Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “There is no choice,” the raven said.

  Mabin turned to Norina, who read an honest desperation there. “Will she give up Shaftal to Willis, rather than give up her anger against me? Will you knowingly allow her to do so? And will even Emil fail to intervene? Does every one of Karis’s followers think loyalty must be blind?”

  “We are not her followers, and we argue with her and with each other incessantly. I don’t know what Emil would advise Karis, but he certainly would disagree with you about the way you have conceived these choices. We air bloods are always drawing neat lines through everything, as though dividing good from bad and right from wrong were a simple business. So when I first began to live with three fire bloods, I feared their chaos of possibilities would drive me insane! My companions live courageously, in doubt and loss and desperate uncertainty, and I’ve come to tolerate their thinking, and even to admire it sometimes. But your way, Councilor, is too simple. If Karis refuses to restore the old order, and also refuses to embrace the warmongers, why does that mean she has no other options?”

  There was a silence. Mabin said, “I used to have arguments just like this with Harald. Might as well argue with a wall. Shout all I want, the wall is unmoved.” She turned away as though to leave the room, and then turned back. “Karis is the hope of Shaftal. How can she refuse?”

  Norina said wearily, “When I was young and knew no better, I delivered Karis to you, and betrayed her without knowing it by pressuring her into obedience. I am fortunate that she forgave me for it. But she is in her full power now, and even I don’t know exactly what that means. Only a fool would trifle with her—and I am not a fool any more.”

  “I’m not asking you to betray her, just to remind her,” Mabin said. “When the day comes that she can leave her bitterness against me behind, remind her that I said I would acknowledge her.”

  “I will remind her, Mabin, though a reminder will not be necessary.”

  When Councilor Mabin had left the room, taken her leave of the farmers, and ridden off with her attendants down the muddy road, Norina said to the raven, “I had to promise Mabin something, or I would not have gotten rid of her. Are you still hungry, raven?”

  The raven flew away with a sausage roll in its beak. Norina tossed her cold tea out the window and poured a fresh cup, but then she sat without drinking it. She was expected in a nearby town to judge an accused murderer—and, if necessary, to execute him. But she was considering what a relief it would have been to her, had Karis simply accepted Mabin’s offer. And then she considered how little she would admire Karis had she accepted.

  Chapter 5

  Zanja’s clan brother, Ransel, had been dead for years, yet every day she missed him. They had been born in the same lodge within a month of each other, and as infants they had nursed at the same breasts and slept in the same cradle. Inseparable as children, they remained scandalously close into adulthood, and the gossips were always examining Zanja’s shape, hoping to be the first to discover that she was concealing an incestuous pregnancy. The na’Tarwein clan, a fire clan, was mostly known for its skilled, artistic rug weavers. Only occasionally did the clan produce a person like Zanja whose elemental talent, and the confirmation of the owl god Salos’a, destined her to be a crosser of boundaries. But Ransel also had become a katrim, and served the raven god—Raven in his trickster aspect, for Ransel’s relentlessly lighthearted delight in the world had seemed inextinguishable. Nearly six years after the Sainnites killed Ransel, what Zanja remembered most vividly was his wide grin and his loud laugh—both rather shocking among a people of such emotional restraint.

  Zanja had survived without him—a bereaved twin, uncertain how to know herself without her alternate self to measure by. And then she met Emil. Now Shaftali people, whose big, loose families accommodated every kind of coupling imaginable, occasionally referred to Emil as Zanja’s husband—which startled and embarrassed her, but inspired Emil to laugh. He’d say, “We fire bloods are always arguing about words because they’re so inadequate. That’s a good example: husband.”

  After five years with Emil as her commander, teacher, father, brother, and friend, Zanja could predict both what he would say and what he would be thinking. During their long summer separations, Zanja conversed with Emil in her imagination, and would discover, months later, that Emil remembered those talks as though they had actually occurred.

  Now she plodded through thick mud in a merciless rain, with J’han suffering silently behind her, and Karis finding the way by dead reckoning through a woodland of sparse trees and dishearteningly dense thickets. Karis often resorted to simply forcing through the bushes, dragging Zanja and J’han behind her. Thorn-pricked, twig-scratched, rain-soaked, mud-coated, unspeakably weary, the three of them were about to chase the springtime plague right out of Shaftal.

  “You’re crossing the boundary,” Emil commented in Zanja’s head.

  “A boundary of thornbushes,” Zanja responded crabbily. “Another one. And another one after that.”

  “No one ever promised it would be easy.”

  Ahead of Zanja, Karis had paused to sense the land ahead, stretching to her full height to see over an obstacle. Zanja was too exhausted to trouble to identify.

  Emil said, in that quiet way of his, “She seems so ordinary.”

  “In all these months, no one has paid her much heed, other than to remark on her size and strength. She goes steadily from one task to the next, until the impossible project is completed. Her persistence is what is supernatural. Her imperviousness is what’s supernatural—her imperviousness to discouragement, her strength of will.”

  “These qualities are both admirable and maddening,” commented Emil. “What do you think she’ll do next?”

  “I don’t know! She wants to serve the land as she is serving it. But Shaftal needs a leader, not a servant.”

  “Does it?” Emil said thoughtfully.

  Karis was pushing through a thicket again. Zanja pressed up against her, to use her as a shield. Still, the thorns grabbed hold of her; her ragged rain cape made a ripping sound; she was snagged. Then Karis reached casually back and jerked her loose, out of the thicket, into the abrupt, surprising flatness of a new land.

  “How about that!” said J’han, as Karis pulled him loose in turn.

  They stood at the southern edge of Shaftal. At Zanja’s back lay the woodland. Ahead lay flat, featureless sand, as far as could be seen. The rain was falling so heavily now it seemed a wonder they were not swimming. Karis pointed a wet finger at the nearly invisible horizon. “That way,” she said.

  The sand seemed to last forever. Unintimidated, Karis began to cross it.

  Four days later, Zanja awoke from an exhausted, uncomfortable sleep to the sound of rain falling on the oilcloth of the makeshift tent. Karis, sound asleep, clenched her arm across Zanja’s chest in a grip it would not be easy to escape. Curled against Karis’s back, J’han uttered a small snore. The three of them had slept like the dead, in a makeshift tent, in wet clothing, under wet blankets, in a flat and featureless land devoid of tree or stone. It had been a dreary, disorienting journey across the sand, with no sight of the sun or stars to reassure them that they were not walking in circles.

  J’han snored again, and Zanja heard another sound as well: faint and distant, but distinctly familiar. She lifted an edge of the sagging oilcloth and peered out. A low sky swallowed up the flat horizon, rain pelted the sand, and a haze of sprouting grass seedlings quivered in the watery assault. There was nothing else to see. Mumbling a complaint, Karis hauled Zanja back under the blankets.

  But J’han had awakened. “Did you see something?”

  “I saw an inn,” Zanja said, “With smoke rising from the chimneys and bread hot from the oven.”

  J’han groaned. “No, you saw sand, grass, and water. Why do you torture me?”

  “I heard a goat.”

  “A goat?” J’han shook Karis roughly by the shoulder. “We’re taking this tent down!”
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br />   “Cruel healer,” Karis mumbled. “Let me sleep!”

  With some effort, Zanja extricated herself from Karis’s powerful grip, and she and J’han began rolling blankets. Not until they had put on the rain capes that formed the tent, so that the downpour was falling in Karis’s face, did she get up, heavy and reluctant as an old bull. “Why don’t we just let them all die?” she suggested grumpily. But when she took a deep breath, she smiled. “I smell smoke. What do you suppose the Juras eat for breakfast?”

  “Sand porridge,” said Zanja, “With bits of grass for flavor. Made with rainwater, of course.”

  “So long as it’s hot!” said J’han.

  They had not walked far before the sand turned quietly to stone. The clouds lay down and kissed the earth, and Karis had to grab Zanja and J’han by the capes to keep them from stepping over the edge of a cliff. Below them, beyond this dramatic step in the land, where the sand began again, lay the Juras camp at last: an unassuming cluster of circular huts with walls of rubble and roofs of skin, and smoke seeping out from holes where the radiating poles met the lodge pole in the middle. Some small piles of hay remained of the haystacks that in autumn must have garrisoned the camp, supplementing the great wind block of the cliff.

  As Karis found a path and led the way down the cliff, Zanja noticed that the base of the cliff was riven with wide cracks, where dun goats crowded. One of the goats spotted them, uttered a warning bleat, and soon all the goats were shouting an urgent clamor, like townspeople at a fair who all shout “thief” at once. By the time they reached the bottom of the path, a half-dozen giants had come out of the huts: people in their prime, as big as Karis, though not quite so powerfully built, their hair bleached almost white by sun and falling in locks like orderly strands of yarn, with eyes like polished chips of lapis lazuli.

  One of them, at least, spoke Shaftalese. He said, “We cannot offer shelter. We have a sickness here.” His voice was deep and sweet as a pipe organ.

  All six of them had glanced curiously at J’han and Zanja, but it was on Karis that their gazed lingered. Her voice, damaged by years of smoke use, was no more musical than a file on wood. “We have traveled far to cure this illness.”

  J’han added, “I am a healer.”

  The man spoke to the others, and the others spoke back. Zanja shut her eyes and listened. The rich, deep voices seemed to almost sing: question and answer, a harmony complex with adjectives. She said in a low voice, “This language is not conducive to quick decisions. We’ll be standing in the rain for some time.”

  J’han said, “After studying their language in a book for a couple of months, you are able to understand them? You will never cease to amaze me.”

  The book Medric had slipped into Zanja’s pack had proven to be a grammar of the Juras language, the life work of a long-dead scholar who had probably never imagined his dry study being put to such serious practical use. Zanja said, “Well, an hour or two of listening would help a great deal—”

  “An hour!” said J’han.

  “An hour?” said Karis. “Someone is dying!” She dropped her pack, and stepped briskly past the head-crackers. Fortunately, they proved indecisive about wielding their knob-headed sticks until she was past them. Then, one uttered a cry that seemed intended to give courage, and they drew themselves up to attack.

  Zanja said sharply, in the Juras language, “She is sham-re!”

  They turned to her, startled, their lifted sticks beginning to lower. “A witch?” said the man in Shaftalese, as though he thought Zanja had spoken a word of his language by simple accident.

  “Your people are singing someone into death, are they not?” Zanja had noticed the melancholy murmur of sound, but until she spoke she had not known what it signified. “The sham-re will save that person’s life.”

  The man spoke to his companions, not translating, but announcing in his own convoluted tongue that these three strangers were sent by the gods. “Well,” Zanja said to J’han, “I think they might let us come in now.”

  “But will they feed us sand porridge?” he asked.

  It was porridge, sure enough, made not from sand but from some kind of ground seed that looked fit for chickens, with bits of dry goat meat mixed in it, and chunks of something chewy and sweet that Zanja did not attempt to identify. In a storage hut hastily converted to guest quarters, Zanja and J’han contrived a laundry line and hung their blankets and clothing over the dung fire to dry. Karis returned, consumed a great bowl of the chickenseed porridge, and lay down on a pallet of goat hides. “The place is crawling with vermin,” she said. “The people are so crowded together they can scarcely find room to separate sick from well. They kept handing me their babies—babies the size of calves! They know what an earth witch is good for.” Karis shut her eyes. “I’ll kill the fleas,” she promised, her words already blurred by sleep. “Why am I so tired?”

  “Zanja and I will manage,” J’han said.

  They went out again into the rain, and found the six head-crackers, crowded with two dozen others into a bursting hut where the only people not talking were wailing children. The din fell still as the two of them ducked through the skin-hung door. The fetor was overwhelming. Zanja said to the man who spoke some Shaftalese, “You must help me to explain something to your people. They are in great danger, and we have come to help them. This illness has traveled to you from the north, and we have followed it. We know it well. We have seen it kill entire families.”

  The man sat still, his big hands folded. “That may be so,” he said. “This sham-re who healed Si-wen-ga-sei-ko-che-ni-so-sen. She is a Juras woman-born-outside-the-plain? Whose child is she?”

  “She does not know her mother’s name. She was born among strangers who did not care to remember her mother for her. Please, I know that you are curious, but your people are in danger. Do you understand?”

  The man said, “You want me to speak to my people. But they will not hear my words until they know this woman’s mother-name.”

  J’han murmured at Zanja’s elbow, “Your people also had peculiar ways, didn’t they?”

  “And many’s the time I wanted to scream at them, too,” Zanja muttered. “Perhaps you could barge your way into the sick room without being invited.”

  She gave him the bags of supplies she carried, and watched him out of the door before she turned again to the man, and explained, “Karis did not know her mother or her mother’s name.”

  “Ka-ris, that is her name? And has she had no life since she was born?”

  The people within hearing repeated, “Ka-Ris!” And then the din began to rise. At least they were not a gesticulating people like the Midlanders, but their big voices filled the hut. They argued among themselves, and shouted questions that the man was hard put to translate, and Zanja to answer. Was Karis born in the autumn, they asked, and how many years ago, and had her mother been enamored of sweets, and what had her mother been so ashamed of, to run away from the comforts of the Ka clan? A gray-haired woman rose and began to chant what seemed to be a list of names all beginning with “Ka,” which Zanja realized must be a genealogy, frequently interrupted by other elders who seemed to be arguing that this or that could not be Karis’s particular branch, for reasons Zanja could not decipher.

  “Huh!” said her translator at last. “I guess she owns a lot of goats.”

  “Goats?” Zanja said in some bewilderment.

  “They say her mother must be Ka-san-ra-li-no-me-la, the eldest daughter of Ka-ri-sho-ma-do-fin-brae-kon, the eldest daughter of . . .”

  Zanja interrupted as politely as she could. “And this Kasanra, what happened to her?”

  “She had a restless heart, and ran away.”

  “Karis’s mother died when Karis was born, thirty-five years ago.”

  He turned and spoke at length with several other people. Zanja sat upon her heels. She could tell Karis her mother’s name! And, apparently, though Kasanra had not been remembered by anyone in Lalali, she had lived long enough
to name her infant, and that name had been remembered. So now that name alone was enough to give Karis a clan, a genealogy, and even living relatives.

  The translator turned to Zanja and said, “Yes, Ka-ris is rich! Her mother’s sister’s eldest daughter, Ka-mo-le-ni-da-he-fo-so, is holder of the goats, but everything thinks they belong to the daughter of Ka-san-ra-li-no-me-la.”

  “I doubt Karis wants those goats, though. Kamole can continue to keep them.”

  This statement excited much comment, for Kamole had a fine herd and any of them would certainly want those goats. And Kamole was overly self-important, and perhaps deserved to lose her herd to a stranger. Their eyes danced at the possibility.

  “Ka-ris does not want them for her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter?” said the translator.

  Zanja gathered that these people would not count Leeba as a daughter, and said, “Karis can bear no children of her own body.”

  At this, the gathered people groaned and cried as though someone had died. The translator explained, straining the limit of his vocabulary, that the Ka women were good breeders, but the clan had long thought the Ka gift had died out, for in three generations there had been no sham-re. That Karis could not pass on her talent to her own children was a dreadful tragedy

  The people demanded to know why Karis could not breed, and what were the names of all her parents, friends, and lovers in the order that she met them. “Shouldn’t Karis tell you this herself?” Zanja asked, but gradually it became clear that to tell one’s story was the duty of one’s shu-shan, which the man confusedly translated as “the people of her name.”