Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Better than what I’m having.”

  “Are you hungry, Master Lora?” The warehouse boss sent his boy to fetch some biscuits and water.

  It had been a beautiful day, with clouds scudding past on a fresh wind and the water’s surface lively with wind-waves, the way Tashar liked it best. When there was tension between water and air, with the water pushing one way and the wind another, it took a true sailor to negotiate between them, to harness those forces and transform them into motion. Tashar had been in his docked boat at sunrise and had spent an hour or so restringing a line that had gotten frayed and testing it to be certain it worked properly. He had stowed his gear, including a delicious lunch, and was about to cast off when the harbormaster’s girl came running down the dock. She was so out of breath she could only point, eloquently and vehemently, at a ship that had been standing at anchor, which was now unfurling a sail and ringing its bell to announce it was coming in to dock. The tide had turned, so of course the ship was coming in. But it was a Lora ship, and Tashar should have been aboard it.

  Someone had misidentified the ship, and the wrong family had been informed of its arrival. Thus there was no landing permit, no manifest, no stevedores, no teamsters. And instead of spending the day in glorious solitude aboard his trim little boat, Tashar had spent it in wretched chaos.

  The days of summer certainly were too few, but they also lasted too long. A person who rose at dawn could complete two days of labor by sunset but would only sleep half a night before the sun rose again. The weary transfer boss and the lethargic warehouse boss peered at the numbers Tashar had frantically scrawled on the fabric-wrapped bales as they were unloaded.

  “Forty-seven,” she said, and gave a slip to Tashar. He ticked the number in his notebook and put the slip in his pocketbook.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Nineteen.”

  Another ship, another tic.

  This idiotic process, although used for generations, assumed that those who transferred the goods from ship to warehouse, and those who guarded the warehouse, might be thieves. But the representatives of the trading family would never steal, since they would be stealing from themselves.

  The warehouse boss moved to the next bale and raised the lantern so he could read the number.

  “What is she here for?” Tashar asked irritably. “Couldn’t she have waited for the end of shipping season?”

  The transfer boss looked askance at him. The warehouse boss said, “I imagine she’s here for the Fair.”

  I hate the Fair, Tashar wanted to say, like a child who has stayed up too late. But he was twenty years old, the age of marriage, and trading families from all across Shaftal were using the Fair as an excuse to impose themselves on the House of Lora, along with their marriageable children. Like a basket of hen’s eggs or a barrel of oysters, Tashar was for sale.

  “Of course, the Fair,” Tashar said. But that explanation for her visit, though obvious, also seemed wrong. The G’deon—and those who advised her—were subtle and devious, determined to convince the people of Shaftal to embrace those amoral killers, the Sainnites—after the blood they had spilled, the families they had destroyed, and the resources they had wasted! After twenty years of subjection to their vile rule! With such a task ahead of her, surely the G’deon had no time for shallow entertainment.

  The boy arrived with the biscuits and water. Tashar crunched and drank, and it was like washing down sawdust with the warm contents of a rain gutter. Then he pretended to recover from his foul mood. “Let’s finish and go home to our families.”

  But Tashar hated his family. He hated them now, and he had hated them five years ago when he ran away and stayed away for more than a year. His mother had hated them too, for she also had run away, leaving her baby son to their awful care, and had never returned at all. To him she was just a vague, bright memory followed by years of absence. But Tashar knew where she was: sailing the seas that lay south of the storm wall.

  The storm wall, sailors said, lay many months’ journey to the south, where it stretched completely across the ocean from west to east, and was impossible to cross. Sometimes the wall moved northward, overcoming and consuming unlucky ships that traveled too near. And at other times it slipped southward, and to the northern sailors seemed to have disappeared. A lucky ship with a canny captain could risk a hasty, risky trip to a warm southern port to buy rare trade goods: certain teas, spices, animals, plants, lumber, dishware, and artisan’s handiwork that could not be found in the cold north. If the ship was lucky, it might return to its accustomed trade route before the storm wall shifted northward again. Or the ship could be sunk in the storms, or, if it lay in a harbor, stranded on the wrong side of the wall.

  Twenty years ago, such ill luck had trapped a southern ship, the Tasharial, on the northern side of the storm wall. It had journeyed all the way to Hanishport and wintered in its harbor. Everything about the ship had been strange. The wood of its hull repelled the barnacles and other sea creatures that gradually destroyed northern ships. Its sails were made of a fiber no one had seen before, and it had no cross-masts. Its sailors, who did not speak the pidgin of the northern ocean, shivered through the winter and died of illnesses that northern people scarcely noticed.

  Tashar had been born that winter in Hanishport, and his mother, absurdly, had named him after that ship. When he was old enough to ask what had become of her, Aunt had pursed her lips in disapproval. “That ship came again, and when it departed she also was gone.”

  Tashar had thought it was wonderful that his mother named him after her secret longing. But later he understood that to her he had been like an anchor that trapped her in the harbor when she longed to be on the open sea. So when the true Tasharial, still trapped in the north, returned for another winter, Tashar’s mother had not hesitated to abandon the child that anchored her.

  The House of Lora had become the wealthiest family in Shaftal by importing the smoke drug that Sainnites used to make their slaves compliant. At age fifteen, Tashar had decided that it was wrong to bring that terrible stuff into Shaftal. But if they didn’t import it, members of the family said to him, someone else would do it. Or else, they said, hundreds of people would die from lack of the drug. Did Tashar want to be responsible for hundreds of deaths? He did not, but his disquiet wasn’t eased by these reasonable arguments. He pointed out that, although House of Lora could not determine the behavior of those who used the smoke drug, or of those who might take up the smoke trade if the House of Lora abandoned it, they could, and should, change what they themselves did. Aunt had decided to silence him by saying, “Tasharial of Lora, trade puts clothing on your back, food in your mouth, and a roof over your head. When you are ragged, hungry, and living on the streets, then you may dictate ethics to your family. Until then, hold your peace!”

  She was right, Tashar thought, and left the House of Lora that same night.

  By the time Tashar returned home from his wanderings, he had indeed worn rags, grown thin with hunger, and bruised and blistered his feet on the roads of Shaftal. But his aunt would have been dismayed to discover that even after his return he was dictating ethics to them—not by using words, but by using the only thing they cared about: wealth.

  When Tashar walked home shortly before sunset, the tide clock was ringing the slack tide, and the fair-weather flags were snapping in a brisk evening breeze. The House of Lora was dark, except for a lantern at the door, and Tashar remembered the family had been invited to supper at the House of Samel, which was celebrating a birth or some such thing. The fountain in the courtyard sang happily to itself, and the heat of the flagstones warmed his feet as he went wearily to the door. The honey vine that climbed the fence was blooming, and moths swarmed around it, thirsty for its nectar. For a moment, Tashar loved Hanishport.

  He took a cold supper to his bedroom, which also was his office. He should have been given a separate room for work, but he w
anted people to be forced to knock before they entered. By lamplight, he wrote a neat but inaccurate copy of the manifest and then burned the original, along with two of the transfer slips. Two bales of smoke that no longer existed on paper soon would be carted away by a woman Tashar knew only as Stone Boots, and the proceeds of the sale would go directly to Shaftal.

  Until Tashar left Hanishport at age fifteen, Shaftal had seemed more distant than Sho, the shipping harbor for tea and spices after their grueling overland journey around the storm wall, or Kanir, where rare woods at the end of long river journeys were hoisted from the water into ships, one log at a time, or the white landscape of Nimanima, where fur-dressed people dropped baited ropes at the edge of the ice and brought up fish twice as long as themselves, whose skin made a precious waterproof leather and whose oily flesh was treasured in every port. His own country, Hanishport, was the center of the world. But Shaftal lay so close, and could be reached on foot, so he went there, and learned a few things, and became what he had been all along without knowing it. He became Shaftali.

  But first he became a thief.

  He supposed he was still a thief, a kind of pickpocket who stole money from rich people right under their noses while they sat laughing in parlors, eating foods and drinking wine that cost more than a farm family could earn in a year. But they were worse than thieves, and Tashar merely took funds they never should have had, and returned the money to Shaftal. He was a righteous thief.

  Of course, Shaftal had tried to kill him, by impersonal, tricky, slow ways that could only be survived by careful thought and hard experience, neither of which he possessed. Starving, he stumbled across a fair and couldn’t make himself beg for food. He became a thief by accident when a distracted person dropped a coin and Tashar picked it up and kept it. He wasn’t too proud to steal, he discovered. So he had lived for some months, getting better and better at theft while he trailed the caravan of merchants and entertainers from fair to fair, with only the haziest idea of where he was and no idea at all of where he would go next. Summer began its slow turn toward autumn, with the spectre of winter hovering at its shoulder. Tashar had learned some things about survival, the most important of which was the hardest to accept: no one survives alone.

  He must go home to Hanishport, or die. And the feeling he had, that returning to his family would be a kind of death, must he ignore it? Wretchedly, he wandered through the Fair, past farmers riveted by a demonstration of a new kind of cider press, around the pits in which whole pigs were being roasted, down the row of hawkers whose hoarse blandishments were never for him, to the far end of the Fair, where a man on a platform was giving a passionate speech to a riveted audience while a company of players set up their scenery behind him.

  It was easy to rummage through the unattended bundles. Tashar was considering whether to risk cutting one man’s purse strings when someone took him by the shoulder and said something—words he would never remember—and when he came back to himself, he was sitting on the ground, far beyond the edge of the crowd, while a troupe on the platform cavorted through a silly comedy.

  A bearded man observed him, and Tashar’s purse was in his hand. “You were stealing from Shaftal,” he said.

  Tashar couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move. Even his common sense seemed to be in thrall: he should have been terrified, but only felt puzzled.

  The man added, contemptuously, “But I am not a thief.” He tossed the purse into the dirt at Tashar’s feet.

  Although Tashar could not reply, the man continued as though he had spoken. “Desperate? You weren’t so desperate that you tried to find work. You weren’t so desperate that you asked your family for help. You weren’t desperate at all—you were proud.”

  Even though the man mocked him now, Tashar felt only an overwhelming desire to justify himself. The man made an irritated gesture. “Speak! But don’t wear me out with drivel!”

  “I don’t know a trade. The farmers said I didn’t work hard enough, even though my hands were bleeding. And my family disgusts me.”

  “So? You’ll grow up. You’ll marry out. You don’t have to become a thief.”

  “They will only allow me to marry into another great house, and all of them are awful.”

  The man gazed at him for just a moment, but for the first time in his life, Tashar felt like he was truly known. When the man spoke again, he seemed like a different person. “Born into a great house in Hanishport? You are unfortunate. Which one?”

  “Lora.”

  “That’s not the house that imports the smoke drug. It is? Then I apologize for my rudeness. You certainly are desperate.” Something about his words made Tashar feel itchy—not on his skin, but in a place he vaguely conceived as his mind. Then the sensation was gone, and Tashar jerked backwards and nearly fell sideways.

  He became aware that a sharp rock was digging into his thigh.

  He picked up his purse, and put it down again. He felt ashamed of himself. “I was a little proud,” he said. “Or anyway, I thought I should have the money, because I didn’t deserve to be hungry. I was self-important.”

  The man squatted down and gazed at him. It was a disconcerting gaze—not terrifying, though it should have been—and Tashar wondered if his will still was held in thrall, even though his body again was his to command. “Are you a Truthken?” he asked humbly, for he had learned about Truthkens from his tutor.

  “There has been no law in Shaftal as long as you’ve been alive, Master Lora. Therefore, if any Truthkens had survived the Sainnites they would be Truthkens no longer. When I was a boy, my father took me on a long journey. He said he was taking me to join the Truthkens. Two days from the House of Lilterwess, we learned of its fall. The Order of Truthkens, the Order of Seers, most of the Order of Healers, and the Order of Paladins, the G’deon, and the Power of Shaftal, all were gone. So my father took me home again. No, Master Lora, the law was destroyed when the House of Lilterwess was destroyed.”

  For the first time in his life, Tashar realized that the history of Shaftal was his own history. His tutor had told him that this was so, but Tashar had ignored him, knowing that Hanishport governed itself, and the city paid the soldiers that lived nearby to leave the city alone. How stupid he felt, that he had been wandering Shaftal all summer and only now knew he was in his own country! “What did you mean,” Tashar asked, “When you said I was stealing from Shaftal?”

  A boy younger than Tashar approached, and the man spoke sharply to him. The boy gave Tashar a bold, hateful look and said something to the man in a low voice. We’ll discuss it later,” said the man. The boy insisted, and the man said, “Do as I bid you.” Sullenly, the boy left.

  Was the boy his son? Tashar felt a jolt of jealousy.

  “You didn’t listen at all to the man on the stage?” the man asked Tashar.

  “I think he was telling a story. A story about a dream.”

  “He is Willis of South Hill. He is the Lost G’deon’s general.”

  He spoke as though these were statements of great significance. Tashar felt as if he had been called upon to recite a lesson that he had not bothered to prepare, a common occurrence, since he spent every day that the weather was fine in a sailboat on the water. “It sounds like a story,” he said.

  “That Willis has met the Lost G’deon, and that she told him he would be victorious over the Sainnites, these things are true. But it is also true that he was dreaming, and the accuracy of a dream cannot be judged by air logic.”

  Tashar felt deeply disappointed, even though he never before had expected that there was a Lost G’deon. It was a children’s tale, he had thought.

  The man said, “Come with me and decide for yourself if Willis dreamed a true dream.”

  “How could I know such a thing?”

  “You will know,” said the man. “And we’ll give you a hot supper.”

  Tashar wondered why he had thought
the man sarcastic, when he was so kind. He went with him to a small encampment beyond the fairground. By then, it was evening, and his crew had gathered to count their money, bathe in buckets of water, and wait for supper to be cooked. They sat on the ground or on campstools made of sticks and burlap. Traveler’s kits, ordinary implements like spoons and cups, dangled from their belts, but they also carried weapons—daggers and pistols. Over their heads flapped a crude flag with a glyph painted on it in red. Tashar had not studied the glyphs, but he did know enough to recognize the G’deon’s glyph, which means both death and life. Saugus, the man who was an air witch, introduced Tashar to his people, and they did seem as if they had lived in a borderland where death and life overlapped, for they had hard faces and unsettling gazes, and their flesh was scarred by violence. The men’s beards were untrimmed, and men and women alike had short, raggedly cut hair. When Saugus invited Tashar to ask Willis his question, their expressions became rapt, even though they must have heard him recount his vision dozens or hundreds of times.

  Willis was a big man with sagging leathery skin and a restless gaze. He wore his hair long and tied back, like Paladins of the past, but he was bearded like a farmer. He squinted habitually, and his flickering gaze was oddly riveting, as though he expected a beloved visitor to appear at any moment. “I saw her,” he said. Tashar turned, for it seemed like the one Willis expected had arrived. But the man continued, “I had devoted my life to defeating and destroying the Sainnites, and I had risen to the command of South Hill Company when the previous commander, Emil Paladin, turned traitor. But a true Paladin was sent to replace me as commander, and, like the previous commander, would not do what was needed to remove the pestilence of Sainnites from Shaftal. I abandoned South Hill Company in despair. Then my family rejected me and sent me out to starve. I thought my life was over—I wanted it to be over—and so I lay outside in a drunken stupor on a bitter winter night and begged Shaftal to take me. Instead, Shaftal came to me, in the form of the Lost G’deon. She chided me, saying, ‘Do you not know that the land will always be embodied in a G’deon? Haven’t you been told that a G’deon cannot die until a successor has been chosen?’”