Water Logic (38 page)

“Karis is returning, I suppose,” Sevan says.

“I suppose.”

“Let us greet her.”

Clement remembers that Karis said she would be gone until nightfall. But now it is only afternoon. Why do people persist in ignoring these schedules? She asks Sevan this question as they walk to the gate. “Unexpected events happen all the time,” says Sevan.

“But that is unreasonable.”

“Yes, General.”

Karis arrives, riding in the wagon, as healer and Paladins require of her, for the soles of her feet have not healed since she marched without rest across the breadth of Shaftal. Clement’s feet had also been sore after her own journey, and some members of her company continued to limp. But Karis’s feet had been raw and bleeding, and now the healer is not pleased by how slowly she heals. A Paladin hops off the rolling wagon and approaches Clement and Sevan, greeting them in Sainnese though Sevan is as fluent in Shaftalese as Clement.

Clement recalls that she has never known Sevan particularly well. She had spent no time with her until the last few days, but now Sevan remains at her side from dawn bell to night bell.

The Paladin is telling them that Karis learned something through her raven in Watfield and wishes to speak with both of them in her quarters. “Which quarters are hers today?” asks Sevan, and Clement is baffled by this question until she remembers the Paladins are moving Karis to a new room every night. It is quite inconvenient.

The Paladin asks if they want to ride in the wagon. Sevan and the Paladin run after the wagon, so Clement does also. It is not unpleasant to run. They jump onto the running board as the wagon jolts along the road through the garrison. The thaw is past, and now the roads are being repaired as they are every year. In large sections the cobbles have been removed and the dirt dug out. Every time the wheels hit one of these, Clement is nearly bounced off her perch, and the Paladins say “Ha!” which is a soldier’s tradition they have begun to imitate. Finally, the wagon halts and Karis follows a Paladin to her new quarters. Tonight Karis is in the same building as Clement, and they encounter the nurse, who is pacing the hall with two babies in her arms. The larger is howling, and the smaller is yelping. Karis can always make a baby stop crying, but she does not pause, and where a Paladin holds the door open, she goes in and glances around the small space.

She sits on the bunk, and Clement sits in the chair, and Sevan stands. The door is closed; the Paladin now stands guard in the hall.

Karis says, “I expected to hate being the G’deon, but I never thought the Paladins would be the most intolerable part of it. Any moment now, one will walk in with tea and a plate of those flat cakes they are always torturing me with.”

Sevan says, “Karis, we have received a report from Euphan, the commander of Appletown.”

Clement remembers the task she had earlier set herself. “Karis, it is not reasonable for you to refuse to take the ferry,” she begins.

“No one expects an earth blood to be reasonable about water,” says Karis. “And I will not take the ferry. Now be quiet, Clement.”

Clement feels certain that, though Karis is always blunt and direct, she has lately become less polite. But now Sevan speaks at some length, and Karis listens without interrupting. Clement recognizes what Sevan is doing: after recounting the contents of the letter, she is assessing how the new information affects their strategy, and soon will discuss tactics. Clement used to engage in such conversations all the time, but now she has been told to be quiet. It is not right that a person of lower rank be allowed to speak when the person of higher rank is not, but everyone must do as Karis says, as she outranks everyone.

The door opens and a Paladin enters with a teapot and cup and a plate of little cakes. “Karis, you ate no dinner,” he says, “And I—”

“I will eat something,” she says. “Leave us alone, please.”

Sevan pours tea and offers the plate to Karis, who says, “Would you eat them?”

“May I refuse?” says Sevan.

Karis sighs. “I told you to treat me like an equal, didn’t I?” She takes a cake and bites it, then lays it on her knee. Her bite has removed a crescent from one edge, and the rest is quite round. “What will happen if we allow this Euphan to believe Clement has accepted his bribe?

“Euphan will have more time to plan and consolidate, or at least he will think he does.”

They discuss positive and negative aspects of various options. Clement drinks a cup of tea and eats the little cakes, for Karis is not hungry and Clement is, as has been the case ever since Wilton. Karis says Clement’s name but is not talking to her.

“—couldn’t think what else to do.”

Sevan is shaking her head. “She is obviously not herself. With every passing day—”

“Her old passion and determination was so strong—it took her through what had to be done in Wilton—but since then she has been gradually rolling to a stop.”

Karis has said similar words to Clement many times, but never to another person. This alteration of custom may be difficult to explain. Clement decides not to attempt it.

“You can’t undo what you did to her?” says Sevan.

“I can. I want to.”

Clement says, even though she had been told not to speak, “I could not endure to suffer any more.”

“Do you mean in the future?” Sevan asks, looking at Clement.

“The future? No I mean when Karis took the fear away.”

Sevan turns to Karis. “I don’t think she can imagine a future that’s different from the past. By luck, her tactics in Wilton worked three more times, in three more garrisons. But Euphan’s garrison is hardly a garrison at all, and Euphan—he is a wily commander—wilier than I am, I fear. We must have Clement back, Clement entire, for we will have to outthink the man if we are to overtake his garrison without violence.

“Without violence! What do you call what she’s done to all those officers?”

Karis has been shouting, and now Sevan is gazing at Karis without expression, a tactic Clement knows soldiers use sometimes, when—when—when bellowed angrily at? Is that right?

Karis breathes. She breathes. She breathes. Her eyes are red. Her eyes are wet. She breathes.

“Karis,” says Sevan. “The general certainly has been harsh—more harsh than anyone would expect of her. But the penalty for mutiny is death, as every soldier knows.”

“If I put her pieces back together,” says Karis, “She will still remember everything she has done. And she will feel it, also.

Karis breathes. She breathes again. “Norina—our Truthken—you know what Truthkens do? Our realms sometimes seem to overlap—both of us can cure madness, for example. But I do it by healing a broken brain, and she does it by healing a broken mind. You don’t understand me at all.”

“I’m afraid not, Karis.”

“I can’t explain air logic, and earth logic is so obvious . . .” Karis breathes. “My wife,” she says. “When her brain was injured, years ago, I healed her. But her mind was also injured, and at midsummer, she becomes mad. It’s horrible what she endures—and yet Norina will not cure her, and I can’t cure her. I can do something—I can break her brain in a way that makes her sane again. Norina forbids it, though. For as long as Zanja is broken, she’ll feel no pain, but that’s because she’ll feel nothing at all, and her genius lies in her passion! Should I restore her feelings, she would go mad again, but it would be worse. And the longer she is without feeling, the worse her madness would be.”

She is looking at Clement now, and she is breathing. “Do you understand,” she says. “I forced Clement to endure that torture when she was shot. Now she has killed a lot of people—people for whom she was willing to endure any misery. She has felt nothing. Now do you understand?”

Clement is puzzled by Karis’s words. “I could not endure to suffer anymore,” she says.

“I do understand,” says Sevan. Her face, Clement notes, has an unusual pallor.

Karis says, “I dare not fix what I have broken in Clement. I fell into the error of mercy, as Norina calls it—the error I am most prone to.” Karis breathes. “I should have made her endure it.”

“I could not—” begins Clement.

“Be quiet,” says Karis.

Karis’s cake still balances on her knee, with that single bite taken out of it. Clement picks up another cake and begins to eat it.

Sevan says, “You cannot undo what you did, because she’ll go mad. But the longer you leaver her as she is, the worse the effect will be.”

“She must be accepted as general,” says Karis. She rubs her face. “Which Clement will the commanders like more, Sevan? Will they like her as she is? Or—”

“I suspect they won’t like her either way,” says Sevan. She glances at Clement and glances at Karis. “When we study tactics, we are told there are never only two choices. If two options seem equally unacceptable, we must reject them both, so we can imagine a third choice, and a fourth.”

Karis utters a small grunt. “Norina,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“The Truthken is the third choice. I have to send for her.” She breathes.

“But this option also dissatisfies you?”

How does Sevan know Karis is dissatisfied? Clement is puzzled. She eats the last cake.

Karis says, “She’ll be angry—that’s all. And it will take too long. Still, I need to write a note to be carried to her.”

Sevan opens the door and speaks to the Paladin, who comes into the small room and removes from his waistcoat a rolled packet. He unties and unrolls it, and it becomes an ink-smeared, leather blotter that contains in pockets a wooden pen, dry ink, a small ink dish, and several sheets of paper. He apologizes that the paper is wrinkled, since it got wet during their long journey in the rain. He steps out. Karis stands up, and the cake falls from her knee to the floor. She dips her finger in her teacup and shakes a few drops of tea into the ink dish. She adds some ink powder and begins to mix it with the blunt end of the pen. That end of the pen was black already—it has been used for this purpose before.

“What did you want to discuss with . . . us?” asks Sevan. “The Paladin
said a raven—”

“Something has happened that wants my attention,” says Karis. Her head is bowed over the dish. The black powder floats on top of the drops of tea. She mixes, but the powder doesn’t mix in. “Zanja,” she says.

She drops the pen. Grainy drops of tea and specks of ink powder spatter across the Paladin’s wrinkled paper. Her head has come up in a peculiar manner, not in her usual slow way. Her eyes are not right.

“Karis?” says Sevan.

Karis steps in the wrong direction, into the table. The table breaks. It cracks into pieces, and the pieces clatter to the stone floor. It is noisy.

“Karis!” says Sevan. She is clasping, is trying to clasp, Karis’s arm. The Paladin has slammed open the door. “Karis!” says the Paladin. His voice is loud.

She has ruined his paper. His pen is rolling across the floor.

He is trying to clasp her arm. Karis does not breathe. Her eyes are not right. She looks at the wall. She steps into the pieces of the table, and they shatter. The Paladin tries to clasp her. “Karis! What is wrong?

She breathes. “Zanja,” she says. “Her knives.”

She turns. The door is there. She steps through it. Now she is gone. The Paladin is gone. The baby is crying in the hallway. Clement remembers that one of the babies is hers. She remembers that she loves him, but can’t remember what that means.

“Bloody hell!” says Sevan.

“I never saw her break a table before,” Clement says. “She spilled ink on my trousers.”

Sevan breathes. “We must follow them, General, to find out what is happening.”

Once again, Karis has failed to follow a plan. It is not reasonable.

Chapter 29

Seth had always avoided looking directly at the ocean—it made her queasy. When she had taken her occasional holidays by the sea, what drew her was the mystery of that unknown land, so close by yet so beyond her reach, where monstrous, beautiful, alien creatures lived in ways she wanted to understand. She would wander the beach, seeking the clues the water scattered there: a shell, a carapace, a scuttling creature, a peculiar corpse. She cut dead creatures apart to see how they worked: various fish, mollusks, once even a sea dog. And if she could force herself to glance at the sickening waters, misery might be rewarded by a glimpse of a great fish like the one within whose skeleton she lived, with her oilcloth roof spread on the rib cage and her cooking fire tucked in the jawbone.

Atop the cliff’s edge south of Basdown, Seth and Damon ate breakfast together, him looking out towards the fog-shrouded sea, her looking towards the scraggly undergrowth. They had been walking since dawn and were more than ready for their oatcakes and cheese.

As long as the two of them had traveled together, Seth had been seeking in Damon a useful way to understand his people. But instead, he had ceased to be a Sainnite and had become a flower farmer loved by a Ten-Furlong woman who eagerly awaited his return. Even now, with Basdown behind them, and with Damon as eager as a hunting dog to catch their prey, Seth saw him as a flower farmer, not a soldier.

“What are you looking for?” she asked him.

“Sainna.”

“It isn’t there.”

“Which way is it, then?”