Water Logic (13 page)

She assessed the resources in the barn and went back out into the storm. The specks of distant light at the riverbank appeared and disappeared behind the dizzying veil of snowfall. She followed the lantern flames as well as she could, slithering on the hard ice that lurked beneath the soft, fresh snow. When she lost her footing entirely, she fell onto stones and realized only then that she had reached the rocky edge of the river. Limping, she finally joined the frozen cluster of people, the lanterns that dripped melting snow. The six Paladins were discussing how to build a shelter around Karis where she stood. Emil was nearly invisible at a distance, still staring downriver. Snow-covered Karis and her snow-covered attendants already seemed paralyzed by the cold that might well kill them by dawn.

Clement squatted beside Seth. The dogs lifted their heads, snorting snow out of their noses, and looked at her suspiciously. “Seth, you’re going to freeze to death,” Clement said. “You don’t have these dogs’ advantages.”

Seth gave no reply. Clement brushed at the snow until she could see Seth’s eyes and eyebrows—the rest of her face was covered by her hat and coat collar. Seth’s eyes were squinted shut. With her breath, Clement melted the ice that froze her lashes. Seth’s eyes opened. “I’ll help you get up,” Clement said.

“But—Karis—”

“She’s got seven other people looking after her.”

“—my fault.”

“You did everything anyone could have done.” Clement tried to lift Seth by the arm but found her immovably rooted in the snow, as some boulders are rooted in earth. The immobility of earth logic. Little wonder Karis, who had twice Seth’s size and strength, could not be forced to abandon her vigil.

“Commander Saleen!” Clement yelled in exasperation.

The Paladins came over and helped haul Seth to her feet, and Clement wrapped her arms around the Basdown cow farmer to keep her from sitting down again. She said to Saleen, “Commander, I’ll send my soldiers to you with the building materials and tools that are in the barn. After we’ve put Karis in some kind of shelter, we’ll rotate people in and out every hour. At least we’ll all suffer the same.”

“I’m staying with her,” Seth mumbled.

“You’re not in your right mind,” Clement said.

“What do you know?”

“You think I’ve never felt responsible for someone’s death? Then you have no idea what my life has been like—no idea at all!”

Bloody hell! When had it become acceptable to indulge her hurt feelings, like a child? “You’ve been out in this weather all day, Councilor,” she said. “Come indoors for a while, drink some hot tea, let your fingers thaw.”

A clot of snow fell, and another. Clement realized Karis was moving, very slowly. Eventually the G’deon was looking at Seth, and her face was as pale as the snowflakes clotting the mad curls of her hair. “Go inside, Seth,” she said.

“Not until you do.”

Two earth bloods, equally intractable, might stand here all night glaring stubbornly at each other. Clement said, “Karis, don’t you see that none of us has any choice but to freeze with you?”

Karis looked around herself at the cluster of Paladins, and then towards Emil, who was outside the reach of light. Her stiff shoulders slumped, and she turned and began walking.

In the barn, the soldiers who had finished eating were bedding down in pairs on the cold stone floor, using one coat as a mattress and the second as a blanket. The farmers had run out of straw, explained Herme, and he had refused to use the hay they offered instead, for he thought this family had too little hay for their animals as it was. He reported that the soldiers had all checked each other for frostbite and put on dry stockings. He told her where the latrine buckets were, and then gestured towards the women’s side. “Your old bedmates asked me to say they’d be glad to sleep with you as they did on our last campaign.”

“Thank them for me, Commander, but I doubt I’ll even lie down tonight.”

Saleen and the Paladins appeared in the passageway to the ell, bearing lanterns, bowls of soup, and lumps of bread. Clement, who had neither the standard rations nor dry socks, shared their supper and their silence. No one said the elegies one might expect to hear upon a person’s death. Clement felt oppressed by that silence, but she didn’t think it was her place to insist they acknowledge that Zanja was dead. Seth, Emil, and Karis all refused food and beds, and disappeared into the dark barn. The Paladins bedded down with each other, and then Clement sat alone beneath the only lantern with its flame turned low, and the darkness and silence took on a quality of unsettling permanence.

Like Gilly, Zanja had done her work invisibly, but to Emil as well as Karis she certainly seemed indispensable. Yet only a few months ago her family had thought she was dead, and they had managed without her. They would do so again.

But Zanja had become a friend who both understood Clement and was not subject to her. Now she had only Gilly once again. Could she weep for herself on this dreadful day? Was self-pity ever permissible?

A footstep scraped in the sawdust, and Seth stepped into the dim light of the lantern. Shivering, she put her coat on the floor, and Clement unbuttoned and removed hers for them to share as a blanket. With the dogs pressed against their feet, they sat huddled together with their backs against a dividing wall, on the other side of which someone uttered an occasional snore. Seth’s shivering gradually eased. Time crept slowly forward.

In a while, Emil arrived and sat on Seth’s other side. “Listen, Seth,” he said in a low, rough voice. “This is not Zanja’s final death.”

Seth’s head lifted. “How many times can a person die?”

“The first time, anger kept Zanja alive though she should have died from that crack in her skull. The second time, Karis made her heart continue beating while she healed her. The most recent time, I killed her spirit with my own hand, and I knew in my heart she was dead. This time I know she is alive.”

Seth said, “I nearly grabbed her hand. But she slipped out of reach. She went under the ice. She did not come up again. She has drowned.”

“I know what happened. But feel my heart.”

Clement heard clothing rustle as Emil endeavored to lift Seth’s hand to his chest. “This is not my logic,” Seth protested.

Karis’s distinctive voice spoke in the shadows. “But by earth logic Zanja isn’t dead either. Not one hair of her head, not one flake of her skin, no part of her, however minuscule, has touched the river bottom.” Karis came out of the darkness and, despite her massive size squatted easily among them. “She simply isn’t here.”

Emil said, “She has crossed another boundary.”

“What boundary could she cross that would cause her to physically disappear?”

Suddenly, Clement could hear the quiet ticking of Emil’s watch. She leaned forward, expecting to see him peering at it in the lantern’s dim orange light. But he was merely holding it.

“Time?” said Clement. “Time is a barrier, I suppose. But how can it be crossed, except by remembering?”

Karis tilted her head back. “That dimwitted twit of a seer had better be awake,” she said, apparently addressing the rafters.

A raven dropped down from the darkness. “Medric has just opened a window for a raven,” it said. Then it added, “He agrees he’s a twit. But don’t call him dimwitted.”

Chapter 8

Zanja was ice: lungs, blood, and bone. Her will was ice; the flame of insight was f
rozen; she floated in a mindless, timeless darkness, dead again.

“Not again!” she tried to say, but choked on ice. “I’ve died enough,” she tried to protest, but the words froze into silence.

“Hush. Hush. There’s naught to fear.”

It was a singing voice, that sang so lovingly and soothingly that Zanja’s rage and terror could not persist. “Hush. Hush. There’s naught to fear,” sang the voice.

You hear the gale wind,

The river flowing near,

The reapers in the glen . . .

A lullaby. Karis sang it to Leeba as she rocked her by the kitchen fire. That was in their old house, soon after the seven of them became a family. A family, a tribe, an order, a confederacy, a circle formed around Karis as much as it was around Leeba.

This was not Karis’s broken, raspy voice, though. And Leeba had become a willful, active little person with no patience for lullabies. And Karis was the G’deon now.

I must be alive, Zanja thought. For time has passed and is still passing.

“She’s trying to speak,” creaked a voice.

“She’s terrified, I guess,” the gentle voice said.

Each unexplained utterance was folded between leaves of silence. Zanja began to see a flickering light. The ice had turned to fire. Her body burned upon the pyre. She cried out with pain.

Dearest, I am always near.

Hush! Hush! There’s naught to fear.

A fresh log flung sparks across a gray stone hearth. A baby uttered an impatient cry and then began to suckle noisily. Knitting needles clicked rhythmically.

A dark, knife-scarred hand lay half-open, the fingertips gray with frostbite.

“She’ll kill us all,” the grim voice said. “Her kind has no laws.”

The hand flexed. The wool blanket burned. Zanja tried to lift her head, but the ice froze closed again.

The grim voice made a disgusted sound. “She’s puking.”

“Hold the baby.”

A rough cloth wiped Zanja’s face. The kind voice said, “You tried to swallow the river, but I guess it disagreed with you.” Zanja saw a swirl of features: a plain, round face, a thick plait of hair, an opened shirt and milk-heavy breasts. The baby uttered a frustrated, demanding cry. “Can you lie still?” the woman asked Zanja. “Until this little one is satisfied? Then I will help you.”

The other voice said impatiently. “She’s not our kind. She will not understand us.”

Zanja said, “Yes. I can.” She coughed for breath. Black spots swirled.
There was a far-away murmur of surprised conversation. Ice and fire filled Zanja’s chest; her limbs burned with hot cold.

“Keep coughing,” said the nursing woman. “That water in your chest, it could make you sick.”

“I’m alive,” Zanja rasped.

“Some people were down at the bend. A farm there is getting flooded—”

The other voice interrupted. “People warned that family they’d get washed out, didn’t they? But they couldn’t resist living right on that good soil, could they? And now their stupidity causes nothing but trouble for their neighbors.”

“I doubt she cares about that,” said the nursing woman. She continued to Zanja, “So someone spotted you half-drowned, hung up on some rocks, and you were pulled out and brought here.”

“Another mouth to feed, too ignorant to work . . .” The voice faded to a grumble.

“I guess you fell in the river and got swept away somehow.”

“I am Zanja na’Tarwein.”

“You’re what?”

“My name: Zanja na’Tarwein.”

“Well why don’t you have a name that can be pronounced!” exclaimed the crabby one.

Zanja turned her head quite cautiously. She lay on the floor of a small, windowless room walled with mortared stone. A brightly painted baby cradle swung gently from the roof beam. In a plain, narrow bed was propped a skeletally thin man with a wool cap on his hairless head. He knitted unceasingly without looking at his hands. In fact, he looked at nothing, for he was blind.

The nursing woman had begun chafing Zanja’s hand. Her own hand was rough with work, and chapped with cold. “It must frighten you to be so far from home. But never mind him! He’s always like this.”

“Zanja na’Tarwein,” Zanja said again. Perhaps they had not understood because her lips were stiff with cold.

“Well, my name’s Mari.”

“Karis will be frantic—”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure.” The rough hand patted hers.

“If you’ll go outside and tell a raven—”

The old man snorted. “Deranged!”

“Tell a raven? I will if I see one.” The nursing woman patted her again. “You shut your eyes and rest, now.”

The house was quiet when Zanja awoke. She hazily remembered the sound of the family coming home, stomping loudly in the adjacent kitchen to clean their boots. Now, it was much later, the middle of a very quiet night. Zanja disentangled herself from the heavy wool blankets that wrapped her and crawled across the stone floor to a latrine bucket. Then, following the faint glow of coals, she crawled into the kitchen and used a chair to lever herself to her feet. Among the coats and clothing that hung on pegs by the chimney, she found her shirt and trousers, stiff but dry. Her coat, belt, and shoes were still damp, though, and she turned them so they would dry evenly. She found her dagger in its sheath and the glyph cards in their pouch. She went to the door barefoot, lifted the latch, and stepped outside.

No starlight glimmered there. In the unrelieved darkness Zanja could not guess where she was, or which way lay the river. “Raven?” She called quietly. She felt her way down a stone path. When she stepped off it by accident she found herself standing in ice-cold mud. How could a thaw have happened so quickly? “Raven!” she cried. But no large bird flew out of darkness to dig its claws into her shoulder and speak reassuringly of how quickly people would arrive to bring Zanja home. Even if Karis had lost track of Zanja in the water, she would have found her again when she was dragged to dry land. But there was no raven.

She made her way back to the open door and scraped the mud from her feet before stepping inside. She built up the kitchen fire and spread the glyph cards on the hearth to dry. Many hand-drawn cards had been added to the pack over the years, and on these the ink had now run, so that on some cards only a ghost of the design remained, and on others the design had become a smear. However, the original cards of the pack had survived another misadventure intact. Zanja’s knees were giving out; she sat on the hard floor. Her vision filled with glyphs flickering in firelight.

“Oh, are you awakened then?” said Mari cautiously from the shadows. The baby in her arms grunted fretfully. Even Mari’s words were disorienting, for she pronounced them strangely and with a lilting rhythm that made her seem to be about to sing again.

“Thank you and your family for saving me.”

“Oh, it’s what anyone would do, I guess.” The young woman approached. “Are you feeling much improved? Perhaps you’d like something to eat?”

“Yes, but let me serve myself.”