Earth Logic
Page 21
A cold draft washed in, and Garland heard the grunts and curses of weary people moving heavy objects. A slim young man came blundering down the hall to the kitchen doorway, where he paused vaguely, blinking snow from his lashes and polishing his spectacles on the front of his rather dirty shirt. “I’m all snow,” he complained. “There you are,” he added, as he perched his still-dirty spectacles on his nose. “My brother!” He clasped Garland’s hand in his own very cold one. “So happy to meet you!” he said in Sainnese. “I get so lonely for my own language, don’t you? Even though I don’t miss those bloody, boring soldiers the slightest bit.”
Apparently oblivious to Garland’s stunned surprise, he unpeeled from himself several layers of dripping jerkins, still talking.
“That’s my books they’re swearing at. The damned things are no end of trouble. And of course, they’re going all the way up to the attic.” The young man paused to peer closely at Garland through his smeared lenses. “Thank you for feeding her.”
“Are you Medric?”
“For feeding Zanja,” said the very peculiar young man.
“The one who’s dead?” Garland felt quite bewildered now.
“In the woods, late in the summer. A rabbit stew.”
Garland remembered a silent, remarkable, solitary, well-armed woman who had walked through the pathless woods as though she had been traveling there since the beginning of time. She had not been of Shaftal; she had, it seemed to him, not even been of that world. Wholly preoccupied with some massive mystery, she seemed to scarcely notice Garland. But when, along with the stew, Garland had cooked pan bread for her, with wild herbs in it, she had come out of her preoccupation to say to him, “This is the best meal I ever tasted.”
“It wasn’t just a rabbit stew. There was bread . . .”
“Well, I don’t know all the particulars.”
“That was Karis’s wife?”
“Her tormentor,” said Medric. “Her champion. Her poet. Her captive.”
It appeared he could indefinitely continue with this contradictory list, but he was distracted by the arrival of two more people: a gray man, who looked like the breath had been knocked out of him, supported by the most terrifying woman Garland had ever set eyes on.
Medric hurried to grab both the man’s hands in his. “What happened?”
The frightening woman, having settled the gray man on a stool, said, “They dropped a box of books. He tried to catch it, of course.”
“You can’t be killed by the books! After all you’ve done for them!”
The gray man, despite his obvious pain, managed to laugh.
“Maybe we’d better find J’han,” said the woman.
With a worried glance at the baking bread, Garland fled the kitchen in a panic. In the hall, extremely muscular people, Karis among them, were heaving crates towards the stairs. In the back bedroom, Garland found J’han, already awakened by the racket and mostly dressed. “There’s a man in the kitchen who’s having trouble breathing,” Garland said.
“Bring that box, will you?” J’han sprinted down the hall in his stocking feet.
Leeba slept in her little twig bed, with the lizard nearby in his own bed, and the rabbit smothered under a blanket, with only a torn, cotton-leaking foot showing. Garland shut the door quietly: The longer Leeba was not underfoot, the better.
“Get out the foxglove—it’s labeled,” said J’han, the moment Garland entered the kitchen. “Emil, lie down on the floor so your heart won’t have to work as hard. Is that water heating on the fire?”
“The pain is passing,” said the gray man.
“Sorrow is killing you,” grumbled J’han. “For that I have no cure.”
Garland said, “J’han, I can’t read.”
The terrifying woman turned her gaze on him. Garland set J’han’s chest of medicines rather hastily on the table, and tried to think of an excuse to run out of the room again. Was the cornbread cool enough to feed to the ravens?
Medric opened the box, and plucked out one of the tin canisters, and showed Garland the handwritten label. “Foxglove,” he read. “Poison. Say, isn’t it time that Leeba learn her letters?” He added to Garland, in Sainnese, “Take deep breaths, brother. It will pass.”
The terrifying woman said in a cool voice that slashed Garland’s ears like a razor, “I am Norina Truthken. Who are you?”
Medric clasped Garland’s hand. “The truth,” he prompted him. His hand was still cold from the snow, and soft, a scholar’s hand, but there was a strength in it, too.
“Garland. A Sainnite. A cook.”
The terrifying woman said, “I’ll stay out of your kitchen.”
“What?”
The woman laid a hand on J’han’s shoulder and the healer, shockingly, pressed his cheek against it. And then she went out, and even from the back seemed dangerous. As soon as the door was closed, Garland’s panic fled.
“She has a strong effect on people,” said J’han. “But I guess we’ve all gotten immune to it.”
Medric brought J’han the canister, but J’han waved him away. The gray man raised a face as gaunt and stark as Karis had looked when Garland first met her. But there was a kindness in him, and Garland immediately began to think of what to feed him. Tea, he thought. This man needs tea, and a lot of good, hot bread, perhaps an entire loaf. Then some real food. “Surely that pot’s about to boil,” he said, and opened the tea tin.
The gray man said, “Ah, Medric, my dear, once again you were right.”
“Emil,” said Medric reprovingly, “I’m always right.”
“Right about what?” asked J’han, his fingers still pressed to the pulse in Emil’s wrist.
“About Garland. Medric dreamed him into our kitchen.”
All eight loaves of bread were eaten, and Garland also cooked two more pans of sausage before the cold-sharpened appetites were satisfied. Karis, carrying a sausage that was wrapped in a thick slice of bread, had gone down the mountain again, this time to fetch grain and hay from a distant farm for the exhausted draft horses. By the time she returned, the three drivers had fallen asleep by the parlor fire. Leeba had awakened to sit in Emil’s lap for a while, as he recounted the highlights of their journey. Then she had played with Medric, a game that seemed to have no clear rules and involved a great deal of running around. Garland had started more bread dough and a pot of beans, and was rolling out the crust for a meat pie when Karis finally came in. Ice shattered from her jerkin as she pulled it off to hang near the hearth. Her moth-eaten gloves must have dissolved, for her unprotected hands were white with cold. Garland gave her a cup of hot tea to hold.
No one spoke. Norina and J’han appeared from the bedroom where they had been unpacking a crate, but Norina leaned on the door frame and did not come into the kitchen. Emil rested in a twig chair brought in from the parlor, his face pale with exhaustion, though he had turned down Garland’s offer of his own bed. All of them had been waiting for Karis, but now that she was here no one spoke. After she had drunk her tea, Garland gave her the half loaf of bread and the sausages that he had hidden away for her, and she uttered a sigh of gratitude. Garland said, “You’ve done three days’ work this morning, and no doubt you’ll spend the afternoon making chairs and beds.” For these travelers, despite their extraordinary quantity of baggage, had not transported a stick of furniture with them.
Karis said, “Well, carpentry is easy work. Wood is so willing.”
Garland pulled up a stool to the table, and gave her the butter and the butter knife.
She sat down and buttered her bread with intense concentration as everyone, even Norina, lounging in the doorway, watched her. Garland had given Leeba some pastry dough and the rolling pin and it appeared that her poor lizard was becoming a lizard pie.
“But there’s other work,” Karis said, mouth full. “Like healing Emil’s—” she glanced inquiringly at J’han.
“Heart,” he said.
Emil said, “I do not ask for healing. What
I need is your forgiveness.”
Karis set down her bread. “You’ll accept both,” she said, “Or you’ll get neither.”
Emil said flatly, “Karis, I don’t forgive myself.”
With the small knife that usually dangled, along with a number of other small tools, from her belt, Karis had speared a sausage. But she eyed the sausage without interest, put it back on her plate, then stood up and went to Emil, and, with an abrupt, heavy movement knelt at his feet.
He looked at her blankly. She lowered her head to rest on his knee. His hand lifted as of its own will, to stroke the wild tangle of her hair. She said, her voice muffled, “Did Zanja think I wanted her dead? Because I did not stop her?”
Norina said from the doorway, “What did you hope she would think?”
Karis raised her head. “That I was trying to be worthy, maybe.”
She sat back on her heels. Garland could see only the back of Karis’s head, her exceptionally square shoulders, her arms at her sides with her hands apparently resting on her thighs. But whatever Emil saw in her face brought the life back into his. “You let her go?” he said, amazed. “Karis? You let her go?”
“Not very gracefully.” Norina’s tone was cool, but when Karis glanced at her, Garland thought he understood a little of how rare and difficult—and satisfying—it might be to win a Truthken’s approval.
“You knew?” cried Medric at Norina, outraged. “You let us think Karis was angry? And you knew all along that she was—”
“—merely devastated,” Norina said.
Karis said quietly, “You know I loved her. And I let her die. What kind of person would do that?”
Garland, attempting to fill the pie crust with meat and vegetables without looking at his hands, saw a quiet descend on all of them.
“A remarkable person might,” Emil answered Karis finally. “A G’deon might.” He brought his hands up and began undoing the polished horn buttons of his heavy shirt. “Let me serve you a little longer, Karis.”
She said harshly, “How much longer do you think you can endure it?”
“As long as it’s interesting,” suggested Medric.
“As long as Shaftal requires it,” said J’han.
“As long as you can endure it,” Emil said to Karis, smiling now.
“A very long time then,” said Norina dryly. They all looked at her, and she added, “Well, look at the evidence! She can endure anything, for any length of time.”
Emil’s unbuttoned shirt revealed that he had experienced his share of violence, and that he was fortunate for the armor of his ribs, which had turned aside more than one Sainnite saber. Karis put her hand to his scarred chest. Leeba, apparently not as oblivious as she had seemed, abandoned her rolling pin to run to Emil and lean on his knee. “Is your heart broken? Does it hurt?”
He put an arm around her. “Yes, dear one.”
“Karis will fix it,” she declared.
“It’s fixed,” said Karis, sitting back.
“Our child is growing up in some very strange circumstances,” said J’han worriedly.
Karis got heavily to her feet, and scooped Leeba up. “Are we having lizard pie for supper? That’s a very rare dish, isn’t it, Garland?”
“Extremely,” he said. “Fortunately, for those of us who haven’t acquired a taste for lizard we have a more commonplace sort of pie also. But you,” he added, “Should eat your breakfast, or you’ll never get any pie.”
“He’s very bossy, don’t you think?” said Karis to Leeba. But she set her giggling daughter down, and made quick work of the bread and sausage that she had before been unable to eat. Now maybe she finally would be able to gain some weight, Garland thought. As he was putting his meat pie in the oven and helping Leeba to put her lizard pie in as well—into the other oven, which was not very hot—it occurred to him that the most important people in Shaftal were gathered here in his kitchen.
He turned around and looked at them: sturdy J’han, who had brought Norina a cup of tea and was leaning companionably against the opposite doorjamb as she sipped it; Medric, who had somehow gotten into the chair with Emil, done up his buttons for him, and kissed him a couple of times with unrestrained affection; Karis, uncombed and unkempt, looking a bit unhappy that she had eaten all there was to eat, glancing up now at the two unlikely couples with the stunned sorrow of the newly widowed.
“How about an apple or two,” Garland suggested.
She looked at him, and he feared she might complain again about his pushiness. “Two,” she said.
When he came out of the store room shining the apples on his apron. She said, “Well, now you have an idea of what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“I’ve gotten myself into a kitchen,” he said, endeavoring to sound as if the rest of it was of no importance to him.
The Truthken in the doorway uttered a snort. Startled, he looked at her—he had almost forgotten her intimidating presence. Had he said an untruth? Perhaps he had.
Medric said, “What did you think of the book, Karis? The Encyclopedia of Livestock?” He was grinning like a madman.
“It was Zanja who found it, wasn’t it?”
“She didn’t exactly know what she had found.”
Karis bit into an apple and held it in her teeth so her hand was free to take the little book out of her vest. She handed it to Medric, took the apple out of her mouth, and said with her mouth full, “There’s an old man in it, with a basket full of cabbages.”
“Oh, now at last I’ll dream of him!” Medric began leafing eagerly through the book.
“I found it,” Leeba said belatedly. “The baby book—I found it inside the big one.”
Emil had looked puzzled, but only for a moment. With one finger he stopped Medric’s enthusiastic page-turning. “Mabin,” he said, and read for a while. Then, he uttered a sharp laugh. He looked up and explained to Norina, “Harald wrote it. To Karis.”
“Ah,” she said. “A misunderstood man attempts to explain himself to his greatest victim. I always wondered why he hadn’t.”
Karis said, “Victim?”
“Things do change quickly,” said Norina. “Sometimes it’s difficult to keep track of what’s actually true. Karis, I know something that will surprise you.”
Karis sat down on the stool, with an apple in each hand, and looked at her. The men in the chair looked up simultaneously from reading, like startled birds.
Norina said, “Zanja na’Tarwein isn’t actually dead.”
There was a shocked silence.
“Physically—” began Emil.
“Metaphorically—” Medric started.
They both fell silent as Karis said in her hoarse, hushed voice, “Nori, what did you do?”
“There were some deceptions,” the Truthken said.
Medric shut the little book. “Gods of bloody hell!”
Emil said in a shocked voice, “With my own hand . . . !”
“I saw her die!” said Medric.
“Fire logic,” said Norina dismissively.
Obviously untroubled by the outraged chorus, she gazed steadily at Karis. Karis said in her strained, raw voice, “You are the most underhanded, disagreeable, uncanny, hard-hearted person in the world.”
“Do you know this for a fact?” said Norina curiously.
“You might be loyal, also,” said Karis grudgingly.
“These idiotic fire bloods, they know I’m sworn to serve you. You only—not their insane visions.”
“I take offense!”
Norina glanced at Medric, and he lapsed into a restless muttering that struck Garland as a kind of play-acting. The odd man might actually have been amazed rather than angry—and if he was, then Norina’s expression of faint amusement made a kind of sense. But not one word in this obscure conversation seemed sensible to Garland, and these people, who had seemed so kind to each other, so remarkable, now seemed only very strange. The strangest thing of all was their apparent ability to understand each other.
“You might have seen something,” Medric burst out, “But you had no vision.”
“Oh, no,” said Norina coolly, “Zanja thinks she’s dead.”
Norina stopped, for J’han had sharply kicked her foot. She glanced at him, then glanced at Leeba, who was raptly watching the action in the oven. Norina continued, rather obscurely, “So whatever you fire bloods thought to accomplish by doing what you did can still be accomplished.”
“Madam Truthken!” said Karis fiercely. “What did you do?”
J’han held up a hand to silence them, and went to squat by the oven with Leeba. He began talking with her about fire, lizards, and pies. Norina began to speak. She gave a quiet, precise, detailed, emotionless account of Zanja’s death. J’han and Leeba sang together a child’s song about the odd things that might be baked in a pie. They made up a verse about lizards. Norina concluded, “So Zanja thinks she’s dead, just as you thought she was dead. But those who deceive themselves, as she did, always know the actual truth, though often they do not know they know it, unless someone says it to them.”
Medric muttered, “And I thought I was obscure.”
Karis had covered her face. Garland thought he might see tears when her big hands lowered, but instead he saw something he did not expect: impatience. “Can we get her back?” she said. Then, more sharply, “Master seer! Is it possible?”