The Waters Rising (22 page)

“How can you breathe wrong?” asked Abasio, intrigued.

Precious Wind shrugged. “I’m sure someone has figured out several wrong ways.”

They gathered around their small fire. Bear snapped his fingers. When everyone looked at him, he said softly, “We’ll still keep watch tonight. These people may be pure, but their purity may allow killing or stealing.”

“Does he really think so?” Xulai whispered to Precious Wind. “It seems very unlikely to me. I think they’re friendly but playing along with the silliness the duchess spouts for reasons of their own.”

“Bear’s only being cautious,” Precious Wind replied. “No one ever died from being overcautious.”

“How long have these people been here?” asked Bartelmy.

Precious Wind replied, “The first ones arrived in Wellsport a dozen years ago. Others followed, and more are still coming, so I’ve heard. All of them have been given permission to stay, though it may be the decision was made by someone other than the king.”

Abasio said, “As Precious Wind says, the decision may have been made by some deputy, but from a practical point of view, it makes sense to have someone maintaining this road. The villagers are obviously controlling traffic, to avoid conflict between wagons going up and wagons coming down. Also, as steep as this slope is, any sizeable storm would cause washouts. You see they’ve had to build a ten-foot wall along the road and fill in behind it just to gain enough level space to put one row of houses. Then they fill in behind the first row and build another row on that, all with little alleys and walkways between.”

“Like an upside-down staircase,” said Xulai. “One room on the bottom, two on the next layer up, three on top of that. The cliff is very steep.”

“It’s steep because it’s recent,” said Abasio. “This escarpment hasn’t been here long enough to erode. It’s a strange feeling.”

“Why, Abasio?”

“Oh, because where I was born most of the mountains were at least slightly rounded, and the plains were deep-cut by rivers. Most of the rock here is sharp, like daggers. It gives me the feeling I’m on some other planet.”

It wasn’t a feeling the others shared. The great cliff was something they knew or knew of, like the jagged peaks on the horizon west of them. The great earthquake that split Norland had happened recently in geological history, but Norland had always been this way in living memory. In either sense, however, the Becomer villages were new. Xulai stood at the edge of the camp, staring directly into it, for the way-halt was level with the top of the wall that supported the first row of houses. A path led straight from her feet to a village entry, a gateway giving on a walkway that was barely wider than Abasio’s shoulders, not so wide as Bear’s. Somewhere inside the structure a light-well pierced the fabric of the place, letting in a bit of sky, a faint light of evening disclosing a crosswalk where a constant flow of people went back and forth, to and fro.

The place was like a bath sponge or a cheese with square holes, little rooms and cubbies throughout, all the exterior walls perforated with windows, hung with little balconies, pierced with walkways and stairways. Narrow chimneys sprouted from wall corners, singly and in clusters, only a few of them emitting pale smoke. Flowerpots stood on roof corners, though the frostbitten vines they held trailed disconsolately down the outer walls. In summer, she thought, the little village would be interesting and gay looking. At the very top, some tile roofs fed rain into gutters that fed into cisterns at the bottom of the walls; other roofs were flat and strung with clotheslines.

“How can they live all on top of each other like that?” she asked no one in particular.

“They’re island people,” said Abasio from behind her. “Island people are sea people, and sea people spend a lot of time on ships. On ships, people do live on top of each other.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Come, you need supper.”

When they had all eaten, they tidied the camp area before sitting together around the campfire, drinking tea, ignoring the parade of Pure Becomers who patrolled the road near the way-halt, chanting and staring. All of them wore the earring in their left ear.

“First watch mine,” murmured Bartelmy at last.

“No. Mine,” said Precious Wind insistently. “I slept for a while in the carriage; you didn’t. We’ll make it short watches, though, so everyone gets some sleep. I’ll wake Black Mike.”

In the night, Xulai woke. Black Mike, supposedly on watch, dozed on a wagon seat. A few Becomers still strolled by, among them the woman who had sold them their robes. When she saw Xulai looking at her, the woman smiled and came a few steps into the way-halt, where she put something on the ground, and pointed at it before rejoining the others.

When Xulai woke in the morning, in deep shadow, the dawn still pale above the cliff, she went to the spot the woman had pointed out and found a tiny loaf of sweet bread, full of raisins and spice. Both her nose and the chipmunk told her it was good. By the time the others had wakened, she and the chipmunk had eaten it all. Though normally she would have told Precious Wind all about it, she did not. The Becomers had picked her, Xulai, to smile at and wink at and bake cake for. Like most mysteries, time might explain it, but before it was explained, she did not want her guardians keeping watch on her night and day. Their customary watchfulness was quite enough. Or too much.

Soon the others woke. Every person and creature seemed well rested. The parade of Becomers resumed as they breakfasted and went on until they had relinquished their robes and were above and beyond the village on the slowly rising road. Seemingly, the Becomers could not get enough of looking at these particular travelers!

That day, Xulai spent much of her time knitting. There was nothing else to do, and she wanted to make something for Black Mike and the other Woldsgard people to thank them for their care.

During the next day, they passed through six more villages. The Sky Becomers wore all blue clothing and painted their skins the same color, for the king’s favorite color was blue; the Perfect Becomers bound their bodies to change them toward an ideal form; the Song Becomers sang all their conversations with one another. There were also the Joy Becomers, a seemingly deadly serious people who invited the group to join them in sexual gratification and using mind-altering substances, following the wagons some distance on the road reiterating this invitation in voices, so Xulai felt, that were syrupy with duplicity. All the Becomers spoke of “her,” the woman who told them how they were to become treasured by the king. Xulai counted sixteen or so other villages crowded into caves at various distances above the road, connected to it only by goat paths and treacherous-looking stairs. If all these were being influenced by the Duchess of Altamont, she was spending a great deal of time amusing herself with a great many people who were playing along though they were not, themselves, either amused or convinced. Perhaps, Xulai thought, this fairly innocuous game preempted other games that would have been far more painful.

Above the Pure Becomers’ village, the way had grown steeper, the progress slower. The second night was spent at the eleventh switchback. Early on the third day on the cliff they came to the thirteenth turn, this one with another bell tower and space for wagons, like the one they had seen before. Several wagons and a flock of sheep were lined up on the road above them, coming down, and several other wagons, going up, had accumulated on the flat. The Wold wagons were waved onto the flat with the others by a bored-looking traffic controller, and there they sat idle while several loaded wagons and a flock of sheep went down.

“Last turn.” Ordinarily taciturn, Black Mike grinned. “Fourteen times across the cliff, seven goin’ north and seven goin’ south, and we’re up!”

By noon, looking down the cliff-side, they passed the six southern switchbacks that lay in a line beneath them. Each turn up to this point had been more or less in line with the ones above and below, but now the road beneath them continued to the south, still gently rising and shaking with a slight vibration. After a time the vibration turned into a low rumble, increasing in volume as they went until the world around them shook with continuous thunder. Opacities of fog came and went on the road before them. The drivers got down to lead the horses and mules around shrouded curves hidden by wavering, silken evanescence that twisted endlessly as they unrolled outward. Since they had only vagrant glimpses of the road before them, everyone but Oldwife preferred to walk, blindly clinging to the cliff-side on their left, watching their feet to be sure they did not approach the edge. On their right they caught occasional glimpses of the enormous cataract surging glassily over the precipice to break into a hundred separate falls on the ledges below. Momentarily, a gust of wind blew the clouds aside to let them see all the way down, multiple cascades leaping and frothing in a frenzy of foam and shattered stone.

The wind persisted long enough to disclose a colossal cauldron a mile or so below, a stone bowl licked out of the bedrock by a millennium of swirling water, maelstrom-filled from edge to edge. Fleeing this vortex, the gleaming, glassy torrent exploded through a narrow cleft in the western edge and lost itself within a wide black canopy of dripping forest, beyond which stood Eastwatch Tower, the watchtower they had left three days before, tiny as a toy.

Several wagons stood ahead of them on the road, waiting, and a bell tolled from a tower on the cliff’s edge as they went onto the downward road. It was answered by a far-off echo from the tower they had passed this morning.

Bartelmy said, “I can see why there’s no quicker way. What a drop that is!”

“One of the wonders of the world, I’m told,” said Precious Wind. “Certainly there is nothing like it in Tingawa.”

“Tingawa has mountains,” murmured Xulai. “So you’ve told me.”

“Lovely rounded mountains,” said Bear in a meditative voice he seldom used. “Like the flanks of maidens, lying at their ease beneath the sun. We have rivers, too, but none so impolite as to roar at anyone.”

“We camp here?” asked Bartelmy with a quick glance at the lowering sun.

“A bit farther, please,” begged Oldwife, who had left her carriage to get a better look at the falls. “The noise makes my head ache. Besides, everything is soaking wet!”

They turned east. At first flickering in and out of sight before them, the road showed more clearly as both fog and noise dwindled behind them. Eventually there was only a murmur of water, like strong wind in distant trees. By this time dusk had fallen.

Xulai tugged at Precious Wind’s sleeve. “I have this feeling,” she said. “It would be a good idea for us to camp somewhere where we won’t be seen tonight.”

“A feeling?” said Precious Wind.

“Like . . . the feeling I had about the horses.”

Precious Wind called a halt to the caravan and went to explain to Bear that Xulai had a feeling.

“I’d take it seriously,” she said, seeing his scowl.

“I’m getting a feeling also,” he said. “I’m getting a feeling that I’m not sure who we’re taking where. You knew Xu-i-lok?”

“I did, yes.”

“Do you get the feeling that the princess may be directing operations here?”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Who knows what I mean? If she’s actually carrying Xu-i-lok’s soul, does that mean she’s carrying the princess’s personality, her opinions? Her special kind of knowledge?”

Precious Wind looked at her feet while she composed her face. “Bear, I don’t know, but I do know she gets these premonitions. About horses. About wagon wheels. About this and that. She’s been right each time, so far.”

“So far. Very well, we’ll take ourselves away from the road.”

At Bear’s direction, they crossed one of the numerous little streams flowing down from the heights to their left, then turned parallel to it and left the road, not stopping until they were deep among the trees that edged the valley. Bear and Black Mike went back to the road.

“We’ve raked up the grass to hide our tracks,” said Bear when he returned. “Here, we’re close to water. There are trees and a hollow to hide the campfire. We are unlikely to be seen or bothered by nighttime travelers.”

“We keep watch?” Bartelmy asked.

“We always keep watch, until we reach Wilderbrook,” said Bear with a long look at Xulai.

In the night, Xulai dreamed of the monstrous roar of the falls and woke to its earthshaking thunder pounding at her. Fully awake, she realized it was not water she heard! A great many horses in a frantic hurry. She sat up, feeling someone near.

“Shh,” said Abasio. “Quiet. Not that they could hear you over that stampede.”

From the forest edge they peered at the roadway, gleaming silver in the light of the moon and thick with riders. The horsemen were riding from the east, toward the falls, many of them carrying torches that streamed fire and reflected from helms and gauntlets, spear shafts and armor.

“Soldiers,” whispered Xulai. “Why? Where are they going?”

“From here the road goes to Altamont,” said Bear from behind her. “Also to Wellsport and the Lake of the Clouds. Even to Ghost Isle and Kamfels.”

“And Woldsgard,” Xulai said to herself.

“How many?” asked Willum Farrier from the darkness.

“Hundreds,” Bear answered.

“King’s men?” asked Clive.

“Possibly,” said Precious Wind.