Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  “There’s a door in the wall right around here,” Annis said. “So people can escape to the river should they need to.” She hopped on one foot, belatedly putting her shoes on muddy feet. She had put on a shirt, but her breeches were still tucked under her arm.

  Zanja could hear Mabin’s people shouting the village awake behind them. Karis leaned in her embrace, cold and soaking wet, gasping for breath. She heard a bolt shoot open, and Emil said, “Annis, don’t take the path. That way, through the woods.” Annis leapt forward, happy in the chase. The three of them followed, compelling Karis through the thicket, where a tracker might be able to follow their route, but not until daylight and not until the rainfall had ceased. They made their way to their horses and put Karis on Homely. The rest of them went on foot, heading westward, into the wilderness.

  It rained all night and well into the morning, and then the sun split the clouds open like a bright hammer upon gray stone. Zanja, trudging across the rocky landscape with her hand on Homely’s stirrup, sensed a quickening in the giant riding beside her, and looked up to see that Karis had lifted her hanging head and was squinting up into the sun. “Karis, are you awake?”

  Karis glanced bleakly down at her.

  Zanja put her hand upon Karis’s sodden knee, wondering if she would even feel the touch. A steady tremor ran through the muscles under her hand, like the vibration of a heavy wagon upon cobblestones. “Should I explain what has happened?”

  Karis shook her head.

  If reason and will broke free of smoke’s paralysis before bone and muscle did, then Karis had been considering her situation for some time already. Perhaps she felt the vacancy of amputation where her raven had been; perhaps she had sorted through the dreamlike memories. She seemed, now, to become aware of the hand upon her knee, and she covered it with her own. Her hands already were trembling.

  Zanja said, “I took the box of smoke from your room. You still have your smoke purse.”

  Karis dried with her sleeve the wretched tears that had streaked her face. “Can we stop?” she slurred.

  Zanja shouted ahead at her companions, who had outpaced Homely and his heavy burden, then led the horse to a bit of a rise, which she hoped might be less muddy, and helped Karis to dismount. Karis lay down with her back against the earth, like an uprooted plant digging herself back into the soil.

  Zanja took hold of her hand again.

  “Help me.”

  Zanja had cobbled together courage before, using whatever poor bits and pieces of strength she had at hand. But to do it for another person, when she herself felt hopeless, was not an easy feat. She stated the bitter facts, as Norina would have. “If you continue to use the drug as you have been doing, you’ll die. But if you stop, that also will kill you.”

  A tremor rippled through Karis’s form, like a small wave running ahead of a devastating flood. “Another choice,” she gasped.

  Wouldn’t there have to be a tenuous route, halfway between one death and the other? If there wasn’t one, what harm was there in pretending like there was one? “A dance,” Zanja said. “A balance. Use enough smoke to keep you alive, but not enough to kill you. Every time you smoke, wait a little longer. In time, you will be using the drug just once a day again.”

  Karis said hoarsely, “And in the interim, this agony. Death sounds easier.”

  “No doubt it is easier. No doubt it would have been easier had I chosen death a year ago, when your raven gave me the choice. There’s been a number of times I wondered why I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you?” she gasped. Her eyes were blank with pain.

  “I knew I was caught up in something, and could not endure to die with my curiosity unsatisfied.”

  Karis smiled faintly. She placed Zanja’s hand upon her breast, where the hard outline of her smoke purse lay under the shirtcloth. “Take it.”

  “I don’t want to decide for you—”

  “Don’t be so scrupulous.” Another tremor, stronger than the last, shook through her, and Karis took a shaky breath. “It won’t be pretty. I’ve seen smoke addicts die—because they could not— light a match. And no one thought to light it for them.”

  Zanja unbuttoned Karis’s shirt and lifted the purse from around her neck. Then, she put the green pendant in its place, knotting the torn and mudstained ends of the ribbon.

  Karis seemed to find it difficult to breath. But she asked, “Are you—all right?”

  “Is this earth logic, to worry about me when it’s your life that’s at risk?” Zanja added, “When I saw the Sainnite army crossing the Asha River in dead of night with my people helpless before them, that tried my courage. This is not any worse.”

  “This is my worst fear.”

  “Don’t face it alone.”

  “So that’s the secret.”

  Karis sat up so Zanja could hold her: against her shoulder, within her arms, between her legs, an embrace that could have scarcely been more intimate if they’d taken off their clothing. When the first convulsion came, it had Karis’s shocking strength behind it, and Zanja could no more hold her still than she could have reined in a maddened plowhorse. She learned to ride it through, evading Karis’s flailing limbs, holding on by gripping her own wrist across Karis’s ribs, so that she still would be there when the seizure was over. Each time a seizure passed, Karis lay limp against her shoulder, sobbing for breath, clammy with sweat, and later weeping, bleeding from a bitten tongue and lips. Finally, she scarcely seemed conscious anymore and Zanja lit the pipe for her and helped her smoke. The convulsions stopped, and then the tremors, and Karis’s head grew heavy and her hands slid down to rest upon the grass that she had torn up earlier by the roots. Her eyes glazed and closed, and Zanja could not rouse her.

  She must have uttered a cry, for when she looked up Emil was kneeling beside her. He felt the pulse in Karis’s neck and said, “Zanja, surely you don’t think either one of you can repeatedly endure such a torment.” He must have watched from a distance and been hard put not to intervene.

  Zanja’s exhaustion washed over her then, as though Emil’s acknowledgment had raised a water gate. “I am the only one who can help her to walk this hard way, though watching her do it breaks my heart.”

  “For the gods require you to show the way across the borders. I understand that. But if you lose her, you will lose yourself. It’s a poor friend who would stand by and let you do such a thing needlessly.”

  “Needless?” She considered for a while. “Heedless, certainly. Haven’t you heard that hopeless passion brings out the worst in the na’Tarweins?”

  “I’m afraid this is the first I’ve heard of it.” Emil uttered an unkind snort. “I take that to mean you’ll try to listen to me, but you’re making no promises. Well, even when I was your commander I couldn’t depend on you to follow orders.” He felt Karis’s pulse again, and said, “She’s got a strong heart, doesn’t she? Earth witches are notoriously hard to kill. I say you need not be so impatient for a cure. Let her move more slowly out of her darkness.”

  Zanja let the reassurance calm her own more volatile heart, and as if in response Karis stirred, and Zanja looked down to find her eyes open, though blank and senseless.

  “We can try to get her back on a horse,” Emil said. “My horse looks the best of the three now, though that’s not saying much. I doubt we can travel much further, but Medric says we’ve entered into an elemental’s domain, unlikely though it seems in this wilderness, and he says this man or woman will investigate our presence and either offer us hostility or sanctuary. Let’s hope for the latter, shall we?”

  They continued to travel in the direction they had been going, with the river canyon to their right. Some trees had begun to appear in the pathless waste. Just after passing a grove of these at midafternoon, a ululating cry echoed behind them. Zanja turned to find a rag-tag group of people emerging from among the trees—children she thought them at first, until she saw that at least two of them had hair gone to gray. Over Emil’s objecti
ons she walked back to them alone. Even alone, with her hands held out in friendship, she seemed to frighten them, for they drew back, wide-eyed, as she neared them. Some wore only necklaces and girdles of white shells, and others wore strange woven garments of rough men. Some carried spears of wood, split into three sharpened points. An old man emerged from their midst and came out to her. He spoke in a language she had never heard, a language like water on stone.

  Surely they had traveled beyond the borders of Shaftal, into the wild lands of the west, which, like the northern mountains and the southern plains, was tenanted by tribal people. This tribe into whose territory they had wandered clearly were too anxious to be warlike, and probably it was usual for them to avoid strangers, rather than seeking them out like this.

  Zanja said, in Shaftalese and then again in the language of her own lost people, “We must have shelter. Will you help us?”

  The man replied. She was too tired to listen, too tired to even try to distinguish one sound from the next. He took a step forward, and held out his hand. A large leaf in his palm unfolded to reveal a bit of fish, brown with the smoke that had preserved it. Enemies do not eat each other’s food, so Zanja took the warm piece of smoked fish and put it in her mouth. The wild people immediately stepped forward, peering at her curiously.

  Emil had the wit to bring out some of their own meat and bread, and the wild people all ate a mouthful of their food, while those of Zanja’s company ate some of the wild people’s fish. During this necessary waste of time, the old man walked up to Karis, cautious of the horse, and stood for a while beside her, looking up at her. Then he put a hand upon her bare foot, and Karis, who throughout the day had scarcely seemed conscious, heavily lifted her head. He seemed startled—perhaps by her size or blue eyes—but did not step back. Karis opened her mouth as if to speak, though she could not, and the old man bowed to her. He turned to his people and spoke to them, and they all bowed to Karis, with their hands upon their hearts.

  The old man was a water witch, Medric enthusiastically told Zanja, delighted and amazed by such a rarity, despite his own exhaustion. Zanja felt no amazement, only relief that she needed not cross the boundary of language in order to explain herself to the man, at least not today.

  They followed the tribal people down a steep and crooked path into a deep cleft in the earth. Here, captured between cliffs as steep and barren as stone walls, lay an island-scattered azure lake carved out by the river long ago, with a cattail marsh along one edge and a stony beach along another. Here a half dozen tiny boats of lath and hide lay upon the shore, and dozens of others sprinted across the water’s surface like paddle bugs. The sound of laughter echoed across the waters, and some curious children came swimming up the shoreline, slick and bright-eyed as otters. Somewhere, Zanja supposed, there was a village, but weariness and sunlight reflecting off the water blinded her so she could scarcely see to keep her feet from wandering off the path.

  They walked along the stony beach to a place where the floods of ages had undermined the cliff face, making a wide and shallow cave, which a crowd of industrious people had nearly finished walling off with gathered stones. Upon a simple hearth, a row of fish pierced on a green wand were being roasted, and a pile of flatbreads warmed. When Zanja came out from helping Karis into the cave and laying her down upon the rush mat within, Emil already had started water heating for tea, and the people seemed intrigued by his iron cooking pot. Medric and Annis had gone away with the horses, and all their gear lay in a pile upon the beach.

  After Zanja had spread the damp blankets out to dry in the sun, she joined Emil, who was drinking a cup of the bitter bark infusion that eased the pain in his knee. The water witch and a few others sat with him, sipping with some astonishment from porcelain cups of green tea. Zanja bowed to the water witch with her hand on her heart, as his people had done to Karis earlier, and he gravely bowed to her in return. Emil said, “What will you have, green tea or willowbark or both?”

  She took both, and when Annis and Medric returned they shared the hot fish, flaking the meat from the bones and wrapping it in the warm flatbread. Medric said, “These people live on one of the islands out there, and hardly ever set foot on ground at all. I wish I knew the language; there’s so much I want to ask!”

  Zanja already thought of them as Otter People: a lithe and small and playful folk. She taught Medric the words she had already learned involuntarily while listening to the Otter People talk. She knew “water,” “fish,” “boat,” “bread,” and the word by which the Otter People referred to the five of them, which she supposed meant “guest” or “stranger.” The verb patterns would take longer for her to grasp, but she expected she would be speaking simple sentences in a day or two. All of them, Otter People and stranger alike, engaged in the game of word exchange, and soon the Otter People roared with infectious laughter. The water element had something to do with time and weather; very little else was known about it. Apparently, it made a people of great merriment.

  Zanja found that humor difficult to endure, and finally she excused herself to check on Karis. Tucked within her womb of stone, Karis lay curled upon her side, with a hand resting palm down upon the rock. Sweat plastered the hair upon her face. She opened her eyes at Zanja’s touch, but her gaze remained dull and blank.

  Medric had come in behind her. “She has a fever,” Zanja said, and added in frustration, “Despite all the elemental talent gathered there on the beach, she is our only healer, and if she could heal herself we would not be in this predicament.”

  Medric said quietly, “And the smoke will not easily let her go. There’s a reason why my father’s people use it to enslave.”

  “What does the future hold for her? Have you no idea?”

  “I feel that we’ll be safe here, at least for now. I cannot see beyond that, because Karis’s life is in the balance.”

  “There must be a way to tilt the scale.”

  “Zanja, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  *

  Though Zanja sat beside Karis that night, waiting for just a word or two with her before she slipped away again, Karis went directly into convulsions without ever leaving her stupor. It was all Zanja could do to get some smoke in her, and afterwards she paced up and down the length of the stony beach in a bitter rage, unable to endure the fact that she was losing a battle she did not even know how to fight. She did not sleep at all.

  All night and all day Karis burned with fever, and not even water remained long in her stomach. She had already gone thirteen days without food, and could not survive much longer. Zanja could not endure watching her starve to death like every other smoke addict, and, in desperation, withheld the drug from her one night. After a long while, the violence of Karis’s seizures began to alternate with a death-like stillness. Zanja finally lit and smoked a pipe herself, breathing the foul-tasting stuff into Karis’s mouth and lungs for her, one mouthful at a time, until Karis opened her eyes and stared at her in bleak horror. At least, Zanja thought, she seemed to be conscious for once.

  Then her wits deserted her entirely, and the gift of smoke was thrust upon her willy-nilly, if a complete cessation of rational thought and physical sensation could be called a gift. Later, she would remember that she had become like a worn-out child, who curled where she was upon bare stone and shut her eyes to sleep.

  She awoke puzzled, heavy-bodied, tortoise-slow. A big hand smacked her cheek, and the dull shock of pain and surprise brought her upright. It was morning, well past dawn. She dimly smelled the cookfires’ smoke, and heard the laughter of the Otter People as they gathered up their nets. A fist caught her braids and she was jerked back down onto the pallet beside Karis, and a muscled arm embraced her throat.

  Karis’s voice rasped in her ear. “You will not smoke again. Swear.”

  Clawing at the blacksmith’s muscles, Zanja choked, “No.”

  “Swear!”

  Black spots swam before Zanja’s eyes. “Only—to save—your life,” she
gasped.

  “My life is not worth such a price!”

  And then she was shoved irresistibly away onto the bare stone, where she lay until her vision stopped swirling and she dared sit up, rubbing her neck and testing the hair at the back of her head to make certain it was still attached. “It’s good to see you feeling so well,” she said, speaking with some difficulty.

  Karis lay upon her back, breathing convulsively, tense with rage, as though she was about to leap up and wreck the cave and all its contents, like a berserker. Zanja got up and went to the door. Emil and Medric lay in each other’s arms on the stony beach, groggy with love and sunshine. She shouted imperiously at them to bring some porridge, and they both stared at her.

  She went back in, and knelt at Karis’s side, and begged her pardon for taking a risk she’d had no choice about and had every intention of taking again should the need arise. Her patent insincerity was enough to make Karis smile weakly. “I guess I didn’t make much of an impression.”

  Zanja rubbed a bruised elbow. “You made an impression all right.”

  As Emil came in with the porridge, followed by Medric, they each in turn blocked the sunlight and cast the cave into shadow. Emil still limped badly. He bowed ironically as he handed Zanja some porridge. “I had checked on you just minutes ago.”

  “I was rudely awakened and it made me ill-mannered. I am sorry.”

  “Well, you’ve been under a strain,” Emil said more kindly. “How is she?”

  He looked directly into Karis’s face and recoiled with surprise.

  Zanja remembered then what it had been like to meet Karis for the first time, to feel the shocking, palpable presence of her intelligence, like a handshake that leaves the hand aching. Emil, whose talent made people’s hearts transparent to him, dropped heedlessly to his knees. Karis gazed at him in some puzzlement, then at Medric, who had crouched, wide-eyed, beside him, and then she turned to Zanja and said, “I should know these people.”