Water Logic (47 page)

Zanja puts something on the floor beside the bed and leaves the room. Several Paladins are here. Among them is Seth. Seth is breathing. She stands where she is. She is steady. Her hands are at her sides. It is not right for them to be here, Clement thinks.

“Wait in the hall,” Karis says. She is not talking to Clement. The people leave the room. Seth stands where she is.

Karis says, “Seth. She has not asked for you.”

Seth says, “Clem, do you want me to leave?”

Clement says, “It is not right for you to be here.”

Seth breathes. She turns and leaves the room.

“It is not right for you to be here,” Clement says.

Karis says, “I decide what’s right, little though I like it.” Her hand is on Clement’s shoulder, and it is heavy. Her shoulder hurts. Her other hand is undoing Clement’s buckles and buttons. Karis puts her hand inside, on Clement’s skin.

Clement remembers Seth, how Seth was, how she was, how she could not hold her. And she cries out.

Norina Truthken enters the room.

“Don’t let her—” says Clement. “There is a horror—”

She remembers. The pain. The thundering clock. The healer-torturer. She remembers. Gabian gazing solemnly at her, awaiting the answer to a question, his soft face against her breast. Will we be or will we not be, and will we be able to choose our lives? We will, Gabe, but I never will. She remembers. She cuts her friend’s throat. Her friend’s hot blood pours onto her hands. She watches her die, and loves her, and hates her. When she betrays the betrayer, she betrays herself. Loyalty is all she has, all she has ever had. Without loyalty, she will now betray them all. She has betrayed them.

The horror gnaws her entrails, and she screams.

“Drink this,” says Karis.

“Talk to me,” says the Truthken.

Norina and Emil had arrived with Ellid and Gilly and an officer Seth did not recognize. When Clement began screaming, they took the lamp that was in the hall and retreated to a room in which were stored several dozen soldiers’ chests. They sat on chests, and Gilly put his hands over his ears.

Emil said, “Commander Ellid sent for us after Commander Sevan explained to her what had happened to Clement. We were meeting downstairs, trying to decide what to do.”

Seth would like to have been there when Zanja appeared out of the shadows and said—she didn’t know what she had said, probably something courteous and mundane.

After a long silence, Gilly said, “How long will take for them to fix what’s wrong with her?”

Emil said, “I don’t know.”

“The time we have must be enough,” Zanja said, “for we won’t get any more.”

Seth would rather have been in the room with Clement, fruitlessly holding her hand. At least that hollow, weary screaming wouldn’t be echoing inside her head, yanking at her will: do something, do something, do something now. If Clement had been an animal, Seth would have ended her suffering already. Would that be an error of mercy?

“How much longer?” cried Gilly.

Seth sat down beside him and took his hand. He said, “I’ve nursed her through some painful injuries. Her mouth might draw tight, and if it was particularly bad, she might make a sound, like a grunt, very quiet.”

“This is a different kind of pain, I guess.”

Ellid said something in Sainnese. Gilly replied with harsh, barking words. Seth didn’t know what it was about, but no one spoke in this way to a commander, certainly not a clerk like Gilly. Yet Ellid replied quietly to his angry words, and Gilly rubbed his ugly face with his hands and replied in reasonable tones. The other commander, Commander Sevan, spoke also. They were discussing how to solve a problem, Seth thought. She heard a name, Euphan, several times.

Zanja and Emil sat quietly with their arms around each other, not telling each other what had happened, not talking at all. Seth had never seen Emil so unworried.

She began to feel like she was alone in the room.

Clement’s awful cries fell silent. The people waiting in the store
room stopped talking. The flickering light of the lamp—a plain, practical
object, like most soldiers’ things—illuminated their faces but surrounded them in shifting shadows. Seth became aware of her throbbing feet, her aching legs, the dragging weariness of tension and travel.

The hallway outside their door heaved a sigh. Emil stood up hastily, then the door was opened, and Karis filled the door frame. “Emil, don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what? Kiss you?” he said.

Karis let her breath out, and they embraced, and Emil murmured, “Oh my dear, you’ve done so well.”

Seth had never found a family in Basdown, had never found a place she wanted to be more than she wanted to be in High Meadow, and she had not much wanted to be there either. Now she had finally chosen, and kept choosing and rechoosing the same thing, over and over, in all different kinds of ways.

Speaking over Emil’s shoulder, Karis said, “Seth, she wants to talk to you.”

Seth stood up and went out into the silent hallway. Then she turned back and said into the room, “Gilly, do you think she’ll want Gabian?”

He bounded to his feet. She continued down the hall, to the door to Clement’s room, which was ajar. The Truthken stood guard outside, where a soldier ought to be. Norina glanced at Seth without speaking. Her shoulders were resting against the scarred, unfinished plank wall. She leaned her head back, and shut her eyes. Whatever she had done in there had been exhausting.

Seth went in the room. Clement was standing, peering into a tiny metal mirror no larger than the palm of her hand, smoothing her cropped hair. Seth turned up the wick of the lamp that stood on the tabletop, and the barren room’s shadows retreated. The vessel Zanja had carried from Essikret to this room now lay on its side on the floor, empty, its cork halfway across the room. It contained water, Zanja had said. And it contained time.

Clement turned. Before, she had looked healthy but lifeless. Now she looked drawn and exhausted, and her eyes were hollow with pain.

“Gilly’s getting Gabian,” Seth said.

“Will he remember me?” Clement looked around the room as though wondering how she had gotten there, or whether it was the right place. Then, she looked down at the wreck of her boots. She said, “They’ll make me general tomorrow. What they needed me to prove, I’ve proven now. Bloody hell.” She took a breath. “A while ago you were here, and I made you leave.”

There was a silence. Seth said, “I wanted to be the one who tells you that I’ve let one of your soldiers be killed. Damon, of Prista’s company.”

Clement’s mouth grew tight. She made a small sound, like a grunt. Out in the hallway, Norina stirred.

Seth said, “He was a kind, funny man, and I was lucky to be his friend. He was becoming a flower farmer. He died protecting me, but it shouldn’t have happened.”

“We need more people like him, not fewer.” After a moment Clement added, “Very little has been explained to me yet.”

“Probably because it would take hours.”

There were voices in the hall. Norina said to someone, “Not yet.”

Seth said, “I won’t let go of you again.”

Clement took a breath. “Seth—”

“I understand that you can’t make room for me—I understand why that’s impossible. So I’ll make room for myself. I know how to help the Shaftali love soldiers, and how to help the soldiers love peace. And the Peace Committee will find other people to help, and there must be other soldiers like Damon. One day soon, you’ll realize your people are safe. You’ll notice that you’ve gone an entire week without worrying.”

Clement turned away. Seth had said too much. She should have waited, waited for other things to be settled. The general put on her hat, which was clean, with its insignia polished to glittering brilliance, but destroyed by weather, so shapeless Seth doubted it could even be reblocked. Clement glanced down at her wrecked boots again.

She turned to Seth at last, and there she was: not the general, but Clem. But it was the general who said, “I’ll give you whatever you need.”

Seth nodded, and turned towards Norina, to tell her that the next person could come in. But Clem said, “Seth.”

She turned back.

“It takes two to hold on. You’ll have to teach me how, probably.”

Seth went to her, and put her arms around her. She felt a surprise in that lean frame, then a relaxing. Clem’s head became a weight on Seth’s shoulder. Her hat fell off. The back of her tunic was damp, sweat-soaked from her ordeal. Seth felt Clem’s arms lift, felt her hands take hold of her. They held on.

Chapter 36

Clement, Gilly, and Ellid walked with them to the gate, and Gabian chortled sleepily in Clement’s arms. Occasionally, he seemed to notice anew that his mother had returned to him, and he would utter a loud announcement: “Yow!”

“Very strange,” Clement would reply to him. Or she would ask him a question, such as, “And how exactly have you managed to become twice as heavy as I remember?”

The wagon awaited them, with the horses hanging their heads, shifting their weight from side to side. Karis said to one of the Paladins, “I’ll walk.”

Zanja put a hand upon the Paladin’s arm before he could begin a pointless protest. “Master Paladin, she’s finished with pretending to be manageable.”

He uttered a snort, the first sign of humor in any of these grim Paladins. At Zanja’s side, Emil said quietly, “If you please, Farber, drive the wagon.”

“Of course, Emil,” he said.

Karis and Emil began the tedious bidding of farewell, a Shaftali custom Zanja could participate in if she had to but would never understand. The Ashawala’i had merely bidden each other farewell, and only made a ritual of it when they knew they would never see each other again. Perhaps this was the custom of a people who expected every day to be their last. And when the Sainnites encountered it in this distant land, they had not recognized it as their own.

Clement took Seth’s hand and spoke to her, bidding her a private farewell, Zanja thought. But they looked into each other’s eyes, and then Seth turned her head to say over her shoulder, “I’ll come to Travesty in the morning. Would someone call the Peace Committee together for breakfast with me?”

“I’ll do it,” said Zanja.

“That won’t be necessary,” said Gilly. “The committee is here in the garrison, all of them, scattered in various companies. I’ll send some notes around and have all of them meet you somewhere.”

Seth stared at him, and then looked at Emil, as if to ask whether it was really true. Emil said, “I’ll have Garland send over some decent food for you.”

“It took those two long enough,” Karis muttered, as they started into the city behind the rattling wagon, with the other Paladins walking close to her. Her bandaged feet were in slippers that someone at High Meadow Farm had hastily made for her. She was not limping, though she was walking very carefully. Her feet had bled all over Shaftal in the last few months, and many a farmer would soon be surprised by the inexplicable fertility of fields she had crossed.

Emil took Zanja’s elbow. A lamp burned on a nearby corner, and she saw tears shining on his face. “Gods know you’ve got plenty to weep about,” she said.

“Saleen,” he said. “Of course he’s dead. But I still expected to see him.”

A raven must be killed and fed to the general so she will continue to live in agony. A tribe must be sacrificed to guarantee the survival of all tribes. The present moment comes to us through unnoticed actions of the past—too many to count, mostly unknown and unnoticed, and sometimes unavoidably terrible. We give ourselves up to the future, one drop of blood at a time, whether we choose to do it or not. That is the truth, Zanja thought, little though we can endure it.

Karis said, “I might have sent for you right away. I might have stayed with Clement when I thought Zanja was dead.” She was talking, Zanja realized belatedly, to Norina, who walked beside her.

Norina said, “I’m tired, not angry. You are the G’deon. You did what you did.”

They took several careful steps, and the Paladins behind them, too exhausted to pay proper attention, began to outpace them, then realized what they were doing and fell back. Fortunately, their ineffectual protection was not necessary.

Norina said, “If you had been more rational, we’d have had the same outcome, though perhaps with less anxiety and effort.”

“You’re wrong,” Zanja said.

“And the correct answer is?”

“Only this moment can be changed, Madam Truthken.”

“You’re both right,” Karis said. “At my next irrational moment, I’ll endeavor to behave rationally.”

Travesty came into sight, so extravagantly lit up that Emil missed a step, perhaps appalled by the expense of all that lamp oil. Karis said, “Garland’s been baking, do you smell it? And J’han is with Medric and Leeba, waiting by the door.”

Zanja said, “Well, let her run to you—running is what she does best.”

The watchdogs began a glad barking, and Paladins rushed out, and a little girl came shrieking down the road into her mother’s arms. Medric, close behind her, clutched Zanja’s hands, crying, “What have you learned?” Then he turned around, ran to the wagon, and flung himself into it.

Zanja turned to Emil, who was wiping his face on his sleeve. “Do you suppose that the people who believe the Sainnites are a blight on Shaftal will be surprised to learn that they themselves are Sainnites? Oh, and there’s a glyphic lexicon in the wagon.”

She added after a moment, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you speechless, my brother. Is your heart still beating?”

“I truly don’t know. By Shaftal—” With tears still on his face, but laughing, Emil went to the wagon, and Medric shoved the lexicon into his arms.