Karis scraped the porringer clean. Zanja took it from her and filled it up again with oats and dry fruit, and set it in the coals. Norina stood up without a word, and went to help with the packing. Karis wiped her face with the ragged tail of her shirt. “I think I’m hungry,” she said, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her hunger. Then she looked at the cloth of her shirt, and touched it to her face again. “What—”
Zanja felt the shirtcloth. “It’s soft, the way old shirts get.”
Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, soot black hands. “I am alive,” she said. “It feels very odd.”
The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, “Well, I must ask you, since you haven’t volunteered. Where are you going to go?”
Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.
“Because I’m going with you,” Karis continued.
“I think I’ll go to Meartown.”
“Well.”
“Karis—”
“Be careful,” she said hoarsely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.
“With your permission,” Zanja said, very carefully, “I’d like to court you.”
Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. “And up until now, what have you been doing?”
“Well, if this whole year has been a courtship …” Zanja paused, and said, “Perhaps it has.”
“I don’t think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim.”
“It seemed whimsical enough at the time.”
Karis was smiling, her panic passed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how uncertain was the path on which she trod.
Zanja said, “I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good graces again.”
“Have you forgiven her?”
“I will, before I bid her goodbye. She makes amends the same way she goes into battle. Gods help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will be the safer for it.”
Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. “Well, since you’ve gotten in her way before, you know what you’re talking about. Nori!”
Norina came over with J’han’s book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.
Karis said to Norina, “You must be bored with penitence by now.”
“My boredom is only just beginning,” said Norina morosely. “But J’han is never bored. Why couldn’t he be the one with the breasts? That’s what I want to know.”
Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The yellowing grasses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been cropped neatly off by their wandering horses. She reached the clear rivulet that had served as their camp’s water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at Karis’s side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It seemed like old times.
Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J’han, who seemed to be systematically giving Karis most of the contents of his healer’s pack: a brown bottle of something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of reassurance, and Karis must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.
The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the plain. J’han and Norina were saddling their horses. Zanja started back toward the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.
Zanja first said goodbye to Norina. “Karis should never have to choose between us,” she said.
“You’ll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words.”
“I already wish I hadn’t.”
“That’s once.”
Zanja said seriously, “If you have any advice, I would hear it.”
The sardonic side of Norina’s mouth lifted at the corner. “You’re the one who threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now that you’re worried about where it’s taking you?”
“Not at all,” Zanja said. “And I’ll never forgive you for trying to murder me.”
Norina said, “In all my days of seeking the truth, I’ve never met a worse liar.”
When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, “Do you ever think about that other Sainnite seer’s vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala’i would defeat the Sainnites?”
“I try not to,” Zanja said.
“That’s good,” Medric said. “I never would have told you about it had I known who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands—”
“Then that puts it in your hands, doesn’t it?”
Medric looked taken aback. “It does? Oh, it does.” She left him fumbling for a different pair of spectacles.
Emil’s hug was bracing. “You know where to find me,” he said.
*
Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of them ride away. Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of grass and then snorted impatiently at them.
Karis said, desolate, “How I’ll explain all this to the townspeople I have no idea.”
Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.
Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.
Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge-jacks and forgemasters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke-begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.
They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow-to-elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had
to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than others.”
“We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness.”
“Sooner or later they’d have discovered I was home. We might as well get this whole thing over with.”
She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she tell what had happened. “I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and saved my life,” she said. “So I’ve learned the value of having a hero or two among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over.”
The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two-sentence tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or die. Karis gravely bid her well-wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.
Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot-gray walls. Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.
“You’ve been very patient,” Karis said.
“Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We na’Tarweins are notoriously impatient.”
Karis seemed bemused. “But I don’t want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why don’t you just stop doing it?”
Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could kiss Karis’s mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run through that long frame, and Karis’s fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja’s shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja’s very skin. The shirt cloth started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it. Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given out on her. The breeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger into the hole in Zanja’s shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they had just sprinted up a hill.
“Blessed day,” Karis gasped.
Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, “The Ashawala’i call that feeling ‘being struck by lightning.’ Shall I explain the sensation to you?”
Karis said shakily, “I understand enough.”
Zanja felt the entirety of Karis’s attention focus upon her. She thought of Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. “Would you rather I go back to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?” she said.
“Could you?” Karis asked, then answered her own question. “No. And if you could, I’d be offended.”
Zanja grinned. “Well then, it’s completely impossible.”
Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a stranger. “Zanja, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s my ghosts.”
“I have my ghosts too. So what?”
“So maybe lovemaking will be an embarrassing, disastrous farce.”
“We’ve survived so much worse than that already.”
Karis looked back at her, stricken.
Zanja said, “Karis, I can always find a way across. It’s my gift.” She gave her a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house without saying another word, and without letting go of each other.
*
The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men frantically tried to make Karis’s bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that clustered around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.
Zanja repeatedly explained to the two men that Karis no longer used smoke and there was no rush, but nothing she said seemed likely to overcome their disbelief. Finally, to calm them down she took over some of the work. She had never made a bed in her life; but it proved, as she suspected, to be largely a matter of common sense. She took out Karis’s two cleanest shirts and hung one to warm by the fire. The second she took with her to the bathhouse, where the washkettle had come to a boil. Buckets of cold water stood waiting to mix in the tub with the hot. There was a crock of herbs and flowers to sprinkle in the water, a crock of soft lye soap, and a bath brush worn soft with use.
Clean, dressed only in Karis’s shirt, which hung to her calves, carrying her knife belt, she walked back to the house and let herself quietly into Karis’s room by way of the garden. It was full dark by then, and she could hear Karis’s voice in the kitchen. Zanja built up the fire in the fireplace and combed her hair with her fingers as it dried. She supposed she was missing dinner.
She fell asleep in the warmth of the fire, and when she awoke, Karis stood nearby, buttoning her clean shirt. She had set a burning candle into the chimney nook, and gazed down at Zanja with her eyes set into dark hollows by the angle of the light.
Ordinary and commonplace words could have filled the silence, but Zanja did not move or speak.
Karis knelt beside the settle and lifted a hand to awkwardly brush the loose hair out of Zanja’s eyes. Her fingers were steady, but her agitated breathing revealed how close her ghosts hovered. She smelled unlike herself: of soap and herbs rather than of smoke and old sweat. She abruptly leaned over and kissed Zanja’s mouth. Then she tried to pull away but Zanja couldn’t seem to release her. Karis easily could have broken free but she held herself still, trembling like a wild horse trapped into the traces. Carefully, Zanja let go of her. She told herself she could wait as long as she needed to, and she could do it gracefully, without resentment. She was a katrim. She could sleep on the hearth in the kitchen and she wouldn’t blame Karis, and she wouldn’t complain.
She sat up, rubbing her face. Karis sat down beside her on the settle and said miserably, “You deserve—”
Zanja crawled into Karis’s lap. Though startled, Karis moved instinctively to embrace her, to accommodate the weight of her. Zanja was so much smaller than she, a tribeless mountain woman lost here in the plains, ready to die of loneliness. Holding her like this, would Karis remember the bitter winter day she rescued her? There had been no coercion when Karis gave her back her life, just generosity: unearned, unsought, utterly unexpected. Zanja felt Karis’s hand in her hair, and shut her eyes and thought of Karis stroking the heath’s soft grasses. She willed herself to be as passive, and as vital, as the heath had been.
She shuddered alert when she heard Karis’s breathing change. Karis’s big, gentle hand had found its way to Zanja’s face and now she began kissing her, and Zanja made her hands lie still. Time carried them upon a quiet river. The fire died down and the candle guttered in its socket. The moon rose and cast a modest light through the garden door’s glass windows. Zanja tasted salt.
She lifted a hand to Karis’
s face and found her gasping with surprise, awash in astonished tears. Zanja straddled Karis on her knees and the river took them again and the moonlight faded away. Karis stood up and carried Zanja to the bed. Zanja’s exquisite restraints snapped, and in a matter of moments she ruined both their shirts.
They’d have nothing to wear in the morning. But between now and then lay an infinity of time.
Though Karis floundered in an agitated ocean of sensation, Zanja’s hands anchored her within her skin. Fragmented flesh knitted itself together, shocking her with each new joining: another recognition, another homecoming. Zanja’s sculptured face moved across her breast: perspiring, ecstatic, entangling them both in a mess of unbound hair, moaning sometimes like the lion upon her hill. Who’d have thought those knife-scarred hands could be so appallingly gentle, or that a woman of such iron will could suddenly turn so soft? With one touch Karis could collapse her. She tried it, stroking the soft inside of a lean thigh, and Zanja fell prostrate and incoherent, as helpless as Karis had ever seen her. For a moment, Karis didn’t know what to do. And then she did know.
A strange, irresistible time followed. With Zanja shouting and sobbing and flailing under her touch, Karis felt the shock of her lover’s ravishment right through skin and muscle and bone. And then Zanja lay shuddering, gasping for breath in Karis’s arms, and beginning to shake with dizzy laughter. “Oh gods of the sky,” she said in abject gratitude, and laughed and cried, and Karis held her more closely than she had ever held anything, and could not imagine letting go.
Then Zanja tied her hair up in a knot and said, “Now I will follow the fire.”
Zanja lay across her, and Karis saw the callused bottoms of her well-traveled feet. She took one in her hand. It was warm, and rough. The tendons tightened and the ball of Zanja’s foot pressed gently against her palm. Karis felt Zanja’s hands, and her tongue— unhurried, coaxing. Under that touch, her thighs gave way, and the rest of her gave way as well. Oh, it was fire, but it was also earth: a monolithic presence, waiting, wounded, for healing. Shaftal. She could not refuse.
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