Water Logic (20 page)

Zanja could not see any use in that ability but didn’t say so. “Do they hold classes on interpreting glyphs?”

“Glyphs? Now there’s a peculiar subject.”

“I suppose so. But it has long interested me.”

“Well, every Speaker is an eccentric, they say. Most glyph masters teach at the university, of course. But we do have a Paladin here who teaches a kind of class.”

Soon, Arel went away to attend his mathematics class, leaving Zanja seated in a plain wooden chair in a group much smaller and less uniform than the classes she had observed. Many wore Paladin’s black but were of every age and rank. All were fire bloods. Zanja wondered if she had been foolhardy for letting Arel introduce her into so curious and insightful a group, but her arrival was scarcely noticed.

On an easel, illuminated by lamps, stood a large, stunningly beautiful glyph illustration. It showed a scene of mountains framed by fantastic vines and stylized clouds, with a sunset that seemed to glow with its own light, a light that was in turn reflected in the water of a lake that stood in the middle distance. In the foreground a weary traveler reclined against a tree, with his walking stick and knapsack beside him. Though the traveler was at the end of his life, he looked forward rather than backward, wondering what he would discover beyond the setting sun. Zanja was familiar with that glyph illustration, for it was included in her card pack, one of a group called the Four Directions that each illustrated a person in one of the borderlands of Shaftal. This glyph, the one titled West, was often also called A Traveler in the Land of Endings.

The group had already been discussing the illustration for some time when Zanja joined them. Soon the glyph master, who was younger than many of the students, removed the painting from the easel to carefully wrap it in a cover of soft leather. Its gilding flashed and glittered as it was turned before the lamp flame. She saw its unpainted side and realized it was a piece of copper, green with age.

The teacher unwrapped a new illustration and lifted it to the easel. He spoke briefly, giving information about the glyph’s relationship to other glyphs and the particular glyph group it belonged to, but Zanja lacked the knowledge to appreciate this learned commentary. It did not matter—even the name of the glyph was irrelevant. She gazed at the painting, stunned.

It was the glyph she had imagined: Clement’s name sign. A woman on her knees cupped a flower bulb in her hand. Its roots clasped and intertwined her fingers instead of earth, and its brilliant flower bloomed in the light that radiated like sun from her face. All around her a fantastic array of people and creatures intertwined, struggled with, and destroyed each other. But she heeded only the flower.

When the class ended, Zanja felt as though she were awakening from a lengthy and not particularly restful meditation. She stood up stiffly as the others also yawned and stretched and spoke a few muted words to each other. They left the room and paced dazedly away in various directions. For a few moments Zanja could not remember where she was, or where she should go. She felt drained of energy and ravenously hungry. She doubted that Arel’s mathematics class would leave him feeling this way.

“The class was odd—and marvelous,” she told him when they met in the fountain courtyard, where now a cluster of young flute players hooted and wailed on their instruments.

“Let us flee this racket,” said Arel. He added, as they turned down the hall toward the dining room, “Everything odd is marvelous.”

“Of course it is. But I have discovered that I accurately imagined a glyph, both its name and its meaning, though I had never seen or heard of it before. That is even more odd and marvelous than usual, don’t you think?”

She told him about Blooming, about its emphasis on the importance of the patient attention necessary to bring a dormant possibility into being, and of the danger posed by the constant distraction of more immediate demands that are more easily and less effortfully fulfilled.

“Ah, my sister, these glyphs are like the gods to you,” he said, as they joined the line of people waiting to enter the dining room.

“I do see the gods in the glyphs,” Zanja admitted. “To think that there are a thousand of these paintings, carefully stored somewhere nearby . . . I could almost remain here the rest of my life so I could study them all.”

Arel shook his head at her, benignly indulgent in the face of an enthusiasm he did not share. “But you cannot remain here, can you? For it is your doom to cross again to yet another world.”

After a midday meal of bean soup with bread, which was exactly what Zanja would expect to be served on an ordinary day in her own Shaftal, Arel took Zanja visiting. She sat quietly in one room while he discussed poetry with several friends, and in another room while he discussed vegetable gardening with some more. A gardener gave Arel a packet of seeds, a variety of green pea that would not drown even in exceptionally wet weather. “The seeds are for the farmers of the Asha Valley,” explained Arel to Zanja. “If the weather allows me to go home before the spring planting season is over!”

They had walked to the Perimeter Way, so Arel could take the daily brisk walk that a healer had advised. They were not alone in this activity, for as farmers exercise their plow horses to condition them for the hard work ahead, so also many people were conditioning themselves for the journeys and labors of the coming warm season. Paladins loped around and around in organized groups, and despite the fast pace still managed to converse with each other. Others made the circuit less swiftly, in pairs or alone. Zanja watched for the shorn heads and white robes of Truthkens, but saw none. Perhaps they were carried everywhere they went, and so did not need to harden themselves to travel. She found it difficult to imagine Norina requiring or accepting such treatment.

The setting sun seemed to have hammered a hole through the clouds, for on the western side of the building red sunlight was cast in slanted squares on the walls opposite the high windows. The light made the people who passed here seem ruddy with good health. Arel and Zanja had been discussing her situation as well as they could, considering that she felt reluctant to reveal any details. “I have never seen or even heard of a living water witch,” said Arel.

“I actually did meet one once—I didn’t spend much time with him, though.”

Up ahead, on the southern side of the perimeter near the front door, a confusion of people had clustered. Paladins who had loped past Zanja and Arel several times had come to a halt there, as had many others, who peered curiously around those in front of them.

“Oh!” exclaimed Arel. “But why has he returned so soon? That cannot bode well.”

Zanja’s faculties drew taut, like a bow being strung. She said regretfully, “This leisure has been so pleasant!”

The collected people began to move back as if in response to an invisible pressure from within the crowd. Then a hole broke open, and out squeezed a number of filthy Paladins in dripping rain capes, whose faces even at this distance appeared gaunt with tiredness. They pressed the people back to create a wider passage for more of their travel-weary fellows, who in turn added their bodies to the human wall. Finally a short, stocky man walked swiftly down the passage they had built. Behind him, in a neat choreography, the Paladins reshaped themselves into an escort. Others, perhaps out of curiosity or just out of habit, trailed behind the escort so that it was a group of twenty or thirty people that bore down on Zanja and Arel.

They stepped back to make room for this crowd. But the short man headed directly towards them. He was as muddy as his companions, but unlike them did not appear tired. His wide girth, Zanja realized, was an illusion created by muscle, not by fat. Even his hands looked powerful, with thick fingers, coarse skin, big wrists, and veins that popped out when he clenched his hands into fists. His momentum did not slow at all, so it seemed he were going to crush them up against the wall like a falling boulder. Then, within arm’s reach, he suddenly halted: a pugnacious figure with his feet apart, his chin jutting forward, his nostrils flaring and narrowing with each breath.

His glare carried the momentum forward, so that Zanja felt its impact like a blow. She had distantly heard Arel murmur a warning in their shared tongue, but already she stood frozen, with her hands well away from her dagger even though like Arel she had knotted the holdfasts.

The man uttered a growl of words: “What are you?”

She said, “Tadwell G’deon, I must talk to you in private.”

Then she cried sharply, as his hand reached as if to grasp her wrist, “Do not touch me!”

Chapter 14

Seth was not the only person seeking refuge in Garland’s kitchen. Though his operation was vast, complex, and highly organized, it still remained a place where farmers like Seth could find familiar, soothing work at any hour. She peeled a lot of vegetables: carrots, turnips, potatoes, and onions. The peels went into the broth pot and the rest would be chopped, fried, boiled, and used in one or another recipe, eventually winding up being fed to an unending, unpredictable, appreciative, and always hungry crowd. Karis came in every day to sharpen the knives and scour the pots, and Garland often cooked a meal only for her. The G’deon’s appetite seemed a measure of her state of mind, and she wasn’t eating well for a person so large and hard working.

If Seth noticed that the pots were less than pristine or the knives were becoming somewhat dull, she went looking for Karis, often bearing something from Garland’s oven—something simple, like a small loaf, trailing the toasty, rich scent of fresh-baked bread. She almost always found Karis in her bedroom in a big chair by the window, watching the rain fall, cuddling the always-cheerful Gabian, with the dogs asleep nearby. She might not eat, but she never wanted Seth to leave. So Seth learned that the G’deon of Shaftal was no less haunted than her wife, though by a different set of ghosts.

The Truthken intercepted Seth one day and took her to one of Travesty’s cold little windowless rooms that had no possible use except as places to collect things that any sane person would give away. This particular room was crammed with horrible furniture, and Seth found herself backed up against the snout of an ugly carved pig that poked out of a headboard someone had understandably not wanted to sleep under. Perhaps the Travesty’s crazed builder had taken pleasure in giving his houseguests nightmares.

“That’s supposed to be the Black Pig of the Walkaround,” said Norina. She shut the door and the light was gone, all but a faint, watery crack at the bottom of the door. In darkness, Seth discovered, she felt able to shift forward so the pig’s carved tusk wasn’t jabbing her in the shoulder blade.

“I have this effect on people,” said Norina, just a voice in darkness now. “It seems to help if they can’t see me.”

“Have I done something wrong, Madam Truthken?”

“Not at all, Madam Councilor, though I understand why you might think so. My public acts all involve identifying errors and falsehood, and people assume that’s all I do.”

“You teach young air bloods to do the same.”

“It must be done. But I also make people sane; I protect them from themselves. I even managed to keep Karis alive for fifteen years, with only one near failure, until people finally came who could do a better job of that than I could.”

“The suicide scars on her wrists,” Seth said.

“I was scarcely more than a child myself at the time, and Karis has a will that—well, I wasn’t adequate to the task, and Mabin wouldn’t permit me to seek help. That’s all past now, fortunately.”

“But everyone is worried about her. I am.”

“She has her dark days, but self-loathing is no longer her greatest weakness. Madam Councilor—”

“Call me Seth.”

“No, not yet. Madam Councilor, there are plenty of things you could fix in this house, but you’re the sort of earth blood who would have become a healer if not for the chaos of our time. It’s broken people you are most drawn to. And though you have neither a proper education nor any particular power, you’ve become quite skilled at using the reality under your hands to influence the reality beyond your reach. Another earth blood with your propensities might drive herself to distraction by the enormousness and inconclusiveness of such projects, but you appear to have a strategy for determining and delimiting your commitments. Whatever you’re doing is quite effective. Is it a rubric of some sort?”

“Rubric? That’s red clay, isn’t it?”

“Red ink is made with that red clay, and in the Law of Shaftal the headings and subheadings are printed in red. By scanning these rubrics, the appropriate section can quickly be found. But a rubric might work
in the other direction also, to screen the mess of the everyday to deter
mine what is irrelevant and what is significant. An air blood must engage in such sorting all the time.”

“I would call it judgment, or a sense of proportion.”

“Yes, of course you would call it that.”

Seth realized that the Truthken’s neutral tone was even worse than hostility. Its blankness must be one source of her unpleasant effect on people. All people have had their shameful failures, and Norina’s absence of warmth could inspire a bout of self-recrimination in anyone. For a Truthken to distinguish genuine guiltiness in a room full of desperately self-conscious people must require a screen of great sophistication. A rubric.

“I suppose I do have one,” Seth said, “Though I never thought about it. Some things are fixable and some are not; some things are important and some are not. It’s not difficult to sort it out.”

“Don’t examine whatever you’re doing; it works well in its natural form but might stop working if you try to do it deliberately.”

“Why point it out to me, then?”

“You need to be told that your careful friendship with Karis is appreciated.”

“You approve of it, you mean.”

“There is nothing fragile about her. She can only be harmed by certain kinds of people, and she identifies them as well as I do. So you are correct that it is not my business to approve of her friendships.”

There were words beneath words, unspoken meanings that echoed in the meanings that were spoken. Seth knew this, but to converse with a person who could address both levels of meaning at once was unsettling.