She reached up, and he reached down, and briefly clasped her hand.
Back in the kitchen, the storyteller took the empty cups from her, then examined the contents of Clement’s basket, and gave an approving nod. “Fellowship,” she commented, and went to put the bottle of milk in the cold cupboard.
Some hours later, Marga came into the kitchen, carrying a bundle wrapped so as to reveal a solemn, old man’s face and blue, unfocused eyes. Clement gave Marga the money, and Marga put the baby in her arms, like a shopkeeper handing over a sack of sugar.
“I need to speak to the midwife!” Clement said in a panic.
“She’s busy,” Marga said. “The storyteller will show you out.” She left the kitchen, hurrying, leaving Clement with a fleeting glimpse of her harried face and fatigue-smeared eyes. The storyteller followed her out, and for some little time Clement was left alone, to stare at the baby, who blinked vaguely at her, opened and closed a toothless mouth and made random movements in its bindings. Clement felt a swift, deep shifting in her heart. Everything felt askew, and yet this giddiness was not entirely due to fear.
The storyteller returned. “The midwife knows of a possible nurse. She’ll speak to her tomorrow, and send her to the garrison, if she’s willing.”
“But I need her to show me what to do!”
The storyteller said, “She cannot leave Alrin.”
Clement stood like a dumb animal, watching without seeing, as the storyteller put a few things in a basket: her silken performance clothes, a wooden comb. Then, she took the baby so Clement could put on her coat. She gave the infant back, now wrapped in three small blankets from Gilly’s basket, and put on her own outdoor clothing. She got the bottle of milk from the cupboard, and picked up both the baskets in one hand.
The storyteller held open the kitchen door for Clement. On the table in the front hall, where the lamp had long since burned itself out, she placed a latchkey. She opened the front door, and Clement walked out into the blinding day, where a cold sun glanced around scudding shreds of clouds, and the street was busy with people, old and young, all wielding snow shovels. The storyteller closed the door firmly.
The infant stirred in the cold and uttered a small complaining sound. The storyteller arranged a fold of blanket to shield its face, then took Clement by the arm to steady her on the snowy walk.
“You’re coming with me? asked Clement.
In a voice made rough by cold the storyteller said, “I will teach you to care for your son.”
“My son?” said Clement blankly. She looked down at the bundled baby. Then, the finality with which the storyteller had shut that door sank in. “Storyteller? Marga won’t tolerate you after Alrin is gone?”
“Marga will do what she wants, now.”
A silence. The street had been scattered with sand, and the storyteller took her supporting hand from Clement’s elbow. Clement said, “Gilly and I will take care of you, somehow.”
The baby in her arms seemed suddenly much heavier. She looked at him, and realized he was asleep.
Chapter 27
In the dim, chilly cellar, Karis painted the blocks of type with viscous ink that Garland had cooked the day before. She took the sheet of paper from Garland, carefully checked the side that was already printed to make certain she oriented it properly, and laid it delicately on top of the plate. She screwed down the press, waited a moment, then swiftly unscrewed it and lifted off the printed sheet, to hand to Garland.
Both of them were covered with ink, their clothing stained, their fingers black, their faces smudged. Holding the sheet carefully by the edges, Garland felt so tired he could not summon up a comment, though it seemed to him an appropriate moment for ponderous statements. Karis dug her knuckles into the small of her back. “Is it right side up?”
Garland glanced at both sides of the big sheet, on which were printed eight pages of Medric’s booklet. “It’s right.”
“We’re done, then.”
He carried the page up the narrow stone stairs to the kitchen, which was strung with rope on which the drying sheets hung like tablecloths on a busy tavern’s laundry line. The entire household had gathered, and, as Garland came through the door, they clapped and uttered huzzahs.
Leeba, who ran giddily up and down the strung lines of paper, contributed a few shrieks. Though she had not been allowed in the cellar, she had managed to become an ink-child, more smeared than Karis, more stained than Garland. She chanted as she ran: “The last page! Of the last book! Of the last year!”
J’han captured her. “But not the last bath!”
She squealed like a piglet. J’han, who had proved to be the one of them patient and persistent enough to master typesetting, gripped her a bit more determinedly than usual. “We have got to get her to go to sleep,” he said ominously.
Norina took the child from him. Leeba abruptly went limp and obedient, for which Garland, although he could now tolerate being in the same room as Norina, did not blame her. Medric took the last sheet of paper from Garland’s hands, and ceremoniously hung it from a line.
Karis had been wearing a shirt that belonged in the rag bag. Ducking paper, she stripped it off, tossed it to the floor, and, in her undershirt, lay face down on Garland’s table. “I need a healer,” she moaned.
J’han went to her promptly, and examined her back. With unconcealed appreciation he said, “You are a fine specimen! Look here,” he said to Garland. “You don’t often see a musculus trapezius so developed. Even her musculus triceps brachii is obvious. What an anatomy lesson she would be!”
Garland looked where J’han pointed, apparently surprising the healer by actually showing some interest. J’han happily explained the details of Karis’s construction, pulling aside her shirt to point out the connections of muscle to bone, to explain what each one did, and to speculate on why and how the muscles of her back had developed as they had.
“Blessed day,” said Emil in a muted voice.
Garland looked around to find that Emil, with Medric folded comfortably to his chest, was gazing at Karis’s amazing back with an astonished expression, as though it had only just occurred to him to be impressed by her. A deep man like him might neglect to notice the surfaces of things, Garland supposed.
Karis groaned pathetically.
“I’m done lecturing,” J’han assured her. His probing fingers paused. “Spasm. I guess that hurts.” He leaned all his weight into the heels of his hands and shoved the breath out of Karis’s chest.
Emil sighed. “The methods by which we divert ourselves are rather peculiar.”
“Eccentric, even,” said Medric.
“Desperate,” said Norina, who had gotten the abnormally passive child into the wash tub.
Both men blinked at this. Emil said, “Desperate. And book binding is next. If you thought printing was dull . . .”
“I won’t do it,” Karis said, her voice strangled by the pressure on her back. “All that fussing. I need to move more.”
“Deliveries after that,” said Medric. “Lots of moving.”
“Oh!” said Karis.
“There,” said J’han in satisfaction, apparently addressing Karis’s anatomy. “That was very obedient of you.”
Karis took several deep breaths, but seemed disinclined to move otherwise. J’han began methodically to work on one muscle at a time, and Karis grew so limp that Garland wondered if she might simply slither off the table, like a very slimy fish.
Eyes closed, she mumbled, “Emil, are you still there?”
“Still here, and still diverted. But now it’s by envy. Why has J’han never done that to me? Obviously, I’m not as beautiful to look at—”
“Where are we going?” Karis asked. “Have we decided?”
“Oh, while you were down in the cellar we did take a look at Norina’s maps, and we figure that we only actually need to visit some ten people—the right ten, of course, who know a lot of other people—but I’ve got a good idea of who the right ten people are.
So we can walk right across the middle of Shaftal, west to east, with a certain amount of meandering north and south. The weather will be terrible, I suppose, but you’ll help us dodge the storms. Do you want to see the map?”
“I put them away,” said Norina, busy with the wash cloth. Leeba peered, rather trapped looking, from behind a mask of soap bubbles.
Garland fetched the map case, and took out a roll of several maps on heavy, sturdy paper; the most remarkable maps he had ever seen, for they appeared to be marked with every single road and path, village, hill, waterway, and stand of trees in the entire country of Shaftal. He held up the maps one by one before Karis’s eyes until she reached with an ink-black finger to point at an undistinguished area. “What’s here? I can’t read it.”
Emil took the map from Garland to bring it closer to the lamp. “I think you were pointing at a sheep-shearing station. It’s pretty far from anywhere, and surely it’s not even occupied at this time of year.”
J’han had switched his attentions to Karis’s shoulder blades. She had shut her eyes again. She said, in a heavy, exhausted voice, “No, Emil. Mabin is there.”
Mabin, Garland thought. Councilor Mabin, general of Paladins. The one with the spike in her heart.
“Do you want to visit her?” Emil’s tone was neutral, but Garland noticed a sudden liveliness in his face.
“Want?” Karis said. “No, of course not.”
“Ought,” Emil corrected himself patiently.
“Ought,” said Medric firmly.
The Truthken briskly rubbed her shivering daughter with a towel. “Karis will protect you, Garland, so don’t go into a panic.”
Garland realized then that panic was exactly what he felt.
“The earth will open its mouth and chew up that woman alive if she even threatens my people,” said Karis. “And she’ll beg me to let her heart stop beating.”
Her tone was so hard, and so matter-of-fact, that Garland said in a small voice, “Literally?”
Emil said, “Earth logic, you, know, is awfully literal. And Karis, well, she’s always been a bit—” He paused, apparently to hunt down and capture the most exact term. “—Definite,” he said. “When she does something, she does it. And you know she’s done it. And you never forget it.”
“And it can really hurt,” said Medric.
Karis raised her head. She looked at Medric, and then at Emil. “You two can hardly wait,” she said.
The parlor had become a makeshift bindery, lit by the household’s entire collection of lamps. Norina stood in the corner, methodically folding and slashing sheets of paper. Emil sorted and ordered the pages and then, like Garland, plied a heavy needle and thread to sew the pages together. Finally, J’han and Leeba glued on the paper covers, and yesterday’s ink-child had been transformed into a glue-child. After an entire morning of sewing, Garland still could not quite believe that books are held together at their centers by needle and thread. Such a homely thing! His fingers hurt, and he was glad to abandon the sewing occasionally, to check his stewpot.
In the afternoon, Medric came down the stairs, and Leeba, who had gotten very bored with painting glue on paper, leaped up with a cry. “Medric! I have a surprise!” She produced with a flourish a very crooked, glue-blotted, ink-smeared book.
“Is that it?” said Medric. “My book?” He swept her up, book and all, and went twirling up and down the hallway with her in a dizzy dance, while she recounted, between shrieks of laughter, her very important role in the construction of this first book. Medric said, “I know exactly where this one is to go.” He poked his head into the parlor. “Stop slaving away in the gloom! Let’s give this book a proper send-off.”
But first the book had to be wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine, and the knots sealed with red wax. The resulting package was carried outside in triumph, with Medric waving it proudly, and the rest of them following in grimy procession: J’han rubbing his sticky hands ineffectually with a rag, Garland sucking a needle-pierced fingertip Emil playing a riddle game with Leeba, Norina intent as a cat stalking a mouse. Out they went into the cold, bright day and Karis came up the slope to greet them, pulling a completed sledge. To get the wood she had dismantled every cupboard in the house, leaving Garland’s kitchen in complete disarray as a result. A hammer was tucked into her belt, and her pockets bulged with pegs or nails. Planes, a brace-and-bit, saws, and mallets scattered the porch where she had been working.
“What’s that?” she said, when Medric waved his package at her.
“A book,” he said importantly.
“Just one?”
“The first one,” Leeba said.
“Well, put it in the sledge. And then go make 499 more.”
“You have no sense of ceremony,” grumbled Medric. “Now listen! This book shall not be hauled across the snow. No weary journey ‘cross hill and dale, no hostile, porridge-eating farmers to be tempted to use it to start their breakfast fires. No, that may be its brother’s fate, but not this one. Not this one!” He held it up, and shook it for emphasis. “This one shall be delivered by ravens!”
“Give it to me,” Karis said.
Medric came down the porch steps and handed it to her. She weighed it in the palm of her hand. “You should have written a shorter book. How far do you expect it to be carried?”
“To Watfield.”
The amusement faded from her cold-flushed face. “Medric—”
Medric gave an elaborate shrug, that seemed to begin with his feet, and traveled upwards in a loose-limbed movement that made him seem on the verge of collapsing into a pile of disconnected bones.
She looked at him, eyes glinting, mouth drawn tight, Garland suspected, to keep herself from uttering words that might at best be discourteous. When she spoke at last, however, it was to say prosaically, “Fortunately, Garland has been stuffing the ravens with corn bread.”
The ravens arrived as she spoke: dropping from the roof, from the treetops, from the cloud-draped sky. “What—what—what?” they cried.
Medric turned completely around, a giddy man in a maelstrom of flapping wings. “You’re sending them all?”
“I have to, so they can carry your heavy book in relay.” With a very small, very mocking bow, Karis returned to the seer the packaged book. He lifted it over his head, balanced on his fingertips. The ravens rose up again in a flapping cloud that briefly cloaked him, and then he was empty-handed, and one of the departing ravens dangled the package from its claw.
“Good-by!” Medric cried. “Good luck!” Leeba, and then the rest of them, joined him in shouting their farewells. But Karis stood silent, monolithic, with her hands jammed in her pockets, squinting in the light as she watched the ravens fly away.
Chapter 28
The door latched softly. Clement, who had fallen asleep with the baby in the crook of her arm and a nippled milk bottle resting precariously on her chest, slitted open her eyes to see that it was the storyteller, slipping in unhindered and unescorted, pulling the hood back from her sharp-edged face. Clement mumbled, “Is it day or night?”
“Almost supper time.”
“Where have you been?”
“I owed Alrin a story.” The storyteller hung her cloak on a hook and began stripping off and folding her plain wool clothing.
“How is she doing?” said Clement with surprise.
“She’s dead. Since yesterday.”
The storyteller had been telling stories to a dead woman.
Clement looked down at her son, who blinked at her as though in abject amazement. She felt a sensation she could not put a name to; it seemed too unfamiliar to be called, simply, sadness.
The room was dark, the storyteller an indifferent shadow, doing up the buttons of her silken performance clothes. Clement had hardly slept in two days. And she was shaken by the enormity and suddenness of the catastrophe she had brought upon herself. Clement let a few tears fall, a luxury so long forbidden she wasn’t even certain how to do it. The storyteller, if
she even noticed, offered no comment.
Before the woman left for the evening’s performance, though, she put a fresh bottle of milk on the windowsill to keep cold, then came over to the bed to check the baby. She had drilled Clement in feeding and diapering as determinedly as Clement had ever drilled a soldier. Clement said, “Do you approve?” Her voice was still rough with tears.
“I visited the midwife,” the storyteller said. “The nurse will come tomorrow morning.”
“What has taken so long?”
“She’s very young. Her parents are reluctant.”
Clement thought of a young woman, as young as Kelin, maybe, arguing angrily with an array of disapproving parents. “Hell,” she muttered. “Will you tell Gilly that she’s coming? And ask him to visit me after the night bell.”
After the night bell, Gilly arrived with the storyteller and an aide who was carrying a precarious supper tray. The stew had gotten stone cold on its journey from the refectory, but at least there was some meat in it. Clement ate, and Gilly said, “Cadmar complains that he is unattended.”
Clement crushed a fragment of frozen butter onto her cold bread. “He knows I’m leaving in just a couple of days. What does he want from me?”
The storyteller approached them, and handed the baby to Gilly, who accepted the bundle with some surprise. She silently left the room.
“Where is she going?” Gilly held the baby awkwardly, looking unnerved.
“She’ll sit on her heels in the hallway. Gazing into space.”
“Peculiar.”
“But it does give me some privacy. Are the soldiers now letting her wander the garrison unescorted?”
“I’ll look into it. She mentioned that the nurse is finally coming tomorrow. Are you thinking that the four of you can live in this one room, in harmony?”
“Won’t the nurse will take the child away?”
Earth Logic Page 29