Earth Logic

by Laurie J. Marks

  Karis asked Medric in her cracked whisper, “What future do you see?”

  The seer said miserably, “I can’t see a bloody thing.”

  “What about Zanja?” Her shattered voice made it seem as if Karis had lost all hope.

  But Medric looked up. The frosted lenses of his spectacles glimmered. “Maybe it’s time I talked to her.”

  Zanja na’Tarwein filled her pot and lit her fire. The stars were coming out. She examined them as they appeared, but not a single star seemed to be in the same place as it had been the night before. She asked, “Does the pattern lie in the lack of a pattern?”

  And then she knew something had changed. In all these fleeting days and patternless nights, she had never spoken out loud. Now that she had done it, she recognized the soundlessness of this barren place: she heard not even a far away bird song, or the soughing of the wind, or the crackle of the flames under her pot of water.

  A footstep grated on gravel. She turned her head, and Medric squatted down beside her. “You’re not easy to find,” he commented.

  “Are you dead, Medric?”

  “Oh, no, just dreaming. You’ve got Emil’s tea set! And that old tin pot we used to put kitchen scraps in.”

  The water was boiling, so Zanja made tea. As she swirled the pot, she could smell it: half grass and half flower, the scent she would always associate with Emil, since it was his favorite kind of tea. She heard her clothes rustle, felt the heat of the pot on the palms of her hands, the ache of pain in her chest.

  Medric sat beside her fire in peaceful silence. She said, “You’ve brought sensation with you.”

  “Have I? Is it unpleasant?”

  She poured him a cup of tea, but hesitated to hand it to him. “If you eat or drink in the Land of the Dead . . .”

  “This is not the Land of the Dead.” He took the tiny cup from her, and sipped. “You know, this is the first time I’ve tasted your tea? It is good.”

  Zanja tasted the cup she had poured for herself. The complex flavor of the tea made a fist of sharp pain clench her heart. She said, “If I’m not in the Land of the Dead—and you can visit me in a dream—have I traveled so small a distance? How long does it take for a soul’s journey to end?”

  “It’s been four months,” said Medric.

  “Thousands of nights!”

  “A hundred. A hundred and twenty, maybe. It’s Long Night now. A few hours before sunrise. I lay down under Karis’s red coat, because I thought it might help me to find you. Karis made me sleep. I suppose she’s still beside me now.”

  “Gods!” Zanja’s dropped teacup uttered a musical ring against the clapper of a sharp stone. She pressed her hands to her chest, but the pain there did not ease. “My agonies should be ended! I should have earned some peace!”

  She jerked sharply away from Medric’s uplifted hand.

  Instead of touching her, he picked up the fallen teacup. “What does it take to break these things? After so many journeys and so many battles, the box is a wreck, but the cups and the pot, not a single chip.”

  She took the teacup from him, and examined it. “I can no longer read this symbol. Your comments are obscure.”

  “Obscure? Nothing is obscure to you.” He blinked at her. “The storyteller has your insight, is that it? And so you can’t see the pattern.”

  “What pattern?” she said desperately. “Is there one? What is this place? Why am I not dead?”

  “I see that you are suspended between life and death, and can’t get to either state.”

  Unsurprised, she said, “Forever?”

  “When your body finally dies, I suppose you’ll be set free. But it may seem like forever to you.”

  “But you severed my soul from the flesh!”

  “I’m afraid Norina subverted our logic with her own. She thought she’d make a way to get you back. But you know air logic, cruel even at its most merciful.”

  Zanja said, bitterly, “I cannot even curse her!”

  A long time they sat together. The sun, usually so quick to pop up from the horizon, was slow to rise. At last Zanja said, “I demand that Norina right her wrong.”

  Looking miserable, Medric dried out his teacup on the tail of his shirt.

  “Medric!”

  “You mean that you want her to finally kill you.” He put the little cup into its spot in the box. “I’ll tell her. I never thought I’d be killing you twice.”

  He took off his spectacles to wipe his eyes. It was terrible to see such a merry man so sad.

  “I wish you would leave,” she said. “And take your heartache with you.”

  “Would you like to have this? It’s my book, the one we printed on the old librarian’s press.”

  She accepted the oddly-made book he had taken from his pocket. It had a child’s gluey fingerprint on the cover.

  “Will you also take this coat?”

  Now that the light was finally rising, she recognized the vivid red of the coat he wore. “No!”

  “But this is a cold place.”

  She had not known it was cold, until he said so. Shivering, she said, “I need to be cold. Please go!”

  He got to his feet, and walked away, into the blaze of the rising sun. He did not look back. She did not call out to him. It was a relief when he had gone.

  They had gathered around Medric while he dreamed, a collection of weary travelers sharing blankets and using each other as pillows in the airy attic of a building never meant for winter habitation. Garland dozed, awoke shivering, pressed himself against the nearest body for warmth, and slept again. When voices woke him, some faint light had begun to filter in, and a distant window floated in the black, framing a couple of fading stars. Downstairs, the Long Night candle would soon be extinguished. The first day of the first year of Karis G’deon would soon dawn.

  Karis still sat beside Medric with one knee drawn up and his hand clasped in hers. But he was mumbling irritably, and Emil stood over him, hauling him to a sitting position.

  “It’s no good,” said Medric.

  “You couldn’t find her?” Emil said.

  “She’s dead?” Karis said.

  Medric said. “It would be better if she were dead. Norina—”

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  Garland was quite startled to realize that the body he clasped so tightly was the Truthken’s.

  She said, “Well, what?”

  “We have to kill her again. Her body, this time.”

  “We? You mean me.” Norina tucked the blankets back around Garland and J’han as she got up. “In your opinion, Medric, would killing the storyteller be a just and merciful act?”

  “Zanja demands that you right your wrong. It seems a demand both for justice and for mercy.”

  “She asks this out of anger? Out of despair?”

  “Oh, she’s angry. But your interference trapped her in a dreadful place, a between place, a nothing place. We can’t just leave her there.”

  Norina asked, with that inhuman coldness of hers, “What if the storyteller would rather live?”

  There was a silence. Emil said, “I think Zanja’s desires take precedence. But you might gain the storyteller’s acquiescence when the time comes.”

  “Yes, you can probably do that,” said Medric. “If she’s the one with the insight, she’ll understand.”

  Norina settled somewhat on her heels. Garland realized she was looking at Karis.

  Karis spoke in a voice that had shredded to a whisper. “What do you want me to say?”

  “That you won’t interfere.”

  Karis was silent.

  But as though Karis had spoken, Norina said, “You must consider this further. If I am forced to act without your consent, it will be the end of our friendship. And I feel that I have no choice in this.”

  “I know,” Karis said. “Leave me alone.”

  Sighing, Emil said to Medric, “Did your dream yield only bad news?”

  “Zanja is trapped in a single, empty mo
ment. It is impossible for her to have any understanding that might be of use to us.”

  The light was rising. Garland could almost see the expression on Emil’s face, as it changed from pained to startled. “Then we’re asking the wrong one,” he said. “We need to ask the storyteller.”

  Part Five: How Tortoise Woman Saved the World

  Tortoise Woman’s son had married some farmers to the north, and one day she decided to visit him. It was a bright, warm day, and she hummed to herself as she walked. Normally, she was a grumpy, solitary person, but on days like this even she could be in a good mood. When she stepped across a crack in the earth, thin as a grass stem, she hardly noticed it.

  Returning home, though, she stopped at the crack, which was as wide as a finger now. She had seen cracks like this before, in flood plains after the water had receded, but this soil was sandy and it had not been that long since the last rain. She put her eye to the crack. It seemed to have no bottom, and the darkness was very dark indeed. But she stepped over the crack, and continued home.

  The next time she walked that path, the summer was over and frost sparkled on the shadow side of the stones. When she came to the crack, it was wide as a hand, and even as she watched, she saw a rock teeter into it and disappear in the darkness. “I wonder how long this crack is,” she said to herself, and walked along the crack in one direction and then in another. It seemed to go on forever. But she stepped over the crack and went on to her son’s house.

  “Has anyone noticed that big crack in the path?” she asked her son and his family. No one had.

  When she returned home, the crack had gotten much wider. She measured it with her walking stick, and then sat down beside the path to take a nap. When she awoke, she measured it again, and although it had not gotten much wider in so little time, it was certainly wider.

  She went home and said to her own family, “I am afraid the earth is splitting in half.”

  “You are being ridiculous,” they said.

  The fall mud came, and then the killing frost. One day, Tortoise Woman told her family that she was going to visit her son one more time before the snow began to fall, but it was a lie. The crack that would soon separate the world had gotten much wider.

  “Perhaps the two pieces of the world might be pulled back together,” she said to herself. “But if I wait until spring and bring all the people I know to see this problem, and get them to use cables and horses to pull the pieces together—- by then it might be too late; it might be impossible to get from one side to the other.”

  Besides, her son’s family had not even noticed the problem, and her own family thought she was ridiculous. Later, they would regret not having paid attention, but she could not wait for that to happen.

  She lay down across the crack, with her front legs on one side and her back legs on the other, and she dug in with all her claws and began to pull. She pulled for many days and nights, and the winter snows began to fall. Her family assumed she had decided to stay with her son for the winter, and of course her son thought she was comfortably at home.

  After the spring mud, though, her family went out looking for her. ‘There is the crack she was so worried about,” they said, as they stepped over it. “It is not nearly as wide as she said it was.” On the way back from their son’s house, very worried about her now, they found Tortoise-Woman’s walking stick. They noticed the marks she had made on it to measure the width of the crack, and they laid it across the crack to measure it again. “According to these marks,” they said, “This crack has gotten much narrower. That’s ridiculous.” And they walked away, looking for any sign of what had become of Tortoise Woman.

  In fact, she was very close to them, so close that she had heard the entire conversation. With her legs dug deeply into the earth and her head tucked in out of the weather, she had gradually been covered with mud, and looked like a big rock straddling the crack in the earth. She had been pulling the edges together all winter long, and was glad to hear that she had made progress.

  Several years later, her son brought his children that way, and they did not even notice the crack, though he did wonder what had happened to it. Tortoise Woman had begun to sink into the earth, and plants had taken root on her back. Even if she had dared let go, she could not have pulled herself loose. But she knew she needed to hold on, for she was the only thing keeping the world from splitting in two.

  And there she remains, to this very day.

  Chapter 32

  The winter sun, a pallid and late-arriving stranger, still lingered below the rooftops as the heavy iron gate of the garrison swung open. A small, precise woman in a gray cloak, with flashes of red silk shining through like flame in charcoal, stepped out onto the crisp ice. “Good day, storyteller,” said one of the soldiers who had just come on duty. “Get some sleep, eh?”

  He and his fellows might have benefited from that same advice, for they were blinking wearily in the rising light. One of the others called after the storyteller, as the gate was locked, “That was a fine night!”

  The storyteller walked away, across the ice. As sunlight suddenly gilded the attic window of a narrow building, she pushed the hood back from her face, and looked up. The sky was clear but colorless. The golden glare on the roof seemed sourceless and mysterious. Across that glare, a raven stalked, his ragged black blurring in a halo of light.

  It was the first day of the new year. Already, though the iron winter stretched before them, farmers would begin to plan for the distant spring. The storyteller climbed the steps, opened the door to the silent house, and went in.

  In the sparsely furnished upstairs rooms, the baby slept beside a cold stove. The storyteller soundlessly lit and built up a new fire, then she went to a dark window over which thick curtains were drawn. She opened the curtains, lifted the stiff, ice-crusted sash, and opened the shutters. Now, the sun’s reluctant rise cast its tentative brilliance across her features, sprinkling a golden flush on her sharp cheekbones, but leaving her eyes in shadow.

  In a rush of cold air, the raven landed. His ragged feathers rustled dryly as he lifted his wings and hopped from the windowsill into the room. The storyteller lowered the window sash, then turned and politely offered the raven something to eat.

  “Thank you,” the raven said.

  She brought him a plate of bread and cheese, poured him a mug of water, and knelt on the floor near him as he gulped down the food. “It cannot be easy to find a meal in winter, even in the city,” she said.

  “Do you know who I am?” the raven asked.

  “You are a raven who wishes to talk to me.” The woman looked at him a moment, as though she knew that she should be surprised. “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “No, I am not certain.”

  “I am a collector of tales. But I have never traded stories with a raven.”

  “I will gladly tell you a story,” the raven said. “But I do not want to hear one of your stories. I want you to answer me a question.”

  “I can answer no questions. There is very little I understand.”

  “You have insight, do you not?”

  “Insight? I suppose I do. But I have no memories. And insight without memory has little value.”

  After a long silence, to which the storyteller seemed indifferent, the raven said, “I know you are a reader of glyphs. I ask you to cast the cards for me.”

  The storyteller rose up lightly, checked that the baby was not too close to the rising heat of the stove, took the packet of glyph cards out of her boot, and squatted down by the raven again. “What is your question?”

  “How can the Sainnites be overcome, without destroying the spirit of Shaftal?”

  The storyteller moved her fingers through the cards, seeming scarcely interested in the raven’s question or in the cards. The room’s only light came through the unshuttered window. A card fell to the floor: the Wall, also called the Obstacle, which glyph-readers often interpret as an impermeable and insurmountable problem. The s
toryteller examined this solitary card, and then she reversed it. On the right and left of the Wall she lay out a pattern of cards. Her actions seemed swift, casual, and random, but, gradually, as she added cards and relocated those already laid down, the scattered cards began to group together and overlay each other in some complex relationships. She had dropped fifteen cards when she finally stopped, though her fingers continued to sort through the cards in her hand.

  “The pattern is not complete,” she finally said. “But that is all I know of it.”

  The raven walked around the cards, examining them. The storyteller rose up to check the infant again, and this time she moved his basket a small distance from the warming stove. Beyond a half-open door a sleeper moaned.

  “Is this a pattern of present-and-future?” the raven asked. “Or is it cause-and-result?”

  She returned to look at the cards. “Both, perhaps.”

  “What is the obstacle that must be broken through?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it a place? An idea? An event? A people?”

  “People,” she said. “Persons. But perhaps it is just a wall.”

  The raven continued to ask questions about various elements of the pattern, both those elements to the left and those to the right of the overturned wall. To some questions the storyteller offered several tentative or overlapping answers. To others she could offer no answer at all.

  The sleeper in the next room moaned again, and the infant became restive. The raven asked, “How much longer do you think we have?”

  “Not long.”

  “I promised you a story,” said the bird.

  The storyteller said, “But I have not truly answered your question.”

  “You have answered—but I must work to understand that answer. Therefore, I will tell you a story without an ending. Is that a fair exchange?”