She hung her apron on a hook, and came to Zanja. She took her by the shoulders. Sweat dripped from the tips of the hair that twisted on her forehead. Her skin was copper, her eyes agate, her hair a burnished bronze. And her hands on Zanja’s shoulders were like two mountains grinding each other into rubble.
Zanja could not speak. Her will was lost. When her love for Karis came over her like this, there was no room in her for anything else.
Karis said, “Are you going?”
Her ravens must have been listening at the window. Was she angry at what she had overheard? Bewildered? Or merely resigned? Zanja could not read her. And to reply to her question was impossible. But Karis must have received an answer, that somehow radiated from Zanja’s skin into her sensitive hands.
Karis kissed her: a sweat-salty, sun-hot kiss. Then she lifted her hands, and stepped back.
She had let go.
Chapter 10
Zanja was standing in a room. It smelled of leather, and oil, and dust. The windows all were ajar, letting in light but no breeze. The glare of sunlight suggested it was afternoon. Zanja was looking at a cluttered shoemaker’s bench. Beside it, on a shelf, stood a neat row of finished shoes—summer shoes, not the high, heavy boots of winter. Of course it was summer. Zanja could hear a blurry murmur of voices overhead, and the creak of a floorboard under someone’s restless weight. One of the voices sounded rather irritated.
She heard a scrape of leather soles on the wooden floor, and turned to find Emil beside her.
“I haven’t been much of a companion, have I?” she said.
“You’ve recited some good poetry,” he said. “Your transliterations of Koles. They’re really quite brilliant. I hope you’ve written them down.”
“How long have I been in this daze?”
“It’s now three days past midsummer.”
Zanja’s shoulders, and the soles of her feet, were sore. These sensations brought memories of walking, of sitting blank and wakeful by a campfire, of a dark but spectacular vista where a distant lake glimmered and a dog barked, far away. Emil had sat awake with her one night, and she had staved off memories of death by talking about the lives of her lost people.
“Where are we now?” she asked.
Before Emil could explain, the shoemaker came down the narrow stairs: a thin, graying woman, hands stained with dye, who squinted a bit at them and seemed none too pleased to find them still waiting. “My mother asks you to come upstairs,” she said disapprovingly.
“Thank you very much,” said Emil. “Would you mind if we leave our gear down here?”
“Just put it out of the way,” the shoemaker said ungraciously.
Emil led the way up the stairs. Zanja said to his back, “It has something to do with books? Books lost in a fire?”
“Just listen,” he said, “And mind your manners.”
In the plain upstairs parlor, a wasted old woman sat by a bright window with a letter, Emil’s letter of introduction, in her lap. Her arms and face were patched and twisted by ugly, long-healed burn scars. Her breath rasped in her chest. But her gaze was bright and curious as her visitors came in. “Emil Paladin? I believe I remember you.”
Emil bowed over her hand. “Madam Librarian, I definitely remember you. You are the one who insisted I put on silk gloves.”
“You were to see the Mackapee manuscript. And students never remember to wash their hands before coming to the library. But you never saw the manuscript, did you?”
“I was never a student, either. I’m amazed that you remember me!”
“Those last days of the library, I remember every single moment. What happened to you, after the Fall of the House of Lilterwess?”
“I commanded a Paladin company for fifteen years. And now I am a bit of a librarian myself.”
“Oh, are you a collector of lost books? How many do you have?”
“Many thousands. And one of them is the Mackapee manuscript.”
She gazed at him in amazement, which slowly became delight. “The manuscript survived?”
“It seems to be unharmed. I’m working with a seer, so I’ve found books in some odd places, where people hid them from the Sainnites and then forgot about them. Many of the books are damaged, and I’ve been asking people if they know anyone who could teach me to repair them. Your name was suggested to me, finally.”
The librarian said, “You’re as earnest and eager as ever, commander. Despite your gray hair.”
“I’m still young enough to be a student, I hope.”
Emil was at his most affable, exercising the graces and courtesies that Zanja had tried to emulate, though she could not imitate his sincerity. He produced books from his satchel, some in paperboard boxes, others wrapped in cotton cloth and tied with twine. The librarian opened them like gifts, and tutted over the water-stained, chewed, and crumpled pages as though the books were children come to harm. “This is no quick lesson,” she said, and then added matter-of-factly, “I’m dying, you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” Emil said. “Your knowledge should not die with you. If you agree to teach me, we’ll take lodging in town.”
For the first time, the librarian noticed Zanja, standing unobtrusively by the stairs, and Emil introduced her as a reader of glyphic poetry, which proved a certain method to win a book-lover’s admiration. Certainly, the librarian also wondered how a tribal woman came to have such an arcane and unlikely pursuit, but did not ask, and so Zanja did not have to make up an explanation for a thing she could not even explain to herself. “Would you like to see my books?” the librarian asked Emil.
“Would those be the ones that you threw by the armload out the windows of the burning library?”
The librarian rose without answering and led them to a staircase. They had scarcely begun to climb the narrow stairs when Zanja smelled old paper and leather bindings, the same scent that pervaded Medric’s book-lined attic. The old librarian hauled herself up one step at a time, and behind her Emil held himself alert as though he thought she’d fall and he would have to catch her. At the rear, Zanja breathed in the scent of the books, and breathed out a few lines from Koles:
“A scent, faint and far away, ephemeral
As though somewhere a flower bloomed
As though someday it might bear seed.”
Ahead of her, Emil paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “There’s something up here? Besides just a wonderful collection of books?”
Zanja’s soul, which had seemed only tenuously connected to her body, snapped sharply into place, like a dislocated bone popping into alignment. “Something that we need,” she said.
At the top of the stairs, the old woman lifted a blind, and in the beam of light swimming dust gleamed like gold. Above Zanja, Emil exclaimed, “Blessed day!” And then Zanja was herself stepping up into an attic crammed with books, and the old woman stood grinning like a child with a wonderful secret. Books upon books: two, three layers deep on cobbled-together shelves that leaned tiredly sideways and surely would have fallen over if not for the companion shelves leaning on them in the opposite direction. Emil turned ecstatically from one book to the next. “Is that a copy of Songs? And is that A History of a Coastal Town? And a complete set of the plays of Barness?”
“Two complete sets,” said the librarian smugly. “There’s another behind that one.”
They would be at it for hours. For Emil, the only pleasure greater than that of reading was the pleasure of talking about books, whether he had read them or not. The attic was narrow, and so crowded with books that there was scarcely room for the three of them. Zanja worked her way to the far end, where a comfortable chair was wedged by the second window, and she squatted down before the lowest shelf. In the shadows and dust that gathered here—for the sick old woman could no longer keep such a mess of books clean—Zanja could not hope to see the titles without removing each book and holding it up to the window. But perhaps the books’ titles or contents were of no importance. She ran her finger
tips across the spines, and then slid her hand through the front row of books to touch those tucked behind. Would touch be enough? When intuition gave her a target, she did not usually have to separate it out from a clutter of virtually identical objects. To Emil, all of these books would be important. To Zanja, only one of them was, but she did not know which one.
They remained in the attic until the light began to dim, and by then Zanja had worn herself with aimless searching. She and Emil ate fried fish and potatoes at a tavern, and rented some rooms that were located over a busy wheelwright’s shop. One room had a battered table and a couple of banged-up chairs. Zanja sat, feeling unutterably weary. Emil opened the windows, and in a moment two ravens landed, and he fed them the greasy remains of the fish and potatoes.
One of the ravens said, “Medric is on his way to join you.”
Emil stepped back in surprise. “Medric is traveling?”
“Karis is alone?” Zanja added.
Without answering, the ravens squabbled over the fish, like ordinary birds. Emil sat at the table with Zanja. “They’ll answer our questions when they’re done eating. Does your head hurt?”
“I think I’m past that now. I feel like I’ve awakened exhausted, from a night of bad dreams.”
“You haven’t actually been sleeping much, that I’ve noticed. What were you looking for in that attic?”
“A book, I think. I know it’s there.”
“Well, you’ll never hear me say that books aren’t important, but how can one book be so important that it brings our recluse out of his attic?”
“You think he’s coming to help me find it?”
“The ravens will tell us. But yes, that’s what I suspect.”
Zanja put her head down on the table. “How did we wind up in this town? Did you follow an impulse of insight, or were you planning to come here anyway?”
“The second,” he said. “But you know, an insight can arrive long ahead of its usefulness. Maybe it was prescience that made me start looking a year ago for an education in book repair.” He stood up, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed.”
“Medric shouldn’t travel alone,” Zanja said. “Someone will think he’s a madman, and lock him up.”
Emil smiled. “Now you sound like yourself again. Go to bed.”
“Karis shouldn’t be alone either,” Zanja said.
“She’s impervious, unassailable, and unbelievably competent. I certainly don’t see why she can’t be left alone. And she’s got Leeba.”
Zanja stood up. And then she noticed that the ravens were gone. Though Emil leaned out the window and called them to come back, they didn’t respond.
“Well, that’s odd,” he said.
The next morning, Zanja set out to find Medric, and brought him into town some days later. He baffled and charmed the old librarian in her sitting room, then climbed the stairs to the attic. Zanja, armed with a broom and feather duster, promised the librarian that she would shelve each book exactly as she found it, and followed Medric’s light footsteps up into the darkness. By the time she raised the blind in the attic, he was already ensconced in the chair, with three books in his lap.
As the morning passed, Zanja sometimes heard the murmur of voices downstairs, where the librarian supervised as Emil painstakingly put back together the torn pages of a book he would later re-bind. Zanja emptied and cleaned one shelf of books at a time. Occasionally, Medric sneezed from the dust, but otherwise seemed oblivious to Zanja’s search.
Zanja had dusted the last book, and was sweeping the floor when Medric, cross-legged in the armchair, looked up from his reading. “You missed some.” He pointed vaguely underneath the chair.
Zanja leaned against the balustrade, exasperated. “You’re worried about the dust under the chair? Sweep it yourself.”
“Dust? Sweep? What are you talking about?” Medric managed to shift the chair, so that Zanja could see that underneath it lay book boxes, stored flat, with warnings written on each one with a wide-nibbed pen: “Be very Careful!”
She took one up, carefully, and opened it. A few tiny pieces of burned paper floated out. Inside lay the charred remains of a book.
“It’s dead,” said Medric sadly. “Maybe she hoped to save a few of its words. Are all the books dead in their coffins?”
Sitting together on the floor, they opened the boxes one by one. All the books were burned, some practically to ashes. They had looked in half the boxes when Zanja reached for one, and felt such heat sear her palm that she jerked her hand away.
“Ah!” said Medric, nodding vigorously. “That one.”
“Do books have memories? I think it remembers the fire.”
“It must still be alive, then, don’t you think?” Medric lifted up the box, very gently, and opened its lid. Within lay the burned remains a large book, titled Encyclopedia of Livestock. “Zanja, what have you found? An amazing thing!”
“Amazingly dull, maybe,” said Zanja in dismay.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Let us see what it has to tell me.” Medric delicately put his hand to the smoke-stained, half burned cover.
Eventually, Zanja went downstairs and found the librarian asleep in her chair, and Emil busy washing a paste brush. The shoemaker’s hammer had fallen silent; perhaps she had gone shopping in the cool evening. This soon after the solstice, the sun would not set for hours, but the shadows in the street below were long and black, and a cool breeze relieved the heat of the stuffy parlor. Emil looked up from his bowl of cloudy water.
Zanja said quietly, to not disturb the old woman, “You’d better come up stairs.”
In the attic, Medric still sat upright with his hand upon the Encyclopedia of Livestock. His eyes moved wildly, focusing and re-focusing on sights only he could see. His face moved also: Zanja read in rapid succession fear, horror, humor, and a sudden surprise. Earlier, Medric had uttered a small cry, but now his lips moved in an inaudible conversation.
Emil said in a low voice, “He must not be disturbed.” He sat in the chair to wait, and Zanja squatted by the stairway to listen for the shoemaker or the librarian. But the small house remained silent. Medric began to chuckle, and then a few tears slid down his face, and then he blinked and fumbled for his spectacles, took them off, and rubbed the crease in his nose. “Is that you, Emil? Is Zanja still here?”
She stood up, out of the shadows.
Medric closed the book box, but held it tightly in both hands. He looked pale and distressed, not at all like a man who has foreseen a hopeful future. But all he said was, “We need to keep this book.”
After supper, in their rooms above the wheelwright, Zanja lay upon the bed with her boots on so that Emil and Medric could sit in the two chairs and continue holding hands, like they had done during dinner. Lovers long separated deserved some time alone, and she was thinking of how she would insist on sleeping on the floor in the other room, which wasn’t much more than a garret. She might point out that she had not gotten so accustomed to sleeping in beds that she couldn’t be comfortable on the floor.
Medric, who had scarcely spoken all evening, said to her suddenly, “Do you remember Raven’s joke?”
Enlightenment was imminent, but Zanja found herself reluctant to ask for it. She said, with some effort, “Is Raven’s joke finally ended? Will something finally change?”
“I don’t know why I’m dreaming your stories,” said Medric complainingly.
Looking at him, she thought she saw a man as reluctant to answer questions as she was to ask them. She said, “Delay won’t make whatever you’ve seen less terrible, master seer.”
“I know. And don’t call me that. There’s another story in which Raven steals and eats pieces of soul. I think I’ve heard you tell it.”
“I remember it,” said Emil.
Medric said, “What would it mean, if you said of someone that Raven had eaten her soul?”
Zanja sat up. The blank shock of her mid-summer madness felt like it was threatening to return. She thou
ght wildly of the silent, distant, unresponsive ravens that continued to track them, of her and Emil’s peculiar card reading the day she left home, of Karis angrily—or resolutely—letting her go. There was a pattern here. “You dreamed of my death,” she said.
Medric took off his spectacles and set them down on the tabletop, as though he never wanted to see anything clearly again.
Emil said in his steadiest voice, “There are so many kinds of death. Raven’s digestion could be a kind of transformation, couldn’t it? What did you dream, Medric?”
Medric said in a strained voice, “I dreamed that Emil cut your heart out, and fed it to the Raven.”
“And then?” said Emil.
“The Raven shit out an owl, and the owl flew to a Sainnite garrison, with its feathers on fire.”
“And then?”
“The owl told the Sainnites a story, and as they listened, the garrison burned down around them, and then they themselves were burned to ashes.”
“And then?”
Medric said nothing. Zanja asked, “What kind of fire was it? Transformation? Or destruction?”
“I hope it’s transformation,” Medric said.
In the long silence that followed, Zanja felt that strangeness come upon her, like the strangeness of a fever, a distance that is almost delirium. Had not a seer once predicted that the Sainnite people would meet their demise at the hands of an Ashawala’i warrior? And had Zanja not wondered, since her life was first spared six years ago, what she had survived for? But surely, she protested silently, it was not for simple revenge, a revenge she did not even want any longer.
Earth Logic Page 13
