Water Logic (17 page)

Clement said, “It’s not so strange to me. I doubt one in ten of my people can read, and we have no books except records that nobody cares about.”

“Imagine that your people suddenly made an effort to write and publish everything you know—everything that is usually taught the young by the old. Zhiva devoted the end of her life to putting this spoken philosophy into writing. Many people objected to her project, arguing that philosophy would be misrepresented by being written down. People said that writing ideas down obscured the fact that a person must come to these ideas, must work with them and make them real. If people merely read ideas, they might think that understanding comes only through the eyes.”

“That explains why Zhiva insists so many times that words alone are without significance or value. But that business about the reader writing the book, what does that mean?”

Saleen responded by asking for her interpretation. They had walked all the way to the base of the lopsided hill before they finished discussing the four sentences of
Ethics and Attentiveness
that Clement had managed to decode the night before. After they left the scrubby trees, they crossed an open, barren, rocky countryside that ran with water. In the hollows water lay ankle-deep; elsewhere it flowed across stones in sheets and rivulets. The land looked flat to Clement, but still the water flowed southward, towards the Corber River. How did the water know which way to go?

They splashed through the puddles. Clement’s people began singing a marching song to help them keep the pace up. The Paladins picked up the tune and some of the words, and for the rest of the song they practiced a babble of Sainnese words, including “curiosity” and “fountain.” Where trees began to grow again, the road came back into sight, and there at a cluster of farmhouses people had come out on their porches to watch the group’s approach. Clement caught a whiff of wood smoke and the mouthwatering scent of baking. She hoped desperately that these farmers could spare enough tea for them all to have a mouthful before they stepped out into the rain again.

Zhiva had finally finished instructing her reader how to read the book and had begun to explain the basic principles of ethical decision making, principles that struck Clement as both simpleminded and incomprehensible:

Were all people just and upright, evil would never be done. Or, were it done (by failure of insight or misapprehension of the situation) it would be quickly halted and the damage repaired. But this is not the case: we surely need not waste our time arguing that all people are not just and upright; the evidence of our experience should be sufficient.

Like Clement, Saleen could repeat this passage word for word, and did so, several times. “Are you certain this book was written two hundred years ago?” asked Clement, for it had begun to seem that every encounter with Paladin philosophy would constitute a further condemnation of herself and her people. But Saleen gave her a puzzled look, and not for the first time, Clement wished he were a soldier like herself. With Saleen she could not help but feel defensive as she explained, “What’s evil to one person may be just and upright to someone else.” She remembered suddenly that she and Zanja had discussed something similar while climbing a staircase in Travesty.

“Oh, yes,” said Saleen. “Always.”

“But Zhiva says that one is right and one is wrong. Aren’t they each wrong to the other?”

“Oh, yes. People kill each other over such disagreements.”

“People like you and I.”

Saleen smiled, showing his teeth a little. “Not yet, Clement.”

Her fingers, jammed in wet gloves into wet coat pockets, gave an involuntary twitch.

“I hope not ever,” Saleen added. “It would be very difficult for me to think of you, Mereth, Herme, and all these other companions as people I must kill. The goodness that is in you is easy to see! Your loyalty to each other, your devotion to duty, your amazing ability to act in concert—”

“The very qualities that have made us your bitter enemies for all these years,” said Clement.

“Of course,” said Saleen. “They are your strengths. And yet you must sacrifice them.”

“Not yet,” said Clement.

Clement expected that a book about making ethical decisions would at some point tell how to actually do it. But, through page after page of difficult text that Saleen insisted was easy, Zhiva drew close to such straightforward instruction, and each time pulled away again. In hand-to-hand combat, some people might fight like this: feint after feint, never actually striking a blow. Clement hated such fighters: hated them because she herself, not particularly talented with edged weapons, had herself won most often by dodging and trickery. She fought, Gilly was fond of saying, by clever avoidance, which seemed very similar to the philosopher’s argument.

One very wet morning, she said, “Why doesn’t she just tell me what to do?”

Saleen, nearly invisible in his rain cape, into which he had huddled like a cow into a shed, said in a muffled voice, “Oh, but she is, Clement. She is very clear.”

“Where? How?”

“To make ethical decisions, be an ethical person. That is what she says.”

“But it’s nonsense!”

“How so?”

If Clement had a warm coat for every time Saleen asked her, “Why?” or “How?” she could outfit five battalions for the winter. She said, “Each half of Zhiva’s argument is defined by the other half. How do I make ethical decisions? By being an ethical person. How can I be an ethical person? By making ethical decisions.”

“Yes,” said Saleen. “That is exactly what her opponents have said. You are doing very well, Clement!”

“What happens,” she said through clenched teeth, “when two different people, each ethical by their own estimate, make ethical decisions that are diametrically opposed to each other?”

“You know what happens,” said Saleen.

“It’s decided who is right by who is the best fighter? That’s not philosophy.”

Saleen said, “I don’t think Zhiva imagined the possibility of war. So I will tell you, not what Zhiva wrote, but what the Paladins have been saying among ourselves for many years: War is a failure of philosophy.”

“Do you mean that philosophy can’t account for war? Or that war occurred because of people failing to think properly?”

“Oh, we are still arguing about that,” said Saleen. “Which do you think?”

“I think you people waste your lives in argument. War occurred because the Shaftali people refused to give the Sainnites anything to eat.”

Saleen shook his head. “War occurred because Sainnites believe every problem can be resolved by force.”

Sometimes, because Clement and Saleen conducted their discussions in Shaftalese, the nearby Paladins would join in, or would start their own arguments with each other. Lately, the Paladins would politely switch languages and limp along in Sainnese, and the soldiers were bored enough to actually participate. It seemed a bad idea to embroil their entire column in an argument about the cause of the war, but the rain had saved them from this outcome. People huddled in their oilskins, isolated from each other by their desire to avoid getting any wetter. The noise of the downpour had kept anyone from overhearing.

Clement said, “My people should have accepted starvation.”

“Do you mean that? Is that a choice your people could have made?” asked Saleen, with a curiosity that seemed genuine.

“I doubt it. When people are faced with death, they never wonder whether it’s better to die than to survive.”

There was a silence. Then Saleen said, “Paladins do. Or we try to.”

“Because you’re all insane.”

“Because sometimes it truly is better to die than to kill. And sometimes death is necessary to achieve the first principle of ethics.”

“Ethical people might have to die in order to prevent evil from entering the world through them?”

“Yes, that is the case.”

As Clement became friends with Saleen, she had come to appreciate the blend of sincerity and playfulness that constituted his character. Now he was somber.

She said, “Well, to my people a dead soldier is just a dead soldier.”

“Is there nothing you would refuse to do on principle?”

Clement made herself consider this question seriously—Saleen’s sturdy patience made her feel obligated to devote as much effort to this peculiar venture as he did. She finally said, “I do what works. If I do something that doesn’t work, I have not done evil; I have merely made a mistake. I try not to repeat it.”

“You would break your promise to the Shaftali people, if that is what would work? You would betray your friendships with Karis, Emil, and myself?”

“Not if I had a choice.”

“What would you consider to be a choice? Would you betray a promise to keep from going hungry?”

“No, of course not.”

“Would you do it to save your own life?”

“No.”

“Would you do it to save your people from destruction?”

“Yes. And so would you.”

“I would find another way,” said Saleen.

“Bloody hell! Did Emil give you this task so you could instruct me in making third choices?”

Saleen’s oilcloth crackled; he was either shaking his head or laughing. “It would be a failure of philosophy,” he said, “To accept that there are only two choices.”

“Sometimes there are only two choices, Saleen!”

She could see his teeth as he grinned in the shadow of his hood. “If I refuse to allow others to define my choices for me, then all doors remain open.”

“In your mind, at least,” she said. “But when you’re in the middle of a sloppy, bloody, hand-to-hand fight, there is no philosophy.”

“Exactly so,” he said agreeably. “Therefore, we must aspire to avoid such fights.”

“On this one thing,” Clement said, “we can agree.”

The rain eased occasionally, for as long as half a day at a time, almost as though the sky had kindly decided to give the saturated earth a chance to breathe. The raven detoured them up out of the Corber Valley—a hard climb on aching legs, followed by several long days on a rocky trail through rough country. Sometimes they traveled along a ridge, where the trees dropped away and they could see the flooded river. The streams that fed it were torrents, and the farmsteads that scattered the valley were islands of high ground surrounded by a sheen of water.

“Are you learning anything?” Mabin asked Clement one day, when the vagaries of weather and travel had once again thrown them together on the trail.

“I’m learning that I’m old,” gasped Clement, “and not as smart as I should be.” The trail was steep and slippery with mud, and her legs wobbled like warped wagon wheels.

“It’s always possible to get older and stupider,” said Mabin, who did not appear to even be out of breath.

“I appreciate the encouragement,” said Clement. She scrabbled for footing and got herself to flat ground, with soldiers and Paladins grimly scrambling up behind her. It was not exactly raining, but a cold mist filled the air. Clement was muddy to the thigh and soaked to the skin in spite of her rain cape. A breathless Paladin set the raven on a gnarled tree branch, where the bird stretched his wings and then let fall a great gob of crap.

“Oh, the soul-stirring glamour of a Paladin’s joyful life,” the Paladin commented in Sainnese.

“The glory of soldier courage!” exclaimed Mareth in Shaftalese.

“Fidelity! Solidarity!”

“Philosophy,” Clement muttered.

They crowded the rocky ridge, gasping with breathless laughter, holding onto each other to keep from sliding back down the hillside. Soon after they had started walking again, the mist congealed into rain, and the soldiers launched into a complaint song that the Paladins had taught them:

Sky, why must you rain on me?

I’ve got such a distance to go—

Across the Midlands all the way to the sea

And south to Keneso.

The rain it keeps on falling, falling

It isn’t going to end

The river is rising—I’m drowning in mud—

What misery this weather portends!

One morning, Clement was seeking the outhouse in the privy yard of the farmhouse in which she had slept, when in the corner of her eye she spotted a furtive movement. It was a dark dawn. Black storm clouds still clotted the sky, shutting out the sun and dooming the sodden land below to twilight. All colors looked gray, so it might not have been a gray uniform she had spotted, drawing back into the shelter of a massive, leafless vine. Surely it was one of the farmers, shyly pulling back at the sight of a sleep-groggy Sainnite slogging through the mud.

After Clement had finished in the outhouse, she reentered the house and then went quietly out the front door, stepping softly around the house and pausing at a distance where she could see and not be seen.

At first, though, she saw nothing. And then she saw a sudden movement that her mind interpreted as violent, except that afterwards all was motionless again. She sorted shapes out in the gloaming, and gradually her eye began to perceive something that she wanted to call both wonderful and impossible: Paladin black and Sainnite gray, entangling, disentangling, stumbling apart, inexorably drawing together again. The water-burdened air swallowed sound, and yet Clement could hear a panting, laughing murmur.

Later, when her composite company was reconstituted and walking forward again, Clement said quietly to Saleen, “I have an ethical problem. What am I to do, when I discover a woman soldier has seduced or been seduced by a man, who is a Paladin?”

After a silence, Saleen said, “I have recently learned that such an alliance is doubly forbidden for a woman soldier, so I imagine that she would be secretive and he would find her hesitation difficult to understand. I imagine that the problems of language might prevent him at first from understanding that it is wrong for her to come to him. And once he understands, they would agree to keep apart from each other.”

All this hypothetical speech tried Clement’s patience. “In the meantime, has Mereth gotten pregnant?”

“Of course not!” He seemed quite shocked.

“See that it stays that way, Commander.”

“Yes, General Clement. But I must ask, how do you justify your position on this matter? Since you have a child, and have taken Shaftali lovers?”

Clement was not in the mood to explain how a soldier’s potential lovers are radically reduced by every promotion, or how and why her people had always increased their numbers through adoption. She said, “I outrank Mereth.”

“That is your entire justification? And that is acceptable to your followers?” Saleen shook his head in disbelief. “I will never understand you Sainnites!”