Water Logic (40 page)

Seth awakened many times that night. Once she awoke with her face wet and thought she had been weeping in her sleep, but it was a heavy fog that chilled her to the bone. She remembered the stolen box. It had gone over the cliff with the donkey. But even with dawn light rising she couldn’t see beyond arm’s length, and when she peered over the cliff’s edge there was only fog, and she became dizzy from trying to look through it.

A hand clasped her shoulder. “Esset,” said the water woman, a sound like water withdrawing from sand. It was her name for Seth, and Seth, who could not pronounce the woman’s name either, was calling her Alila.

“I lost something over the cliff.” She gestured into the fog.

Alila made a rowing motion, as if to remind Seth that the bodies had been taken away.

“It was a box. The donkey carried it.”

Alila’s face was difficult to see in the fog, but of course she didn’t understand, and Seth couldn’t explain through gestures. It didn’t matter, for the donkey must have destroyed the box when he landed on it, and even if the box had survived, the sea had ruined whatever it contained. She let Alila pull her away.

They walked in fog all morning, pushing through invisible thickets, winding around trees they could not see until they loomed suddenly into their faces. Alila held Seth’s belt, and Seth kept the cliff to her left, invisible but palpable, a yawning vacancy. This blindness seemed to last forever, but when the fog cleared abruptly, the woods and the cliff were unchanged, as if they had been walking in one place all that time.

For two days they traveled along this ledge. The harbor, which at first had grown wider, gradually narrowed. Across its quiet waters, boats sometimes journeyed, rowed by people like Alila. But often the entire harbor lay empty as far as Seth could see. She felt too dull to appreciate the beauty of the place, though few Shaftali had ever set eyes on it.

On the second night Seth saw lights reflected on the water—many lights, some dense and some scattered, spread across a great distance. She heard the wailing of an infant, the barking of dogs, and a sweet, distant singing. She smelled wood smoke. The rising light revealed the village she expected to see, but she had never imagined that it would be floating. The house roofs were low and flat, and naked children played on the rooftops in the sun. Seth counted houses and stopped at a hundred. The houseboats were tethered in rows with lanes in between where rowboats passed, as wagons pass in a street. “Alila, is this where you live?” said Seth. She should be amazed, but felt nothing.

“Essikret,” said Alila, gesturing at the town or at the people, or both. In the distance, three naked children fell off a roof, one of them just a toddler. Nearby adults continued their work—and then all three children reappeared, calling shrill taunts at a child in a boat, who also leapt overboard, along with a small white dog. They engaged in a splashing tussle and Seth’s eyes told her they were drowning, though her ears could hear laughter and an occasional playful bark.

Seth and Alila began walking again. And now the water down below them became so shallow Seth could see sunlight on the sea bottom, and the flickering sparks of fishes. White birds chased them, hovering, splashing into the water, lifting up into the air, and splashing into water again. To the west, the water ended at a long, curving beach. The beach gave way to what seemed a vast hay field with hundreds of streams meandering through it, dividing and redividing like blood vessels, as far as Seth could see.

They reached a stairway cut into the living rock. Alila and Seth climbed down the cliff, holding ropes tied to steel spikes that were driven into stone. The ropes were flexible, with a texture more like leather than like hemp. They smelled like salt.

At the bottom of the path, Alila began to dance on the dark sand. The coarse cloth of her skirt wheeled around her, and her strings of shells flashed and glittered like many-colored jewels. A flock of long-legged birds nearly as tall as she watched her closely, and some began to dance also, solemnly bobbing their spear-shaped heads on long, flexible necks and taking high, bouncing steps with their backward-bending, willow-wand legs. Alila stretched her arms out to embrace the water, the beach, the sky.

The great birds began to run across the beach, each stride longer than the one before, and then were flying, their long necks stretched out ahead and their long legs trailing behind. Seth and Alila walked after them. When they reached the first of the many streams that flowed from the wetland to the harbor, Seth saw the sense of bare legs and stopped to remove her boots and her trousers. Alila drank from the stream, so Seth did also, and could scarcely taste any salt.

Ahead, rowboats cluttered the beach. There seemed to be a lumberyard or boatyard well above the highest tide mark, stacked with logs and resounding with the sharp sounds of adzes and axes. Here a group of young people, who wore the skirts shunned by younger children, were trailing scarves of bright silk in the air as they danced around an unlit pyre. High overhead, ravens and other scavenger birds wheeled, hungry for carrion but fearful of the scarves. The dancers’ only instrument, a drum, was played by a girl with twisted legs. Some of them sang, shrill and discordant, and Seth wanted to cover her ears. Damon would love that peculiarly practical dance, though, were he alive.

People had noticed their arrival and were gathering: the sawyers with yellow wood dust stuck in their sweat, villagers in boats they dragged to the beach, others who didn’t bother with boats, but swam. The beach smelled unpleasantly of decay. Seth took a dry, twiggy branch from the lumberyard’s waste pile, lit it at the only fire on the beach, where a pot of stew was simmering, and brought it to the pyre. The wood caught quickly, popping and spattering from the fat they must have treated it with. Seth stood back, and from that slight distance, hazed with smoke, Damon looked very like himself, dressed in the plain work clothes Seth had purchased for him, with a love-knot tied in his hair.

A man began singing a song that seemed dreadfully sad. All the people joined in, and again many seemed to sing different songs that intertangled with each other in ways that were surprising to Seth’s ears. She sat on the sand and, her heart empty, watched Damon burn.

For several days, Seth only watched. She watched the tide come in and invade the many streams with seawater. People in boats rode the tide inland, and when the tide turned, they returned with fowl, rushes, roots, greens, and fresh water. Alila cut her houseboat loose, and her neighbors helped tow it to shore, so Seth could climb aboard without having to swim or be afloat. The boat’s deck was a workroom with table and stools. Three steps down a ladder was a cleverly organized one-room house, a kitchen complete with storage and fireplace, with beds that were like slings of canvas folded away in cupboards. Small holes in the roof were plugged with faceted glass that sprayed light everywhere; they had lanterns but never brought them below. It was a marvelous little house. But as soon as a wave made it shift and grind on the sea bottom, Seth fled for dry ground. There she sat on the sand and watched as the houseboat was towed back to its place. A cat sat on the rooftop, nonchalantly washing its face. Alila’s three children sat with Seth, showing her how to suck living snails from their shells. They ate theirs raw, but she cooked hers in a pan, then couldn’t eat them—they were awful—but a dog ate them, and followed her hopefully for the rest of the day.

The weather stayed calm, though the fog came and went, and Seth slept on the beach except for one cold night when she took shelter in the carpenters’ town, where in a row of grounded houseboats the ship-builders lived. Many were earth bloods, building boats they could not endure to travel or live in. In the chilly morning, the harbor steamed like a cauldron. An onshore breeze began to blow, and little swells sighed onto the beach. After the tide had turned, Seth heard a cry from the village. She saw bright silken scarves being waved by people on rooftops, as a single-masted ship sailed grandly towards them across the harbor. People crowded the rooftops, and the carpenters who had gathered at the water’s edge gave each other congratulatory nods. Children cheered when the ship dropped anchor, and then there was a great launching of rowboats, and with much shouting and laughter the ship was offloaded. First came many baskets of fish, and soon on every houseboat deck people were hard at work with their gutting knives. Next large bundles were lowered from the ship to the waiting boats, and all of these were brought to shore. There began an impromptu fair. The oilcloth wrappings were spread out and the contents displayed: tools, fabric of silk and of wool, bags of corn, and tins of lard, sugar, and paint. Throughout the afternoon people admired the goods, before everything was distributed. Every household received something, and all the children were given nuts and candies and toys.

As darkness fell, a bonfire was lit on shore, and kegs of sweet ale were tapped. Drums, flutes, and stringed instruments were brought out, and the villagers danced. Seth watched from the edge of the salt marsh. Tomorrow, she told herself, she would ask for provisions and take her leave. She could not bear to go back to Basdown—she would go directly to Watfield and tell Emil what had happened. After that—oh, there was nothing Seth wanted any more! This was grief—she knew it well enough. And it was responsibility. She had not killed her friend, but she had put him there, between her and the poison, and if she had not done this, he would not have died.

“Esset?” Alila approached, with a young man Seth did not recognize, who must have arrived on the ship. Looking unhappy, Alila gestured to him and said a word—his name, Seth assumed.

She said politely, “Greetings.”

The man said, “Greetings. Your people call me ‘Silver.’ ”

Seth stared at him, openmouthed, until Alila spoke. The man
squatted down and said, “This woman—Alila, you call her—is brokenhearted
from your sorrow. She wants to give you a gift.”

Seth clutched his hand in both of hers. “You must be the Speaker of the Essikret! Have you heard that there is a G’deon in Shaftal once again? Do you know—”

The firelit dancers beyond them were exuberant, but Silver was somber and said, “We will discuss these things later.” He turned towards Alila. She held out a hand, in which was cupped a string of shells, which flashed with light in all colors.

“These shells are precious to the Essikret,” said Silver. “A person must dive deeply, and only in certain places, to collect the shell with the living creature inside. It must immediately be treated or the colors will fade. Alila wishes you to have this necklace.”

Alila poured the string of shells into Seth’s hand, and spoke.

“She says, ‘Remember our friendship,’ ” said Silver.

Seth looked at the shells in her hand, and fear stirred. When she looked up, Alila had backed away, and several muscular sailors had stepped forward.

“I am very sorry, Esset,” Silver said. “You must come with us onto the ship.”

Chapter 30

In pale dawn, with the sun not yet risen, Zanja awoke to unendurable restlessness, and, leaving her things in the woodcutters’ camp, walked back to the river. The waterfall, invisible to her left, uttered a distant roar, but the water here seemed smooth as stretched silk except where it plunged over boulders. To her right, the river curved out of sight, into dense forest. In between the waterfall to the east and the forest to the west, there sat an ancient woman with her feet in the water, with the powerful current parting around her ankles.

The berthed boats of the water people were gathered here, pulled by the current, bumping each other hollowly as they strained against their tethers. Zanja felt she had a great deal in common with those boats: she need not even try to understand the current that pulled her, for she would go where it went, whether she understood it or not. She knelt upon the creaking mosaic of water-rounded tones. So she had once used to kneel before the na’Tarwein elders, but always on several layers of woven rugs. The patterns in those rugs had been complex, but not mysterious. These stones, though, seemed to have no pattern at all, nor were they comfortable to kneel upon.

Ocean held a large shell in her hands. Her fingers fit between the spines that ridged it, as though the shell had grown to match her hand. She sipped water from it as though it were a cup, and droplets spattered her bare knees. “Are you thirsty, traveler?” she asked.

She offered Zanja the shell. Perhaps it was foolish to accept a drink from a water witch, but Zanja sipped politely from the strange cup and handed it back to her. “I thank you, Grandmother.”

The old woman dipped her fingers in the water and scattered droplets in the sunlight. “You may ask me one question, granddaughter.”

Zanja said nothing. The water witch glanced at her—sardonic, amused, and possibly grateful. She uttered a laugh and splashed her feet in the rippling water. The shell necklace upon her breast flashed in the rising sunlight. “My brother of the lakes and rivers has taught you something!”

Zanja said, “I suppose he taught me that there are patterns I cannot see, and music I cannot hear.”

The water witch flung water in a glittering arc over her head. She turned her face upward. Water splashed upon her face and became tears. She was a glyph: past within future, sorrow within joy.

Then she bent over and smashed the shell’s pointed tip to the stones, and put the shell to her lips and blew. In a spray of water, the improvised horn uttered a gurgling, melancholy sound. Ocean blew again, and now the sound reverberated: clear and sweet.

Zanja heard a cry. She stood up, and turned. The Ocean People appeared in the distance, bounding among the saplings. Four of them held the handles of a wood-carrier, in which was suspended the gigantic stolen book. And now Zanja saw their pursuer, thundering upon them like an avalanche: Tadwell G’deon.

“A fool has attracted the rock man’s ire,” Ocean commented. Now standing ankle-deep in water, she watched what avalanched towards them with amusement.

“It was for you I stole the book,” said Zanja.

“You desire the book. The rock man chases it. I do not care at all about books.”

The swift-footed people had nearly reached the river. Tadwell pounded hard behind them—slow, relentless. To become trapped in a confrontation between the opposing elements of water and earth seemed very unwise.

“I think I should get into a boat now,” Zanja said.

Ocean climbed into a skiff and set the oars into the locks. She pointed imperiously at the other bench.