“But you never heard that song. It was heard by the Zanja who died. Oh, but these thoughts are too difficult to think at this hour!”
“You’re saying that I’m forever an exile from my people.”
“Not exiled,” Medric said. “That’s the wrong word. You’re estranged, or alienated.”
“Oh, Medric, but not from us!” Emil cried.
“I have you now,” said Karis, with her arm around her.
The stars whirled, and slowed, and became still. They lay together in the meadow, with a few accuser bugs creaking in the distance, the horses chewing their cud and sighing with contentment, the Paladins sighing in weary sleep, and Leeba breathing quietly, pressed against Karis’s other side.
The next day, the Ashawala’i elders met Zanja and her companions at the fork of the path, which at the left went to the village and at the right to the lush flood plain of the valley. The elders—little older than she—drank the Paladin’s tea, talked for a long time, then granted her party permission to take only the right-hand path and make no attempt to cross the river or go to the village. So Zanja returned to the Asha Valley, but would never go home. This decision seemed right and wise, and she accepted it without complaint.
“I might as well get the people tired of staring at me,” said Karis, and took the horses to the riverbank to drink, where she checked their hooves and legs, then let them loose to graze, and all afternoon sat on a rock in full view of the opposite bank, doing the mundane work of checking, mending, and dressing harnesses. When Zanja joined her to say that supper would soon be ready, a good many people were still standing and sitting on the opposite bank, watching Karis in amazement.
The young children had grown bored and were playing in the water, but the older children seemed unable to play. Many of the adults supported themselves with staffs or sat on the ground doing nothing.
“They starved themselves to the point of death so that the children would have enough food,” said Karis.
“They used to grow a sturdy kind of corn, and various vegetables, and they cut hay for the goats, whose wool they spun and wove into garments and rugs. I don’t even see any goats, and the farmland lies barren. Maybe the starving people killed and ate the goats, along with the seed corn.”
“I notice that the forest within a day’s walk of here is mostly nut trees, then it gives way to mostly pine. Over many generations, your people must have planted a nut tree every time they cut down a pine, so the nut trees could be a hedge against famine. But the mountains offer no salt, no metal, hardly any flat land, a slow, wet spring, and a very short growing season. That corn your people managed to grow under these conditions, there’s nothing like it in Shaftal. We can’t bring in some sheep to replace the goats, either—sheep are too stupid, and too destructive. So, early this spring, before the planting begins, someone will have to visit the other mountain tribes, with salt and tools to trade for pregnant goats and seed corn that will thrive in the mountains.”
“Do you mean to say that I’ll be returning here with the first supply train in the spring?”
“Well, you still are the speaker of the Ashawala’i,” Karis said.
This was their shared destiny, thought Zanja. From the Asha Valley south to the grasslands, from the eastern coastline west to the borderlands, until she and Karis were very old women and Leeba’s children had borne children, until Karis handed over the load of power and knowledge to the next G’deon and then died, until Zanja lay down and died beside her they would think together like this, mulling over serious questions, working their way slowly toward equally serious answers. It would be a good life—sometimes significant, often surprising, and perhaps never again as perilous as it had been.
Zanja said, “And so my life will have turned completely inside-out and backwards. I’ll occasionally visit my mother’s people, but my home will be Shaftal.”
“Oh well,” Karis said. “You’ll get used to it.”
A short while later, a small group of people arrived on the opposite shore and came down to the river. Some took off their tunics and put them on a raft to keep dry, and some sat on the raft. Zanja said to Karis, “They are na’Tarweins.”
“Of course fire bloods would be the first to cross the river and meet the strangers. Well, I’d better go tell the Paladins we have supper guests. But we don’t have enough soup bowls to go around . . .” Karis walked off, talking to herself, hauling an armload of harnesses. She certainly would have resolved the bowl shortage by the time she reached the camp.
Zanja stood alone, waiting. The swimmers entered the water and began pushing the raft across the water. One person in the raft held a baby: she was Zanja’s sister’s oldest daughter, and in her arms was a grandchild. The young woman probably had volunteered to allow her baby to be held by Karis, to determine whether the alien earth witch’s powers were benign. Perhaps the baby was sickly, and the baby’s mother was insightful and reckless.
The others sitting on the raft were people Zanja recognized, but the four youths in the water would have been very young children when she knew them, and they had changed too much.
One of those four swimmers could not pay attention to his task. His curious gaze reached beyond the water, beyond Zanja, perhaps tracking the shape of the giant as she strode away across the meadow, or perhaps yearning farther, toward the strangers’ camp, or farther still, toward the mysterious land of Shaftal. Although Zanja didn’t know the boy’s face, that eagerness, that yearning toward the alien and unknown, that was familiar.
Then the knowledge of what had happened in the last two days came over her: the loss, the bewilderment, the weary ache of old wounds. Standing on the riverbank, waiting for these members of her lost family, soon to be eating supper with her people past and present, she looked toward the high bank from which she had once watched the doom of the Ashawala’i come across the river. She had thought she was to witness the end of everything.
It had been the end, and yet it had not been. She began to weep, but it was only sorrow—familiar, endurable sorrow, and extraordinary gladness. Her people’s years of starvation, like her own summers of madness, had ended. Perhaps their paths through the maze could not converge in the past; but they had converged in the present.
The small contingent reached the shallows. The swimmers began walking, and their lithe bodies slowly rose out of the water—the boys with chests beginning to broaden, the girls with breasts starting to take shape, their brown bodies cloaked in long, black, wet hair. The curious boy looked at Zanja—a respectful, hopeful, hungry look. Suddenly she remembered his name: Brama, son of Sarja. He had grown to look much like his mother.
And then she recognized more than his face. She knew him: her dream helper, her lost son, a fire blood selected by the elders and chosen by the owl god Salos’a to be a crosser of boundaries. The boy would be the next Speaker of the Ashawala’i. The na’Tarwein elder stepped into shallow water and waded to dry land. He had come to ask Zanja to accept Brama na’Tarwein as her student. Zanja would accept him, and, for the boy, in that moment, everything would begin.
Acknowledgments
My wife, Deb Mensinger, deserves my most profound thanks, but I feel unable to begin to list the reasons, for fear that I’ll never finish. My longtime friends and advisors, Delia Sherman, Rosemary R. Kirstein, Didi Stewart, and Ellen Kushner, have given me priceless support and intelligent and thoughtful commentary on various drafts of this book and the Elemental Logic series, and I hope I have managed to give them equal value in return. My most profound thanks to Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press, not only for giving this final book a home, but also for devoting so much time and energy to helping it to be a better book, and for reprinting the entire series which, for a while, seemed in danger of disappearing entirely. Thank you above all to the many who waited patiently for me to finish this book, while I wrote and rewrote it in hospitals, hotel rooms, coffee shops, airplane
s, trains, and any other place that happened to be handy. I wish the writing hadn’t taken so long, but it is amazing that I managed to do it at all.
About the author
Laurie J. Marks (lauriejmarks.com) is the author of nine novels including the Elemental Logic quartet, Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic. She lives in Massachusetts, and works at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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