Earth Logic el-2

by J. Laurie Marks

  “Shall we be the victims of brutes instead? Shall we let them—”

  Karis said, “If you want to convince me, you’d better come up with some new arguments.”

  Though Karis’s voice was a mere shadow, at these words Mabin fell silent.

  Norina said crisply, “Karis, you don’t need Mabin. Ask her to retire. Spare yourself and us the aggravation.”

  Karis said wryly, “When Mabin raves at me how wrong I am, that’s the only time I’m certain that I’m right.”

  Norina said, “You don’t need that certainty. You have your own, the certainty of action.”

  As Garland leaned over Karis’s shoulder to take the teacup out of her hand and fill it up again, he noticed that her palms had been fissured by dry cold and hard work. J’han came in to report that Leeba was asleep. Garland whispered in his ear, and J’han went off to rummage in his pack, and returned to rub an unguent into Karis’s battered hands. Mabin, rigid, glared into the fire. Karis appeared to be considering Norina’s suggestion, but said finally, “Aggravate me all you want, Mabin. Shaftal needs its hero.”

  Mabin cried, “By the land—you’re just like Harald!”

  “Obstinate as a tree stump,” said Norina coolly.

  Karis said in her shredded voice, “Oh, I don’t think so—a tree stump canbe moved.”

  J’han, with a choked snort, dropped Karis’s hand. Emil fought for composure. Medric began to snicker helplessly. Apparently immune to their stifled hilarity, Norina said, “Councilor, you know that’s a truth to be ignored at your peril. Your continuing resistance will only force Karis to continue to humiliate you. I recommend another strategy, one that will make both of you less miserable.”

  Mabin opened her mouth as though to utter a fresh recrimination. Norina raised her eyebrows. Mabin stopped herself, and took a breath. “Karis, what does Shaftal need of me?”

  Emil gave Norina a congratulatory glance. Clearly, the two of them understood the shifts and starts of this conversation far more profoundly than Garland could hope to.

  Karis said, “Responsibility. For Emil.”

  This strangely worded request meant nothing to Garland, but Emil jerked with surprise. His fingers rose to his scarred earlobe, then he controlled the movement, and closed his mouth tightly over what Garland thought might be a strenuous objection.

  Mabin said, “But Emil resigned from the Paladins.”

  Emil replied in a strained, muted voice, “No, I resigned my position in South Hill. I wrote in my letter to you that I could no longer serve under your command. But I did not renounce my vows.”

  After a moment’s thought, Mabin said with rigid discipline, “I see. And you are not refusing Karis’s request?”

  Emil looked at Karis. Her lips were drawn tight; her jaw was set. He said unsteadily, “I know better than to refuse the will of Shaftal.”

  Mabin seemed to be gathering herself to rise, and Garland said, “What do you need, Councilor?”

  She glanced at him, surprised. “My commander.”

  “And a cork,” said J’han, who was again rummaging in his pack.

  Garland went out and signaled the commander, who came in and talked to Mabin, then bent over Emil’s huddled form and said something quietly to him, with a hand on his shoulder. Emil raised a tear-stained face to talk to her.

  J’han had opened his chest of surgical instruments, and selected a sturdy needle from among the strange devices. Garland examined the contents of his pockets: a packet of salt, a nutmeg, a short length of string, a tin of matches, a wad of tinder, a sewing kit, a tin of tea, and an array of corks. He offered them all to J’han. “Which one?”

  “You keep corks in your pocket?”

  “Where else would I keep them? J’han, I don’t understand what is happening. Why is Emil so unhappy?”

  “He’s being promoted,” J’han said.

  “And that makes him miserable? You people are nothinglike Sainnites.”

  Smiling crookedly, J’han selected one of Garland’s corks, and stuck the needle in it. “Emil has always wanted to be a scholar. The last few years, he’s been calling himself a librarian. I never heard him express a desire to be a general. Give that to Karis, will you?” He handed Garland the needle and cork.

  After Mabin’s commander had stepped out, Emil said shakily to Medric, “Master seer, what is my future?”

  Medric said, with strange gentleness, “You know the answer, Emil.”

  “Karis—!” Emil cried.

  ‘After what you’ve done to me—!“ Karis said.

  Norina uttered a sharp laugh, perhaps because Karis’s aggrieved tone so exactly matched Emil’s.

  Garland gave Karis the needle and cork, which she examined determinedly. He collected the empty teacups, and hung sodden clothing on hooks. J’han, having packed away his gear, went to Karis and appeared to be explaining to her the anatomy of ears, pointing at his own ear as an example. Emil withdrew into inexplicable suffering, and no one disturbed him.

  When Mabin’s commander re-entered the room, a dozen others followed her in. The Paladins were somber; the music in the big room had been silenced. The commander put three gold rings into Mabin’s hand.

  Emil refused the handkerchief Medric offered, and knelt before Karis. No one seemed surprised that he was weeping; some of the Paladins seemed ready to weep themselves, in sympathy.

  Three times, Karis put the needle through Emil’s earlobe.

  Mabin put in the earrings. When she was finished, she said solemnly, “Emil, General of Paladins.”

  Everyone moved towards Emil: it appeared to be time to comfort him, embrace him, reassure him that he would survive.

  But Emil did not rise. Karis’s hand rested on his shoulder. Apparently, she was not finished with him. Emil gazed steadily, starkly, into her face.

  When Karis finally spoke, her voice was scarcely audible. “Emil, will you form and serve at the head of a new Council of Shaftal?”

  He replied without surprise, in a voice that did not waver, “What Shaftal requires of me I will do.”

  Norina said, “Emil, General of Paladins, by this vow you are bound.”

  Then, Karis helped him to rise, and kissed him apologetically, and passed him to Medric, who passed him to his friends, who passed him to the Paladins, and they each did what they could for him.

  Garland spent Long Night as cooks do, in the kitchen. When he emerged with trays of food still crackling from the oven, he saw Emil dancing gracefully with Mabin’s commander. He saw Karis laughing, with a half dozen people crowded around her. He saw Paladins dancing around the candle and kissing drunkenly in the corners. He saw Norina and J’han leaning shoulder to shoulder against a wall, fingers intertwined. Another time, he saw Norina and J’han dancing, Emil serious in the middle of an earnest crowd, and Karis crouched on a crate, delicately repairing the neck of the fiddle, with her toolbox at her feet.

  Garland lost all track of the time. When he eventually found his way back to the celebration, the ovens were cold, the dishes washed, and the First Day sweet bread was rising in bowls on the hearth. In the great room, the Long Night candle was two-thirds burned. People dozed in companionable huddles by the fireplaces. The fiddler played a melancholy tune while four people, leaning on each other for balance, sang soulfully but unclearly about leaving home. Garland could find none of his companions and did not know where to look for them. He found a chair and watched the candle burn.

  Eventually, he noticed Karis’s toolbox, pushed out of the way against the wall. Above it was an empty peg where her coat had hung.

  He put on his coat, and went outside.

  The cold struck with such violence that he could not much appreciate the crystalline beauty of the starlit night. Snow cracked under his boots, and despite the hobnails his steps skittered on ice as hard as iron. The wailing singers, the howling fiddle, these sounds seemed far away as he tread around the glittering stones that composed the exterior wall of the building. The river was a
road of ice, hedged on both sides by barren, bowed-over trees. The sky was light-spangled black, remote and mysterious. By habit he located a few familiar stars, and noticed the rising and setting constellations. He heard a sound of ragged breathing, and walked down the quay that stuck a stubby finger into the river here. Karis huddled there, like a boulder shoved up out of place by ice. He reached an arm around her, for she was weeping.

  The cold seemed unendurable. When Karis spoke, her breath covered them in a sudden cloud, but her voice was just a crack of sound. “I’ve made a lot of tools in twenty years. Scarcely a household lacks one now. I feel them, gathering dust or being used. Just like with Medric’s books, I know where they all are. Like stars.”

  Garland looked up and tried to imagine being surrounded always by such a constellation of knowledge. He wanted to ask her to come inside, to be again the one who turned tree prunings into furniture and cupboards into sledges. But the transformations of that day had been irrevocable.

  She said, “I made some metal files one year. And one of those was used a while ago. It’s the only one of my tools used tonight. Now, the one who used it is dead, and the file is still in her bloody pocket.”

  She breathed sharply in. Her muscled back gave a shudder under Garland’s arm. “Now another one is dead,” she said, in her shredded voice.

  “What is happening? What is killing them?”

  “Violence,” she said heavily.

  “But it’s Long Night! A new year!”

  She raised her head from her knees. “And it would be acceptable on any other night?”

  Garland heard the scrape of hobnails on ice, and then the distant, distinct rhythm of Sainnese curses. He stood up, and shouted. Medric, his feet jammed into unlaced boots, and Emil steadying him with one hand while buttoning his own coat with the other came down the quay. Medric crouched beside Karis, shivering violently. “Hell, hell, hell! She’s given them a martyr!”

  Emil stood back, hands in his pockets, grim in the faint starlight. He looked up—the habitual movement of a traveler, checking his orientation, confirming with the sky that it was indeed winter, the dawn of a new year. His earrings glittered faintly in the starlight. He said obscurely, “That idiot, Willis. Inevitable.”

  Medric responded, “But Clement is a short-sighted, bloody fool! If she had just read the book! She had it in her hand …”

  Karis had raised her head again. She said to Garland, “These men speak a strange language, don’t they.”

  “I guess Willis is one of those that was killed,” said Garland, “And that’s a disaster. I don’t know how!”

  “My poor little book,” said Medric. “All I did was tell the humble truth, and trust the common sense of the Shaftali people. But Willis, his is a grand, heroic tragedy. My little book can’t compete. His death is what they’ll heed.”

  Garland burst out, “You mean it’s all for nothing? The writing, the printing, the hauling, the worry? It’s all wasted? Because that fanatic got himself in the Sainnites’ way?”

  In the silence, the distant sound of celebration seemed drunken self-indulgence. If such great labors could be so casually undone, thought Garland, what was the point of effort?

  Karis asked Medric in her cracked whisper, “What future do you see?”

  The seer said miserably, “I can’t see a bloody thing.” “What about Zanja?” Her shattered voice made it seem as if Karis had lost all hope.

  But Medric looked up. The frosted lenses of his spectacles glimmered. “Maybe it’s time I talked to her.”

  Zanja na’Tarwein filled her pot and lit her fire. The stars were coming out. She examined them as they appeared, but not a single star seemed to be in the same place as it had been the night before. She asked, “Does the pattern lie in the lack of a pattern?”

  And then she knew something had changed. In all these fleeting days and patternless nights, she had never spoken out loud. Now that she had done it, she recognized the soundlessness of this barren place: she heard not even a far away bird song, or the soughing of the wind, or the crackle of the flames under her pot of water.

  A footstep grated on gravel. She turned her head, and Medric squatted down beside her. “You’re not easy to find,” he commented.

  “Are you dead, Medric?”

  “Oh, no, just dreaming. You’ve got Emil’s tea set! And that old tin pot we used to put kitchen scraps in.”

  The water was boiling, so Zanja made tea. As she swirled the pot, she could smell it: half grass and half flower, the scent she would always associate with Emil, since it was his favorite kind of tea. She heard her clothes rustle, felt the heat of the pot on the palms of her hands, the ache of pain in her chest.

  Medric sat beside her fire in peaceful silence. She said, “You’ve brought sensation with you.”

  “Have I? Is it unpleasant?”

  She poured him a cup of tea, but hesitated to hand it to him. “If you eat or drink in the Land of the Dead …”

  “This is not the Land of the Dead.” He took the tiny cup from her, and sipped. “You know, this is the first time I’ve tasted your tea? It isgood.”

  Zanja tasted the cup she had poured for herself. The complex flavor of the tea made a fist of sharp pain clench her heart. She said, If I’m not in the Land of the Dead—and you can visit me in a dream—have I traveled so small a distance? How long does it take for a soul’s journey to end?“

  “It’s been four months,” said Medric.

  “Thousands of nights!”

  “A hundred. A hundred and twenty, maybe. It’s Long Night now. A few hours before sunrise. I lay down under Karis’s red coat, because I thought it might help me to find you. Karis made me sleep. I suppose she’s still beside me now.”

  “Gods!” Zanja’s dropped teacup uttered a musical ring against the clapper of a sharp stone. She pressed her hands to her chest, but the pain there did not ease. “My agonies should be ended! I should have earned some peace!”

  She jerked sharply away from Medric’s uplifted hand.

  Instead of touching her, he picked up the fallen teacup. “What does it take to break these things? After so many journeys and so many battles, the box is a wreck, but the cups and the pot, not a single chip.”

  She took the teacup from him, and examined it. “I can no longer read this symbol. Your comments are obscure.”

  “Obscure? Nothing is obscure to you.” He blinked at her. “The storyteller has your insight, is that it? And so you can’t see the pattern.”

  “What pattern?” she said desperately. “Is there one? What is this place? Why am I not dead?”

  “I see that you are suspended between life and death, and can’t get to either state.”

  Unsurprised, she said, “Forever?”

  “When your body finally dies, I suppose you’ll be set free. But it may seem like forever to you.”

  “But you severed my soul from the flesh!”

  “I’m afraid Norina subverted our logic with her own. She thought she’d make a way to get you back. But you know air logic, cruel even at its most merciful.”

  Zanja said, bitterly, “I cannot even curse her!”

  A long time they sat together. The sun, usually so quick to pop up from the horizon, was slow to rise. At last Zanja said, “I demand that Norina right her wrong.”

  Looking miserable, Medric dried out his teacup on the tail of his shirt.

  “Medric!”

  “You mean that you want her to finally kill you.” He put the lit‘ tie cup into its spot in the box. “I’ll tell her. I never thought I’d be killing you twice.”

  He took off his spectacles to wipe his eyes. It was terrible to see such a merry man so sad.

  “I wish you would leave,” she said. “And take your heartache with you.”

  “Would you like to have this? It’s my book, the one we printed on the old librarian’s press.”

  She accepted the oddly made book he had taken from his pocket. It had a child’s gluey fingerpri
nt on the cover.

  “Will you also take this coat?”

  Now that the light was finally rising, she recognized the vivid red of the coat he wore. “No!”

  “But this is a cold place.”

  She had not known it was cold until he said so. Shivering, she said, “I need to be cold. Please go!”

  He got to his feet, and walked away, into the blaze of the rising sun. He did not look back. She did not call out to him. It was a relief when he had gone.

  They had gathered around Medric while he dreamed, a collection of weary travelers sharing blankets and using each other as pillows in the airy attic of a building never meant for winter habitation. Garland dozed, awoke shivering, pressed himself against the nearest body for warmth, and slept again. When voices woke him, some faint light had begun to filter in, and a distant window floated in the black, framing a couple of fading stars. Downstairs, the Long Night candle would soon be extinguished. The first day of the first year of Karis G’deon would soon dawn.

  Karis still sat beside Medric with one knee drawn up and his hand clasped in hers. But he was mumbling irritably, and Emil stood over him, hauling him to a sitting position.

  “It’s no good,” said Medric.

  “You couldn’t find her?” Emil said.

  “She’s dead?” Karis said.

  Medric said. “It would be better if she were dead. Norina—”

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  Garland was quite startled to realize that the body he clasped so tightly was the Truthken’s.

  She said, “Well, what?”

  “We have to kill her again. Her body, this time.”

  “We? You mean me.” Norina tucked the blankets back around Garland and J’han as she got up. “In your opinion, Medric, would killing the storyteller be a just and merciful act?”