Dragon of Mishbil (v1.0), page 11
The steady downpour soaked through a linen cloak almost instantly. “We might as well accept being wet,” Xerlanthor said. He let his sodden cloak fall and took off his cap. The rain plastered his hair in black clumps down his forehead, and dripped steadily off his nose. He paced along with a jaunty air as if he felt superior to merely physical elements. That made her laugh.
“You can’t be comfortable,” Zaryas said. “At least with a cloak one makes the gesture.” For a while it was amusing to splash along hand in hand, wet to the skin, the water squelching out of their shoes. A deliberate merriment possessed them, a conscious delighting in the present moment. Zaryas pretended not to notice when Xerlanthor guided their steps steadily westward, toward the Neck:
But their progress became slower and slower. First the water was sole-deep, then ankle-deep. The gutters overflowed in every street, so that lanes became rivers and roads torrents. Very soon they had to wade, stubbing their toes on hidden kerbstones and water-borne trash. The ways seemed curiously rough, perhaps because they could not see. Xerlanthor pointed at a dead rat bobbing past and panted, “Cellars must be flooding all over town.”
It had never occurred to Zaryas that rain could kill. “Is it safe to be out in this?” she asked.
“I want to see the dam,” he admitted at last. “But you needn’t come along.”
“No, I can keep up.”
It was a little better west of the city center, where the waters were not channeled by buildings. The tall sycamores along the road seemed to droop their boughs into the water. Houses presided helplessly over flowing sheets of water that had once been gardens or courtyards. The dry sandy soil could not retain the runoff. Xerlanthor wiped his face and peered for a glimpse of the river, but the streaming rain hid everything.
There was no doubt now the road was washing away. Zaryas stepped again and again into deep potholes. Every time the jolt seemed to loosen her teeth. Gravel and sand scoured past her calves. “Let’s stop and rest a bit,” Xerlanthor suggested.
It was good to pause beneath one of the roadside sycamores. Gratefully they leaned against the gleaming wet bark where the new broad leaves gave a little shelter. Zaryas bent to rinse out accumulated grit from her shoes. “I’ll have the Director of Roadworks lapidated,” she declared.
“There isn’t a road in Averidan built to take this,” Xerlanthor replied. “Nor a roof, nor a house. This is no ordinary rain. It’s a cataclysm.”
Zaryas would not have believed clouds could hold so much water. If anything the rain was pelting down even harder. The dirty water that swirled past seemed only a little less close than the cascade from the sky. Even in the tree’s scant shelter the numbing, bewildering power of it was like stepping under a waterfall. “I must go back,” she said at last. “If this is no ordinary storm I must be where my people can find me.”
“You might have said so before,” Xerlanthor exclaimed. “We’ve come at least a league and a half. Now I’ll have to take the time to help you home.”
“It’s my duty to be there,” she defended.
“Well, for that matter, my duty is at the dam.”
Now they had stopped walking Zaryas had time to realize how tired she was. The exercise had been warming at first but now in her soaked tunic she was shivering. Far more sharply than she had intended to she retorted: “If it holds, it holds, there’s nothing you can accomplish by being there.” Articulating their unspoken fear seemed to give it power. Realizing that she sounded like a child frightened to go to bed alone she said, “I’m perfectly capable of walking a league home myself.”
She saw the anger harden his mouth. She had never provoked it before. “Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “In this?” He would have gone on, with untold unforgivable words. But in a different tone he interrupted himself. “Is it my imagination, or is this tree moving?”
Startled, Zaryas looked up. It was hard to say, what with the water swirling round their legs and the fat cold drops descending on their heads. But she thought there was indeed a slight seasicky motion to either the invisible earth beneath her feet or the living wood at her back. “Or maybe it’s us,” she suggested. “You don’t feel feverish, do you?”
Suddenly his face seemed to blanch. She tried to blink the steady rain out of her eyes and see better. With harsh alarm he cried, “Run!”
The jerk he gave her arm nearly wrenched it from her shoulder. “What is it?” she gasped as she splashed stumbling after him. A rending, sucking sound behind them obliterated any reply he might have made. With a crash that sprayed dirty water up all around them the sycamore toppled down across the roadway. The supporting earth had been eroded away from its roots.
Like the avenging claws of a dragon the threshing boughs caught her. Zaryas struggled in vain. The weight of the tree as it settled on its side bore her down, down, farther than she thought possible. The water seemed fathoms deep. The cold flood clutched at her garments, forced itself into her mouth and eyes. The clumsy magus had died this way. She would drown, held down in the dark, hidden under the roiling water, and when the flood receded her bloated body would be left hanging on the branches of the dead sycamore like some untimely fruit.
Terror stripped away all her mental vestments. As her body failed her she could have bared imaginary teeth at death, like a trapped rat. The fiery determination to live consumed even thought for Xerlanthor. Locked in her struggle it did not occur to her that he also might be drowning in the cold dark.
Then the tangle of branches seemed to relent. The weight across her body eased. It was raining so hard she did not realize at first that her head had broken through the surface. Her first gasp for air sounded like a sob in her ringing ears. She had not given in. She was alive.
Xerlanthor was splashing in the waist-deep torrent beside her. With frantic haste he tore her free, as if the tree might change its mind. “I thought I’d lost you,” he gasped, crushing her to his wet chest. “Thank Viris I had the strength to roll the tree a little.”
“So it was you.” Reaction made her limp and a little dizzy. The warm solidity of his shoulder was comforting but not quite real. The sweet, moist air in her lungs was all she had ever wanted, and the deluge, the dam, all receded into insignificance. With an effort she remembered her manners. “Thank you. You saved my life.”
“Are you hurt?” He explored her back and limbs with hands that were abrupt with anxiety. She submitted with such uncharacteristic patience that he became alarmed. “Did you hit your head?”
“No,” she panted. “But I’m going to be sick.” The water she had had to choke down lay like a slab of ice on her stomach. She leaned over his supporting arm to spew it up.
When she was done he said, “Just relax, I’m going to lift us home.”
Feebly she protested, “Is that safe, in this storm?”
“Not really. But I’ve had some practice.” She could not see if he was smiling. She made no further objection as he clasped her tightly against him. The surging water sank away, and they were flying through the downpour, no longer bound to earth. The sky took them in. Yet even here the storm was cruel. The wind cut right through Zaryas’ wet clothes, and lashed icy rain at her face. It was more like swimming than flying. She burrowed deeper into Xerlanthor’s arms and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again they were already hovering over the city. It was so far below she felt no sense of actuality at all. Like a map-tray, Mishbil was spread neatly below their feet. All the streets were threaded with silver water, and the Eye Pool had overflowed. She could almost touch the lowering ceiling of cloud above their heads. Through rifts in the rain-curtain they could sometimes see leagues away.
She felt the sudden tension in the arms that encircled her before he spoke. “There, did you see that?” Xerlanthor cried. “It must be the lake!”
She gasped at the sight of it. Overnight the reluctant little lake had gorged fat on rain and runoff. Pale and gross, it had invaded farmsteads and gullies, pressed itself right up to the lip of Xerlanthor’s dam. The fury of the storm was less cold than the sudden dread that the lake might run over.
Without warning they began to fall, in the swift yet controlled stoop of a hawk dropping on its prey. The swollen Eye Pool rapidly expanded below Zaryas’ feet. Only when Xerlanthor set them down on her private little balcony did she grasp his intention. “You’re going back to the Neck?”
“Yes.” The strain of lifting through the storm made his chilly hands tremble a little as he closed them over hers. “Send workers, as many as you can find, the magi, and especially my foremen. We’ll try sandbags.”
“Oh, my dearest—” She hugged him. For a brief instant he leaned his head on her shoulder as if the burden was too great for him. Then he freed himself and stepped back. Without further words he lifted, and the rain took him in.
Her fingers were clumsy with cold as Zaryas pried up the trap door. The drip from her soaked clothing ran down before her and made the narrow stair slippery. As soon as she descended to the hall she ran, tripping over her broken shoes, from her part of the house to the main section. When she burst into the arched passage a,few dozen bureaucrats were watching the downpour from its shelter.
“Princess, it’s raining,” the senior chamberlain greeted her.
“I’m well aware of it,” Zaryas snapped. “You, run to the guest wing and tell the magi to hurry to the Neck. Say that the dam’s spillways can’t handle this flood. You three, find the roster of Xerlanthor’s foremen and divide it among you. Find them all and send them to the Neck. And you, chamberlain, gather together the guardsmen, all the city workers who came to work today. Everyone in my employ is to hurry to the Neck to fill sandbags. I’ll give you a requisition, you can pick up the sacks from the grain dealers.”
“But we’ll get wet,” the unfortunate chamberlain protested.
“You’ll all get a lot wetter very soon!” Zaryas flashed back. “Don’t you understand? If the dam overflows, here we all are, right in the path of the torrent!”
They ran, then. Zaryas debated with herself whether to order the evacuation of the city. Surely it would suffice to have the people climb to the rooftops? But she could not risk it. The unbaked mud-brick that most of Mishbil was made of could never withstand long wetting. She considered how to mobilize an entire city population to hurry several miles in the pouring rain. There was no provision in Mishbil for sudden disaster, no system of general warning. Bitterly she contemplated the reasons for that appalling oversight. The last war in Viridese territory had been fought eight hundred years ago, and then the Shan had lost. From then until now they had never needed vigilance. There was not even an army garrison in Mishbil. The Shan King maintained a token force at the capital only for the sake of tradition. And anyway, there was no Shan King now.
Then Zaryas knew where to obtain ready help and obedient hands. As fast as she could she slogged through the rain-lashed streets to Ennelith’s temple. By the mercy of the Goddess the Mistress herself was at the great seashell gate, watching the storm from its shelter. Her blue-clad assistants cried out in dismay at the sight of Zaryas’ muddy clothes and broken, soaking shoes. “Call up the Sodality,” Zaryas panted to the Mistress. “We must evacuate Mishbil immediately.”
The acolytes and novices burst out in shrill questions and exclamations, but the Mistress was serene. “Where shall the populace flee to?”
Zaryas did not know. “To high ground,” she said. “Either north or south of the Bilcad channel will do. Knock on every door, warn each household to flee.”
The Mistress left the dispatching of her women to her seconds and guided Zaryas to a bench. “Sit and rest,” she urged in a low voice. “You look frightful, you must consider your condition.”
For a moment Zaryas was tempted to obey. Her cold hands and feet seemed to have no blood in them at all. Their skin was pale as a fish’s belly, and wrinkled from the day’s wettings. She trembled with weariness, and longed for a cup of hot tea.
But a demon of fear would not let Zaryas rest. The child within her was not immediate, but distant as next year’s harvest. “Food,” she remembered. “We must not lose all our food stores to the floods. Let someone go to warn the granaries.” Someone lent her a pair of sandals, and she laced them on.
“I’ll go to the granaries,” the Mistress promised.
“And we’ll need bonesetters, herbals,” Zaryas continued. When she stepped out the gate the rain hardly seemed cold anymore to her wet body. Already the women of the Sodality were hurrying out the gate, holding their blue cloaks over their heads as they splashed away. As she and the Mistress hurried out along the river road Zaryas remembered she had not warned the archivists to secure the genealogical records. But surely their ancestors’ living descendants were more important—
“Look!” The Mistress shrieked and pointed. To their right a long curve in the Bilcad allowed a view upstream. A curl of foam poured into the river just where distance and rain veiled it. It roared downstream faster than a man could run.
And the sound, the deep gnashing thunder of enraged water, swept ahead—the bellow of the Dragon of Mishbil. Zaryas stared, unable to grasp the significance of this new peril. But the Mistress cried, “That isn’t overflow! The dam must have burst under the strain! Quickly—have you your knife?”
The Mistress drew a short table dagger from her belt and ran to the road’s edge. Zaryas hastened after as the Mistress leaped off the stone parapet. Below, the narrow pebble beach already was drowned deep in the gurgling brown river. Boatmen who cannot afford proper boathouses drag their dinghys and punts up onto the gravel and tie them to the wall below the road. Now those vessels bobbed on the rising tide, straining at their moorings. The Bilcad was nearly overflowing.
Her skirts trailed in a rowboat’s dirty bilge, the Mistress hacked at its ropes…The boat drifted free, listing a little from its ballast of rainwater. The Mistress half leaped, half-fell into the next barge, and staggered up to cut it loose also.
Zaryas scrambled off the parapet into a dinghy. When the flood came only boats would be able to traverse the streets of Mishbil. If these were not cut free to float on the surge they would founder. The thick hempen ropes were slimy and wet. It was hard to balance against the boat’s jerk. But when the Mistress held the rope taut it went a little faster. Zaryas sawed at it with her bigger blade.
Of course it was impossible. All of a sudden the dinghy reared upward like a wounded bird. The river climbed up over the gunwale and poured into Zaryas’ lap. The Mistress clutched wildly at Zaryas’ outstretched hand, missed, and fell overboard. With feverish haste Zaryas slashed the dinghy free before it was overwhelmed. She dared waste no time to bail, though it wallowed almost full of water. “Mistress!” she screamed. “Mistress!” Only the rush of water and the roar of falling rain answered her.
The current would soon capsize the boat unless she turned it. There were no paddles, but a bargepole was wedged up between two submerged boats and she grabbed it. Clumsily Zaryas pointed the prow downstream, and then set to with the earthenware bailer. Her face was wet, but not, she hoped, with tears. She had no time to cry now. There was too much to do.
Zaryas found she could pole right up over the embankment. The Dragon had reclaimed Mishbil, and ran chest-deep down what had once been the road. The whirling currents sucked down pedestrians and the scour of water undermined house foundations. Many who climbed to an upper story and thought themselves safe died when their walls collapsed. The rains peeled tiles from rooves, plaster from mud-brick, earth from rock. The city seemed to be sinking, melting into the waters.
A thick numbing blanket muffled her emotions. Zaryas did not try to fight it. The long habits of efficiency now carried her forward unwavering. She fished out a drowned beggar, and gave him the pole while she helped a young father with three children and their grandmother into the dinghy. Then she steered the laden boat past the mounds of waterlogged rubble to what had once been a guildhall—the Glassblowers, she noticed distantly. The walls had sagged and brought the roof down. But the timbers had been soundly bolted together, and the roof lay more or less in one piece in the middle of the square. “You can all wait there in safety,” she heard herself say. “I shall return with others.”
Her passengers, dumb with horror, obeyed. As the beggar poled the boat away Zaryas looked back, and saw them huddled in the rain.
Gradually a makeshift rescue was organized. Small boats threaded the streets of drowned Mishbil to ferry the living away. The patient dead had to wait. The granaries stood deep in water, but foods that could take wetting were salvaged—sealed jars of pickled fruit, stoppered bottles of oil.
Darkness came quickly, limiting the world to the merciful circle that torchlight cast on the restless water. “Further search must wait for morning,” Zaryas acknowledged unwillingly. No one dared relax in such buildings that still stood, for they might fall in the night. So everyone slept where they could outdoors in the rain—in the boats, or on the little mud islands that once had been a house. Zaryas found her slice of boat-deck an entirely satisfactory couch.
Chapter 12: 21 Ynnem
The dawn was dreadful. Sullen clouds still wept over the city. As when the sword severs the hand the shock of loss had numbed all pain at first. Only with the light did the bereaved begin to mourn. The sobs and cries wound themselves horribly through. Zaryas’ dreams. She had been too tired to notice her bodily discomforts; being soaked through had become second nature. So she woke gradually. For a moment, half-awake, she was able to tell herself that it had all been a dreadful nightmare. She could leap out of bed and escape into the pleasant daytime world. Then she opened her eyes, and knew the dream terrors had conquered day. The water that is life had transmogrified into death.
