On the day before the assassinations, the three of them had worked together in this peculiar manner all morning. A librarian had interrupted Emil to ask his opinion of a book, Gerunt’s Decision, which was in dreadful condition. Emil put it upon his pile of books to be restored, and then glanced at Zanja. “There you are, sitting in the pattern woven by your ancestors,” he had said. “Do you suppose that, just as you were woven into the pattern of the past, the pattern of the future will be woven from you?”
That had been the sixty-third day since Zanja returned from the dead. Emil, too, had occasionally cheated death through fire logic. But he was not a crosser of boundaries, and when he did die he would not return.
“Now,” Emil was saying, “Let’s not waste time trying to resolve issues that have not been properly researched or discussed. I will establish two committees, one for peace with the Sainnites, and one for punishment of them. Mabin, please guide the committee for peace. Clement, yours is the committee for punishment.”
Clement uttered a grunt of shock or pain. No doubt Mabin, on the other side of the room, had been equally dismayed. Zanja felt Karis’s leg muscles tense—she was holding her breath, fighting to keep herself from laughing out loud. “The two committees will make identical proposals!” someone said.
“Of course,” said Emil blandly.
Throughout the room, stifled snickers became laughter. “Now I am certain that our land has other problems besides the Sainnites,” Emil said.
People began to suggest other, more benign committee topics: rebuilding roads, managing commerce, reestablishing the old orders and guilds, reopening the schools and the university, and starting up a broadsheet to report on all these activities. As Zanja half listened, a peculiar thing began to happen. She began to be angry.
It took some time for her to understand why.
Emil glanced at her in surprise. She had stood up, as others were doing when they had something to say, and waited for him to call on her. At last he said with a trace of puzzlement, “Zanja na’Tarwein?”
“I am Speaker for the Ashawala’i,” she reminded him. And then, to forestall Norina, who was at her most legalistic today, she added, “I have no standing on this council, for although the dead sometimes do speak to me, I do not speak for them. Nor do I speak for the nineteen other border tribes that used to send representatives to the House of Lilterwess. Not one of those tribes has sent a representative to this meeting, though, which was not by choice—”
Norina interrupted, as only she was permitted to do. “Speaker, even if your people still existed you would have no right to be heard here. The border peoples are not subject to and have no privileges under the Law of Shaftal. Instead, they are under the direct protection of the G’deon.”
“Does that not seem even slightly patronizing?” said Zanja. “Are the border tribes like children whose powerful parent solves their problems?”
Norina said firmly to Emil, “Zanja cannot speak here.”
Emil, looking pained, said, “Zanja, we will find a way to notify the tribes. But for now—”
Zanja walked out of the room.
She spent the rest of the day in the china room behind the kitchen.
The sun had gotten bright enough with the slow turning from winter to spring that the snow in the garden outside had begun to melt. Water streamed across the window panes and puddled in the garden. Water shimmered on the surface of the snow, and when the garden fell gradually into shadow, the water then fell still, shimmered like glass, and dulled as it turned to iron.
As the garden sank into darkness, so did the little room. The racket in the kitchen peaked. Dinner was being served.
Later, Garland came in with cheese melted on toast, decorated with crisp bacon, and a cup of cider so cold it was frosted with ice.
Garland had only produced this combination of her favorite foods one other time, the day after her return from the dead, when he was trying to assure himself or herself that there was room in the house for both of them. That he was serving it to her now seemed a bad sign. Zanja forced herself to take a bite and then was overmastered.
When he returned for the empty plates, she asked, “Has Emil reconvened the assembly?”
“Yes, a while ago.”
He left her alone again.
Long past nightfall, she got up stiffly from her chair for a long-delayed trip to the outhouse. The watch volunteers were singing loudly, cheerfully out of tune and rhythm with each other, interrupting themselves with bursts of laughter. Within Travesty the halls were quiet, lit by carefully placed lamps, watched over by a couple of Paladins who talked together in serious voices. Zanja found the library empty and didn’t want to disturb Emil if he had already gone to bed. She went to face Karis instead.
In their bedroom, Karis sat in the chair by the fireplace, where flames licked lazily around a half-burned log. Leeba, who probably had exhausted herself trying to be leader of a pack of strange children all day, lay limply asleep in her arms. Medric had come downstairs, and he and Emil had contrived to share the other chair; J’han and Norina sat together on the floor; and Garland sprawled on the bed, sound asleep.
Zanja shut the door behind herself and put her back against the doorjamb.
Emil said, “Zanja, it never once occurred to me, in all the years of our friendship, that you are not Shaftali.”
Norina said, “Zanja is Shaftali—but the Speaker for the Ashawala’i is not.”
Emil rubbed his weary face. “Land’s sake, Norina, she’s both.”
Zanja said, “The Otter People are surrounded on all sides by Shaftal, and have lived in Shaftal longer than history remembers. But they are not Shaftali.”
“They are protected from Shaftal,” said Norina. “They cannot be what they are protected from.”
Emil said, “I’m offended on your behalf, Zanja. But if you can think about the future rather than the past—”
“Oh, I know what you’re going to say.” Emil certainly had thought through what must happen, much faster than Zanja had.
There was a long silence. Zanja feared she had offended all of them, and she could not lose her family and her country on the same day. She said, “I wish I had not been so wounded on a day we’ve been looking to for so long.”
Karis, her head bowed over the tousled, sleeping daughter, said quietly, “But it’s an old wound, not a new one—much older than both of us. But it’s one that we can repair, isn’t it?” She looked up into Zanja’s eyes. “Will you begin to visit the tribes? As soon as Emil can manage without you here?”
Zanja stared at her, speechless.
Karis had been somber but now began to look amused. “Did you think I hadn’t learned to let go of you? Did you think you’d have to die every time you wanted to get away from me?”
“Yes, every time,” said Zanja wryly.
“Then I guess we both can be stupid as rocks.”
J’han stood up, saying, “I’ll take Leeba tonight.”
“No, we’ll take her,” said Medric.
Emil groaned. “Medric, I beg you—”
“We’ll go skating in the morning. I’ll sneak out with her, and you can sleep all day.”
Medric extricated himself from the chair, lifted Leeba from Karis’s embrace, and kissed her whiny complaints back into sleep again. J’han and Norina woke Garland, who was nearly as cranky as Leeba. Zanja, at the door, got a cool kiss from Norina, a warm embrace from J’han, and a shy handclasp from Garland, who promised to pack a traveling meal for her and Seth in the morning. Emil kissed her twice, and when she told him he had been magnificent that day, promptly agreed with her. “Oh, and have I mentioned to you how glad I am that you’re alive?” he asked.
“Sixty-seven times,” she said.
She kissed Leeba’s head, and then she kissed Me
dric’s, and he wagged a finger at her, like a teacher reminding her of an important lesson.
Early in the morning Zanja took the back hall to the kitchen to beg for some hot water. Garland seemed to find her pitiful, and made her sit and drink some tea while he lit the stove in the bathroom and hauled hot water to fill the tub. She had just eased herself into the bath when Seth tapped on the door and said, “I just want to let you know I’m ready. Don’t hurry, though.”
“You can come in if you want.”
Seth came in, looked disapprovingly around the dark, crowded space, then overturned a water bucket to use for a stool.
“People insisted on discussing you with me all afternoon.”
“They complained to you about my self-importance and temper, I suppose.”
“No, of course they didn’t! Mostly they were mystified that none of them had even thought about the border people, even with all the thinking we have done lately. It’s because the border tribes live in protected lands, some said, and so a person might live seventy years without ever setting eyes on one. They’re like a story to most of us.”
“But why?” Zanja said. “What are we being protected from?”
“From us, maybe,” said Seth.
Zanja had not left the city and in fact had scarcely been outside for most of the winter. To stretch her legs and make them do some work was good, but to stretch her vision across the sun-brilliant landscape and rolling hills made her mind feel opened up, as well. Seth was not the chattering type; they walked a long time in silence.
They left the road to follow the river and had reached a place where a much-used footpath pounded into the snow continued across the ice. The river was wide and shallow here, which was believed to make the river ice more stable. But Seth looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Walk ahead of me to prove it’s solid, will you? And walk quickly.”
Zanja glanced up into the brilliant sky at the raven that followed them. Karis, who might be watching through the bird’s eyes, would be terrified while they were crossing. But the ice was hard and solid.
They walked briskly but had to pause to give way to a couple of Paladins on ice skates, who flew past like falcons, leaving the walkers to tread through the wispy vapors of their hot breath. “Oh, we are so slow,” Seth complained. “They’ll reach Watfield before we reach the south bank!”
Zanja looked after them yearningly, for although she had never even used ice skates, she had always wanted to skate the ice road, for no good reason.
Storm clouds began to sweep in, which gave their eyes some relief from the sun glare but made the cold wind seem even colder. They asked their way at various farmsteads until they located the farmers who raised watch dogs. Zanja shamed them into giving up two young dogs to the G’deon. Seth picked them out and spent quite a while with them, and as they began their return journey, the dogs cheerfully and enthusiastically did exactly what Seth told them to do.
Soon Zanja began to envy the dogs for their fur coats. She and Seth kept a fast pace, but the raven landed on Zanja’s shoulder, too weary to continue fighting the wind. When they reached the river and started across the ice, the bird abruptly said, “Emil thinks you are in danger.”
Zanja stopped short. “What kind of danger?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Well, I don’t sense anything. Raven, will you fly ahead and check?”
As the raven lifted from her shoulder, Zanja looked back at Seth, who was several body-lengths behind her. “Did you hear that? Emil’s having some kind of presentiment—”
The ice cracked open under her feet, and she fell in.
The shock of cold froze the breath in her chest.
She scrambled wildly to get hold of the edge, but the current dragged her away.
Seth lay on the edge, reaching for her, shouting at her to grab her hand. Their hands were inches, then feet, then yards apart.
The ice was more than thick enough for safety, Zanja noticed resentfully. It certainly should not have broken under her weight.
Then the current sucked her under the ice. It lay above her: translucent, beautiful, impenetrable.
Part Two: Mud Season
Chapter 7
The council meeting had lasted far into the night. As Saleen and a few other Paladins escorted Clement to the garrison, she had been able to hear the midnight bell ringing. Gabian awakened and yelped politely until she could provide him with fresh diapers and a meal of warm milk. She sat in the hard bed with him cradled against her shoulder, rearguing the day’s arguments in her mind, first to correct her own mistakes, then to say the many impolitic statements she had avoided. She couldn’t decide which would be better: to make no mistakes, or to say whatever she liked.
Finally, her son’s peacefulness infected her, and she slept for a few hours until Ellid opened the door, bearing a pot of tea and a scorched lump of bread. That dawn meeting to review Ellid’s progress with the visiting commanders had been both frigid and fruitless. After Ellid left and Gilly came in seeking to know his day’s tasks, Clement went banging around the room, slamming chest lids and kicking her boots across the floor.
“You’re losing your patience,” Gilly observed.
“I’m the general! I shouldn’t have to be patient! Bloody hell!” She sat down abruptly to cup her hands around a stubbed toe.
“Oh, you are much more than the general, little though that pleases you.”
“I’d strangle you if I didn’t need you so badly,” she muttered.
“Cadmar did throttle me any number of times,” he replied.
“Gods, I miss that stupid bastard.”
Gabian, cradled in Gilly’s unlikely but competent arms, broke free from sucking his bottle to gurgle contentedly at his ugly uncle. Gilly might be Gabian’s tutor one day, if all of them survived that long.
Yesterday, the commanders had toured the garrison’s damages, seen with their own eyes the mountain of weaponry that in one moment Karis had turned to trash: shattered crossbows, blunted sabers, broken axes. Unimpressed by a weaponer’s demonstration of the impossibility of sharpening even a humble kitchen knife, they themselves had taken turns at the grinding wheel. The blades, picked randomly out of the pile, all had shattered into gravel.
These demonstrations seem to have convinced them that Clement had accepted a truce because she could not fight. Yet their opinions of her hadn’t altered. They wanted to be led by a mythical figure, a forceful, decisive idiot who looked good on a horse. They did not want a soldier who accepted shameful peace, no matter how necessary and unavoidable; who only fought when she had to and then did it badly; who knew everyone’s name; and, most of the time kept her feet on the ground.
She slid her foot into the abused boot, whose shine she had damaged as she kicked it across the grimy floor. “I’ve become a straw target between battle lines, the only object that anyone on either side dares to attack.”
“Well, you are convenient,” said Gilly. “And maybe it’s better this way. No, listen before you start throwing things at me.”
“Talk quickly, then!” Clement yanked her bootstraps.
“People will insist on seeing their conditions as choices, and will always embody those choices in whatever people are convenient. To the commanders you represent one choice, an unappealing, costly, and extremely unsettling choice. They will never accept you gladly. You cannot change that fact. But if you accept the blame, and suffer the consequences of our situation alongside or instead of them, you’ll earn their gratitude and admiration.”
“That might be true,” said Clement, “if not for Heras.”
She looked up and found him staring at her. Apparently it hadn’t occurred to him that the absence of the western commanders was Heras’s first foray in a campaign to be general.
“It’s tactically brilliant,�
� Gilly said finally. “So long as she remains absent, the commanders are able to invent her. They can believe she is your opposite. They can tell themselves that she represents the power, honor, and continuity you are prepared to surrender.”
“And she looks good on a horse.” Clement stood up, finished doing up her tunic buttons, put on her hat, and peered into the campaign mirror. It gave her a blurry view of exhaustion held upright by a stiff uniform.
“You look tired enough to be a general,” Gilly said. “Do you even sleep anymore?”
With Seth, Clement thought, for a few hours I truly slept. She kissed her son and went out to meet with the garrison commanders one last time.
The nine commanders awaited her in the hall of the new building, under walls that had received only the first rough brown coat of plaster, by windows that were still smeared with the glazier’s oily fingerprints, near a fireplace where a brisk fire painted the first stains of smoke on the new bricks. Nothing cushioned the harsh sound of chair legs scraping on the bare floor as the commanders rose to greet her, too slowly, with too little genuine respect.
Let them have Heras, thought Clement. And for a moment the prospect of freedom dizzied her: Seth, Gabian, a comfortable bed at night, a flower garden.
And yet, though these commanders persisted in thinking they had only to choose between one general and another, in fact it was a choice between changing or dying. If these particular soldiers were to die, it would make little difference to Clement, so weary she was of them. But thousands of soldiers who followed their commands would die with them, and for them she felt dreadfully responsible. For most of her life, she too, like these commanders, had substituted discipline for vision, had ignored her doubts and done her duty. Her commands had helped to deliver her people to this quandary, and she must deliver them from it, if only because no one else would.
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