by Demir Barlas
They had begun as separate creatures, Salt and Marlo, but, in two thousand years, they had become a single organism. Sometimes, she would work on him; that was when he entered his preordained and doomful depressions, and when she had to lead him back to saner lights. Sometimes, he would work on her; that was when she was in danger of failing, or in danger of danger, and when he had to make her anew. These interpenetrations were too profound for individuation to remain. They were, in truth, unhappy monads on their own.
There were no signs of danger tonight. Salt’s mind, returning to himself, understood his need for distraction. He had been excited, this morning, to hear of someone waking, but Masters’ identity was too intrusive. He reminded Salt not only of humans as a whole but also of the murder of the world, a specific crime of which his first self had been guilty. The distance between his selves did not altogether obscure their commonality; he was a bead in the same necklace of seed and circumstance that bound and contained them all. Salt 1 had devised the means, and gathered the will, to kill everyone in the Laurasian Empire. Salt 272, although having no such deadly opportunity, was damned by the knowledge of his capability.
He had successfully drained himself with work, however, and the oppression of guilty and memory fell from him. Salt soon drifted to a sofa to fall asleep, willfully blind to the changed unicorn contours of his world.
2 REDCOLDS
The man raced through the forest, his heavy leather boots gouging the shallow coat of snow. He looked behind him for his pursuer, who was no longer bothering to conceal the sound of her vengeance. The forest, and the world around it, lacked the orderliness of nature. There was no tree line; some trees, frozen spies and adventurers, had wandered implausibly far beyond their peers into the cratered land, a record of past eruptions and injustices. There was no uniformity of growth; there were jumbles and accretions of thickets, bushes, grass, and trees that had no business coexisting. The very sky was broken; the clouds contained fissures and flashes. Something terrible, something human, had happened to the whole world, but long ago: The man who fled through it now was unimpeded by the craziness of the landscape.
The running man had chosen to flee from judgment. There was no reason in that choice, as there had been none in the strangulation of his wife. Rage had been riding him, rage and fear. She had been about to leave him. She would have left him. She would not have been there to rend and beat. She would have told his secrets to another man. She had come too close to him; her throat had been too near, and her skin too soft, and her life too weak, and nothing was his fault. The Goddess had made him weak and short. The Goddess had put good people in his power.
He stumbled slightly before entering a small clearing bordered by old and massive trees, a place that had avoided the storms long enough to regrow its wooden guardians with something of the dignity of nature.
He heard the Knower closing on him and decided to fight. There was a scabbard across his back. From this, he drew a slender sword, a classic Redcold sword—brighter than silver, sharper than winter. The provenance of the sword was unknown to him. It had been part of a hoard that the Redcolds had inherited, and a scientist would have asked how such a quaint weapon would also have been so metallurgically perfect, as if the technology of a much later age had brushed its loving fingers on the ruder past. But there were no scientists and no science. There was this bearded man, at bay in a broken world, raising his sword.
Redcolds were born to the sword, not for protection from enemies but because duels guided all matters of honor and decision that were not determined by the Knower or the kurultai. The Redcolds were too few in number, and too close in destiny, to truly depredate themselves, and their governance ordinarily kept most matters from coming to the sword, but many matters still came to the sword, and it was best to be ready. These nomads believed, however naively, that the outcome of personal combat was determined not as much by technical as by moral skill.
The man held the sword ready and waited. Icicles had formed in his red beard, and his breath turned to mist before him. The forest had been hot where he’d entered it, but the clearing was cold. Whatever had happened to the Earth was reflected in the weather, whose unpredictability had gone local. Cold and heat, once alternating, could intermingle like lovers.
He was short for a Redcold but still far taller than the men who had lived in this forest thousands of years ago. The Knower was taller and stronger than him, but he knew he would have a real chance to kill her. She was in the wrong too, wasn’t she? She was kutsuz. Maybe the Goddess had chosen him for the holy task of clearing the way for the next Knower.
The Knower entered the clearing from the far side. She stood thirty feet from the man, and her own sword was drawn. Her breathing, despite the considerable distance she had covered, was not labored. Her features were set somewhat far apart, giving her a placid and abstracted look at other times. Her jaw was long and taut, and her lips were closed tightly over strong teeth. She breathed through a haughty nose, regal and aquiline, and her purple pupils were dilated. The survival of this face was no miracle. Only these features of dignity and strength could survive in this landscape. The man’s craven features had survived by accident, and the woman’s arrival was in the nature of a correction.
The man circled around the far edge of the clearing. The Knower was surely the instrument of the Goddess’s vengeance, and she was strong and undaunted. There was fear and respect in his eyes, and disdain in hers, in the clash of moral assessment that always preceded violence.
He had wanted the yurts to roll past and leave him in the wilderness, free at least of all judgment but the Storm’s. But the Knower had found him, and her face told him that he was going to suffer. Not at the tip of the sword, which held no terrors for him, but at the tip of her soul, which could consign him to true darkness. He had feared many things, but the darkness was his greatest fear.
“You have no name,” she began. “You cast no shadow.”
“Stop!”
“The storm will only take your shell.”
The curse was unbreakable, and he charged at her to prevent its completion. She parried his sword easily, stepping aside to finish the invocation.
“I give you to the void.”
It was done. He was damned to darkness now. He threw his sword down and knelt, waiting for her to kill him.
The Knower’s shoulders tightened, and she winced slightly. She had wanted this man to fight, to cling to life and feel it going. A layer of suffering could have been added to him before damnation. She had been wrong to speak the formula so quickly. It was another of her many weaknesses.
He turned back slowly to look at her, his ochre hair matted by sweat and snow, his chest expanding and contracting in gasps. And she was so intent on him that she didn’t hear the clumsy steps of his brothers until they were also in the clearing, swords drawn.
The Virtue brothers! Had any family been named so falsely? The older one, Carr, had kimiz dried on his drooping yellow mustaches. The younger own, Acanthus, normally stupid and placid, had an angry audacity that she had never before seen in him. The kneeling man was Topaz. Yes, the Virtue brothers; nature, asserting wisdom after these three successive mistakes, had denied the family a girl, respecting the holiness of femininity. The three men present here represented distinct failures of manhood, a rare pooling of failed potential among the Redcolds.
“Astrid,” Acanthus sneered.
“Pick up your sword, Topaz,” said Carr to the third Virtue brother, the one whom Astrid had come to kill, and the doomed man, emboldened by his brothers, reached cautiously for his discarded weapon.
It would have taken more time, from where Astrid stood, to sever Topaz’s head. His arm was closer, so she cut it off instinctively, and Topaz was too shocked to scream. He watched merely as his arm, newly distinct from himself, bled innocently on the grass. The grass, so long deprived of sustenance, seemed to drink the blood.
Having disarmed Topaz, Astrid turned to find the tip of
Acanthus’s sword six inches from her neck. Her sword was still pointing downwards from the force of her earlier stroke. She flicked her weapon back up now as she turned sideways. She had barely moved, and her sword had barely parried Acanthus’s clumsy thrust, but he had overcommitted badly, and the force of his lunge carried him past Astrid and into the tree cover. She would have slashed him then but for the advance of Carr.
Carr swung his own sword in a crushing stroke not at all suited to the subtle artistry of Redcold iron. Astrid didn’t step backwards, because Acanthus was still somewhere behind her. She had to block the incoming stroke. As she did so, Topaz used his remaining arm to pick up his sword and aimed a slash at Astrid’s stomach. The Knower turned sideways again, but blocking Carr’s stroke had limited her movement. Topaz drew blood from Astrid’s haunch. She turned again, this time to parry the resurgent Acanthus’s strike.
The clearing was too small for skill, technical or moral. Between them, the Virtue brothers would surely kill her.
There was, however, another surprise. With a crash of twigs, a bumbling and giant figure emerged into the clearing, his passage slowed by the very large axe that he carried. The axe was upset at having been kept from this fine morning’s sport, and it responded by cutting Carr into two, having made contact at his crown and ceased its passage just past his groin, where it once again met air. The axe had whistled on the way down, then percussed the bone and coaxed hisses and complaints from its victim’s innards as it went.
The bifurcative death of Carr came as a surprise to Acanthus, but not, apparently, to Astrid. She drove her sword unhesitatingly through Acanthus’s neck. Topaz once more threw down his sword, but the large man didn’t care for surrender or repentance. The axe struck again, this time sideways, and Topaz’s head rolled through the clearing.
Thus came Riku Redcold to the rescue of Astrid the Knower, Chosen of the Goddess, Moon of Knowledge, and his wife. He grinned in considerable satisfaction at himself, but the charisma of the moment was a little spoiled by his wheezing—
and, more tellingly, by Astrid’s failure to fall into his arms. Instead, she wiped her sword on the grass.
“I know you could have handled them,” Riku said at last. He was still breathing heavily. Cardiovascular endurance was not uppermost among his physical qualities.
“That’s big of you,” she replied, and he was glad to be teased, but her brief mirth dissipated.
“I saw Topaz running off. And you following him. Came as fast as I could.”
“And Nya?”
“The girl was just outside. She’s with Del now. The boy was cutting wood.”
Astrid wasn’t eager to return to the Redcold yurts. She and Riku trudged back slowly. He followed a few steps behind her, unwilling to lead.
They made a strange pair. Ordinarily, long cohabitation created invisible bonds between mates, who could be identified as such by the attuned proximity they kept. But Astrid and Riku were out of rhythm. He followed her doggedly but clumsily—almost bumping into her when she stopped, distancing himself unwittingly when she sped up, failing always to achieve true proximity of soul or flesh. There was something cowardly in the way he followed, as if he had failed to keep step in the ways that counted and was trying too hard to remedy that failure. The shadow of weakness debilitated Riku, the same weakness that he had, perhaps, recognized in Topaz: The weakness of the unfixed man. Riku was subtle enough to know that there were degrees of heartlessness, and that he lived somewhere in the shame that had swallowed Topaz.
Astrid and Riku were, in this landscape, the only people in the world, but they were phantoms to each other.
The Knower’s mind was elsewhere. She thought of Farinaz lying on the felt floor. She remembered her cry—the cry of a little bird in the sudden talons of a hawk. The force of the memory overcame Astrid’s reason and judgment. The cry! A cry of shock and refusal, an admission of error, a plea of help, and Astrid had been too late to answer it. True, the Knower had reached the yurt very quickly, but Farinaz had already been slain, and Topaz’s shadow was already heading into the forest.
Astrid the Knower, seer of the Storm and prophet of safety, had not seen that Topaz was capable of true evil. She had thought him merely weak, and she had forgotten the bond between weakness and evil. She had seen Farinaz bruised and accepted her friend’s flimsy stories of mishaps. She had seen Nya and Balder grow silent and lose the joy of childhood. She had seen these things, and she had done nothing.
There had been a hundred full moons since Astrid had succeeded Tomris as the Knower. In that time, only a few people had broken Redcold law, and she had cursed none of them. They had waited contritely for her judgment with words and thoughts of penitence. They had returned to the Goddess’s favor.
Until today, she had never issued the curse that would keep a Redcold trapped in the halls of Erlik Khan for such eternities as Earth might know. She had issued that curse because of her own failure. She had invoked a supernatural penalty because her natural leadership had failed. The bitterness of this thought blended with another, deeper fear and mistrust of the other world, the spirit world, the world to which the Knower was so closely connected. For some moons now, she had been plagued by the thought that the Knower and the grace of the Goddess were only necessary because the ancients, her own kind, had wrecked the natural world. After all, the ancients had created the Storm; she knew this from the factbooks. A better management of the natural order would have quelled the need for the spirit world to interfere in human affairs, to puncture the dignity of human autonomy. Hadn’t she done the same? Having failed to manage her actual world, whose signs and responsibilities had been all around her, she had fled into the Goddess.
Farinaz had died because of her. Topaz was cursed to the halls of Erlik Khan because of her. Nya and Balder were orphans because of her. She could forgive herself; she was expected to; she already felt Riku’s silent bulk apologizing for her and anticipated the pious resignation of the other Redcolds. She could forgive herself, but, today, she wasn’t inclined to, and that was the seed of her doom and redemption, the seed that, unknown to anyone—even to Marlo—would change the world.
“Not your fault,” Riku mumbled diffidently, and Astrid was reminded how well this giant bumbler knew his wife. The progression of her thoughts was as clear to him as the way back out of the forest. Such insight on his part ought to have been accompanied by love instead of servitude.
“I should have seen it.”
“Not your fault,” he insisted. Ordinarily easygoing, he was stubborn in her defense, which consisted of the simple certainty that she was never wrong. Alas that this simple, solid man would never understand that she wanted honest scrutiny, not dishonest certainty, from a husband.
“Anyway, it’s done,” she sighed.
“And Farinaz”
“I won’t bury her yet. The Goddess might send a vision first.”
They had returned to the fringe of the forest. Beyond lay the Redcold yurts in their traditional circular arrangement.
Even in Astrid’s brief lifetime, the circle had grown smaller. As Knower, she had kept her people safe from the Storm, but she was powerless against age and disease and, most perniciously, the disinclination to reproduce. Maybe reproduction required the optimism of settlement, or, at least, known patterns of migration.
The Redcolds never saw the same landscape twice. They had been camped at this particular location for ten days. It was a very long time to stop anywhere. Though the yurts were light and small, designed to fit easily on the ox-drawn carts that conveyed the Redcolds throughout what had been the Laurasian wilderness, they seemed to sit heavily on the steppe, as if mutely protesting Astrid’s delay. But the campfires were going, and the rousing scent of roast oxen came to Astrid across the golden grass.
As Astrid entered the encampment, she drew nods of respect from the Redcolds who were outside, tending to their teas and stews. Other Redcolds who had been in their yurts drew back their tent-flaps to look
at the Knower.
One people, one tribe, one name.
Astrid went straight to her yurt, which was in the middle of the encampment, and Riku followed her dutifully.
The yurts were mounted on a four-wheeled platform and abutted by a small ledge. This ledge, which stood three feet above the ground, was a sort of doorstep—a means of ascent to the oval aperture, warded and decorated by leather, that led to the interior of the yurt. Each ledge was hollowed out to allow the passage of a thick ribbon along its length, a ribbon that was carefully and ceremoniously knotted. In time, when the Redcolds moved, the ribbon would be attached to yokes, and the yokes attached to oxen, and the well-muscled ruminants would pull the wheeled yurts twenty miles a day before demanding their allotments of grass and water, which, mercifully, were plenty. The oxen’s engineered metabolism, a remnant of Laurasian agricultural experimentation, ran well on such modest sustenance.
Del had heard Farinaz’s scream, and she had been right behind her mother in the race to the slain woman’s yurt. Nya had been playing outside, her little cheeks wet with snow. She had been frozen in place by her mother’s dying scream, and, while Astrid ran in pursuit of Topaz, Del took Nya back to the safety of the Knower’s yurt—the larger girl leading the smaller.
Astrid’s yurt was crowded, and not with the kinds of impediments that teemed in other Redcold yurts. Astrid had kept many things of interest solely to her, things found in the caravan’s eternal wanderings, things of the past. There was a small pile of factbooks; through endless perusal of these, Astrid had gathered shards and shreds of knowledge that she had conveyed to Del and, less successfully, to the most curious of the other Redcolds. There were the treated hides of oxen waiting for transformation into breeches and caftans and coats. There were small pieces of plastic and iron left over from great machines and found embedded in the weakened Earth. Nya’s eyes passed uncomprehendingly over these relics and rested, as Del watched her closely, on a wicker cage, empty and forlorn.