"Laurie Marks - Elemental Logic 03 - Water Logic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marks Laurie)

Water Logic
Laurie J Marks

Prologue: Seeking Balance Fire
If it can be imagined, it can be done, said Emil.
Emil, Medric, and Zanja, all fire bloods, had each by an equally unlikely route become governors of Shaftal.
Yet only Emil even knew what a government was. He alone had been a minor thread in the vast tapestry of
the old government before it unraveled. Children not then born had now borne children of their
ownтАФchildren who expected only bloodshed and oppression, who did not know and could not imagine how
it had once been.
The patterns of the past can no longer serve, but people believe that strength lies in tradition, said Emil.
Zanja said, because of tradition they believe in Karis, little though she wants to be believed in.
No, earth is what they believe in, said Emil.
But even earth is unstable, said Medric. For the power of any witch arises from lack of balance. What we
must have is the steadiness that comes from balance: the insight and passion of fire, the solidity and fertility
of earth, the ideals and intelligence of air, the fluidity and vision of water. When, though informing and
contradicting each other, the elements are in balance, then they become stable, and then we have strength.
But how can an entire country be in balance? asked Zanja. How can we do now what we must, while also
devising a future?
Oh, it's an impossible task, said Medric. Let us begin it at once.
Water
Ocean stands knee-deep in the future.
The water is warm. The harbor is protected. There is a narrow beach, insurmountable cliffs, a pounding
waterfall. These have not been enough.
She is a child when she flees there with the remnant of the tribe. The strangers have come, with their
weapons and their anger. Ocean is there, and now she is the leader of the tribe. She finds a haven for
them. She is standing there now, but the tribe has gone.
The people have built larger boats, and have learned to grab the wind with them. They have slipped
between the rocks and dared the open sea. Ocean returns to the ship, to every ship, in every storm, in every
passage. She returns and the sea never takes the sailors, and they find the way back to the harbor with
barrels of salted fish. They go out and meet other ships, and they trade for all that their small harbor does
not give them. To this chary shore, to toothed rocks, to hungry waves, they return, she returns, the tide rises
and falls and she returns, and the pattern is failing.
She stands in childhood; she stands in adulthood; an old woman now, she stands in the future. The tide
flows, in and out, and always inevitably there is less. The pattern will be failing, the pattern has always been
failing, and it has failed. She will stand in the future, is standing there, and she is alone. The pattern has
failed. It must not fail. She returns and again she begins.
Earth
Months had passed, and every night Seth still thought about Clem, a weary, haunted, quiet woman, making a
difficult journey in dead of winter. They had made love in the way of strangers who are compelled towards
each otherтАФa surprising, strange, unsettling, yet heady business, coming to know each other's skin without
knowing each other's secrets.
Later, when Clem returned as Clement, lieutenant general of the Sainnites in Shaftal, leading a company of
soldiers, the uniform had changed her into someone else. They had not touched, though Seth's hands had
yearned to her: not to the heavy, oil-blackened leather, not to the gray wool underneath, where brass
buttons flashed. Her hands yearned to the skin, upon which her fingers had once sensed the scars in the
dark, the scars Seth never mentioned and hardly even heeded.
Seth's hands had betrayed her into foolishness, into a stupid mistake that might well make her notoriousтАФa
Basdown cow doctor who was such a bumpkin she had mistaken a Sainnite soldier for a Shaftali farmer,
even when they lay naked in her bed! Yet at that second meeting, Clem'sтАФClement'sтАФidentity had been a