Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  With only a dagger in her hand, she followed the tightening circle of soldiers inward. She heard a scream, and bit her own tongue. The clearing seemed filled with soldiers. She might kill one more before she herself was killed, then no one would survive to light the signal beacon, or carry a message to Emil.

  She got herself under command and slipped back into the dark wood.

  She had scarcely gotten her bearings when she heard a tentative bird call. The racket of battle was already falling silent and she dared not whistle back, but stumbled about until she had found a handful of others: some survivors of the evening watch, who were booted and armed and frantic with guilt, some barefoot like her, with or without weapons, several of them injured, one certain to die before the night ended.

  Knowing that Zanja reported to Emil, the people who had been on watch gave her a garbled account of not having seen a bit of movement in the valley all night, until suddenly the firefight erupted. “They must have slipped out of Wilton last night. Somehow, our spies there didn’t notice. And they worked their way towards us from the north, along the rim of the valley where we couldn’t see them. That’s what we think happened.”

  Zanja paid no heed, for how this horror had happened seemed irrelevant. “We need to light the beacon,” she said.

  “There’s three people up there already, like always.”

  “They would have lit the signal fire by now if they were still alive.”

  “Shaftal’s Name!” someone said, raw voiced. “These Sainnites are devils!”

  But they were too experienced to waste precious time cursing the enemies. The five that were still in condition to fight set out for the beacon hill, which pressed itself like a blunt knucklebone against the stars. But, as Zanja more than half expected, the hill crawled with Sainnites, with more arriving even as Zanja and her companions watched. It had been a well-planned attack, the Paladins bitterly told each other. The Sainnites must have attacked the beacon, the watchposts, and the encampment simultaneously, and now two-thirds of Daye’s unit was almost certainly dead.

  But now the Sainnites appeared to have nothing better to do than to keep the Paladins from lighting the beacon. Zanja and her companions returned to the site of the encampment, finding it now occupied only by the sprawling dead. Daye had died fighting—“As she intended to,” said one of the survivors dully.

  Zanja sorted through her trampled gear, blinded by tears, feeling as choked for breath as though she were drowning. But one part of her stood distant from her grief, coolly reminding her that she had survived worse horrors than this. Mechanically, she found and put on her boots, holstered her pistols in the belt that crossed her chest, slung a light haversack upon her back, and abandoned the rest of her gear where it lay.

  “Listen,” she said to the others, who stood in an aimless, stunned group. “The Sainnites have bigger plans that this tonight, or they wouldn’t be troubling themselves to secure the beacon. We need to learn what they are doing, and then we need to run messages to Willis, Perry, and Emil. Some of us need to go to the nearest farmholds to get help for the wounded and to carry away the dead. Do any of you watchers have a spyglass?”

  They all walked the short distance to the overlook, where more bodies lay. It was impossible to see much in the dark, but the column of soldiers marching briskly towards them across the valley along the east-west road would have been difficult to miss. Zanja handed back the spyglass to its owner. “I’ll carry the news to Perry and Emil,” she said, and began to run.

  The pallid light of dawn was warming Zanja’s shoulders when the road began to edge its way around an appealing meadow, where anyone with any sense would break their journey to rest and water their horses, if they had them. She herself paused to fill her canteen at the brook, and then stood for a while, wasteful though it seemed to stand so quietly while disaster unfolded around her. Her thigh muscles quivered with fatigue, but surely the Sainnites also would be weary after marching all night, and even on a forced march would have to take the time to rest and eat. This meadow seemed a likely place for it.

  She took herself up a gentle hillside on the far side of the road, and settled down among the dappled shadows to eat her honeycakes and fight off desire for sleep. Soon, a few outriders arrived on worn-out horses, and while the horses were being watered, the riders searched their immediate surroundings for lurkers. The bulk of the army arrived soon after: 150 soldiers, Zanja counted, all heavily laden with the kind of gear that might support a long and rigorous journey.

  Perry’s encampment now lay a hour’s journey to the south. Zanja got heavily to her feet, and as soon as she had found a deerpath to follow she began to run again, which relieved her from the need for further thinking, until the path abruptly popped her into the channel of a chattering brook. On the other bank, Emil sat waiting for her. Stupid with exhaustion, she gaped at him. Two of his messengers lay under the trees nearby, apparently sleeping.

  He said, “I sent a message to Perry some time ago, and I expect his entire company will arrive shortly. Have you alerted Willis and Daye?”

  “Daye’s dead,” she gasped. “Attacked last night. Most of the company was killed. I was with them.” She sat down where she was, rather too quickly as her legs gave out under her. For a little time they sat in silence, with the brook between them. Then, Emil breathed in, white-faced, and asked calmly for more information. She told him all she knew.

  He sat silent. She groped for something more to say. “How did you know to send for Perry’s unit?”

  “I heard a voice in my sleep. But when I awoke, it kept talking to me for a while. A voice in the sky. It was very strange. Perhaps,” he added, not much seeming to care, “I am losing my mind.”

  Zanja looked around for any sign of a big, black bird. “Well,” she said, in a neutral tone. But in the midst of her exhaustion, she felt an extraordinary relief.

  Chapter 12

  Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, until they could no longer see the way, Zanja and her twenty companions made a swift, hectic journey through the woods, following a path cut through the wild lands that they jokingly named Bandit’s Road. The older Paladins told how that path had first been cut—how in the interval between planting and harvesting, Emil had recruited farmers and dray horses from all across the region to help in the enterprise, which none of them had thought necessary. Every year since then, a grumbling expedition walked the length of the path with saws and axes to clear away the year’s growth and deadfall. Now, more than one old timer patted Emil’s shoulder and apologized for cursing him behind his back.

  The Bandit’s Road paralleled the East-West Road, but rather than meandering around the hills and wild lands, it cut directly through whatever lay before it, straight as a compass could make it. Zanja and her companions could not know how far ahead of the Sainnites they traveled, but that they were in fact ahead of them seemed certain.

  That first night, Zanja awoke from exhausted sleep, and tottered out to the edge of their haphazard encampment. There she found Emil sitting by himself, weeping for his dead where no one could see him. She sat with him, dry-eyed. In time, he wiped his face and in a rough voice admonished her for not resting when she had the chance.

  “I’d say the same to you,” she said, “If you were not my commander.”

  “My blasted knee keeps me awake. But I drank a potion for it and should be able to sleep soon.” He tilted his face back so the starlight shone on his deeply creased skin, and added, in a voice still hoarse with sorrow, “I’ve heard no speeches from the sky tonight.”

  Zanja said seriously, “Surely the voice will speak again if it seems we need more guidance.”

  “You believe we are watched over?”

  “I believe the gods take the shapes of birds when they choose to speak to us.”

  “I am not a religious man.”

&
nbsp; They sat in silence, until Zanja said, “I imagine the Sainnites have their seer with them, and he will have realized by now that we are running ahead of them. So if we cannot take them by surprise, how are we to stop them from crossing the bridge?”

  “Have you ever tried to shoot a mouse with a pistol?”

  “I should think,” Zanja replied after a moment, “That any self-respecting mouse would no longer be where it was, by the time the pistol ball arrived.”

  “Exactly. And where would the mouse be instead? I doubt even the mouse knows.”

  “So our best strategy is no strategy?”

  “When seers predict the future, they are simply telling themselves stories, as you and I tell stories to each other. And they have the gift for knowing which of many possibilities are the most likely. The better educated they are, the better the stories they can tell themselves. But if all the possibilities are equally likely, then how will our enemy know where to point his pistol, and when to pull his trigger?”

  “He will not know.”

  “That’s what I hope. I suppose it depends on just how smart he is.”

  After a moment, Zanja added, “No strategy? Willis won’t like that.”

  “Don’t tell him I’ve been hearing voices.”

  When Zanja last crossed this bridge, the river had been flooded. But even though spring thaw and mud were long past, it remained a most intimidating river, that muscled its temperamental passage between the steep shoulders of the hills. It could not be safely forded, someone told Zanja. Before the bridge was built, the river was so much trouble to get across that few people bothered, which explained why Darton had so few inhabitants to this day.

  A cottage stood by itself on the hillside above the sturdy bridge and the wild river, with a vegetable plot in the back and a fat, pampered cart horse running loose on the grassy hillside. As Zanja and her companions came down the road, having reached the end of Bandit’s Road and arrived at the East-West road with no Sainnites in sight, a peculiar old man came trotting down the hill to meet them. “You pay a toll to cross this bridge,” he said, and counted heads and began doing calculations. Perhaps haggard, heavily armed brigands were an everyday sight to him.

  Emil stepped forward. “Sir—”

  “Don’t interrupt!”

  “Sir, I am Emil, Commander of Paladins, South Hill Company. I regret to inform you that we have come to tear down the bridge.”

  The bridgekeeper gaped at him. “You’ve got no right!”

  “I am a ranking commander, authorized by the Lilterwess Council to act on behalf of the Shaftali people. I do have the right.”

  Zanja had flopped down with the others by the side of the road, too stupefied with exhaustion to even consider the enormous labor that yet had to be accomplished that day. When the bridgekeeper submissively started his way back up the hill, Zanja somehow got her legs under her and tackled him, and almost immediately regretted it. The man uttered a harridan’s screech and swung his fist wildly, narrowly missing her nose. Still screaming, he fought her like a crazy man, slamming a foot into her shin and getting a good punch to her ribs before she managed to get him to the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a fist in his hair for good measure. “Check the cottage!” she shouted to her companions. “Stop fighting!” she yelled at him.

  He let his muscles go limp, but then, wild-eyed, turned his head and sank his teeth into her forearm. Zanja cut him then, and though it apparently took a moment for his pain to register, the man released his teeth from her flesh to shout in outrage, “You’ve killed me!”’

  “Dead men don’t argue,” said one of Zanja’s companions dryly, having come over, somewhat puzzled, to help restrain him.

  Emil came down from the man’s cottage. “That little house is built like a fortress and is crammed with guns. With the clear shot he’s got of the bridge he could have held us off all day.”

  They trussed the bridgekeeper to a tree, where he screamed curses until they plugged his mouth with a kerchief. Besides the cut in his neck, he had broken his hand punching it into the pistol that came between his fist and Zanja’s ribs. Anger seemed to be keeping him from feeling it, but he certainly would regret losing his temper soon enough. Zanja went up to the cottage to have the bite in her arm washed with soap. She and her companion returned to the bridge, lugging baskets of food ransacked from the cottage: preserved meats, bottled pickles, dried fruit, tins of crackers. Emil and the others had finished inspecting the bridge by then, and, standing in a group, they fished pickles from the jars with their fingers, chomped the dried fruit, and smeared preserved meat on crackers and ate them in a single mouthful. The luxury was wasted: they would have eaten raw horsemeat with just as much enjoyment.

  A good team of dray horses is what we need,” said one. “But that little horse on the hill won’t be worth the effort it will take to catch him.”

  “What we need is Annis and a couple of bags of explosives.”

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  “What we have, however, is a couple of axes and our bare hands,” said Emil.

  They glumly studied the sturdy bridge, jaws working, passing the pickle jars. “I guess we’d better get busy,” someone finally said.

  They chopped through the massive timbers one by one, and pulled apart the rubble pilings, stone by stone. By sunset, the bridge had begun to groan. The river joined the game, pushing and pulling at the teetering structure, until the bridge collapsed into the water, and the river broke it up as though it were no more substantial than a sugar cake. Not one member of the company was unbloodied by then, but no one had been carried away in the collapse of the bridge, so they found the energy to utter a ragged cheer that was more relief than jubilation. Then Perry looked around at the battered company and said wryly, “Well, we’re in slightly better shape than the bridge, though not by much. Good thing there’s been so sign of the Sainnites. Rather than fight or escape, I’d beg them to put me out of my misery.”

  The sun was setting. They dragged themselves a little way into the woods and lay down on the ground like wounded animals.

  Zanja awoke with rocks embedded in her cheek and big black ants crawling through her hair. The members of her company were strewn like corpses across the hillside. Others moved among them in the mist, shaking them awake, offering to fill their porringers with porridge spooned from the kettle that two people carried between them. She turned and saw Willis squat down beside Emil to shake him vigorously by the shoulder.

  “What were you thinking? You left the bridgekeeper tied to the tree, and he told us exactly where you had gone. If the Sainnites hadn’t turned around in their tracks—”

  “What?” said Emil in a voice blurry with exhaustion. “When did they turn around?”

  “We met them on the road before dark.”

  “That was before the bridge fell.” Emil sat up, rubbing his face. “Shaftal’s Name! Were they just a decoy? What are the Sainnites up to in the flatlands, while all of South Hill Company is out of the way?”

  Zanja felt a peculiar, urgent impulse to be alone. She got to her feet with difficulty, and limped into the woods, where night had not yet given way to dawn. With the awakening voices of her company sounding far away behind her, she sat upon a fallen tree cushioned with damp moss. She felt only half awake: some part of her still dreamed of the ringing ax and the scraping away of her skin on the heavy stones. Her wandering thoughts vaguely considered a young man, a Sainnite, cleverer and further-seeing than she, who knew before she did what she was going to do next, and danced her on strings like a puppet at a fair. She noticed that in her bloody hand she clasped one of the bridgekeeper’s crackers, and she gazed at it in some bewilderment.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked. Then, the storm-battered doors of her mind creaked slowly open, and she broke the cracker to pieces and
lay them on the log beside her. Like a shadow untouched by daylight, Karis’s raven appeared from the shadows and landed softly beside her.

  These seven months of her reclaimed life had largely been filled with hectic and dangerous effort. In the peace of the wood, Zanja felt how illusory was all this activity, how empty her life truly was. In a voice as racked as any smoke addict’s, she said, “Good raven, I brought you this bit of bread.”

  The raven ate. Zanja said, “Your help has been vital these last few days. Even though the Sainnites may have tricked us, I am sure that if we had not destroyed the bridge, the Sainnites would have crossed it.”

  The raven, his cracker eaten, turned on Zanja an intelligent gaze. “Zanja, at dawn for just a little while, my soul inhabits the raven.”

  “Karis!” Zanja saw her hand reach out under its own power, as though to grasp the muscled arm of her friend and not the raven’s rasping feathers. “Karis!” she cried, but said no more, for the words that crowded forward were dangerous and filled with longing.

  Karis said through the raven, in a voice as hoarse and frayed as her own would be at this hour, “I also am surprised. The raven is not supposed to be in South Hill.”

  “I understand that. But I think he is watching over you. He intervened to help prevent the Sainnites from crossing into Darton.”

  The raven—Karis—was silent. Whether her silence meant confusion or displeasure was impossible to know.

  Zanja said cautiously, “Surely you did not think it would be too difficult for me to realize you live in Meartown.”

  “Well, you aren’t supposed to know.”

  “Like everyone in South Hill Company, I have good reason to protect the forges and furnace that provide our weapons. My reason is just more personal than most.” Zanja added, “And thank you for my dagger. It is such a fine blade that I sometimes think it could fight on its own. I often wonder why you have not made more of them.”