Andrew Knighton

 Ichik was happy in his job and his art and confident in his future until he came across an obscure, rebel village and met a woman, Mahaway, who would change his life completely. Can he change a boss stubbornly set in his ways and an autocratic society determined to waste nothing to save the village and his new-found love?

Fantasy stories sometimes skimp on technical details to concentrate on the narrative, but in this case we are immersed in a consistent, solar-mechanical driven world from the beginning. I hope you enjoy Andrew Knighton's "Land of Black and Red" as much as I did.

Andrew Knighton is an author of short stories, comics, novellas, and the forthcoming novels The Executioner’s Blade (Northodox, November 2024) and Forged for Destiny (Orbit, April 2025). As a freelance writer, he’s ghostwritten over forty novels in other people’s names, as well as articles, history books, and video scripts. He lives in Yorkshire with an academic and a cat, growing vegetables and dreaming about a brighter future. You can find more of his work and his social media links at andrewknighton.com.

-- Andrew Knighton

LAND OF BLACK AND RED

by Andrew Knighton

The eighth cogwheel was a mistress wheel, one of the big stone gears that controlled the settings on the floodgates and so regulated the flow of water into the terraced fields. It was bigger than the rest, a real challenge, and Ichik lowered it slowly onto the pile. He stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth, to the laughter of one of the nearby labourers, and screwed up his face in a caricature of concentration. As he pulled his hands away the mistress wheel wobbled and then steadied itself, balanced on the tip of his pyramid.

Ichik rose and took a bow to the three bored labourers and two guards who were his audience. The applause was sarcastic but friendly, just loud enough to compete with the gobbling of a wild turkey strutting around their feet.

'Thank you, thank you!' He turned on the spot, twirling through the accounts lying scattered on the seed crate. The gears of a calculating machine continued to click away beside him.

This was the life. Drifting with the work crews from valley to valley, always free to move on, often free to stop and play.

And what a place to play! The empire's irrigation teams had such marvellous devices, from accounting boxes to mechanical pumps to crystal arrays that focused the sun's light, using it to melt snow, boil water, and power digging machines. He had sat and watched them channelling that light a hundred times and never quite managed to capture its power and beauty.

'You done with that?' Chac took the mistress wheel off the heap and headed up the hill. Being leader of a construction team had sapped all the fun from him.

'Ichik!' Lord Ahmakiq's roar echoed around the valley. Ichik glanced through the steam pouring from the lead engineer's huge barge, but he had not emerged from his cabin. He was just that loud.

And mean. Never forget mean.

Ichik turned the lens on his wrist to catch a sun reading. Not yet noon, so Ahmakiq shouldn't be worried about the paperwork. He had set a deadline, after all, and he was scrupulous about deadlines.

'Ichik!' Ahmakiq poked his head out of a doorway, twisting around to glare at a wilful world.

'Coming!' Ichik swept the papers into his bag, stoppered and stowed away his two pots of ink -- black and red, always black and red -- grabbed his brass quill, and headed for the barge.

Ahmakiq was tall and straight backed, as befitted a second cousin of Queen Ixtab. He would make a good subject for a statue one day, his face as rectangular as his body. Ichik had drawn that statue once, sketched out the line of his boss's nose and the fall of his robes, but not the bright yellow and turquoise of the cloth. Statues were grey, and Ichik saved colours for his most special pictures, the perfect moments he preserved in his book of memories.

'You bellowed, oh enlightened one?' Ichik bounced along the gang plank and up onto the barge, one brightly beaded trail of hair dancing around beneath his topknot. The canal oozed by on either side, an easy going traveller drifting towards the city.

Ahmakiq glared down at Ichik like he was an insect underfoot. The lord's attempts to legislate against sarcasm among his staff had sunk in a quagmire of ill-defined terms, but he still looked upon Ichik as a remorseless dissident, his most positive responses meeting the sharpest rebukes.

'I have a job for you,' Ahmakiq said. He was holding a half-assembled device of delicate obsidian gears and dazzling crystals, points of sunlight scattering from the tip. Other pieces lay behind him in the shadows of his work room -- reflector dishes, lens arrays, gears in a dozen different shapes. Doubtless his latest attempt to create a better water regulator or draw more sunlight to power the diggers.

Ichik tensed. This could be almost anything, from counting sacks of maize to carrying a letter to the capital. Ahmakiq's tone did not promise fun.

'But I already have a job.' Ichik grinned and patted his bag. 'I am honoured to be your water scribe, and ill-suited to digging or building. Perhaps you might retain me as --'

'Enough.' Ahmakiq glared at him. 'Keep up your stupidity, and you will have no job at all.'

Ichik's heart sank. Him and his blabbering mouth. This job was freedom, the chance to move from place to place, to roam the countryside mapping and planning. It was as close to complete happiness as he had found, and he dreaded being sent back to the factories in Tonina.

'Sorry, my lord.' He hung his head.

'As you should be,' Ahmakiq said. 'You will go up into the hills and map this area. Identify slopes that will be hard to terrace, patches of jungle that can be kept and gardened.'

Ichik's heart lifted in relief. He loved to be sent mapping, to wander the country seeing its sights, the hills and valleys, animals and plants, people and places. He would find many exciting new things to draw as he did his work.

'And the people?' he asked, curious about whom he was to meet, how they would fit into Ahmakiq's grand plans.

'There is a remnant of a town in the hills, a backwards hole probably full of rebel sympathisers. Their cycle is ending. We will divert the water to the terraces, and they will move on. The handful of rebels lurking in these valleys will either starve or come out and face justice.'

Ahmakiq picked up another device, a hefty flow meter of hardened wood with a blue crystal dial.

'Most importantly, map the rivers. Measure their flow. Plan what should be redirected and where. This valley has lain neglected long enough. It is time for its cycle to resume.'

###

Ichik liked hills. He liked rivers and trees, toucans and opossums. He liked all the wild delights of the jungle, and had captured many of them in ink. But after four days of mapping, even with regular breaks to sketch, the town was still an exciting change.

It was a quiet, dusty place on an east-facing slope, white daub houses and granaries standing on stone platforms between dirt streets. The only building of note was a small, stepped pyramid with a broken-down sacrificial machine on the top. The machine had once been driven by a crystal array, half-a-dozen gems held in a ring of carefully carved stone so that they focused the sun's light onto a boiler. Steam from that system had driven the bladed arms that dispatched the town's offerings to the gods, but now its crystals were missing, its blunted arms curled inward like a calcified spider. Around the edges of the town, the jungle was creeping in on the shells of outlying homes, giving the place an air of decline.

Ichik heard giggling and followed the sound to the foot of the pyramid. Half-a-dozen skinny children were playing there, racing across the ceremonial stones, a clockwork ball rolling erratically back and forth between them. They waved and Ichik waved back, then sat down in the dirt. Gratefully, he set aside the weight of the flow metre, pulled out his memory book, and began to draw.

His brass quill was bottle fed, vials of ink slotting into the top, their contents flowing through regulator dials that let him balance the colours. He started with yellow-grey for the stones of the pyramid, but that was just a framing device. The real picture was the children, their moment of innocent delight, the joyous energy that filled their every movement.

'Not bad.' He turned to see a woman staring over his shoulder, arms folded across a white, cotton dress. Ichik guessed that, like him, she was in her mid twenties, though she looked as stern as his grandmother.

Ichik smiled back. A little cheer never did any harm.

'Thank you,' he said. 'I don't suppose you have coloured inks I could buy? I'm running out of light brown, and it's hard to do skin in red and black.'

She shook her head. 'We can make blue up here, but we don't have much time for drawing.'

The children were running over now.

'Mahaway, Mahaway, come play with us,' they said, grabbing at her skirts.

'Not now,' she replied.

'I'll play,' Ichik said, stoppering his precious bottle of green ink. 'Do you know the dead toucan game?'

They crowded around him excitedly, sharing his big grin. But as he looked down he realised how skinny they were. Not just hungry but malnourished, their arms little more than bones, bright eyes shining above sunken cheeks. He pulled out his lunch, two tortillas and a handful of dried fruit, and shared it around.

'That was kind of you,' Mahaway said, sitting down beside Ichik.

He shrugged. 'I didn't need it all.'

'Really?' Mahaway prodded him in the belly. 'You've not got much more meat on you than they do.'

'I'm not fuelled by food. I live off sunshine and art and the smiles of beautiful women. I'm feeling particularly full today.'

Mahaway laughed and looked away, then glanced back at him with a stifled smile and a shake of her head.

'Run along, children,' she said. 'I need to talk with....'

She let her sentence hang unfinished.

'Ichik,' he said, watching her smile. 'I'm here with the agricultural team from Tonina.'

'The water thieves.' Her smile was gone.

Ichik sagged. He'd been having fun, and now it had all turned serious.

'Not thieves,' he said. 'Sent here by the queen to improve food supplies. Without us --'

'Without you controlling the water we would have all starved centuries ago.' She held up a hand against his interruptions, a bracelet of old obsidian arrow heads clinking on her wrist. 'I've heard it all before. Just like I've heard how the rebels want to return the waters to us. Well, I don't care about your fields, or about their so-called insurgency. I care about my people.'

She pointed at the children sitting in the dirt, chewing tortillas and watching a warbler fly by, then down into the town beyond. Women and men were sitting outside their homes doing all the things that were needed to keep a community alive -- washing, weaving, carving, grinding corn. They talked and smiled and traded conversation, apparently oblivious to the changes happening in the world around them, or perhaps just focused on the things they could change. Past the houses and feed stores at the edge of town, others were working vegetable patches at the edge of the jungle.

'We have enough water to stay alive,' Mahaway said. 'No more. None to spare to feed the city or for those idiots up in the hills. If you take our water, our town will wither away within the year. Or worse yet, the rebels will come down to fight, and the town will be gone within a week.'

'All things die and are reborn,' Ichik said. Everybody knew this. 'It is the great cycle. One day, your town will be back.'

'And you would let them die for your great cycle?' She pointed again at the children, who waved gleefully at Ichik.

'I didn't mean it like that.'

'Well you should. Do you think they have the strength to trek across the country to a new home? Do you think if our well runs dry, they will even last that long?'

'Oh.' He had never thought about it that way. It was like someone had pulled a stopper from his heart and let all the joy pour out. Then a thought struck him. 'It's alright, I can fix it. There are plenty of ways to water the fields. I'll explain about you to Lord Ahmakiq, and it'll all be alright.'

A look crossed Mahaway's face. Not quite confusion but very close, like she was watching an opossum juggle knives and feared that he might drop one near her.

'If you want to help,' she said at last, 'perhaps a more subtle approach?'

'Yes, yes.' He wandered over to join the children playing ball. Something was niggling at his mind, but it couldn't be that important. 'Don't worry, I'll fix it.'

###

The agricultural crews were well practised at their profession and the terraces were going up fast. Strips of jungle were cleared, the trees turned into bulwarks to hold the soil back. Digging machines gouged channels from the ground, arrays of crystals sending sunlight to heat their boilers and drive those huge shovels. Small water mills were set along the banks, paddles turning bird scarers and scoops that fed rich soil into the upper beds.

Ichik sauntered down the hillside, whistling a warbler's song. The sun was shining, and he glowed inside. He was set on a good deed.

He spotted Ahmakiq halfway down the hillside, knee deep in mud. The engineer was supervising the rebuilding of one of the mills, bellowing at workers who hadn't followed his meticulous instructions, shoving Chac's face into the gearbox to show him how it should be done.

Hopefully some good news could ease his mood, maybe even give Chac and his colleagues a reprieve.

'My lord!' Ichik balanced on the edge of a drainage ditch, arms outstretched for balance.

'Not now,' Ahmakiq said.

'I have your maps,' Ichik continued, more focused on staying upright than his master's words. 'And I have an idea.'

'I said not now!'

Ichik started backwards at the furious shout. He wobbled and tumbled into the ditch, then decided he should stay there until things blew over.

A newt waddled over and stared down into Ichik's face, its scales patterned like lightning bolts. He pulled out his memory book and brass quill and began to sketch.

He was half-way done when the newt turned its head in alarm and scurried away. A shadow fell, over Ichik and he looked up into Ahmakiq's glare.

'Well?' came the growl.

Ichik rummaged in his bag and pulled out a sheath of sketch maps on rough bark paper, points of interest highlighted in red. He had avoided using red around the town.

Ahmakiq peered at the dotted lines of Ichik's irrigation proposal.

'Idiot,' Ahmakiq said. 'You have missed out one of the best sources.' He pointed at a spot just north of the town, where a stream running down from the mountains turned off and into another valley.

'That was the idea I mentioned,' Ichik explained as he scrambled upright, feet sliding on the mud beneath his feet. 'We can provide enough water for the terraces while still leaving local people their supply.'

Ahmakiq rubbed at his forehead with two knuckles.

'I gave you one task and you couldn't even do that right,' he said. 'Does Your plan involves laying longer pipes, spending extra time on this work when we could be elsewhere. The cities did not survive the dry time by clinging on to what was already lost. We use water at its full efficiency or we die. We certainly do not leave useless ruins of towns out here beyond our control.'

He flung the maps at Ichik, who stood, face slack and arms hanging loose; the bright spirit that had carried him here swept away.

Ichik pulled himself together. It was never going to be easy to convince Ahmakiq, a man who seldom shifted paths once his mind was made up. But if he told him about Mahaway and the children, about the people whose fate depended upon them, then surely that would make a difference.

'My lord, the town --'

'Cannot survive, even if we leave that river.' Ahmakiq leapt down into the ditch, snatched one of the sheets from Ichik's hands, and shoved it in his face. 'It is melt water, idiot. They cannot rely on it all year round. With the other water sources diverted and the water table dropping, they would need an expert to get by. I cannot waste my years out here when others need me. Can you?'

The very thought of it panicked Ichik. Of staying in one place for the rest of his life, stuck with the same people, the same sights, week after week, year after year. He was an artist, not a farmer to be tied to a loom or plough.

'Of course not, my lord.' Would Ahmakiq do that to him, leave him here to punish his defiance? Him and his stupid mouth. 'I'm sorry my lord. I'll do the surveys again.'

'Yes, you will.' Ahmakiq gave him a shove, sending him sprawling once more in the mud, then climbed up out of the ditch. He turned back briefly at the top. 'Don't forget to finish the accounts.'

###

Ichik lay on the top of the stepped pyramid, a living sacrifice safe beneath the powerless blades of the disembowelling machine. He had his ink set to black and was scrawling away on a heap of paper, drawing mill wheels and water screws, drainage channels and lifting machines. In one corner was a sketch of the children at play in the square, in another a goat that had stopped to rest near them. But mostly he was attentive, focused on the task in hand, painstakingly checking and rechecking his design.

From time to time he would look up and take in the view around him. He'd spent most of his life in the city, bustling from one place to another, looked after by his grandmother one summer, his uncle the next, until he was old enough to keep moving by himself, from artist's studio to engineer's office, then out into the wild, drifting along the rivers with the irrigation teams. The atmosphere here was like nothing he’d felt before. Everyone knew each other. Everyone was welcoming. They smiled and waved at him while he worked. A man had brought him bread and spiced sweet potato, not in return for payment, just because it was time to eat. These people had so little, yet they shared it all. They were special, and they deserved his help.

Mahaway ascended the steps of the pyramid, her dress spotless white against a background of wilderness and dirt. When she reached the top, she sat next to him, peering curiously at the sketches.

'How do you make them look so real?' she asked.

Ichik took out two fresh sheets of paper and handed her a pen.

'It's about drawing what you see, not what you think you see,' he said. 'Like that house over there, what shape is the end of it?'

'Square I suppose, with a triangle on top.'

'Not when you see it from here.' He sketched out a few lines, capturing the shape of the wall and the slope of the roof. 'See? Now you try.'

Mahaway looked from his picture to the house and then down at the paper in front of her. She set the pen tentatively to the page and slowly drew out the lines. When she was done, she frowned.

'It's not right.'

'That's because you're not drawing what's really there.'

Ichik leaned in close to her, then used his finger to draw in the air along the line of the distant roof. Then he took hold of her pen hand and helped her draw that same line.

'See?' he asked.

'Not really. But then I don't plan to become a surveyor.'

Despite her words she kept drawing, while Ichik returned to the work that had occupied him.

'You spoke to your lord?' Mahaway asked after a while.

Ichik nodded as he put the final touch on a scheme for a wind-powered pump. He had held out hopes for it at the start, but now he could see that it wouldn't be powerful enough among these trees. He threw it away and reached for another sheet.

'We all thank you for your help,' Mahaway said, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder. He could see others wandering in the square below, looking up at them with wide smiles. 'How did it go?'

'He said “no”.' Ichik put his quill down and looked around at her.

'No to what?' There was an edge in her voice, the sort that made him think he was in trouble.

'To avoiding the town,' Ichik said. Wasn't that what she wanted?

'You just flat out asked him?'

'Not at first. But now I think about it, it was probably pretty obvious.' He thought back to his map, to that absence of red he had considered inconspicuous.

'Unbelievable.' She rose, arms folded. 'Didn't I say to be subtle?'

'I tried.' It made him sad to see her so angry. She had a lovely smile, she just didn't seem to use it. But he could help with that. He held up his best sketch.

'What's this?' she asked, letting it dangle between her fingertips, as wanted as a stained swaddling cloth.

'It's for digging deeper wells,' Ichik explained. 'Or it will be, once I get it right. It's for you, for your next town, so this doesn't happen again.'

Shouting rose from the square at the base of the pyramid. A boy and two girls had started a running race, cheered on by nearby adults. Weaving and washing and grinding were forgotten for a minute while the grownups watched the children run.

'Our next town?' Mahaway dropped the drawing, letting it flap away on the wind. 'What next town? You think we can just leave this behind?'

'Of course. You can go see new places, find somewhere else to live. Maybe down by the coast, or on the plains, or --'

'Oh, of course, we'll just walk away. Pack up our houses and fields on our backs and take them with us. Maybe dig up the graves of our ancestors so that they can come along too.'

'You can build new houses, plant new fields.'

She grabbed his arm and dragged him to the edge of the pyramid's upper platform.

'You see him?' she said, pointing to an old man sitting hunched outside the nearest house. 'You think  he'll survive living out in all weather while we build our new homes?' She pointed again, at the skinny children running down the street. 'You think they'll survive the years of hunger while we clear and plant new fields then wait for those crops to grow?'

She spread her arms wide, a gesture that took in everything around them, from the pyramid to the jungle's edge.

'You think even half these people will survive when you take the away their land and shelter and the sights that lift their hearts?'

Ichik's pulse pounded in his veins. He felt flushed and uncertain, battered about by her words and by the maelstrom of his own emotions.

'I'm just trying to help,' he said.

'You call this help? Turning up to places, planning their destruction, and then moving right on?'

'It's not destruction,' Ichik snapped. He was proud of his work and didn't like to hear it talked about this way.

'Not destruction?' She waved her arms around, filling his vision with angry gesticulation. 'What do you call it when you let a town die?'

'We're laying better fields, building better farms, finding ways to use and conserve the water.'

'Not for us.'

'For the thousands of people in cities and towns. We keep the empire alive.'

'Because who cares if some children starve, as long as the lords in their cities have full bellies.'

'Your town can't last forever.'

'Of course, nothing is allowed to. Except of course your precious empire.'

'Our fields keep people fed.'

'Oh, bravo, you great hero of the masses. What next, a machine to hook our mouths into smiles while we shrivel away?'

'It's not like that.' Ichik didn't like to feel angry, but here it was. 'I'll prove it isn't. I'll find a way to save your stupid town and to make those fields grow.'

Sketches forgotten, he dashed off down the steps, off to find a plan.

'Maybe I'll even be subtle,' he shouted as he went.

###

Ichik lay in his hammock at the end of the loading dock, letting noises of hauling and hammering bounce through him. He leafed through his memory book, looking for anything that might provide a hint of inspiration. A sound, an image, a recollection, one thought that would tangle with another and come out the other side as inspiration. That was what he needed.

He gazed past the packing crates at the snow-capped mountains. If he took one of the crystal solar collection arrays up there, he could use it to melt snow. He could carve a picture of a winged snake rising blue-grey from the fields of white. He closed his eyes and imagined trekking through that snow, roaming free above the rest of the world. Then he thought of Mahaway's town, of sitting on the pyramid with her and sketching the children, of what it would be like to stay and do that a little longer. Not settling down exactly, just resting. The thought made him smile.

The first he noticed of Ahmakiq was the cold of a shadow settling over his face. He bolted upright and frantically tried to remember what he was meant to be doing.

'The new maps,' he said, grabbing them off a crate.

'This is it?' Ahmakiq sneered at the carefully redrawn lines, nothing more than a sketch of the engineer's demands. 'And what's this you're working on now?'

He snatched the memory book from Ichik's hand and flicked through its bright pages.

'You call this work?' He held the book up. 'Where are my accounts?'

'Your accounts?'

'They were due yesterday. We need to send them to Tonina so that they will send us wages for the work crews and supplies for construction. So I say again, where are my accounts?'

Ichik remembered the calculating machine, left abandoned a week ago when Ahmakiq sent him out mapping. He felt the blood drain from his face.

'I've been busy,' he said. 'With your maps. And, um...'

'As I suspected.' Ahmakiq leaned in towards him, glaring malevolently.

Ichik pushed himself away from his master. The hammock tipped under his weight, and he fell face first onto the ground, blood spurting from his nose, stars swimming in his eyes.

'I'm sorry,' he mumbled miserably, clutching at the pain that was his face.

'You're sorry? You waste your time scheming with backwards villagers and drawing pictures of children, and now you're sorry? Will sorry do my accounts? Will sorry see our people paid or save the man hours we'll waste without a proper plan?'

Ahmakiq flung the memory book past Ichik's head. It sailed out over the canal, landing with a splash.

'You're worse than my chidren,' Ahmakiq said. 'No more time in the jungle. No more trips to that town. If you're lucky, I'll let you go into the trees to relieve yourself. You do your work -- not sketching, not dreaming, work. Because one more failure and you're fired.'

Ichik sat trembling with sorrow, watching canal water soak the ink from his precious sketches. Blue and green, yellow and orange, even black and red, seeping out and fading away into the flow. The book bobbed, turned, and vanished from view, along with his freedom.

###

'Ichik.' The whisper rose from the crates behind him, down near the edge of the jungle. He ignored it. He had to do these accounts. He had to do a proper map. He had to make things right, to keep his job, to stop Ahmakiq beating him. He had to avoid being sent back to the city, to the stifling confines of a factory.

'Ichik!' The voice was louder now and closer by, just behind a pile of sacks of seed.

'Go away, Mahaway,' he hissed, trying not to draw the attention of the dockside guards. They were Ahmakiq's eyes and ears and could be his fists. Right now they were distracted by the laundry women.

'I'm sorry, Ichik.' Her voice sounded strained. She clearly didn't like to say those words, any more than she liked hiding behind the sacks. But that was her problem, not his. 'I'm sorry for snapping at you, but I need to know, did you think of a plan? A way to save the town? A way to look after the children?'

Ichik glanced up at the guards again. Now they were helping the women with their baskets, any excuse to get close. They might never notice he was gone, and even if they did he could say he had gone to empty his bladder.

He scrambled back around the sacks and found her sitting in the dirt, white dress hitched around her knees.

'I couldn't do it,' he snapped, letting out all his anger -- at himself, at her, at Ahmakiq and his petty brutality. 'And now I'm not allowed out of the camp. Thanks to helping you, he threw my book into the river. Years of my most precious moments, thrown away for nothing.'

'So you lost your sketches. You can always do more. We can't build a new town.'

'Enough!' Ichiq clapped his hands over his mouth, appalled at how loud he had been. He listened for the guards' footsteps, but the laughter of women had been enough to drown out his cries.

Mahaway stared at him in shock, then looked sheepishly down into the dirt.

'I'm sorry,' she said at last, and this time her tone said it too. 'You have so much paper that I didn't realise....' She toyed with her bracelet, the broken arrow heads grazing her wrist. 'The thing is, you're all we have. We tried asking the rebels for help, but we've turned them down before, so instead they're attacking a plantation three valleys over. You've tried to be kind to us, even if you don't understand how. And you're smart, in your own way. So I hoped...'

Ichik held up a hand. Just listening to her voice, his sorrow had lifted. His life wasn't Ahmakiq's to dictate.

'I hate to stop you,' he said. 'You're almost as beautiful when you're sorry as when you smile. But I don't think I can take another of your compliments.'

She blinked, that look of confusion crossing her face again.

'I'm doing my best,' he continued. 'But sometimes the cycle comes around. Sometimes you have to accept that you're out of orange and start drawing in blue. Sometimes you have to use reflectors instead of....'

In the back of his head, apropos of nothing, two ideas tangled together.

'Did you say that the rebels are attacking three valleys over?' he asked.

Mahaway nodded, still looking a little dazed.

'You'll need a crystal array.' He peered over the seed sacks at the snow-capped mountains, then down at a box just out of the guards' sight. 'There's one over there. Do you know how to set it up?' He pulled a map from his pouch and looked around for a pot of ink.

'We'll manage.'

'We're not using it for power this time. I'll show you where to go, but you'll have to be fast.'

'Thank you.' She smiled and laid a hand on his shoulder.

'That's alright.' He smiled back. 'But you'll still need a water specialist when this is done.'

###

Ahmakiq stood at the head of the terraces, watching the irrigation channels.

'Well?' he said. 'You told me this would be worth seeing. All I see is sludge and idle hands.'

Ichik glanced anxiously uphill, into the jungle. More water should have appeared by now. Unless the crystal array had broken, or Mahaway's people couldn't set it up right. Or worst of all, he had got this wrong, and his whole plan was a waste of time.

'Just a few more minutes,' he said, wringing his hands.

'No.' Ahmakiq turned and strode away. 'All of you, back to work.'

Ichik stared sadly into the muddy channel. His plan had relied on the work of the townsfolk, swiftly setting crystal arrays to melt a large snow drift, exaggerating the flow. If Ahmakiq thought that he had succeeded already, thought that he was needed more elsewhere, he might move on. But without that melt water, all was lost.

Ichik trudged despondently after Ahmakiq.

'Wait!' Chac called out. 'Come back!'

Ichik turned to look up the hill. Water was running down the ditches from the jungle -- first a trickle, then a bubbling stream, then a rush that filled the irrigation channels, turning mill wheels, and soaking freshly planted seeds.

Ichik's spirit soared.

'That's enough water for the fields.' Ahmakiq stood beside him, his voice weighed down with incredulity. 'What changed?'

'I miscalculated the effect of the melt water,' Ichik replied, knowing it was at least half true. 'You see, the valley boundaries....'

The valley boundaries had nothing to do with it, but Ahmakiq couldn't know that. He had never been up into the jungle himself. All he had was Ichik's diagrams and a lot of theory. He listened and nodded and watched the water, his frown slowly sliding into satisfaction.

'So you see,' Ichik said, coming to the end of his explanation, 'we have the water we need. These streams will keep the fields supplied throughout the growing season.'

'How did you miss this?' Ahmakiq asked, eyeing him suspiciously. 'You are a fool, but you are a fool with an eye for detail.'

'I got distracted by the town,' Ichik said, hanging his head to hide his smile as well as to make a show of shame. 'Too busy with my drawings to notice how the flows would connect. But now I've found the solution, we don't need to disturb the town any more.'

'Enough with this town,' Ahmakiq snapped. 'There are rebels in this region. For all we know they live in that town. The plants can always use more water, and that remnant of the past needs to die. We will finish diverting their water.'

'But the extra work to cut them off --'

'We're here, we should be working. Not strolling under trees drawing pictures and growing idle.'

Ichik backed away, head bowed, before his master's scorn.

'My lord!' A runner was heading towards them up the terrace. Her hair was held back by the red and black headband of the Royal Messenger Corps.

She stopped and bowed before Ahmakiq, catching her breath.

'Well?' he asked.

'The rebels are mustering three valleys over,' she said. 'There are rumours they plan to attack a plantation.'

A look of malevolent glee crossed Ahmakiq's face.

'I bet there's some scruffy little remnant town up there, isn't there?'

'I believe so, my lord,' the messenger said.

'I knew it!' Ahmakiq looked around for a guard. 'You! Gather together half a troop. We're going hunting.'

'Just you and half a troop?' the messenger asked.

'Are you challenging me?' Ahmakiq narrowed his eyes.

'Of course not, my lord.' The messenger lowered her gaze. 'I merely wondered what your other servants would do here without you.'

'You're right, they can't be left unsupervised.' Ahmakiq shouted at the digging crews. 'Everybody grab your tools and get to the boats. We're finished here. The fields are watered and there's work to be done elsewhere.'

He turned to Ichik.

'I told you the rebels were in one of these places,' he said. 'But oh no, you had to make friends with them. Pathetic.'

'I was wrong, my lord.' Ichik bowed his head, trying to hide the grin creeping across his face. 'And I'm afraid I have made a further error. The accounts are still incomplete.'

'Still?' Ahmakiq was crimson with anger. 'I have had enough of your ineptitude. As soon as we reach a trading post I'm sending you back to the city. You can explain to the minister why I have to replace you.'

'I'm so sorry, my lord. Just let me fetch my surveying tools, and I'll be ready to go.'

'Fetch them? Where have you left them?'

'At the town.' Ichik pointed toward the jungle. 'It will only take me half a day to --'

'Half a day? We have to leave!'

'I thought that the townspeople would like to see-'

'These townspeople again! You like them so much, you can stay with them. See how you get on out here in the wild.'

Ahmakiq stormed off down the hill, the rest of the workers going with him.

'Yes, master,' Ichik murmured.

When the boats were gone, the messenger pulled off her hastily improvised red and black headband and flung it away into an irrigation ditch.

'So you're staying with us?' she asked.

Ichik nodded a little sadly and looked Mahaway in the eye.

'You'll need someone to keep adjusting the water courses and crystal arrays.' He waved at the work he had helped Ahmakiq do, what would one day be fields of maize. 'That way you'll always have enough water without drying out the terraces. We don't want people from the city thinking this land needs their attention.'

'What about you? You seemed to like what you had.'

'This might not be so bad. I can explore the jungle, draw the animals, devise half-baked devices to make your lives easier.'

'Our lives.' She leaned in to kiss him on the cheek.

A warm glow filled his body, a sense of satisfaction at a job well done and of excitement at a new sort of freedom.

They headed up into the jungle, Ichik's bag bouncing on his back, filled with paper, quills, and a dozen different inks, the stuff of memories to come.

The End

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