J’han leapt to his feet. “We must improvise a pipe.”
“But this one time I will not fail her.” Norina took a pouch out of her shirt and emptied its contents into the palm of her hand. One by one she untwisted the spills of paper and crushed the contents to powder between her fingers, and rubbed the powder into the wet grass where it could not be reclaimed. None of them made any move to stop her.
J’han said, “Medric, perhaps you will start a fire and we’ll warm some water to bathe her. And then we’ll put her clothes on her.”
Throughout the night, Medric had traveled silently, except for an occasional hoarse word to direct their path, a directive which they had accepted in silence. From time to time, his face had seemed to come at Emil out of the darkness: drawn with sorrow, wet with tears, hollow with a terrible weariness, as though he had borne the whole weight of history upon the frail hinges of his vision, and could not carry that weight much longer. But now Medric stood back, gazing at this desperate, hopeless scene as distantly as a general gazes on a battle. “There’s a reason why she took off her clothes,” he said.
Norina wiped a sleeve across her eyes as though to clear a fog, and looked at him in that way which makes even the bravest warrior flinch back from a Truthken’s stare. “By the land, what are you?” she said softly.
Medric did not flinch under her gaze.
She said, as quietly as before, “Better people than I have given you their trust. Tell me what you see.”
“Madam Truthken, when you destroyed that smoke, I saw you close a door. And I saw another door open. There is no one in this land who knows Karis like you know her. So tell me, why did she take off her clothes?”
“Even though Karis cannot feel the wisdom of her flesh, there are times she knows exactly what she needs to do. I suppose it is earth logic.“
“So wouldn’t it be even more logical if she lay on soil rather than grass?”
Norina began pulling up great handfuls of grass by the roots. J’han and Medric helped her, and by the time the sun had risen, they had cleared a patch big enough to lay Karis upon with her skin pressed against the damp black earth.
“It looks like a grave,” Norina said.
“But it is a garden.” Medric’s eyes had seemed glazed with sleeplessness and sorrow, but he was, Emil realized suddenly, in the midst of a waking vision.
Emil said, “Medric, what should we do now?”
“Plant her,” Medric said. “Plant her so she will grow.”
Emil went creeping through the nearby brush until he managed to kill a couple of heavy ground birds with some lucky shots. Plucking and cleaning the birds took nearly as long as hunting them had, and then he dug up some roots that would make a poor substitute for potatoes, and picked greens. He returned with his heavy gathering bag to find that nothing much had changed. J’han had dosed Medric with a sleeping draught to stop his hallucinations, and Medric slept, pale and exhausted even in sleep, his face still creasing sometimes with worry or fear. J’han, a botanist like all healers, had collected a pile of strengthening herbs. Norina knelt at Karis’s side like a mud-covered statue, watching her breathe. Karis, except for her face, was covered with a blanket of soil that steamed now in the warm afternoon sun. She had not died yet, and that was surprising.
Emil filled his pot with the fowl and the roots and set it on the fire to stew, then went off again to gather wood and fill their canteens. Normally, all the walking and riding and worrying would have crippled him by now, but when Karis laid her hands upon his knee she had repaired much more than that one badly healed old injury. He had returned to their camp, and was stirring the pot that had started to simmer, when he heard Norina say in a voice destroyed by weeping, “Karis.”
Emil feared what he would see, but what he saw was that the soil had cracked over Karis’s chest, and those cracks widened and narrowed in rhythm with her deep breaths. Karis lay quiet, eyes open, gazing at Norina with an expression Emil would not have liked to have directed at him. She turned her face away and Norina sat back, as if she had been hit.
J’han scraped away the earth so he could listen to Karis’s heart. He said, “Well, Karis, it seems your heart wants to keep beating.”
He put his head near hers, for she seemed to have spoken. “Emil, she’s asking for you.”
Emil went to kneel beside her. Her voice was just a whisper, like a sheet of paper being torn. “Zanja,” she said.
“We left her in the cave by Otter Lake. She and Norina had a fight and she was unable to travel.”
On Karis’s other side, Norina covered her face with her hands. Zanja’s blood still spattered her shirt.
Karis opened her mouth again, and the tearing paper sound resolved itself into a word: “No,” or perhaps, “I know.” Then she said, “Where is she?”
Emil gazed at her, baffled. Norina dropped her hands and said, “Karis, I swear I didn’t kill her.”
Karis did not look at her or seem to have heard her.
“She is alive,” Emil said. “She was bitterly angry at Norina and desperately worried about you, last I saw her.”
Karis said very carefully, as though to a stupid child, “Where. Is. She.”
Silence, then Norina spoke, looking at Emil and not at Karis. “Something has befallen Zanja. Karis cannot perceive her presence.”
“What!” Emil leapt to his feet.
“I will accompany you. I won’t anger her any longer with my presence.”
J’han began to protest, but stopped himself and said in exasperation, “There’s no point in even talking to you. Emil, if I give you some powders, will you find a way to make her take them? Slip them into her drinking water if you have to. She has not even rested since giving birth, and seems determined to kill herself.”
“I’ll take your powders,” Norina said. She stood up and began to gather her gear, making the jerky, mechanical movements of a body strained beyond endurance.
Karis continued to gaze at Emil. Only the earth had brought her back from the threshold; she had no business being alive at all. Anger burned m the depth of her sunken eyes, and suddenly, Emil could imagine her as G’deon of Shaftal.
Emil said to her, “We’ll wait a little while for Medric to wake up, in case he can tell us what’s befallen her. We will find her. You have plenty of evidence that fire bloods do not lose what they love.“
Some time after Karis had eaten and been taken hostage by a healing sleep, Medric awoke, not with a start, as he usually did, but slowly; so that Emil, who had been doing what he could for the exhausted horses, could contrive to be beside him when he finally awoke, and place the correct pair of spectacles upon his nose. Medric said thickly, “I recognize you even as a blur.”
“I certainly should hope so,” Emil said.
Medric smiled, and so it seemed that they would survive the anger and disappointment of the last few days. Still, Emil said, as was right, “I feel as if I failed you by being angry at the choices you felt you had to make. Surely it was a terrible time for you, and my anger only made it worse.”
Medric said in some astonishment, “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“Karis is going to live, as far as J’han can tell. And, apparently, she’s going to live without smoke.”
“Oh, Shaftal,” Medric said, sitting up in a daze. “Oh, earth and sky, do you feel it? The door is swinging open, and the breeze is blowing through …”
Emil said, though he hated to dampen the young seer’s enthusiasm, “I’m so worried about Zanja and Annis that there’s not much else I can think about. Something has befallen them, Karis says, and that something can only be Mabin.”
“Karis doesn’t know what happened?”
“She can hardly talk, but Norina says that Zanja is beyond Karis’s ken.”
“Well, that puts her over water then, doesn’t it? It seems obvious enough.” He took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes.
It had not been at all obvious to Emil, but, remembering Kar
is’s discomfort around water, it began to make a kind of sense. It was said that Shaftal is the G’deon’s flesh and bone, and nothing happens between ocean and mountain that the G’deon does not feel. If Karis could not feel Zanja, alive or dead, then it could only mean Zanja was no longer in physical contact with the earth. He said, “So she’s somewhere on the river.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Medric, my dear, if Karis ever needed a seer beside her, now is the time. I’ll find Zanja without your help. You know I can. And I have Norina, who is the equivalent of an entire battalion.“
“But it’s an awfully big river.”
“You forget about our friends the Otter People. Surely the water witch will know what’s happened on his river.” Emil kissed Medric, not too hastily, and then he kissed him again. Before he could stand up, he had to disentangle himself from the fist gripped in his hair. For the first time in days, it was not just weariness that made him so dizzy.
And so the next day Emil and Norina found the empty cave and fresh blood splashed across the stones, and then the Otter People came and took them to the island, where they showed them Annis’s body. They had laid her in a little boat with her knees drawn up to her chest like an infant curled in the womb, and they had filled her boat with journey gifts: a net and fishing spear, tiny people of twisted reed to accompany her, a bottle of good spring water, a supply of dried fish, and many small items of great value: knives and beads and pieces of worked fish skin, the kind of gifts that are given to a beloved friend when bidding her goodbye. At sunset they all escorted Annis across the lake to the river outlet, and they let her boat go and watched until she’d slipped out of sight. They uttered encouraging shouts to send her on her journey, but many of the people seemed devastated with grief. They’d loved her more, and better, than her family ever had.
Emil had seen many a Paladin killed or maimed, but always had been able to explain the death as having served a cause. This death could only be explained as a betrayal. When he wept for Annis, he wept also for himself, for an entire adulthood spent serving under the command of a leader who would kill an innocent like Annis simply for being in the way.
Emil understood perhaps three dozen words of the Otter People’s language, which was not enough to ask the question he needed to ask. But the old water witch was dismayed by the terrible, sudden violence that had occurred on the shores of his lake, and told what had happened using story dolls, like the little reed poppets that had accompanied Annis on her last journey. The doll that had Zanja’s long hair was in a boat two day’s journey to the east of Otter Lake.
Emil and Norina left at dawn to journey to the Paladin garrison where all that remained of the old traditions of Shaftal were preserved, all except the traditions of honor and open-handed generosity. These traditions were not even mentioned in the letter of the law, but without them the law was just a mindless formula. Emil had dared to read a little of the Mackapee manuscript before he carefully put it away in a mouse-proof chest, in a dry attic, in a stone building unlikely to burn down. And what he’d read there was the spirit of a man who valued change. “The peaceful speech of strangers transforms the world,” Mackapee had written in his crabbed handwriting. If Emil had laid eyes on the manuscript fifteen years before, he’d have hurried past those words, looking for more subtle revelations, words to argue about in the university.
Zanja na’Tarwein had lived by and nearly died for that transformation. Mabin Paladin, the hero of the people, had chosen another way, the shortsighted way of the bitterly conquered, the vengeance by which the wronged becomes the wrongdoer and the whole world gives way to war. When Emil lay down in love with a son of the enemy, he had abandoned that vengeance, and he was only now beginning to realize what that meant for him. And Norina Truthken, whose devotion to the law had not been able to keep her from betraying her dearest friend, what was she going to do now?
Norina had scarcely spoken a word on this entire journey. She was far from recovered from childbirth, and her bandaged, milk-swollen breasts must have hurt her greatly. She took the powders her husband had given her: reliably, publicly, as though she was doing a kind of penance. In fact she was doing the only thing a person of honor could do in her position: accepting disgrace, humbling her pride, making reparations. She would put her life at risk to do these things, and her life wouldn’t be worth much if she could not accomplish them.
When they stopped to rest the horses and eat their dinner of cold fish and flatbread, Emil said, “I’m curious how the law would resolve this paradox we’re in.”
Norina snorted in bitter amusement and passed him the jug of water. “Everyone who breaks the law does it for the same reason: because her own desire, she believes, should take precedence. The question is, which of us is in fact the lawbreaker, when our governor under the law falls into the error of thinking she rules the law rather than being ruled by it? Are we right, for serving Karis’s personal interests and thus opposing Mabin? Or are Mabin’s followers right for serving Mabin’s personal interests and thus injuring Karis? This situation is a judge’s worst nightmare.“
“But if Karis is G’deon …”
Norina lifted her head, as though genuinely surprised at the idea. “That has never even been a possibility. But now that she is no longer addicted to smoke, perhaps everything has changed. If Karis is G’deon, that certainly resolves the moral difficulty. The G’deon’s role is and always has been to protect the land, to remember the people, even if that means going beyond the law. And we are required by law to serve the G’deon first. However—”
“She’s not the G’deon.”
“It’s not as if we had the power to decide such a thing.”
“So we have a paradox, a puzzle that defies resolution. But not a dilemma, for we both know exactly what we must do, and we intend to do it. That is what intrigues me, you see. It’s a purely philosophical problem.”
Norina groaned, as people often do when they hear the word “philosophy,” for the Truthkens are always wanting their truths to be unarguable. So she seemed to be curing herself with self-mockery, the only cure for the obsessiveness that is the bane of all Truthkens, and no doubt she was practicing it as deliberately as she was taking her husband’s powders. A woman of her age and experience could hardly expect to be re-schooled by anyone except herself. But if she had a true community such schooling would be the service her people provided. And if Karis were to lack such a community as well, who would then school her in the right use of her power?
Oh, but if there was one thing Karis did not lack, surely it was wise and strong-willed friends. And they all would be well advised to not get into the habit of servicing her whims, even now, when she was so desperately ill. To do her will without question was no service at all, but an abdication.
“What are you thinking that makes you so happy?” Norina asked.
“Just when I was thinking with despair of a dishonorable and unappealing retirement, I realize that I may yet have an interesting few years ahead of me. Madam Truthken—”
“Oh for pity’s sake, call me Norina.”
“Why don’t you lie down and rest for a while, and I’ll make a good report to your husband.”
She was not so humorless as she had seemed. She was still chuckling when she lay down on the blanket he brought her, and shut her eyes.
Before dawn the next day, the two of them stood on the canyon’s edge overlooking the Paladins’ Valley, and waited for sunrise. They actually had slept for most of the night, and awakened before first light to travel the last mile on foot, leaving their horses and gear hidden in a glade. If there was an additional watch being kept on the valley, somehow they’d managed to avoid the trap, and they sat peaceably upon stones overlooking the magnificent landscape of the canyon. As the sun lifted, pink and gentle light set the stones to glowing like coal. Norina took a spyglass out of her shirt—she was astonishingly well equipped—and scanned the valley below. Without a word she handed the spyglass t
o Emil.
The boat was anchored in a deep eddy near the walled village, which had been built on high ground to avoid being destroyed in the periodic flood times. The river still lay in shadow, and even at this distance Emil could see a spark of lantern light upon the deck. As he watched, the sunlight hit the river, turning it to glowing amethyst, and he saw the figure pacing on the boat deck, back and forth, like a lion in a cage.
He thought of Zanja, being hauled from a rowboat onto the deck of the riverboat. Considering her recently broken bones, it was an unpleasant thought. He gave Norina back her spyglass. “She’s on that boat,” he said, as certain as he’d ever been of anything.
Norina peered down at the river, muttering, “I all but gave Mabin the bait for this trap. What am I going to do about it now?”
“We,” Emil corrected. “It’s a boat because Karis can’t endure boats?”
“Over water she’s an ordinary mortal, and a seasick one at that. No doubt Mabin will demand that she come aboard, however. And she will comply, if that will save Zanja’s life. We’ll have a sorry time trying to stop her, for now that I’ve lost her regard she won’t listen to my advice.”
“I think Karis will listen to me. Certainly, Zanja would want us to prevent her from putting herself in Mabin’s power.”
“That’s one argument that might dissuade Karis,” Norina said wryly. “Let’s think up a few more on the way back, shall we? We’re going to be needing them.”
*
When they returned to Otter Lake, they were greeted with an astonishing sight: black smoke billowing from a crude chimney made of gathered stones, boatloads of ore and coal drawn up to the shore, a line of Otter children taking turns at pumping a monstrous bellows, and Karis in the middle of it, swinging a huge stone hammer to shatter the ore and keeping an eye on Emil’s cookpot, which had now become a smelting pot.
“She always was incorrigible,” Norina said.
J’han came across the beach to greet them, a harried and frustrated man. “Are all elementals so willful?”
Fire Logic el-1 Page 33