“Zanja demands that you right your wrong. It seems a demand both for justice and for mercy.”
“She asks this out of anger? Out of despair?”
“Oh, she’s angry. But your interference trapped her in a dreadful place, a between place, a nothing place. We can’t just leave her there.”
Norina asked, with that inhuman coldness of hers, “What if the storyteller would rather live?”
There was a silence. Emil said, “I think Zanja’s desires take precedence. But you might gain the storyteller’s acquiescence when the time comes.”
“Yes, you can probably do that,” said Medric. “If she’s the one with the insight, she’ll understand.”
Norina settled on her heels. Garland realized she was looking at Karis.
Karis spoke in a voice that had shredded to a whisper. “What do you want me to say?”
“That you won’t interfere.”
Karis was silent.
But as though Karis had spoken, Norina said, “You must consider this further. If I am forced to act without your consent, it will be the end of our friendship. And I feel that I have no choice in this.”
I know,“ Karis said. ”Leave me alone.“
Sighing, Emil said to Medric, “Did your dream yield only bad news?”
“Zanja is trapped in a single empty moment. It is impossible for her to have any understanding that might be of use to us.”
The light was rising. Garland could almost see the expression on Emil’s face, as it changed from pained to startled. “Then we re asking the wrong one,” he said. “We need to ask the storyteller.”
Part 5
How T ortoise Woman Saved The World
Tortoise Woman’s son had married some farmers to the north, and one day she decided to visit him. It was a bright, warm day, and she hummed to herself as she walked. Normally, she was a grumpy, solitary person, but on days like this even she could be in a good mood. When she stepped across a crack in the earth, thin as a grass stem, she hardly noticed it.
Returning home, though, she stopped at the crack, which was as wide as a finger now. She had seen cracks like this before, in flood plains after the water had receded, but this soil was sandy and it had not been that long since the last rain. She put her eye to the crack. It seemed to have no bottom, and the darkness was very dark indeed. But she stepped over the crack, and continued home.
The next time she walked that path, the summer was over and frost sparkled on the shadow side of the stones. When she came to the crack, it was wide as a hand, and even as she watched, she saw a rock teeter into it and disappear in the darkness. “I wonder how long this crack is,” she said to herself, and walked along the crack in one direction and then in another. It seemed to go on forever. But she stepped over the crack and went on to her son’s house.
“Has anyone noticed that big crack in the path?” she asked her son and his family. No one had.
When she returned home, the crack had gotten much wider. She measured it with her walking stick, and then sat down beside the path to take a nap. When she awoke, she measured it again, and although it had not gotten much wider in so little time, it was certainly wider.
She went home and said to her own family, “I am afraid the earth is splitting in half.”
“You are being ridiculous,” they said.
The fall mud came, and then the killing frost. One day, Tortoise Woman told her family that she was going to visit her son one more time before the snow began to fall, but it was a lie. The crack that would soon separate the world had gotten much wider.
“Perhaps the two pieces of the world might be pulled back together,” she said to herself. “But if I wait until spring and bring all the people I know to see this problem, and get them to use cables and horses to pull the pieces together—by then it might be too late; it might be impossible to get from one side to the other.”
Besides, her son’s family had not even noticed the problem, and her own family thought she was ridiculous. Later, they would regret not having paid attention, but she could not wait for that to happen.
She lay down across the crack, with her front legs on one side and her back legs on the other, and she dug in with all her claws and began to pull. She pulled for many days and nights, and the winter snows began to fall. Her family assumed she had decided to stay with her son for the winter, and of course her son thought she was comfortably at home.
After the spring mud, though, her family went out looking for her. “There is the crack she was so worried about,” they said, as they stepped over it. “It is not nearly as wide as she said it was.” On the way back from their son’s house, very worried about her now, they found Tortoise Woman’s walking stick. They noticed the marks she had made on it to measure the width of the crack, and they laid it across the crack to measure it again. “According to these marks,” they said, “this crack has gotten much narrower. That’s ridiculous.” And they walked away, looking for any sign of what had become of Tortoise Woman.
In fact, she was very close to them, so close that she had heard the entire conversation. With her legs dug deeply into the earth and her head tucked in out of the weather, she had gradually been covered with mud, and looked like a big rock straddling the crack in the earth. She had been pulling the edges together all winter long, and was glad to hear that she had made progress.
Several years later, her son brought his children that way, and they did not even notice the crack, though he did wonder what had happened to it. Tortoise Woman had begun to sink into the earth, and plants had taken root on her back. Even if she had dared let go, she could not have pulled herself loose. But she knew she needed to hold on, for she was the only thing keeping the world from splitting in two.
And there she remains, to this very day.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The winter sun, a pallid and late-arriving stranger, still lingered below the rooftops as the heavy iron gate of the garrison swung open. A small, precise woman in a gray cloak, with flashes of red silk shining through like flame in charcoal, stepped out onto the crisp ice. “Good day, storyteller,” said one of the soldiers who had just come on duty. “Get some sleep, eh?”
He and his fellows might have benefited from that same advice, for they were blinking wearily in the rising light. One of the others called after the storyteller, as the gate was locked, “That was a fine night!”
The storyteller walked away across the ice. As sunlight suddenly gilded the attic window of a narrow building, she pushed the hood back from her face and looked up. The sky was clear but colorless. The golden glare on the roof seemed sourceless and mysterious. Across that glare, a raven stalked, his ragged black blurring in a halo of light.
It was the first day of the new year. Already, though the iron winter stretched before them, farmers would begin to plan for the distant spring. The storyteller climbed the steps, opened the door to the silent house, and went in.
In the sparsely furnished upstairs rooms, the baby slept beside a cold stove. The storyteller soundlessly lit and built up a new fire, then she went to a dark window over which thick curtains were drawn. She opened the curtains, lifted the stiff, ice-crusted sash, and opened the shutters. Now the sun’s reluctant rise cast its tentative brilliance across her features, sprinkling a golden flush on her sharp cheekbones but leaving her eyes in shadow.
In a rush of cold air, the raven landed. His ragged feathers rustled dryly as he lifted his wings and hopped from the windowsill into the room. The storyteller lowered the window sash, then turned and politely offered the raven something to eat.
“Thank you,” the raven said.
She brought him a plate of bread and cheese, poured him a mug of water, and knelt on the floor near him as he gulped down the food. “It cannot be easy to find a meal in winter, even in the city,” she said.
“Do you know who I am?” the raven asked.
“You are a raven who wishes to talk to me.” The woman looked at him a moment, as though
she knew that she should be surprised. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“No, I am not certain.”
“I am a collector of tales. But I have never traded stories with a raven.”
“I will gladly tell you a story,” the raven said. “But I do not want to hear one of your stories. I want you to answer me a question.”
“I can answer no questions. There is very little I understand.”
“You have insight, do you not?”
“Insight? I suppose I do. But I have no memories. And insight without memory has little value.”
After a long silence, to which the storyteller seemed indifferent, the raven said, “I know you are a reader of glyphs. I ask you to cast the cards for me.”
The storyteller rose up lightly, checked that the baby was not too close to the rising heat of the stove, took the packet of glyph cards out of her boot, and squatted down by the raven again. “What is your question?”
“How can the Sainnites be overcome without destroying the spirit of Shaftal?”
The storyteller moved her fingers through the cards, seeming scarcely interested in the raven’s question or in the cards. The room’s only light came through the unshuttered window. A card fell to the floor: the Wall, also called the Obstacle, which glyph readers often interpret as an impermeable and insurmountable problem. The storyteller examined this solitary card, and then she reversed it. On the right and left of the Wall she lay out a pattern of cards. Her actions seemed swift, casual, and random, but, gradually, as she added cards and relocated those already laid down, the scattered cards began to group together and overlay each other in some complex relationships. She had dropped fifteen cards when she finally stopped, though her fingers continued to sort through the cards in her hand.
“The pattern is not complete,” she finally said. “But that is all I know of it.”
The raven walked around the cards, examining them. The storyteller rose up to check the infant again, and this time she moved his basket a small distance from the warming stove. Beyond a half-open door a sleeper moaned.
“Is this a pattern of present-and-future?” the raven asked. “Or is it cause-and-result?”
She returned to look at the cards. “Both, perhaps.”
“What is the obstacle that must be broken through?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it a place? An idea? An event? A people?”
“People,” she said. “Persons. But perhaps it is just a wall.”
The raven continued to ask questions about various elements of the pattern, both those elements to the left and those to the right of the overturned wall. To some questions the storyteller offered several tentative or overlapping answers. To others she could offer no answer at all.
The sleeper in the next room moaned again, and the infant became restive. The raven asked, “How much longer do you think we have?”
“Not long.”
“I promised you a story,” said the bird.
The storyteller said, “But I have not truly answered your question.
“You have answered—but I must work to understand that answer. Therefore, I will tell you a story without an ending. Is that a fair exchange?”
The storyteller had picked up the baby to quiet him. “It is fair.”
The raven told her a story about a woman whose spirit had been irretrievably split in two. Half her spirit was exiled to wander aimlessly in a distant dream world. Half her spirit remained in her body, and could only tell stories. So those separated halves were doomed to continue, the raven said, without any alteration in their condition, as long as the woman’s body lived.
The storyteller stood by the stove with the infant in her arms. She said, “If I were telling this story, it would properly end with death uniting the two halves into a whole.”
After a long silence, the she added, “Ah, Raven, I understand! What a favor you have done!”
The raven said, “With your consent, I can arrange your death.”
“But you are a trickster. To what am I truly consenting?”
The raven said, “I will not trick you. In twelve days time, you will be killed. If you consent.”
“I do consent,” the storyteller said, without hesitation and with‘ out sorrow.
The girl in the next room asked an irritable question. The storyteller went silently to open the window, one-handed, with the baby starting to wail with hunger into her shoulder. The raven flew out, and was gone in the blaze of pale sunlight.
It was the first day of the first year of Karis G’deon. She huddled on the rough, unfinished boards of the shearing-house attic, weeping. Garland had his arm stretched across her broad back. Leeba, recently awakened, huddled with her arms wrapped around Karis’s bent legs, frightened into tears herself.
Emil had been the one who talked to the storyteller, through the medium of Karis and the raven, but it had been Karis who offered the storyteller her death. Now, Emil knelt beside Medric, who under Karis’s direction had laid out the glyph pattern on the floor, using cards borrowed from a sleepy and confused Paladin.
Medric said unhappily, “This is worse than reading Koles.”
“She was able to give us some clues of how to read it,” Emil said.
“But glyphs without context… !”
“The reader always creates the context.”
“We are not seeking a subjective truth, though. And to read these cards as though my experience of them somehow reflects a political reality is not just specious. It’s dangerous.”
Emil put his hand on the seer’s shoulder. His three earrings glittered briefly in a beam of sunlight. “We sent her out to explore the wilderness. Now she has found a way through, but it is up to us to read the trail markings so we can follow her.”
“What if we are too stupid?”
“Stupid? Oh come now, Medric!”
To Garland, this discussion was incomprehensible. He understood, rather vaguely, that Emil had thought it reasonable to let a casting of cards determine Shaftal’s future. He understood now that Medric, who would be responsible for interpreting those cards, thought that to read them reliably was impossible. But Medric’s explanation for his reluctance made no sense, and neither did Emil’s steady assurance that it could be done. What if Emil were as mad in his way as Medric was in his? Surely, Norina would not allow lunacy to continue. Garland glanced hopefully at her.
Norina stood with her arms folded, her back against a post that supported the center beam. She watched Medric fret over the incomprehensible glyphs. Her face was inscrutable.
When Norina killed the storyteller, it would be with that very expression on her face: passionless, impersonal. She was as mad as the rest of them.
Karis’s desperate, shuddering sobs had fallen silent. One of her clenched hands unfolded, to stroke Leeba’s head. J’han, who embraced Karis on the other side, dug out a preposterously clean handkerchief for her to use. Leeba made a fretful sound, and Karis said hoarsely to her, “I’m sorry I’m scaring you. But I’m just sad.”
“You’re always sad,” Leeba said.
Karis let her limbs unfold to take the child into her embrace. “I’m sorry. But you make me glad, you know.”
Emil said, “Karis, can you talk to me about politics?”
Karis, bowed over Leeba, did not respond.
Emil persisted. “I think I must call an assembly, and it will take two months at least to gather people together. I have the Paladins now to act as messengers, but I assume we won’t be bringing them to Watfield with us—”
“You’re going to visit the center of Sainnite power without any Paladins?” said Mabin, who had joined them earlier. “Well, this is certain to be a short-lived government.”
Karis looked up then. “That battle last night was the last. There will be no more bloodshed in Shaftal.”
Mabin looked blank, and Garland felt that blankness also. No bloodshed? How?
Norina said, “Under the law, the G’deon�
��s declarations are to be understood as fact.”
“Her words only sound like hope to me!” said Mabin.
Norina straightened from her post. “Break the law at your peril, Mabin.” Her tone was cold.
“Fact?” said Karis in a small voice.
“You speak for the land,” said Norina to Karis, as though that explained everything. “You’ll get accustomed to it.”
Not by accident, Norina’s foot sharply nudged Mabin’s. The councilor said, “If Karis says we don’t need an army to defeat an army, then she must be correct.” She looked like she had taken a mouthful of putrid fish and was trying to determine how to spit it out.
“For war cannot make peace.” Emil gestured at the cards on the floor. “And I see no war there. Do you, Medric?”
Medric said irritably, “This is nota predictive casting. It’s an advisorycasting.” He sat back on his heels. “War, defeat, victory, none of these are advised.”
Abruptly, mysteriously, Garland understood all of them. Medric, who examined possibilities, could conclude that war might continue, despite the storyteller’s advice. Except Karis had said that it wouldn’t. And Mabin clearly thought that peace without victory would be impossible, and Norina might well have agreed with her, except that the law required her to agree with Karis, no matter what. So she agreed with her.
Karis said flatly, “The war is over.” A statement of fact.
Karis’s advisors all nodded distractedly: fire logic’s uncertainty was resolved; air logic shifted its entire rationale to match a new principle; earth logic remained inarguable. Emil, apparently the quickest to readjust his thinking—a dancer, that man, always poised on his toes—said, “Well, Medric will grumble over the cards, however long it takes. You and I, Karis, we need to decide what I am to do, if I am not re-establishing the old government.”
Karis shut her eyes. Emil began to say something apologetic, but a gesture from Norina silenced him. Garland, still embracing Karis, thought she might be analyzing the distribution of weight on that loaded food tray she had once described. Her desperate sorrow was not past—and would never be, perhaps. But Karis said sturdily, “Call an assembly, Emil, and name everyone who attends it a councilor of Shaftal.”
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