Air Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  The main body of Sainnites was encamped at the edge of the forest. This Seth told Chaen, after Chaen had startled her greatly by embracing her.

  “You don’t look like you got much sleep.”

  “I spent the night sitting upright with water soaking my trousers. Is that a mushroom in your hair?”

  They stood laughing, poking fun at each other’s disarray.

  Seth said, “That emptiness in you doesn’t seem as empty.”

  “I hoped I would find my son,” said Chaen, “and I did. I remember his face, and his voice, and a feeling.”

  “But it might have been easier if you had not remembered. That boy of yours is being pursued by the law and power of Shaftal.”

  “And he’s pursued by his mother,” Chaen said.

  For a while everyone did what was necessary, and some even did what they enjoyed. They climbed the trees and shouted the measurements of the wrecked air ship to a Paladin who, with a rock for a desk, noted them on a sketch. At the same time, they salvaged parts of the ship and sail and tossed them down to Karis, who made of them an ingenious litter for Emil. From the single pot, Garland served tea, then porridge, then tea again, until all the food Zanja had stolen from the air sailors had been eaten, and even the tea tin was empty.

  Emil was heavier than he looked; the litter bearers were weary when they started, and what they traveled through was no woodland but a nightmare. With Medric assigned to carry only himself, Kamren had sorted the rest of them into teams of three: two teams to carry Emil while one team rested. But without help, Medric could not go two paces without falling or becoming entangled. And even six people working together could not easily thread a man through, over, or under the branches, limbs, and trunks of fallen trees. Soon Emil was the only one who had not lost his temper.

  The long summer morning had become afternoon when Chaen, who was taking a turn at leading the way, leaned her weight on a stiff branch to widen the passage, felt it snap, and fell into the arms of the Sainnite general who was waiting there with a dozen burly soldiers. Chaen said fervently, “I’m very glad to see you, General Clement!”

  “How peculiar that must feel,” Clement replied

  Karis had sent the dogs ahead with a note to Clement written with pen and paper borrowed from a Paladin, wrapped in a strip of the flying ship’s silk, and tied around Feldspar’s neck. Seth said, “Feldspar is a follower. With Granite in front, that gave Feldspar some protection, so the note wouldn’t be ripped . . .”

  Chaen said, “The note reached Clement, and she knew to come meet us, and it was a success.”

  Seth’s shirt was wet, limp, and filthy, and she had tied the tails in knots so they wouldn’t catch in the brambles. Her eyes were red with sleeplessness; her weathered, sagging face looked like it might tear up like a rag if she smiled. “We earth bloods do carry on about how things work.”

  “Sensible effort solves problems. It is a soothing fact.”

  “It’s an obvious fact.”

  “Not in my life.”

  “Your life is out of balance, then.”

  “It certainly has not had enough earth in it.” Chaen had taken Seth’s arm, without thinking about it. “And I find myself liking that soldier of yours.”

  “What, because Clement shows up and gets things done?”

  “That’s a virtue. I never imagined I would ever see virtue in a Sainnite!”

  The path narrowed, they crossed a brook by balancing on stones, and she and Seth were separated. After a while Kamren was walking beside her. “Karis tells me your son is traveling west. But you are traveling east.”

  “That is true, Master Paladin.”

  He scratched his chin, where his beard was sprouting, more gray than brown. Brambles had snagged his woolen waistcoat, and his shirt was torn open at the shoulder seam. The bottle of wind that he carried at his waist had lost many of its decorative shells. His boots seemed to be made of mud. “What does this mean?” he asked.

  Fire people’s tendency to perceive significance where there was none could be irritating. “It means you don’t have to chase me.”

  “That’s good of you.” Truth is, I’m becoming convinced of some things that make me want to stay with you. But I suppose I’ll have to make some kind of decision eventually.”

  Kamren considered for a time. “What I have to tell you would be said far better by Emil. But I must do the best that I can. Saugus, Maxew, and your friends, possibly all the friends you have, pose a grave danger to Shaftal. So long as they require our time and resources in dealing with them, Shaftal cannot recover from this awful history.”

  “But I don’t have to choose one side and betray the other.”

  “Because there are no sides? You see that now? But those people who do think there are sides will call you a traitor.”

  They took two more steps, or three, certainly no more than four, and even at their slow and shuffling pace not much time passed. Yet Chaen felt like she had traveled a far distance. “I should make some Paladin friends, then, because they don’t make people choose sides.”

  “You have a Paladin friend,” he said.

  “And I’ll accept your friendship gladly! But you have killed people, like I have. You, Clement, Seth, all of you, have killed, or may have killed, my friends. And I have killed yours. Can we forget that?”

  “My friend of twenty years was standing watch at the door of Travesty and was the first one assassinated by your friends. We were trading a book back and forth, and she was reading it that night, and now I can’t bear to finish it.” Then he said, “But if I killed even one person because she was killed, I would dishonor that friendship, and she would tell me so. She would tell me that our war with the Sainnites began long before the Fall of the House of Lilterwess. When they first came to Shaftal, we used coarse tools to separate ourselves from the strangers who were seeking refuge on our coast, and that is how the war began. But even after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess, my friend would say, we should have remembered that it was our duty to know the difference between alliance and truth.”

  Her glance caught him rubbing his eyes on a sleeve that wanted mending as badly as it wanted washing. He said, “What a maddening life it is, to be committed to a way of living while also remaining open to all possibilities.”

  “That way seems impossible, actually.”

  “It’s possible if I embrace uncertainty. Your old leader, Willis, when he served under Emil in South Hill Company, was always at odds with him because Willis knew his purpose while Emil lived in doubt. Eventually, both of them found a G’deon to follow. Willis found her in a dream, a G’deon who confirmed his beliefs and fulfilled his desire. Emil found her in reality and every day struggled beside her, in humbling uncertainty, to serve the land. Both Willis and Emil chose a G’deon, but Willis found what he wanted, and Emil was surprised by what he never expected.”

  “I never believed in Willis’s G’deon, and I respected Saugus because he didn’t believe in her either. I thought this meant he was a man of principle rather than superstition.”

  “No doubt he is a man of principle,” said Kamren. “But they are the wrong principles.”

  Chapter 38

  At the edge of the woods, the Sainnites had made an orderly and organized camp. There the soldiers, in scattered teams, were practicing a peculiar sort of fighting, with one soldier in each group using weapons to fight all the others, whose hands were empty. The scuffles often ended with jokes and laughter, and sometimes with all of them rolling in the dirt. Many lines of laundered clothing flapped like funeral flags in the sunshine, and a giant stewpot bubbled over with suds, into which a limping old soldier tossed Chaen’s dirty shirt. The Paladins who had returned from the woods were bathing and shaving; Karis was pulling on a clean shirt; Emil was being walked like a puppet between two soldiers toward the latrines; and Seth changed the baby’s diap
ers. Chaen wanted to lie down and sleep, but instead she found her knapsack and sat down to sketch the pictures she had been carrying in her memory.

  There was a convergence: Garland with a pot—tea, probably; Seth singing to the good-tempered baby; Kamren looking nearly cheerful as he buttoned a fresh shirt; the general, her captains surrounding and then departing from her. Karis had knelt in the shade by a blanket on which Norina unrolled a very large map, and around this the people were gathering. Chaen heard someone calling, noticed Medric wandering confusedly among the trees, and with much effort got up and limped over to him.

  “It’s Chaen,” she said, not knowing if he was too blind to recognize her.

  He took her arm. “Did you see that Emil can walk a little, although he’s very weak? Garland should make him some of his special porridge.”

  Medric’s filthy shirt was shredding at the hem. His sunburned face had peeled, and the peeled places had been sunburned again. He limped as painfully as the old soldier who slowly and stiffly hung the laundry out to dry. “The cards Zanja cast for you,” he said. “Do you remember the one that showed a young man carrying an old man on his back?”

  In that illustration, the young man walked naked and barefoot on a steep and stony path, but the old man was magnificently robed, and the pattern of the fabric blended with the background of trees, hills, clouds, and sky. The young man’s tongue hung out, and his hair stood around his head in a tangle. The old man’s face was serene.

  “The Wisdom That Must Be Carried,” said Chaen.

  “Oh, I like that name! Do you know, some Paladins are fretting that if we think of new meanings for the glyphs to replace the old, then the lost knowledge will continue to be lost. But how did the old meanings come to be known, anyway? People who were like us studied the illustrations for the first time, as we are doing, and decided what to call them.”

  “What were you going to say about that illustration?” Chaen asked, possibly with too much patience.

  “The card-casting didn’t reveal your future only. Your question was not just What should I do? It also was What must we do? For you have become a member of this company, and your future is our future. All of us must carry the burden of wisdom, and that burden will be horribly heavy.”

  “Like carrying Emil.”

  “We will carry him, though—and many others as well.”

  Her heart sank. “But I can scarcely carry myself.”

  “That may be true. Yet you’re carrying me.” As if to prove his point, he leaned more heavily on her arm.

  At the group that clustered around Karis and the map, many now were sipping hot tea.

  “Is that a map?” asked Medric. “What does it look like?”

  Chaen said, “It is very intricate. The coastline is like a frayed hem at Karis’s knees. The forest is within her reach. The Shimasal Road is a straight line from left to right.”

  Responding to a question, Karis pointed at a place in the forest, saying, “The air ship crashed there.”

  Chaen murmured to Medric, “A Paladin’s outspread hand is serving as a desk for a pen and ink stone. Norina is marking the place on the map.”

  “Where is the storm-wrack?” someone asked.

  Chaen told Medric, “Karis is showing an area with her fingertip, and Norina is marking it with a pen. The southern point is about a quarter of the way between Shimasal and the crossroad, and the northern point is about halfway. The storm didn’t affect any cities or villages, but it destroyed many furlongs of forest.”

  Watching the Truthken carefully annotate the already much-annotated document, it occurred to Chaen that Norina’s entire life was mapped there, on the landscape of the country she served. Karis took an iron bolt out of her pocket and placed it in the area of storm-wrack, perhaps halfway between the shipwreck and the road. She said, “Maxew and his companion are here, heading westward. I imagine they’re trying to reach the road.”

  Norina said, “Can you tell us anything about his companion? Now that you have seen him through Zanja’s eyes?” Something in her tone made the listeners shift uneasily. Weary though the Truthken certainly was, she still focused on the two fleeing criminals with the eagerness of a dog chasing a rabbit.

  Karis said, “It’s the man who met Chaen at the tide clock.”

  All turned to Chaen, except the Truthken who continued to examine the map. When she averted her unsettling gaze, Chaen realized, it was a kind of politeness.

  Chaen said, “His name is Tashar. He’s a scion of a great house—of Hanishport—but I don’t know which one. Perhaps it’s him who watched us through the peephole.”

  “Lora, no doubt.” Norina rubbed her eyes with rough, impatient cruelty. “Perhaps he imported the snake poison.”

  Chaen said, although it probably didn’t matter, “When Saugus recruited Tashar, he had abandoned his family and become a thief. Sometime later, Tashar returned home to his family, and after that we no longer needed to beg for money.”

  “The House of Lora gave money to Death-and-Life?” asked Karis.

  “Well, I assume he stole it from them.”

  Norina said, “Medric, is it possible that these two young men will lead us to Saugus?”

  “They lack vision,” said Medric.

  Everyone looked sharply at him, and Kamren even smiled and said, “So do we all, Master Seer.”

  “Yes, but this blind man knows when he is blind, and so has carefully chosen which guide to follow. Zanja, she has the vision.”

  “Well then,” said Norina, “Where is Zanja?”

  Karis took another bolt and stood it on its head on the map. “There. She’s going south and west. I don’t know why.”

  Chaen said, for Medric’s sake, “Zanja is nearly beyond the storm-wrack at the southern edge.” She added, “How can she continue to move at that pace with so little rest?”

  “By earth and fire,” said Medric.

  Karis said, “She wept over Emil. She seemed to believe he was lost. She loves him dearly, as she loved her brother who was killed in front of her when he tried to save her life after the massacre. Perhaps she thinks they are the same person, and her brother is killed again. Perhaps she isn’t following a vision and is merely deranged. I don’t know.”

  The cook spoke. “Karis, must we decide at this moment what to do next? I think you should rest!”

  She looked at him. He stared fearlessly back.

  “Garland is correct,” said Kamren. “And since it seems that you are driving Zanja even as she is driving you, can’t you stop her, so that both of you can rest?”

  “Oh, no,” Medric said. “Don’t do that. It’s a terrible idea. Emil would say so!”

  Karis looked at the seer, apparently puzzled by the configuration of advisors that surrounded her.

  But Norina said dryly, “How many people are required to make one Emil? Is twelve the answer?”

  “Counting you and Clement, it’s fourteen,” said Kamren.

  “So few?” Karis wiped her filthy face on her ragged shirttail. “Where is Zanja going, Master Seer?”

  Medric said, “I can’t see the map, but I’m sure the answer is easy to determine. If she was shot from the shipwreck like an arrow, what would she hit?”

  The cook, Garland, bent over to lay his spoon on the map, with the bowl at the shipwreck and the handle pointing past the arrow that was Zanja. The map was crowded with details—perhaps not every building and tree in Shaftal, but a good many of them. The area ahead of Zanja contained a scattering of hills with farms flowing between them like rivers. One hill, on the far side of the Shimasal Road, was marked with a few words written in red.

  “To the House of Lilterwess,” said Kamren.

  “Shaftal’s broken heart,” said another Paladin, perhaps a poet.

  Norina said, “A rubble-covered hilltop.”

  “The Sham
e of the Sainnites,” said Clement. She knelt, and Chaen noticed jealously that her trousers were clean. She rotated Garland’s spoon so the handle still pointed at the ruin, but now the bowl lay at the eastern edge of the forest. “We are around here, yes? So we can reach the ruin without going through the storm-wrack.”

  Norina said, “But we must follow the criminals. To do anything else is a disservice to Shaftal. And we don’t have any idea why Zanja is going to the ruin. But Maxew and Tashar may lead us to Saugus.”

  The Paladins murmured to each other, until one said, “Madam Truthken, we Paladins must follow Zanja. But we could divide the company and go both directions.”

  The general replied, “We could, but there’s a cost. If Saugus has as few as thirty followers with him, our divided company won’t outnumber him by enough soldiers to capture them without bloodshed.”

  Garland added, “And two supply lines is unworkable.”

  Seth said, “Our numbers will be further diminished anyway, since many of us can barely walk. To catch up with Zanja, we’ll have to run.”

  “Who can’t walk will be carried,” Clement said.

  Many of them looked at her, mostly in disbelief. Chaen, having heard Medric say those same words just a short while earlier, looked at him sharply.

  Clement spoke in the soldier’s language. Garland began to speak, and hesitated. “What the general said is difficult to say in Shaftalese.”

  Medric said, “Her word refers to a kind of honor that is an aspect of a way of living, a path. If you consider Sainnites to be a kind of order, then you might call it The Way of Soldiers. The Sainnites carry each other, and that is both their pride and their wisdom.”

  One Paladin hastily took out a sheet of paper and began to write on it, using another’s back as a table, apparently adding Clement’s word and Medric’s explanation to their dictionary.

  Norina said, “The way of soldiers dictates that no one be abandoned?”