“Right,” Clement said, in a daze of exhaustion.
Ellid looked gravely down at her. “You sure managed to look like you knew what you were doing out there.”
“You know bloody well it was a blind charge.”
“That’s a secret between you and me, General. The soldiers think you’re some kind of magician who pulled a truce out of the teeth of disaster. And that’s exactly what they need to be thinking.”
“Oh, hell,” Clement said. “You mean I have to continue this pretense?”
Ellid’s grin was more than half a grimace. The door opened, and this time the cold air smelled like a bakery. A crowd of people, some soldiers and some not, carried in the storyteller, with the little girl riding behind on her father’s shoulders, crying imperiously at them to be careful and vehemently waving a painted lizard in the air.
A soldier deposited a glorious basket of marvelous bread in Clement’s lap. Ellid said, “My lost cook gave me a distracted greeting, and promises that soup, meat, pies, and other fine foods are soon to follow the bread. If you want to make an old woman happy, you’ll think of a way to make him a soldier again!”
She left to look after the garrison.
Clement breathed in the scent of the bread. She picked up a round loaf and the warmth was almost painful on her numbed fingers. She tore off a piece, and the crust shattered, and the interior let out a cloud of exquisite steam. At last, she took a bite and let out a small moan. The cold fled from her flesh, but the pain revived: face, shoulder, hip, muscle. She had been smashed, bruised, broken, depleted, and worn out by these momentous days and nights, and it seemed only right that this should be the case.
She forced herself to stand up and walk over to the one person in the room whose condition was worse than hers. The storyteller had been deposited on the hearth with a much-worn coat over her shoulders and the red-cheeked little girl tucked under her arm. The child noticed Clement’s approach and said with hostility, “It’s another one of those soldiers.”
The storyteller slowly looked up at Clement. Her dark skin had turned gray with cold, her lips blue. Her muscles were still spasming with shivers. Apparently, the cold of the unheated gaol had nearly killed her before the execution squad even arrived. Clement squatted down beside her, knees cracking, muscles quivering. She proffered the basket. “Warm bread?”
The storyteller said, “Do you truly think I will break bread with you?”
Clement instinctively jerked back, lost her tenuous balance, and nearly dropped the basket in the effort to catch herself. Even the man who was unstrapping the woman’s boots looked shocked. “Zanja—!”
“Why are you so mad?” the little girl asked nervously.
Clement set the bread basket securely on the floor. “Zanja na’Tarwein?”
As the woman glared, the man said politely, “Yes, General, she has been restored.”
So this was the one Clement had feared: who had survived a skull fracture, a broken back, torture, and imprisonment; who had emerged from a valley populated by corpses determined to exterminate the killers of her people; who had suborned both the Sainnite Medric and the Paladin Emil; who had not merely found the Lost G’deon but had won her love; and who had finally sundered her very soul… all for the sake of—revenge?
“I’ll just leave the basket here,” Clement said. Feeling truly battered, she gathered herself to rise, but simply could not do it.
“General, you’re hurt! Let me help you,” said the man.
Zanja said, “No, J’han.”
“It is not right—”
“Brother healer, heed me!”
Apparently perceiving something that Clement could not, the man sat back on his heels, restraining his reflexive kindness with an obvious effort. Less than a year ago, a person of his generosity and knowledge had taught the Sainnites how to save themselves from the plague. Perhaps it had in fact been this very man. Unfortunately, not all Shaftali were like him.
When Clement looked at the silent warrior, she looked into the other face of Shaftal: unbowed, unforgiving. Every attempt to overcome the people had not merely increased their resentment, but also their ability to resist. Clement’s acts, and the actions of all the soldiers like her, had created this unrelenting enemy and all the enemies like her. With a great deal of effort they could be killed, but they could not be eliminated.
“What do you want from me?” Clement asked in Sainnese.
The warrior replied in the same language. “You took no risk when you put yourself at the G’deon’s mercy. Karis is so fearful of doing harm that she has repeatedly refused to act at all. You had good reason to expect only generosity.”
Clement protested, “My desire for peace is sincere! Ask that Truthken—”
“If you misrepresented your intentions in her presence you would not be alive now. But sincerity is not enough.” Zanja na’Tarwein was speaking with an effort, yet her words were like the storyteller’s: precise and devastating.
Clement urgently wished that she could get away from her. But she could not. “What wouldbe enough?” she asked. “If I offered you as many soldiers to kill as we killed in your village—”
“It would not be enough.”
“If I had the power to undo the past—”
“You could not help but undo the marvelous along with the despicable.”
The weight of those words, the horror of them, felt unendurable. Clement’s eyes were burning—a general does not weep! Yet she spoke, inadequately, words that broke even as she uttered them. “What my people did to yours wasdespicable. I am sorry—desperately sorry.”
There was a silence. The warrior took a breath and looked away, as though she also were fighting tears. Suddenly, she did not seem terrible at all. She said, “The valley of my people is populated by nothing but bones. The memories of their deaths will haunt me until the day of my own death. But your sorrow—like my sorrow—is not enough.”
“Then nothing can be enough.”
The katrimlooked at her. “If that is true, then lasting peace is impossible. Nothing has been gained today.”
Dread replaced the last remains of Clement’s relief as she realized how truly Zanja na’Tarwein had spoken. So many people had been wronged, over so many years! Somehow, reparations mustbe made, or the peace of words would never become a peace of fact. Yet Clement had nothing to offer Shaftal. Nothing.
Surely seven thousand Sainnite soldiers was not nothing!
As sometimes happens in extreme exhaustion, Clement felt a hallucinatory clarity. She understood exactly what must be done.
She said, “If my people become Shaftali, would that be enough?”
The last survivor of the Ashawala’i people turned her harshly beautiful, starkly alien face to her. “You will offer them to Shaftal?”
Every stupidity of the last thirty-five years had come from the Sainnites’ unwillingness and inability to change. Certainly they had not been welcomed, permitted, or encouraged to belong in Shaftal. But neither had they tried to be anything other than conquerors. To attempt it now might be so difficult it verged on the impossible, and might take the rest of Clement’s life to achieve. But wasn’t her only other option to take Cadmar’s well-trodden road, a coward’s way of self-induced oblivion and obstinacy, to delude her people with visions of heroism as she marched them to destruction?
Clement said, half to herself, “I must do better than merely preserve the past. For I have a son.” She looked up at Zanja. “So even if I fail at everything else, I will offer myself to Shaftal. And though I fear I won’t live long enough to see this promise fulfilled, I’ll do all I can to transform my seven thousand soldiers as well.”
And then Clement felt sick with disorientation—giddy, grief-struck, light-headed—and the man had leapt up to steady her, to help her get securely seated on the floor, to bow her head between her knees until the nauseating dizziness had lifted. When her ears had stopped roaring and the cloud of her vision had cleared, Clement cau
tiously lifted her head.
“I am satisfied,” said Zanja. Her spasms of shivering had eased. The little girl was saying to her irritably, “You talk funny! Why are you doing that?” The man spoke soothingly to the child as he returned to his examination of Zanja’s feet. “You Ashawala’i are a sturdy folk,” he commented.
Zanja reached for one of the loaves of bread and tore it in half. She said to the child in Shaftalese, “I have been speaking with General Clement in the soldiers’ language, Little Hurricane. Look— here is some jam in this basket. Do you want some on your bread?”
With the restless child successfully distracted by bread and jam, Zanja gave Clement a serious look. “I will eat with you now,” she said, and handed Clement the remains of the loaf. With the crisp crunching softly in her teeth she added, “I am a crosser of boundaries …”
It sounded so like the storyteller’s opening ritual words, I am a collector of tales,that Clement rubbed her face in bafflement.
“To cross is my calling—my curse—”
“Your gift!” protested the healer.
Zanja smiled wryly. “That also. And my joy.”
“I thought your curse was telling stories,” said Clement.
“The storyteller is gone,” said the healer. “Zanja doesn’t even remember her.”
“Medric says the storyteller was killed—that she had asked to be killed. She must have known that she had completed her task.” Zanja brushed breadcrumbs from her fine wool clothing. Clement watched her knife-scarred hand in dazed fascination. Did this woman not remember doing up those silver buttons? Did she not know how she came to be in Watfield garrison? Did she remember none of the stories she had been told? She seemed remarkably composed for a person who had awakened to find the walls falling down around her.
A crosser of boundaries, Clement thought, might be accustomed to such abrupt and inexplicable transitions—accustomed enough that she could mask her disorientation as effectively as Clement could mask her fear.
Zanja glanced at Clement, still smiling wryly. “Even to my kinfolk I always seemed peculiar,” she said. “But I might be a useful friend to you, General.”
“Gods of my mother!”
The little girl, jam-smeared, looked worriedly at Clement.
“Zanja surprised me,” Clement explained to her. “Your mother is a very surprising person.”
The girl said, “But she just wants to be your friend. Why, Zanja?”
Zanja stroked a hand affectionately down the child’s tangled hair. “She needs a friend to teach her how to be Shaftali.”
“She won’t be a soldier any more?”
“Maybe she’ll be a different kind of soldier.”
“I do need your help,” Clement began.
Zanja interrupted her. “In Shaftal, no one’s judgment overrules the judgment of a Truthken—except the G’deon’s, of course—for a Truthken represents the law. Therefore, General—”
“Won’t you be one of the people who calls me Clement?”
“Yes, Clement. I advise you to do whatever Norina tells you to do.”
Clement turned her head and found the Truthken standing beside her. The woman gave Zanja a keen look, then, in a swift glance at the healer, seemed to ask and receive an answer to a question. She turned to Clement and said, “General, Karis has asked to speak to you.”
“Of course,” said Clement.
She was able to stand and began to follow the Truthken, but then turned back to clasp Zanja’s hand in farewell.
“You are becoming a Shaftali already,” said Zanja na’Tarwein. In the black center of her dark eyes there was a flame.
While Clement had been preoccupied, the room had become crowded: soldiers and Paladins in what appeared to be equal numbers were standing against the walls. The Paladins, all of whom seemed to possess extraordinarily graceful manners, were attempting to engage the uncomprehending soldiers in conversation. In the center of the room, the G’deon’s people formed a constantly loosening and tightening knot around Karis, who was kneeling at Gilly’s feet with his hands clasped in hers. No one appeared to find her behavior unusual.
Herme hurried over when she beckoned him. “Tell your people to ask the Paladins to teach them Shaftalese,” she said.
Herme managed to maintain his bland countenance. “Yes, General.”
The Truthken murmured, “Watch Karis, General. See how he refuses, she insists—there, it’s over already.”
Karis had risen. Her big hands stroked down the twisted, hunched line of Gilly’s back. Then, she stood talking to him casually, with a hand on his shoulder. Clement’s cynical old friend stared up at Karis with an expression of bedazzled adoration.
Clement said, “Very instructive. But I think I’ve already studied that lesson.”
The Truthken said, “Save yourself some trouble, then. Ask her what Shaftal needs of you, and promise to do whatever she says. Call her by name, look her in the eye—though it makes your neck hurt—and don’t mince words.”
“I will. Thank you.”
Clement wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers, and stepped forward to clasp the G’deon’s hand. “Karis, what have you done to my friend?”
She replied blandly, “Nothing, really. I just made his back stop hurting.”
Well, for her perhaps it was nothing,thought Clement. By the gods, the woman was big, and wildly disordered, as though she had come in from a storm wind and had not yet caught her breath. But her devastatingly gentle handclasp was still warm. “I thought we should discuss Shaftal,” she said, as though the problems they faced could be dispensed with in a single conversation.
“Karis, I want my people to become Shaftali. Do you think that would be possible?”
Karis gave her a very surprised look, then cast an amazed glance at the Truthken, who said dryly, “Zanja is already doing what she does best.”
“Oh,” said Karis. Her face crinkled up as though she were suppressing a sneeze—no, a laugh—and she said with exaggerated disgust, “Fire logic!”
“Oh ho!” cried the peculiar little man in spectacles. He peered at Clement with intense curiosity, as though he could scarcely wait to see what she did next. Councilor Mabin, who remained excessively upright under these very strange circumstances, gave the little man a look of withering disapproval—a wasted effort.
Clement bent to mutter in Gilly’s ear, “You’ve never looked at me the way you were looking at Karis.”
“Of course not, Clem. You never deserved it.” He added, straight-faced, “Has anything important happened?”
Gabian announced his presence with a loud yelp. Clement lifted him out of his basket, and he flapped his arms enthusiastically. “Don’t make me giddy,” she admonished him. “Gilly’s obviously lost his mind, and one of us must keep a clear head.”
Karis held out her big hands, and Clement put her son into them. Competently cradled, Gabian blinked at Karis with dim-witted devotion.
Then Emil pushed his way in, assured Clement that they all certainly hoped the Sainnites could become Shaftali, and introduced Medric, who said cheerfully, “I imagine you hoped you’d never hear of me again. What did you make of that cow farmer, eh?”
“Watch out,” Karis interjected. “You are completely surrounded by dangerous busybodies.”
Clement suddenly had to sit down again: she was so dizzy with trying not to laugh, and her face hurt abominably. Karis sat next to her with Gabian in the crook of her arm. So gently that Clement could hardly feel it, Karis nudged Clement’s broken nose into better alignment. The pain went completely away.
So the seven of them sat knee-to-knee, passing Gabian from lap to lap, arguing vehemently about what to do next. Medric said that transforming Sainnites into Shaftali was possible but not easy, for they would have to neither hurt the soldiers’ pride or arouse the Shaftali anger. The Truthken reminded them that it was human nature to escalate conflicts and hold grudges. Emil thought they might counter old bitterness with intelligence, in
sight, hope, good will, generosity, self-interest, education, and wisdom.
“And coercion,” Clement said.
“Persuasion,” said Karis.
“Oh, persuasion,” said Medric. “Like iron before your hammer? That kind of persuasion?”
“I doubt it will be that easy,” said Karis.
Clement said, “If my people aren’t attacked or forced to go hungry, they’ll follow my orders—for a time. But eventually I’ve got to win their consent, not just their obedience. I think it’s the same problem you’ve got, Karis, only worse. I have to give them a reason to surrender the only thing they’re proud of, in exchange for something they’ve always scorned. Right now, I’ve got no idea how to do that.”
Medric peered at her and said, quite unnervingly, “The same way it happened to you, General.”
So Clement found herself thinking what had happened, really: the plague, Alrin, the fire, Kelin’s death, the kidnapped children, the storyteller, Davi’s rescue, Seth’s embrace, Gabian’s birth, Medric’s book, Willis’s death, Cadmar’s fist, and the madness of the last two days. Each situation had been accidental or unpredictable, yet together they had changed her, so that when Zanja insisted that she confront the last, radical truth, she had been prepared to do so. Clement shut her eyes, pressing her fingers against her eyelids, trying to remember the storyteller’s glyph card pattern. In the middle, there had been a wall. A pile-up of images leaned against it, one after another.
“The wall fell down,” Clement said.
“Ho!” cried Medric triumphantly. “Exactly!”
Emil put a restraining hand on the giddy man’s knee. “By the land, General, you do astonish me. You would not believe how many nights we spent studying those cards.”
“Which cards?” asked Zanja. Supported by the healer at one side and the child at the other, she was standing shakily at the edge of their close-crowded circle. As they hastily put Zanja in the chair the Truthken vacated for her, Gilly produced the storyteller’s card pack out of a pocket. She accepted the cards as if they were old friends she had feared lost, but gave him a puzzled look.
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