by Glenda Larke
She thought about it and went cold.
* * *
Ryka remembered Kaneth’s words when they faced the Cloudmaster in the Breccia Hall dining room several days later. Granthon was apparently well enough to sit up and have dinner with the rest of his family, but she was shocked by the decline in his health since she had seen him last. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes deep-set and suffering. Moreover, he looked… unkempt. And this in a man who had always been faultlessly attired, a regal, proud man, not one who would informally interview a couple of rainlords in front of his family, let alone be seen with his vest stained and his tunic sleeves dirty.
Ryka shot a look at Ethelva and saw the tightness around the woman’s eyes. They exchanged a wordless glance, and Ryka saw the pleading there, and the wisdom. Her expression said, as clearly as spoken words, “Don’t thwart him. He’s all we have.”
Ryka looked away to give her attention to the others. Nealrith, who had risen when she and Kaneth were ushered in, was shifting his weight uncomfortably. He’d greeted them both, but now refused to meet Kaneth’s gaze. Laisa watched with interest, smiling faintly, as if secretly amused, while Senya, the little brat, sparkled with an unpleasantly gleeful interest.
The kind of women men admire, Ryka thought. Beautiful, and who cares what the inside is like? Or whether they have anything but sand in their skulls. She sighed to herself, wryly aware that she did not much like the cynicism of her thoughts. She used to be a much nicer person before she’d fallen in love. How ironic is that? she mused. And do we really have to stand here like a couple of naughty children while Granthon chastises us in front of these two bitches, mother and daughter? Sands, this is as humiliating as my interview with Taquar.
“Laisa, Senya, let’s go outside, shall we?” Nealrith said. “This is not a matter that concerns us.”
“On the contrary!” Granthon barked, his white bushy brows drawn so tight they met over his nose. His voice was surprisingly strong. And angry, with a twist of deep emotion. “This is exactly something you should all hear, because you should all know the sacrifices you might be called upon to make in the future. Senya, particularly.”
He then directed his attention to Kaneth and Ryka, saying, “You both know the situation. The land could die with me. Probably will. And neither of you are doing your duty to prevent it. I have been patient far longer than I should have. I have threatened you with monetary loss. I have appealed to your sense of honour. I know nothing is certain—that any children you have may be water-blind—but we need to try everything, no matter the cost. If I can ruin my health and the quality of my life for you and this land, the very least you can do is marry for the good of it.”
Ryka looked steadily at the floor, but heat spread from the back of her neck into her cheeks. Shame. Anger. Helplessness. She wasn’t sure what was uppermost. Humiliation, perhaps, and not just because the Cloudmaster’s family was listening, but because she couldn’t imagine a worse humiliation, than marrying a man she loved who didn’t care for her and would be rubbing her nose in his faithlessness every evening. What would he do: bed her then go off to his snuggeries? Or the other way around? She felt sick.
Granthon continued, “Now go into the next room and talk to one another, and don’t come back until you have a solution that involves an attempt to bring another stormlord into the world. Is that clear?”
She and Kaneth glanced at each other, silently communicating their reluctance to even discuss the subject. Then Kaneth turned his gaze to look at the Cloudmaster. “The fault is mine. And I will not compound my errors by forcing myself on a woman who does not want me.”
Granthon’s eyes narrowed, but he did not comment.
“Would you really countenance such a thing, Lord Granthon?” Kaneth asked. “Since when did the Cloudmaster advocate rape?”
Nealrith winced. Senya smirked. And Granthon levered himself out of his chair in rage. “You think to play with me on this matter? It is the future of the Quartern we speak of here! Go discuss this, the two of you, and before you come back, think on this. If you will not marry—or set up a viable relationship in a home together—then one of you will be cast out of the gates as far as a pede can ride in three days, without water and away from a road. And the choice of which one of you that will be will rest on the selection of the shortest straw of two in my hand. Is that clear?”
Ryka felt the colour drain from her face. He would kill a rainlord—and never mind which one—just to make a point? And in such a cruel way: death by thirst. Neither she nor Kaneth had the kind of power that could retrieve water from the city over such a distance.
When he stared at her now, she could see none of his weakness, just the harsh look of a ruler who was determined to help his land the best way he knew how, no matter the cost to others.
There were no choices left, and she knew it. She tensed to control the shiver that threatened to skitter down her spine.
She exchanged another glance with Kaneth, saw his compassion, and said, “Yes, it is clear. And we don’t need time to think about it. I will do as you ask.”
“Kaneth?” the Cloudmaster asked.
He nodded abruptly.
“Good. Then I will expect to see you living under one roof within ten days. Nealrith, show them the door.” He slumped back against the chair, suddenly once again an old, tired man.
Outside the door, a servant came to show them out but Kaneth waved him away irritably. Ryka was already at the top of the stairs, where she had frozen, her attention caught by what she saw as she glanced over the banisters to the hall below. There was a new waterpainting set into the floor.
It measured perhaps ten paces long and seven wide, and it showed a young woman riding a black pede crossing a white landscape. The pede’s many feet kicked up a white cloud as it went. The woman was dressed plainly, in travelling clothes, a palmubra hat on her head, her cloak billowing out behind her. Heat shimmers rose into a cloudless sky. All the immediate landscape was flat, featureless and white; in the distance, a range of blue and grey peaks rose, capped with white. They seemed to float in the sky, impossibly distant, yet appearing solid and real at the same time.
“That’s new,” Kaneth said at her elbow. He sounded upset, and she knew he was glad to find a neutral topic of conversation. “There used to be a picture of the clouds over Warthago Range, which was more appropriate for a cloudmaster’s villa, I would have thought. This looks too, um, too personal. Although I’m damned if I know where it is. I’ve never seen a range like that one.”
“I don’t like it,” she said, shuddering, not sure if it was the painting or the Cloudmaster’s anger or the commitment she had been obliged to make that was making her so fearful. “In fact, I don’t like waterpaintings.”
“Why not?”
“They are too powerful. They… dominate the room they occupy. And you are right. This one is too personal. That has to be a real portrait of someone. And she looks…” She searched for the right word. “She looks haunted.”
He glanced down at the painting again. “No, not haunted. Hunted. She looks hunted.” He turned back to Ryka. “And I don’t know why we are talking about a damned painting when we should be talking about what we are going to do.”
She didn’t look at him, but started on her way down the stairs. “There’s nothing to talk about. We have to go through with it.” She strove to sound cool, insouciant. “All we have to do is decide what we opt for: marriage or just a liaison.”
“Marriage,” he said.
She waved a careless hand, trying not to read anything into the choice. “As you wish.”
Inside she wanted to weep.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gibber Quarter
Wash Drybone Settle
Shale kept his promise to Taquar.
He told no one he had been tested and had passed the test. He even explained away all he had previously said to Mica. “I was making that up ’bout knowing which bowls had water in them,” he said. “I w
ouldn’t have known, no way. I did know the rush was comin’ down the wash that time—I saw the grey things in the sky, that’s all. Clouds. Anyone could tell the rush would come down after that.”
Mica looked relieved, willing enough to believe the lie in place of the more inconceivable truth. “I’m glad there’s not somethin’ funny ’bout you. I was worried ’bout what Pa said. ’Bout the rainlords not liking anyone to meddle in their business.”
“Yeah,” said Shale. “Me, too.”
In his heart, though, Shale wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing, lying to Mica. The oddities of the conversation with Taquar had soon come to haunt him. First the rainlord had said a water sensitive was valuable and that Shale was in no danger, then he’d said water sensitives had been snuffed. First he had said no one in the rainlords’ caravan would harm him, then he had told Shale it would be dangerous to tell any of the rainlords that he was a water sensitive.
The inconsistencies worried him, but by then the caravan had gone, leaving nothing except the unreality of the memory. He could not even ask anyone in the settle about just what a stormlord was, because no one knew. When a small Reduner caravan passed through a couple of weeks later, collecting the settle’s resin, he asked several of the servants about stormlords, but the answers were unsatisfactory. “A Scarperman,” he was told. “The sandmaster of the Scarpermen,” another added. “The stormlord breaks the clouds to bring rain to the waterholes.” But none of them had ever seen a stormlord, although they had all seen it rain.
Shale couldn’t make sense of it. If a stormlord was a Scarperman or a sandmaster or powerful enough to bring rain—well, Shale was sure he was none of those things. Just knowing about water was a far cry from breaking clouds to make water fall from the sky. He continued to mull over the question, keeping his uncertainties to himself.
In the meantime, life went on. His caution stopped him from trying to sell the jasper to any of the caravanners or telling his father about it. He had a feeling he might need the tokens it would fetch at some future date. For now, he continued to wander the plains collecting resin.
Mica worked in the bab groves or the clay pit or the stone quarry, wherever there was casual work to be done that would earn them a few tokens to buy water and food. Marisal sold her embroidery—and perhaps her services as well—directly to the caravans, and then lied to her husband about how much she was paid. Galen did little except drink away as much of their earnings as he could.
But Shale had gained something from Rainlord Taquar’s visit: hope. For the first time in his life he had a vision for the future that didn’t include his father, or being scared of him. He had a confidence he’d never possessed before. He no longer cringed before Galen. If he could, he simply walked away; if he couldn’t, he stood his ground. Galen’s eyes would flash with anger, but he no longer beat his son. Nor did he again broach the idea of prostituting him for money. The idea was dropped as if it had never been suggested.
Patiently, Shale waited for the day when Taquar would return.
Life seemed better than ever before.
One morning early in the next star cycle, about a hundred days after the Scarpen rainlords’ visit, a kick to Shale’s ribs woke him from a troubled dream. He rolled over, aware only of a feeling of terrible wrongness. His head ached with the oppression of it.
“We’re outta fronds to burn. Go get some from the grove.” His father’s voice, still thick with the results of a drinking bout the night before. Dawnbreak had not yet come, and Galen had lit a rush light. Shale knew what he was supposed to do: sneak down to the palm grove and steal some of the fallen fronds under the trees. Anything that fell from the tree was the property of the tree owner, and such fronds were valuable as fuel or roofing thatch or for the weaving of mats.
Shale could filch fruit from a garden orchard before the sandgrouse alerted the household, or shin up a palm tree and pinch the bab fruit from the back of the bunch without the owner ever realising it had been pilfered, or relieve settlefolk of their property in a hundred similar ways. But he didn’t like doing it. It made him feel dirty inside. How could he feel right about stealing, say, from Rishan the palmier, when it was Rishan who occasionally gave him the leftovers from his kitchen or a few extra eggs from his sandgrouse?
He staggered out of bed rubbing the sleep from his eyes, unable to say why he felt so rotten. So heavy-headed, so suffocated. That feeling of something botched was back. He glanced over at Mica, still curled up asleep, and contemplated waking him, but a fierce look from his father sent him stumbling straight out into the morning cold. His breath made clouds in the air and he regretted not having picked up his blanket on the way out. He thought about returning to get it, but the memory of the anger in his father’s voice banished that idea, so he plucked the empty burlap sack from where it hung on the outer wall to put around his shoulders in its place. As he headed for the edge of the wash, he decided he must be sickening with something.
The watercourse was black with night, the sun still hidden below the desert rim. A touch of colour tingeing the horizon indicated that dawn was on its way, but the bab palms were just indeterminate shapes barely rising to the level of the bank. It was too dark down there to be able to see anything.
Yet it was all wrong. His awareness of water was telling him things that didn’t make sense.
He stood on the lip of the wash, knowing his world had been changed while he slept. There was water everywhere. The beginnings of panic finally snapped his eyes wide, tensed his muscles ready for flight, banished sleepiness.
He forced himself to concentrate, and the details came into focus. Too much water. Surrounding him. Surrounding the settle. Once he concentrated on the pieces instead of the whole, he was able to put a name to what was happening. People. Not water by itself, but water inside people. Everywhere.
The settle was surrounded by people and pedes, too many to count. Far more people than had ever visited Wash Drybone at any one time before, far more pedes than Shale had known could ever be gathered together in one place. The reality of it hit as hard as his father’s fist in the stomach. This was all wrong. Caravans didn’t sneak up in the pre-dawn and come on the settle from all sides. And caravan folk didn’t sneak along the wash, either.
Vague tales of nomad raids and rumours about recent water thefts in some of the settles coursed through his mind, even though common sense told him that nomads raided cargo-rich caravans or gem-rich wash towns, not water-poor settles. Not Wash Drybone Settle.
His second thought grew with his fear: it can’t be because of me… can it? I didn’t tell anyone, Lord Taquar!
He shuddered and tried to convince himself that he wasn’t that important. That no one surrounds a settle with tens and tens of people just to kill one boy. And yet his fear scudded into terror.
He was outlined against a sky that was getting lighter by the moment. He abandoned the sack and dropped down into the wash, where it was darker. He doubled over as he ran into the shelter of the grove. When he sensed strangers among the trees, he gave them a wide berth and dropped down still further, this time into an empty slot. He pelted up the narrow stone drain, his bare feet skidding on the sifting of sand that covered the stonework.
When he reached the grove’s holding cistern, he climbed out and ran into the settle street. Arms pumping, he pounded upward to the top house in the settle: Rishan’s. He desperately needed to pass on the problem to someone who would know what to do. Luckily no one in the settle ever barred their gates, so he was able to enter the garden and bang on the house door, yelling at the same time.
Rishan himself came to answer, bare-chested and yawning, his wife behind him uncovering the coals in the fireplace to light the candle she carried, his two sons hanging back, stupid with sleep. “Shale? What is it? What’s the matter, lad? Your pa hasn’t gone killed your ma, has he?”
“Somethin’s botched, Palmier Rishan. There’s folk all round the settle. More than I can count—they’re sneakin’ up
through the wash, an’ ’cross the plains!”
The two boys woke up properly at that and came up behind their father, full of questions. Rishan ignored them and took the lighted candle from his wife. “Is it a caravan, lad?”
Shale shook his head vigorously. “Too many folk. Tens ’n’ tens of pedes. As many men as settlefolk. No—more. I’m scared, palmier.”
“You saw them?”
He thought of explaining—and opted for an easier lie. “Yes.”
“Who are they?”
“Dunno. Too dark t’tell.”
Rishan didn’t move. He was holding the candle high, as if to study Shale’s face, but his eyes had gone blank.
Shale was panicking. Why didn’t Rishan do something? He began to hop up and down, unable to contain his agitation. He needed to get back home. He had to warn them. “I got t’go—” he began.
Rishan came alive and turned to his sons. “Warn everyone, quickly. Run!” His face was dead white.
Shale fled. As he ran down the street, he could hear Rishan and his sons beginning to pound on doors to wake their neighbours. He himself went straight back home, flung himself into the hut, shouting, not even sure what he was saying between his gasps for air. He was aware, horribly aware, of the people out there, all around him, closing in on the settle, getting closer. Waiting for the sun to come up, to do whatever it was they were going to do. He tried to explain to them all, to Mica, raising his tousled head from the filth of the blankets, to Galen who had gone back to his sodden sleep after Shale had left the hut, to his mother who just looked at him blankly, with no alarm or interest.
“What’s it matter?” she asked. Citrine had woken screaming and she pushed the child at him. “You woke her with your noise, you can shut her up.”
“Don’t you unnerstand? Those folk out there, whatever they want ain’t good! They’re sneakin’ up on us like marauders—”
