Water Logic (3 page)

“Excellent!” said the ugly man.

“Drivel. And it’s got too many letters.”

Clement turned her attention to another document. The ugly man recalled the waiting soldier. “Yes, Damon?”

The soldier said in Shaftalese, “I have brought a councilor of Shaftal who wants to speak with General Clement.”

Clement uttered a sigh, set down her document, and stood up to face the door. Her mouth parted, preparing a polite if exasperated greeting. She said nothing. She stared at Seth, flabbergasted.

Seth pushed self-consciously at the wisps of sticky, roughly cut hair that were escaping from under her knit cap. What could she say, after all, to explain her presence? I could not stay away? Something between us must be finished? She, too, said nothing at all.

The ugly man leapt up, crossing the room, speaking in the soldier’s language to Damon, then switching languages to speak to Seth. “Greetings, councilor. I’m the general’s secretary, Gilly. Let me take your bag.” He took her knapsack and snowshoes from her shoulder, showed her to the fireplace, exclaimed in dismay to find the fire nearly burnt out, and launched a discussion of the weather as he took tinder from the woodbox.

Clement said, “Go away, Gilly.”

The ugly man abandoned his project, stepped into the hall, and shut the door behind him. The silence made Seth’s ears feel empty. Clement went to the fireplace to fuss with tinder and puff a breath of air onto the coals. A cloud of ashes lifted.

One of them must speak! Seth cleared her throat. “Everyone says it’s been a marvelous winter.”

“It’s been a winter of marvels, anyway.” Clement sat back on her heels, rubbing her smoke- or weariness-reddened eyes.

“For you certainly! . . . and I—I marveled at the tale of the Sainnite general who climbed the rubble of the fallen wall and offered her hand to the G’deon of Shaftal.”

Clement glanced up at her and replied with heavy irony, “I was all Sainnites, and Karis was all Shaftali, and the wall was all obstacles to peace. So Emil says. Though at the time the true marvel was that I didn’t fall down on my face out of terror.”

“Emil? The head of the council? That Emil?”

“There’s only one Emil,” said Clement. “Praise the gods.”

“And now, Clem—do you continue to be
all
Sainnites? Or are you, sometimes, yourself only?”

Clement uttered a sharp explosion of breath, like a laugh or a choke. Light flickered in the cinders and a flame flared up, reaching hungrily for the tinder. Her shoulders strained the coarse wool cloth as she stood up from the hearth. “Do I look like a symbol?” Her uniform buttons shimmered in the hot light; leather straps buckled across her breast. Her hands, bony and chilblained, smoothed the rumpled wool of her trousers.

Seth said, “You look important, anyway.”

The general stepped close to her. Seth felt the warmth, the pull of her, and held still with great effort. Clem laid a hand on her shoulder and hesitated—afraid? And then she leaned forward and touched Seth’s wind-cracked lips with hers, quite shyly, then intently, then with a moan that vibrated on Seth’s hands, which had risen of their own will to take hold of the buttons and buckles that bound Clem in this rigid disguise. Seth noticed them in time to prevent them from importunately removing the general’s clothes.

“So are you here to see if I am still here?” Clem’s breath tickled Seth’s mouth. “What can I do—what will it take—to keep you from leaving?”

The skin of her face was overlaid with a fine grain of wrinkles. Her eyes, brown like Seth’s, were shadowed by blue underneath, like shadows on snow. Seth’s hand, still pressed against gray wool, felt the woman’s thudding heart. She said, “Just give me a small thing: my skin upon yours.”

Seth felt Clem’s breath shake itself out of her. She said, “My room upstairs—it’s cluttered with my son’s things. The blankets haven’t been aired since autumn. The shutters are open, to let in the light for the flowers, and it’s bitter cold, certainly. The lamp has no oil—the woodbox is empty—”

“What can’t be fixed we will ignore.”

“—And we’ll be interrupted.”

“What!”

“If I post a guard—”

“You can only have privacy by sacrificing it?”

“I am in charge of several thousand terrified soldiers.”

Those soldiers were not in charge of themselves? Were they children? Jolted again, Seth drew back.

The door cracked open and a voice said, “General?”

“Gods of hell, Gilly, leave me alone!”

“I did intend to. But a note just arrived from Travesty.”

“Cow dung!” Seth muttered. Clement stepped away. Seth jammed her misbehaving hands into her pockets and glared into the fireplace. The flare of new flame had burned out.

At the door, Clement and her secretary argued in Sainnese. The tone of their conversation changed so swiftly from dismay to sarcasm to mockery that Seth could not imagine the topic. The baby chortled sleepily, like a bird at sunset. Clem had not been pregnant, last time—Seth would have noticed that! This was not a son of the body, then—of course not; women soldiers never bore children.

Seth had congratulated herself for finding it irrelevant that Clem was Sainnite. But in fact she had not been thinking of her as Sainnite at all; she had been thinking of her as a Shaftali in a soldier’s uniform, as though the clothing were wearing her. And Seth might wish it were true—she might wish it with vigor for the rest of her life—but all that wishing would make no difference. The uniform was Clement; Clement was Clem; and Seth must know her entirely if she was to know her at all.

The door closed, with Gilly again exiled to the hall. Clement approached Seth with an unfolded note in her hand and showed it to her. “Please visit me,” was scrawled on it in pencil, in big, awkward letters.

Clement looked down, seeming very interested in the toes of her boots. “The Council of Shaftal meets in four days. My thirteen garrison commanders could arrive as early as tomorrow, and their quarters aren’t even built yet. But the G’deon has summoned me, and I must go.”

“I should go there also, I suppose,” said Seth distractedly.

“Gilly reminded me that if you have no kin in Watfield, you’ll be residing in Travesty.”

“I have no kinfolk here.”

“The people who live in Travesty are always complaining that none of the chimneys draw properly and the floors are all crooked. But it’s a massive building. You’ll certainly have a room to yourself.”

Seth took a hopeful breath—and then she was jolted again, and appalled. “How could anyone’s timing have been so perfect? Tell me I have not been following a path without thinking! Like a cow!”

Clement looked up from studying her boots. A wry smile had reshaped her face. “There was a raven—am I right? A raven watching for you to arrive?”

“There was, but—I am no one to the G’deon! Why would she watch for me?”

“Her seer probably dreamed of you.”

Seth stared at Clement. Clement in turn observed Seth assessingly, seeming curious to see what she would do now.

“Then she’s subtle, for an earth witch,” Seth finally said.

“Oh, yes, subtle as a bull in bracken!”

Seth was so surprised to hear this Basdown saying—uttered with a Basdowner’s dripping sarcasm—that she laughed out loud.

But Clement said, “Go home, Seth.”

Yes, Seth thought, I certainly should—if I expect to ever go home at all. But beneath the jolts and surprises and clamoring confusion of the last few moments, her certainty remained certain as ever. She said, “I gather that your life is intolerable. And you think those intolerable conditions will be mine, too, and perhaps you think that is already happening. But you don’t know me, just as I don’t know you. So here’s a lesson: I cannot be discouraged—if you don’t believe me, ask my mother! And don’t tell me what to do, either.”

Clement looked at her a long time. At last she said, very quiet and amazed, “You have a mother?”

A dead general’s lieutenant serves as general for only four months. Then the commanders gather to choose a new general for life. Because Cadmar died in dead of winter, during two of Clement’s four months the only communications with the garrisons had been written. Now all fourteen commanders would soon arrive in Watfield, and Clement would need to convince them that without her as general, the Sainnites would not survive.

Clement could strategize, give orders, obey orders, and argue against plans she thought inadequate. But she did not know how to convince a group of people, whose hostility to her decisions had certainly hardened to intransigence, to choose her.

How do people choose? How—why—had Seth chosen to come to her again? She could not explain it.

Clement had gathered some things for the baby, put on her coat, and left for Travesty. Now, the cow farmer walked sturdily beside her, snowshoes dangling from her knapsack, her legs wrapped in grimy oiled leather, her cheeks chapped and red from facing the bitter Shaftal wind. They walked side by side through the garrison. As always when Clement went out, soldiers continually approached to talk to her.

“Good day, General. I am happy to report that your new uniform will be finished today.”

“General Clement, have you heard that we’re running low on fodder for the horses?”

“A fine day, eh, General?” This was said sarcastically after sleet had begun to pelt Shaftali and Sainnite indiscriminately.

“General! What’s going to become of us?” An old one-eyed veteran, whose duties involved much scattering of sand in winter and sweeping it up in summer, limped out of a sheltered doorway. As Clement stopped to talk with him, he gently stroked Gabian’s downy head, which poked out the front of her leather coat. Gabian talked to him also, though the baby’s comments weren’t entirely sensible.

Now a Shaftali carpenter trotted over to tell Clement that the building they were passing could be occupied tomorrow—the garrison commanders, who would be arriving any day to attend the Council of Shaftal, would have a place to sleep.

Sleet pinged on the hard brim of Clement’s hat. The carpenters began to chant a loud song about Shaftal’s awful weather. Their hammer blows slowed to keep rhythm, and soon every hammer within hearing whacked in unison, while red-cheeked, vapor-breathed, wool-dressed carpenters bellowed their objections to the looming storm

At Clement’s side, Seth also began to sing: “Why must it snow in spring? It is not just nor right!” Her voice was rough and homely as raw lumber.

“Ark!” Gabian shrieked, and wriggled joyfully against Clement’s breast.

They crossed the fallen gate, Seth greeting one of the gate guards by name. Now, having finally broken free of the soldiers’ anxieties, they rubbed elbows with busy citizens trying to finish their errands and tasks so they could take shelter from the storm.

Seth tucked a hand into the crook of Clement’s arm.

Clement looked down, and saw Gabian’s bright gaze peeking up at her, as if to ask why she found happiness so alien and bewildering. Even through the leather and wool of their heavy winter clothing, Seth was a warm pressure, tucked up against Clement as though they were an ordinary couple taking a baby on a stroll on a typically wretched winter day in Shaftal.

Of course they weren’t, and Clement noticed some hostile stares. She also noticed that Seth was staring back. Not easily discouraged? Well, that certainly was true.

In the square fronting Travesty, Seth dragged a little, apparently unable to tear her gaze from the soaring towers and extravagant decorations of the buildings on that street, a rare sight, and a shameful one in this land of extreme practicality. At the ugly, squatting stone monolith at the end of the square, the usual idling crowd had been diminished but not dispelled by the weather.

“What a horrible place!” said Seth. “How hard would it have been to pleasingly balance the windows? And why must the walls seem on the verge of falling onto us? And what idiot decided to build with that hideous stone? Of course they must call this building
Travesty
!”

“Unfortunately, it’s the only building in town that’s large enough to house a government.”

“Will they rebuild the House of Lilterwess?”

“I don’t think so. If there’s rebuilding, the library at Kisha will be first—these people are obsessed with books.”

Having been admitted by Paladins, they unwrapped and unbooted themselves in the vast cloakroom and made their way through a wide, crowded, noisy hall in which every single piece of extremely ornamental furniture was occupied. What all these people thought they were doing here Clement did not know.

In a room beyond the hall, Norina Truthken had set up her domain. There she kept collected the young air elementals who, after causing great trouble to their parents and communities, had been sent to her as soon as word of the Truthken had spread. Through the storms of winter the air children had come, often unescorted, always unannounced, never recommended. Now, an excessively upright twelve-year-old boy demanded that Seth identify and explain herself, just as one or another of the air children demanded of everyone the first time they entered the Travesty. These children must have responsibilities, Norina had said. But a responsibility like this? Well, if anyone were incapable of error, it was Norina.

The Truthken, who had been standing over a desk reviewing a line of text with a rather frustrated-looking girl, now observed the boy’s interrogation of Seth. Norina’s hair was clipped as close to her head as any soldier’s, which signaled her status, should there be someone whose creeping skin were not a clear enough signal. Once, long ago, a person stupid enough to attack Norina had managed to slash her face open, which was an impulse Clement understood well. Every time Clement saw Norina she had this same thought, and the Truthken knew it.