Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  “Lieutenant-General, you are not injured?”

  She was holding her head, she realized. The medic had come up to her, with his knives and his bone saw. The cauterizing irons were once again on the fire.

  “It’s been a long night,” she said.

  He snickered, apparently thinking she was making a pun. And then he said viciously, “Hell!”

  She leapt up. The medic tore frantically at Willis’s tightly bound bandages, which were suddenly sodden. Blood pooled on the tabletop, and dripped to the stone floor. But Willis lay quiet, profoundly at rest. Even his fanatical heart had stopped beating.

  Chapter 31

  From one exterior wall to the other, nothing interrupted the open space of the big building’s first floor. At both ends, hot fires crackled in stone fireplaces, but could not do more than lift the chill of so vast a space. As the whole host of Paladins came in, however, the space began to seem too small. They stripped off their winter gear, and soon a wall of pegs was hung with clothing, skis, and weapons. Garland, pushing his way through the convivial, loud-spoken groups towards the kitchen, heard scattered words of conversation that mixed together like the ingredients for a soup.

  “. . . when she took my hand . . . ”

  “. . . dizzy!”

  “. . . what Mabin is saying to her now?”

  “I never even felt like hesitating.”

  “. . . how often do we have that confidence?”

  “And I just want to know what . . . ”

  “. . . the first day of the first year of Karis G’deon?”

  Garland found the kitchen, another grand space, crowded with a half dozen sweating cooks, who upon every surface were rolling and filling pastries, on every fire were turning massive chunks of roasting meats, and on a number of auxiliary stoves were stirring big pots of strong-smelling soup. Garland had thought he was exhausted, but now his heart began to pound with excitement.

  Someone grabbed him by the shoulder. “Who are you?”

  “Tea for Karis?” he said. “I’m a cook,” he added.

  The cook, a crabby looking woman with a wool cap on her head, pointed the way to hot water, then followed Garland suspiciously to the steaming kettle, and watched as he unpacked Emil’s teapot from its box, and measured out the tea. Abruptly, she asked, “You’re a cook? Will you help us out in here?”

  “Yes, as soon as I can.”

  “Is it true what they’re saying? That it’s really her, the Lost G’deon?”

  “It’s true.”

  “What’s going to happen now?”

  “I don’t know. Making history isn’t much like following a recipe, I guess.”

  “Well! Maybe if she gets something to eat!”

  The cook hurried off to fill a tray with lovely crisp bits of filled pastry that had just come out of the oven, exactly as Garland would have done in her position. Yet if he had asked her if she thought that good food could make people wise, she would have laughed at the idea.

  Karis had picked up and returned every discarded weapon to each Paladin. By the time she was finished, the sun had nearly sunk below the horizon. Now, as Garland edged his way through the crowded shearing room, the Long Night candle was being lit: a monstrous candle, red as Karis’s coat, set on a table in the middle of the room. As its wick sputtered into flame, the Paladins began to sing, a rather mysterious song full of great symbolism, that Garland vaguely remembered having heard every year. As the singers finished the last verse, the kegs were tapped, and the singing was obscured by cheers. Garland had safely transported his tea pot and tray to the door of the side room, where, he supposed, brokers and shepherds had conducted their negotiations during shearing time. Within, Karis, Emil, Norina and Medric had drawn sturdy wooden chairs up to the hearth, their sodden hats, gloves, and mufflers lay on the floor, and they held out cold-whitened hands to be toasted by the flames. Karis’s frozen tears had finally thawed. Now, vivid red patches on her cheeks revealed where the wind had peeled the skin away.

  Mabin was scolding her. While Karis stole away the hearts of her Paladins, Mabin had sat indoors, fuming. She had begun her rant even before Garland had taken Emil’s tea set and left in search of hot water. Her angry speech continued as Garland filled and almost immediately began refilling the little tea cups. “. . . have you not even one thought of justice? Thousands of Shaftali people have been killed on their own soil, defending their own land. Do you think we can simply forget those wasted lives? The great talents of my generation and of yours—hunted down, extinguished, their knowledge and understandings forever lost. Our libraries burned, our university razed . . .”

  Karis took the food tray from Garland, offered it to her friends, then balanced it on her knees. By the time Mabin had finally worn her anger into silence, Karis had drunk four cups of tea and eaten most of the pastries. The Paladins, having sung several songs, apparently had now begun to dance. Their heavy boots stamped out the rhythm on the wooden planks. Belatedly, some musical instruments began to play: a squealing fiddle, and a breathy flute.

  “Are you done?” Karis said to Mabin. Her voice was wracked, a raw edge of sound giving rough shape to hollow silence. She turned to look at the Councilor, and added, “I hope?”

  Mabin pursed her thin lips. “Will you respond?”

  Karis ran fingers through her hair, which melting ice had left a damply curling tangle. “No,” she said.

  “No?” Mabin’s voice rose. “No?”

  Karis sat back in the chair, which gave an alarming squawk under her weight. “My logic supersedes yours.”

  Mabin stared at her. Norina gave Karis an impressed glance, eyebrows raised. Emil said, “The Sainnites are weak, and we are rapidly becoming the kind of people who can do what we must do to overcome them, without any further trivial dithering over the morality of our actions. And then we’ll live in a land like Sainna, where all disagreements are decided by violence, and every generation wreaks vengeance on the next. Is that the justice you want?”

  Mabin seemed relieved that someone, at least, was willing to tangle with her. As though Medric, inconsequential in his shivering, red-eyed misery of cold and weariness, were not even in the room, she said with disgust, “Is that what your Sainnite seer predicts?”

  Emil said, “Medric was not the first to see it. When Zanja na’Tarwein was brutalized by Sainnites and then by Paladins, she rightly wondered what real difference there was between them and us. So she was the first to see that the habitual use of brute force was changing us, including her herself, into brutes. That’s a lesson you yourself managed to teach her.”

  “Shall we be the victims of brutes instead? Shall we let them—”

  Karis said, “If you want to convince me, you’d better come up with some new arguments.”

  Though Karis’s voice was a mere shadow, at these words Mabin fell silent.

  Norina said crisply, “Karis, you don’t need Mabin. Ask her to retire. Spare yourself and us the aggravation.”

  Karis said wryly, “When Mabin raves at me how wrong I am, that’s the only time I’m certain that I’m right.”

  Norina said, “You don’t need that certainty. You have your own, the certainty of action.”

  As Garland leaned over Karis’s shoulder to take the teacup out of her hand and fill it up again, he noticed that her palms had been fissured by dry cold and hard work. J’han came in to report that Leeba was asleep. Garland whispered in his ear, and J’han went off to rummage in his pack, and returned to rub an unguent into Karis’s battered hands. Mabin, rigid, glared into the fire. Karis appeared to be considering Norina’s suggestion, but said finally, “Aggravate me all you want, Mabin. Shaftal needs its hero.”

  Mabin cried, “By the land—you’re just like Harald!”

  “Obstinate as a tree stump,” said Norina coolly.

  Karis said in her shredded voice, “Oh, I don’t think so—a tree stump can be moved.”

  J’han, with a choked snort, dropped Karis’s hand. Emil fou
ght for composure. Medric began to snicker helplessly. Apparently immune to their stifled hilarity, Norina said, “Councilor, you know that’s a truth to be ignored at your peril. Your continuing resistance will only force Karis to continue to humiliate you. I recommend another strategy, one that will make both of you less miserable.”

  Mabin opened her mouth as though to utter a fresh recrimination. Norina raised her eyebrows. Mabin stopped herself, and took a breath. “Karis, what does Shaftal need of me?”

  Emil gave Norina a congratulatory glance. Clearly, the two of them understood the shifts and starts of this conversation far more profoundly than Garland could hope to.

  Karis said, “Responsibility. For Emil.”

  This strangely worded request meant nothing to Garland, but Emil jerked with surprise. His fingers rose to his scarred earlobe, then he controlled the movement, and closed his mouth tightly over what Garland thought might be a strenuous objection.

  Mabin said, “But Emil resigned from the Paladins.”

  Emil replied in a strained, muted voice, “No, I resigned my position in South Hill. I wrote in my letter to you that I could no longer serve under your command. But I did not renounce my vows.”

  After a moment’s thought, Mabin said with rigid discipline, “I see. And you are not refusing Karis’s request?”

  Emil looked at Karis. Her lips were drawn tight; her jaw was set. He said unsteadily, “I know better than to refuse the will of Shaftal.”

  Mabin seemed to be gathering herself to rise, and Garland said, “What do you need, Councilor?”

  She glanced at him, surprised. “My commander.”

  “And a cork,” said J’han, who was again rummaging in his pack.

  Garland went out and signaled the commander, who came in and talked to Mabin, then bent over Emil’s huddled form and said something quietly to him, with a hand on his shoulder. Emil raised a tear-stained face to talk to her.

  J’han had opened his chest of surgical instruments, and selected a sturdy needle from among the strange devices. Garland examined the contents of his pockets: a packet of salt, a nutmeg, a short length of string, a tin of matches, a wad of tinder, a sewing kit, a tin of tea, and an array of corks. He offered them all to J’han. “Which one?”

  “You keep corks in your pocket?”

  “Where else would I keep them? J’han, I don’t understand what is happening. Why is Emil so unhappy?”

  “He’s being promoted,” J’han said.

  “And that makes him miserable? You people are nothing like Sainnites.”

  Smiling crookedly, J’han selected one of Garland’s corks, and stuck the needle in it. “Emil has always wanted to be a scholar. The last few years, he’s been calling himself a librarian. I never heard him express a desire to be a general. Give that to Karis, will you?” He handed Garland the needle and cork.

  After Mabin’s commander had stepped out, Emil said shakily to Medric, “Master seer, what is my future?”

  Medric said, with strange gentleness, “You know the answer, Emil.”

  “Karis—!” Emil cried.

  “After what you’ve done to me—!” Karis said.

  Norina uttered a sharp laugh, perhaps because Karis’s aggrieved tone so exactly matched Emil’s.

  Garland gave Karis the needle and cork, which she examined determinedly. He collected the empty tea cups, and hung sodden clothing on hooks. J’han, having packed away his gear, went to Karis and appeared to be explaining to her the anatomy of ears, pointing at his own ear as an example. Emil withdrew into inexplicable suffering, and no one disturbed him.

  When Mabin’s commander re-entered the room, a dozen others followed her in. The Paladins were somber; the music in the big room had been silenced. The commander put three gold rings into Mabin’s hand.

  Emil refused the handkerchief Medric offered, and knelt before Karis. No one seemed surprised that he was weeping; some of the Paladins seemed ready to weep themselves, in sympathy.

  Three times, Karis put the needle through Emil’s earlobe.

  Mabin put in the earrings. When she was finished, she said solemnly, “Emil, General of Paladins.”

  Everyone moved towards Emil: It appeared to be time to comfort him, embrace him, reassure him that he would survive.

  But Emil did not rise. Karis’s hand rested on his shoulder. Apparently, she was not finished with him. Emil gazed steadily, starkly, into her face.

  When Karis finally spoke, her voice was scarcely audible. “Emil, will you form and serve at the head of a new Council of Shaftal?”

  He replied without surprise, in a voice that did not waver, “What Shaftal requires of me I will do.”

  Norina said, “Emil, General of Paladins, by this vow you are bound.”

  Then, Karis helped him to rise, and kissed him apologetically, and passed him to Medric, who passed him to his friends, who passed him to the Paladins, and they each did what they could for him.

  Garland spent Long Night as cooks do, in the kitchen. When he emerged with trays of food still crackling from the oven, he saw Emil dancing gracefully with Mabin’s commander. He saw Karis laughing, with a half dozen people crowded around her. He saw Paladins dancing around the candle and kissing drunkenly in the corners. He saw Norina and J’han leaning shoulder to shoulder against a wall, fingers intertwined. Another time, he saw Norina and J’han dancing, Emil serious in the middle of an earnest crowd, and Karis crouched on a crate, delicately repairing the neck of the fiddle, with her toolbox at her feet.

  Garland lost all track of the time. When he eventually found his way back to the celebration, the ovens were cold, the dishes washed, and the First Day sweet bread was rising in bowls on the hearth. In the great room, the Long Night candle was two-thirds burned. People dozed in companionable huddles by the fireplaces. The fiddler played a melancholy tune, while four people, leaning on each other for balance, sang soulfully but unclearly about leaving home. Garland could find none of his companions, and did not know where to look for them. He found a chair, and watched the candle burn.

  Eventually, he noticed Karis’s toolbox, pushed out of the way against the wall. Above it was an empty peg where her coat had hung.

  He put on his coat, and went outside.

  The cold struck with such violence that he could not much appreciate the crystalline beauty of the starlit night. Snow cracked under his boots, and despite the hobnails his steps skittered on ice as hard as iron. The wailing singers, the howling fiddle, these sounds seemed far away as he tread around the glittering stones that composed the exterior wall of the building. The river was a road of ice, hedged on both sides by barren, bowed-over trees. The sky was light-spangled black, remote and mysterious. By habit he located a few familiar stars, and noticed the rising and setting constellations. He heard a sound of ragged breathing, and walked down the quay that stuck a stubby finger into the river here. Karis huddled there, like a boulder shoved up out of place by ice. He reached an arm around her, for she was weeping.

  The cold seemed unendurable. When Karis spoke, her breath covered them in a sudden cloud, but her voice was just a crack of sound. “I’ve made a lot of tools in twenty years. Scarcely a household lacks one now. I feel them, gathering dust or being used. Just like with Medric’s books, I know where they all are. Like stars.”

  Garland looked up, and tried to imagine being surrounded always by such a constellation of knowledge. He wanted to ask her to come inside, to be again the one who turned tree prunings into furniture and cupboards into sledges. But the transformations of that day had been irrevocable.

  She said, “I made some metal files one year. And one of those was used a while ago. It’s the only one of my tools used tonight. Now, the one who used it is dead, and the file is still in her bloody pocket.”

  She breathed sharply in. Her muscled back gave a shudder under Garland’s arm. “Now another one is dead,” she said, in her shredded voice.

  “What is happening? What is killing them?”


  “Violence,” she said heavily.

  “But it’s Long Night! A new year!”

  She raised her head from her knees. “And it would be acceptable on any other night?”

  Garland heard the scrape of hobnails on ice, and then the distant, distinct rhythm of Sainnese curses. He stood up, and shouted. Medric, his feet jammed into unlaced boots, and Emil steadying him with one hand while buttoning his own coat with the other came down the quay. Medric crouched beside Karis, shivering violently. “Hell, hell, hell! She’s given them a martyr!”

  Emil stood back, hands in his pockets, grim in the faint starlight. He looked up—the habitual movement of a traveler, checking his orientation, confirming with the sky that it was indeed winter, the dawn of a new year. His earrings glittered faintly in the starlight. He said obscurely, “That idiot, Willis. Inevitable.”

  Medric responded, “But Clement is a short-sighted, bloody fool! If she had just read the book! She had it in her hand . . .”

  Karis had raised her head again. She said to Garland, “These men speak a strange language, don’t they.”

  “I guess Willis is one of those that was killed,” said Garland, “And that’s a disaster. I don’t know how!”

  “My poor little book,” said Medric. “All I did was tell the humble truth, and trust the common sense of the Shaftali people. But Willis, his is a grand, heroic tragedy. My little book can’t compete. His death is what they’ll heed.”

  Garland burst out, “You mean it’s all for nothing? The writing, the printing, the hauling, the worry? It’s all wasted? Because that fanatic got himself in the Sainnites’ way?”

  In the silence, the distant sound of celebration seemed drunken self-indulgence. If such great labors could be so casually undone, thought Garland, what was the point of effort?