After a moment, Medric added gloomily, “I’m better at being silly in Shaftalese.” He sipped his milk, and raised his eyebrows in surprise. “How did you do that?
“It just takes patience.”
“I’ll never be able to do it, then.”
They sat a long time without talking. The smell of baking bread began to suffuse the kitchen. The ravens on the rail outside cried hoarse curses at each other. Medric said, “This milk is making me sleepy.”
“It’s supposed to. What was the dream that woke you up?”
“I dreamed that the lieutenant-general was making love with a Shaftali cow farmer.”
“Huh!” said Garland after a long silence. “Are you sure?”
“I may be an addle-pate, but when a couple of people take off their clothes and tangle in a bed like that, it’s difficult to mistake what it is they’re doing.”
“What does your dream mean, though?”
Medric put on his spectacles, found them clear, and blinked at Garland quite sleepily. “She’s loyal to her people, isn’t she? Not confused, like us?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but shook his head sympathetically. “She doesn’t even realize what’s happened to her yet.”
Chapter 24
Clement noticed Gilly on horseback at the garden’s edge, watching her and Captain Herme put the reluctant soldiers through their drills—familiar drills, except that they were done in deep snow, wearing snow shoes. The soldiers floundered and lost their tempers. After Clement had dismissed them, she went to stand at Gilly’s stirrup. He said, “I really do admire your persistence. But what idiocy!”
Herme’s company trailed ignominiously off the field, most of them dangling their snow shoes distastefully from their hands. They would return to the work of building themselves a barracks, and no doubt they would complain about her all afternoon.
She said, “So you too believe that Sainnites are naturally unable to cope with snow? Just like Shaftali are naturally incapable of fighting?”
“No. I am a man of facts.”
“Fact is, those soldiers would die rather than learn something new.”
“Fact is, like anyone, they’d rather be incapable than incompetent.”
“It’s hard to blame them, when observers call them idiotic. Well, it doesn’t matter. I need for them to learn to walk and fight on snow. And I outrank them.”
“You outrank almost everyone, from sheer endurance.”
“At least you have no illusions about my native abilities.” She grinned up at him. The unflappable, sure-footed horse pushed her gently, and she scratched his forehead as well as could be done in heavy gloves.
Gilly added, with a trace of genuine concern, “Oh, but the soldiers do hate you today.”
“Everyone hates me, lately. But not you, for some reason.”
“Make me wear snow shoes and I’ll hate you too.”
“What are you doing here?”
“The storyteller’s coming to hear some stories, and I’ll be supervising, as usual. Come with me.”
“Any particular reason?”
“None at all.” Under her suspicious examination, his face remained bland as his horse’s, though much uglier.
“Give me a moment to undo these bindings,” she said.
Since her return to Watfield, Clement had frequently glimpsed the storyteller, whose red silk clothing could hardly be missed in a world of white snow, gray slush, and even grayer woolen uniforms. And in the bitter evening cold, while walking past the refectory, Clement had sometimes heard the storyteller’s voice. Perhaps a few words, so crisply articulated they hardly seemed words at all, but notes of music, might linger in Clement’s ear. More often, she heard at a distance the roar of soldier’s voices, and the pounding of their hands and feet, which signaled another story told and now owed.
Walking at Gilly’s stirrup, Clement commented, “I don’t know that I’d want to spend so much time in that woman’s company as you’ve been spending. See that icicle?” She pointed at an extraordinary one, that dangled from the eaves of an unfinished building. “That’s her. Not human at all.”
Gilly gazed at the icicle. “But her stories don’t make us cold,” he said.
The storyteller was waiting in the guard shed, huddled with the soldiers around the brazier, watching a game of cards. The soldiers started guiltily as Clement looked in the door, and leapt to their feet in a tangle of salutes. “Lieutenant-General,” said the captain, “Gilly was late, and we thought the storyteller shouldn’t be left standing in the snow.”
Clement said mildly, “You shouldn’t have let her in.” In fact, the discipline of the gate guard was not her concern, and the soldiers were probably confident that she wouldn’t report them.
The storyteller greeted her with cool courtesy, and as coolly said to Gilly on his horse, “Good day, Lucky Man.”
“Good day, storyteller. I trust you are well.”
“I am. You owe me ten stories.”
“You will be paid.” Gilly added, as they started down the street, “I have a question for you. Do you ever repeat a story?”
“No, never.”
“So what will you do, when you have told us all your stories?”
The storyteller walked beside Clement, sure-footed and precise on the slick paving stones that here and there emerged from ice. “It will not happen.”
“Never? You know, they’re taking bets on how long you can continue without repeating yourself.”
The storyteller seemed unamused. “Your people’s stories will run out, but mine will not.”
Clement protested, “We Sainnites have a long history!”
“No histories,” said Gilly. “Forbidden.”
“By command? Or by the storyteller’s preference?”
“I hear whatever tale people choose to tell,” said the storyteller. “So long as it is new to me.”
“If I told you how I got my flower bulbs,” began Clement.
“No personal tales,” interrupted Gilly.
“I hear whatever tale people choose to tell,” said the storyteller again, in a tone so neutral that a listener might not even notice that she was contradicting Gilly.
Clement said, “But if you heard a story about flower bulbs, that isn’t the kind of story you would then tell, is it?”
When at last Clement turned to see why the storyteller had not answered, she noticed first that the woman continued to find her balance on the slippery stones, as easily and unconsciously as a dancer. Then she noticed that the storyteller was not even looking at her feet, but at her. Her attentiveness and silence both were deeply unsettling.
Clement felt irresistibly compelled to speak. “This kind of story: The fighting had been incessant, and it was the first time I had seen my mother in days. We had just heard that the enemy was coming over the wall. She came to the barracks, took me out into the garden, and we began digging. She wore a coat like this one I’m wearing, with big pockets. We filled her pockets with bulbs—all different kinds—until we couldn’t cram any more in. Then she picked me up, and ran with me. I looked over her shoulder and saw the enemy coming down the road. I could hear my mother gasping for breath. I could feel the great lump of bulbs in her pocket, and I remember hoping that none of them would fall out.”
She stopped. She felt Gilly’s gaze, but did not want to look at him. The general’s Lucky Man had been a child beggar in a ditch when she first met him. There was not much doubt that Cadmar had abused the boy, those first few years. There were many topics that Clement and Gilly never discussed with each other, including both their childhoods.
It was time for one of her listeners to ask a question, to rescue Clement from embarrassment. But Gilly was silent, and the storyteller did not appear to be capable of asking questions, or of engaging in anything resembling a normal conversation. She said, “Your mother’s power came to you through those flower bulbs. Because she loved you, she rescued that power for you in the face of disaster. When I tell this stor
y, I will tell how you rescued that power for your child.”
Clement found she had lost her power of speech.
Gilly was gazing intently at the icicle-decorated eaves of a half- built building. He glanced at Clement, finally. To her surprise, his glance was serious, with no mockery at all. He turned to the storyteller, and asked the question Clement could not. “How will she do such a thing?”
“When I tell that story,” the woman said, “Then we will know how.”
In a crowded, dirty room, a dozen soldiers gathered, all men from the same company, who had come directly from the construction work. They had pulled bread and meat from their pockets and were eating companionably and passing a surreptitious flask as they awaited the storyteller. They leapt up in confusion when Clement entered, and settled down again at her gesture, though now the flask was nowhere to be seen. She could smell forbidden spirits, though, and a stink of dirt and sweat and slightly rancid meat. After Clement and the storyteller had helped Gilly to dismount, he had scarcely been able to walk. But now, as he sat and took a pen from behind his ear, an ink bottle from his pocket, and a roll of paper from inside his coat, he became the very model of grimy officiousness. In fact, of everyone in the room, only the storyteller was truly clean, as though even dirt could not adhere to her.
The soldiers began telling stories almost at once, their order of recitation apparently having been worked out in advance. Half listening, Clement watched the storyteller, whose attention in turn was focused on whoever spoke: an attention the likes of which Clement had never seen, not even in a predator whose life depended on such watchfulness. When one or another speaker began to falter self-consciously, the storyteller would look away, to give him some relief. Every single time, she looked into Clement’s eyes, instead. Clement perceived nothing in that glance: not curiosity nor self-consciousness nor weariness nor wonder. Certainly, the storyteller didn’t care that Clement stared at her. In fact, she hardly even seemed to notice.
Gilly, skimming his list, interrupted one man’s story, and then another, to say, “Sorry, that one’s been told.” For other stories, he wrote a few words down on his paper: a title, or a description, Clement supposed. After some mental ciphering, Clement concluded that the woman probably had already told, and been told, well over two hundred stories. And if the storytelling continued to winter’s end, it would easily be more than a thousand. Surely the soldiers were making bets on when the stories would run dry because they had realized however vaguely, that the storyteller was uncanny, and that she was doing something that should have been impossible. But, apparently, it had occurred to no one, except perhaps to Gilly, that extraordinary events are seldom benign.
The storyteller was in the refectory, being served an early supper so she could be refreshed and ready to perform when the meal bell was rung. Clement and Gilly stood out in the chilly street, both of them on foot now. As always, Gilly crouched over his cane like an old man, but he looked even older in winter, and in the last few years his hair had begun to go gray. Clement took off her hat and brushed a hand self-consciously across her own hair, close-clipped for the helmet she hardly ever wore anymore. Was she also going gray? She tried to think of when she had last looked into a mirror.
“That storyteller is more than strange,” she said. “She is supernatural.”
Gilly gave her that peculiar sideways look of his, but did not speak.
“Is she a witch?” Clement asked.
He said, “I believe she has what the Shaftali call an elemental talent, an unusual ability that gives a remarkable shape to her thinking. If she were a witch, though, she’d be turning her stories into reality.”
“If Cadmar knew about this . . .”
Gilly looked grimly down at his hand gripping the cane. “The soldiers adore her. I’d hate to take her away from them for no good reason, after such a year as they’ve had to endure.”
“I think,” said Clement, “That you yourself might like her a little.”
He looked sideways at her again. “A monstrous creature like her?”
They were silent until Gilly added, quietly, “She must be aware of what danger she puts herself in by entering these gates. But she seems incapable both of fear and of self-protection.”
“Isn’t she as much a danger to us?”
Gilly said, “You think she’s a Paladin spy? With that memorable face? Dressed in extremely visible flame-red silk? Always the center of attention?”
“Well, if she was lurking about trying to be invisible, she wouldn’t have soldiers blabbing to her for hours every day with official permission.”
“What one thing has she been told today that could be even remotely useful to our enemies?”
“It’s not what they’re telling her that matters,” said Clement. “It’s the habit of telling.”
“Yes,” said Gilly. “The habit of telling. And the novelty of being heard. It matters, yes. But how is it dangerous?”
Clement could not think of when she had felt so unbalanced, so utterly confounded. Gilly’s steadiness, his very seriousness, only contributed to the sensation. She wanted him to make a joke of the entire afternoon. But he clung to his cane as though he feared he would fall over, frowned distantly at the icy ground, and waited for her to speak.
Surely something the storyteller had said to Gilly had unnerved him also. Perhaps, because of her, he now shared with Clement this lingering sensation that he had overlooked the possibilities of his life. But the sensation would pass, and they would still be what they were.
Clement said, “Well, we can forbid the storyteller to enter the garrison. Or we can arrest her and do to her what we do to witches. Or we can pretend like we haven’t noticed a bloody thing, and let the soldiers hear her tales.” She paused. “Do you think you can make certain she has no other conversations like the one she had with me today? With anyone? Including yourself?”
There was a silence. “Yes,” Gilly said.
“Has Cadmar showed any interest in hearing her tales?”
“None.”
“Let’s make certain he doesn’t.” The bell was ringing. “Shall we go in?” She took his arm, and felt him lean into her.
It was the first time Clement had sat down in that room to watch the storyteller’s performance. The eager soldiers struggled with each other for the best spots, but they had left a seat for Gilly, and Clement sat in the place the storyteller vacated. A soldier said, “Lieutenant-general, you’ve not come here before? You’ll be amazed.”
She turned to the soldier, and found a hard-faced, embittered veteran, who had already turned away from her to look up at the storyteller with an expression of childish anticipation. “Why?” said Clement.
“Oh, she’s good.” The veteran put a finger to her lips. “This is the best part.”
What followed was a ripple of silence, and the tension of anticipation. The storyteller waited on the stage of the tabletop: poised, taut, intent. Just as Clement thought the performer had waited too long, she spoke. “I am a collector of tales, and I will trade, story for story. This is a tale of the Juras people, who are giants in an empty land, whose voices are so big they sing the light into the stars.”
She told the tale of the grass lion and the buffalo, which Clement thought was about the dangers of underestimating the enemy, or of overestimating oneself, or perhaps of being so stupid as to assume there is no more to be understood about the world. The storyteller told five more tales, and each one was a disappointment to Clement, for none of them was a tale of magical flower bulbs.
“Oh, dear,” Gilly said. “Clem, I fear you are in trouble. Something very odd is happening to you.”
But he added, after a while, “At least get Cadmar’s permission.”
Clement made certain Cadmar was in a jovial mood, which, after so many years with him was not too difficult to engineer. He laughed at her request, which she expected, and then granted it. He liked to think he was generous with his inferiors, especially in matters t
hat were irrelevant to and not inconvenient to him.
Clement rode to Alrin’s house early one cold afternoon, alone and unexpected. Marga must have been out, for the storyteller opened the door and admitted her without comment. She was not wearing her performance clothes, but Alrin’s tailor certainly had been exercising his skills on her: her wool suit was austere, not impractical, and very flattering. Clement had been curious what possessed the courtesan to take in this unconventional lodger, but, watching the uncanny woman go up the stairs to announce Clement’s presence, it occurred to Clement that Alrin might simply be indulging in a passion for exotic decoration.
“She asks you to come upstairs,” said the storyteller when she returned.
“You did tell her—?”
“Business. As you said.”
Clement made her own way to Alrin’s room. The courtesan lay in bed, supported by pillows, with the lamp lit and an account book beside her. Her round belly jutted before her. “You’re not well?” Clement said.
Alrin waved a graceful hand. “Oh, it’s nothing. Marga made me see the midwife, and now I must lie abed all day. I’m sure you wish that you might suffer so.”
Earth Logic Page 26
