It had become too dark to paint. She slid the unfinished painting into the case that made it possible for her to transport her work with the paint still wet. She packed her pigments, her oils, her turpentine, corking the bottles and sealing them with wax, for if she did not die tonight she would flee, bringing her paints and painting with her.
Her companions came in, and at last it was time to draw straws.
Part One: The Region of Reconstruction
Chapter 1
By winter’s end, the field of rubble had become famous. The new councilors of Shaftal had begun to arrive in Watfield from far and near, and all came to view the remains of the destroyed wall. Seth went there as soon as she and her Paladin companion entered the city, even before they sought a place to lay down their heavy packs and thaw their frozen fingers.
The massive wall had surrounded Watfield Garrison. Now the stones lay in a swath through the city. Seth squatted down, took off her gloves, and with numb fingers broke a small stone loose from its icy mortar. She set it atop a much larger one, the surface of which had been flattened by the stone mason’s chisel. The small stone shuddered sideways off its wide base, to impinge upon another, which cracked free from the ice that pinned it down, and rolled away. Now, that stone touched two others, which also hitched themselves sideways. The chain reaction quickly spread, from a few stones to many, until noisy waves of movement rippled ponderously in both directions, between the buildings, out of sight.
Seth had stood up to watch. She felt cold air on her teeth and realized she was gaping. Everyone spoke of this wonder—but she had not truly believed it.
“You’d better put your gloves back on,” the Paladin said.
It seemed impossible Seth could still be in her familiar world. Yet she pulled on her gloves, which like her hat and jerkin were tightly knit of unwashed, undyed wool. The grease that repelled snow and rain from her hat and gloves still smelled like dirty sheep, and the busy city continued to clatter, shout, slam, ring, and rattle even as the crack and thud of the supernatural stones faded into the distance. Seth said, “The wall can’t be rebuilt. These stones will always refuse to remain one on top of the other—to even touch each other.”
The Paladin, as pragmatic as Seth but even less talkative, shuffled her feet, as if to remind Seth how cold they were and how welcome a hot meal would be. “The G’deon lives in the city center, in a house called Travesty.” She gestured towards a busy artisan’s district, where an oversized shoe advertised a cobbler’s shop, a normal-sized wheel the wheelwright’s, and a gigantic needle and thread the tailor’s. Seth felt offended by the asymmetry of these displays.
“You go,” she said to the Paladin. “I’ll find my own way.”
They parted ways, in the manner of strangers thrown together who had never become friends. Alone now, Seth walked along the edge of the rubble, following the mostly obscured road that once had abutted the garrison wall. On the opposite side of the restless debris stood what once had been an orderly group of garrison buildings. Some were fire-scarred, and others were heaps of charred beams and wrecked furniture. Many were being rebuilt. She could hear the carpenters chanting breathlessly as they pulled on the ropes that lifted a center beam. The banging of hammers punctuated the racket of the city. Roofers swarmed over the top of one building, shouting cheerful curses at each other. At another, the carpenters were hanging clapboards as fast as they could drive in the nails. Some of them wore soldier’s gray, but most of them wore Shaftali longshirts, several layers, so they could take them off and put them on again depending on how cold the day became and how vigorously they worked.
The main gate lay flat on its face, embedded in dirty ice. There, two soldiers were gathering stone blocks that had begun to clutter the passage. In their wheelbarrow, the stones banged the wooden sides as they struggled to get away from each other, but the soldiers seemed accustomed to this extraordinary behavior.
The woman soldier looked up as Seth began picking her way through the passage. “Carefulness,” she advised. “Rocks move much.”
The man soldier had stopped his work to watch a grinding wave of movement he had inadvertently instigated in the field of stones. His wave encountered another coming from the other direction, and there was a brief confusion. A raven that had been perched on one of the stones flew up in startlement. The waves separated and continued on, and more rocks rolled into the passageway he had just cleared. The soldier rolled his eyes comically. The raven landed nearby and began preening its flight feathers.
“I would like to speak to the general,” said Seth. “Is that possible?”
“The general is in quarters,” said the man soldier. “Will I—I will show you the way.”
Seth followed the soldier in dumb surprise, feeling as if a door she’d expected to stick had swung easily open, without even a squeak of the hinges. The soldier said, “I am Damon. You have traveled far?”
“I’m Seth, a Basdown cow doctor. Now I’m a councilor.”
The soldier said, “A councilor? Your mission will be difficult. I follow orders only—easier, eh?” He gestured meaningfully at the sky.
Puzzled, Seth looked up. The raven she had noticed at the gate now floated overhead. Why did this soldier find the bird significant? She said, “Is that a G’deon’s raven?”
“That one has not talked today, so I am not certain. Still, I have been polite to it.” He grinned.
When Seth first realized Clement was a soldier, the woman’s darkness of spirit, her bouts of formality, and even her ravening hunger had made sense to Seth. But this soldier’s friendliness and humor were as surprising as the supernatural raven. Fortunately, the sound of hammers and saws rose around them in such a din that Seth could not have answered the soldier had she been able to think of something to say.
On both sides, new buildings rose up out of ashes and charred debris. Seth had entered the region of reconstruction.
Damon led Seth into a smoke-stained building, down a hall that was being swept by an old, one-legged woman in a ragged old uniform, to a nondescript door that stood ajar. He called out in the soldier’s language and received a brisk answer from within.
“We wait,” he explained to Seth.
Looking over his shoulder, she could see only a coat tree on which hung a much-worn, felt-lined leather coat, and part of a homely laundry line, hung with woolen stockings and . . . diapers? She shifted sideways, and now she could see a large window with its grimy upper panes unshuttered to let in dim light from the rapidly darkening sky. Beneath the window, at a scarred table surrounded by battered chairs and piled with dirty dishes and waxed-leather envelopes, sat the ugliest man Seth had ever seen, reading aloud from a stiff sheet of paper.
She shifted sideways again, and now her heart gave a hard thump. Clement sat across the table from the ugly man. She appeared to be listening to him read, while also reading another document to herself as her leg moved rhythmically in a motion familiar to everyone in Shaftal who’d ever looked after an infant: the Sainnite general was rocking a cradle. Seth heard the unseen baby utter a small, happy yelp and Clement glanced downward, smiling, with all the joy and pain of a new parent’s exhausted adoration. Then she yawned prodigiously, rubbed her eyes, and said to the ugly man, “That can’t be what it says. It has too many letters!”
He murmured something, and she replied, “No, once was enough! Who wrote that drivel?”
The ugly man grinned. “Mackapee.”
“Mackapee, the first G’deon? Hell!”
“Drivel it may be, but don’t say so in public.”
“What would they do to me?” Clement muttered. “How could they punish me more than I’ve already been punished?” She pointed at the page Gilly had been reading. “What is that word again?”
“Humble. ‘Humble acts of kindness . . . ’”
“‘ . . . Are like glue in the furniture of our community.’” She read the words haltingly. This was a reading lesson, Seth finally realized. Clement could
read in the soldier’s language, but not in the language of Shaftal.
“Excellent!” said the ugly man.
“Drivel. And it’s got too many letters.”
Clement turned her attention to another document. The ugly man recalled the waiting soldier. “Yes, Damon?”
The soldier said in Shaftalese, “I have brought a councilor of Shaftal who wants to speak with General Clement.”
Clement uttered a sigh, set down her document, and stood up to face the door. Her mouth parted, preparing a polite if exasperated greeting. She said nothing. She stared at Seth, flabbergasted.
Seth pushed self-consciously at the wisps of sticky, roughly cut hair that were escaping from under her knit cap. What could she say, after all, to explain her presence? I could not stay away? Something between us must be finished? She, too, said nothing at all.
The ugly man leapt up, crossing the room, speaking in the soldier’s language to Damon, then switching languages to speak to Seth. “Greetings, councilor. I’m the general’s secretary, Gilly. Let me take your bag.” He took her knapsack and snowshoes from her shoulder, showed her to the fireplace, exclaimed in dismay to find the fire nearly burnt out, and launched a discussion of the weather as he took tinder from the woodbox.
Clement said, “Go away, Gilly.”
The ugly man abandoned his project, stepped into the hall, and shut the door behind him. The silence made Seth’s ears feel empty. Clement went to the fireplace to fuss with tinder and puff a breath of air onto the coals. A cloud of ashes lifted.
One of them must speak! Seth cleared her throat. “Everyone says it’s been a marvelous winter.”
“It’s been a winter of marvels, anyway.” Clement sat back on her heels, rubbing her smoke- or weariness-reddened eyes.
“For you certainly! . . . and I—I marveled at the tale of the Sainnite general who climbed the rubble of the fallen wall and offered her hand to the G’deon of Shaftal.”
Clement glanced up at her and replied with heavy irony, “I was all Sainnites, and Karis was all Shaftali, and the wall was all obstacles to peace. So Emil says. Though at the time the true marvel was that I didn’t fall down on my face out of terror.”
“Emil? The head of the council? That Emil?”
“There’s only one Emil,” said Clement. “Praise the gods.”
“And now, Clem—do you continue to be all Sainnites? Or are you, sometimes, yourself only?”
Clement uttered a sharp explosion of breath, like a laugh or a choke. Light flickered in the cinders and a flame flared up, reaching hungrily for the tinder. Her shoulders strained the coarse wool cloth as she stood up from the hearth. “Do I look like a symbol?” Her uniform buttons shimmered in the hot light; leather straps buckled across her breast. Her hands, bony and chilblained, smoothed the rumpled wool of her trousers.
Seth said, “You look important, anyway.”
The general stepped close to her. Seth felt the warmth, the pull of her, and held still with great effort. Clem laid a hand on her shoulder and hesitated—afraid? And then she leaned forward and touched Seth’s wind-cracked lips with hers, quite shyly, then intently, then with a moan that vibrated on Seth’s hands, which had risen of their own will to take hold of the buttons and buckles that bound Clem in this rigid disguise. Seth noticed them in time to prevent them from importunately removing the general’s clothes.
“So are you here to see if I am still here?” Clem’s breath tickled Seth’s mouth. “What can I do—what will it take—to keep you from leaving?”
The skin of her face was overlaid with a fine grain of wrinkles. Her eyes, brown like Seth’s, were shadowed by blue underneath, like shadows on snow. Seth’s hand, still pressed against gray wool, felt the woman’s thudding heart. She said, “Just give me a small thing: my skin upon yours.”
Seth felt Clem’s breath shake itself out of her. She said, “My room upstairs—it’s cluttered with my son’s things. The blankets haven’t been aired since autumn. The shutters are open, to let in the light for the flowers, and it’s bitter cold, certainly. The lamp has no oil—the woodbox is empty—”
“What can’t be fixed we will ignore.”
“—And we’ll be interrupted.”
“What!”
“If I post a guard—”
“You can only have privacy by sacrificing it?”
“I am in charge of several thousand terrified soldiers.”
Those soldiers were not in charge of themselves? Were they children? Jolted again, Seth drew back.
The door cracked open and a voice said, “General?”
“Gods of hell, Gilly, leave me alone!”
“I did intend to. But a note just arrived from Travesty.”
“Cow dung!” Seth muttered. Clement stepped away. Seth jammed her misbehaving hands into her pockets and glared into the fireplace. The flare of new flame had burned out.
At the door, Clement and her secretary argued in Sainnese. The tone of their conversation changed so swiftly from dismay to sarcasm to mockery that Seth could not imagine the topic. The baby chortled sleepily, like a bird at sunset. Clem had not been pregnant, last time—Seth would have noticed that! This was not a son of the body, then—of course not; women soldiers never bore children.
Seth had congratulated herself for finding it irrelevant that Clem was Sainnite. But in fact she had not been thinking of her as Sainnite at all; she had been thinking of her as a Shaftali in a soldier’s uniform, as though the clothing were wearing her. And Seth might wish it were true—she might wish it with vigor for the rest of her life—but all that wishing would make no difference. The uniform was Clement; Clement was Clem; and Seth must know her entirely if she was to know her at all.
The door closed, with Gilly again exiled to the hall. Clement approached Seth with an unfolded note in her hand and showed it to her. “Please visit me,” was scrawled on it in pencil, in big, awkward letters.
Clement looked down, seeming very interested in the toes of her boots. “The Council of Shaftal meets in four days. My thirteen garrison commanders could arrive as early as tomorrow, and their quarters aren’t even built yet. But the G’deon has summoned me, and I must go.”
“I should go there also, I suppose,” said Seth distractedly.
“Gilly reminded me that if you have no kin in Watfield, you’ll be residing in Travesty.”
“I have no kinfolk here.”
“The people who live in Travesty are always complaining that none of the chimneys draw properly and the floors are all crooked. But it’s a massive building. You’ll certainly have a room to yourself.”
Seth took a hopeful breath—and then she was jolted again, and appalled. “How could anyone’s timing have been so perfect? Tell me I have not been following a path without thinking! Like a cow!”
Clement looked up from studying her boots. A wry smile had reshaped her face. “There was a raven—am I right? A raven watching for you to arrive?”
“There was, but—I am no one to the G’deon! Why would she watch for me?”
“Her seer probably dreamed of you.”
Seth stared at Clement. Clement in turn observed Seth assessingly, seeming curious to see what she would do now.
“Then she’s subtle, for an earth witch,” Seth finally said.
“Oh, yes, subtle as a bull in bracken!”
Seth was so surprised to hear this Basdown saying—uttered with a Basdowner’s dripping sarcasm—that she laughed out loud.
But Clement said, “Go home, Seth.”
Yes, Seth thought, I certainly should—if I expect to ever go home at all. But beneath the jolts and surprises and clamoring confusion of the last few moments, her certainty remained certain as ever. She said, “I gather that your life is intolerable. And you think those intolerable conditions will be mine, too, and perhaps you think that is already happening. But you don’t know me, just as I don’t know you. So here’s a lesson: I cannot be discouraged—if you don’t believe me, ask my mother! An
d don’t tell me what to do, either.”
Clement looked at her a long time. At last she said, very quiet and amazed, “You have a mother?”
A dead general’s lieutenant serves as general for only four months. Then the commanders gather to choose a new general for life. Because Cadmar died in dead of winter, during two of Clement’s four months the only communications with the garrisons had been written. Now all fourteen commanders would soon arrive in Watfield, and Clement would need to convince them that without her as general, the Sainnites would not survive.
Clement could strategize, give orders, obey orders, and argue against plans she thought inadequate. But she did not know how to convince a group of people, whose hostility to her decisions had certainly hardened to intransigence, to choose her.
How do people choose? How—why—had Seth chosen to come to her again? She could not explain it.
Clement had gathered some things for the baby, put on her coat, and left for Travesty. Now, the cow farmer walked sturdily beside her, snowshoes dangling from her knapsack, her legs wrapped in grimy oiled leather, her cheeks chapped and red from facing the bitter Shaftal wind. They walked side by side through the garrison. As always when Clement went out, soldiers continually approached to talk to her.
“Good day, General. I am happy to report that your new uniform will be finished today.”
Earth Logic Page 46
