Fire Logic el-1

by J. Marks Laurie

  Dinal’s horse jumped forward at a kick of the heel, and left the young man to enjoy his hilarity in private. His laughter swooped and howled through sunrise’s silence. “The boy seems half mad,” Dinal muttered.

  On horseback, she wandered the streets of Lalali as the sun gradually chased away autumn’s chill and cast a shimmer of light across the copper-tipped towers. Sunlight glared on walls of white sandstone. It gilded three nude marble figures in the center of a fountain, engaged in a complicated sexual act.

  Dinal passed a crew of blank-eyed, starved and sore-riddled street sweepers, who were so numbed by smoke that they did not even flinch when the foreman laid into them with a switch. Other than these, Dinal did not see another living soul until noon approached. Then, a few early-rising whores came out to sit naked in the sun. Their pierced and bejeweled nipples glittered; last night’s golden paint peeled away in patches to reveal bruises, scars, scabs, and bloody wounds. Lounging in chairs dragged out into the middle of the road, they cushioned certain parts of their bodies with pillows, and watched Dinal pass with the same stunned and incurious gaze they turned upon each other. A street doctor made her rounds, dispensing poultices and headache remedies.

  They smoked to dull the pain, Dinal supposed. But a whore under smoke was helpless to defend herself against injury. So the trap closed, and there was no escape.

  Dinal’s horse stopped dead in the middle of a deserted square and looked at her over his shoulder. Dinal could offer him neither explanation nor purpose for their continued wandering. It was her lot and joy to serve at the beck of the G’deon. She would have to remain in this cursed town, and await either the bidding of her heart or the long-expected word that the G’deon had finally breathed his last.

  She allowed the horse to drink from one of the pornographic fountains, then she turned him toward the eastern end of town. Here, the nearby ocean scented the air with a sweet reek of seaweed and salt. In the debris of narrow alleys, rag-dressed people huddled against moldy stone. When the sun suddenly came blazing over the edge of the rooftops, they began to awaken, in a mutter of groans and curses.

  The narrow street led Dinal to a plaza, where a broken-wheeled carriage stood with the horse still in the traces, and the driver, asleep or dead, slumped to one side with the reins in his hands. A few newly risen drunks had gathered to dunk their heads in the fountain. Two shouted at each other, and seemed on the verge of blows. One vomited onto bare stone, as another looked speculatively at the carriage. Others still lay like soldiers mowed down in a desperate rout and left behind to rot. Dinal’s horse picked his way squeamishly among the fallen.

  Not much liking the look of this plaza or its occupants, Dinal turned her horse toward the nearest alley. Directly across from her, in a windowless wall scabrous with the remains of a decaying mosaic, a door opened. Out came a barefoot girl, dressed only in a night shift, with a water jug balanced upon her hip. She was extraordinarily tall and thin. The invading sunlight passed across her face as she stepped through the human debris. At Dinal’s hail, the girl neither stepped forward nor stepped away.

  Dinal held out a hand, with a silver coin in the palm. “I have lost my way. Will you take me back to the main road?”

  The girl examined Dinal from toe to head, her gaze lingering longest on the telltale gold earrings: three of them, marking her high rank. “All roads lead to the main road. No one will ever believe you are lost. Who are you?” Her body was all arms and legs; she had been growing with astonishing speed and her breasts had started to form. And she had come into her power, and had only just begun to realize what she was. This Dinal saw, imprinted in the girl’s very flesh. She was earth.

  “I’m Dinal Paladin. I’ve come here to find you.”

  “Now there’s a story,” the girl said. Yet her body had shivered, as with yearning, before she spoke with such quick cynicism. Perhaps she had half expected someone to come and find her, thinking that surely someone, somehow, would realize that an earth witch had emerged in the back streets of Lalali.

  “I was sent by the G’deon,” Dinal said. “I am the mother of his children.”

  After a moment, the girl said, “You must speak to my master and hire my services. Do you have a kerchief or a length of cloth, something to cover your face? And let loose your hair.”

  Dinal untied the thong that bound her hair, so that it fell forward and covered her earrings. She took a black scarf out of her baggage, and the girl helped her to tie it so it covered her entire face, except for her eyes. “Now, stand so, holding the reins.” The girl demonstrated an attitude of impatience and boredom. “You must seem eager, but do not agree to pay more than you have there in your hand.”

  The girl’s master, a thin, hard-faced man with a grimy red ribbon tying back his greasy hair, seemed none too willing to let the girl go with Dinal, even for so little time. They dickered until the girl reappeared in the open door, fully dressed in a plain, serviceable tunic and trousers. Dinal, who had been holding the coin between her fingers where the girl’s master could see it, abruptly closed her fist and mounted her horse. “Never mind, then. I was particularly taken with your girl’s unusual appearance, but I will find someone else.”

  “Lady, if you knew what it costs me to keep her!” Defeated, the girl’s master reached behind himself to grab the girl and shove her forward, but smacked her cheek when he got a good look at her. “What are you wearing? Will you shame me before the entire city?”

  Dinal said, “Her plain clothing pleases me.” She held out the coin. “Come here, girl, and take your payment.”

  Expressionless, the girl took the money and dutifully delivered it into her master’s hand. A handprint had appeared on her cheek. “Bring her back by sunset,” the man warned, as the girl mounted behind Dinal.

  When the girl pressed against Dinal’s back, the tension in her muscles belied the calm, even indifferent expression on her face. They rode down the cluttered alley. As they turned the corner, Dinal said, “He assumed I wanted a whore, and I let him believe what he liked. But you must understand that you are free now, and it is your choice whether or not to come with me. I intend to take you to the House of Lilterwess, where you belong. Will you come with me, of your own will?”

  The girl said, “Yes.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Karis,” she said.

  The girl directed Dinal safely to the main boulevard, where masked men and women now sauntered arrogantly down the rows of whorehouses, surveying the exotic beauties beckoning wearily from the steps. At the city gate, a dozen boys and girls now gathered, each more beseeching and desperate than the last. Dinal rode past them, as a bell tower counted the second hour of the afternoon, and a drunken troubadour balanced his way along the top of the wall, incoherently singing.

  Then they passed through the gate, and Karis sighed, as though she had been holding her breath. Dinal never felt her turn to look back at the city, not even once.

  Several days later, Harald G’deon vested Karis with the power of Shaftal, and died. It was the last night that the walls of the House of Lilterwess would remain standing.

  In the twilight, Zanja spotted Karis coming toward them across the ragged plain, stumbling because her head was tilted back so she could watch the sky. Zanja stood up, unsteady from the lingering weakness of starvation. “I want to be alone with her for a while.”

  “See if you can get her to sleep,” J’han suggested, offering a blanket. “She doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

  Zanja walked across the treeless heath. Karis was a tattered shadow, with fraying hair and raveled shirt. Her hand caught Zanja by the shoulder as if starlight had blinded her, and she said in a voice as rough as a hoe’s edge, “Zanja, what am I going to do?”

  Zanja said, “Lie down with me and I’ll tell you the stories of the stars.”

  Karis lay down where she was standing, and starlight filled her eyes as water fills a cup. Zanja had to fit herself around the sharp stones and pr
ickly plants that Karis had not heeded. The blanket that she drew over them smelled of smoke and mildew and the detritus of a long, hard journey; a journey far from over, perhaps never over.

  Karis said, “Emil fought me for Mabin’s life. And even now I wonder if it was wisdom or cowardice that I didn’t simply kill her. I could have.” She sounded both amazed and horrified. “Accept the burden of responsibility, Emil says, or become what Mabin imagines I am.”

  Zanja said, “Now you will become something else.”

  “Something better, or something worse?”

  They lay in silence. Zanja said, “It ispossible to exercise power well.”

  “You think so? Did I exercise it well when I deceived you?”

  “I suppose you thought I wasn’t strong enough to let you choose to go to certain death. I admire your courage now, of course, but in the moment of decision, I would have begged you not to take the risk.”

  Karis said, “I never feared that you would hold me back. I did fear that if I made you part of my decision, you would choose to die with me if I died.”

  They had been quiet long enough for the crickets around them to start to chirp, when Zanja finally said, “Karis, thank you for this year.”

  “What? It’s been the most lonely, miserable, forsaken year…”

  “But even the gods must be amazed by it.”

  “Amazed?” Karis said in a choked voice.

  Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis’s hair. It pushed back against her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.

  Zanja said, “Of course you are uncertain. That’s the way it is.”

  “For everybody?”

  “Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one massacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G’deon and you’ll be consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart like a herd with too many stallions.”

  Karis uttered a hoarse, ragged gasp of laughter.

  “Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be learned.”

  “Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I’ll never do it as well as you do.”

  “But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee I am …“

  “How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?” said Karis.

  Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, Karis added, “Weren’t you going to tell me the stories of the stars?”

  “That’s what I have been telling you.”

  A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with stories of her own, so that none of the tales were finished. The silences grew longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away some of the stones from underneath them both, then folded herself against Karis’s back. Karis’s shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.

  She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited like tinder.

  Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J’han checked on her and said simply, “Let’s leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us.” So they improvised a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the seam to splint her leg. Norina and J’han seemed engaged in extremely complex negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry J’han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.

  In the middle of a poem, Karis came stumbling groggily over to the smoldering cookfire and half sat and half fell onto the stone chair that Emil vacated for her. Medric finished the poem and looked up from J’han’s book.

  “I think I had a dream,” Karis said uncertainly. Had she never dreamed before? She rubbed her face with her hands. “Dreams are like poetry, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Medric said.

  “Well, I’m no good at metaphors. I dreamed I was naked and so I started to put on my clothes, but then I looked down and realized that I was putting on my own skin. What does that mean?”

  “Oh, my.” Medric closed the book and hastily put on his other spectacles.

  Emil, squatting by the coals to pour water into a fresh teapot, set the pot of water down suddenly. “Karis, I’ve been thinking that perhaps the best gift we might give you is a season of solitude.”

  Karis looked at him, and finally said in a voice gone blank with shock, “What?”

  J’han had been examining her from across the cookfire. Now he said, “Certainly, it doesn’t look like you need me anymore, and Norina and I have already agreed to return to our daughter, to raise her together through winter, anyway. The spring is still an open question, of course, but the sooner we leave the better.”

  Karis glanced at Norina, who neither spoke nor looked away. In fact, Zanja realized, Norina had yet to speak a word in Karis’s presence, which surely required an inhuman discipline on her part. “Of course you don’t know what to do in the spring,” Karis said, as though she had not realized before now exactly how much her friends’ decisions depended on hers. She accepted a steaming porringer from Zanja, along with the spoon from her belt, and obediently stuck the spoon into it.

  Emil said, “Medric and I can go to my winter home, perhaps. It’s distant, but not so far that we couldn’t visit you if we needed to, or you us. Medric, what do you think? It’s a lonely and wild enough place. Will we get sick of each other?”

  “We’d better not. You’re going to help me write my book—”

  “I am?”

  “—and there’s that library to build.”

  “Hmm. Not this year, I don’t think.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Medric said. “You are I are in it for some years at least. Karis—”

  She looked at him, sullen as though she were the youth and he the elder telling her what to do. “Go back to Meartown,” Medric said.

  “Why?”

  “Because the most important journeys all begin at home.”

  Karis opened her mouth, but said nothing.

  Zanja said, “Then we all should come to Meartown. The tribe should stay together.”

  They all looked at her in some surprise. Then Medric said, “Tribe? A community, maybe, after Mackapee.”

  “No, a company,” said Emil.

  And J’han said, “Or a family, perhaps.”

  Norina put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from speaking. Perhaps she would have demanded that they found a new order.

  “But not yet,” said Emil. “The last thing you need, Karis, is to be surrounded by people who are slavishly waiting for you to tell them what to do with their lives. You must answer y
our own questions first.”

  Karis said mutinously, “So you’re all going to abandon me out here in the wilderness instead?”

  Emil said, “Why, yes, I believe we are.”

  Medric added irrelevantly, “Slavish? That’s a bit of a hyperbole, isn’t it?”

  They argued amicably and finally settled on “obsequious.” Norina seemed to be trying to tear her hair out of her head. Karis glanced at her and said irritably, “What?”

  “Eat your porridge,” Norina said.

  Karis seemed flabbergasted. “The first words you’ve said to me in ten days—”

  “Eat your blasted porridge,” Norina amended.

  “You’ll be a rotten mother,” Karis muttered. She put a spoonful of porridge into her mouth.

  There is a stillness that comes across the earth sometimes, at dawn, or just before a storm, a stillness as if the entire world lies stunned by possibility. So Karis became still, and so the agitated, half-hilarious talk of her friends fell silent, and so the breeze itself seemed to take its breath. Karis looked at the bowl of porridge as though she had never seen food before.

  “Porridge is pretty dull, as food goes,” Norina said.

  “Dull?” Karis took another taste. “This is dull?”

  Comprehension struck Zanja like a stinging slap in the face. “Dear gods,” she whispered.

  “Oh, my,” said J’han.

  But Medric grinned complacently and gave J’han his book, and Emil calmly poured out onto the ground the pot of tea he had just made, and packed his tea set away. Zanja caught a glimpse of how irritating fire bloods could be when they have realized a truth before anyone else. J’han got up and began fussing in his saddlebags, taking things out and putting them in again. Norina laced her fingers across her knees and in silence watched Karis eat another astounded spoonful of porridge. Of course, to a Truthken there is no such thing as privacy, but Zanja felt it proper to look away, if only to hide her own expression. She would have found something to do, like Medric and Emil, who were fretting now over how to distribute the weight of books and food between their two horses, but it just would have made her feel as foolish as they looked.