Earth Logic el-2

by J. Laurie Marks

  He walked the entire day, through intermittent downpours, until the weight of water made his poor burdens so heavy he was tempted to simply drop them in the road. After the day ended the cold would come, which he could stave off only with wet blankets and wet, threadbare clothing; for although his matches were probably dry in their tin, he would find no fuel dry enough to burn, not even if he used his own hair for tinder.

  The road had begun to rise in the afternoon. Without regrets, he had left the hostile farmlands, with their suspiciously peering residents, and climbed into forbidding, rocky country. Oak trees gave way to pine, and as sunset approached, the road petered out, and he awoke from his daze of cold and loneliness and wondered if he might die that night.

  For a moment, overwhelmed by futility and aimlessness and the vacancy left behind when he abandoned his hopes, he thought he did not care. Then, he heard the ring of a woodcutter’s ax, and he thought longingly of how wood means fire, and fire means a hearth, and a hearth means a house. He stepped into the woods. Soon, he was walking among no mere saplings, but trees much further around than he could clasp in two hands. What kind of people would he find, living beyond a road that had been overgrown for so many years?

  The sound had seemed close, but as twilight gave way to deep, drizzling shadows, the sound of the ax mocked him, luring him further from the now distant road, without letting him get closer to the sound. The Shaftali are a people of many stories that they hold up like shields against the boredom of winter, and Garland had heard his share of them, including a number that told of malevolent forces that inhabited the forest and tried to lure solitary travelers from their chosen roads. He asked himself if he was afraid, but was too tired to attempt an answer.

  The trees that had closed in around him suddenly flung him out of their company. He stumbled to his knees among slim saplings. The road had not reappeared, but now he was in a clearing, looking at a steep crag looming against a starless sky darkening to black. Between him and the crag stood a humble stone house, and between him and the house, the woodcutter worked in a circle of lantern light.

  The woodcutter bent and straightened, graceful as a dancer, but with a moment of brisk violence at the end of each easy stroke. The split kindling leapt up, sometimes bright and sometimes black, and flew, and fell. Garland got up from his sprawl, but dared not step forward. The woodcutter seemed gigantic, a construction of powerful muscle that gleamed wet in the light. The wood split with a single stroke; only the sharp crack told him it was wood, hard and dry for burning. He saw beauty, art, and a fearsome anger, and stood suspended between that terrifying sight and the woods, and wondered if the malevolence of myth might be safer than the bright power at work before him. And yet he gasped as the ax entered the log, and slid through it, and transformed it.

  Abruptly, the woodcutter turned, and he saw it was a woman, shirtless, bleeding in the breast where a flying splinter must have struck her. She said, “Help me to pick up the wood—quickly. It’s going to rain again.”

  Her hoarse, homely voice galvanized him. He hurried forward, to toss his knapsack onto the porch and wander about the yard, seeking the far-flung pieces and dumping them under the porch roof by the armload. He and the woman met at the steps, she carrying the lantern and putting her other arm through a shirt sleeve, he with one last load of wood. They ducked into shelter as the sky opened up and the deluge began.

  “Quietly,” she said, opening the door. “Don’t wake the child.”

  Surely bandits have no children, Garland thought, but he could not imagine what else she might be. He followed her into a kitchen, where a few coals glowed upon the hearth and dirt lay thick on a creaking floor. She hung the lantern on a hook, and he got a good look at her: a large, tangle-haired woman in clothing as worn out as his own, with big hands, and palms as black as soot. A blacksmith?

  He put some wood onto the fire, and went back to get his sodden gear from the porch. A huge table was the kitchen’s only furniture, but the walls had plenty of hooks, on which he hung his belongings to dry. The woman sat on the hearth: silent, monolithic. He lit a candle stub and with it in hand, located a storeroom, surprising clean and practically empty, and came back with some lard and a canister of flour. He hung a battered, soot-crusted teakettle from the crane and swung it over the fire, and by the time the water boiled he had patted out the biscuits and dropped them into the rusty hearth oven to bake.

  While the tea was steeping and the biscuits baking, he put together a pot of beans with onions so sharp he cried as he chopped them, and some bacon ends that he licked first to make sure they were not rancid. He hunted through the storeroom again, and found, all crowded on one shelf, a pat of fresh butter, a big chunk of honeycomb in a cloth-covered bowl, and a bucket of russet apples. He imagined the big woman walking up the mountain from the closest farm, with the bucket of apples in one hand, the butter in the other, and an ax on her back, setting the supplies down on a stump so she could chop down a bee-tree, and then … Garland thought for a moment. She had run out of hands. The child would be with her, he concluded, and she was old enough to be trusted to carry the butter. So the woman had carried a bucket of honey the rest of the way up the hill.

  The woman still sat unmoving on the hearth. Her face, revealed by firelight, was drawn and stark. She turned her head slowly as Garland lifted out the biscuits from the oven that sat in the coals. He buttered them generously, dripped them with honey, and gave her a tin plate full, with a tin cup of tea, and sat on the hearth himself, and watched her from the corner of his eye.

  With the first bite, she uttered a small sound of surprise. She closely examined the biscuit, and then him. She stuck a finger in her mouth to suck off the honey, and then she truly began to eat: seriously, attentively. He refilled her cup and gave her the last three biscuits, but she gave one of them back to him. When the plates were empty and wiped clean, and the woodcutter-blacksmith clasped her third cup of tea within her big hands like an egg stolen from a bird’s nest, she said in a quiet, rasping voice, “I don’t suppose you are looking for a place to stay.”

  Garland cleared his throat. He had not spoken, he realized, for several days. “It’s only biscuits.”

  “Evidence enough,” she said, as though they were old friends, having an oblique but cordial argument.

  “I can stay a few days,” he said cautiously.

  “It will rain for three more days. You can help clean and secure the house, if you will. And then the roads will be firm enough for you to travel on, to wherever you are going. It will rain again, of course, after that.” Her tone of voice asked no questions.

  He said politely, cautiously, “It seems you are not well prepared for winter.”

  “Not yet. But the roof is tight, the woodshed full, the chimney sound.”

  “The storeroom, though …”

  “When the roads firm up, I’ll visit a market town nearby. If you come with me, I’ll buy you whatever you want.”

  The silence descended again: his astonished, hers preoccupied. But she seemed less vacant now; the biscuits were doing their work, which gave him to understand that she had been terribly hungry. That drawn, shadowed face of hers suggested she also had not slept well in some time. The beans began to boil. He gave them a stir, then raked the coals away, to slow the pot. “That will be tomorrow’s supper,” he said. “For tonight, have you got eggs?”

  “I did. Leeba dropped them, though.”

  “Leeba is your child?” He paused. “My name is Garland.”

  “Karis. They tell me that my name means ‘Lost.’” She seemed ironic and skeptical, but Garland thought she did seem, if not lost, then certainly bewildered.

  “Well, but you have talent,” he said. “You’ve done all this, repaired the house and cut the wood.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Has yourtalent given you happiness?”

  He said honestly, “Happiness never lasts longer than a meal.”

  “It lasts so long as that?”
r />   He looked at her, not knowing what to think or say. The plate of biscuits he had already given her was all he had to offer. But she was big, and hardworking, and probably still hungry. Another plateful of biscuits, or even two, would not be too much. He went to the table, measured flour and leavening, and once again began cutting in the lard.

  Karis was heavy spirited, but not difficult to live with. Her daughter took some getting used to, though: active, loud, insistent, demanding every bit of Karis’s attention and at least once a day working herself into such a temper that Karis exiled her to a distant room. Since Karis was working outside in the rain much of the time, Garland often supervised this difficult child, who did not, at first, seem to particularly like him or to want him around. Then he made jam buns, and Leeba warmed up to him considerably.

  Karis worked: steadily, restlessly, and oftentimes wearily. In the cold rain and mud, she stood out in the overgrown road and wielded her ax, mowing down the trees like grass before a scythe. Garland was content to clean the house, which had been abandoned long enough for bats to live in the attic, squirrels to inhabit the chimney, and rats tomake the cellar their kingdom. Somehow, Karis had already shooed out the squatters, but they had left a mess that took some stomach to clean up. The rest was merely dirt and dust, vast quantities of it that Garland swept up with a twig broom Karis had made the first morning, along with a dust pan she fashioned from a tin plate found rusting in the cellar.

  He showered off the filth each night, standing in the cold rain with a bar of yellow soap. Then, suddenly, the rain stopped in the night, and in the morning they walked down the track Karis had cut through the trees. The road had firmed up as she predicted, though the ditches were full and Karis made Leeba ride on her shoulders to keep her out of the muck.

  “There’s the ravens,” Leeba said suddenly, pointing into the distance. “Tell them to come here. I want to ask them a question.”

  Karis said, “They’re looking for food. What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know why are there three? There’s yours, and mine. But—” She looked sideways at Garland. “Does he have a raven?”

  Karis said, in a voice like a saw cutting wood, “Zanja’s raven is with us now. Do you remember what I told you? That she is dead?”

  “I don’t want her to be dead,” Leeba protested.

  Garland, outside the edges of this strange, obscure conversation, did not ask for an explanation. If Karis had to start explaining herself, then so would he have to. He was thinking he might be able to manage through the winter with these two, in their stone house that every day became cozier, though it still had no furniture. He did not want to risk his comfort by telling half truths that might make him a vagabond again.

  “I don’t wanther to be dead,” Leeba said again. Garland thought he saw the same pain convulse in her that Karis kept checked within herself. “I want J’han,” she added. “Is he dead too?”

  “No,” Karis said, vaguely and distantly.

  “Is summer over? My daddy promised to come home!” As they drew closer to the market town, the road became quite busy as people gathered for what would more than likely be the last market day of the year. These people who had seemed to Garland so distant and suspicious, greeted each other jovially, though they avoided even looking at Karis and Garland. Karis commented, “We’ve settled in an unfriendly place, but money might win them over.”

  When they reached the town, she casually handed Garland a bag of coins. “I’ll hire us a wagon, so have everything you buy delivered to the livery stable, and we’ll sort it out there.” She added lightly, “Don’t be overly economical. If you run out of money, tell a raven, and I’ll bring you some more.”

  Garland gave a bemused laugh. Leeba said, “If you talk to a raven, tell him I want my daddy to come home.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Garland. He did not understand children particularly, and did not himself remember believing that birds could talk, but he supposed this game to be harmless.

  “Get yourself some new clothes,” Karis commanded, as they parted ways. “I won’t have you shivering in your bare threads all winter. New shoes, too. Promise!”

  They parted, and Garland turned to watch Karis walk towards the livery stable, with the girl trotting beside her, one arm stretched up as far as it would go, so she could clasp two of the big woman’s big fingers. Leeba was asking why the roofs were shaped with upturned edges, and then she pointed out that a woman was carrying four live chickens upside-down by the feet, and then Garland could not hear her penetrating voice any more.

  It did not seem to even have occurred to Karis that, once she gave Garland her money, he no longer needed her stone house, her grim company, or her noisy child. He could live through winter in a rented room, in some large town, developing respectability and familiarity, eventually winning a permanent position in a prosperous inn, perhaps, and so end his wandering days.

  But he followed the crowds to the market, and began methodically spending the money. Soon, he was too wrapped up in calculating sensible quantities of supplies, consulting the list he had constructed in his head over the last three days, and bargaining fiercely with the unfriendly merchants to feel any particular regret. He emerged from a clothiers in the late afternoon, with a few coins still jangling in his new pockets—the first new clothing he’d had since he lost his temper with the general five years ago and made himself a wanderer—and glanced up to see the source of a dry flapping sound. There on the edge of the roof stood a great raven, black as the heart of a stormcloud, looking at him inquiringly through one eye and then the other. Garland glanced around himself. He was practically alone on the street, for it was the time that most people go home to start cooking their suppers. He said out loud, feeling foolish, “I’m not quite out of money, but I think the shopping’s done. And Leeba wants her daddy to come home.”

  The raven said, “Karis is waiting for you.”

  Surely the raven had not actually spoken. Certainly, it had not. Garland continued to repeat this assurance to himself, as the raven lifted its wings and flew nonchalantly down the road, to perch on another rooftop and glance back—impatiently? “I’m losing my mind,” Garland muttered. “Soon the pots will start reciting recipes to me.” He picked up his basket, which was laden with tins of tea and spices, a couple of pair of woolen stockings, a half dozen wooden spoons, a rolling pin, and a few other things, and started down the road. The raven flew ahead of him, never out of sight, looking back at Garland with unsettling intelligence, until they had reached the edge of town. Two other ravens waited on the roof of the supperhouse where he and Karis were to meet, and they greeted the third with raucous, hoarse cries. Were they now talking to each other? It almost seemed they were. Garland set his basket at his feet; he could not make himself go one step further.

  A fourth raven arrived, and the others shouted their greetings. Garland turned, slowly, reluctantly, to look in the direction from which the fourth black bird had arrived. He saw a wandering man, shabby in the way that wanderers get, carrying a big, heavy pack such as peddlers carry. The man was standing still in the middle of the road, like Garland, looking at the ravens on the rooftop. His eyes were bright with tears. Garland heard the supperhouse door creak open. He heard Leeba cry, “Daddy!” She ran past Garland, shrieking joyfully, and jumped into the peddler’s arms.

  Karis came out to stand at the top of the supperhouse steps, with her big hands tucked into her belt. The peddler danced in the street, turning and turning with his daughter clasped to his chest, kissing her head in rhythm with her enthusiastic outpouring of words: “I kept asking and asking the ravens where you were, but they wouldn’t tellme. And Karis is going to make me a bed out of sticks! Daddy, is Zanja dead? I don’t want her to be dead.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Karis cries.”

  “So do I. Do you?” Eventually, the peddler set his daughter down. He and Karis looked at each other.

  Karis turned abruptly away
from his gaze and said, “Garland, I’ve ordered a meal already.”

  Garland said, “I just came to give you these things. And to say good-bye.”

  The peddler had glanced at him in some surprise. Leeba explained, “That’s Garland. He makes jam buns.”

  “And I got you a present, Leeba,” said Garland.

  Karis said quietly to him, “At least come in and eat something, and let us settle our accounts.”

  Garland had no choice then, for Leeba had grabbed him by the trouser leg and was dragging him insistently towards Karis, dragging her father as well by the hand. “Come on.You’re so slow.I want my present!”

  The man Garland had taken for a peddler said to him, “I’m J’han.”

  Garland gave a nod. “Karis’s husband.”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  They were in the supperhouse then, and J’han’s pack was tucked out of the way, and Leeba insisted on sitting in his lap, while continuing to demand Garland’s present. Garland dug it out of the basket: a brightly painted wooden lizard purchased from the same wood carver who had made the spoons and rolling pin. Soon Leeba’s rabbit had come out of her pocket to make the lizard’s acquaintance, and they appeared to be destined to be fast friends.

  Karis, even more grim and red-eyed than usual, sliced and passed the bread. Garland gave her an accounting, and laid on the table all the money that was left. She added more coins and pushed it back to him. “For your work these four days.”

  “You’ve sheltered me and given me clothing.”

  “Please, take it. It can’t be easy, to be a Sainnite in this land, without friends or family. I can always make more money.”

  With nerveless fingers, Garland took the coins. He glanced at J’han, who must have heard her words but kept right on buttering his bread. Garland said, “Five years I’ve been wandering, and no one’s even guessed …”

  “Earth bloods don’t guess,” said Karis.

  Tearing his bread in half to share it with Leeba, J’han said, half to himself, “We know what we know.”