The other lands

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was so much worse than when she had last been here. Even then, two years ago, the northern Talayans had been complaining about the lack of rainfall. Corinn had thought their fears exaggerated. To her eyes the fields looked like… well, like fields of growing plants, rows and rows of short trees, fields of golden grasses. She understood that this apparent bounty was achieved only because the staple crops that required the most water had already been replaced by sturdier varieties. Change was not to be feared. The skilled agriculturalists of Talay, she had believed, would adjust.

Not so, as the scene before her eyes now confirmed. It was a vision of devastation, as full of death as any battleground. In the nearest field, withered trees stood naked of leaves or fruit, blackly skeletal and twisted like hundreds of demons captured in gestures of agony. Farther south some grain crop glittered as if the stalks were silvered strings of glass, ready to shatter underfoot. The horizon to the west was choked with smoke. The fires were far distant, but the wind carried the scent of them and dropped flakes of ash from the heavens. The irrigation channels were completely dry, their beds cracked. In several spots across the landscape figures moved, singly or in small groups. They looked more like scavengers than workers. Perhaps they had been workers, Corinn thought, but could do nothing but scavenge now.

The queen took this all in from the earthen embankment that paralleled Bocoum's southern battlements. She was on horseback, with Aaden at her side, both of them largely silent as a contingent of Bocoum's wealthy estate owners buzzed around them. Each one of these rich men claimed to have suffered more than the others. They detailed the withering of crops, the irrigation and replanting measures they took to adapt, the worsening situation, the bleak possibilities. They even admitted to praying to the Giver and allowing their laborers to call on whatever regional deities they might win favor with. A few had taken to sacrificing pigeons, chickens, even goats. None of it had helped, and the merchants feared the laborers might take even more desperate measures soon.

"We know the Giver forgives, but so far he has ignored us," said Elder Anath. He sat on his horse with straight-backed grace, his bright red robes vibrant against his dark skin. He was the head of the main branch of the Anath clan, the second most powerful of the city's merchant families. It showed in the easy grace of his carriage. Talayans were not natural horsemen, so his ease in the saddle was a product of his class.

"Or he punishes us," Sinper Ou offered wryly. "Some have grown too rich, perhaps, for his liking."

Elder Anath turned to see who had spoken. He studied him a moment and smiled, seemingly content that the man meant to slight him but had not managed it. "One can never grow too rich. The Ous have proved this. Can a lion's mane be too full? Never. But, Queen Corinn, even my fortune-not to mention Ou's-is shriveling under these empty skies."

Corinn knew these men were competitors, but she always suspected much of their repartee was a show for her benefit. They were both rich. They both had married among each other's families. They both had all the rewards of royalty with none of the responsibilities. She spoke crisply, as if the scene before her did not affect her at all. "The Giver abandoned us long ago. He neither rewards nor punishes. That's for me to do. Come. Lead me to the heart well you spoke of. I will speak with the prince as we ride."

With that, the merchants knew she wished them out of earshot. They started off-even Elder Anath deferring without a word-along the embankment, their assistants and advisers with them. The tall sandstone walls and towers of Bocoum dwarfed them to one side, stark contrast to the flat desolation on the other. Corinn let them ride well away before touching her mare on the neck and urging her forward.

A contingent of Numrek followed them, bare chested and proud, their swords in prominent sheaths, some with axes in hand. They did not ride, since horses were nervous around them and their rhinoceros mounts were suited only for warfare. Their long strides easily kept them in position, though. Corinn had grown as used to them as she was to any servants. They were simply a part of her life.

"What do you think of all this?" Corinn indicated the ruined fields with her chin.

Aaden wrinkled his lips. "It really wasn't like this before?"

"No, you heard how they described it at dinner last night. They exaggerate, but these farmlands are what made Bocoum the city it is. Their crops fed mouths all around the empire. There was a time you could have ridden south from the city for four days before leaving cultivated lands. Acacia's power came as much from Talay's crops as from anything else. An army can bring death, but a farmer can give life. Fortunately, people fear one more than they acknowledge the other."

"Why did it change?"

"I don't know," Corinn answered. "I don't know." She repeated the answer for no reason other than that it felt good to admit it. She could do so only with Aaden, for he had always asked her questions that she could not answer. Why are eggs egg shaped? Why are sand dunes like ocean waves? Where does wood go when it burns? How does the Giver's tongue work? Nobody else, of course, asked her questions like that, and she loved him for it.

Glancing at him, she said, "I'll have to fix it, though."

"How will you? Will you use-"

"Yes. It's time the world sees some of what I can do."

The boy considered this a moment, his lips pursed and his expression older than his eight years. He eventually answered with a curt nod, his gesture of approval.

The merchants turned off the main thoroughfare and descended a ramp to a south-running road, closer to ground level but still elevated enough to provide a vantage. They worked their way farther from the city, riding on roads and sometimes in the empty irrigation canals. The slow rain of falling ash gave the place a surreal, hellish aspect. It was a wonder that anything had ever grown here.

All of this because of the lack of something so simple: water. Corinn could still scarcely believe it. In Calfa Ven, where she spent as much time as she could, showers appeared out of cloudless skies. The rivers bubbled with water. Floods were the concern, not drought! And a good thing, too, for it was the bounty of that place that had sparked the idea that led her here this afternoon. That and Dariel's charitable work. And, of course, her study of the song. Nothing was more central to her life now than the study of the Giver's tongue.

From the first moment she held The Song of Elenet in her hands, on the day that Thaddeus Clegg had brought it to her as a blood gift, she had been changed. It had awakened strength within her, cunning that she had always had but had never used, determination that she knew lay within her but that she spent a lifetime shying away from. It was because of the book that she was able to ally with the league, the Numrek, Rialus Neptos-all of whom she had needed to destroy Hanish Mein. And the song had promised her that more, much more, was to come.

At night, with her servants dismissed and her doors barred, she had opened the book and fallen again and again into the moving, languid words that were not words. It was a wonder every time; and for the first few years it had been enough just to see the words come alive and to hear them inside her head. When they gave her permission to open her mouth and let them out, she had discovered new joy like nothing she had known before, joy as complete as the moment Aaden had slipped free of her and been laid on her chest.

Aaden was part of the song, in a way. Only he had ever witnessed her singing. She had called up small things for him: glass beads and smooth stones at first, gourds that made rattles, simple toys, and then insects, butterflies, red-breasted birds, and tiny ring-necked snakes. The things she had brought to life were but trinkets, she knew, but singing them into existence exhausted and sometimes frightened her. That last creation had been strangely, benignly terrifying.

When her voice faded that afternoon in her chambers on Acacia, the swirling of sound and shimmering light that had gathered around the object finally dissipated. And there it was, the thing she had spun out of words. A thing that "nobody had ever seen before," as Aaden had requested. The two of them had stared at it in silence. It was a furry creature the size of a six-month-old child, but it did not have legs or arms. It had a trunk but the bulk of it was a head of sorts, vaguely feline, with no sign of ears, no whiskers. Its fur was so fine it swayed in waves at even the slightest motion, changing color as it did so, as if each strand had within it yellows and reds and blues and every shade in between.

For all this, its eyes were its most distinct feature. They were completely round, and when it blinked, some sort of lid passed from one side of the eye to the other, and then back again a few moments later. With each blink, it seemed more and more sentient, as if it understood something new about them each time that membrane slid from one side to the other.

The mother and son stood watching the creature for just a few short moments. The entire time, it watched them as well, cocking its head and looking from one to the other, waiting. When Corinn began the song to unmake it, she was sure she saw something like disappointment in the creature's eyes. But that may have just been the spell, for within a few breaths the invisible ribbons of sound moved around it, slipping over and through its form and rubbing it from existence.

Aaden's voice had seemed inordinately loud when it broke the silence after the unmaking. "Why can we never show anyone?"

"Because such things are only for you and me to see. This is our great secret, remember? No one else knows; no one else can know. In the song is all the power we will ever need. The knowledge of creation and destruction. In the song is power that the world has not truly seen in uncorrupted glory in twenty-two generations. It's my power. Mine alone, but it will be yours in times to come."

They were far out into the fields when they again drew up to the contingent of Talayan merchants. The city was a prominent but distant barricade to the north. Heat shimmered around them, blurring objects even at middle distances. They had stopped at the edge of a massive square basin. It was elevated above the plains around it, hemmed in by thick earthen walls, and carved down into the earth. There were gates at each of the four sides, with plates that could be raised and lowered. Beyond the gates, irrigation channels stretched off in each direction. It was meant to hold a great body of water, but, like the landscape all around it, it was completely dry.

One of the engineers-several had met the group, along with a few laborers, even some children who stood at a slight distance, nearly naked and silent-explained that a deep spring had once fed the tank. She could see the hole in the center of the square. It had been a steady source of water for hundreds of years. There were a few others like it throughout the fields, but those had run dry much earlier.

Corinn asked, "Water from this tank can be distributed throughout the entire irrigation system?" The engineer began to say that it had never done that, but Corinn cut him off. "Could water from this tank be distributed throughout the entire system? I asked to be brought to a tank that was central to everything. Is this it?"

"As near as there is to that, yes," the engineer said. "Some channels would have to be modified, perhaps embankments reorganized." The man looked to his companions for help. They offered none. "I am not sure, Your Majesty, what you-"

"You have answered me," Corinn said. She slipped down from the saddle and touched the ground. She looked immediately composed, her cream-colored trousers-deceptively cut to look like a dress-as unwrinkled as when she began the ride. She bent and plucked a pebble from the ground, studied it, and then enfolded it in her palm. "I'll have you all wait for me here. No one is to approach me while I'm in the tank no matter what happens. Understand?" She was answered first with silence, and then with a quick barrage of half-formed questions. She cut through them, glancing up at her son as she did so. "Aaden, that means you. Numrek, you stay here as well. I'll be back in a moment." With that, she stepped over the rim and began a careful descent into the tank.

She had to catch herself from falling several times, slamming her palm down against the coarse earth as her feet slipped, careful to keep the pebble trapped in her other hand. It was a deeper pit than she had realized. On reaching the bottom, she glanced up at the figures gathered at the rim. They seemed very far away. Aaden raised his arm to wave at her. She turned and walked on. Again, it took her longer than she expected to reach the center of the tank. She felt the men's eyes on her the entire time.

The heart spring was a scar in the ground just wide enough that she could have leaped into it and fallen to its depths. It was simply a hole with jagged edges that quickly faded to shadow. Looking at it, Corinn had the momentary feeling that it was the puckered maw of some wormlike creature, stuck fast in the rock-hard soil, begging for moisture. She moved up close to it, planted her feet, and sang. She opened her mouth and exhaled the first words that came to her mind.

It was as if the song had been in the air already, and she had joined it midflow the moment she began. She knew the right words, the correct notes, and the tempo and rhythm and duration and inflection at precisely the moment it came into and left her mouth. She did not remember what she had sung once it was past, nor did she anticipate what she was going to sing. There was no linear progression. She was not following the notes or words as written on a page. She was the song, changing with it each moment.

And the song was beautiful. She knew it was. She knew that nothing else since the world's creation had captured beauty so perfectly in sound. She felt her body pulled and swayed with the ribbons of god talk that eddied around her. They caressed her, tugged at her, pulled away bits of her being and floated them on the air and returned them to her, changed. While she did not control the song, she did infuse it with her intentions. She explained-using the words that came to her unbidden-what she wished, what she asked for, what she needed. She sang this into the song, and she could feel understanding between her and the swirling music grow.

At the point that she felt the impulse to, she lifted her arm, opened her hand, and let the pebble fall into the well, singing the entire time. A breath of heated air surged up from the well, as if the worm creature were coughing itself to life. Corinn took a half step back, steadied herself, and sang through it without faltering. A few moments later, the well sputtered, gurgled, coughed again. She felt a spray of vapor rise out of it and evaporate instantly in the sun. She sang on.

The water, when it finally bubbled out of the hole, was thick with soil. It seeped into the thirsty ground. For a few moments it seemed as if the lip of the hole would drink it all. But soon the water began to roll forward, carrying dirt and ash before it, a stain on the ground that the watchers must have seen clearly. It flowed in all directions. Corinn felt it touch her toes and grab at the hem of her trouser skirt. She kept singing. She heard the merchants exclaiming up on the rim. A Numrek shouted her name, but she kept singing.

The water began to gush. It surged a few feet into the air. It splashed the front of her dress and reached up over her ankles, buffeting her feet. She sang on, not feeling where the end of the song might be. She vaguely thought that she might not be able to stop. She might be here still with her mouth open when the water poured inside her and she filled with it. This was not a frightening thought. Nothing was frightening when the song was in her. There was nothing, nothing, nothing to fear.

And then she stopped. Just like that. Her lips paused and nothing more came through them and she knew she was finished. The water continued to flow, growing even stronger. She stepped back from it, awed-now that she could see her work with clear eyes-at the wonder of water in this place. She could taste it in the air. The tang of it was sharp and cold, as if she were standing beside a mountain stream, a rising mountain stream.

She turned around and waded toward the merchants with all the grace she could manage. She was panting hard as she reached the rim, but she did not give them time to study her. "Back away from the edge," she commanded. "Back away! Drop to your knees and bow."

The men looked startled, scared even, but one after another did as she commanded. Several had to dismount, but they did so quickly. Soon the entire company around her-merchants, nobles, laborers, and the ragged children-pressed their knees to the ground, waiting, jittery, caught between obeying her and their desire to watch the water rise. The Numrek contingent stood straight backed, their weapons in hand, looking as if they were ready to attack the merchants, slaughtering them. Not today, Corinn thought.

She stood gathering her breath, holding the moment, using it. Aaden still sat on his horse. She glanced at him long enough to smile away his concern. In a gesture meant only for him, she rolled her eyes, as if acknowledging the silliness of it all. The gesture almost knocked her off balance. She indicated that he should dismount and stand beside her. Then she turned her attention to the bowed heads.

"Are you true to me?" Corinn asked.

"Of course," Elder Anath said.

"Why?"

"You are our queen."

"Are you the only one who thinks so?"

The others spoke then, praising her, talking over one another, some bending forward like worshippers. It was what she wanted, but the sight of them annoyed her also. They were scared now, cowards. "Do not ask how I have done this thing, but see that it was I alone who did it. Tell the truth when you speak of this. The water will rise and rise and never stop as long as this is my wish. It will fill the tank and will replenish itself as you open the gates and feed the fields. This heart spring belongs to all Bocoum. Don't let me learn that any of you have called it your own or deprived others of it. You may look up now."

Corinn's gaze moved from one person to the next, pausing at each one, speaking to them all-old and young, rich and poor-with the same authority. Before, there might have been much to read in the hidden thoughts and emotions behind the various faces. Now, though, they all looked the same. Sinper Ou shared the same slack-mouthed expression as the boy standing a little distance behind him. Elder Anath had a face of wet clay, upon which she could write what she wished.

"I am not just the mother of this child. I am the mother of Acacia. Say that. Say that I am the mother of Acacia."

"You are the mother of Acacia," they intoned raggedly, in different volumes and pitches of voices.

"Say that I am the mother of the empire."

The kneeling group did.

"And remember to pray each day for my health, for should I die, this spring will as well. Betray me," Corinn said, "and your world will dry, shrivel, and burst into flames beneath my sun. This water that I give"-she motioned to the rising body behind her-"I can take away. So say I, and my son." As hard as it was to do, she raised Aaden's arm with hers. For a few moments longer, her eyes moved from person to person, until she was sure that she had made eye contact with them all. Then she smiled and said, soft voiced, "That's the truth, but we are friends here, aren't we? Do not think me angry. I just enjoy speaking the truth. Now drink of this water, friends. It will not cease flowing. Never. Grow your crops, and spread word of the gift I have given Bocoum. I am your queen, and I give this to you."

As the merchants rose and moved toward her, she had to speak over their adulation to announce that she would return to the city now, without the merchant escort. Though they fawned around her until she moved away, it was clear they did not care. They rushed toward the edge of the bubbling tank as soon as she turned her back to them. On her horse again, she rode without looking back. Aaden did, though.

"What are they doing?" she asked.

The boy laughed. "They're acting like children. They are dancing, shouting, and hugging each other. I didn't know you were going to do that! You did magic, Mother, and everyone saw!" He laughed again, and Corinn knew the child in him would have liked to have joined them, to share their giddy enthusiasm, maybe even to jump in and swim. She needed him, though. She could not fall from the saddle. If she did, the Numrek would carry her back to the city, but that wouldn't do.

She began to reach out to touch him, but just lifting her hand from the pommel made her feel she might fall. She returned it, gripping hard and trying to find the swaying balance she needed. It would not be easy, but she knew she could do it if she kept her focus. For that reason, she rode in silence for several minutes.

"Aaden, ride close to me. Watch me carefully."

"Why?" Serious now, the prince drew up near her.

"Doing such a thing as that tires me very much. I need you beside me."