Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  “—don’t know their frigging place—”

  “—literally!” she concluded. “If they would just lie down and do what they’re supposed to do …”

  Their conversation deteriorated. The stablehand, who had become all too familiar with the Sainnites’ assumptions about what non-Sainnites were good for, deliberately knelt in horse dung as she checked the horse’s hooves. She was grimy already, but wanted to make certain the soldiers found her unappealing.

  “How long does it take to saddle two horses?” said the man, banging his booted foot against the floor as though he were a horse himself.

  “That stablehand is always slow. A simpleton.”

  “All barbarians are. And they live like animals.” The soldier’s lip curled as the stable hand brought out the horses. “Look at her. She’s been rolling in horse dung. She may even eat it, for all we know.”

  The woman companionably made a retching sound, and set to work checking over her mount with insulting care, testing every strap and buckle. The stablehand stood back, gaze humbly lowered. Though the soldier had found nothing wrong with the horse’s gear, she cuffed her casually on the way out the door.

  As the two soldiers rode off to harass the people they called peasants, the stablehand raised her dark eyes to gaze after them. She said softly in her own language, “You two will die today.” It was no idle threat. She sensed the death awaiting them, hidden in the woods not too far out of town.

  Zanja na’Tarwein’s prescience had been particularly heightened this year, for to live safely among the Sainnites required a degree of caution and conscientiousness that verged on the supernatural. For months now, she had been dodging attention as meticulously and instinctively as the rat that lives underfoot, unnoticed. The gift of prescience was a troubling talent: useful when it came to guarding her own safety, distracting and unnerving when she became conscious of pending events in which she did not care to intervene. Perhaps a dull winter at home among her people would suppress her foresight to a more tolerable level.

  She had returned to the dreary work of mucking out the stalls, but paused at the thought of home. Suddenly, between one breath and the next, she decided it was time to leave the Sainnite garrison.

  She had covertly learned their language, and she had learned much else that left her worried and distressed. The Sainnites were skilled fighters, accomplished tacticians, and ruthless oppressors. She did not want to know any more. She had done her duty; she had crossed into the Sainnites’ world. Thankfully, the same god that required her to travel between worlds did not forbid her to travel home again.

  Zanja na’Tarwein leaned her pitchfork on the wall, fetched her money pouch from its hiding place, dropped it down the front of her filthy shirt, and left the stable. At this time of day, the garrison was lively with the orderly and energetic activity that she had reluctantly come to admire. A company of soldiers was delicately weeding a flower bed—the Sainnites loved flowers, and cultivated them in every inch of bare ground. Disabled soldiers were busy with the housekeeping: sweeping and scrubbing one or another item that Zanja would have sworn had just been cleaned the day before. Pigs were being slaughtered in the kitchen yard, and the practice field was crowded with soldiers who sweated and grunted and shouted with triumph or dismay.

  That spring, when she had first presented herself at the garrison gate, a good portion of the day had passed before she was able to communicate that she had learned there might be work in the garrison for border people like herself—barbarians, according to the Sainnites, who stupidly assumed that the border people could not be spies because they had no ties to the land of Shaftal. Now, leaving the garrison in early autumn, Zanja had to wait no longer than it took the bored soldier to unlock the gate. She didn’t even have to display the empty bottle of horse liniment she had brought with her as an excuse for going out.

  By contrast to the garrison, the streets of the city were practically deserted. As the work of harvest drew to a close, the city would fill with farmers. But now, Zanja walked down an empty street hung with tradesmen’s shingles, marked with glyphs that Zanja had never learned to interpret. One had an Ashawala’i rug on display that Zanja remembered selling to a northern trader the year before. She proceeded cautiously, for even though someone as ragged as she seemed an unlikely target for thieves, smoke addicts were known to steal anything from anyone, often in broad daylight. She had been forced to go unarmed all summer, and though this was not the first time she had wished earnestly for a weapon, she hoped that it would be the last.

  She turned down a side street and stepped into the narrow doorway of a public bath, startling the proprietor from her doze over the account books. Surely the woman had seen plenty of dirty people come through her door, but still she wrinkled her nose. “I hope you have something clean to wear.”

  Zanja said, “Yes, I stored my belongings with you in the spring. You’ll remember me when the dirt is washed off.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Shaftal’s Name, you certainly are changed. I’d better get the water heating. A lot of water.”

  Alone in a private room, Zanja sat naked on the bench and painstakingly undid the tight plaits of her hair. When the woman and her assistant arrived bearing between them a vat of hot water, Zanja knelt over the drain and allowed herself to be doused with water, briskly scrubbed with brushes and foaming soap, and doused again. Her skin was raw before the last of the dirt had been scrubbed away. The two bath attendants chattered about people she had never met and would never meet as they washed her hair, treated it with various mysterious unguents, and combed it for her. In an ecstasy of cleanliness, Zanja gladly paid what they charged, and when she left was dressed in her accustomed goat’s wool and deerskin clothing, with a dagger at the small of her back and her stablehand’s rags left behind on the ash heap. She doubted that the Sainnites would even notice that she was gone.

  The city was built on a hilltop. As she left the last of its crowded buildings behind, the land opened up below her: fields and forest bright in the vivid light of autumn. Some fields lay barren, their bounty already picked and plowed under. Some were striped with hay rows. Others were alive with industry, as wheat fell before the scythe and potato forks turned up the soil. Zanja, though her back and shoulders ached from the summer’s dreary labor, felt a moment’s guilt at her laziness in such a busy time. She decided to avoid the farmlands and sleep in the woods, lest she find herself recruited, willy-nilly, into the frenzy of harvest. The weather would hold, she thought, examining the sky. She settled her burdens on her shoulders and started briskly northward, toward the mountains that at the moment lay far below the horizon.

  A few hours later, she found the dead soldiers. The ravens had arrived before her, and hopped reluctantly away as she approached, uttering insults in their harsh, secret language. The Paladins had done their work as briskly as any butcher, and deliberately left the bodies to be found. The man who had banged his foot on the floor like a horse had been shot with a pistol and then finished with a dagger. The woman whose fist had left an aching bruise on Zanja’s cheekbone had been shot three times. The horses had been recruited to serve the resistance, Zanja assumed. The two Sainnites must have been ambushed here by a number of concealed marksmen, now long gone, perhaps hunting the other Sainnites who had foolishly assumed the members of the resistance would be at home helping with the harvest.

  In the near distance, Zanja could hear the voices of the farmers, breathlessly singing a working song to keep their energy from flagging as the afternoon grew old. The smell of violence suffused the bright air. The ravens jostled each other impatiently, edging their way back to the feast. This was still Shaftal, Zanja told herself, but it seemed like an alien land.

  A year after the fall of the House of Lilterwess, Councilor Mabin’s book, Warfare, had become the manual for insurgency throughout Shaftal. People whose lives had until then been the very model of peacefulness joined the Paladins—the new Paladins, Mabin called them, for they
did not give up their families or take complicated vows. Soon, every region of Shaftal that the Sainnites occupied also supported a company of irregular fighters who made it their business to cause the Sainnites no end of misery. The retaliating Sainnites, perhaps thinking to prevent any book from having such an impact again, destroyed all the printing presses, the paper mills, the schools, and the libraries. They executed everyone whose ear was pierced, everyone who appeared to be learned, everyone who had or was rumored to have an elemental gift. They hunted and killed any member of an old order, even the Healers, though their vows forbade them to fight. To escape the harassment of the Paladins, the Sainnites built garrisons in which they could secure themselves, from which they exercised an iron control over the commerce of the cities upon which they depended for the taxes that ensured their survival. The countryside, however, remained firmly in the control of the Paladins and of the farmers who fed and sheltered them.

  Zanja’s teacher developed a shortness of breath that left him unable to endure the rigors of travel, and she became Speaker at age twenty-two. Traveling beyond the borders, she became adept at avoiding the frequent, brief armed confrontations between Sainnites and Paladins. She learned the side roads and byways, since the main roads were frequently patrolled by foul-tempered Sainnites. She could not avoid the cities, though, where to sell her woolens she first had to bribe the guards, and afterwards hand over a substantial portion of her profits. In the countryside, the Paladins sometimes were not much easier to deal with, for, like the Sainnites, they had become violently suspicious of any stranger, and especially a stranger like Zanja, whose dark coloring made her uncomfortably visible, and whose presence and purpose could not be easily explained.

  She continued to serve her people and her god, however precariously. But every year, she wondered how long she could continue. That she would eventually be caught up and killed in the random violence of the unending war seemed inevitable. But this year, as she reclaimed her horses from the farmers who had looked after them that summer, and continued homeward on northerly roads, she carried a new fear with her. The fear haunted her as the roads became narrow tracks and finally disappeared entirely, leaving her to navigate her way by the stars, the shape of the land, and sheer common sense. The fear followed her as she entered and scaled the mountains, following ways so rarely traversed that scarcely the trace of a path could be seen. She returned home to her people, as she did every autumn, but this year, living among the Sainnites had left her wondering whether her people’s future was any more certain than her own.

  The flashing mirrors of the sentinels alerted the village of her coming, and her clan brother, Ransel, met her on the path as he usually did. “Zanja! Home so soon? Did you grow tired of breaking the hearts of the Shaftali women and decide to break the hearts of katriminstead?”

  She gave a snort of amusement, for Ransel knew perfectly well that she had no great accumulation of discarded lovers on either side of the border. “I grew tired, anyway,” she said.

  “And you missed me?”

  She eyed him with mocking doubt. “Well…”

  He laughed. Ransel was always laughing, always mocking, always telling jokes or making up crazy riddles. The raven god, a trickster himself and a great practical joker, had chosen Ransel to serve him, and Ransel did so with unremitting enthusiasm. “Say you were lonely!” he teased. “Admit that the inconquerably self-sufficient Zanja na’Tarwein was about to expire from the poison of solitude! Say that—”

  He could go on like this forever if not interrupted. “I was,” she said. “Terribly lonely. As I always am.”

  He fell silent. She put her arm around his waist, and he gripped her affectionately across the shoulders. “Well,” he finally said, “You’re lonely no longer. Let’s go climbing tomorrow.”

  “Climbing! And what exactly do you think I’ve been doing for eight days now?”

  “You’ve been climbing alone. Climbing with your brother, that is completely different.”

  “No doubt. Anything done with you is completely different. But the elders will want me tomorrow.”

  “Oh,” he sneered. “The elders!”

  “Has the weather been fine?”

  “Other than the occasional touch of frost and flurry of snow.”

  “Will it hold until the day after tomorrow?”

  “It might. But whether I will be offended at being put off to accommodate a bunch of creaking, self-important—”

  “—Leaders of the people,” she said pointedly.

  “You’re no fun,” he grumbled. “Did you bring me something?” He glanced hopefully at the heavily laden horses.

  “I’ll answer that question when we go climbing.”

  “Aha! A bribe! Well then, since you know my price, I shall agree.”

  They walked companionably together, behind the horses, who kept up an eager pace because they could smell the nearness of home. “So tell me the news,” Zanja said. She did not usually have to prompt him.

  He said, soberly for once, “Well, I don’t know a good way to tell you this, my sister. The Speaker is dead.”

  She stopped in her tracks. Ransel’s momentum carried him a couple of steps beyond her, and he turned around. “Here,” he said. “Sit for a moment. The horses know the way.”

  He squatted on his heels beside her in the middle of the path. “It was a quiet thing. One morning, he simply did not wake up. Salos’a had come during the night to carry him across his last boundary.”

  “Without anyone there to remind him of the stories of his life.”

  “I am sure there was no need. Salos’a knows his life already.”

  “I wanted to be there at his death. And I needed to ask him …” To the astonishment and embarrassment of them both, she abruptly began to weep, and could not get herself under control for some time. As much as she looked forward to Ransel’s staunch affection, she had looked forward to her long conversations with her old teacher, the only one she could confide in. Though she had taken over his duties and position, she still relied heavily on his advice. Now, when she needed most to ask him what to do, Salos’a had taken him off to a far land where he could not possibly be so badly needed.

  She raised her head at last. Ransel, uncertain what to do in this unprecedented situation, had simply looked away and was courteously pretending not to have noticed her tears. She stood up, wiping her face, and they continued down the path. After a while, Ransel, somewhat muted at first, began to tell her all the other events of the summer, as he always did. By the time they reached the Asha Valley, where Zanja’s people thrived in peaceful comfort, she had gotten more surefooted as she tread the precarious edge of sorrow, and was able to keep from falling into it again.

  The next day, she spoke to the elders, who gathered in the elder-house to hear her. She told them of her summer with the Sainnites, and she told them of the fear she now carried with her. While living with the Sainnites, she had learned the extent of their arrogance and their ignorance. She had learned that the Sainnites feared Shaftal: they feared its supposedly conquered people for their tenacious refusal to give up the fight; they feared the rage and bitterness that they themselves had caused; they even feared the long, harsh winter that to them seemed arbitrary and undeserved as a curse from a vengeful god. And she had learned to fear the Sainnites m return, after she learned that, because they were exiles in a land they detested, they could be destructive and vindictive in a way no sane people could tolerate. She reminded the elders of the weapons that kill at a distance, and of the smoke drug that insidiously killed the will and spirit of Shaftali city dwellers.

  All morning and well into the afternoon, she tried to convince the elders of their danger. When she was finished, they placidly replied that the Sainnites were indeed dangerous, and so it was fortunate that they had no reason to even notice a remote tribal people like theirs.

  They agreed to post additional sentinels in a wide circle a day’s journey outside the valley, so that if a danger
were to approach them, they would at least know of it in advance. But they refused to develop a plan for how to defend the village against attack, since it would have required them to explain the danger to the Ashawala’i people. “When you are old,” they said to Zanja, “you will understand. Now, it is difficult for you to see how easily that which is right and good can be changed, and how difficult it is to change it back again. You say that our people are endangered by these Sainnites. But you do not see that fearing the Sainnites would endanger them even more certainly.”

  On a day as warm as summer, Zanja and Ransel went climbing to a place they knew, a high meadow not too far from the groaning edge of a glacier. From there, it seemed they could see to the end of the world. Ransel entertained her with accounts of his many love affairs, and then advised her at length about which of the women katrimmight be amenable to her advances this winter. She listened carefully, for he was a good matchmaker. Eventually, their conversation trailed off, and they lay a long time in silence, half-asleep in the warm sunshine.

  “You are like an umbilical cord,” she said to him after a while.

  Ransel had a sweet tooth, and she had surreptitiously brought him a tin of sweetmeats from Shaftal. “An umbilical cord!” he exclaimed stickily. “What kind of compliment is that for a katrim?”

  “I didn’t mean to compliment you. You’re conceited enough already. I meant to say that the Speaker had no friend like you, and I’m thinking that he must have dreaded coming home much more than I do. Even with your help, it’s a painful passage.”

  Ransel unwrapped the stiff waxed paper from another sweetmeat. “He never was contented,” he said. “But then, neither are you.”

  “I’ll always think I am his student.” Zanja rolled over in the warm grass, startling a couple of tiny rabbits back into their holes. “An umbilical cord,” she repeated. “You connect and nourish me, and I do nothing but kick you in the stomach.”