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the pattern woven by your ancestors, and I wondered
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Water Logic - Laurie J. Marks - Elemental Logic 03
what the people of the future would have to say about you.
Would they say that you were woven into the pattern of
the past just as the pattern of the future was woven from
you? I realize now that when I said those words, I was
using water logic. I should have paid more attention.
That was the sixty-third day after your return from the
dead. The ice has melted, the rains have fallen, and the
flood has receded. Yet Medric commented wryly only
yesterday, We re all drowning in water logic. And then I
cut open the spine of the book, and your letter fell into my
hand.
Tonight I can t sleep for thinking of you and wondering
whether or when you will return, or whether, as your
letter suggested, we ll know your fate when Karis finds
your weapons.
I want to think of you writing me a letter, or walking
among the preoccupied students of Kisha, in that way you
have of heeding everything while seeming completely
uninvolved. I want to know how you met Coles, and
whether he was in fact a poet, or just a man of too much
talent and not enough sense, like Medric. I want to be
with you when you finally view the sea not in
Hanishport, where most people see it, but from the wild
southern coastline, where those broken battlements and
crashing waves give sailors the horrors. Yet some clever
coastal peoples manage to do it, and surely that requires
more than skill and luck they must have water magic.
Karis has gone to the west, and her ravens have stopped
talking. I read your letter to my raven, though, and
Medric says she heard it. Now I have sat up half the night
writing to and thinking of you. The Travesty is a big,
echoing building. Its heart is gone. Come home, my dear, I
beg you.
Zanja awoke from sleep and found herself in the place Emil had
written about. The night before, when she d first stood reeling on the
cliff s edge, she saw the starry sky sweep down to join the glowing
surface of a restless horizon, and then flow towards her, almost to
her very feet. Even in the treeless grasslands of the south, Zanja had
not encountered the terrible, vast emptiness that yawned before her
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Water Logic - Laurie J. Marks - Elemental Logic 03
here, where it seemed she could take a single step and fall into the
watery sky.
By daylight, she could distinguish water from sky, though the water
continued forever. In the middle distance the glare of light from the
surface dazzled her, but closer to shore she could glimpse the sea
bottom, where was rooted a ropy forest of underwater trees. At the
surface, their bronze leaves floated in the intersection of water and
air. Though the water was churned to froth by the battle between
ocean and shore, here the struggle became graceful: the dense stems
swayed like lithe dancers with their hands spread to capture the sun.
Back and forth they swayed with the rhythm of the swells.
In the tops of those sea trees she saw a splash, and then she saw the
face of a creature that seemed to gaze at her with the same curiosity
and wonder with which she looked down at it. An otter many times
larger than those she had seen in rivers. They dove and swam among
the stems of their underwater forest, then emerged to loll upon their
backs, wrapped in seaweed. Zanja felt like she could leap into the
water and live with them in their exquisitely beautiful world. Surely
such friendly and joyful creatures would welcome all strangers.
But when she lay on her belly to look cautiously over the cliff s edge,
she saw what separated her from them. Shrieking white birds had
found nooks in the vertical cliffs in which to lay their eggs, and they
fought viciously to protect these perilous nests. Lower down, the sea
spray began, and the wet rocks looked like black glass. Lower still,
waves smashed against black boulders. These waves and rocks would
destroy most of the Sainnites flotilla, leaving them with enough
people to survive, but not enough to decisively conquer this new land.
A large ship with a huge, square sail appeared it had been
sheltering behind one of the small offshore islands. Zanja watched
with fresh astonishment as it sailed directly towards the inhospitable
coast, followed by a soaring retinue of long-winged white birds. At a
distance the ship seemed to move by its own mysterious will, but as
it drew closer, Zanja could see figures working frantically upon its
deck and crawling up and down its rigging. Then the ship seemed
amazing in a different way, in the precise coordination of those many
sailors, in lovely harmony, effort, and effrontery.
They sailed directly into the cliff. The sailors seemed too busy to
notice their peril. The spray and froth seemed to consume their ship.
It disappeared. It had slipped impossibly into an invisible gap in the
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Water Logic - Laurie J. Marks - Elemental Logic 03
cliff face the harbor entrance.
Zanja s route along the ragged cliff soon came to seem nearly as
precarious as the ship s and frustrating, for she repeatedly
encountered impassible ravines and rock falls from which she could
only retreat, with the baleful donkey dragging behind. She expended
many steps but made little progress, and it was well past midday
when she could finally see Secret Harbor. To the east, at the narrow
harbor mouth, the booming ocean muscled through the cliff s narrow
doorway. To the west a waterfall poured over the cliff, a floating
gauze scarf that seemed an unlikely source for the distant, ominous
roar. Yet, despite all this agitation, the waters pocketed between the
cliffs lay smooth and still. Here in that protected harbor, the water
people had built their floating town.
In some folk stories Zanja had heard and told, there was a city of
boats, where a person might live from birth to death without setting
foot on solid ground. Now she saw it, not a city, but a tiny village of
floating houses. Down narrow avenues between clusters of houses,
boats were rowed briskly to the anchored sailing ship, where laden
baskets were lowered to them by rope. The rowers returned to the
town to deliver the goods to the houses. People worked busily on the
decks as wheeling birds dove after the offal tossed into the water.
Smoke trailed cozily from stovepipes. There would be fresh-caught
fish for dinner tonight.
But unless Zanja could discover how to reach the floating town, she
would eat hard bread and salted beef again. There must be a path,
she muttered to her reluctant companion, the donkey, who was
unable to find any grass in the rocky soil and uttered a hopeless
snuffle. They might get drinking water from that waterfall somehow
but they also need wood for burning and building. They must be
able to climb up to where the trees grow.
The day had ended by the time she found the pathway she knew
must be there. The twilight sky s blue was turning to black, and
lantern light from the village lay across the water in restless,
fractured reflections. She had traveled nearly to the waterfall, and its
roar filled her ears and mind, silencing her worries and impatience,
filling her with a giddy exhilaration. She recognized it now: water
magic.
A string of rowboats and a flat barge were tethered below at the base
of the path. Above, near the cliff s edge, was a curing yard for messy
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Water Logic - Laurie J. Marks - Elemental Logic 03
piles of firewood and neat stacks of stickered lumber. Zanja led the
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