Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  The Sainnites had still believed then that every winter in Shaftal would be their last. Any day now, they believed, they would conquer this land of stubborn farmers, and offer the subjected country to one of the lords of Sainna, as a bribe to let the exiled soldiers come home. In the early years, none of them could have imagined they would die of old age in a still-unconquered land.

  Clement drank the cold tea, and half listened to Cadmar’s tedious account of the various bouts he had fought in the training ring that morning. Fortunately, Clement’s smaller size had always excused her from being the big man’s training partner. Though she often wished to pummel him, it was more likely to be the reverse: no one admired Cadmar’s acumen, but his prowess as a fighter was beyond doubt.

  Cadmar began telling old, often repeated jokes that he had heard in the men’s bathhouse. Gilly finally looked up from his book, and rescued Clement with a comment about the storm that was approaching. They argued amicably about whether or not this winter was lingering longer than the last, until Cadmar, impatient with any conversation that was not about him, dismissed her.

  “Gods be thanked,” muttered Clement after the door was shut behind her.

  However, she had nothing else to do. She had tended the flower bulbs that bloomed on her windowsill; her quarters were pristine, her uniforms clean and mended, and she had bathed herself and changed her bed linens only yesterday. That morning she had attended the gathering of the garrison’s senior officers, who were themselves desperate to create new projects to divert the soldiers from picking fights with each other.

  They were all half mad with cold and confinement and the bad humors that move like evil spirits from one barracks to the next. But Clement doubted that anyone had more cause for wretchedness than she had. For five years, she and Gilly had conspired to keep a dreadful truth secret from everyone but Cadmar. And Cadmar sustained his own equanimity by listening selectively or, when that failed, by re-shaping the inconvenient facts into a comforting new form.

  The man was a marvel, really.

  Clement started down the hall. She would take a walk before the storm confined her indoors again. At the front door, she found that the soldiers on watch duty had already taken shelter in the anteroom. “It’s gotten awfully cold out there, lieutenant-general,” one warned. Clement set her teeth and stepped out the door into the rising wind. By the gods, it was a bitter day! Surely, if the Sainnites had arrived at Shaftal in winter rather than in summer, they would have simply expired of cold.

  Winters in their homeland, Sainna, had been little more than interruptions in the growing season. In Sainna there had been lush croplands, vineyards, fat cows in green fields. And there had been soldiers, fighting in the service of one or another blood-thirsty lord, killing each other over possession of one or another tract of land. In Sainna, Clement had been born in a child-crowded hovel outside a garrison, and had never been certain which of the four constantly-pregnant women had given birth to her. She regularly saw her siblings sold to soldiers, then one day was herself sold to a new mother, Gabian, who took her into the garrison to become a soldier. A couple of years later, their entire battalion was forced to sea, and they became refugees.

  Clement remembered riding on her mother’s back as they ran for the docks with an army at their heels. She had been eight, or maybe nine years old. She did not know she was screaming with fear until her mother put her down on the ship’s deck and slapped her to make her be quiet. After that, a blur of seasickness, bad water and worse food, and a single clear memory of being brought above deck to see some gigantic fishes, bigger than the ship. Their ship had run aground on the rocky, inhospitable coast of Shaftal, and Clement arrived in her new land by being heaved out of a longboat and dumped onto the sand, along with several other children and a great pile of armor, weaponry, and supplies. One of the soldiers who rowed that boat repeatedly through treacherous waters so as to unload the wrecked ship of its supplies and passengers, had been as a god to her: a big, golden-haired young man whose great muscles gleamed with freezing spray, whose blue eyes glinted with joy when a jagged rock or towering breaker challenged his strength. That man had been Cadmar.

  It had been high summer then, but the Sainnites had soon learned the bitter facts about Shaftal’s weather. Today, the wind felt sharp enough to trim the skin off Clement’s face. She pulled the muffler up to her eyes, jammed her hat down over the ears, and set out across the sand-strewn ice. She walked briskly, giving every appearance of having a destination, exchanging greetings with the few soldiers unfortunate enough to have outdoor business. Most of the five hundred here in Watfield Garrison would be in the barracks, huddled together under blankets rather than use their day’s ration of fuel, grumbling, arguing, gambling, and telling each other the same worn-out stories, over and over again.

  Clement walked a half-circuit of the garrison. At the edge of a wasteland of snow, she perched on an ice-encased stone bench, and tried to imagine the garden that would emerge here, in the spring. The flower bulbs she had inherited from her soldier mother were planted under this snow. That they would soon bloom seemed unbelievable.

  The cold had taken hold of her very bones when the gray sky blithely began scattering stars of snow across her lap. She broke her own torpor by cursing the weather, and then, because it made her feel better, continued to curse as she walked, starting with her enemies, but not neglecting her friends and herself. She cursed everyone in Shaftal while she was at it, and everyone who had ever been born, and only stopped short of cursing the gods because her angry, snow-kicking perambulation had finally brought her near enough to the gate that one of the guards might have noticed and been perplexed by her behavior.

  The gate, just then being shoved open to admit a new arrival, contained the city beyond in an illusory cage composed of its heavy iron bars: the narrow street, the high, steep-roofed buildings that seemed ghostly and restless in the falling snow. In those buildings, the people of Watfield did whatever they did—tirelessly busy, indifferent to weather, oblivious the threatening presence of the garrison. Artisans, shopkeepers, builders, brokers, they worked hard, ate well, lived comfortably, and followed rules or laws that Clement simply could not comprehend, no matter how often Gilly explained them to her.

  Clement walked over to the gate captain, and pulled aside her muffler so he could see her face, in case snow had obscured the insignia on her hat. He saluted casually—after five years it was generally known that Clement didn’t share Cadmar’s obsession with protocol—and said, “It’s a messenger from Han.”

  “Han? That’s a journey of a good twelve days.”

  “In good weather,” said the captain, “On a clear road. But it took this soldier some twenty days, she says. She sure walks like she has a case of frostbite. Here, you, soldier!”

  The limping messenger blundered her way to the captain, and made a vague gesture that might have been a salute. The captain said, “This is Lieutenant-General Clement. You can give your message to her.”

  The messenger peered at Clement, apparently snow-blind, and asked hoarsely, “You’re Clement?”

  Clement had once known every soldier in Han garrison, but she did not recognize this woman. “I’m afraid I am. Have you got a packet somewhere inside all those clothes? Let’s get you out of this weather, eh?”

  “Take her in the barracks,” said the captain, gesturing so Clement would know which barracks he meant. “They’re having a birthday party on the men’s side, if you don’t mind a bit of noise.”

  “Whose wretched luck was it to be born in this dreadful month?”

  The captain grinned. “Eliminate all the dreadful months and you wouldn’t have many left for people to be born in.”

  Clement took the messenger by the elbow and led her to shelter. In the cold trap it was not much warmer than it was outside, but further inside, the coals in the fireplace still gave off a little heat. The room was plain, low-ceilinged for warmth, with its windows caulked shut and insulated with str
aw and burlap. The neat room, crowded with beds, smelled as bad as might be expected, of dirty linens, unwashed chamber pots, and used blood rags. The messenger took a deep breath of the stink and said hoarsely, “Home.”

  “Knock some of that snow off your clothes, will you, and I’ll get these coals to flame a bit.”

  On the other side of the dividing wall, the company was enthusiastically, if tunelessly, thumping and shouting their way through the last verse of a particularly raunchy birthday song. The cake they ate would be gluey at best, since Cadmar had driven away Watfield Garrison’s talented cook some five years ago.

  When Clement commanded Han Garrison, during the three years she had managed to get herself out from behind Cadmar, the entire garrison had turned out to sing to her on her birthday every year. Then the old general died, Cadmar was elected to replace him, and he gave Clement her unwelcome promotion. Now, no one cared when it was her birthday.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Clement said to the exhaustion-addled messenger, now the fire was burning. “You’ve distracted me from poisoning myself with pity.”

  “Eh?” the messenger said. “It’s dark in here, isn’t it?”

  Clement brought the messenger to the fire, unbuttoned her coat, and sat her down on a stool. “Can you see my insignias now? So you believe who I am?”

  The messenger peered blurrily at Clement’s hat. “All right.” She plucked a packet from the inner pocket of her coat, releasing with her movements a stink of sweat and another smell that reminded Clement unpleasantly of rotten meat. The woman handed Clement the packet, then toppled messily off the stool.

  Startled, Clement felt the woman’s greasy skull to make certain she hadn’t cracked her head open. Her head felt scalding hot. She left the woman collapsed on the hearth, head pillowed on stone and one leg still tangled in the stool, and shouted out the door at a passing soldier to fetch a medic. Then, she broke open the packet and read its contents by the dim, glittering light of the snow storm.

  Commander Taran had written with the unapologetic terseness of extreme duress. “An epidemic has overcome the garrison, a hideous illness so swift and vicious I fear for all our lives.”

  “Gods of hell!” Clement cried. She dropped the letter, slammed her fist through the thick skin of ice over the water in the bucket, and plunged in both her hands. A yellow bar of soap lay nearby; she whacked it on the floor to break it loose from its dish, and began vigorously scrubbing her hands. But she could not think how to scrub the woman’s contaminated breath out of her lungs.

  “An epidemic could do us in,” she muttered. “Bloody hell!”

  The stricken woman uttered some ugly, choking sounds and flailed her arms vaguely. The fetor of the room was overlaid by the appalling stink of vomit.

  “Did you have to be such a hero?” Clement asked her. “Couldn’t you have died on the road?”

  The woman’s aimless movements stilled. Clement slammed open the barracks door and again shouted for help. The snow, falling heavily now, swallowed her voice, but eventually a shape approached out of the white curtain, and she told the soldier to fetch the guard captain.

  “The entire gate watch goes into immediate isolation,” she told the captain. “Send someone who had no contact with the messenger to inform Commander Ellid.”

  “You’ll have to be isolated too, lieutenant-general.”

  “Aye,” she said glumly. “Better inform the general of that fact.”

  The stricken messenger died before the day was out. When the dead woman was undressed, the medic found a horror: a gruesome sore in the armpit that seeped pus and stank of rot, and black marks like the footprints of a fell creature that had marched across her belly and thighs. They burned the body, the clothing, and everything the messenger had touched, and the entire contents of the barracks in which she had collapsed. The company that had lived there was relocated, and Clement and her unlucky fellows were locked in, without even a window through which to watch the world melt its way from depressing snow to appalling mud. For twenty days they endured each other’s company, playing cards or listening to Clement read out loud Gilly’s wry and witty daily letter, which he illustrated with unflattering caricatures of people they all knew.

  At first, the confined soldiers were so anxious that every sneeze or cough seemed a death knell, and to complain of an itch or a pain was to be condemned to days of avoidance—not easy in these cramped quarters. However, after a few days in which none of them experienced a worse affliction than boredom, they began making a joke of this enforced idleness. Clement gave up fretting over Han Garrison, since there was nothing to be done. Often, she found herself actually enjoying the company of her fellow soldiers. She had not slept in a barracks in at least twenty years, but the members of this company had lived together for so long that they had blunted each other’s sharp edges years ago. Though Clement, along with the medic, got the usual courteously distant treatment accorded outsiders, the conviviality was still comforting enough to make her nostalgic for the days that the members of her company had constituted her entire world.

  By the end of her confinement, five more messengers had arrived bearing news of garrisons devastated by illness. The messengers were all quarantined in a dank basement, where two had died, while the other three idled away the time and complained about the food. In the quagmire of the garden, bright green spikes had broken through, and Clement, along with most of the soldiers in the garrison, checked every day to see if any bulbs were blooming yet. It rained, and rained, and rained.

  Seeking Gilly in the archives, Clement trotted through a downpour, with a packet of papers inside the oiled leather of her coat to protect it from the wet. The archives were in a massive storeroom near the stables: a dusty, cluttered, mildewed space in which the shelves crowded so close together that it was almost impossible to pass between them. Gilly had visited the archives only once before, and had declared the place a hopeless trash pile of worm-eaten paper. Now, Clement found him crouched miserably in the dank room at an unsteady table, leafing through hundreds of deteriorating documents, with a girl soldier fresh out of the children’s garrison to do his fetching and carrying.

  “All the messengers are still well today,” said Clement, as she sat beside Gilly.

  Gilly hushed her, jerking a thumb towards a lamplit corner, where his young assistant was shuffling papers. In a low voice he asked, “And no one in Watfield Garrison is sick yet?”

  “No. Nor anyone in town, either, I’m told. But in some towns, as many as half the people are sick.”

  “And it’s an ugly way to die.” Gilly stretched his crooked back, grunting with pain. “Look at this, will you?” He opened a leather-bound book and showed her how an enterprising mouse had made herself a cozy nest inside some garrison’s old logbook. Six naked mouse babies lay in the hollow chewed out between the covers, curled in a bed of shredded paper. “Sometimes I think this is all these books are good for,” said Gilly. “But I have learned a few things—nothing very useful, yet. You soldiers probably brought this illness with you from Sainna. I’ve learned that.”

  “But this thing is killing Shaftali people as well.”

  “Do you think an illness can pick and choose between you and me?” His bitter gaze mocked her.

  “But we came from Sainna over thirty years ago. Where has this illness been hiding?”

  “What do you expect of me, Clem? If you need expert understanding, you’ll have to bring a Shaftali healer back from the dead to consult with.”

  For Clement to actually be able to resolve one of the problems that were her unfortunate responsibility was a rare event. “As requested,” she said, gloating as she put the thick packet in front of him.

  “What? What is this?”

  “Well, I can’t read it, since it’s in Shaftalese. But someone handed it through the gate at first light, and told the guard it was from a healer, and that it’s about this terrible illness. Cadmar is suspicious, of course. I myself am wondering why a healer
would help us, if that’s what this is.”

  “To keep healthy Shaftali from being infected by sick Sainnites,” said Gilly, studying the first page. “That’s what the healer writes here.”

  He scanned the documents. “Look: a drawing of a person’s insides. This healer is a bit of an artist.” Later he said, “Well, here’s the answer to why it might take thirty years for the illness to reappear. It’s an illness of rats, he says, and only occasionally does it get transmitted from rats to people. Through flea bites. Now I wonder how the healer figured that out.”

  “A rat illness, carried by fleas? It’s bizarre!”

  Gilly, apparently fascinated by the healer’s exposition, turned back to the anatomical drawing. “This healer says that if a sick person gets big, painful boils here or here—” he pointed at the groin and the armpits, “—then the sickness can only be passed from the sick person to the well person by fleas. But if there are no lumps, then the illness is in the lungs, and can be transmitted by the sick person’s breath. These are the people who must be quarantined, and they almost certainly will die within a few days of falling ill. The others can be cared for in the infirmary, so long as it’s free of fleas, and half of them may survive.”

  Clement gazed at the drawing in horrified fascination.

  “I think this is no fabrication,” said Gilly. “This healer writes from a knowledge that far exceeds mine.”