Zanja had survived without him—a bereaved twin, uncertain how to know herself without her alternate self to measure by. And then she met Emil. Now, Shaftali people, whose big, loose families accommodated every kind of coupling imaginable, occasionally referred to Emil as Zanja’s husband—which startled and embarrassed her, but inspired Emil to laugh. He’d say,
“We fire bloods are always arguing about words because they’re so inadequate. That’s a good example: husband.”
After five years with Emil as her commander, teacher, father, brother, and friend, Zanja could predict both what he would say and what he would be thinking. During their long summer separations, Zanja conversed with Emil in her imagination, and would discover, months later, that Emil remembered those talks as though they had actually occurred.
Now she plodded through thick mud in a merciless rain, with J’han suffering silently behind her, and Karis finding the way by dead reckoning through a woodland of sparse trees and dishearteningly dense thickets. Karis often resorted to simply forcing through the bushes, dragging Zanja and J’han behind her. Thorn-pricked, twig-scratched, rain-soaked, mud-coated, and unspeakably weary, the three of them were about to chase the springtime plague right out of Shaftal.
“You’re crossing the boundary,” Emil commented in Zanja’s head.
“A boundary of thorn bushes,” Zanja responded crabbily. “Another one. And another one after that.”
“No one ever promised it would be easy.”
Ahead of Zanja, Karis had paused to sense the land ahead, stretching to her full height to see over an obstacle that Zanja was too exhausted to trouble to identify.
Emil said in that quiet way of his, “She seems so ordinary.”
“In all these months, no one has paid her much heed, other than to remark on her size and strength. She goes steadily from one task to the next, until the impossible project is completed. Her persistence is what is supernatural. Her imperviousness is what’s supernatural—her imperviousness to discouragement, her strength of will.”
“These qualities are both admirable and maddening,” commented Emil. “What do you think she’ll do next?”
“I don’t know! She wants to serve the land as she is serving it. But Shaftal needs a leader, not a servant.”
“Does it?” Emil said thoughtfully.
Karis was pushing through a thicket again. Zanja pressed up against her to use her as a shield. Still, the thorns grabbed hold of her; her ragged rain cape made a ripping sound; she was snagged. Then Karis reached casually back and jerked her loose, out of the thicket into the abrupt, surprising flatness of a new land.
“How about that!” said J’han, as Karis pulled him loose in turn.
They stood at the southern edge of Shaftal. At Zanja’s back lay the woodland. Ahead lay flat, featureless sand, as far as could be seen. The rain was falling so heavily now it seemed a wonder they were not swimming. Karis pointed a wet finger at the nearly invisible horizon. “That way,” she said.
The sand seemed to last forever. Unintimidated, Karis began to cross it.
Four days later, Zanja awoke from an exhausted, uncomfortable sleep to the sound of rain falling on the oilcloth of the makeshift tent. Karis, sound asleep, clenched her arm across Zanja’s chest in a grip it would not be easy to escape. Curled against Karis’s back, J’han uttered a small snore. The three of them had slept like the dead in a makeshift tent, in wet clothing, under wet blankets, in a flat and featureless land devoid of tree or stone. It had been a dreary, disorienting journey across the sand, with no sight of the sun or stars to reassure them that they were not walking in circles.
J’han snored again, and Zanja heard another sound as well: faint and distant, but distinctly familiar. She lifted an edge of the sagging oilcloth and peered out. A low sky swallowed up the flat horizon, rain pelted the sand, and a haze of sprouting grass seedlings quivered in the watery assault. There was nothing else to see. Mumbling a complaint, Karis hauled Zanja back under the blankets.
But J’han had awakened. “Did you see something?”
“I saw an inn,” Zanja said, “with smoke rising from the chimneys and bread hot from the oven.”
J’han groaned. “No, you saw sand, grass, and water. Why do you torture me?”
“I heard a goat.”
“A goat?” J’han shook Karis roughly by the shoulder. “We’re taking this tent down!”
“Cruel healer,” Karis mumbled, “Let me sleep!”
With some effort, Zanja extricated herself from Karis’s powerful grip, and she and J’han began rolling blankets. Not until they had put on the rain capes that formed the tent, so that the downpour was falling in Karis’s face, did she get up, heavy and reluctant as an old bull. “Why don’t we just let them all die?” she suggested grumpily. But when she took a deep breath, she smiled. “I smell smoke. What do you suppose the Juras eat for breakfast?”
“Sand porridge,” said Zanja. “With bits of grass for flavor. Made with rainwater, of course.”
“So long as it’s hot!” said J’han.
They had not walked far before the sand turned quietly to stone. The clouds lay down and kissed the earth, and Karis had to grab Zanja and J’han by the capes to keep them from stepping over the edge of a cliff. Below them, beyond this dramatic step in the land, where the sand began again, lay the Juras camp at last: an unassuming cluster of circular huts with walls of rubble and roofs of skin, and smoke seeping out from holes where the radiating poles met the lodge pole in the middle. Some small piles of hay remained of the haystacks that in autumn must have garrisoned the camp, supplementing the great wind block of the cliff.
As Karis found a path and led the way down the cliff, Zanja noticed that the base of the cliff was riven with wide cracks where dun goats crowded. One of the goats spotted them, uttered a warning bleat, and soon all the goats were shouting an urgent clamor, like townspeople at a fair who all shout “thief” at once. By the time they reached the bottom of the path, a half dozen giants had come out of the huts: people in their prime, as big as Karis, though not quite so powerfully built, their hair bleached almost white by sun, and falling in locks like orderly strands of yarn, with eyes like polished chips of lapis lazuli.
One of them, at least, spoke Shaftalese. He said, “We cannot offer shelter. We have a sickness here.” His voice was deep and sweet as a pipe organ.
All six of them had glanced curiously at J’han and Zanja, but it was on Karis that their gazed lingered. Her voice, damaged by years of smoke use, was no more musical than a file on wood. “We have traveled far to cure this illness.”
J’han added, “I am a healer.”
The man spoke to the others, and the others spoke back. Zanja shut her eyes and listened. The rich, deep voices seemed to almost sing: question and answer, a harmony complex with adjectives. She said in a low voice, “This language is not conducive to quick decisions. We’ll be standing in the rain for some time.”
J’han said, “After studying their language in a book for a couple of months, you are able to understand them? You will never cease to amaze me.”
The book Medric had slipped into Zanja’s pack had proven to be a grammar of the Juras language, the life work of a long-dead scholar who had probably never imagined his dry study being put to such serious practical use. Zanja said, “Well, an hour or two of listening would help a great deal—”
“An hour!” said J’han.
“An hour?” said Karis. “Someone is dying!” She dropped her pack, and stepped briskly past the head-crackers. Fortunately, they proved indecisive about wielding their knob-headed sticks until she was past them. Then, one uttered a cry that seemed intended to give courage, and they drew themselves up to attack.
Zanja said sharply, in the Juras language, “She is sham’re!”
They turned to her, startled, their lifted sticks beginning to lower. “A witch?” said the man in Shaftalese, as though he thought Zanja had spoken a word of his language by simple accid
ent.
“Your people are singing someone into death, are they not?” Zanja had noticed the melancholy murmur of sound, but until she spoke she had not known what it signified. “The sham’rewill save that person’s life.”
The man spoke to his companions, not translating, but announcing in his own convoluted tongue that these three strangers were sent by the gods. “Well,” Zanja said to J’han, “I think they might let us come in now.”
“But will they feed us sand porridge?” he asked.
It was porridge, sure enough, made not from sand but from some kind of ground seed that looked fit for chickens, with bits of dry goat meat mixed in it, and chunks of something chewy and sweet that Zanja did not attempt to identify. In a storage hut hastily converted to guest quarters, Zanja and J’han contrived a laundry line and hung their blankets and clothing over the dung fire to dry. Karis returned, consumed a great bowl of the chickenseed porridge, and lay down on a pallet of goat hides. “The place is crawling with vermin,” she said. “The people are so crowded together they can scarcely find room to separate sick from well. They kept handing me their babies—babies the size of calves! They know what an earth witch is good for.” Karis shut her eyes. “I’ll kill the fleas,” she promised, her words already blurred by sleep. “Why am I so tired?”
“Zanja and I will manage,” J’han said.
*
They went out again into the rain and found the six head-crackers, crowded with two dozen others into a bursting hut where the only people not talking were wailing children. The din fell still as the two of them ducked through the skin-hung door. The fetor was overwhelming. Zanja said to the man who spoke some Shaftalese, “You must help me to explain something to your people. They are in great danger, and we have come to help them. This illness has traveled to you from the north, and we have followed it. We know it well. We have seen it kill entire families.”
The man sat still, his big hands folded. “That may be so,” he said. “This sharri’rewho healed Si-wen-ga-sei-ko’che-ni-so-sen. She is a Juras woman-born-outside-the-plain? Whose child is she?”
“She does not know her mother’s name. She was born among strangers who did not care to remember her mother for her. Please, I know that you are curious, but your people are in danger. Do you understand?”
The man said, “You want me to speak to my people. But they will not hear my words until they know this woman’s mother-name.”
J’han murmured at Zanja’s elbow, “Your people also had peculiar ways, didn’t they?”
“And many’s the time I wanted to scream at them, too,” Zanja muttered. “Perhaps you could barge your way into the sick room without being invited.”
She gave him the bags of supplies she carried, and watched him walk out of the door before she turned again to the man and explained, “Karis did not know her mother or her mother’s name.”
“Ka-ris, that is her name? And has she had no life since she was born?”
The people within hearing repeated, “Karis!” And then the din began to rise. At least they were not a gesticulating people like the Midlanders, but their big voices filled the hut. They argued among themselves and shouted questions that the man was hard put to translate, and Zanja to answer. Was Karis born in the autumn, they asked, and how many years ago, and had her mother been enamored of sweets, and what had her mother been so ashamed of, to run away from the comforts of the Ka clan? A gray-haired woman rose and began to chant what seemed to be a list of names all beginning with “Ka,” which Zanja realized must be a genealogy, frequently interrupted by other elders who seemed to be arguing that this or that could not be Karis’s particular branch, for reasons Zanja could not decipher.
“Huh!” said her translator at last. “I guess she owns a lot of goats.”
“Goats?” Zanja said in some bewilderment.
“They say her mother must be Ka-san-ra-li-no-me-la, the eldest daughter of Ka-ri-sho-ma-do-fin-brae-kon, the eldest daughter of …”
Zanja interrupted as politely as she could. “And this Kasanra, what happened to her?”
“She had a restless heart and ran away.”
“Karis’s mother died when Karis was born, thirty-five years ago.”
He turned and spoke at length with several other people. Zanja sat upon her heels. She could tell Karis her mother’s name! And, apparently, though Kasanra had not been remembered by anyone in Lalali, she had lived long enough to name her infant, and that name had been remembered. So now that name alone was enough to give Karis a clan, a genealogy, and even living relatives.
The translator turned to Zanja and said, “Yes, Karis is rich! Her mother’s sister’s eldest daughter, Ka-mo-le-ni-da-he-fo-so, is holder of the goats, but everyone thinks they belong to the daughter of Ka-san-ra-li-no-me-la.”
“I doubt Karis wants those goats, though. Kamole can continue to keep them.”
This statement excited much comment, for Kamole had a fine herd and any of them would certainly want those goats. And Kamole was overly self-important, and perhaps deserved to lose her herd to a stranger. Their eyes danced at the possibility.
“Karis does not want them for her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter?” said the translator.
Zanja gathered that these people would not count Leeba as a daughter, and said, “Karis can bear no children of her own body.”
At this, the gathered people groaned and cried as though someone had died. The translator explained, straining the limit of his vocabulary, that the Ka women were good breeders, but the clan had long thought the Ka gift had died out, for in three generations there had been no sham-re.That Karis could not pass on her talent to her own children was a dreadful tragedy.
The people demanded to know why Karis could not breed and what the names of all her parents, friends, and lovers were, in the order that she met them. “Shouldn’t Karis tell you this herself?” Zanja asked, but gradually it became clear that to tell one’s story was the duty of one’s shushan,which the man confusedly translated as “the people of her name.”
“Her clan?” she asked, using the Juras word.
“No, no, her shushan.”
Zanja was getting tired, and the camp’s fleas had worked their way to her skin by then, and she was not enduring the discomfort of their sharp bites with a stoicism that would have made her teachers proud. She said, “Am I in her shu’shan?”
“You know her story, don’t you?”
She rubbed her eyes, which were burning from the smoke. The rain pounded on the stretched hide roof, and leaked into some well-placed containers. She said, “Karis cannot bear children because her womb was injured. Her father’s name she does not know. I do not know the names from Karis’s childhood, for she has chosen to forget them. The first one to befriend her was named Dinal, whom she calls her mother, though she did not know her long. Dinal’s foster daughter, Norina, became her first and oldest friend. I am her first and only lover, Zanja, of the Tarwein clan. And then her friends all came at once: J’han, the healer who is with us now, his daughter, Leeba; Emil, our elder; and Medric, a wise man. That is her entire shu’shan.”
The man, diverted by curiosity, asked, “Your clan-name is your second name? Do your people do everything backwards?”
“I come from the furthest northern borderland of Shaftal, and the Juras live in the furthest southern borderland. My homeland is as wrinkled as yours is flat, and the mountains are so high that some of them at their peaks have stars shining on them in the middle of the day. Your people are large and fair and full of noise. My people were small and dark and full of silence. You Juras seem backwards to me!”
The translator grinned at her. His curiosity and humor would make him a fine ally, Zanja thought, as he turned to participate in the rapid, complicated discussion that Zanja could not follow. The fleas continued to bite, and Zanja practiced her deep breathing, while the people talked interminably. She understood that they were still, after all this time, arguing about Karis’s name. She put he
rself into a listening trance, and came awake only when the man said, Tarwein-zan-ja, does Ka wish to continue to be known as Ris?“
“Of course. Why wouldn’t she?”
“Ris is a lost-name, a wilderness name. And now she has come home.”
Zanja said, “Would it be wrong for her to remember that she once was lost?”
“No, no,” he said. “It is her choice, but she may ask her clan to give her a new name, now that she has come home.” The people talked some more. The man asked Zanja how many of the people she named were dead. When she told him that Dinal had died in the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, the translator shook his head morosely. “Then Karis’s name is too short.”
Zanja named some of the still-living people who had befriended Karis in Meartown: the forge master Palo who taught her all he knew, and Mardeth who had watched the gate and reminded Karis to eat. More argument ensued, but at last the people gathered there seemed satisfied. “We will call her Ka-ris-ri-lo-seth-ja-han-il-ric-ba. It is a very short name for a woman her age. But since she has a child in her shu’shan,perhaps she will avoid losing her name entirely as her friends die.”
“I will urge her to increase her shu’shan,”said Zanja gravely, though in her opinion Karis was not doing so badly for a woman whose life had hardly begun until five years ago. Unlike Karis, Zanja would have had a very lengthy name if the Sainnites had not killed her entire shushanin a single night’s work. Now her Juras name would be shorter than Karis’s. She knew from harsh experience that it was indeed a dreadful fate to be, by Juras standards, nameless, for so she had been for the months after the massacre, before she met Karis and her own shu’shanbegan to increase. Then she smiled a little, realizing that despite the fleas and smoke and weariness, her fire logic had not failed her, and she was starting to understand these people. She said, “Will your people hear what I have to say now?”
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