Ventus Part 25

As soon as he was out of sight of the camp, Jordan sat down and tried to re-establish his link with Armiger. This time, it took all his concentration to bring the voices to him; Tamsin seemed to be a bad influence on his concentration. When the voices did return, he found that Armiger and the queen were now discussing military logistics. The terms meant nothing to Jordan, so he stood up with a sigh, and went to gather the wood.

When Jordan staggered back his first load of sticks, Suneil was sitting on the wagon's back step, but Tamsin was nowhere to be seen. "I apologize for my niece," said Suneil. "She lost her parents and sister recently. The shock has brought all her emotions to the surface."

"The war?"

Suneil nodded. "The war. We fled Iapysia three months ago to escape it. Now we're on our way back. They say the queen is defeated... maybe things have settled down."

"I don't know," said Jordan. "I know you can't run away forever." He longed for home. Once he had gotten Armiger to raise this curse that was on him, he would return to Castor's manor.

"Well spoken," said Suneil. "You were patient with her just now. I'm glad. She strikes out, but if you strike back, she'll shatter like gla.s.s. Just remember that. I know it's an imposition, but--"

Jordan waved a hand. "No, it's fine. These things happen. We have to help one another."

Suneil grinned. "Thanks. And thanks for the wood. We're going to need a lot more, though, when we get to the border."

"Why?"

Suneil glanced at him, raised an eyebrow. "Well, you said you're from Iapysia, you'd know there's no trees in the desert, wouldn't you?"

"Uh... yes, of course."

Suneil gave him an odd little smile, and walked away.

18.

Two days' travel brought them deep into the barren hills that signified the border of Iapysia. He was confident now that the Winds did not know where he was. The gauze continued to protect him, and hence the people he travelled with. That was good; but he couldn't wear it for the rest of his life. He would have to find Armiger soon--or Calandria would, and either way there would be an end to this.

He was riding up front with Suneil when the wagon topped the crest of a particularly long hill, and Suneil reined in the horses. Standing to look at the vista below, Suneil sighed and said, "Home."

Jordan stood too. Sun had broken through a rent in the autumn clouds, illuminating the valley below within a vast golden rectangle. Within this frame, the land fell in a series of green steps to a landscape of gra.s.s and forest cradling a long sinuous lake. The road wound down switchbacks to the floor of the valley, and vanished beyond the sunlit frame at the far end of the lake, where the valley seemed to open out into a plain.

Jordan could see some blue-grey squares and lines near the lake. "Are those ruins?"

Suneil nodded. "That valley lies in Iapysia. The desert starts beyond it."

"It's beautiful. n.o.body lives here?" He could see no sign of settlement, though he could easily imagine dozens of farms fitting in near the lake.

"The Winds do. It's okay to visit, but no one stays."

They sat down again, and Suneil flicked the reins. Over the past couple of days they had talked a lot about the local countryside, and Suneil had grilled Jordan at length about the war between Ravenon and the Seneschals. Jordan had spun a long tale about the destruction of Armiger's army and the death of the general, pretending he had heard it from other travellers.

His own eavesdropping had yielded few results, since the queen had not met with Armiger since their first encounter. She was busy with preparations for the siege, and it seemed Armiger was content to wait.

Jordan had reluctantly admitted to Suneil that he was not from Iapysia. His Memnonian accent didn't match his story. Suneil had asked no further questions, but he had also volunteered nothing about his own past. Jordan let his curiosity lead him now, though, as it seemed a natural time to ask. "Tell me about the war. And the queen. All I've heard is that she's mad, and that the great houses revolted."

Suneil nodded. "I suppose your countrymen think it's a scandal that we're deposing our queen." He scowled at the road that rolled down before them. "We do too. Even the soldiers in Parliament's army. But things got... out of control."

Jordan waited for more. After a while, Suneil said, "Iapysia's a very old country, but it was one of the last places settled. At the beginning of the world, they say the Winds made Ventus--and they're not finished making it yet. But they didn't make Man. Some say we made ourselves, some that we came from the stars, and some say that renegade Winds created us as an act of defiance. That's what I believe. How else to explain what Queen Galas has done?

"The first people spread across the world from one original tribe. They had great powers, and they wanted Ventus as their own. They fought the Winds, because the Winds were still sculpting Ventus, and would not let the people build cities or cultivate the land. Men defied them, but the Winds beat them down, until at last there were only scattered communities, who learned to get along with the Winds by obeying their laws. We learned to stay out of the Winds' way, and appease them when we went too far. Your general Armiger went too far--they took notice of him, and swatted him like an insect. There's a lesson in that.

"In the early days after our defeat, some folk wandered to the edge of the desert. There they found the desals hard at work, flooding the sands to strain salt from ocean water that poured in from the t.i.tans' Gates--those are the Wind-built dams at the seaside. They pumped the newly freshened water deep into the earth. We know now that it comes up again through springs all across the continent. Back then, it was just another miraculous and incomprehensible activity of the rulers of the world. Our people huddled on the edge of it, watching the floods in awe.

"Iasin the first, ancestor of all the kings of Iapysia, was the man who realized that the desals were utterly indifferent to the plants and animals that struggled within the flood plains. The ocean water brought nutrients from the sea, the desert sands strained the salt, and fresh water poured up and out through a thousand channels into rivers that flow into your lands, or that vanish into bottomless lakes. A thousand kinds of life thrived during the flooding, and when the t.i.tans' Gates closed to draw strength for another great gasp, they withered and died. Iasin led his people into the heart of the inundated lands, and they began to grow huge crops there, in open defiance of the Winds.

"Our people have always believed that we have a silent pact with the desals. All our laws were made to preserve the pact. As far as we can see, the desals will always use the desert to purify water for the continent. What was in the beginning, will be always. So it should be with our laws, our kings and our traditions.

"The laws are harsh. They dictate everything from our professions to the size of the family. Our cities have grown only so big as the desals will tolerate, and can grow no more. We cannot divert the Winds' rivers to suit our needs. The n.o.bility trace their lineage back to the time of Iasin, as do people in the guilds and trades. All life is fixed. While your nations have been in a constant uproar of change and growth all these centuries, we know you will reach the same point eventually. Humanity cannot rule Ventus. We are merely tolerated. In my country, people believe that life will always be like it is now, for all eternity.

"I should say, we used to believe that. Then came Queen Galas, to upset a thousand years of tradition."

"What did she do?" asked Jordan. The swath of sunlight that had blanketed the valley below was gone, leaving the landscape blued by lowering clouds. More rain was coming.

Suneil pointed along the road that led past the long lake. "Our lives are tied to the floods. We prosper insofar as we can predict them. We have always relied on observation and our records to do that. Galas had no need of such indirect means. She negotiated with the desals, and the desert flooded when and where and by how much she said it would. No sovereign has ever had such power over nature. We prospered as we never have.

"It wasn't enough for her. Galas despises the Winds. She sees humanity as the rightful rulers of the world, and the Winds as usurpers. People find her views shocking, but who could argue with her success? She gained a great following, and began to erase a thousand years of law and tradition, replacing it with daring and unsettling edicts of her own. She wanted to remake the world in her own image.

"She went too far. About five years ago, the desals turned against her. Her predictions for that year's flooding were tragically wrong. Thousands died in the waters or the famine that came after. Whatever she had done to alienate the Winds, their rebuke simply hardened her heart. She pushed ahead with her reforms, although for our own survival we now had to fall back on our old ways of predicting the floods."

"You supported her," ventured Jordan.

"At first, yes. I won't pretend I didn't profit by it. By the time the Winds turned against her, I had become entirely her creature. I'm not a fool, I could see what was coming, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. Parliament tabled a doc.u.ment demanding Galas cease all her meddling, and rescind the edicts that had broken centuries of tradition. She refused. The war... I think no one really believed it would happen, or that it was happening, until it came to visit one's own town or relatives. I believed. I ran. To stand and fight... well, she lost. She's probably dead by now. I wish I knew, that's all."

Jordan could have told him, but a new caution, perhaps learned from his experience with the Boros', made him hold his tongue.

They made camp near the etched outlines of vanished buildings and streets. Jordan sized up the place in spare glances while he got the fire going and tended to the horses. Tamsin sat listlessly on the back step of the wagon, watching the men work.

Jordan knew that in his country, a small town might contain a handful of buildings made of stone, and dozens of wooden houses. The wooden structures would make no permanent impression on the land after they were torn down or burned. Stone buildings left a kind of scar, and it was these that patterned a rise near the end of the lake. If there were ten wooden houses to every stone, and every house held eight people, then half a thousand people had lived here once.

Suneil confirmed it. "It was a border town once. They traded with Memnonis. But the Winds razed it to the ground, four hundred years ago."

"Why?"

"They use this place." Suneil gestured to the lake. "It's a transfer point, or something. Don't really know. Anyway, they won't let people build here."

The thought made Jordan uneasy. Since the clouds and their threat of rain had vanished, after dinner he walked down to the edge of the lake. Using his new talent, he listened for the presence of the Winds.

The water was perfectly clear, the bottom covered in a fine yellow sand with red streaks in it. He remembered someone telling him once that clear water was unhealthy for any lake or river outside mountain country. Dark waters held life, that was the rule. He dipped his hand in it, marvelling. This was only the second lake he had seen up close. The water laughed quietly along the sh.o.r.e, and the flat vista glittered hypnotically in late daylight. It was surprisingly peaceful.

He could hear the song of the lake. It was deep and powerful, belying the tranquility of the surface. Thin gra.s.s grew here, but the soil beneath his feet was shallow, quickly giving way to sand. Below that... rock? He couldn't quite make it out, though it felt like there was something else down there, a unique presence deep below the earth.

There was no indication that anything supernatural dwelt here.

He sat down, mind empty for the first time in days, and watched the water for a while. Gradually, without really trying, he began hearing the voices of the waves.

They trilled like little birds as they approached the sh.o.r.e. Each had its own name, but otherwise they were impossible to tell apart. They rolled humming towards Jordan, then fell silent without fanfare as they licked the sand. It was like solid music converging on him where he sat. He had never heard anything so beautiful or delicately fragile.

He didn't even notice the failing light or the cold as he sat transfixed. His mind could not remain focussed forever, though, and after a while he made up a little game, trying to follow individual waves with both his eyes and his inner sense.

He tried to follow the eddies of a particular wave as it broke around a nearby rock, and in doing so discovered something new. It seemed like such an innocent detail at first: as the wave split, so did its voice. From one, it became many, then each tinier individuality vanished in turbulence. As they did, they cried out, not it seemed in fright, but in tones almost of... delight. Urgent delight--as if at the last second they had discovered something important they needed to tell the world.

If he closed his eyes, now, he could see the waves and the lake, finely outlined as in an etching, grey on black. Many words and numbers hovered over the ghost-landscape, joined by lines or what looked like arrows to faintly sketched features of the sh.o.r.eline or lake surface. If he focussed on one of those, it instantly expanded, and he was surrounded by a swirl of numbers: charts, mathematical figures, geometric shapes. It was beautiful, and nonsensical.

The most important part of it, he decided, was that this ghostly vision apparently let him see with his eyes closed. Was this how Calandria May had seen the forest when she lured him away from the path, so many nights ago?

He stared at the wavelets, listening down the chain of nested ident.i.ties: lake, swell, wave, crest and ripple. Each sang its ident.i.ty only for so long as it existed. In water, consciousness arose and vanished, merged and split as freely as the medium itself.

Jordan had been raised to think of himself and other people as having souls. Souls were indivisible. What he heard happening out in the lake were voices that could not possibly be attached to souls, because the very ident.i.ties behind those voices freely changed, merged, and nested inside one another. Even the word beings couldn't be applied to them, because it implied a stability impossible for them.

"What are you?" he whispered, staring out at the lake of voices.

I am water.

Over the next hour Jordan asked a few halting questions of the lake, the sand and the stones. Few of the answers made any sense. For the most part he sat with his head tilted, listening to voices only he could hear. If Tamsin or Suneil crept up to watch and sadly shake their heads, he didn't care, because he had taken a great secret by the edge, and he wasn't going to let anything stop him from grasping it entirely.

When he finally dragged himself back to camp, the others were asleep. Suneil had offered to let him sleep in the wagon tonight, but Jordan was too tired to make the effort, and saw no point in disturbing them. He rolled himself near the fire, and fell instantly asleep.

He dreamed about dolphins, which he had heard of but never seen. In the dream they swam in the earth itself, and leapt and splashed in it as though it were a liquid. He chased them across a rough, rocky landscape and at times he almost caught them, but they laughed as they danced just out of reach. Finally he made one last effort and dove after one as it entered the ground, and he followed it into dark liquid earth. He slid among the rocks and sinews of the solid world with perfect ease, knowing now where the dolphins were going: to find a secret buried deep in the earth.

He woke up. He lay on his back by the cold embers of the fire, and it seemed like some sound hovered above him. Someone had spoken.

Jordan rolled over. It was early morning, and fantastically misty. It looked like the camp had been put inside a pearl. Directly overhead, it was bright; at the horizons dark still reigned. There was no sound at all now. The mist absorbed everything, causing him to cough hesitantly to check that he could hear at all.

As Jordan sat stoking the fire, Tamsin emerged from the wagon. She was dressed in woolen trousers, several layered white shirts and something she had yesterday told him was called a poncho. She looked around once, and a big grin split her face. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and it utterly transformed her. She became at once ugly and electrically exuberant when she smiled.

"It's great!" She waved at the mist. "I've never seen it so thick. I'm going to go see what the lake looks like."

"Okay."

She walked purposefully into the directionless grey, stopping when she had become a two-dimensional shape against it.

"Mr. Mason?" Her voice sounded timid; there were no echoes, and no other sound.

"Yes?"

"You can come too, if you want." Jordan shook his head and followed. He was cold and achy, but he knew the walk would warm him faster than sitting by the fire.

"How are you feeling?" he asked Tamsin.

"Good." She stopped and ma.s.saged her shin. "Still hurts, but it's okay to walk on." The wagon vanished behind them, but the fire remained a diffuse orange landmark.

As they walked on, he tried to think of something more to say. For some reason, his mind had gone blank. Tamsin seemed to be having the same problem. She walked with her hands behind her back, head down except at intervals when she made a show of peering through the fog.

The low grey lines of the ruins coalesced ahead of them. Tamsin stood on a low wall that once must have supported a large house. She raised her arms, making the mauve poncho fall into a broad crescent covering her torso.

"Your uncle's not used to travelling," Jordan observed.

"He was a cloth merchant back home," she said. Tamsin lowered her arms and stepped down. "He was really rich, I think. Before the war. When he had to leave home, he took some of his best cloth. We've been selling it to buy food and stuff. But we're all out of it now."

"Did you live with him before?"

She shook her head. He wanted to ask her about her family, but could think of no way to do it.

"He saved me. When... the war came to my town, the soldiers were burning everything. It was a surprise attack. I was trying to get home, but the soldiers were in the way. Uncle... he appeared out of nowhere and took me away. He saved my life." She shrugged. "That's all."

"Oh." They walked on.

"Thanks," she said suddenly.

"For what?"

"For coming with us. For helping out." She hesitated, then added, "and for putting up with me."

Jordan found he was smiling. She walked a few steps away, her face and form softened by mist. She was looking away from him.

"You uncle told me you had a tragedy very recently," he said as gently as he could. "It's understandable."

"It'll be all right, though," she said a bit too brightly. "When we get to Rhiene Uncle is going to introduce me to society there. There'll be b.a.l.l.s, and dinners, and the rest of that. So you see, I'm ready to take up a new life now. Uncle is helping me do that."

"That's good," he said cautiously.

She took a deep breath. "My foot feels a lot better."

"Good. But you shouldn't use it too much yet."

They took a faint path down a long slope to a pebbled beach. The sound of the waves was strangely hushed here.

A vast translucent canopy of light hung over the lake now, and in the heart of it... Jordan and Tamsin stopped on the sh.o.r.eline, staring. Impossibly high in the air, a crescent of gold and rose as broad as the lake burned in the morning sun. The crescent outlined the top of a deep cloud-grey circle that seemed to be punched in the mist overhanging the water. Jordan could see a long, nearly horizontal tunnel of shadow stretching to infinity behind the thing.

The sense of free happiness Jordan had felt only moments ago collapsed. He backed away, hearing his own breath roaring in his ears, and aware that Tamsin was saying something, but unable to focus on what.

The vagabond moon was utterly motionless, its keel mere meters above the wave tops. There was no way to know how long it had been here, though it must have arrived sometime after Jordan had fallen asleep.

Tamsin stared up at it with her mouth open. "It's a moon," she said. "A real moon."

"Hush," he said. "We shouldn't be here."

"This... was this what destroyed the..."