Zanja protested, “It’s too much. Look at these worn-out old cards! They’ve been dunked in water, smeared with mud and grease, and—this is a bloodstain, I believe.”
“There must be some sweat-stains too,” said J’han. He paid his daughter, took the cards out of Zanja’s hand, and then presented them back to her. “A humble token of my esteem and gratitude.”
Zanja was still smiling as she knelt again on the hearth, tugged the book safely out of range of the crackling flames, and began laying out glyph cards.
Leeba, who came over to watch Zanja lay out the cards, said eagerly, “It’s a story!”
“It’s a story with half its pieces missing. In fact—” She shuffled through the deck. “Did you take one of the cards? A picture of a person standing halfway in a fire?”
“No.” Leeba sat beside her on the hearth and leaned against her. “There’s a girl,” she said, pointing at the card called Silence. “Why is she so sad?”
“Maybe she has no one to play with.”
Through this method of question and answer, the sad girl’s story was revealed: how she got herself in trouble due to the lack of a playmate, and how her toy rabbit came alive after being fed a magical tea from a miniature teapot. Leeba leapt up and ran out of the room. J’han, who had been drawing again, commented, “I certainly hope that Emil’s traveling tea set is well hidden. Is this a suitable replacement for the missing card?”
He handed her a stiff piece of paper, on which he had carefully drawn the glyph called Death-and-Life, or the Pyre, in the lower left hand corner. Above and around the ancient symbol, he had drawn an anatomically convincing picture of a person half in, half out of a burning fire. The half that was in the fire was skeleton; the other half was a very muscular woman with what appeared to be a bush growing on her head.
Zanja gazed at it until J’han began apologetically, “It’s not very artistic.”
“It looks like Karis,” Zanja said.
“It does?” He looked at his own drawing in surprise. “I guess that makes sense. It is the G’deon’s glyph, after all. It’s natural I would draw her.”
In the kitchen, there was the distinct familiar sound of disaster, followed by the equally familiar sound of Norina losing her temper. J’han rose from his squat, saying mildly, “Hasn’t Leeba learned not to drop a kettle when that mother is in the room?” He went off to make peace in the kitchen.
Zanja said to his back, too softly for him to hear, “Karis is everything. But she’s not the G’deon.”
The parlor windows, double-shuttered against the cold, shut out the light as well. J’han had drawn his pictures by lamplight, but he had thriftily blown out the flame as he left. Now gloom descended, and silence. By flickering firelight, Zanja studied the newly drawn glyph card in her hand. She felt no pity for the woman paralyzed in the flame.
The glyphic illustrations often gave Zanja a path to self-knowledge, but at this moment she was reluctant to acknowledge that she might be pitiless and impatient. For four-and-a-half years— Leeba’s entire life—Zanja and Karis had been lovers. Yet Zanja understood Karis less with every passing year. Like the woman in the pyre, who was neither completely consumed nor fully created, Karis remained inexplicably contented. Zanja was the one who could not endure this inaction.
She heard Emil return from his weekly trip to town. With much stamping on the door mat, he announced unnecessarily that it was snowing, and added that according to his watch, which he knew was accurate since he had just set it by the town clock, it was time for tea. Leeba loudly demanded magic tea for her rabbit. The racket brought Medric blundering sleepily down the stairs, to plaintively ask for help finding his spectacles.
“I’m afraid Leeba took them,” J’han said. He called rather desperately, “Zanja!”
“I’m coming.” She extricated both pairs of Medric’s spectacles from Leeba’s pile, and forced herself to leave the quiet parlor and step into the chaotic kitchen. There Medric, even more tousled and beleaguered than usual, stood near the stairway peering confusedly into the cluttered room, where Emil fussed over the teapot, Norina sliced bread for J’han to toast, and Leeba managed to be in everyone’s way. Zanja set a pair of spectacles onto Medric’s nose and put the other into his pocket. “Wrong!” he declared, and, having exchanged the pair in his pocket for the pair on his nose, asked, “Do you think there might be something a bit disordered about our lives?”
“We’ve got too much talent and not enough sense.”
“Really? Is that possible? Well, if you say so.” He added vaguely, “Your raven god has been telling me a story about himself. Why is that, do you suppose?”
“Whatever Raven told you,” Zanja said, “don’t believe a word of it.”
Medric managed to appear simultaneously entertained and offended. “I’m not a complete idiot. Not more than halfway, I shouldn’t think. I certainly know an untrustworthy god when I meet one!”
Medric had spoken loudly in his own defense, and everyone in the room stopped working to stare at him. Norina displayed her usual expression of unrestrained skepticism, which was only enhanced by the old scar that bisected one cheek and eyebrow. Emil gazed at Medric with amusement and respect. “That is a bizarre pronouncement.”
“Isn’t it?” An underdeveloped wraith of a man, Medric had to stretch to get his mouth near Zanja’s ear. He whispered, “Raven’s joke: nothing changes.”
She looked at him sharply, but he had already swept Leeba up in a madman’s dance dizzy enough to put all thoughts of magic tea right out of the little girl’s head.
The last time Zanja heard the Ashawala’i tale of Raven’s Joke, she had been huddled with her clan in a building much more crowded than this one, while the snow, piled higher than the roof, insulated them against the howling wind of a dreadful storm. To her people, the tale had made sense of the maddening stasis of winter. Now, perhaps Medric’s vision was admonishing her for her impatience. Or perhaps it was congratulating her for it.
“Where’s Karis?” asked Norina.
Emil looked surprised. “You don’t know? A raven told me she had gone to town, though I didn’t see her there.”
The toast was buttered, the tea poured, and the letters distributed from the capacious pockets of Emil’s greatcoat. All three men had received letters, for they each kept up a voluminous correspondence. Today, even Norina had a letter, which she viewed with doubtful surprise and seemed disinclined to open. Zanja helped Leeba with her milk and spread jam on her toast, then lay out the glyph cards again.
Once again, she studied Leeba’s sad girl, the glyph called Silence. To Zanja, silence signified thought, but to Karis it might signify inarticulateness. What has Silence to do with the Pyre, Zanja wondered? In the Pyre, death becomes life; life becomes death. But if nothing changes, the fire cannot do its work of transformation. Thus the person in the pyre is trapped between death and life, and cannot speak at all, not even to say, Help me.
In the hush, it almost seemed Zanja could hear the snowflakes floating down and settling outside the door. She was aware that Medric, across the table from her, was only pretending to read his letter. Then Norina, who had finally broken the seal of her letter, uttered a snort, Emil grunted, and J’han folded up a letter with apparent satisfaction. “The trade in smoke appears to be in a serious decline,” he announced.
“Of course it is,” said Emil. “Haven’t you healers cured almost every smoke addict in the land, now that you know how to do it?” He tapped his own letter with a fingertip. “Here’s something downright strange. Willis, from South Hill—do you recall him?”
Medric had known of Willis but had never met him, Norina had met him only once, and J’han might not remember who he was and what he had done. Zanja responded, though, as if Emil’s question had been directed to her. “Willis? Wasn’t he the one who shot me, beat me, imprisoned me, called me a traitor, and nearly had me killed? No, I had completely forgotten him.”
“I am extremely surprised t
o hear that,” said Emil gravely. “Listen to what my South Hill friend wrote to me: ‘We have received some word of Willis at last. He claims to have had a vision of the Lost G’deon! Apparently, he has formed a company of his own, for he believes he has been chosen to single-handedly lead the people of Shaftal in a final battle that will eliminate every last trace of the Sainnites from the land.’”
There was a long, amazed silence. Zanja sat back in her chair and began to laugh. “Oh, Emil, write a letter to Willis and tell him exactly where the Lost G’deon is, and what she is doing.”
“Wouldn’t you rather tell him yourself?” asked Emil with a grin.
“My letter is just as peculiar,” said Norina. “Listen to this: ‘I must speak with Karis on a matter of some urgency. I beg you, in the name of Shaftal, to convince her to meet with me as soon as the weather permits travel, in a place of her choosing. Signed, Mabin, Councilor of Shaftal, General of Paladins.’”
Emil, who had just picked up his teacup, set it down again rather sharply. “I don’t believe it.”
Norina passed him the letter. He examined it closely. “Well, it appears to be Mabin’s handwriting.”
Norina said, “If Mabin thinks Karis will even be in the same region with her—”
“Mabin must think you can change her mind.”
Norina snorted. “Well, the councilor is under a misapprehension.”
Medric, to protect his unstable insight, did not drink tea and avoided both fat and sweets, so he had nothing to eat but a piece of dry toast that he had torn into bits. He now sat very quietly with his palms together and his fingertips against his mouth. He returned Zanja’s glance, and his spectacles magnified the intentness of his gaze. Even without the seer’s expectant look, all these significant letters would have seemed like portents to Zanja. At last, something was going to happen!
Then, they heard the sound of Karis stamping the snow off her boots outside the door. Leeba leaped up, shrieking with joy, making every mug and cup on the table rattle ominously. A flurry of snow followed Karis into the house. The door seemed disinclined to shut, but could not resist her. Karis let Emil help her out of her coat, and bent over so Leeba could brush the snow out of her tangled thicket of hair. The room had shrunk substantially; the furniture looked like toys; even lanky Emil seemed reduced to the size of a half-grown child. If Karis had stood upright, her head would have dented the plaster. But it was not the mere impact of her size that made the house seem to stretch itself, gasping.
Perhaps Karis was immovable, thought Zanja, but she also was unstoppable.
Karis’s kiss tasted of snow. “Zanja, the ravens would have told you where I had gone, but you didn’t venture out the door. What was I to do? Send a poor bird down the chimney?”
Emil had pulled out a chair for Karis. The chair groaned under her weight, and groaned again as Leeba crawled into her lap. Zanja pushed over her own untasted toast and untouched cup of tea, both of which Karis dispatched before Emil could bring her the teapot and bread plate.
“There’s an illness in town,” Karis said. “And there’s going to be a lot more of it. And not just here.” She tapped a forge-blackened fingertip on the tabletop. “Here,” she said. “Here. And here.”
J’han examined the table’s surface as though he could see the map of Shaftal that to Karis was as real and immediate as the landscape outside the door.
“And here,” Karis added worriedly, tapping a finger in the west.
Leeba peered at the tabletop, then up at Karis. “What’s wrong with the table?”
“Illness doesn’t spread like that,” J’han objected. “Not in winter, anyway. Sick people can’t travel far in the snow—so illness doesn’t travel far, either.” He frowned at the scratched, stained surface of the table.
“It was already there,” Karis said. “It was waiting.”
“Then it could be waiting in other places, too.”
“Yes.”
J’han stood up. “I’ll start packing.”
Karis nodded. She said belatedly to her daughter, “Leeba, there’s nothing wrong with the table.”
“You said the table is sick!”
“No, it’s Shaftal that’s sick.”
Leeba looked dubiously at the tabletop.
Emil, busy smearing jam on toast almost as fast as Karis could eat it, gave Zanja a thoughtful, level look. He was worrying about Shaftal— he always was. How will this illness affect the balance of power in Shaftal?He was probably wondering. Will it show us a wayto peace?
Zanja plucked a card from her deck, but the glyph her fingers chose to lay down on the table did not seem like an answer to Emil’s unspoken question. It was the Wall, usually interpreted as an insurmountable obstacle: an obdurate symbol that in a glyph pattern often meant utter negation. She could not think of what, if anything, the glyph might mean at this moment.
From the other side of the table, Medric said, “That glyph looks upside down to me.”
“Maybe you’re upside down,” Zanja said.
“Maybe you are,” Medric replied solemnly.
Zanja considered that comment. If it was intended as a criticism, it certainly was gentle enough. She said to Karis, “I’m coming with you and J’han.”
Before Karis could reply, Medric said, “Pack carefully, Zanja. I’ll go copy a few pages of Koles for you to bring with you. It’ll keep you preoccupied for months.”
“For months?” Karis asked sharply.
Medric waggled his eyebrows. “Oh, and I’ve thought of another book you had better bring along.” He headed back upstairs to his library. A notorious waster of time, he could be quite efficient when he had to be.
Norina said, “Karis, you have to look at this letter and tell me what to do with it.” She pushed it across the table.
As Zanja left the kitchen to start packing, Karis was already reading Mabin’s letter. A moment later, Zanja heard her utter a sharp shout of laughter.
Chapter Two
In the hot kitchen of the Smiling Pig Inn, Garland had finished feeding everyone and was starting the stock for tomorrow’s soup when the serving girl bustled in and informed him that a dozen people had just arrived. They had taken all the places closest to the fire, which had left the regular customers feeling put out. Garland had to make a lot of fried potatoes, and the girl nagged him to hurry up. “Give them some soup,” he told her. “You know they’ll complain even louder if I serve them scorched raw potatoes.”
“No one’s fussier about their food than you are,” the girl said, and Garland took that as a compliment. She filled bowls with bean soup and would have forgotten to sprinkle them with bacon crumbs and caramelized onions if Garland hadn’t stopped her. She complied, rolling her eyes with exasperation.
“They’re already asking about tomorrow’s breakfast,” the girl reported when she returned with the empty bowls. “They have to leave at first light, they say. And they want to carry dinner with them when they go.”
“First light? Who’s in that big a hurry at this time of year?”
“They’re skating the ice road all the way to the coast, and the old timers are telling them the ice will break up any day now.”
Garland’s heart sank. When the ice broke up, it would be spring. And what would become of him then?
“The potatoes are done,” he said. “Take those plates out of the warming oven, will you?” He served, swiftly, slices of crispy roast pork, mounds of crackling fried potatoes, and scoops of steaming pudding, all in the time it took the girl to ladle out the boiling applesauce. Five months Garland had been cooking in this kitchen, from first snow to last, and no one had yet complained that their food was cold. In fact, no one had complained at all, and many had asked for more.
“Help me with this!” the girl said impatiently. Garland glanced around to make certain there was nothing on the stove or in the oven that demanded his immediate attention, picked up a tray, and followed her out into the public room.
The room was
crowded, and everyone huddled as close to the fireplace as they could get. It might have been nearly spring, but that didn’t prevent the wind from blowing hard and bitter enough to find a way in through stone and mortar. People had taken off their coats and gloves, but tucked their hands in their armpits and loudly demanded that another log be added to the fire.
“Here’s supper,” the girl called cheerily. “Sizzling hot! Take the cold right out of your bones!”
“Is that the cook?” someone asked. “That was a fine soup.”
The newcomers crowded the trestle table. “Yow!” cried one young woman as she burned her tongue on a piece of potato. It seemed an unlikely group to be taking such a long, fast journey together, Garland thought as he distributed the hot plates. Members of a farm family usually bore a regional resemblance to each other even if they were only related by marriage, but these people did not look much alike. And in any case, it would be unusual for so many members of a single family to travel together like this. Garland had learned a little about farming during his years of wandering: a farmstead that missed spring planting time because its farmers were on a trip was surely heading for disaster.
The way they passed the plates to each other revealed a peculiar hierarchy. Among Shaftali, the hierarchy should be determined by age, but here the man most fussed over was not the oldest. While fetching salt cellars and mustard pots, Garland kept glancing at him surreptitiously, noting how everyone fell silent to listen to his trivial remarks.
Back in the kitchen, Garland cubed the leftover pork and mixed it with parboiled vegetables to make a filling for turnovers. He put together a sturdy dough—a tricky business to make a dough strong without making it tough—and seeded it with dried rosemary before breaking it into fist-sized balls and rolling them out.
The girl came in, and before she opened her mouth Garland said, “Bring them slices of dried apple pie. There’s clotted cream in the pantry.” He crimped the edges of the first turnover, and sprinkled it with a bit of salt.
“Is that for their dinner tomorrow?” the girl asked as she got the pies out of the warming oven. “Will it taste good cold?”
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