at the top of their voices about how dangerous and unjust it would be to ignore the terrible crimes of the past. Karis interrupted. “You’re the second man in four days to say I’ve got no right to speak for the land. Should I be grateful that you said it with words and not with snake poison?”

He stared at her, shocked. “I am not—”

“You aren’t? Well explain the difference, will you?”

The Midlander glared up at Karis as though he were facing down an angry bull. “Maybe if people felt they had another recourse—”

“So you’d do away with me so you can do whatever you want to the Sainnites?”

Clement attempted to dislodge Karis’s grip from her elbow, but it was hopeless. The Midlander—a brave man, if a foolish one—continued
obstinately, “What kind of land will this be if we reward the criminals? We must have justice if we are to have peace! Murderers must be convicted of their crimes!”

“And you think that calling it justice will change the fact that it’s vengeance?”

Clement said, “Excuse me, Karis. Councilor, there’s no need to convict us. My people
are
murderers—I admit it, though I wish it were not so. Yet if you treat us as criminals, you leave us no choice but to continue to be criminals.”

“Not if we defeat you!” the earnest farmer cried.

Some people in the group uttered grunts of agreement, but others drew back in dismay.

“I’ve learned not to infuriate Karis, myself,” Emil said.

Clement stepped aside for him, and Karis’s clench on her arm abruptly relaxed. He carried a beautifully painted porcelain teacup in an equally beautiful, though mismatched saucer, from which rose a plume of exceptionally fragrant steam. This he handed to Clement. In Shaftal, apparently, the reinforcements always arrive with a teacup in hand. Emil looked around at the people, and Clement tried to see what he saw: Jerem’s power did not lie in his anger, his loud voice, his insistence, or even in his logic.

“Karis speaks for the land,” Emil said. “Therefore, she
should
be impossible to ignore.” The people who had drawn away edged even further back. One was glancing about as if seeking a friend in the crowd. Perhaps he would join the cluster nearby, where occasionally could be heard the voice of a Basdown cow doctor.
Power is given but never taken, and never possessed,
Clement thought.
How in hell would soldiers be convinced of such crazy ideas?
She herself had been convinced—not because of that day, but because of all the days that had come before. But the time in which the commanders might also be convinced was quickly fleeing.

Chapter 6

On that significant morning, Zanja had found Medric in the frigid, many-windowed round room that he had cluttered with pens and papers but hardly ever used. He huddled in a deep chair, cushioned by pillows of clashing colors, wrapped in at least three woolen blankets, with a book too massive to hold in his lap lying open nearby on a sturdy stand. His spectacles, both pairs of them, rested upon the book. With his eyes closed, he seemed ridiculously young—a skinny boy, possibly unwell, at a hazardous age.

Zanja squatted with her back against the closed door. Her breath condensed before her eyes. “You’ll freeze,” said Medric eventually.

His eyes remained closed. Zanja wondered what he was looking at. “This feels like a balmy spring day to me,” she said.

“Oh, but your people, with their frozen hearts pumping icy blood, crawled about in snow tunnels like moles all winter.”

“Except there is light under the snow, blue light—incredibly beautiful.”

“What would you do,” Medric said, “If you could bring them all back from the dead?”

Well, he was at his most bewildering today. Still, Zanja considered his question, for even his most random-seeming comments could prove significant. The answer seemed too obvious. “At what cost?” she asked.

“No price. Just the logical result: All that happened because of that massacre would not have happened at all.”

Now it was she who shut her eyes, from pain. But what she saw with her inner sight was terrible, and she opened her eyes again. Medric was looking at her now, but without seeing her. With his eyes open he looked older, much older—older than any of them.

He was bearing a terrible burden today.

“Why are you asking me this question, my brother? It isn’t my time to be mad with guilt and grief. Can’t you wait for midsummer?”

“If you were given the choice, what would you choose?” he asked.

“I can’t answer you. Which one of me is doing the choosing? Is it the one who is here now, holding back her impulse to strangle you? Or is it the one who once loved only her tribe and didn’t even know it was possible to love a person like you?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t miss me,” he said.

“Certainly not, you dotty little man.”

He grinned, but without much humor.

“Surely such a choice should never be given, and never be made, except by the gods.”

“Elemental witches are gods, then, for we do and must make such choices.”

What awful choice was Medric making with his silence? An answer came to her, a dreadful one. “Medric—not Emil!”

Medric fumbled for his spectacles, put on a pair, took them off, and put on the other pair. His breath fogged the lenses, and he took them off again and tucked them into his shirt to warm up. He would not answer.

Sometimes it seemed as if Emil knew everyone in Shaftal. Perhaps it was true, as he claimed, that during his years of wandering he had not expected all the incidental friendships he made to prove essential. In his mind he may have been just a peddler of beautiful tools, a rescuer of books, and a retired Paladin commander. But fire bloods do little by accident, and so now people all over Shaftal knew Emil, and trusted him. If he were to die . . .

Zanja could not bear this silence. “What can or will you tell me, then? Can you say what boundary I am to cross? Can you say what choice I am to make?”

“Time,” said Medric. “And insight.”

Time and insight, water and fire.

Zanja had left her glyph cards in her room, carefully hidden from Leeba, who found them irresistible. Not today, probably not tomorrow, but the day after, she might seek out the peace and solitude in which to ask the cards the questions Medric wouldn’t answer: How can the boundary of time be crossed? How can insight, which always chooses, be chosen?

She said to the young seer, “Do you know what today is?”

Medric had shut his eyes again. He said with no apparent interest,
“It is the day we have labored for—for months, even years. It is the day my husband becomes a paragraph in future histories. But nothing important will happen today.”

“Nothing in particular will go wrong, then? That’s good. Still, I think Emil would want you to be there.”

“Emil would want me to think of tomorrow, as always.”

He would, and so would Karis, when Zanja told her that her seer was seeking the very vision she had been demanding of him. “Don’t freeze to death or starve,” she said.

She opened the door and stepped out, and only half heard his reply. “Be buoyant,” he might have said. “Be carried.”

“What?”

But Medric never repeated himself.

Now, Karis had returned to the front of the meeting room, and the councilors had ended their restless arguments and begun to return to their seats. Standing beside Karis, Zanja commented, “You have gone to war after all.”

Karis was gazing into the crowd, in which Zanja could not distinguish the offending Midlander from the many other work-bowed and weathered farmers in the room. “I’m glad he made me so angry,” she said.

“You surprise me!”

Karis looked down at her, and almost smiled. “I didn’t think that was possible. I understand something, that words won’t change people’s minds.”

“Oh, don’t tell Emil that!”

“People are changed by circumstances. Those I can change.”

“If you know what changes to make!”

“I suppose I have to pay better attention.”

Norina and Emil were waiting at the table. Most of the people had sat down, and now Karis did, in a hissing crackle of silk. Zanja sat at her feet. As Emil began to speak, Zanja glanced behind herself at Clement, who now sat alone in a row of empty chairs—Ellid had taken the commanders back to the garrison for meetings of their own. Clement’s boots, set in precise alignment with each other, reflected lamplight in their high polish. Her face had so little expression, her back was so erect, and her shoulders so square, she scarcely seemed made of resilient flesh at all.

Emil was calling on the councilors of Shaftal to identify issues of common concern around which committees might be formed.

Zanja looked down at the carpet upon which she was sitting, which by no accident was the same Ashawala’i carpet that had been on the floor by Emil’s worktable. The carpet was woven of goatswool, dyed in various reds: the red made from the inner bark of an oak tree; the red from a root that did not grow in the woods but was farmed instead in the valley; the red from a particular beetle, collected during the summer, then dried and ground to powder. The pattern of interlocking shapes and lines was ancient, and the carpet itself had been woven either by Zanja’s mother or by her grandmother. Upon it Zanja had sat, day after day, while Emil wrote and paused and wrote again, and Medric wandered among the books, appearing regularly with information Emil needed before he knew he needed it. They thought in parallels, and when they spoke with each other, it was to articulate fragmented statements from a conversation that seemed to continue in silence.

On the day before the assassinations, the three of them had worked together in this peculiar manner all morning. A librarian had interrupted Emil to ask his opinion of a book,
Gerunt’s Decision
, which was in dreadful condition. Emil put it upon his pile of books to be restored, and then glanced at Zanja. “There you are, sitting in the pattern woven by your ancestors,” he had said. “Do you suppose that, just as you were woven into the pattern of the past, the pattern of the future will be woven from you?”

That had been the sixty-third day since Zanja returned from the dead. Emil, too, had occasionally cheated death through fire logic. But he was not a crosser of boundaries, and when he did die he would not return.

“Now,” Emil was saying, “Let’s not waste time trying to resolve issues that have not been properly researched or discussed. I will establish two committees, one for peace with the Sainnites, and one for punishment of them. Mabin, please guide the committee for peace. Clement, yours is the committee for punishment.”

Clement uttered a grunt of shock or pain. No doubt Mabin, on the other side of the room, had been equally dismayed. Zanja felt Karis’s leg muscles tense—she was holding her breath, fighting to keep herself from laughing out loud. “The two committees will make identical proposals!” someone said.

“Of course,” said Emil blandly.

Throughout the room, stifled snickers became laughter. “Now I am certain that our land has other problems besides the Sainnites,” Emil said.

People began to suggest other, more benign committee topics: rebuilding roads, managing commerce, reestablishing the old orders and guilds, reopening the schools and the university, and starting up a broadsheet to report on all these activities. As Zanja half listened, a peculiar thing began to happen. She began to be angry.

It took some time for her to understand why.

Emil glanced at her in surprise. She had stood up, as others were doing when they had something to say, and waited for him to call on her. At last he said with a trace of puzzlement, “Zanja na’Tarwein?”

“I am Speaker for the Ashawala’i,” she reminded him. And then, to forestall Norina, who was at her most legalistic today, she added, “I have no standing on this council, for although the dead sometimes do speak to me, I do not speak for them. Nor do I speak for the nineteen other border tribes that used to send representatives to the House of Lilterwess. Not one of those tribes has sent a representative to this meeting, though, which was not by choice—”