He turned down another hallway—their path was so complicated Zanja doubted she could find her way back to the front door—entered a self-important anteroom, and went through that, into a bedroom full of gleaming furniture, thick carpet, and rich draperies. This room, at least, seemed recently cleaned.
Karis sat near the hearth on a cushioned stool, taking tools out of her tool box, unwrapping them, examining them, testing their sharp edges, rubbing them with an oily rag to protect them against rust. She said grumpily, as Emil came in, “But I’m not going to sleep in that awful bed.”
“You can stand out in the snow all night—I don’t care,” he replied.
Zanja found herself paralyzed in the doorway, unable to cross the threshold. Emil said to Karis, “What are you doing, anyway?”
Karis gently extricated a small plane from the box. Zanja could remember when Karis had shaped that plane’s body and forged its blade, but she could not remember what this particular plane was designed for. When Karis invented a tool, she also invented the need for it, and Emil went about the country showing the new tool to carpenters, who became better at their work by buying it.
The hand that does the work creates the tool; the tool creates the work done by the hand. By earth logic, action and understanding are inseparable.
Zanja said, “The tools remind Karis who she is.”
Karis looked at her. “Do your tools remind you of who you are?” Her eyes had a deep, rather dangerous brightness to them. She reached again into her toolbox, and although the tool she had removed was swathed in leather, Zanja recognized it. Karis held up the little knife that had been her first gift to Zanja.
Zanja had come into the room somehow; had dropped to her knees on the lush carpet.
Karis said, “Clement confiscated this blade from you—from the storyteller. But then she gave it to a raven, to bring to me. That one gesture made everything possible.” She pressed the leather-wrapped blade into Zanja’s hand.
In a moment, Zanja said, “When they took the blade from me—from the storyteller—she felt a terrible loss. She knew that she had always carried the blade with her, though she couldn’t remember where it had come from or what it represented to her. But she treasured it anyway. It allowed her to keep believing that she had a past, that she was someone, and not merely a container of stories. But after they had taken the blade and the cards, she had nothing of her own.”
She looked up at Emil, who had given Zanja the cards, who now wearily leaned against a chair back, but seemed unwilling to sit down. “She loved the glyph cards too,” she said, “For the same reason.” She added, “The storyteller’s memories are very strange.”
He signaled with his eyes, telling her to look again at Karis. She had taken Zanja’s dagger out of her toolbox and was holding it out to her.
“I left it lying on our bed,” Zanja said.
“Did you? When Norina brought it to me, she didn’t say where you had left it.” Karis paused, and added apologetically, “I’m as stupid as ever about symbolism.”
“I don’t remember feeling angry, but to leave the knife in the bed we had shared for five years, that was an angry gesture. I can’t believe I did such a thing.”
“I do remember being angry with you,” Karis said. “With you—and with our family—and with Harald. But it’s gone now.”
There was a long silence, during which the faint sound of Emil shifting his weight seemed awfully loud.
Zanja said, “The storyteller thought she had murdered her wife.”
“Will you take the blade,” Karis said impatiently, “Or not?”
“Of course I will!” Zanja took the dagger out of her hand.
Emil straightened up rather stiffly. “I’m going to bed. My only wish is that no one bother me before breakfast. Everyone else will eventually end up in the kitchen this evening, I expect, sitting on the floor and drinking beer like the rustics we are, and eating with our fingers whatever amazing thing Garland cooks up next. Oh, Karis, I suppose I should warn you that Garland has fallen in love with the kitchen.”
“What? No! Emil!”
But he was gone, the relieved liveliness of his voice already swallowed by the house’s maw.
“Now it’s inevitable that we’ll live in this ugly travesty,” said Karis gloomily. “This building is an affront—a waste of good land and good stone. How shall I endure calling it my home?”
Zanja put her head on Karis’s knee. In a moment, Karis’s hand stroked her head, and Zanja’s skin came alive, like dry tinder catching fire. Karis gave a gentle tug to her solitary braid. Zanja murmured, “You practically pulled it out by the roots already.”
“Ungrateful—”
“I am not at all ungrateful. Do you know, someone has mentioned to me that it’s the thirteenth day of the first year of Karis G’deon? How did that become possible?”
After a silence, Karis said, “Thirteen days? Surely it’s been thirteen years.”
Zanja raised her head, for Karis’s voice had been harsh in its center and ragged at its edges. “What’s so awful about that bed? Why can’t you bear to lie down in it?”
“Those bedposts are overbearing. The carving is grotesque. The whole thing is an ostentatious monstrosity.”
Zanja looked at the bed. It truly was an awful thing; she herself couldn’t imagine lying in it. “So take a chisel to it,” she said.
Karis blinked at her. “By Shaftal, I’ve missed you.” Eyes glittering, she reached for a chisel in its protective wrappings, and a wooden mallet that lay nearby. Then, she chose a crosscut saw, its handle darkened by oil and age. “This won’t take long,” she said.
Not much later, they made love on the feather bed, amid wood chips and sawdust, as the ornate bedposts burned briskly in the fireplace.
A new age in Shaftal had begun.
Acknowledgments
For four or more hours a day, for more than a year, I sat writing in the front window of a downtown coffee shop, in sun and snow, warmth and chill. The people of Melrose came and went before and around me—and gradually they began waving hello, chatting, and inquiring about my progress. I am grateful to them—and I am equally grateful to the smiling young barristas who concocted my lattes, visited my table to see if I needed a refill, and stayed to ask questions about writing, language and education. Thanks also to the friends who suffered through my incoherent first draft, the members of my writing group, the Genrettes—Delia Sherman, Rosemary Kirstein, and Didi Stewart. And, when this book had with their help moved beyond its early confusion, even more people read the manuscript and helped me to see how to finish it: Amy Axt Hanson, Diane Silver, Jeanne Gomol, Debbie Notkin, Deb Manning, my agent, Donald Maass, and my beloved Deb Mensinger. As my life is so filled with kind, intelligent, generous friends, it’s no surprise this book is filled with them as well.
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 Melrose, Massachusetts, and lectures at the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Water Logic
Elemental Logic: Book Three
Laurie J. Marks
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
Prologue: Seeking Balance
Fire
If it can be imagined, it can be done, said Emil.
Emil, Medric, and Zanja, all fire bloods, had each by an equally unlikely route become governors of Shaftal. Yet only Emil even knew what a government was. He alone had been a minor thread in the vast tapestry of the old government before it unraveled. Children not then born had now borne children of their own—children who expected only bloodshed and oppression, who did not know and could not imagine how it had once been.
The patterns of the past can no longer serve, but people believe that strength lies in tradition, said Emil.
Zanja said, because of tradition they believe in Ka
ris, little though she wants to be believed in.
No, earth is what they believe in, said Emil.
But even earth is unstable, said Medric. For the power of any witch arises from lack of balance. What we must have is the steadiness that comes from balance: the insight and passion of fire, the solidity and fertility of earth, the ideals and intelligence of air, the fluidity and vision of water. When, though informing and contradicting each other, the elements are in balance, then they become stable, and then we have strength.
But how can an entire country be in balance? asked Zanja. How can we do now what we must, while also devising a future?
Oh, it’s an impossible task, said Medric. Let us begin it at once.
Water
Ocean stands knee-deep in the future.
The water is warm. The harbor is protected. There is a narrow beach, insurmountable cliffs, a pounding waterfall. These have not been enough.
She is a child when she flees there with the remnant of the tribe. The strangers have come, with their weapons and their anger. Ocean is there, and now she is the leader of the tribe. She finds a haven for them. She is standing there now, but the tribe has gone.
The people have built larger boats, and have learned to grab the wind with them. They have slipped between the rocks and dared the open sea. Ocean returns to the ship, to every ship, in every storm, in every passage. She returns and the sea never takes the sailors, and they find the way back to the harbor with barrels of salted fish. They go out and meet other ships, and they trade for all that their small harbor does not give them. To this chary shore, to toothed rocks, to hungry waves, they return, she returns, the tide rises and falls and she returns, and the pattern is failing.
She stands in childhood; she stands in adulthood; an old woman now, she stands in the future. The tide flows, in and out, and always inevitably there is less. The pattern will be failing, the pattern has always been failing, and it has failed. She will stand in the future, is standing there, and she is alone. The pattern has failed. It must not fail. She returns and again she begins.
Earth
Months had passed, and every night Seth still thought about Clem, a weary, haunted, quiet woman, making a difficult journey in dead of winter. They had made love in the way of strangers who are compelled towards each other—a surprising, strange, unsettling, yet heady business, coming to know each other’s skin without knowing each other’s secrets.
Later, when Clem returned as Clement, lieutenant general of the Sainnites in Shaftal, leading a company of soldiers, the uniform had changed her into someone else. They had not touched, though Seth’s hands had yearned to her: not to the heavy, oil-blackened leather, not to the gray wool underneath, where brass buttons flashed. Her hands yearned to the skin, upon which her fingers had once sensed the scars in the dark, the scars Seth never mentioned and hardly even heeded.
Seth’s hands had betrayed her into foolishness, into a stupid mistake that might well make her notorious—a Basdown cow doctor who was such a bumpkin she had mistaken a Sainnite soldier for a Shaftali farmer, even when they lay naked in her bed! Yet at that second meeting, Clem’s—Clement’s—identity had been a surprise but had not mattered: Seth’s hands still wanted that hauntedness, that hunger. She wanted Clem.
No, the lieutenant general had said. No. And she had left with her soldiers, she had slept with them in the barn, though Seth lay awake half the night listening for the sound of the door latch. She is a Sainnite, she reminded herself, over and over. A Sainnite—a monster—a killer—a leader of monsters and killers. She listened for the door latch, nevertheless. In the morning the soldiers had left, Clement among them, walking across the snow, dragging sledges behind them. Seth’s family went to the cow barn, fearing the worst, but found it neater than it had been; found that the Sainnites had made their beds in straw and left the hay alone; had molested none of the animals and had not even requested food for themselves. Never before had Sainnites been such careful guests.
Later, there came rumors: Harald G’deon had vested a successor after all, a woman who had been living in obscurity but now had stepped forth. She had reached through a garrison gate and nearly strangled the general of the Sainnites with her bare hands. Within hours, he had fallen ill and died. With a single blow of a hammer, the G’deon had knocked to pieces the walls of Watfield Garrison. The new general had clasped hands with the new G’deon, and they had made peace with each other. Surely such things could not be true!
But then there were broadsheets, carried from farm to farm—and Seth had examined an etched illustration of the G’deon and the new general standing upon a pile of rubble, clasping hands: Clement, general of the Sainnites in Shaftal, and, towering over her, Karis, G’deon of Shaftal. The etching was titled, PEACE BETWEEN OUR PEOPLE. Isn’t that—? said Seth’s family. Surely not!
Later, a Paladin had come to Basdown, bearing a letter addressed to an elder who had died earlier that winter. Soon the letter also made the rounds of the households, grimy and softened from being passed from hand to hand, carried through wet weather, read again and again at one or another farmstead. There would be a government in Shaftal once again. A person from Basdown must be named councilor and must travel to Watfield, to speak for the people of the region.
The elders of Basdown asked Seth to go to Watfield and speak for them.
Air
Whatever he said, she knew it was truth, knew it in her bones, where it transformed to steel the human stuff that broke too easily and never healed right: Meertown folded steel, which no one had seen but everyone knew about, that never lost its edge and never rusted, not even in salt water. His truths gave her bones that did not bend, that supported her changeable, fragile spirit in such a way that she was strong. Such strength she had now!
All will be well, he said. Now she had come here, fearless in this fearsome place, this city where all that was wrong was embraced, where people went about with their eyes glazed, some bewildered and some enchanted and most waiting in doubt for their hopes to be fulfilled. She had traveled here with the others, Senra, Charen, Tarera, Irin, and Jareth, her brave companions. Her son had left, for he had his own calling. His absence freed her. She had nothing to do, and the empty hours begged her to fill them with her pigments and brushes. So she painted them: her son and him, whose name must never be said or even thought, both of them in one face. Not even the others recognized who it was! Yet to her heart the two of them had always been the same.
She painted, in a cramped, dirty room, in this notorious city, where no one suspected her presence. How delicious that ignorance was. The evil ones, the bringers of violence and destruction, here was their center, their ruler, their locus of power. The soldiers, yes—but not only the soldiers, mere animals after all, hardly worth the time and effort required to exterminate them. Their leaders, for leaders they must have—they cannot decide anything for themselves, not even where to dig their latrines, for land’s sake. One might almost pity them in their stupidity if they weren’t such brutes.
If they hadn’t—if they hadn’t . . .
Her thoughts stopped there, as they always did, ever since he put a bulwark in her spirit to protect her from the memories. The past did not matter, he had said, and it was true. She looked to the future, to the one who was coming, whose way must be cleared, whose pretender must be eliminated, whose beasts must be butchered, so that the true people of Shaftal could see clearly! Their task had seemed impossible, until he showed them the simplicity of it. Small actions have massive results. So simple!
She painted. Her companions could not abide the smell and left her alone, which was a relief, though she adored them. The two faces gazed out as one face, and she felt full, satisfied, fearless. She might die soon, and the prospect filled her with gladness. Whether she lived or died, those united faces would gaze at her always: solemn, confident, approving. You have done well.
Senra came in, saying, “Phew! How can you bear it?”
She was making a col
or, a tricky business in the gloom of late winter, when even sunlight looked gray. She did not look up from her palette. Senra, holding his nose (he was always playful, that Senra) went to the painting. From the corner of her eye she watched as his casual glance turn to a shocked stare, a repelled glancing away. She smiled, working carefully with her muller and the precious pigments that he had declared must be bought, though she had expected to sacrifice everything, even—especially—this joy. And of course her son. But he had been wiser than she—there are no sacrifices, he had said.
Senra said, “Why does he have no eyes?”
“He does have eyes,” she said.
“They are holes! Right through his head! You can see the hills behind him!”
She continued to work the pigment into the oil, and Senra went away, shaking his head, muttering something. He was amusing, but not very imaginative. He might die soon. Well, what of it? His death would rescue them all! She went back to the painting and began putting flames on the forehead of her son-leader, flames in the shape of that ancient glyph, the one that means Death-and-Life. Tonight on her own forehead that glyph would be drawn with a fingertip in a paint made of grease and soot. But on them it burned always, a pure flame, not golden and red like the hot fire of passion, but white and blue, burning with a cutting, clear cold: flames of air.
She thought of the impostor, the pretender, and her hand painted with anger—anger pure and selfless as the flame. In that perverse, degraded town of whores the evil of Sainna had merged with the solidity of Shaftal—that was disgusting. The bastard child had risen up out of nothing and declared herself the G’deon—that was intolerable. Oh, the painter’s skin crawled with rage and horror, but her hand painted true. She had never painted so well as she painted now, waiting in this city, where the pretender also waited for the people who were coming from every corner of the land, coming to be infected by her foulness, and then to carry that foulness outward to the whole. But one simple act would mend all.
Earth Logic Page 45