Davi’s father had brushed most of the snow from his clothing. His skis and ski poles were slung across his back, and an empty sling for Davi to ride home in. He set all this gear down and sat reluctantly, with Davi clinging to his neck.
“These people, Death-and-Life,” he said, “They’re going to rescue the children. But they aren’t going to send the Watfield children home, not right away, because they think you Sainnites would blame their families, and the people of Watfield have suffered too much already, so maybe Davi would have been safe anyway. But I’d never see her again. And I couldn’t bear it.”
“I didn’t tell anybody Clemmie was a soldier,” announced Davi. “And I didn’t cry.”
Her father said, “All your mothers and fathers will be so proud of you.”
Clement, while gathering up Davi’s warm clothing, had noticed a loose button, and sat down to sew it on. The man gave her a surprised look, and she glared at him, saying, “I suppose you feel required to explain to me now how badly you feel, but I wish you wouldn’t. Tell me: Nobody knows where the Watfield children are. So how are they to be rescued?”
“Not just the Watfield children. All of them.”
She looked up again from her stitching, genuinely surprised now, and even more dismayed.
The farmer said, “I suppose you thought it was a secret that you’ve got a garrison full of children. But those people knew you Sainnites had to be keeping your children somewhere! And your children aren’t in the garrisons, because no one’s ever seen one, and a child’s not easy to hide. So the rebels have been looking around, and asking questions, and they’ve found your secret place, and they know the Watfield children are there. They wouldn’t say exactly where that place was, though. I guess they feared the Watfield parents might go there and wreck their surprise. And I would have gone, too, if I had known. In fact, my husband wasn’t supposed to tell anything at all, even to his family, but he did because he was so sick. And my husband was sure those Death-and-Life people knew exactly where the children were.”
“They planned to steal our children? All of them?”
“To liberate them. Because they’re all Shaftali children, they say. You Sainnites don’t bear children, so every last child you’ve got is a stolen child. But that’s not true, is it?”
“It’s not true,” she said, outraged.
He seemed relieved. Bad enough that he was allowing nearly forty of his neighbor’s children to remain imprisoned while his was rescued. No wonder his family had abandoned their farmstead rather than endure the public shame! And no wonder he clutched his girl so tightly now, so she protested, and then complained that she was hungry.
“She wouldn’t eat her porridge,” Clement explained. “She wanted milk, but we don’t have any.”
“Have you been fussy, love?” The man produced a neat packet of oat cakes from his pocket, and Davi was as contented with these as Clement had ever seen her. “You haven’t fed her right,” he said.
“She’s been very sick. I nursed her back—she would have died otherwise. So don’t complain.” Clement bit the thread, and tested the button. “When are these kids to be ‘liberated’? And how?”
“On Long Night. The people of Death-and-Life figure that by mid-winter, the children will be so isolated by weather that when the initial battle is over, they’ll have a couple of months to haul the kids away to their new homes, at households scattered all over Shaftal. A surprise attack, at night, sure to succeed. The children aren’t well-guarded, they believe. And Long Night’s an important holiday to us, you know.”
Clement said nothing, but she did not doubt that with enough attackers the plan he described would probably succeed. The only weapons at the children’s garrison were carried by the seven soldiers she had abandoned there. Unless one counted the practice weapons the children used.
“That’s all I know,” the man said. “Shaftal forgive me! Can I go?”
“Tell no one what you’ve told me.”
“You think I would? I’m a traitor to my people, now.”
“Maybe you might try to clear your conscience by alerting Death-and-Life that their secret ambush isn’t a secret anymore.”
The man said stiffly, thoroughly offended now, “Those people? You think I owe them something? There’s nothing to admire in them, no more than there is in you.” He stood up with some effort, and said to Davi, “Let’s get you into your jacket and hat. It’s time to go.”
Clement helped bundle her up. “What’s going to happen to her, come spring?” She did not want to say in front of Davi that her father was dying, but he knew what she referred to.
“I’ve got a plan. I don’t have to tell you what it is.”
As Clement tied Davi’s cap strings, Davi blinked at her. “Aren’t you coming, Clemmie?”
“No.” She couldn’t manage to say more.
“But Daddy,” Davi protested, as her father picked her up again, “Why isn’t Clemmie coming?”
“She isn’t in our family,” he said. And they were gone.
Part Four: What’s Inside the Buffalo
“You are slow and stupid,” the grass-lion said to his friend the buffalo one day. They always shared the shade on hot summer days, and were lying together, the buffalo chewing her cud, and the grass lion licking the blood from his paws. “I wonder sometimes why I don’t just eat you.”
The buffalo looked up at her friend and coughed up another lump of cud. “Who would dig the water hole for you?” she said.
Looking at the buffalo, the grass-lion decided she was disgusting. Her fur was clotted with the dried mud she rolled in to keep off the flies. Grass mush dripped from her mouth. Her eyes were big and watery and contented. “I can dig,” the grass-lion said. “I can dig better than you can.”
“Well then, who would eat the grass to exactly the right height for stalking rabbits?” said the buffalo.
Looking at the buffalo, the grass-lion decided she was ugly. Her horns sat up on her head like an ugly hat. Her fur hung to her knees like dead grass. Her hooves looked like gray turds that when broken open have maggots inside them. “I can stalk rabbits in grass of any height,” he said.
“Well then, who will sing to the stars with you, to please the ears of the gods?” said the buffalo.
The grass-lion looked at the buffalo and decided she was ridiculous. Her legs were short and her body fat. Her mouth was wide and her tail had a puff of hair on its tip. It was difficult to imagine that anything she did could please the gods. “My voice is so much sweeter than yours,” said the lion. “Maybe the gods would like me better without you bellowing beside me.”
“Well then,” said the buffalo, “If you don’t want to be my friend that’s fine with me. But I have to warn you that if you try to eat me, it’s me who will eat you in the end.” And she got up and walked away.
So now the grass-lion had to dig his own water hole and chase the rabbits in high grass and sing all by himself and all this made him angry. And he watched the silver buffalo from afar and thought about how much meat was on her bones, and how it would keep him fat and contented for many days. And finally he was in such a fever of anger and bloodlust that he went sneaking up on the buffalo in the tall grass, and jumped onto her back, and dug his claws in.
Now, the buffalo set to work trying to get that lion off her back. She jumped and twisted and kicked, but she couldn’t dislodge the lion, who kept ripping away with his claws until he had opened up her back like a shirt. Suddenly the buffalo’s skin fell off, and out of the buffalo hide stepped a man. He shook his head as if he were waking up from a long sleep, and then he took a look at the lion, who certainly was feeling somewhat surprised. “Oh, it’s you, trying to eat me,” the man said. “Well, I have to warn you that it’s me who will eat you in the end.”
The lion was annoyed at the man’s arrogance. “We’ll see who eats and who is eaten” he cried, and jumped onto the man’s back, and dug in with his claws.
The man didn’t like
having the lion on his back any more than the silver buffalo had. He yelled and he rolled on the ground and he tried to hit the lion with a rock, but the lion hung on, ripping with his claws, until the man’s skin had opened up like a shirt.
Suddenly, his skin fell away, and out stepped a big yellow hare. That hare yawned and scratched her chin, and then she noticed the lion standing there, so surprised he didn’t even try to lift a paw and grab her. “Oh, it’s you trying to eat me,” she said. “Well, I have to warn you that it’s me who will eat you in the end.” And then the hare took off, kicking her yellow feet in the air, taking great bounds over the high grass. The lion chased her, of course, all up and down the length of the grassy plain, from the ocean in the east to the mountains in the west, from the forest in the north to the wasteland in the south. At last, the hare was so tired she fell down gasping, and the lion fell down right on top of her, with his red tongue hanging out of his mouth. “I’ve got you now,” he gasped, and ripped with his claws until the hare’s back opened up like a shirt.
Inside the hare’s skin was a pool of darkness, and then that pool began to move, to uncoil, and out slid a fat black snake with a flickering tongue. The lion lay exhausted, panting and weak from the long chase, looking into the hard black eyes of the black snake. “You warned me that you would eat me in the end,” said the grass-lion.
“Oh yes, I almost forgot,” said the snake. And he opened his mouth, bigger and bigger, until his mouth was as big as the lion, and he swallowed the lion whole.
And that’s why the grass-lions never hunt the buffalo.
Chapter 23
The sun rises and falls like a ball tossed from a hand, and Zanja na’ Tarwin walks steadily across barren mountain tops. The owl floats ahead of her, a feather-down guide lit faintly by a sun that is always in twilight. As long as she can see, Zanja follows the owl. When it is dark, she squats down wherever she is, and takes a handful of twigs and dried grass that she has managed to gather among the rocks, and with it builds a fire no bigger than the palm of her hand.
Over her shoulder, she has carried all day a fire-blackened tin pot with a length of rope tied to its handles for a shoulder strap. She also carries a wooden box that once was decorated with pastoral scenes, but from which most of the paint now has been scraped off. Although in her day’s journeys she sees nothing but stones, when she stops walking she can always find a pool of water within a few steps of her fire: a pool just big enough to fill her pot. And as the water heats, she takes out of the wooden box a porcelain tea set and a tin of tea that is neither full nor empty. By the time the twigs burn to ashes, the water boils. She steeps a pot of tea and drinks it, while looking at the stars.
These stars are unfamiliar: not unremembered, but entirely different from night to night. Yet the landscape across which she travels by day remains the same: rocky mountaintops that giver her no glimpse at all of what lies beyond them. Nothing distinguishes this landscape. She cannot even be certain that the sun rises in the same place every dawn. She is following the owl, who is leading the way to the Land of the Dead.
By the time the teapot is empty, it is sunrise. She packs the tea set and slings her burdens over her shoulders. She spots the owl, flying in the distance. Again, she follows.
The day’s bread was in the oven. With the storm shutters open, Garland could watch the tentative dawn of early winter: its stark, crisp shadows, black on white, the rising glimmer of the snow. He could see the ravens on the porch rail, impatient for their cornbread, bickering like children over perches in the sun. Garland had awakened to a kitchen hung with snowshoes—Karis, apparently unable to sleep again, had done her insomniac’s work here.
The kitchen door clicked open and he turned, surprised. Medric, who he last had seen wrapped in Emil’s arms in the attic room the three of them shared, stumbled in: only half dressed, spectacles askew, fingers still ink-stained from the previous night’s work on his manuscript. “Brrr!” He squinted at the pale light reflecting in from the snow.
“It’s called a sunrise,” said Garland. “What are you doing up so early? After Karis was awake all night? Trading places with her?”
“Gods! No!” Medric shuddered. “It was a dream.”
Medric didn’t drink tea or spirits and didn’t eat butter or sugar or meat or cheese, and so was a thin wisp of a man who felt the cold quite keenly. Garland distractedly considered what to feed him at what was for Medric a wretched hour. Hot milk. “I suppose you don’t take honey?”
Medric shook his head mournfully. “I’d like to stay sane. Or not get any madder than I am.”
“Honey causes madness?” Every day in this household was another amazement. Garland warmed the milk, determined to do it slowly, so the milk would sweeten on its own.
Medric rubbed his eyes, mumbled crankily, and then burst out, “You know her!”
“Who?”
“The one I dreamed of. I never met her, so you must have, in Watfield. Otherwise, I couldn’t have dreamed of her.”
“A soldier? I knew them all, five years ago. What did this dream woman like to eat?”
Garland had asked his question flippantly, but Medric replied promptly, “Cheese, with an apple and a glass of wine.”
“And a couple of butter biscuits, I hope.”
Medric shrugged. Clearly, he was a man who saw no reason to think about food.
“With tastes like that, she’s probably an officer.” Garland stirred the milk steadily, peacefully, letting his memories rise: sergeants, captains, lieutenants, commanders. The higher the position, the older the person who held it, generally. “How old? Thirty? Fifty?”
Medric grumbled something, pulling himself out of his daze. “She’s energetic, not so beat up as most veterans get. But she’s not young. A lucky fighter.”
Garland was remembering his last day in Watfield garrison. Summoned to the general’s quarters, he found himself confronted by a very angry, very large man who gestured dismissively at the untouched plate on his table: beef in gravy with mushrooms and vegetables covered by a crisp pastry. Garland had been worrying all evening that he had used too much rosemary in the gravy, which is a mistake impossible to recover from, and surely that was what the general wanted to complain about. “Do you call this soldier’s fare?” the general had roared when Garland came in.
Garland could vividly recall what at the time he had scarcely noticed: that the other plates on the table were scraped clean, that the woman who sat at Cadmar’s right had looked sharply away when the general uttered his unimaginable, unacceptable command that from now on Garland was to cook badly. What had she been hiding from Garland—or from Cadmar—when she looked so swiftly away? Embarrassment? Contempt? Garland wanted to describe her to Medric now, but he could not think of what distinguished her in appearance from any other Sainnite. There were some things the soldiers had said about her, though, and he repeated them, struggling to remember. “She learned the names and history of every single person in her command. If they went hungry or cold or wet, so did she. She always hauled her own load.”
“I think I like her,” Medric said. “Whoever she is.”
“The lieutenant-general, Clement.”
“The lieutenant-general?” Medric sat upright, blinking. “She hauls her own load?”
“I’m just telling you what I heard when she first arrived.” Garland tasted the foaming milk. Not sweet yet.
“I understand the general is a bloody fool,” said Medric.
“That certainly is true.”
“Then how did he get himself a competent lieutenant?”
“She’d been his lieutenant an awfully long time. Every promotion for him was a promotion for her.”
“It was torture for her.” Medric’s spectacles were reflecting the fire again. Garland felt a shudder. Karis might exercise her talent invisibly, or at least in a way that almost seemed ordinary, but this peculiar man could not pull off that trick. “They came over on the boat together, from Sainna,” he said. �
��She was a child. She thought he was a perfect soldier. She learned better—but she couldn’t escape him. He remained her superior. His rise controlled hers. But, finally, she managed to escape him and for a few years they both were commanders, equals. And then the old general died.”
Medric was only half articulating. In the twilight region between sleep and wakefulness, he opened his mouth and through speaking understood what he had no business knowing.
Medric opened his eyes. “Am I making your skin crawl yet?”
“Yes,” Garland said, and let out his breath. “The milk is ready, I think.”
“You’re being very helpful, you know.”
“Helpful for what? Why do you want to understand her like this?”
“To intrude on her, you mean? Oh, don’t deny it—I know it seems unsavory. But how else are we to win this war, except by knowing the enemy better than they know us?”
Garland poured two mugs of milk, gave one to Medric, and then flavored his own with honey and spices, the scent of which made Medric look distinctly rueful. “The enemy,” Garland repeated. “You mean our fathers’ people.”
“Oh, I’m a traitor no matter who I mean by ‘enemy,’” said Medric lightly. “And so are you. You might let me have just a tiny bit of that cinnamon.”
Garland grated some cinnamon into Medric’s milk. The young seer’s eyes closed as he breathed in the smell. He said, still sniffing, “No one in this house has ever asked me to be unprincipled, though. And they won’t ask it of you, either.”
“Unless I’m asked to murder Karis’s wife,” said Garland recklessly.
Medric’s spectacles had steamed up as he held his nose over the mug. He took them off, rubbed his eyes, and said with terrible sadness, “Emil and I—we are always exactly parallel to each other, and we couldn’t step on each other’s toes if we tried. But Karis and Zanja, they had to fight their way into that dance of theirs. Gods—it was exciting to watch.” He put his spectacles back on, found them still steamy, and irritably took them off again. “I won’t deny that Zanja’s murder was barbarous, heartless, and cruel,” he said, “But don’t call it unprincipled. Norina loved her for her discipline. I loved her quickness. Emil, well, he just loved her. Killing Zanja was a triumph of principle over passion. It may have been the most principled act of my life. I certainly hope I’m never asked to do such a thing again.”
Earth Logic Page 25
