Water Logic (41 page)

Zanja undid the mooring, waded through water, stepped in, and sat hastily as the rocking skiff jumped forward on the swift current. Ocean’s white hair made a frame of light around her aged face. Her hands crossed at the wrists and put the oars into the fast-moving water. The boat jumped into the swift current. Whooping, the Ocean People leapt into their bright red and yellow boats.

Tadwell’s charge halted at the water’s edge. The water lay between Zanja and him, an ever-widening barrier. Yet they were surrounded by earth, and earth even lay beneath them. A fool has attracted the rock-man’s ire.

But now the shore fled out of reach.

In the other boats, the Ocean People were now yodeling mockingly and waving their arms or their scarves in farewell at the glowering earth witch. Zanja cried, “Tell them not to taunt him!”

“Hoo-hoo!” cried the old woman.

The skiff climbed a wave that flung it past a half-submerged boulder. The water witch dug her oars into air, teeth bared, and the rowers on either side of them shrieked. Zanja clenched the edge of the bench to keep from flying out of the boat. From shore, those waves had not seemed so high. Ocean’s oars dug in and whisked them neatly up the side of the next wave.

They flew in a spray of water. A wave fractured into droplets, which hung suspended before Zanja’s gaze. Each one contained the complete sky and the entire earth. Then the droplets coalesced, and became the wave again, and the boat was flying up a hill of water. Zanja felt something rising from her gut. She opened her mouth, and yelled exhilaration. They fell, and fell down the side of the wave.

“Oof!” The hard landing flung Zanja off the bench, nearly into Ocean’s lap. Water gushed in on both sides. Ocean knocked Zanja on the head with an oar. She scrambled out of the way and wrapped her arm around the bench, amazed that she was still in the boat. Ocean’s red-painted oars flashed in air, dipped in water. With her foot she indicated the bucket that was tied to the bench. Zanja let go and began bailing.

A breath hissed in the grinning woman’s teeth as she steadied the boat, which jumped this way and that like a confused rabbit. The other skiffs nearby jumped about also. The shoreline on each side behaved oddly—not slipping past, but remaining still. Yet at the same time, it seemed to be rippling, and the water’s surface rippled also, in an exactly contrary movement. Some of the Ocean People had been spilled into the water and were being hauled into boats again. Some were bailing, and others had stood up and were shouting a rhythmic chant while flapping their oars like wings.

Zanja looked wildly for Tadwell, but their mad voyage had left the angry figure planted on the bank out of her sight. The water grew more agitated. The witch cried a warning, and everyone shipped their oars and dropped to the decks. Zanja huddled in the cold water at the bottom of the boat, face to face with Ocean. The old woman’s expression was terrible: grim and desperate.

Zanja said, “The Otter Elder told me that you must return me to my place . . . or die with me.”

The water witch said nothing. The boat began to spin.

Zanja raised her head. A brown wave loomed over their spinning boat. Stones and logs flew along its crest as if from a catapult. The Ocean People were shrieking—a nearby boat flipped over.

Ocean reached one arm over the boat’s edge. Muscles bulged as she dug her hand into the water. The spinning stopped, and the boat sluggishly turned its bow to face the enormous wave.

They flew up. Zanja slid under the bench, braced her feet on the stern, and then found herself nearly standing, looking up at the serene, dawn-pink sky. The water witch clung to the bow like a spider, her toes and fingers somehow holding to the boat’s ribs. A dreadful thud of collision, and an entire tree flew past them. Stones rattled on the bow, and then it was raining gravel.

And now they were falling, and falling, and Zanja wanted to vomit, but there was no time for it. The jolt of their landing flattened her to the bottom. The boards warped. Water squirted through the cracks into her face. Then water poured in on both sides, and she struggled out from under the bench, lest she drown. The water witch already was rowing again. Zanja heard hoarse shouts and glanced at the shore. Sights flashed past, making no sense: a running man, flung up in the air like a toy; the trees of a woodland tumbling over like scythed wheat; the earth rippling as huge boulders were heaved up from the firmament; a cliff rising, or a valley sinking; dust rising like smoke into the rosy sky. She saw overturned boats, people clinging to floating logs in the swirling water. She saw water flow uphill. And now she saw Tadwell. They had somehow returned to where they had begun.

Ocean uttered a sharp command. Zanja shouted, “Take me ashore!” But the witch whacked Zanja’s leg with the bucket. As she began bailing again, Ocean leaned over the edge, and more water poured in. She grunted with effort, and dragged aboard—not a drowning person—the lexicon.

The boat began to spin again. The shoreline now seemed to be rapidly becoming more distant, even as the boat spun in place. A huddle of Ocean People clung to each other, thigh-deep in water. A few other boats were still afloat but unoccupied. In the distance, water began to flow downhill again, boiling, frothing, thick with dirt. Zanja retched from vertigo. But Ocean caught the crazy current with her oars, and the boat steadied.

What had been a clear, fast-moving river now seemed more like the muddy bottom of a nearly dry lake. Far to the east, where the sun’s red-flushed face had risen, Zanja could see what had been the harbor: the cliffs, the impossibly narrow entrance to the sea. Yesterday’s neatly arranged village had now been torn to pieces, the boats scattered across the heaving water.

They had not gone over the waterfall. They had not been flung into that pocket of ocean. Thus, it should have been impossible to see the harbor at all. But—somehow—they now were on a level with it.

Ocean’s boat ran aground.

Tadwell waded towards them through the thick water or thin mud and yanked Zanja out of the boat. Her shirt seams ripped. He dragged her through the cold soup, across shattered, sharp-edged stones, up a slope, the surface of which was cracked and fissured. He flung her down. He ripped the earring from her ear. He put his hands around her neck.

“You’ve done exactly what she wanted!” she gasped.

The hands closed around her throat. Zanja’s dagger had gotten itself into her hand. As Tadwell strangled her, she would fight him. That dagger, forged by earth magic far more powerful than his, might even be able to kill him. She flung the dagger away in a spasm of revulsion.

Then she realized, with no little irony, that she would die a hero after all—though no one would know it.

While she thought these things, she fought him for her life. But it was hopeless—he had the power of Shaftal in his hands.

“Tadwell! Let her go!”

“What are you doing here!” the G’deon roared.

“What are you doing!” the other man bellowed back at him. “You tear the land to pieces! You make yourself a murderer! For what?”

The back of Zanja’s head cracked on a rock. “Arel—go away,” she said, for she could breathe again. But her voice was like the scratching of a cricket, and neither of them noticed her.

“For Shaftal!” Tadwell shouted.

“For Shaftal? Only a madman could expect that to make sense!”

“This woman’s very existence threatens Shaftal! And yet I trusted—”

Zanja creaked, “Quiet!”

They both looked at her. Perhaps her rudeness had gotten their attention.

“Tadwell—kill me if you must. But don’t talk about it. Not to him, not ever.”

After a moment, Arel stepped back, and turned. He picked up Zanja’s dagger. He stiffened with surprise.

While Tadwell was flattening the landscape to make the river flow in reverse, Zanja had been on the water—not a restful place, certainly. But Arel had been riding the bucking back of the earth—it must have been him she had seen being thrown into the air. He had landed like a katrim, of course, and had kept running, directly towards the center of the madness, while trees fell and boulders exploded out of the soil all around him. The man certainly should be beyond surprise.

“Bloody hell,” Zanja said. “Nine curses of the nine gods. Shit.” She would have cursed in the water language also, had she known how to do it. Her ear hurt as if it had been torn from her head; her ribs felt like they had been hit with a club; and now the rocks of the deranged earth seemed to be embedded in her skull. She’d have a G’deon’s finger marks on her throat, too, if she survived this day.

Tadwell loomed over her, breathing heavily, his big hands poised to clutch her throat again. “Tad,” said Arel quietly. “She threw her dagger out of her own reach, so she couldn’t harm you.”

The G’deon made an irritated movement, as if a fly were buzzing around him. Arel said, “She stole a book—this seems beyond doubt. But why? She can’t sell it, and it contains no secrets. She is drawn to glyphs, but there are no obstacles to studying them. She could even have stolen a smaller book! What she did is no more reasonable than what you’re doing.”

Arel squatted, wisely keeping his distance. From head to foot he was covered with dirt. Zanja’s dagger dangled from one hand, and she saw the ripples in the metal as if she had never set eyes on that beautiful weapon before. Karis had invented the technique of folding the steel and pounding it flat, fusing the layers, over and over. The best metalsmiths in Meartown had been unable to imitate her work. Two hundred years in the future, this dagger would still be unique.

“Fire logic compels,” Arel said. “Its compulsions are beyond explanation. But they are never wrong.”

Tadwell’s head moved, just a small amount. He said to Zanja, “That old woman demanded the book?”

That old woman? At least Tadwell was belatedly guarding his tongue, but he had recognized his adversary. The water witch had deliberately communicated her presence to him by sitting upon the stones of the riverbank. Tadwell’s extraordinary rage had been inspired by Zanja, and by his anger at himself for trusting her. But only water magic could taunt an earth witch into such a massive act of destruction, and surely Ocean had known that.

Zanja said, “I was brought here so I would steal the book. But not because she wanted it. Because she wanted this—this cataclysm.”

“Rock man!” cried a voice from the river.

Though Tadwell certainly did not understand the water tongue, he turned sharply. Arel hastily rose and helped Zanja to her feet, murmuring in their language, “Your warning was inadequate, my sister! Why did you take that book?”

“Because I wanted it,” she said.

He uttered a strangled sound, as if the struggle between bewilderment and amusement were choking off his breath.

She took her dagger from him.

“That blade—!” he said.

“If Tadwell does kill me, bury my dagger in a place no one will find it.”

She looked towards what had been the river. The water witch, standing in her rocking boat, was holding up the massive lexicon. Her necklaces flashed and glittered in the light of the rising sun. Other survivors of the catastrophe waded dazedly towards her, towing boats or carrying oars. A man who had already reached Ocean helped her to dangle the book over the confused, muddy water.

Zanja said, “Tadwell, the lexicon must be ruined already, for it fell in the water, when—”

He grabbed Zanja’s arm, crushing flesh to bone. “The book has no value, then. It’s a fair trade!” He took a step towards the water, hauling her with him.

“You need not force me, sir.”

To her surprise, Tadwell let go of her and allowed her to turn back to Arel. A bleeding scrape on Arel’s high cheekbone was caked with dirt. His warrior’s braids, which Zanja had rebraided for him when she was imprisoned in his room, had begun to come loose from the bindings.

When Tadwell exiled her, as he certainly was about to do, she would never see any member of her tribe again. She felt the old loss, familiar, no more or less endurable: her people were gone, and had been gone, for nearly six years.

She said, “Farewell, my brother. The mountains shelter you, the waters nurture you, the gods remember you.”

He replied as was customary, in the language of Zanja’s dreams, and they embraced. He felt very real.

She turned away and walked beside Tadwell, back into the soupy mud. She stripped off the sodden Paladin’s waistcoat and dropped it behind her. Tadwell, a walking boulder beside her, began to speak.

“I know I can’t return here,” she said, interrupting him.

He splashed forward two more steps. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

“Tell him what?”

“Perhaps I seem stupid—”

“Somewhat,” she said.

He uttered a harsh snort. “Zanja na’Tarwein, your tribe is gone. I had wondered if it might be true, and now I’m certain. But you didn’t tell Arel.”

Each step Zanja took felt like sinking into a quagmire—there was no solidity here, just a morass. She said at last, “My people, these water people, the giants of the south, the other mountain tribes—the western tribes—we all will be extinct some day. For to be alive is to change, and to fail to change makes death certain.”

“What is that? A poem?”

“It is a poem not yet written, by a poet people will always suspect might be crazy.”