Water Logic (42 page)

Tadwell snorted again. “Aren’t all poets crazy?”

They were more than knee-deep in mud, now. Grandmother Ocean stood in her boat waiting for them. The boat’s prow was gashed, scarred, and dented by the objects the maddened river had catapulted at them. The ancient woman gazed down at them without expression. The water man who held the bowline was mud-brown from head to knee. He grinned, and some of the mud on his face flaked away. Then he knelt, not in respect to the G’deon, but to offer Zanja his knee as a step into the boat. Tadwell stopped her with a hand on the shoulder. “The book first,” he said.

Ocean’s boat rocked as the book’s great weight was transferred, from her arms to the kneeling man’s hands to Tadwell’s massive shoulder. The lexicon was not muddy at all—it didn’t even look wet. Tadwell would take it back to its vault and lock it safely away, to be burned by the Sainnites.

Zanja stepped up onto the man’s knee and stepped into the boat. Pain stabbed her side. Gasping, she stumbled to the bench. Holding her ribs, she turned to watch the G’deon return to shore, carrying the book on his shoulder.

All around him, the landscape seemed to be resolving its elemental confusion: the earth was settling out of the water, and the water was separating from the earth. Mudflats were appearing, crisscrossed by tiny, eastward-flowing streams and channels.

Arel met Tadwell on firm ground and offered his hand. Zanja thought Tadwell would not take it, but he did.

Ocean dug in her oars.

Chapter 31

The G’deon and the Speaker had disappeared from sight. Ocean rowed laboriously through the soupy water, until she seemed to find a sluggish current and shipped her oars. Though Ocean was an unbelievably old woman, Zanja didn’t offer to help with the rowing. The chill lifted under the influence of the rising sun. The devastated landscape ceased to be amazing and become only wearying. The pain in Zanja’s ribs grew worse, and she moved to the boat’s bottom, seeking a position that eased the pain. Blood from her torn earlobe stiffened on her neck as it dried; it seemed too much trouble to wash it off.

With her head leaning against the boat’s wooden edge, carefully positioned to avoid pressing the bruises in her skull, Zanja closed her eyes against the brilliant, dust-suffused sunshine.

“What did you do to me?” she asked, remembering the water she had drunk from Ocean’s shell. She would have complied without being bespelled, had Ocean bothered to explain what she was doing. But perhaps water witches couldn’t explain, like Karis couldn’t. Earth bloods know what they know, and gods help anyone who gets in their way . . .

Zanja chuckled and woke herself up. Sunlight glared, and she shaded her eyes with a heavy hand. She still couldn’t see Ocean. “Grandmother, why have you done these things? How will you recompense me?”

The boat creaked softly, the muddy water splashed heavily, and the witch gave no answer. The oars lay where she had placed them. Her bench was empty. Zanja was alone again—utterly alone.

She shut her eyes and slept.

Someone was calling. Zanja opened her eyes and sat up slightly. She saw a wide, smooth stretch of blue-green water that reflected the sun. Her unguided boat had drifted into the harbor.

“Traveler, the tide turns!”

She looked in the direction of the voice and found herself an armspan from the tarred hull of the Ocean People’s ship. A man dangled from the ship’s side, one foot on a flimsy rope ladder, and the other heel hooked over the skiff’s edge, tethering it. “Climb, traveler!”

She fought herself to her feet, breathing fast to diffuse the pain. Her wet clothing hung from her, and her boots were heavy with water. She discovered that the leather boot fastenings had become too gummy and soft to be untied, so she took her small knife out of the boot sheath, sliced the straps, hacked loose the sheath, and flung the boots into the puddle at the bottom of the boat. Holding the sheathed knife in her teeth, gasping with pain, she began climbing the rope ladder. The man’s weight at the bottom of the ladder held it steady.

At the deck rail, she hesitated. The ship’s deck was in such tumult that she feared another disaster might have occurred while she slept. The men below her on the ladder said, “We must hurry—the wind will soon turn.” She heaved herself over the rail, lost her balance, and was crashed into by a running sailor. She clutched the rail, gasping. Her helper hopped to the deck and hauled in, rolled up, and stowed the ladder. He pointed towards the stern and gave her a push.

She went where he pointed. She found a place to sit among coils of line and bundles of canvas.

To the west lay a vast stretch of devastation. Dust floated over the churned landscape like brown fog. The new, far more distant cliffs looked raw and unfinished. Tracts of trees lay on their sides, their roots grasping at air. The lovely waterfall was no more. Upon the new shore, some of the water people were salvaging logs and cut firewood from the pileup of debris, while in an improvised pen, their youngest children rolled and shrieked in the mud. In the water, rowboats clustered around sinking houseboats, from which people threw everything they could salvage. On rafts of logs lay piles of rescued objects: cushions, baskets, barrels, and bodies. Zanja’s heart hollowed out. What disaster had she brought upon these people with her passion for a book of lovely pictures?

A body stirred. Another rose up and staggered to a cask to get a drink. She shut her eyes, relieved. Ocean had warned her people, of course, and they had been prepared for the cataclysm.

The ship creaked like the knees of an old person climbing a stair. Zanja opened her eyes to find that her view had shifted; the ship was turning on its anchor, and the sailors replied with an enthusiastic, bellowing chorus that resolved into a song. In clusters they began heaving at ropes. At the sound of flapping canvas, Zanja looked up and saw a sail being raised. The canvas sighed and then cupped like a hand. The ship came alive. Astonished, Zanja watched the wrecked village begin to recede. The ship moved like a living creature, but with muscles of wind. How quiet it was!

But as the ship neared the opening to the sea, the booming, pounding crashes of the waves against the rocks became deafening. A woman far aloft in the rigging screamed instructions. People yanked on a great wooden wheel. The ship plunged into chaos. It bucked and groaned, and the lookout’s precarious perch swung wildly back and forth as the vessel wallowed in troughs and reared over breakers. Then they slipped through the fissure, and the ocean opened up before them.

Yesterday morning, from that very cliff, Zanja had observed the ship’s arrival. Since then the earth had shifted its foundations, but her situation was in no way improved. The stolen lexicon had been taken from her. The water witch had disappeared, and Zanja was an exile. Karis and the rest of her family remained two hundred years out of reach. Zanja understood nothing.

Zanja did not know where she was being taken, but to travel like this was marvelous. She stood at the rail as they flew away from the grasping waves of the coastline. A stark, water-rounded stone island slipped past them, and several dozen gigantic, slug-shaped creatures raised their whiskered faces to bark at them like a pack of angry dogs. They passed a larger island, where dwarfed trees clung to bare rock. After that, there were no more islands; just open sea.

While Zanja marveled, some sailors set up a sunshade and went to sleep. Others worked on the rolling deck, checking and coiling the lines, mending fish nets and hanging them in the wind to dry, while some played a music game with tiny, piping flutes.

No one spoke to her. They did not seem oppressed by catastrophe, though perhaps their loud laughter was their own way of screaming at the elementals whose war had wrecked their peaceful village.

The land and landscape that had shaped Zanja’s life began to seem small, and its remoteness made her feel quite unmoored. When the Sainnites first spotted—or would spot—Shaftal, it would look like this: a dark line of land, a promise that their terrible voyage would soon end. By the time they had realized—would realize—what a dangerous shore they approached, they would not be able to turn away, and most of their ships would be wrecked. They would resent and hate Shaftal for good reason.

The sun sank behind that deceptive promise, turning Shaftal gold, which faded to purple. The land melted into the sea. A sailor brought Zanja a supper of boiled fish and slimy seaweed. She lay on her back, floating in wonder as the universe filled up with stars.

She awakened to the sound of raucous whistling. A few sailors at the bow made that happy racket as the sun’s edge lifted above the horizon. Others awoke, and some stamped a rhythm on the deck, and the stamping became dancing as the swollen sun escaped the sea.

One of the dancers was Grandmother Ocean.

Zanja stood up, then staggered like a drunk. The ship had begun to climb and descend steep swells that came at them from the northeast. But the dancers made the rolling deck part of their dance, and the old woman walked towards Zanja as if on solid ground.

“Where have you been, Grandmother?” Zanja asked. The water language had no words for greeting or farewell.

“I have been to a good salt marsh filled with birds, crabs, and clams.”

“But your people—!” Yesterday’s dreamy acceptance had dissipated. A pain struck Zanja, and she cried out, “My people—!”

“The ocean is great,” the old woman said, irrelevantly.

The witch gestured, and Zanja looked across the restless waters, all the way to the horizon. The horizon made the edges of a vast bowl, filled to overflowing. Above it lay another bowl, the sky. The sun and this arrogant ship were the only sailors in two parallel seas without shores.

Zanja’s gaze returned to the old woman, who continued to rock peacefully with the ship’s tossing. “I admit I’m insignificant,” Zanja said. “But—”

A sailor gave a shout, and people swarmed up the rigging as a wave rose up before them like a looming giant. The ship boomed hollowly, and water sprayed across the deck. Flung off balance, Zanja clung to the rail, baffled by this rough sea beneath the sunlit sky.

The water witch, who ignored all Zanja’s important questions, answered a trivial one she had not asked. “The water feels a distant storm,” she said.

Some people had drawn near, five bare-chested sailors whose muscular arms and shoulders belied the seeming ease of the ship’s movement. “Throw her overboard,” Ocean told them.

And they did.

Zanja came to the surface, gasping, in the hollow between two moving hills of water. One hill came at her and she slipped up its side. From the top, she saw the ship flying away from her on a freshening wind. Though its rigging was crowded with sailors, they were preoccupied. No one was even looking at her. Water splashed in her face, into her open mouth, and some entered her lungs. It burned. She began coughing helplessly. Sliding down the watery hillside, she went under. With a panicked kick of her legs she rose to the surface, where she again climbed a wave. This time she turned her face away from the crest so it would not break in her face. The ship sailed briskly out of sight.

Her belt hung from her hips, dragging her down. She unbuckled it and let it go: the two blades Karis had forged for her, the glyph cards Emil had given her in the early days when none of them even suspected how these new friendships would reshape their lives. How could she let these treasures go? But they were gone already. She tore off her clothes, her fingers already numb with cold. Naked but more buoyant, she climbed up and slid down the waves, over and over, until it began to seem like the waves were standing still, while she moved over them by a power she could not control. Soon she shuddered so violently from cold that she could scarcely continue to swim. She became desperately thirsty. Her legs hung from her, heavy burdens dragging her under, and she could not undo them and let them go.

A wave enveloped her. She emerged into a froth of wind-whipped water. Black clouds stamped towards her and let loose a torrent of harsh rain. A distant lightning bolt stabbed into the sea. Water mixed with wind; rain raised more water as it fell; and Zanja began to drown even as she swam desperately to keep her head in the air.

Thunder detonated on top of her and a bolt of white fire plunged into the water. Her light-blinded eyes retained an afterimage. A bowed shape? A boater pulling at the oars?

A curling wave shoved her into a quiet, cold darkness that asked only that she give her last breath in exchange for relief from the exhausting struggle. But she flapped her ungainly limbs and moved out of the black peace into the screaming wind, where she flailed her arms as though she could swim in the watery air.

A hand grabbed her wrist.

She looked into a pale, terrified, determined, and familiar face. A Basdown cow doctor.

Seth grabbed Zanja’s elbow. She let go with her first hand, and then clamped it under Zanja’s armpit. She jerked Zanja out of the water’s muscular grip. They sprawled into the flooded bottom of a skiff.

“Zanja?” Seth gasped.

Zanja vomited seawater. Seth weakly pounded her back, and Zanja’s vision went black, but when she came out of her swoon she could breathe again. A wave tilted the small boat sideways, and water gushed in. Seth shrieked, clutching wildly at the boat’s rim. But Zanja, though stupid with cold and exhaustion, had noticed the old woman in the prow, who was guiding the four oarsmen with vehement gestures. Each stroke of the oars placed the boat in a safe place upon the violent water: up, in, through, and past the foaming waves. They would not drown.

The witch turned her face up into the torrent and shouted. A weighted rope flew out of darkness; the oarsmen passed it to Seth, who fumbled at the tangled harness, then tied it onto Zanja. She was hoisted high into the wet air in jerky alternations of movement and stillness. The hull of the ship swung close, then away. Now she dangled near the deck rail, the wind pushing her back and forth, and she saw three sailors leaning on a rope, their bare feet clinging to the wet, tossing deck as though they were attached to it by pegs. Zanja’s rope was caught with a long-handled hook, and she was dropped to the heaving deck. Someone yanked off the harness, and she dragged herself to the mast, which swung through black sky, its fittings jangling, all but one sail tightly furled. The ship groaned with effort.

People clung to the rigging, wrestled with the ship’s wheel, and huddled in shelter from the waves, ready to take action when it was needed.

These ocean people wore the same skirts and shell necklaces as before, but they were not the same people. This was an old, weathered ship, but it was larger than the first, and many of its fittings were of metal rather than wood: they jangled in the wind. It was not the same ship. Nor was this the same weather. When Zanja sank into the wave, the sun had been shining in a clear sky, but she had emerged into storm. Seth had come to her, but she also had come to Seth. Between sinking and rising, she had come home.