Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  She looked closely at Medric then, wondering whether he was thinking much the same thing. Was it irony or justice that one Sainnite seer’s visions had led to the destruction of Zanja’s people, and a second’s would lead to the destruction of his own people? And was Medric considering now, as she was, whether the cost would be worth the result?

  The room grew dark. None of them thought to light the lamp, and though the windows all were open, eventually the only light came from bright stars, and a crescent moon. Zanja remembered: when she, her clan brother Ransel, and a half dozen other katrim were all that remained alive, they had deliberately lit their campfire on a steep peak that overhung the demoralized Sainnites below, so that the enemy would be unable to forget for even a moment that unrelenting death still stalked them. The surviving katrim had left the bodies of their massacred people to molder in the Asha Valley, a prosperous tribe of some eight hundred, all dead, and since then most of their fellow survivors had been killed. Now they had planned a trap that could kill or maim a great many of the enemy, but to spring the trap one more would have to die.

  They had chosen the one by lot, and when Zanja finally won the toss she was relieved: relieved at the end of the dreadful game, relieved that she no longer would spend the days and nights fearful that Ransel’s crazed bravado would get him killed. It was ridiculous, really: they all were destined to die, and only desire for more revenge had kept them from choosing suicide. Yet, more than anything Zanja feared that Ransel might be hurt unto death, and it might become her duty to give him a quick and merciful ending. Of all the dreadful prospects that had haunted her in those nightmare days, that had been the most awful.

  She had been chosen by lot to die, and yet Ransel was dead now, while she still lived. She had crossed the boundary into a new life, but she had never entirely forgotten that the gods had first selected her for death.

  She said to her brothers huddled together in the darkness, “Will precedes insight. If we are to see beyond my death, to understand how, or why, or what it is for, we first have to accept that I will die.”

  She saw a movement in the shadows: Emil shaking his head in refusal, though for fifteen years his friends had gone to their deaths at his command. “I am to kill you with my own hand, for the mere hope that someday I’ll understand why? No, I won’t do such a thing.”

  Zanja said, “Somehow, it will make positive action possible. But, Emil, if I am to die—”

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re the only one—”

  “Do not ask me!”

  “—the only one I trust to do it properly.”

  There was a sound of wings flapping. Somewhere nearby, the ravens roosted in the darkness. Or were they listening, silently—and did Karis sit awake, alone, by an open window in their sprawling house, also listening?

  Zanja got up from the bed and took up her still unpacked traveling gear: a blanket to lie on or to cover herself with should the nights turn cool; matches; a few essential tools; spare socks; a dagger at her hip; a knife in her boot, and the glyph cards in their pouch dangling from her belt.

  Medric had put on his spectacles, and now they were gleaming in the faint moonlight. “You’re leaving?”

  “I can’t endure to be with anyone. And Emil can’t endure to be with me.”

  “Of course not,” said Medric. “Well, you’ll know when it’s time to come back to us. Do you want some money? Karis gave me a great handful of it.”

  Zanja accepted a few coins, to make him feel better, and kissed him good-by. She said nothing to Emil. She went down the stairs, and out into the quiet night. The moon was obscured now by the rooftops, but she could tell by the glow of light in which direction it lay. She followed, and behind and above her there was the whisper of raven’s wings.

  Chapter 11

  For twenty days, Zanja lived off the land or worked for meals, for farmers always welcomed more hands at this time of year. As she drew close to the borderland, that hazy edge where Shaftal ended and the western wilderness began, she met a man as wild and solitary as she, who volunteered to cook the rabbit she had snared with the mushrooms and wild vegetables he had gathered, and soon served her one of the best meals she’d ever eaten. They were in the woods, had come across each other by chance, and parted with scarcely a word having been exchanged; but nothing seemed strange to Zanja any more, and the wandering cook never asked her a single question, so perhaps nothing seemed strange to him, either.

  Eventually, Zanja walked all night, and at dawn entered again into the outskirts of the old librarian’s town. She found the rooms above the wheelwright’s shop to be vacant. She jogged down cobbled streets to the librarian’s house. A loaded freight wagon stood at the door, with four big horses in the traces, munching from feed bags. A hired driver leaned on one of the wheels with a half-eaten bun in his hand. “You must be the one we’re waiting for,” he said.

  She got into the wagon, which was packed with crates that smelled of old paper and leather: the librarian’s rescued books. She was making herself a rough bed among the crates when Emil and Medric, summoned by the driver’s call, came out of the house, with the shoemaker trailing behind them. Her eyes were puffy with weeping.

  Emil leaned over the edge of the wagon and offered Zanja a bun.

  “When did the librarian die?” Zanja asked. The bun was warm. She clasped it between her hands.

  “The day before yesterday. She was telling me how to remove a water stain. She fell silent, and I realized she had stopped breathing. Her daughter practically begged us to take the books. And that thing there—” he gestured at a large crate whose position directly over the wheels suggested it was particularly heavy. “That’s a printing press, would you believe! We’ve got paper, too, and those chests are full of type. It was all hidden away in the cellar.”

  “That old woman possessed some dangerous weapons,” Zanja said.

  “Well, it certainly will cost us our lives if the Sainnites catch us with this load.” Emil said these words without concern; their prescience, and the raven escort, made it unlikely they would be surprised by soldiers or any other danger.

  “Have you decided to kill me?” Zanja asked.

  He folded his arms on the edge of the wagon. The sun was rising, and he squinted in its light. “Have you decided to die?” he replied.

  “Decided? Well, I accept that I must accept my death.”

  “You’ve gotten as particular about words as Medric and I.” He turned his head; Medric was talking animatedly to the shoemaker, but she listened to him with an expression of blank bewilderment. Emil turned back to Zanja, and said, “I accept that I must become able to kill you. But somehow we both must become able to actually decide.”

  “That’s a problem for the gods,” said Zanja.

  “Hmm. What will I do, then, since I have no gods? Shaftali supposedly worship the land itself. And if Shaftal is what’s sacred to me, then that makes Karis—” Astonishingly, he seemed unable to think of the right word, and looked as baffled as the shoemaker. “Well, Karis is certainly not going to help me decide to kill you! Just the opposite, I expect.”

  “And yet we’re going home.”

  “We are.” He sighed. “What else can we do? Deceive her? Hide from her?” He glanced up at the ravens, three of them, that stalked along the rooftops. “It’s tempting, actually. But it’s both immoral and impossible.”

  Medric, finished with the poor shoemaker, came down the steps, with the burned book tucked under his arm. “Will you talk all day?” he said with mock peevishness, and climbed into the wagon. He turned to Zanja, and added, “Who was that man who cooked dinner for you in the woods?”

  “What? Gods of the sky, Medric!”

  “I know I’m a surprising sort of fellow,” said Medric. “But I should think you’d be used to me by now.”

  “I don’t even know his name,” said Zanja. “But I’ve never in my life eaten such a meal! Should I have asked him to come with me?”

&n
bsp; “Oh, no. He needs to find his own way. Did he seem like a Sainnite to you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well! He’s a rare man, then, if he could fool even you. I look forward to meeting him, some day.”

  They journeyed home, past fields crowded with hay cutters, near ponds where naked, nut-brown children took their last swims in the last warm days of the year, through the rising dust that glittered like gold shavings in the blinding sunlight. For entertainment, the three of them wildly re-interpreted poems they had memorized, and the driver, mystified at first, soon took to declaiming poetry of his own. Medric spent the better part of a day giddily proposing arcane interpretations of the driver’s explicit lyrics, and Emil laughed until he wept. They came home like drunks from the fair, to an empty house and a cold forge and tomatoes rotting on the vine in a garden long since gone to weeds.

  “Gods of hell,” said Medric, in Sainnese. He stood on the doorstep, flabbergasted, pulling tangled hair out of his face and tying it at the nape of his neck with a greasy blue ribbon. He pushed his spectacles into a better position, but appeared dissatisfied and took them off to clean them on his shirt.

  Zanja searched the house, and when she came out, Emil was walking up the hill from the orchard, where he had gone to try to get the ravens to talk to him. The driver of the wagon, who had finished untying the ropes that secured the load, leaned nonchalantly on the wheel.

  “Those ravens are nothing but brainless carrion eaters!” shouted Emil.

  Zanja called back, “Her toolbox is gone, and Leeba’s rabbit. She left the moneybox in the middle of the kitchen table. Everything is covered with dust.”

  “Gods of hell!” Medric said in bewilderment. “She’s run away!”

  The word had spread that their house was occupied again, and yet another neighbor had come by to inquire worriedly about Karis. Zanja would have been rude and Medric unsettling, so Emil went out to stand in the yard and attempt to explain her absence. He came in looking angry and impatient, and said, “He wants me to reassure him that she’s coming back, that his good fortune at living in the purview of an earth witch will never end. I wish I had the luxury of his petty worries.”

  The three of them had been reading the cards when the anxious neighbor interrupted them. A three-person reading was not for the faint-hearted, for they slowed each other down to the point of tedium with their questions and answers, and with the difficult task of reconciling the multitude of contradictory insights that occurred to them with every new card. Medric was recording the twists and turns of their grueling work, and when he shattered a pen had managed to splatter himself, the room, and most of the cards with ink. In Emil’s absence he had trimmed a new pen and, after reviewing his notes, had started a fresh page. He scribbled on, ridiculously ink-speckled, undisturbed by Emil’s grumpiness. Zanja offered Emil the bowl of raw, overripe vegetables that she had rescued from the neglected garden. He sat down, took a bite of a rather yellow piece of cucumber, spit it out again, and studied the scattered cards in silence. After a while, he started rearranging them, studying the new pattern, and rearranging them again.

  The two of them were at their most maddening, but Zanja was fortunate to be so wrung out that she welcomed even the respite of watching them trap themselves in their own ruminations. She slipped into an exhausted sleep, and when she woke up, Emil was examining Medric’s paper by the light of the window, and Medric was standing over the table, studying Emil’s arrangement of the cards. She had no idea how much time had passed.

  “Huh!” Medric exclaimed.

  “Ah!” Emil said at the same time.

  They looked bemusedly at each other, across the room.

  Zanja rubbed her gritty, tear-raw eyes. “Wise men, explain to me my fate.”

  Emil said, “With all the questions we’ve asked, we really are asking just three questions: Why must you die? How should this death be accomplished? And what might be the future result if we are successful?”

  Zanja glanced at the tabletop. The cards were arranged in three clusters, and each cluster was an answer: an answer that was a poem no less complex or resistant to reading than the poetry of Koles. Though the two men could just as easily have each played the opposite role, Emil had defined the poetic arrangements, and, she assumed, Medric had transliterated them. Zanja said, “To translate the glyphs that answer these questions, one must be analytical, practical, and visionary by turns, just as the questions are.”

  Medric gave a loud laugh. “While we slaved away, you saw the answers in your sleep, didn’t you?”

  “I feel like my head has been broken. When that happened the first time, I wanted to sleep all the time. But the Sainnites could not withstand the intelligence of my dreams.” Zanja got up rather stiffly to take a close look at the cards. She did not feel intelligent, but the cards’ meaning seemed clear as light, distinct as a voice speaking loudly in an empty room. “Why must I die? Here lies the owl, myself, beset by the past, by the Laughing Man, by war and truth, by unhealed wounds. I cannot fly under that weight; and only death can lift it from me.”

  Emil said, “How should your death be accomplished? There I am, of course, the Man on the Hill, who will send you on a journey to the underworld. The Pyre belongs there, but it’s shared with the next pile, so I put the flame card there, to signify transformation as well as insight, and the raven card, which we say is the carrier of truth and you say is death. Your soul only will be consumed; your vacant body will survive, to be filled again somehow by your god. My duty is to empty you; and the card that signifies ceremonials suggests I am to enact your death through ritual.”

  Medric said, seriously for once, “Call it by another name, define it as we like, it is still death, and not merely a metaphor. As for the future . . .” Medric took the owl from the first pile and moved it to the last. “Death-becomes-Life: for Karis, who will step through a door; for the Sainnites, who will be subject to the flame. Past-Becomes-Future: the old G’deon, I think this means. Harald, who first refused to destroy us Sainnites when it would have been easy to do so. The three of us always assumed it was to keep Shaftali from becoming destroyers, but here we have a card of preservation, which suggests that for all the evil the Sainnites have done, something about us is worthwhile. But the three of us have not named that thing, have we?”

  “I have two names,” said Emil. “One is Medric, one is Karis. Oh, I mustn’t forget that cook in the woods. And many more Sainnites whose names I don’t yet know.”

  In the silence, they could hear the ravens, making a racket in the apple orchard, not warning of another neighbor’s approach, but uttering the harsh shouts of raucous welcome. Emil leaned half his body out the window, shading his eyes from the glare of sun. “I think there’s five ravens now. Yes, I see Norina and J’han together coming up the hill. He’s looking more than a little footsore, as if he never paused to rest during his entire trip from south to north. And Norina is as I’d expect her to be.” He drew his body back into the room.

  “Emil . . . !” Zanja stopped herself, embarrassed that she sounded so beseeching.

  But he said, “Medric and I will attempt to explain all this to them.”

  Medric seemed inclined to object, but Emil gave him a look so grim that Medric followed him reluctantly out, glancing back at Zanja with an expression of comical terror.

  Long before Emil thought to shout at the ravens to send for Norina and J’han, the ravens must have told them to come home, and had orchestrated their meeting along the way as well. Through the window, Zanja watched as Emil spoke, J’han wept, and Norina raged. She listened as they came into the house and, in the kitchen, Emil built up the fire and hung the teakettle. She went into the kitchen when it seemed the leading edge of the storm was past, but she was not surprised when Norina gave her a look she rather would have avoided, and commented, “So now you have finally found an excuse for suicide.”

  Zanja said flatly, “I do not want to die.”

  Apparently conv
inced and at a loss, Norina sat silently on a stool. Zanja had to turn away to escape that disconcerting, unrelenting gaze. Medric abstractly wiped out the dusty tea cups, and J’han looked bleakly around himself, seeking the daughter whose absence left the house achingly silent. His heavy pack, loaded with medicines and instruments of surgery, squatted in the corner, but J’han seemed unable to sit down.

  Norina said quietly, “J’han, Karis will not keep Leeba from you.”

  “But she is keeping me from her!” J’han accepted a cup of tea from Emil, but did not seem to know what to do with it.

  “You promised Leeba you’d be home by late summer, and she knows the seasons, now, so she will not give Karis a moment’s peace.” Norina accepted a cup, sipped cautiously, and added to him, “The less you have to do with this fire blood business, the better. Perhaps you should leave right away, and ask that the ravens show you the way to Leeba. And be insistent.”

  “Name of Shaftal,” said Emil, “the poor man is exhausted—”

  “If Karis is angry, let’s make certain there’s one person she can’t be angry with. J’han, you think these fire bloods all have lost their minds?”

  He looked surprised, for he was incapable of being so judgmental. But then he said, “Yes. All three of them at once. All right, I’ll go.” He swallowed his tea, and Emil went to get him some money. J’han fetched clean clothes and kissed them all good-by, Zanja twice, and was going out the door when he paused and said, “But what will I tell Karis, if I find her? I am utterly confounded.”

  “Oh!” Medric got hastily to his feet, and fetched the book box from the parlor. Its pointed warnings to be careful with the contents were obscured by the twine Medric had used to secure it for its journey. “Just give this to her, and tell her to read it.”