A Choir of Lies

by Alexandra Rowland

  “You didn’t ask me any of that.”

  “Didn’t need to. You were thinking of foods you liked when you were very small. You mentioned that birch syrup drink—you said it was only for children. And I didn’t need to ask about the butter or olive oil, because, well . . .” She nodded to the pan. “Cream. So you had cows, so you had butter. And I didn’t need to ask if it was a peasant dish or not because—” She nodded to the pan again. “Cream. Your family was comfortable, at the very least—you either had a cow of your own or you could afford to buy milk and butter and cream from someone else.”

  “You’re a little like me, I think,” I said, immensely pleased.337 “You with food. Do you want to travel at all?”

  She laughed and crossed her arms. “The world already comes to my doorstep without me having to take a step outside the city.”

  “I can’t pry her out of the kitchen with a crowbar,” Basisi muttered as Stasyn prodded the onions around the pan. “Mevrouw Chef does not understand the concept of a day off.”

  Stasyn rolled her eyes. “Oh, and you do?”

  “Always things to do,” Basisi said sagely. “Inns don’t run themselves, and Nicasen can only manage so much by themself at the house. Has trouble in crowds,” she added to me. “The noise, the jostling—they find it very upsetting. They handle the accounts and so forth, all the things that require a great deal of focus and concentration and don’t involve other people at all. Anyway, back to food. You were saying, Stasyn.”

  “It’s important to get it right, isn’t it? Not just for our reputation, although that is of utmost importance.” Basisi grunted in what seemed to be agreement. Stasyn continued: “Doing something like this, you have to give a shit about people. As long as they can pay, you give a shit. Food is the best way to do that.”

  “Everybody eats,” Basisi agreed. “Doesn’t matter who they are or where they’re from. They eat.”

  Stasyn lifted the iron pot from over the eggs and moved the two little bowls onto a plate with her bare fingers, unaffected by the heat. She turned towards our table. “Oh. Dear. Basi, the door—”

  We both turned to look. There was a puddle of water coming through the crack at the bottom, and it was visibly growing. Stasyn dropped my plate on the table, and both she and Basisi leapt forward, seizing dishtowels and rags and cramming them into the crack. “This rain!” Basisi cried. “Damn this city.”

  I’d leaped up from the table to clatter through the cupboards, seizing what other rags and dishtowels I could find and tossing them over.

  Stasyn said breathlessly, “It’s wind. It’s driving the rain through every little crack. I’d best go check the windows upstairs too—”

  “But the wind is coming from the other direction,” I said. “From the northeast.” That was the opposite side of the building—the side Orfeo’s room was on.

  Stasyn and Basisi frowned, and then Stasyn shot to her feet and opened the top half of the kitchen door, just a crack. A gust of wind blew through the room as Stasyn peeked out. “Oh, shipwreck,” she said, slamming it closed and latching it. She was wild-eyed when she turned back to us.

  “What is it?” Basisi asked. Stasyn leaned down to help her up from the floor—Basisi’s knees, I gather, aren’t what they used to be.

  “It’s the water,” she said. “It’s . . . high.”

  Basisi froze. “How high?”

  “High.” Stasyn was pale and grim.

  “I thought it never got high enough to flood the houses,” I said. “Should we start moving things upstairs?”

  “No,” Basisi said. “Things don’t matter at this point.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “One of the dikes went down,” Stasyn said.

  We ran out of the inn, or rather waded out of the inn. We were wearing boots, but the water was already more than knee-high. Stasyn and Basisi didn’t seem to care—what was so alarming about a potential infection and amputation when the water was going to kill us one way or another?

  “How high does the sea get?” I shouted to Stasyn. We were weighed down with buckets and tools, and we had to fight against the wind and rain at every step. She couldn’t hear me, or she didn’t have time to answer. Down by the canal, there were rowboats tethered to cleats, covered in oilcloth tarps to keep out the rain—the cleats were under more than a foot of water, and the rowboats floated at the level of our hips. Basisi seized ahold of one boat, throwing off its tarp heedlessly, dumped her supplies into the bottom of it, and clambered in after them. Stasyn followed.

  “Go back inside,” Basisi shouted. I could barely hear her over the gale.

  “I can help!”

  She gestured firmly back to the inn, but I shook my head and climbed into the boat after them. Basisi sighed, and Stasyn, who had untethered the boat, set the oars in their locks and began to row.

  We had to fight against the wind there too—it was coming off the sea, from the same direction we needed to go. I crammed myself into the prow, and for half an hour I had nothing to do but stay quiet and still and think about how if some of the stars-in-the-marsh had escaped infection before, they certainly wouldn’t have done so now. The waters were too high.

  “How do you know where the break is?” I shouted to Stasyn over the wind.

  “I don’t!” she yelled back. “Someone will find it and tell the rest.”

  I saw what she meant when we got closer to the edge of the city—there were more boats now, other people, all of us rowing out to the edges of the city, and I could imagine it through the rest of the city too: Hundreds of people flying for the closest dike, looking for the break. We hardly slowed our pace, though the canals were crammed. No one stopped; no one jammed up the rush of boats.

  The dikes here are artificial hills, thirty feet wide or more, sturdy enough to resist the pressure of the sea. On the outer side, they’re set with rocks and boulders to protect the packed clay from being worn away by the constant battering crash of the waves. And they’re tall enough, twenty feet or so, that even a storm on the day of the king-tide wouldn’t raise the seas high enough to spill over the lip—yet there’s a three-foot stone wall running right along the top, just in case. Orfeo and I had walked along them before the storms came, throwing pebbles into the sea like young boys and ducking down together in the lee of the wall to stay dry when a wave crashed too close and cast its spray into the air.

  And, set at intervals along the dikes and on either side of the locks that let ships in and out of the harbor, the windmills pump water from the harbor over the dike and dump it back in the sea. Or they’re supposed to—in the stormy season, the gales blow too strongly. They’d break the vanes right off the mills like they were twigs, if the millers left the sails on.

  We turned a corner, and the harbor opened out before us. The waters were rougher here, choppy with the howling wind that slammed into us full-strength now that the shield of the tight-packed houses was behind us. Stasyn heaved at the oars as the boat floundered in the gusts, and I scrambled from my place in the prow to the thwart beside her and took an oar. Basisi squinted through the driving rain, shielding her eyes, then pointed suddenly, catching at Stasyn’s wrist.

  There it was—the break.

  A gash in the side of the dike, as if someone had wrenched part of it free, and a powerful torrent of water was pouring into the harbor. One of the windmills lay, partially submerged, against the side of the dike, its very foundations torn out from the ground like an uprooted tree. The remaining crater had evidently been a sufficient enough weakness in the dike for the pounding waves to work their way past—and once a trickle made it through, the force of the water behind it would have eroded the crack, widening it more and more until . . . this.

  There were people swarming across the dike already, pummeled by the wind—people with tools, breaking up the stone wall on top of the dike into its component rocks; people frantically unloading boatfuls of spare wooden planks.

  Stasyn brought us right up to the di
ke, one more boat in the row, and we struggled to alight, fighting against the heaving waters long enough to stumble from the tossing hull to land that squelched under our feet—I had a brief clutch of fear, a vivid memory of the nightmares, the mud sucking at my feet as I floundered through the marsh, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe.

  But Stasyn hauled me along with her, and we scrambled up the slope of the dike to the top, where the wind hit us in the face like a punch, throwing saltwater so hard it stung like needles against our skin. Basisi followed along behind us, a little more slowly.

  The rest of it is . . . vague. I’ve trained for most of my life to remember things as exactly as possible, and yet all I have from that moment on is glimpses:

  We broke the wall for raw stone. Others, working in the lee of the dike, hammered the wood planks together into lengths long enough to span the gap, burying each end in the mud, with gaps between the planks so the water could continue rushing through without breaking the wood. We heaved the rocks from the wall into the gap; the planks held them in place, keeping them from being washed away into the harbor.

  We labored for hours—my arms and legs screamed with effort, hauling rocks mindlessly, frantically. The gap was so large; I felt like we were filling in a vast ravine with mere pebbles. And the wind, battering and bashing at us like the punching fist of a god, over and over, unceasing, for what seemed like eons. I remember whispering the names of gods, requesting strength, or attention, or mercy. I even whispered Shuggwa’s name, asked him to let his Eye fall on me.338

  I remember feeling faint as I worked, as the hours wore on and on. I remember throwing another stone into the torrent and nearly falling in after it myself—but someone caught me by my sleeve, pulled me back from the brink. When I turned around, I didn’t see who it might have been; I couldn’t even thank them.

  I remember more and more people arriving; I remember that some of them were turned away as there was no space for them to land their boats or move about on the dike. Some of them brought food and drink, casks of water and weak beer, cups that occasionally got shoved into my hands which I gulped down with rainwater.

  So many people. So many, many people. And the ones that couldn’t land on the dike, or couldn’t get close enough, floated there in the harbor and watched, their boats flung about by the rough waves, the wind shoving at them until they must have been nearly as exhausted as we were, but they watched. They waited. When a space opened—someone exhausted leaving the work, or someone injured being taken away from it—just as quickly another boat would land, and another few pairs of hands would replace those that could go on no longer. The rain was so heavy we could barely see across the harbor, but there were more people watching on the docks, and flurries of activity as they loaded boats with supplies or unloaded the injured and whisked them safe inside.

  The whole city, it seemed like, knew the dike was down, and all of them were turning their entire attention our way, straining towards it with their minds, if not their hands and backs.

  I would have thought they would flee. In moments of disaster, most people do. They run; they try to save at least themselves, if they can’t save their property. But the people of the city came out into the water, into the rain and the wind, and they helped. We strained and heaved and pulled while the waves crashed against us unceasingly, only seeming to grow stronger by the hour.

  But of course everyone was trying to save themselves. Of course they were. If the dike had fallen, if the water had gone unchecked, we all would have drowned. Everything would have been lost.

  The dikes go all across this little country, a network of walls holding back the tide against the will of the gods and the inexorable pull of the moons. It is the material product of the struggle between the citizens and the water, and in this struggle there is no room for selfishness. Better for one person to fall than for the country to fall. Better for exhaustion so deep in your bones you’d feel like sobbing, if only you had the strength. Better to save yourself with a rock wall broken to pieces and thrown into the torrent, standing alongside all your kith and kin, working to save each other as much as yourself . . .

  No lone person in Heyrland can keep the waters back. It takes a city. And the city was there today. The danger was not yet past when we left, trembling, weak, and too wrecked to even lift our oars. Someone came for us, tumbled us into a rowboat, and took us back to land. No questions asked; no conversation. They helped us step down into the flooded street, and then they rowed back again, waiting for another passenger to ferry across the harbor. When we left, supplies were still arriving: food, water, stone, and wood. There were people clustered around the other windmills then, I saw as we left—the vanes were lashed tight and still, the sails still off, but the pumps were going at full speed, powered by the hands and backs of the people who could do that one little thing.

  There were people on the dikes carrying buckets of water from the harbor, up the slope of the dike, and tossing it back into the sea. Bailing out the city drop by drop, but that was one little thing too, and they did it.

  They’re out there now, saving themselves, saving the city. They all live, or they all drown, and they don’t know if their efforts will be in vain. . . .

  And they do the one little thing.

  I know what to do about the flowers.

  * * *

  336. Wait, what thing? The Shuggwa thing? I’m assuming the Shuggwa thing. Ugh—and now I have no way of knowing what you’ve left out, even though you obviously have left something out.

  337. She is, at that. I’d track her down and introduce Lanh Chau to her, but I’m waiting for him to come to food on his own. He’s too contrary—if I shoved him at it and said, “Look, there’s your heart’s desire,” he’d open his mouth and deny it categorically before his brain had time to catch up and think, and then he’d be stuck.

  338. Hm. I didn’t think of it until you mentioned Shuggwa but . . . this is a little bit sinking-your-homeland-beneath-the-waves—the rocks, the water, the willingness to sacrifice. You know, most people only throw a pebble or a handful of earth into the water, but you threw wagonloads of rocks, eh? Dramatic little thing. Did you remember Arthwend, as the rites command, as you worked to save Heyrland from a similar fate? I don’t expect that you did, or that you even took notice of the parallels. For a Chant, an awful lot of stuff goes over your head. But I suppose that’s to be expected in one so young.

  FORTY-NINE

  The water level stabilized by yesterday afternoon. It’s been falling steadily since. Around three this morning, I think, the gale died down, but even when the sails were replaced on the windmills and the vanes began turning, even when the pumps sputtered to life and the people working them could fall back in exhaustion, the bucket teams stayed on the dike, draining the city by hand. Drop by drop. The one little thing.

  This morning, the waters were still on the higher side, but most of the pavements had drained into the canals. There are new high-water marks on the buildings, thigh or hip-height in most places. Basisi’s inn took a full foot of water, spoiling the food on the low shelves of her kitchen larder and almost everything that we’d left in the cellar but the contents of the watertight casks.

  The Acamporas were taken by surprise in the torrent and waited out the storm at the house of their business contact; they returned this morning as I was leaving for Sterre’s offices, bedraggled and damp and not in terribly good spirits.

  As I walked today, I passed by house after house where I caught the faint rancid-meat scent that marked the presence of stars-in-the-marsh somewhere in the back gardens.

  It’s too late. The waters rose too high. A few days ago, before the dike fell, we might have had a chance of catching the plague before it spread, but now it is only a matter of time until all the flowers wither up, and then all the imaginary money that those people have accrued from passing around the futures contracts will disappear in a snap.

  Sterre’s office door was open when I arrived. I kicked off
my water-boots and threw my oilcloak onto the floor without looking, and I charged through the front room, barely paused to knock at her threshold, and let myself in, shutting the door behind me.

  She blinked at me. “Well, good morning,” she said. “Bit of an upset last night, wasn’t it? Teo said he saw you on the dike when he went out to help with the repairs.”

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “Rather, I won’t do it.”339

  “I beg your pardon? Won’t do what?”

  I took a breath and steeled myself. “I won’t lie for you. I won’t tell any more stories for you. I won’t let you use me like a tool.340 Something bad is happening because of your choices and your greed, and I won’t help you cover it up.”

  She stood slowly. “Think about what you’re saying, Chant. You’ll ruin yourself—no one in this city would hire you again. Your future, all your prospects . . . You’ll be blacklisted forever.”341

  “I don’t care,” I said, because I didn’t.342 “I’ve never cared about that. I have to do the right thing. You made mistakes, terrible ones. The flowers are dying even now—after last night, it’s a certainty. We can’t cover it up, and we shouldn’t have been trying to. We shouldn’t have sold the flowers like that in the first place. The sickness has already swept through the city, and soon they’ll all be dead, but it won’t matter to you, because you’re rich, right? It won’t matter that people are going to be ruined, that they’re going to starve.”