Clement had expected nothing else from him. As long as she had known Cadmar, what he could not understand or imagine he had always declared impossible. She went to her quarters to change into a fresh uniform, to reassure the nearly hysterical girl-nurse, and to pick up her sleeping son. “I’ll watch him for a while. Why don’t you take a nap? You look tired.”
The girl’s bleak stare followed Clement out the door.
In Gilly’s room, the fire had been built up and a lamp had been lit, and now he sat in a sturdy chair near the fireplace, waiting for her. “Well, I have to find some kind of proof that even Cadmar will accept,” said Clement wearily as she sat down beside her old friend. “He treated me like an addle-pate, of course.”
“Of course,” said Gilly. “And if not for those ravens, I’d agree with the general. This is another puzzlement, Clem: you wonder why the storyteller did not try to flee; I wonder why the ravens want us to realize they are watching us.”
“Or why Medric wanted us to know the contents of his book.” “Or why a woman whose power can shift the very foundations of the land has done nothing at all for twenty years.”
“Well, as far as Cadmar is concerned, that inaction proves that she doesn’t exist.”
Gilly said quietly, “Cadmar can only imagine her as a general, like him. And you and I also have fallen into that error, up until now. But if we now imagine that this woman’s inaction has been intentional, then, suddenly, we must reconsider everything. When the old general sent a battalion to eliminate an entire people from the face of the earth, did he never once think that his actions might well be causing the very fate he intervened to prevent? Surely this Ashawala’i woman, this storyteller, has pursued our destruction for nearly six years becauseof what we did to her people.”
“Yes,” Clement said. She had considered this possibility so often that it had finally lost its ability to dismay her.
For a long time, the two of them sat side-by-side by the crackling flames as though they had nothing of importance to do. Clement, who for nearly a month had worried about the son she had abandoned to the care of a callow girl, allowed herself a little while to think of him. He did not seem much bigger; but would he be livelier now? Would he recognize her at all, or would he mistake the one who fed him for his mother?
Gilly had asked earlier what would happen to them. And now Clement wondered what would happen to her son, should the Lost G’deon exercise her destructive power as Willis claimed she would.
She said musingly, “My mother saved me and her flowers… but after all, she was merely running away from soldiers much like her, and she knew that a ship was waiting, and the tide was turning. All she had to do was reach the boat before the people chasing her did.”
Gilly said, “Welt, your problem is much more complicated. If you can confirm the storyteller’s identity, will that prove the Lost G’deon’s existence?”
Clement said sadly, “The storyteller will soon explain everything. She will not be able to help herself.”
“Don’t torture her,” Gilly said.
She looked at him—her monstrous friend, whose sympathy for this monstrous woman would only be more acute, now that he had an inkling of what her life had been like. She said, “One woman’s life gives us the lives of six thousand soldiers.”
“Exactly,” grated Gilly. “Her life, not her death. And after all she has survived, you won’t be able to frighten her with mere pain, not unless you torture her beyond recovery.”
“I must prove something, somehow!”
“Fine. Torture the storyteller, get your proof, win Cadmar’s approval… and what have you really gained? You’ve hardened the G’deon’s determination, and you’ve thrown away an extremely valuable hostage. I’m starting to think you areaddle-pated.”
“No, I’m cornered.”
“At this moment, it is only your thinking that is cornered.”
“Bloody hell, Gilly! Get me out of the corner, then!”
“Is it possible you will not—cannot—respond defensively to this threat? This seer, Medric, seems to think it’s possible.” Gilly stood up stiffly, and went to the lamp table to leaf through the crudely constructed little book that lay there.
Watching him, Clement felt a darkness descend on her. What if Medric’s book had been a weapon? And that weapon had reached its target: not her, not Cadmar, but the Shaftali man who advised them both? What if Medric had won Gilly’s heart?
Gilly found a page he had marked, and began to read out loud. Clement could hardly pay attention. But the words were rhythmic, the sentences clear. Dismayed as she was, Clement began to listen.
“‘What has always distinguished the Shaftali people is their hospitality. The great historians have written of it repeatedly: of the effort the Shaftali people go through, to treat every stranger as a member of the family. They say, perhaps rightly, that this tradition has an element of self interest, for to feed and shelter the homeless wanderer prevents crime and theft. But in fact this custom goes much deeper than self-interest.
“ ‘The Land of Shaftal is unforgiving, a place of harsh winters and brief summers, where sometimes only luck might decide the difference between death and survival. In such a brutal land, it seems the people should also become brutal. That once was the case, long ago, in the time of the first G’deon, Mackapee. But as Mackapee sat in his isolated cave by a peat fire, watching over his sheep, he imagined Shaftal as a community based on mercy. Kindness and generosity, he wrote, can never be earned and will never be deserved. Hospitality is not an act of justice, but of mercy—a mercy beneficial to everyone, by making it possible to depend on and trust each other.
‘“But now, Shaftal has again become a merciless place. I do believe the Sainnites more than deserve the destruction that even now bears down upon them. But the Shaftali people will one day regret that they allowed their land to be transformed by rage.’”
He interrupted himself. “Why are you looking so desperate?”
“Those farmers,” she said.
“Which farmers?”
“All of them! Seth, the woman with the vegetable seeds, the man who knew the Sainnites are refugees.”
“That is in the book.”
“That we don’t have families?”
“In the book.”
“Hell! I knew there was something ominous about those people’s behavior! They all had read the book!”
Clement had left Gilly in the dark, she realized, but in a moment he had achieved his own understanding and was saying, “They offered you hospitality, I gather. And you find it reasonable to conclude that the hospitality was actually threatening. Does it not occur to you that if Medric is with the Lost G’deon, and published this book with her consent, perhaps with her participation—”
“You wantto believe this man is sincere. And you want to believe that what he wrote, the G’deon agrees with.”
He looked at her a long time before he looked away and said regretfully, “I do want to.”
“But in fact they have much to gain by making us believe they don’t intend to destroy us. If we lower our defenses—”
“No, a G’deon is not a general! She does not think this way.”
“Whatever she is, that doesn’t change what I am. When my people landed here on the shores of Shaftal, perhaps we couldhave thrown ourselves on the mercy of the Shaftali people. But we made ourselves criminals instead! How will we escape that culpability, Gilly?”
Gilly shut the book and lay it down. For some time, he stood beside the bright flame of the lamp, with his ugly head bowed over the table. At last, he said quietly, “You were just a child, Clem. It was your elders, including your mother, who made the choices that made you a criminal. And now you have a son. What will you choose for him?”
The crackling of the fire seemed awfully loud. The scraping of Gilly’s cane on the floor made Clement flinch. She looked down at her sleeping son and felt the depth of what she had done to herself when she allowed him to be pu
t in her arms. How could she bequeath to this baby the violence and ostracism that shaped her life? How could she not bequeath it to him?
He lay very still. It seemed odd that he had not awakened yet. She opened the blanket to feel his chilly, flaccid hand.
“Gilly, stop blocking the lamplight!” Gilly hastily stepped back from the table.
She turned the baby so the light shone full on his face. The violet shadows that bruised his eyelids seemed stark and terrible. She had seen children who were sick unto death. She knew what it looked like.
Gilly came over to her. He looked into the baby’s face. He put an arm across her shoulders. Of all the clumsy, graceless actions Clement had seen him do over the years, this was by far the most awkward.
She pressed her face against his arm, which was all knotted with the muscle it took to support his ungainly body’s weight on the cane. “I’ll send for the midwife right away,” he said. “Listen,” he added desperately, perhaps fearful that Clement would weep. “If you’re a criminal, so am I. And I’ll gladly share your fate with you, if I can die your friend.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sometimes a babe just fails, the midwife said. The nurse’s milk is plentiful, but milk does no good if the child won’t suck. He was born early, and his mother died—such infants commonly don’t survive. The midwife gave Clement a cool glance. She seemed to think Clement should have expected this outcome.
Clement sent the midwife home.
The baby remained with his nurse in Clement’s quarters. Though Clement pursued business that was too urgent to wait, she forced herself to keep returning to make certain the frightened girl attempted to make the baby take the breast. Each time Clement returned, she took up her son, and held him, and watched the nearly indistinguishable movement of his breathing. Each time, she learned a new lesson in excruciating helplessness.
She could endure anything but hopeless waiting. That her urgency drove her out again into the bitter night seemed almost fortunate.
In the refectory, she talked to the night watch as those soldiers came on duty, and then to the much larger day watch as they came in for their evening meal. She found some soldiers who had been posted in South Hill, and in nearby Reece before that. They remembered the seer, Medric, quite vividly: a ridiculous, voluble little man, nearly blind without his spectacles, hopelessly bad at combat, and, reportedly, a drunk. Yet under his guidance the Sainnites in Reece had decimated the Paladins, and at first it had seemed they could do the same to the Paladins in South Hill. The informants agreed on the man’s practical incompetence, and doubted he could have survived as a deserter. It did not occur to them that such a man might get himself some powerful friends.
The ringing of the night bell customarily would have ended Clement’s inquiries for the day, but if she delayed until the dawn bell, Ellid would inevitably hear of her activities, and just as inevitably would ask Cadmar why Clement’s inquiries had not proceeded by the usual slow but methodical transfer from commander to captain to soldiers. Then Cadmar would certainly stop her investigation and might well relieve her of duty, for she was acting without orders.
Clement burst into barracks, roused the sleepers, dealt with the affronted company captains, and dismayed the soldiers with her urgent questions. By halfway to morning, Clement had spoken to all four hundred soldiers in combat companies, and also to the armorers, the cobblers, and the stable crew. It was in the stable that she finally found a man, the stable captain, who had participated in the attack on the Ashawala’i. A bow-legged man Clement’s age or older, he had been burned while rescuing horses from last summer’s fire, and after all these months the injury still kept him awake nights. In the back room of the newly built stable, he stoked the fire in the stove and set on top of it a rusty pot of what appeared to be treacle, though he claimed it was tea. He appeared to view Clement’s unprecedented visit as the opportunity for a leisurely chat to while away the night, and he was less than pleased when, upon learning that his duties had prevented him from attending any of the storyteller’s performances, she insisted that he immediately put on his coat and come to the gaol with her.
The night had gotten bitter cold. The deserted roadways, transformed to narrow passageways by the piled-up snow, offered a very slippery argument for the value of hobnailed boots. It was the kind of cold that silences speech, but Clement persisted with questions that the captain answered with chilled brevity.
He had witnessed the attack on the Ashawala’i from a distance. The Sainnites’ approach had been noticed in time for the tribal warriors to set up a defense, but the war horses had galloped right over them, and had herded the fleeing villagers into the second prong of a two-pronged attack. What followed was a bloody slaughter.
“So that was it?” Clement asked. “The Ashawala’i were all killed?”
“We certainly wished that were true. Some ten, twelve days it took us to get out of the mountains, and sometimes we feared not one of us would get out alive. They burned our supply wagons, drove our pack animals over a cliff, and shot a dozen pickets. That was just the first day.”
“How many survivors were there, do you think?”
“We didn’t know. We hardly saw them.”
“What did the people of this tribe look like?”
“Like racers: deep chests, light build, strong legs. It’s hard to even breathe in them mountains. And if you’re not grinding your way up a heartbreaking slope, you’re trying to keep from falling down one. Those people, they could run all day up and down those vicious ridges, and then they would sneak into our camp at night, and cut throats so quietly no one would even notice until fifteen or twenty soldiers were dead. It got so no one dared sleep.”
“They were fearsome, then. But what was their appearance?”
“Dark skin. Black hair: straight, coarse, long as a horse’s tail. Eyes the color of their skin. Their faces were sharp and narrow. Long, braided hair—dozens of braids, all knotted together.”
There was a silence while in her mind Clement compared this description to the storyteller, and found no difference but in the length of her hair—excepting that solitary braid.
The stable captain said, “You’re not thinking this storyteller is the one that was captured alive? Because I can tell you now, she’s not.”
“One of these warriors was captured alive?” she said in amazement.
“She lured us into a canyon, and then her companions dumped a mountain of rocks onto our heads. We pulled her out of the rocks, and it turned out she spoke Sainnese, so the commander thought she might be some use, and didn’t kill her.”
“Good gods, she spoke Sainnese? Would you recognize her, do you think?”
“I tell you, it’s not her. This warrior we captured, her back was broken. She was paralyzed—when they chopped off some of her toes she didn’t even flinch. And her skull was cracked, too, a kick from a war horse, probably. The medic figured she’d die any moment, but she was still alive when we reached the garrison. I don’t know what became of her, but she sure isn’t walking on her own two feet!”
They had reached the gaol. As they went through the ritual of recognition and admittance, Clement’s exhausted thoughts were overcome by a dreadful image of a woman warrior like herself__
maimed, broken, tormented by memories of a massacre—and yet alive. Then, Clement and the stable captain stood at the barred door of the gaol cell. Within, the storyteller sat awake, huddled in her cloak, gazing blankly into darkness. Clement held up the lantern so its light could enter through the grate. The stable captain peered in. He stumbled back. He gave Clement a look of terrified disbelief. “It’s her.”
In Clement’s bed the girl-nurse slept, puffy-eyed and tangle-haired, in a mess of blankets that testified to a terrible restlessness. She must have realized the child was sick, and was terrified even before she saw the storyteller arrested. But she had found a temporary peace now, and Clement left her alone. The baby, closely wrapped in his basket near the fire,
was still cold, still limp, still unresponsive, but still breathing. She talked to him softly and bid him farewell. An eventful, possibly dreadful day lay before her, and she doubted she would manage to see him alive again.
She left him in his basket, and went to Gilly’s room. Perhaps two hours remained before Cadmar would have reason to angrily summon her, and even the sight of Gilly’s sleeping face, gray and drawn with pain, could not make her wait to awaken him. She shook him. He opened his eyes, squinting in the lantern light. “You look like hell,” he mumbled.
She sat heavily in the chair by his bed. “I’ll help you to get up. I don’t even know where to look for your aide at this hour.”
“Give me some time to wake up, or I’ll just fall over. How is the baby?”
“I doubt he’ll survive the morning.”
He sighed.
“Gilly, what do you know about earth magic? How does it work? What can it do?”
“Earth magic?” Gilly rubbed his face with one hand. “It is physical—a physical power with a physical existence. It inhabits the flesh of the earth bloods, and it flows out of them through physical contact. Whatever earth witches do, they do it with their hands.‘
“Are earth bloods healers?”
“Yes, people with earth talent might be healers, farmers, stone masons, artisans of any type.”
“Could an earth witch heal a broken back that had caused paralysis?”
Gilly’s painful effort of sitting up was excruciating to watch. He finally said, “I doubt it. I don’t know what the limits are, but surely something so dramatic would be talked about.”
“Could a G’deon?”
“A G’deon?” Gilly considered. “Yes, it seems possible.”
Clement said, “Well then, the proof of the Lost G’deon’s existence, and the proof of the storyteller’s identity may all be written down, in a document that even Cadmar can read.”
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