Fire Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.

  Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.

  Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge-jacks and forge-masters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke-begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.

  They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow-to-elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeeps did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than others.”

  “We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness.”

  “Sooner or later they’d have discovered I was home. We might as well get this whole thing over with.”

  She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she tell what had happened. “I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and saved my life,” she said. “So I’ve learned the value of having a hero or two among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over.”

  The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two-sentence tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or die. Karis gravely bid her well-wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.

  Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot-gray walls. Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.

  “You’ve been very patient,” Karis said.

  “Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We na’Tarweins are notoriously impatient.”

  Karis seemed bemused. “But I don’t want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why don’t you just stop doing it?”

  Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could kiss Karis’s mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run through that long frame, and Karis’s fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja’s shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja’s very skin. The shirt cloth started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it. Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given out on her. The breeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger into the hole in Zanja’s shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they had just sprinted up a hill.

  “Blessed day,” Karis gasped.

  Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, “The Ashawala’i call that feeling ‘being struck by lightning.’ Shall I explain the sensation to you?”

  Karis said shakily, “I understand enough.”

  Zanja felt the entirety of Karis’s attention focus upon her. She thought of Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. “Would you rather I go back to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?” she said.

  “Could you?” Karis asked, then answered her own question. “No. And if you could, I’d be offended.”

  Zanja grinned. “Well then, it’s completely impossible.”

  Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a stranger. “Zanja, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s my ghosts.”

  “I have my ghosts too. So what?”

  “So maybe lovemaking will be an embarrassing, disastrous farce.”

  “We’ve survived so much worse than that already.”

  Karis looked back at her, stricken.

  Zanja said, “Karis, I can always find a way across. It’s my gift.” She gave her a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house without saying another word, and without letting go of each other.

  The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men frantically tried to make Karis’s bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that clustered around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.

  Zanja repeatedly explained to the two men that Karis no longer used smoke and there was no rush, but nothing she said seemed likely to overcome their disbelief. Finally, to calm them down she took over some of the work. She had never made a bed in her life; but it proved, as she suspected, to be largely a matter of common sense. She took out Karis’s two cleanest shirts and hung one to warm by the fire. The second she took with her to the bathhouse, where the washkettle had come to a boil. Buckets of cold water stood waiting to mix in the tub with the hot. There was a crock of herbs and flowers to sprinkle in the water, a crock of soft lye soap, and a bath brush worn soft with use.

  Clean, dressed only in Karis’s shirt, which hung to her calves, carrying her knife belt, she walked back to the house and let herself quietly into Karis’s room by way of the garden. It was full dark by then, and she could hear Karis’s voice in the kitchen. Zanja built up the fire in the fireplace and combed her hair with her fingers as it dried. She supposed she was
missing dinner.

  She fell asleep in the warmth of the fire, and when she awoke, Karis stood nearby, buttoning her clean shirt. She had set a burning candle into the chimney nook, and gazed down at Zanja with her eyes set into dark hollows by the angle of the light.

  Ordinary and commonplace words could have filled the silence, but Zanja did not move or speak.

  Karis knelt beside the settle and lifted a hand to awkwardly brush the loose hair out of Zanja’s eyes. Her fingers were steady, but her agitated breathing revealed how close her ghosts hovered. She smelled unlike herself: of soap and herbs rather than of smoke and old sweat. She abruptly leaned over and kissed Zanja’s mouth. Then she tried to pull away but Zanja couldn’t seem to release her. Karis easily could have broken free but she held herself still, trembling like a wild horse trapped into the traces. Carefully, Zanja let go of her. She told herself she could wait as long as she needed to, and she could do it gracefully, without resentment. She was a katrim. She could sleep on the hearth in the kitchen and she wouldn’t blame Karis, and she wouldn’t complain.

  She sat up, rubbing her face. Karis sat down beside her on the settle and said miserably, “You deserve—”

  Zanja crawled into Karis’s lap. Though startled, Karis moved instinctively to embrace her, to accommodate the weight of her. Zanja was so much smaller than she, a tribeless mountain woman lost here in the plains, ready to die of loneliness. Holding her like this, would Karis remember the bitter winter day she rescued her? There had been no coercion when Karis gave her back her life, just generosity: unearned, unsought, utterly unexpected. Zanja felt Karis’s hand in her hair, and shut her eyes and thought of Karis stroking the heath’s soft grasses. She willed herself to be as passive, and as vital, as the heath had been.

  She shuddered alert when she heard Karis’s breathing change. Karis’s big, gentle hand had found its way to Zanja’s face and now she began kissing her, and Zanja made her hands lie still. Time carried them upon a quiet river. The fire died down and the candle guttered in its socket. The moon rose and cast a modest light through the garden door’s glass windows. Zanja tasted salt.

  She lifted a hand to Karis’s face and found her gasping with surprise, awash in astonished tears. Zanja straddled Karis on her knees and the river took them again and the moonlight faded away. Karis stood up and carried Zanja to the bed. Zanja’s exquisite restraints snapped, and in a matter of moments she ruined both their shirts.

  They’d have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an infinity of time.

  Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja’s hands anchored her within her skin. Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja’s sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. Who’d have thought those knife-scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft?

  With one touch Karis could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For a moment, Karis didn’t know what to do. And then she did know.

  A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover’s ravishment right through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for breath in Karis’s arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. “Oh gods of the sky,” she said in abject gratitude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting go.

  Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, “Now I will follow the fire.”

  Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well-traveled feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened and the ball of Zanja’s foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja’s hands, and her tongue - unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could not refuse.

  The earth claimed her.

  In the dead of night, Zanja awoke to find herself alone, with the blankets tucked carefully around her and the garden doors standing ajar. She walked out into a chilly breeze, and saw frost sparkle in the starlight. A year ago she had never thought she’d see stars again. Now the cold night felt huge around her, cupped within the folded hollow of the hills, but expanding out into the bright universe. The garden lay breathless and silent, the accuser bugs silenced at last, the frog song long since ended. It would be a sudden winter.

  Karis lay naked on her back in a bed of thyme, staring up at the stars. Zanja paused. She knew there had been a mystery at the end of their lovemaking, when with the moment of consummation upon her, it was not to Zanja, but to the land itself that Karis cried out. Perhaps Karis had not slept at all since then, and all their lovemaking had been for her the opening of another door. Perhaps everything they did would ripple outward in the vast future: every breath, every word.

  “Now you are afraid,” Karis said from the thyme bed. Her voice was hushed.

  “I should be afraid.”

  “Yes,” Karis said peacefully. “Anyone should fear to possess such powers as we possess.” Then: “Do you remember when I healed you?”

  “I’ll never forget that day.” Zanja knelt down in the thyme. “You restored me to myself.”

  Karis said, “Now you’ve done the same to me. So it was the land that sent me forth, to make whole the one who would make me whole. I’ll never again question the logic of my life.”

  Chapter 28

  At mid-autumn, when the ground began to freeze, South Hill Company disbanded. The malaise that had affected the Sainnites seemed also to have affected the Paladins, like a plague jumping across the battle lines. By then, half the people of the company had no homes to go to, and only food delivered from outside would keep the people of the region, including the Sainnites, alive until spring. Even Willis had succumbed to the bitterness of that year. He was gone from South Hill; no one knew where. One of Emil’s friends had gotten a brief and inexplicable letter: I am released. I wish you the same. Though she shook her head in pity that so fine a commander had fallen victim to the silliness of middle age, she lay awake that night, thinking of the ways that her own service to the war had imprisoned her over the years.

  Emil and Medric, on their second trip for supplies to the nearest town, outran the storm by less than an hour. They had scarcely finished unloading the wagon when the rain began to fall. Medric, who had insisted that they augment their already substantial supply of food and lamp oil, took on the project of cramming their purchases into the already packed storeroom of the little cottage. Emil went up to the attic to check for leaks, and wound up sitting for quite some time on one of the trunks of precious books, listening to the rain pounding on the roof, and peering out the one small window at the gray landscape below. When he climbed down the ladder, he found Medric curled in an armchair by the kitchen fire, with a book in his lap and a pen in his teeth, and the ink pot precariously balanced on a pile of papers on the arm of his chair. He looked up, took the pen out of his mouth, and said, “Why has no one ever written about Harald G’deon?”

  “Chaotic times have brought us a dearth of historians,” Emil said. “And so many have blamed Harald for the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, I suppose that there is an impulse to erase him from history.”

  “But some day people will wish they could know more about him,” Medric said. “And another thing: the House of Lilterwess came into being around Lilter, the second G’deon, largely to keep her powers regulated. So once Mabin made it clear she would not c
onfirm Karis as G’deon, at that point, it could be argued, the House of Lilterwess lost its reason for existence.”

  “Now that’s hardly true,” Emil began. He chopped some vegetables for a bean soup while he explained as well as he could how the Orders of Lilterwess had gradually become the unifying heart of Shaftal’s government and culture. As he put the pot onto the fire he caught sight of Medric’s smile, and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. “Do you hear?” he said. “The rain has turned to sleet, just like in your dream. What are you thinking about?”

  “I was thinking that ‘The House of Karis’ just doesn’t sound very impressive.”

  “That’s because it’s impossible to imagine her as an institution.”

  “That’s probably what they said about that woman Lilter, and look at what happened.”

  Medric wrote for a while in his weird mix of languages and alphabets. Emil did not feel like doing anything, and made himself a pot of tea. Although it had been a long day, Medric still would sit up with his books and papers for half the night. Emil would go to bed, and wake up before dawn with Medric curled against him like a friendly cat. In the kitchen, Emil would find both the lamp reservoir and the wood box empty. He would go out on a solitary walk to watch the sunrise, and when he came back he’d start some bread and write a letter to Zanja, though he could not imagine how to arrange for its delivery.

  Emil got up to stir the beans. The wind flung sleet at the shuttered windows. By now it was full dark, and the storm would rattle the shutters all night long. Within the cottage, here in the bright kitchen, it was easy to forget about the storm.