Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Hmm.”

  Though the days had begun to warm, in the cool woods it remained chilly, and the trees had scarcely begun to leaf out. Emil wore his tattered coat, and Zanja could hear the faint sound of his watch ticking in a pocket.

  Emil said, “What is a seguli?”

  “Unfortunately, I have never heard that word before. But I think the seguli may be our true enemy - a talented strategist, the same one who gutted Rees Company last year.”

  “If he truly has never been wrong before, our little escapade today will surely leave him—and them—a bit unnerved.” For a moment, Emil looked as gleeful as a boy, and then he sobered. “Still, if not for you, they would have found us, and it would have been a massacre.”

  “We were lucky,” Zanja said. It would not do for Emil to start relying on her to predict their battles for him. The raven was gone, and Karis would certainly see to it that he never returned.

  “We were lucky,” Emil agreed. “It’s the kind of luck we need to survive this summer. I hope that it continues.”

  Chapter 10

  The important work of collecting and distributing bread to the scattered company proved as dull and tedious as Zanja had feared. The greatest challenge it posed was that of finding her way—first to the various farmholds that had agreed to supply the bread, then to the various encampments that needed it. The farmholds most often provided great wheels of hard rye bread that kept well and did not crumble easily, but they also loaded her poor donkey with whatever else could be spared from their own or their neighbors’ storerooms: carrots, cheese, sausage, turnips, apples, potatoes, onions, and ham. At least, when Zanja succeeded in finding a company encampment, no one was sorry to see her.

  It had become known that Zanja’s prescience had saved the company that night. Although most of the Paladins could not bring themselves to treat her as one of their own, they were courteous enough, though in Willis’s unit the welcome remained particularly cool.

  “There you are at last,” Annis said, when Zanja arrived at Daye’s unit with a fresh load of bread. “We’re running low on saltpeter, and I have to go to Wilton. Emil says to bring you with me, and we’ll meet him and Willis along the way.”

  The next morning, on the east-west road just outside the river valley, they found Emil and Willis waiting for them. The road was busy with market day traffic. Willis and Annis, their weapons hidden in their longshirts, became indistinguishable from any other farmer. Emil might have been a rather seedy accountant looking for work. Zanja wrapped her hair in a headcloth, obscured her face with a hat brim, and hoped no one looked at her too closely.

  “I want you to learn to read glyphs,” Emil said to her, and produced out of his knapsack a sheet of paper. “I’ve written some out for you.” He pointed. “The four elements, the four directions, the four seasons, the twelve implements.”

  Next to each carefully drawn symbol, he had written its name, followed by a brief explanation of the symbol’s implications. The symbols seemed stagnant, their implications arcane and irrelevant. “Why?” Zanja asked.

  “Indulge me.”

  She felt Willis glowering at her back. “Of course.”

  To understand the glyphs seemed like knowledge of the most tedious sort. Each glyph had primary and secondary meanings, and sometimes meant two things simultaneously. Each glyph had a history or special use, and some of them were accompanied by lengthy expository tales that complicated rather than clarified their meaning. In addition, the meanings of the glyphs interacted with each other, so that two glyphs together meant something different from what they meant separately. To fully understand these glyphs might require lengthy study, and the entire system, Emil told her, included a thousand symbols, though he was not certain if any remaining alive was familiar with them all. He himself knew about half of them, and had despaired of ever learning the other half.

  His passion for this strange, ambiguous method of recording and understanding ideas was as evident as Willis’ and Annis’ excruciating boredom with it. If only out of perversity, Zanja struggled to comprehend what Emil was telling her about the glyphs. The more she came to understand them, the more genuine her interest became.

  Wilton was as big as the largest towns Zanja had traded in up in the border country. Located near the junction of two major rivers, it was a warren of narrow byways and sudden plazas, with balconies on opposite buildings a mere hop apart from each other, and a casual attitude toward garbage that made her always be on the lookout for dung and debris underfoot or falling from overhead. The rivers brought travelers from far-flung communities who were riding the current to the seaport and paused here to replenish their supplies and sell some of their wares. Many of these travelers looked no more like a South Hiller than she did, and some of them even resembled her.

  “I won’t say you can get everything in Wilton,” said Emil. “It’s not like it used to be, and it’s nothing like Hanishport, where you can get everything.”

  “Everything but what you can get in Hanishport’s neighboring town, Lalali,” said Willis. “Of course, in Lalali you’ll be robbed and murdered in the bargain.”

  The taverns had set up their tables in the streets, the better to entice the farmers to drink what money they had rather than buy seed or tools or pay their taxes. It seemed a hopeless enterprise, however. This early in the season the farmers come into town for market day hadn’t much to sell, and they all had a pale, winter-pinched look, and a way of keeping their hands up their sleeves.

  Emil and Willis had come into town to talk to Willis’s brothers, who worked at the garrison. Annis left to make some arrangements with one of her chemist friends.

  A row of beggars sat against a wall with their empty hands lifted, moaning tales of being reduced to poverty through no fault of their own. Emil tapped Zanja’s arm and pointed at the garish sign that hung over the door. As was common throughout the country, the business folk of Wilton used glyphs to identify their shops. Merchants used only one symbol, the tavern keepers two, which made the name of the taverns amusingly ambiguous. However, the symbols were always represented as pictures: in the case of this tavern a wheel and a hoe.

  The tavern was empty. Willis shouted for ale.

  “So what is this place named?” Emil asked Zanja, as they sat at a battered table.

  “Progress Through Hard Work,” she hazarded. “It seems rather an odd name for a tavern.”

  It was an elementary reading compared to what Emil could do, but he nodded approvingly. “There’s a humor in it—most people would miss the joke entirely these days, and simply call this place The Wheel and Hoe.” A big, light-footed woman entered from the arched doorway that led to a steep stone staircase. Down its length echoed the wail of a baby.

  “So sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know my husband had gone out.” She served them heavy mugs of ale and went into the kitchen to warm up some pies for them.

  “Husband,” snorted Willis. When Zanja glanced at him curiously, he added, “City folk use it to mean something completely different from what it truly means, and then they call us backwards. These are the same people who let their kin live on the streets, like those beggars out there, rather than keeping them decently clothed and fed.”

  “Those beggars are smoke sick,” Zanja said.

  “All the more reason why they need their families,” Willis snapped.“So what would you call this woman’s man?”

  “Not her husband,” Willis said obstinately. “Where is the household? Where are the other parents for the child? It’s just the two of them. That’s no family.”

  Zanja took a swallow of the bitter ale she’d never developed a taste for, and ate the greasy pork pie the ale wife set in front of her. The woman’s husband returned, and they had a brief, bitter argument behind the closed door of the kitchen. When Willis’s brothers arrived, the ale husband came ou
t smiling and rubbing his hands, and wouldn’t leave them alone until Emil threatened to go to another ale house.

  Willis’s brothers smelled distinctly of the stable. They were identical twins who dressed alike and ate alike and finished each other’s sentences. When both of them turned their attention upon Zanja, she realized that they probably made love together as well, and she had to struggle to keep from revealing how repellent she found the prospect.

  There was a certain affliction that every member of Willis’s family seemed to share, a single-mindedness that sorely tried her patience. “Tell me about this new commander,” Emil said. “You have at least seen her, haven’t you?”

  “She’s young,” said one.

  “And handsome,” said the other.

  “How young? Is she one of this new breed, Shaftali-born?”

  “She’s older than fifteen!”

  Emil rather wearily reminded the brother that, though it had been fifteen years since the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the Sainnites had been a presence in Shaftal for a good fifteen years before that.

  “I suppose she could be thirty,” said a brother. “Maybe a bit older.”

  “What does it matter?” asked the other.

  “The young ones sometimes speak our language, and they understand us much better than their fathers did. I think they are the more dangerous enemies because they don’t make as many stupid mistakes.”

  The brothers looked at him blankly. “Sainnites are Sainnites.”

  “Exactly,” said Willis impatiently.

  Emil looked as if the three of them together were enough to give him a headache.

  The brothers told him that the soldiers reassigned from Rees had arrived all at once, before the thaw. There were too many of them for the brothers to notice any one in particular. They complained at length about the great quantities of baggage the two of them had carried that day. In particular, they remembered some large, remarkably heavy trunks that the two of them had been unfortunate enough to have to move into one soldier’s quarters. “Trunks full of rocks,” they said bitterly. “A lot of rocks.”

  “Weapons,” suggested Willis.

  “Oh, sure, it could have been ax heads or something made of iron, though what one soldier wanted with so many of them I don’t know.”

  “It was books,” said Zanja.

  Willis and his brothers burst into raucous laughter. “Books! Even we don’t have books anymore, and at least we know how to read!”

  But Emil said somberly, “Books? What kind of Sainnite would have such a collection of books?

  “Perhaps a Sainnite young enough to be fluent in both languages, so he can read Shaftali books.”

  “And educated at least a little—though how that might happen I don’t know. Some of them must be able to read, but not in Shaftalese.”

  “And he’s influential enough that his commander allows him to fill a wagon, when most soldiers have only one small trunk, and whatever they can carry on their backs.”

  Emil turned to the brothers. “Find a man like that,” he said. “A young Sainnite, fluent in both languages, educated, and influential, who arrived with the others from Rees. Find out everything you can about him.”

  The brothers gaped at him as though he was a street corner magician pulling coins out of children’s ears. Willis, predictably, protested, “You don’t even know this man exists. It’s just guesses.”

  Emil said quietly, “No, it’s fire logic.”

  Willis banged his tankard on the table. “I need more ale.”

  Zanja gave him hers. The thick stone walls retained the day’s chill too well, and the fire on the hearth was stingy at best. Dour Annis came in, and greeted the brothers with indifferent kisses. Probably the brothers were her cousins, like just about everyone in South Hill. Then she kissed Zanja, much less indifferently.

  The four of them left the brothers drinking their ale, and followed a circuitous route to a road that ended at the garrison wall. There was no gate; the wall rose up out of the road’s debris. The city buildings stood aloof, with the basements of the buildings which had once stood there filled with the rubble of their demolished walls. The garrison wall had been built of reused stone blocks. As they stood there, a soldier strolled past along the battlement, eating an apple. He carried a long gun by a sling over his shoulder. He did not even glance down at them.

  “The main gate is to the west,” said Emil, “and there’s two postern gates, all guarded. We’ve dreamed up half a dozen ways to break in over the years, but we’ve never actually done it. Let them hide away inside their walled city...if they’ll just leave the rest of Shaftal alone.”

  They walked to the main gate, and Emil went into a shop within sight of it to visit a friend who had made it his habit to watch the comings and goings of the garrison. When he reappeared, he reported that his friend had nothing useful to tell them. If a Shaftali spy were visiting the garrison, he or she had the sense to go in by the postern gate, and if the owner of the trunks of books were going in and out, he looked no different from any other soldier.

  Willis’s mood seemed to have only grown more foul as the day continued. Apparently, he did not like that Emil taught Zanja about glyphs, nor did he like that their intuitions had proven so compatible. But why he was so irritated by these things Zanja could not imagine.

  As they walked through the rich farmlands of the river valley, Annis talked to Zanja about her experiments with gunpowder and other unstable compounds. It seemed incredible she had not even injured herself, when she clearly deserved to be blown to bits.

  In this community of huge, fantastically intermarried families, Zanja’s loneliness was becoming intolerable. She experimented with touching Annis’s arm, wondering if she herself would be blown to bits. Annis turned her head at Zanja’s touch, and her glance was not unfriendly. “We should go away somewhere so you can practice shooting,” she said.

  “Sometime soon,” Zanja suggested.

  Annis smiled. Apparently, not all South Hillers were hopelessly unsubtle.

  The land slowly put on the clothing of summer: first white and pink, then many shades of green. The Sainnites regularly hunted South Hill Company, commonly by daylight, less commonly by night. Lookouts within and without Wilton signaled troop movements with fire and flag, and, inevitably, when the Sainnites arrived at one or another encampment, their prey would have fled. South Hill Company set traps, lay in wait, and struck back, though their enemy rapidly grew cautious and canny and so did not fall for their tricks often. Thus, every fallen Sainnite was a cause for celebration.

  Zanja occasionally led the Sainnites on a merry chase through the wildwood, but more often she and her food-laden donkey took refuge in a thicket as the soldiers marched past, and instead of fighting or fleeing she spent much of her time straining her prescience, trying to calculate where and when she might find the hungry Paladins, who, by making themselves difficult for the soldiers to find, also made it difficult for supplies to find them.

  The second full moon that Zanja had seen in South Hill was starting to wane as she and her donkey climbed wearily into the highlands where Daye’s Company had retreated for a few days of rest. A startled, haggard picket challenged her, for even in a place so remote from the garrison they dared not relax their guard. Zanja gave the poor man some bread and dried fruit, and made her way into the camp, where her appearance was greeted with an exhausted chorus of huzzahs. Daye intervened to keep the donkey from being stampeded, and handed over the fresh supply of food to the cook, who in turn sent a phalanx of helpers to fetch buckets of water and start chopping vegetables for stew.

  “Tonight will be our first night’s sleep in three days,” Daye explained. “And we’ve hardly eaten since yesterday.”

  “I could not find you,” Zanja said apologetically. “By the time I was do
ne dodging Sainnites...”

  “Well, I don’t blame you. It’s just frustrating, not being able to send my people over to the nearest farm for food when we get hungry. The lack of beds and baths, well, that’s not so pleasant either. You’re looking pretty tired yourself.” She examined Zanja critically. “How long since you haven’t spent a day on your feet?”

  Zanja shook her head; it was too much trouble to count.

  “Too long, then. You rest with us tomorrow.”

  “People will go hungry.”

  “Let them shoot a deer or snare some rabbits, like we’ve been doing.”

  Daye told Zanja the way to a nearby hot spring, in a rocky meadow where the turf would satisfy the donkey. The spring was easy enough to find, for it was marked by flapping flags of drying laundry. Though the pool’s edges were trampled and some suds lingered, Zanja had the steaming, stinking place to herself. She tossed her dirtiest clothes in to soak, then lay herself down in the scalding, sulfurous water and decided she would never get up again.

  People came to collect their laundry, and Zanja managed to exchange a few groggy words of conversation with them. They left; Zanja dozed, and was awakened by more laundry being tossed in to join hers. Then Annis came into the water and waded to the deepest, hottest part of the pool, where Zanja lay stunned by heat, with her head propped up on stone. Zanja put her hands on bare skin that was heated by the earth’s center and slippery with minerals. Annis’s hands stroked from ribs to hips and then to Zanja’s breasts, and Zanja let her kiss her, lazy and slow, and eventually her hands found their way to the insides of Annis’s thighs. For a while Zanja was unmoored, half drowned, dazzled by sharp flashes of sunlight, of pleasure, of simple release. Annis was a laughing, easy and uncomplicated lover.

  When they had finished, Annis got up and began briskly pounding her sodden clothes with stones. Bewildered, Zanja watched Annis sink to her elbows in soapy foam. Had she just been entertaining Annis, helping stave off boredom while her clothes were soaking?