Part One: The Deluge
1.1
Harv’s senses crashed and blurred; they faded in and out with flickering images and feelings and smells. A forest, a desert, a campfire—no, a million campfires stretching back to the dawn of time! He felt his hands, coarse and calloused, on the steering oar of a reed boat, pushing and pulling desperately in an effort to avoid…buildings? A flooded city? No, a wave crashing through a city. His heart hammering in his throat, more afraid than he’d ever been in…his life? In someone else’s life? Suddenly the flickering quieted, and he snapped into place.
* * *
“I always find you here on clear days.”
Manuah Hasis turned away from the sea, toward the man speaking behind him. A man with walnut skin, black hair, and a black moustache, dressed in blue robes and bleached-white cap of finest linen, exactly the colors of the sky and the lazy summer clouds drifting across it.
Manuah bowed. “I could say the same, Your Theity.”
The man laughed, because while the title was accurate, he was Manuah’s half-brother, Adrah Hasis, and might just as reasonably have been addressed as “Pook” or “smallest” or “fart noise,” if they were both twenty years younger.
“I come here because I work here, Harbormaster. You come to admire the view, and they only let you in because your hereditary titles make them nervous.”
“I also donate money,” Manuah countered, laughing along with his brother. The two of them tapped hands in a less formal greeting.
They were standing atop the highest tower in The City—five floors tall, and built upon the Hill of Stars, from which Adrah and his fellow Cleric Astrologers tracked the movement of planets across the night sky. They were a hundred feet above the valley floor—practically celestial bodies themselves! The Cleric Portenters also sacrificed animals here in the tower, presumably on the notion that it was physically closer to the gods, but fortunately today was Groundsday—hardly the most auspicious day of the week. In fact it was the day of laborers and merchants, and thus perhaps the most distant from the gods’ attention.
Adrah’s tone became more serious. “You look troubled, brother. I see you staring out at the waters—your waters—and it never brings you satisfaction. Is it not an excellent harbor?”
Indeed, it was an excellent harbor, mostly natural, though with a pair of cut-stone sea walls at the east, like the jaws of a dragon nearly closed, forming a barrier against storm surge and a tricky navigation for foreign sailors entering without permission. It measured nearly a full kos—the range of a cow’s loudest moo—so that a herd on one bank could be heard by a man on the opposite one, but only barely, and only on a quiet day. Its pale blue waters were deep enough for boats and shallow enough for good fishing, except on the far west edge, where they were so shallow that at low tide a woman could walk out into the mud with a shovel and pail, and in less than half an hurta dig up as many clams and crabs and frogs as she could carry. The people of The City dined better than anyone else in Kingdom, by far. Well, the ones who liked fried clams, anyway.
But that was the problem, yeah? The clam beds got smaller every year. This very month, Manuah had sent his boatmen out to move the buoys again, widening the range that boats could safely travel without fear of running aground or fouling their nets.
“The water keeps getting deeper,” he told his brother. Then added, “Your Theity,” just in case the gods were listening, and in case they cared.
The cool shadow of a cloud passed over them, chasing out across low stone buildings and white-painted roofs, then into the harbor, darkening it for a few kesthe and then passing on.
Beside him, he felt Adrah shrug. “Isn’t that a good thing, Harbormaster? Your domain ever expanding? Your boats safer and safer from the horrors of getting stuck on a sandbar?”
“It would be nice to think so,” Manuah said.
“But?”
“But The City is built on flat ground, Adrah, between the Great River and the Grand Sea. There’s no higher ground to retreat to. If the water rose another twenty feet, this whole place would disappear.”
Adrah barked out a laugh. “Twenty feet! Yes, and the sky might fall on us and crack the tower. Brother, surely there are better things to worry about.” But when Manuah didn’t answer, Adrah became serious again. “You’re a sailor, and a merchant. You know the tides. You’re worried about storm surges.”
“Among other things.”
In fact, Manuah was worried about all sorts of possibilities, only some of which he could clearly articulate. His mother, Adrah’s aunt, had often chided him as someone who worried too damn much, about too many things. And perhaps she was right about that, but while she had trained him to keep quiet about most of it, that had really only made the problem worse. The less he shared of the things that bothered him, the more power they seemed to hold over him. And yet, the more wealth and power he accumulated, the more men he had working for him, the more servants his wife commanded, the more ridiculous it seemed for him to be afraid of anything at all.
After a moment of silence he asked Adrah, “Can you people really speak to the gods? Do the gods speak back to you?”
“Not in The Language, no. You know that. But they make their patterns known. Brother, what’s on your mind?”
Sighing, Manuah took his gold-leaf-covered walking stick—worth more than most men earned in a year—and pointed west to the Great River, past the edges of the city and the harbor, to where the river’s waters fanned out and spilled broadly into the ocean. “That water is rising, too. Every year, the river gets a little wider, eating up a few more feet of the farms that line it. Every year, the spring floods get worse. Not just deeper, but worse, with faster water and more mud and debris. This water comes from somewhere, yes? Past all the towns, into the wild lands and the desert beyond that, there are hills, and the water comes from behind those. From the mountains.
“The mountains are white. The wildmen call it ‘snow,’ but they say it’s what happens to water when it gets cold. And when it gets warm, it turns back to water again. What if the mountains are getting too warm? What if the land between the harbor and the delta just washes away? And Brother, the edges of another big river delta begin just thirty kos farther that direction. You haven’t left The City in many years; you don’t really understand the shape of the land, but the fan of the Other River is close. And that water is rising. Kingdom is great because the land is fertile, because we live in the flat space around these two river deltas. But what if the water keeps rising?”
“I’m sure the gods would never allow that,” Adrah said, with a confidence that Manuah envied.
“Would you ask them for me?” he pressed. “I’ve seen some big storm surges, and I am afraid. If the gods became angry, it wouldn’t take much to drown us all.”
“Well, then we’ll see to it they don’t get angry. My brother, you look so tense. It helps nothing if you walk around like that. Will you try some poses with me?”
* * *
Throughout this conversation, Harv Leonel’s consciousness hung just beneath the surface. He was Manuah, or felt that he was, and could not remember anything else. But here, for a moment, his own thoughts floated to the surface, and he noted (with something like astonishment) the grace of their speech. The word for Harbormaster was something like Vaivas Vakta or “Keeper of the Waters,” and Adrah’s title was Vaivas Jyotis or “Keeper of the Stars.” The Great River was Sarudas Vakti or “stream so big it has waves,” and the Other River was Chera Vakti, which meant something like “Brother of Waves.” And The City was Chera Sippar, and the Kingdom was Chera Desa, and the word for brother was simply Chera. And so in their words and in their minds, everything was brother to everything else, and the result was a kind of holistic poetry Harv could barely follow, like a joke whose punchline he didn’t quite get. But this was their everyday speech; they weren’t composing or trying to outdo one another. It seemed this wordplay came as naturally to them as speech itself.
And Harv also took a moment to, it seemed, turn Manuah’s head and survey the landscape around them. He could not, for the life of him, figure out where they were. The City had thousands of stone buildings and tens of thousands of wooden ones. Probably at least a hundred thousand inhabitants, which was a large settlement for almost any era. And the Great River had to be almost ten kilometers wide—wider than the Nile!—and he had the distinct impression that it flowed from north to south, and that the Grand Sea was to the south, and that this brother river to the west was parallel, and nearly as large. And although he had aced every geography and geology and world history course he’d ever taken, he couldn’t think of a single spot on Earth that met this description. Adrah looked vaguely Middle Eastern, or perhaps Indian, and his clothes bore some resemblance to those of a Tibetan monk, although the colors were all wrong, and the cloth, while soft-looking, seemed to have been woven from particularly large thread. And although it was summer, the temperature here did not seem overly hot. Did any of that mean anything at all?
Anyway, was there really such a thing as a saltwater frog? Was Harv simply hallucinating? Given the strength and complexity of the magnetic fields pulsing through his brain, he supposed it was a possibility. He surely wasn’t supposed to be here, and no one had ever done anything like this before, and every second that went by might be causing irreversible brain damage. And yet, there seemed to be very little he could do about it. He couldn’t feel the chair in which he was reclining. Couldn’t feel himself at all. He was Manuah.
These thoughts flitted through his mind, taking all of two seconds, or a third of a kesthe, before his consciousness submerged again.
* * *
Manuah grumbled for a few moments, before allowing Adrah to lead him through a series of stretches—first the fingers, then the wrists, then the elbows and shoulders, and similarly with the feet and legs and finally his back, which really did ache. He might be a lord and a shipping magnate, but when the dock crew was short a man he was not above loading and unloading cargo with his own two hands, or supervising a repair crew by getting in there and showing them how they were supposed to apply the tar. Or steering. No matter how respectable he got, he would never lose his love for standing at the stern of a boat and sculling, or pulling on the steering oar for all he was worth, to make those tricky turns without any of his sailors having to dip a paddle in the water. He never felt more free than that.
“You carry your worries on your back,” Adrah told him. “I can see it from here. Perhaps that wife of yours can rub it for you, but here, stand with me. Like a tree. Like a post. Like a marsh reed in the wind. Now extend your knee, and now the other one…”
This was not Manuah’s first time being led through the poses—not even his first being led by his baby brother—but it was perhaps the first time he felt that spiritual thing one was supposed to feel while doing it. Not the presence of the gods, exactly, but a kind of openness to the world beyond the boundaries of his flesh. Something pulsed in him that was neither fire nor water nor light, nor strength or weakness, but resembled all of them in some way, and when it was done—after almost half an hurta of jumping and posturing—he felt a better kind of tired than he had in months.
“Clarity,” his brother told him. “The poses align the body in accordance with natural principles, and this in turn aligns the mind. Helpful thoughts join together, and unhelpful ones slide off you like water off a heron’s wing.”
“Why?” Manuah wanted to know. Why should it work that way? If the body and soul were separate things, then how could the one affect the other?
“Because the gods decree it,” Adrah answered happily.
And again, Manuah envied him, because his own mind went to darker places. Indeed, if the gods had that kind of power, to reach inside human beings and affect their bodies and their souls, then what couldn’t they do? If angered by the actions of human beings, what wouldn’t they do?
“Keep them happy,” he beseeched his brother, and mounted the first ladder to begin the long climb down to solid earth. In the meantime, he had an appointment to keep, here in the physical realm.
“May the next month be kind!” Adrah called after him.