Air Logic
Page 11
She looked up from her drawing when the musicians fell silent. The nearby sounds gradually fell still, and she began to hear the more distant shouts, shrieks, and patter of drums. The flowing current of the crowd had become a jostling, surging movement, and there seemed to be an awful lot of people, many of whom were peering over each other’s heads, and small children were hoisted to their parents’ shoulders. Chaen tucked the sketchbook into the knapsack, moved the knapsack under the easel, and stood behind it, ready to climb onto the stool if she needed to. Of course her heart had begun to thud in her chest, and she began breathing deeply so her hands would be steady. “Sweeeet coooool juuuuuice,” sang out her neighbor. “Sweeet—”
The shabby man in his new hat had reappeared. He bought a cup of juice and became trapped by the crowd at the juice seller’s counter. The juice man climbed onto a box and peered over the heads of the crowd. “It’s the G’deon! She’s coming!”
The shabby man stretched up onto his toes, peering eagerly in the same direction. “Are you certain?”
Shielded by the painting on her easel, Chaen took the bow out of the knapsack. She checked that the darts were at hand, then strung the bow. She had known that the G’deon, if she came to the Fair at all, would have to cross the quay. But she hadn’t expected that her wait for that opportunity would be so short.
“I see Paladins,” said the juice seller. “Dressed all in black on this warm day—they must be hot.”
“I suppose they’re used to it,” said the man.
“The G’deon towers above everyone! Why doesn’t she comb her hair? I believe I’ll send her a hair comb as a gift.”
The man uttered an amused snort. “Make it a plain one. I hear she doesn’t like fancy things.”
A Paladin spoke to the musicians on the dais, who hastily moved their instruments out of the way. Now Chaen spotted the false G’deon: a towering, broad-shouldered woman with hair like a tangle of tarnished bronze wire. Chaen could not possibly hit her in this crowd. But when the woman stood on the stage, she would be exposed.
Chaen remembered what Saugus had said to her and the other assassins: History will join hands with us. She sighed with relief, as though the unfinished mission that had been gnawing at her for months had already been completed. Soon all would be well, and what happened afterwards would not matter.
The crowd surged toward the stage. The man in the hat stumbled toward Chaen, with the juice cup still in his hand. Directly in front of her, another man lost his footing. The man in the hat tripped over him and his juice cup went flying. The easel began to teeter, despite its weights, and Chaen grabbed it. When she looked down, her knapsack had disappeared. The man was helping the other to his feet, bowing a graceful apology, holding his new hat to his heart. Meanwhile, a woman with a long, black cord of braided hair trailing down her back stepped onto the stage. She turned and looked across the crowd, directly into Chaen’s eyes. She was the fortune-teller.
“That must be the G’deon’s wife.” The juice man’s voice sounded odd—distant, muffled.
The man who had stumbled showed Chaen the dagger that had been concealed by his linen short coat. The shabby man tucked his loose hair behind one ear, revealing three gold earrings.
Strong hands took her arms from behind. Someone took the bow.
The false G’deon stepped up onto the stage. She had a blacksmith’s massive arms and soot-stained hands. Her eyes were a shocking blue. She heaved a breath, like a suffering sigh. The people cheered, but she did not look like she enjoyed being cheered at.
A crisp, terrible voice spoke near Chaen’s ear. “I am Norina Truthken. You stand accused of murder. You will be tried in three days, in accordance with the Law of Shaftal.”
“Get away from me.” Chaen’s voice seemed like it belonged to someone else.
“Are you putting me under interdiction?” the Truthken asked.
“Yes!”
The Paladins forced Chaen to turn and walk. The Truthken went ahead of them, opening a path through the crowd. Her hair was clipped close to her skull, and in the small of her back hung a long dagger in an age-blackened sheath. A raven swooped from wherever it had been hidden and landed on her shoulder. The bird looked backwards at Chaen. All these months, despite Chaen’s vigilance, it had been watching her.
Slightly behind the Truthken walked a slim young man with a massive book under his arm.
It was Max.
Maxew had entered the world in silence, and he never cried at all. The midwife said something was wrong with him. At first, Chaen, and Orman, his father, carried their infant everywhere, as if holding him could cure him. But the baby struggled against any embrace, and even when Chaen gave him suck would pull away from her breast. One day, Chaen confessed to her mother that she found it difficult to like her own infant.
“I have been wondering if he could be an air child,” said her mother. “In the old days, we would send for a Truthken to judge a child’s elemental balance. If it was an air child they took it away, because only Truthkens could raise such children properly. But there are no Truthkens left, and I don’t know what to do. I suppose we should ask the elders.”
The elders determined that both Chaen and Orman had air witches in their lineages. They summoned a healer, a weary old woman with bowed shoulders and silver hair, who examined Max. She spoke bluntly to the young parents: “I am as certain as anyone but an air witch can be that your baby is an air child.”
She said that air children know things that adults cannot bear to know, and have powers that few adults are wise enough to manage. She said that once Max discovered and began to use his power, he would be dangerous—at first to other children, and eventually to everyone. “Since the Order of the Truthkens no longer exists, air children usually are killed. I can do it for you. He will feel nothing—he will sleep deeply, and then he will cease to breathe.”
The elders thought they should accept the gentle death the healer offered, but Chaen refused. “I will become wise enough to raise my son,” she declared. A year later, the healer returned and asked again, and again Chaen refused.
Chaen had loved her contentious, hard-working family, and she had loved the farmstead that defined them. She felt that love most deeply when she painted: a busy flock of chickens, a line of people picking weeds in the garden, an ancient bucket filled with tools that were far older than the carpenter who used them. Now, when she remembered her family, she remembered a painting of them that she had done: the entire family at work in the parlor, with a fire blazing, a lamp hanging over the vast table, and everyone crowded together in the warmth and light while snow piled up on the windowsill. Orman sat on a stool playing his mandolin as a daughter of the house leaned on his knee and imitated his fingering upon a piece of wood. At his other side, the father of Chaen’s second son was singing, with his eyes closed and his head tilted back, while the sock he was knitting dangled from his hand. Three older children worked sums on slates, directed by Marcena, who at the time had been recovering from a sword slash. Breve and Anda sat together as always, sharpening tools and laughing. May sat close to the fire, sewing straight seams by feel since she could scarcely see anymore and giving an occasional push to the cradle that hung from the rafters, while Arin slept within. Maxew sat in the shadows, watching this busy, noisy family in bafflement. Chaen herself was a reflection in a mirror: a smiling young woman with a paintbrush in her hand.
In the painting, the twenty-four of them were bright and dark, warm and cold, busy, contented, preoccupied, and oblivious to looming disaster. By the following autumn, twenty-two of them would be dead.
The Midlands had suffered under the Sainnites’ iron rule since immediately after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess. According to Anda, the Sainnites wanted to control the road and the river so they could control nearly all of the trade. But Marcena said they wanted to control the grain fields that fed the soldiers and th
eir horses. And Breve said that the Sainnites were so stupid it was impossible to understand them.
Every farmstead in their region sent three, four, or even five people to join Midland Company and fight the Sainnites. Anda was the first in Chaen’s family to be killed.
Anda and Breve had grown up on adjacent farmsteads and became lovers in boyhood. They began working together on each farm on alternate days so that they could spend their days together as well as their nights. Such passions of youth usually burn themselves out, but theirs persisted, and their families finally arranged for them to marry together. When Chaen married into the same family, she was in love with Orman and was devoted to some of the others, but she most admired Anda and Breve. They were heedlessly brave, notoriously inventive, and ridiculously funny. When word came that Anda had been killed, all who knew the couple thought the same thing: How could one survive without the other?
Chaen wished she could join Midland Company in Anda’s place, but she could not leave Max to be raised by his other parents. Max, without being taught, had already learned too much, but could not exercise proper judgment. Just as he had learned to read that winter by watching the older children at their lessons as he sat in the shelter of the shadows, so also had he learned anger and hatred from his elders. Chaen kept him out of sight when the soldiers came to help themselves to livestock, goods, or grain, because the child still spoke rarely but always said too much.
Every autumn, the fighters came home to bring in the grain and cut the hay before the mud season began. Chaen took up the scythe that had been Anda’s, even though she was weaning Arin and her breasts spilled over with every swing of the scythe. Max followed behind her, shaping bundles for the sheaf-stacker. It was a good day for harvesting wheat, with a warm sun and clear sky, and the wheat stalks so dry they practically cut themselves. But the warmth also made for dirty work, and when the dinner whistle sounded, Chaen was encrusted with dust and chaff that had glued itself in her milk and sweat. As she and Max walked back to the field’s edge, passing the water jug back and forth, she spoke proudly, saying, “You are doing so well and working so sturdily, keeping out of my way exactly as I showed you. What a fine son you are!”
She knelt in the stubble to wipe his face with a wet kerchief and to brush back and re-tie his hair in a tail. The summer sun had streaked his hair with straw yellow, just like Orman’s hair had been when Chaen fell in love with him at a harvest dance. Max gazed at her in that odd way of his that made people feel nervous and threatened. “You don’t like me, Mother,” he said.
Chaen never knew how to answer him when he said such things. For most parents, it was enough to behave toward their children with love, even if they disliked their children sometimes. But if she denied to Max that she disliked him, Max would hear the lie and miss the love that motivated the lie. Chaen said, “Oh, Max, I just told you what good work you’re doing.”
“While you were saying it, you wished you could be proud of me all the time.”
He was only six years old, and he knew people’s secrets. He knew that he was disliked, and he was becoming indifferent to that dislike. How soon would he realize what an advantage it was to care nothing for what people thought of him?
Chaen said, “I will always tell you the truth, Max. Sometimes, I don’t want to—but it’s love that makes me want to shelter you. I do wish you were like other children. But that’s my failure, not yours. I’ll always love you as much and as well as I possibly can.”
His gaze, expressionless and remote, seemed more animal than human.
She said, “People are anxious around you and don’t know how to act. You have to teach us what you need from us, so we can do better.”
She could hear Arin screaming in the distance as someone carried him from the house so she could nurse him. Her aching breasts let out a gush of milk.
“Arin makes you happy,” Max said. “And I do not.”
“Your brother is an easy child, and you are not. Anyway, being happy isn’t what matters.”
“What does matter?”
“Doing your share,” she said.
Footsteps crackled in the stubble, and Breve walked past, alone. He didn’t look at Chaen, which was good, for she’d have fallen to weeping if he had.
“Breve did his share,” said Max. “And now he has a hole in him.”
Breve sat on the wall beside Marcena, staring into the distance, his jaw working up and down as though he were a cow. The bread was hot from the oven, and there was lots of sweet butter, jam, cold salt beef, fresh-pressed cider, cucumbers dressed with herbs and clotted cream, blackberry pie. Chaen ate until she couldn’t cram in one more bite, and leaned back against the warm stone wall and let her grunting baby suck all he wanted.
She was awakened from her doze by the distant clatter of shod hooves on stone: a company of Sainnites rode past. Some people stood up to look at the highway, shielding their eyes against the sun glare.
“They’re preparing to steal the harvest before it’s even brought in,” someone said. The farmers, streaked with sweat and coated in dust from head to foot, each cursed the passing soldiers with the bitterest words they could think of.
“They are a plague of grasshoppers,” said one. “They strip the plants to the bone and give nothing at all in return, not even shit.”
Another said, “What we do to grasshoppers, let’s do to them—a pitch fire in dry grass.”
Some of what happened that last day she could hardly remember, and some she could not forget. She remembered that afternoon so vividly that she didn’t trust her memory. Had someone truly said that he wanted to burn the Sainnites alive? Or did Chaen want those words to be said, because the fate that is wished on others may be the fate that’s visited upon oneself?
That night, like everyone, she had slept in a stupor of exhaustion. But she awoke, and realized the house was on fire. She didn’t know if she tried to awaken the others, or if her only thought was of her helpless babe. In nightmares she stumbled down unending corridors, crying Arin’s name until the smoke clamped its harsh hand on her throat, scalded her eyes, and felled her to her knees. Then she crawled, thinking she heard the baby crying, following the sound from turning to turning so it seemed she must have crawled the entire distance to Wilton. Her waking memories of that horror were not much clearer, though she would never forget that she did reach the children’s room, felt for Arin in his cradle, then remembered he had been in the bed with her. Already stupid from breathing smoke when she awoke, she had left him behind.
There’s a kind of knowledge that opens up inside a person, a dreadful, vacant clarity that strips the soul bare, that in a single, devastating realization turns the rich clutter of one’s life into a wasteland. So it was when Chaen realized she could not return to rescue Arin.
“Mother! Mother!” Max was shaking her shoulder, coughing, shaking her again. “—window,” he said, and “—on the floor,” and “—won’t wake up.”
The roaring in her ears meant she would die. She fainted, or fell down, and lay on the floor. A dreadful, vivid light writhed in the smoke.
Her son knelt beside her, gasping, choking. “Mother,” he said. “Mama.” He was crying. It was the only time in his entire life that he cried.
She heard others screaming. She couldn’t choose to die that way. She dragged herself across the floor to the window and wrestled it open. Max told her later that they climbed down the outer wall of stones until they fell. She broke an arm and an ankle, but he only had the breath knocked out of him. She saw that the barn also was burning—a skeleton of black timbers in a tower of red flame—and black horsemen crossed the fire, chasing someone or something. She crawled toward the darkness, with the wrong son beside her.
After the Sainnites had left, and the neighbors came to see what could be saved, Max showed them where his mother lay in a thicket, her shirt charred, her hair turned to ashes.
While Chaen was recovering from her injuries, the child she had saved began to bully and torment the other children. Chaen could not make Max stop except by watching over him, day and night. She was twenty-six years old when, at winter’s end, to save the other children, she took Maxew with her and became a traveling artist. Soon they were living from meal to meal, sheltering with farm animals when they could, and frequently managing without shelter at all. For three years she and Maxew wandered the land, often cold and always hungry, often avoiding skirmishes in the war that continued around them, constantly seeking households that could feed and shelter them for a while in exchange for a portrait.
One summer in Rees, a family hired her to paint a much-loved daughter of the house who was soon to be marrying out. That family had no young children for Max to bully, and they tolerated his strangeness. After the portrait had been completed, they invited Chaen and Max to remain. She began to be acquainted with the neighbors, some of whom belonged to Rees Company, and by autumn she also was a member. During the warm season, while she was fighting, she left Max with the family, so he could learn some of the things that a boy often must know in order to find a place in the world.
She killed a soldier, and then killed some more, and when she had killed or helped kill twenty-two of them she stopped counting but did not stop killing.