“Thank you, lieutenant-general. The company will certainly appreciate that.”
It was a gray day, and the bright colors of the city’s latched shutters and doors were further muted by a haze of chimney smoke. They walked between ridges of snow that walled either side of the road, and the sledge runners clacked rhythmically on exposed cobblestones. The garrison gate lay ahead. Clement could hear a distant cheer as the gate guards spotted them, and then a bugle pealed the news of their arrival. Suddenly the entire company walked in step, lined up, straight-backed.
By some unlikely piece of luck, Gilly was already waiting at the gate. Clement could see him, hunched like a crow on his exceptionally steady horse, exactly as he had been when she left. Had he been as haunted by anxiety as she had been, this last month?
Now they were passing the building that housed Clement’s small, peculiar family. The door opened; the girl-nurse came out onto the stoop with the heavily-bundled baby in her arms.
Clement had broken formation and climbed the stairs before it even occurred to her that now the entire company had no choice but to come to a disorderly and rather confused halt. She took her son in her arms. He seemed to be asleep. The small weight of his body simultaneously relieved and oppressed her. She kissed his forehead softly so as to not awaken him.
The girl-nurse looked pale. “Is my son well?” Clement asked. “Has Gilly looked after you?”
“Of course,” the girl said, looking flustered.
“Come into the garrison with me. Captain Herme—”
Clement gave the baby back to the girl, and the captain stepped forward to help her down the stairs. Now the door opened again, and the storyteller came out, carrying a basket, with her heavy cloak loosely wrapped around her shoulders.
Clement thought, Now it begins.
She said, “Storyteller, are you on your way into the garrison? You might as well come with us.”
The storyteller’s dark, narrow, sculpted face was beyond reading. Yet it seemed to Clement that the woman knew she had no choice but to comply. The storyteller followed the girl-nurse down the steps, and silently accepted the soldiers’ greetings. The company continued its progress, and was admitted with the usual fanfare into the garrison, as Gilly watched, his ugly face drawn and unsmiling.
Clement made a laudatory speech and dismissed the weary company. As the soldiers sorted out their gear and began to disperse, Clement took the gate captain aside. “Captain, I want you to take the storyteller into custody and keep her under guard in the gaol. Do it as quietly as you can. I don’t think she will resist.”
“Yes, lieutenant-general. May I ask—?”
“No, I can’t explain.”
He gave her a stiff salute, signaled his company, and with several soldiers behind him approached the storyteller. She spoke a couple of words, and handed the captain her basket. Then, she turned and walked off with the soldiers. It was a very quiet arrest, but the girl-nurse noticed, and understood. Uttering a small moan, wild-eyed, she clutched the baby to her breast. What reason had she to fear she might be next?
Gilly’s stolid horse breathed out a puff of fog as Clement went to him, and took his proffered hand in a pretense of greeting.
“What are you doing?” he asked in a low voice.
“I believe the storyteller’s tribe is Ashawala’i, the tribe that would destroy us, a seer once said.”
Gilly said after a moment, “Seer’s visions are explanatory or tentative, not necessarily predictive. Even if she is a survivor of that unfortunate tribe . . .”
“She also may be the Lost G’deon’s lover.”
Gilly sharply turned his head to look after the departing woman and her respectful escort.
Clement said, “She might be fully capable of destroying us.”
“With a G’deon’s power behind her? Most certainly.” Gilly’s gaze became unfocused. Then he blinked, and said, “Clem, look up at the roof.”
Clement did. Two ravens stood together near the roof’s edge. One of them watched the departing storyteller. The other looked directly into Clement’s eyes.
“They can behave like natural birds when they choose to,” said Gilly. “At the moment, apparently, they don’t so choose. How long has that one been following you?”
“I don’t know.” Clement felt very cold.
“The other one follows the storyteller.” As Gilly spoke, the raven lifted up and flew over the rooftops, towards the gaol. “I think it would be safe to say that nothing you have done since the ravens first appeared a month ago, has gone unnoticed. If the storyteller is the Lost G’deon’s lover, then there seems little doubt whose supernatural agents these birds are.”
The remaining raven continued to gaze at Clement, an unearthly, unblinking stare. Clement, her face stiff with cold, said with difficulty, “Until this moment, I thought I was just guessing.”
“How will imprisoning the storyteller prevent our destruction? Isn’t it possible you might bring destruction upon us?”
“Don’t you think I have driven myself mad with that question already?”
“You look mad,” he said, with a frail shadow of his old sarcasm.
A soldier approached with the storyteller’s basket, which was crammed with the baby’s supplies. “She said to give you this, lieutenant-general.”
Gilly said, “You’re taking your son back inside the walls?”
“Put the basket with my gear,” Clement told the soldier. “Gilly, how did you know I would arrive today?”
“The storyteller told me. Not just the day, but the hour as well.”
“Apparently, she expected to be arrested. Why didn’t she flee?”
There was a long, strange silence. “Well, here’s Cadmar,” Gilly said, as though that were some kind of answer.
Cadmar strode down the road briskly, with Ellid practically trotting behind to keep up. Clement said, “I’ll deal with him. I’ll meet you in your room, in about an hour. Will you get that girl and my son settled in my quarters?”
Gilly leaned over stiffly, to clasp her hand again. “What will happen to us?” he asked. Fortunately, he did not seem to expect an answer.
Cadmar was only interested in the success of Clement’s mission, and since all the attackers of the children’s garrison had been killed, with no Sainnite casualties, he considered it a success. Clement explained very precisely why and how this success could prove to be a disaster, but Cadmar would not hear of it. With Willis dead, he said, the movement he had inspired would surely falter. Cadmar also dismissed the importance of Medric’s book. “This Medric himself admits he is a traitor to his own people—and he obviously is a madman. Get Gilly to read some of it to you and you’ll see what I mean.”
It was without much hope that Clement explained to Cadmar why she had arrested the storyteller. By the time she was done, Cadmar appeared to doubt her stability. “There is no G’deon!” He went on to explain why, as though she were a particularly simple child who could not seem to learn anything. “This mission has been a trial,” he finally said patronizingly, and, dismissing her, told her to get some rest.
Clement had expected nothing else from him. As long as she had known Cadmar, what he could not understand or imagine he had always declared impossible. She went to her quarters to change into a fresh uniform, to reassure the nearly hysterical girl-nurse, and to pick up her sleeping son. “I’ll watch him for a while. Why don’t you take a nap? You look tired.”
The girl’s bleak stare followed Clement out the door.
In Gilly’s room, the fire had been built up and a lamp had been lit, and now he sat in a sturdy chair near the fireplace, waiting for her. “Well, I have to find some kind of proof that even Cadmar will accept,” said Clement wearily as she sat down beside her old friend. “He treated me like an addle-pate, of course.”
“Of course,” said Gilly. “And if not for those ravens, I’d agree with the general. This is another puzzlement, Clem: you wonder why the storyteller did not try
to flee; I wonder why the ravens want us to realize they are watching us.”
“Or why Medric wanted us to know the contents of his book.”
“Or why a woman whose power can shift the very foundations of the land has done nothing at all for twenty years.”
“Well, as far as Cadmar is concerned, that inaction proves that she doesn’t exist.”
Gilly said quietly, “Cadmar can only imagine her as a general, like him. And you and I also have fallen into that error, up until now. But if we now imagine that this woman’s inaction has been intentional, then, suddenly, we must reconsider everything. When the old general sent a battalion to eliminate an entire people from the face of the earth, did he never once think that his actions might well be causing the very fate he intervened to prevent? Surely this Ashawala’i woman, this storyteller, has pursued our destruction for nearly six years because of what we did to her people.”
“Yes,” Clement said. She had considered this possibility so often that it had finally lost its ability to dismay her.
For a long time, the two of them sat side-by-side by the crackling flames as though they had nothing of importance to do. Clement, who for nearly a month had worried about the son she had abandoned to the care of a callow girl, allowed herself a little while to think of him. He did not seem much bigger; but would he be livelier now? Would he recognize her at all, or would he mistake the one who fed him for his mother?
Gilly had asked earlier what would happen to them. And now Clement wondered what would happen to her son, should the Lost G’deon exercise her destructive power as Willis claimed she would.
She said musingly, “My mother saved me and her flowers . . . but after all, she was merely running away from soldiers much like her, and she knew that a ship was waiting, and the tide was turning. All she had to do was reach the boat before the people chasing her did.”
Gilly said, “Well, your problem is much more complicated. If you can confirm the storyteller’s identity, will that prove the Lost G’deon’s existence?”
Clement said sadly, “The storyteller will soon explain everything. She will not be able to help herself.”
“Don’t torture her,” Gilly said.
She looked at him—her monstrous friend, whose sympathy for this monstrous woman would only be more acute, now that he had an inkling of what her life had been like. She said, “One woman’s life gives us the lives of six thousand soldiers.”
“Exactly,” grated Gilly. “Her life, not her death. And after all she has survived, you won’t be able to frighten her with mere pain, not unless you torture her beyond recovery.”
“I must prove something, somehow!”
“Fine. Torture the storyteller, get your proof, win Cadmar’s approval . . . and what have you really gained? You’ve hardened the G’deon’s determination, and you’ve thrown away an extremely valuable hostage. I’m starting to think you are addle-pated.”
“No, I’m cornered.”
“At this moment, it is only your thinking that is cornered.”
“Bloody hell, Gilly! Get me out of the corner, then!”
“Is it possible you will not—cannot—respond defensively to this threat? This seer, Medric, seems to think it’s possible.” Gilly stood up stiffly, and went to the lamp table to leaf through the crudely constructed little book that lay there.
Watching him, Clement felt a darkness descend on her. What if Medric’s book had been a weapon? And that weapon had reached its target: not her, not Cadmar, but the Shaftali man who advised them both? What if Medric had won Gilly’s heart?
Gilly found a page he had marked, and began to read out loud. Clement could hardly pay attention. But the words were rhythmic, the sentences clear. Dismayed as she was, Clement began to listen.
“’What has always distinguished the Shaftali people is their hospitality. The great historians have written of it repeatedly: of the effort the Shaftali people go through, to treat every stranger as a member of the family. They say, perhaps rightly, that this tradition has an element of self interest, for to feed and shelter the homeless wanderer prevents crime and theft. But in fact this custom goes much deeper than self-interest.
“The Land of Shaftal is unforgiving, a place of harsh winters and brief summers, where sometimes only luck might decide the difference between death and survival. In such a brutal land, it seems the people should also become brutal. That once was the case, long ago, in the time of the first G’deon, Mackapee. But as Mackapee sat in his isolated cave, by a peat fire, watching over his sheep, he imagined Shaftal as a community based on mercy. Kindness and generosity, he wrote, can never be earned and will never be deserved. Hospitality is not an act of justice, but of mercy—a mercy beneficial to everyone, by making it possible to depend on and trust each other.
“But now, Shaftal has again become a merciless place. I do believe the Sainnites more than deserve the destruction that even now bears down upon them. But the Shaftali people will one day regret that they allowed their land to be transformed by rage.”
He interrupted himself. “Why are you looking so desperate?”
“Those farmers,” she said.
“Which farmers?”
“All of them! Seth, the woman with the vegetable seeds, the man who knew the Sainnites are refugees.”
“That is in the book.”
“That we don’t have families?”
“In the book.”
“Hell! I knew there was something ominous about those people’s behavior! They all had read the book!”
Clement had left Gilly in the dark, she realized, but in a moment he had achieved his own understanding and was saying, “They offered you hospitality, I gather. And you find it reasonable to conclude that the hospitality was actually threatening. Does it not occur to you that if Medric is with the Lost G’deon, and published this book with her consent, perhaps with her participation—”
“You want to believe this man is sincere. And you want to believe that what he wrote, the G’deon agrees with.”
He looked at her a long time before he looked away and said regretfully, “I do want to.”
“But in fact they have much to gain by making us believe they don’t intend to destroy us. If we lower our defenses—”
“No, a G’deon is not a general! She does not think this way.”
“Whatever she is, that doesn’t change what I am. When my people landed here on the shores of Shaftal, perhaps we could have thrown ourselves on the mercy of the Shaftali people. But we made ourselves criminals instead! How will we escape that culpability, Gilly?”
Gilly shut the book and lay it down. For some time, he stood beside the bright flame of the lamp, with his ugly head bowed over the table. At last, he said quietly, “You were just a child, Clem. It was your elders, including your mother, who made the choices that made you a criminal. And now you have a son. What will you choose for him?”
The crackling of the fire seemed awfully loud. The scraping of Gilly’s cane on the floor made Clement flinch. She looked down at her sleeping son and felt the depth of what she had done to herself when she allowed him to be put in her arms. How could she bequeath to this baby the violence and ostracism that shaped her life? How could she not bequeath it to him?
He lay very still. It seemed odd that he had not awakened yet. She opened the blanket to feel his chilly, flaccid hand.
“Gilly, stop blocking the lamplight!” Gilly hastily stepped back from the table.
She turned the baby so the light shone full on his face. The violet shadows that bruised his eyelids seemed stark, and terrible. She had seen children who were sick unto death. She knew what it looked like.
Gilly came over to her. He looked into the baby’s face. He put an arm across her shoulders. Of all the clumsy, graceless actions Clement had seen him do over the years, this was by far the most awkward.
She pressed her face against his arm, which was all knotted with the muscle it took to support his ungainly body’s weight on
the cane. “I’ll send for the midwife right away,” he said. “Listen,” he added desperately, perhaps fearful that Clement would weep. “If you’re a criminal, so am I. And I’ll gladly share your fate with you, if I can die your friend.”
Chapter 34
Sometimes a babe just fails, the midwife said. The nurse’s milk is plentiful, but milk does no good if the child won’t suck. He was born early, and his mother died—such infants commonly don’t survive. The midwife gave Clement a cool glance. She seemed to think Clement should have expected this outcome.
Clement sent the midwife home.
The baby remained with his nurse in Clement’s quarters. Though Clement pursued business that was too urgent to wait, she forced herself to keep returning to make certain the frightened girl attempted to make the baby take the breast. Each time Clement returned, she took up her son, and held him, and watched the nearly indistinguishable movement of his breathing. Each time, she learned a new lesson in excruciating helplessness.
She could endure anything but hopeless waiting. That her urgency drove her out again into the bitter night seemed almost fortunate.
In the refectory, she talked to the night watch as those soldiers came on duty, and then to the much larger day watch as they came in for their evening meal. She found some soldiers who had been posted in South Hill, and in nearby Reece before that. They remembered the seer, Medric, quite vividly: a ridiculous, voluble little man, nearly blind without his spectacles, hopelessly bad at combat, and, reportedly, a drunk. Yet under his guidance the Sainnites in Reece had decimated the Paladins, and at first it had seemed they could do the same to the Paladins in South Hill. The informants agreed on the man’s practical incompetence, and doubted he could have survived as a deserter. It did not occur to them that such a man might get himself some powerful friends.
The ringing of the night bell customarily would have ended Clement’s inquiries for the day, but if she delayed until the dawn bell, Ellid would inevitably hear of her activities, and just as inevitably would ask Cadmar why Clement’s inquiries had not proceeded by the usual slow but methodical transfer from commander to captain to soldiers. Then Cadmar would certainly stop her investigation, and might well relieve her of duty, for she was acting without orders.
Earth Logic Page 36
