She gazed at him in amazement, which slowly became delight. “The manuscript survived?”
“It seems to be unharmed. I’m working with a seer, so I’ve found books in some odd places, where people hid them from the Sainnites and then forgot about them. Many of the books are damaged, and I’ve been asking people if they know anyone who could teach me to repair them. Your name was suggested to me, finally.”
The librarian said, “You’re as earnest and eager as ever, Commander. Despite your gray hair.”
“I’m still young enough to be a student, I hope.”
Emil was at his most affable, exercising the graces and courtesies that Zanja had tried to emulate, though she could not imitate his sincerity. He produced books from his satchel, some in paperboard boxes, others wrapped in cotton cloth and tied with twine. The librarian opened them like gifts and tutted over the water-stained, chewed, and crumpled pages as though the books were children come to harm. “This is no quick lesson,” she said, and then added matter-of-factly, “I’m dying, you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” Emil said. “Your knowledge should not die with you. If you agree to teach me, we’ll take lodging in town.”
For the first time, the librarian noticed Zanja, standing unobtrusively by the stairs, and Emil introduced her as a reader of glyphic poetry, which proved a certain method to win a book lover’s admiration. Certainly, the librarian also wondered how a tribal woman came to have such an arcane and unlikely pursuit, but did not ask, and so Zanja did not have to make up an explanation for a thing she could not even explain to herself. “Would you like to see my books?” the librarian asked Emil.
“Would those be the ones that you threw by the armload out the windows of the burning library?”
The librarian rose without answering and led them to a staircase. They had scarcely begun to climb the narrow stairs when Zanja smelled old paper and leather bindings, the same scent that pervaded Medric’s book-lined attic. The old librarian hauled herself up one step at a time, and behind her Emil held himself alert as though he thought she’d fall and he would have to catch her. At the rear, Zanja breathed in the scent of the books, and breathed out a few lines from Koles:
“A scent, faint and far away, ephemeral As though somewhere a flower bloomed As though someday it might bear seed.”
Ahead of her, Emil paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “There’s something up here? Besides just a wonderful collection of books?”
Zanja’s soul, which had seemed only tenuously connected to her body, snapped sharply into place, like a dislocated bone popping into alignment. “Something that we need,” she said.
At the top of the stairs, the old woman lifted a blind, and in the beam of light swimming dust gleamed like gold. Above Zanja, Emil exclaimed, “Blessed day!” And then Zanja was herself stepping up into an attic crammed with books, and the old woman stood grinning like a child with a wonderful secret. Books upon books: two, three layers deep on cobbled-together shelves that leaned tiredly sideways and surely would have fallen over if not for the companion shelves leaning on them in the opposite direction. Emil turned ecstatically from one book to the next. “Is that a copy of Songs?And is that A History of a Coastal Town?And a completeset of the plays of Barness?”
“Two complete sets,” said the librarian smugly. “There’s another behind that one.”
They would be at it for hours. For Emil, the only pleasure greater than that of reading was the pleasure of talking about books, whether he had read them or not. The attic was narrow, and so crowded with books that there was scarcely room for the three of them. Zanja worked her way to the far end, where a comfortable chair was wedged by the second window, and she squatted down before the lowest shelf. In the shadows and dust that gathered here—for the sick old woman could no longer keep such a mess of books clean—Zanja could not hope to see the titles without removing each book and holding it up to the window. But perhaps the books’ titles or contents were of no importance. She ran her fingertips across the spines, and then slid her hand through the front row of books to touch those tucked behind. Would touch be enough? When intuition gave her a target, she did not usually have to separate it out from a clutter of virtually identical objects. To Emil, all of these books would be important. To Zanja, only one of them was, but she did not know which one.
They remained in the attic until the light began to dim, and by then Zanja had worn herself with aimless searching. She and Emil ate fried fish and potatoes at a tavern, and rented some rooms that were located over a busy wheelwright’s shop. One room had a battered table and a couple of banged-up chairs. Zanja sat, feeling unutterably weary. Emil opened the windows, and in a moment two ravens landed, and he fed them the greasy remains of the fish and potatoes.
One of the ravens said, “Medric is on his way to join you.”
Emil stepped back in surprise. “Medric is traveling?‘
“Karis is alone?” Zanja added.
Without answering, the ravens squabbled over the fish like ordinary birds. Emil sat at the table with Zanja. “They’ll answer our questions when they’re done eating. Does your head hurt?”
“I think I’m past that now. I feel like I’ve awakened exhausted from a night of bad dreams.”
“You haven’t actually been sleeping much, that I’ve noticed. What were you looking for in that attic?”
“A book, I think. I knowit’s there.”
“Well, you’ll never hear me say that books aren’t important, but how can one book be so important that it brings our recluse out of his attic?”
“You think he’s coming to help me find it?”
“The ravens will tell us. But yes, that’s what I suspect.”
Zanja put her head down on the table. “How did we wind up in this town? Did you follow an impulse of insight, or were you planning to come here anyway?”
“The second,” he said. “But you know, an insight can arrive long ahead of its usefulness. Maybe it was prescience that made me start looking a year ago for an education in book repair.” He stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed.”
“Medric shouldn’t travel alone,” Zanja said. “Someone will think he’s a madman and lock him up.”
Emil smiled. “Now you sound like yourself again. Go to bed.”
“Karis shouldn’t be alone either,” Zanja said.
“She’s impervious, unassailable, and unbelievably competent. I certainly don’t see why she can’t be left alone. And she’s got Leeba.”
Zanja stood up. And then she noticed that the ravens were gone. Though Emil leaned out the window and called them to come back, they didn’t respond.
“Well, that’s odd,” he said.
The next morning, Zanja set out to find Medric and brought him into town some days later. He baffled and charmed the old librarian in her sitting room, then climbed the stairs to the attic. Zanja, armed with a broom and feather duster, promised the librarian that she would shelve each book exactly as she found it, and followed Medric’s light footsteps up into the darkness. By the time she raised the blind in the attic, he was already ensconced in the chair, with three books in his lap.
As the morning passed, Zanja sometimes heard the murmur of voices downstairs, where the librarian supervised as Emil painstakingly put back together the torn pages of a book he would later re-bind. Zanja emptied and cleaned one shelf of books at a time. Occasionally, Medric sneezed from the dust, but otherwise he seemed oblivious to Zanja’s search.
Zanja had dusted the last book and was sweeping the floor when Medric, cross-legged in the armchair, looked up from his reading. “You missed some.” He pointed vaguely underneath the chair.
Zanja leaned against the balustrade, exasperated. “You’re worried about the dust under the chair? Sweep it yourself.”
“Dust? Sweep? What are you talking about?” Medric managed to shift the chair so that Zanja could see that underneath it lay book boxes, stored flat, with warnings written on each one w
ith a wide-nibbed pen: “Be VeryCareful!”
She took one up, carefully, and opened it. A few tiny pieces of burned paper floated out. Inside lay the charred remains of a book.
“It’s dead,” said Medric sadly. “Maybe she hoped to save a few of its words. Are all the books dead in their coffins?”
Sitting together on the floor, they opened the boxes one by one. All the books were burned, some practically to ashes. They had looked in half the boxes when Zanja reached for one, and felt such heat sear her palm that she jerked her hand away.
“Ah!” said Medric, nodding vigorously. “That one.”
“Do books have memories? I think it remembers the fire.”
“It must still be alive, then, don’t you think?” Medric lifted up the box, very gently, and opened its lid. Within lay the burned remains of a large book, titled Encyclopedia of Livestock.“Zanja, what have you found? An amazing thing!”
“Amazingly dull, maybe,” said Zanja in dismay.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Let us see what it has to tell me.” Medric delicately put his hand to the smoke-stained, half-burned cover.
Eventually, Zanja went downstairs and found the librarian asleep in her chair and Emil busy washing a paste brush. The shoemaker’s hammer had fallen silent; perhaps she had gone shopping in the cool evening. This soon after the solstice, the sun would not set for hours, but the shadows in the street below were long and black, and a cool breeze relieved the heat of the stuffy parlor. Emil looked up from his bowl of cloudy water.
Zanja said quietly, to not disturb the old woman, “You’d better come upstairs.”
In the attic, Medric still sat upright with his hand upon the Encyclopedia of Livestock.His eyes moved wildly, focusing and re-focusing on sights only he could see. His face moved also: Zanja read in rapid succession fear, horror, humor, and a sudden surprise. Earlier, Medric had uttered a small cry, but now his lips moved in an inaudible conversation.
Emil said in a low voice, “He must not be disturbed.” He sat in the chair to wait, and Zanja squatted by the stairway to listen for the shoemaker or the librarian. But the small house remained silent. Medric began to chuckle, and then a few tears slid down his face, and then he blinked and fumbled for his spectacles, took them off, and rubbed the crease in his nose. “Is that you, Emil? Is Zanja still here?”
She stood up out of the shadows.
Medric closed the book box but held it tightly in both hands. He looked pale and distressed, not at all like a man who has foreseen a hopeful future. But all he said was, “We need to keep this book.”
After supper, in their rooms above the wheelwright, Zanja lay upon the bed with her boots on so that Emil and Medric could sit in the two chairs and continue holding hands, as they had done during dinner. Lovers long separated deserved some time alone, and she was thinking of how she would insist on sleeping on the floor in the other room, which wasn’t much more than a garret. She might point out that she had not gotten so accustomed to sleeping in beds that she couldn’t be comfortable on the floor.
Medric, who had scarcely spoken all evening, said to her suddenly, “Do you remember Raven’s joke?”
Enlightenment was imminent, but Zanja found herself reluctant to ask for it. She said, with some effort, “Is Raven’s joke finally ended? Will something finally change?”
“I don’t know why I’m dreaming your stories,” said Medric complainingly.
Looking at him, she thought she saw a man as reluctant to answer questions as she was to ask them. She said, “Delay won’t make whatever you’ve seen less terrible, Master Seer.”
“I know. And don’t call me that. There’s another story in which Raven steals and eats pieces of soul. I think I’ve heard you tell it.”
“I remember it,” said Emil.
Medric said, “What would it mean if you said of someone that Raven had eaten her soul?”
Zanja sat up. The blank shock of her midsummer madness felt like it was threatening to return. She thought wildly of the silent, distant, unresponsive ravens that had tracked her travels, of her and Emil’s peculiar card reading the day she left home, of Karis angrily—or resolutely—letting her go. There was a pattern here. “You dreamed of my death,” she said.
Medric took off his spectacles and set them down on the tabletop, as though he never wanted to see anything clearly again.
Emil said in his steadiest voice, “There are so many kinds of death. Raven’s digestion could be a kind of transformation, couldn’t it? What did you dream, Medric?”
Medric said in a strained voice, “I dreamed that you cut Zanja’s heart out, and fed it to the Raven.”
“And then?” said Emil.
“The Raven shit out an owl, and the owl flew to a Sainnite garrison, with its feathers on fire.”
“And then?”
“The owl told the Sainnites a story, and as they listened, the garrison burned down around them, and then they themselves were burned to ashes.”
“And then?”
Medric said nothing. Zanja asked, “What kind of fire was it? Transformation? Or destruction?”
“I hope it’s transformation,” Medric said.
In the long silence that followed, Zanja felt that strangeness come upon her, like the strangeness of a fever, a distance that is almost delirium. Had not a seer once predicted that the Sainnite people would meet their demise at the hands of an Ashawala’i warrior? And had Zanja not wondered, since her life was first spared six years ago, what she had survived for? But surely, she protested silently, it was not for simple revenge, a revenge she did not even want any longer.
She looked closely at Medric then, wondering whether he was thinking much the same thing. Was it irony or justice that one Sainnite seer’s visions had led to the destruction of Zanja’s people, and a second’s would lead to the destruction of his own people? And was Medric considering now, as she was, whether the cost would be worth the result?
The room grew dark. None of them thought to light the lamp, and though the windows all were open, eventually the only light came from bright stars and a crescent moon. Zanja remembered: when she, her clan brother Ransel, and a half dozen other katrimwere all that remained alive, they had deliberately lit their campfire on a steep peak that overhung the demoralized Sainnites below, so that the enemy would be unable to forget for even a moment that unrelenting death still stalked them. The surviving katrimhad left the bodies of their massacred people to molder in the Asha Valley, a prosperous tribe of some eight hundred, all dead, and since then most of their fellow survivors had been killed. Now they had planned a trap that could kill or maim a great many of the enemy, but to spring the trap, one more would have to die.
They had chosen the one by lot, and when Zanja finally won the toss she was relieved: relieved at the end of the dreadful game, relieved that she no longer would spend the days and nights fearful that Ransel’s crazed bravado would get him killed. It was ridiculous, really: they all were destined to die, and only desire for more revenge had kept them from choosing suicide. Yet, more than anything Zanja feared that Ransel might be hurt unto death, and it might become her duty to give him a quick and merciful ending. Of all the dreadful prospects that had haunted her in those nightmare days, that had been the most awful.
She had been chosen by lot to die, and yet Ransel was dead now, while she still lived. She had crossed the boundary into a new life, but she had never entirely forgotten that the gods had first selected her for death.
She said to her brothers huddled together in the darkness, “Will precedes insight. If we are to see beyond my death, to understand how, or why, or what it is for, we first have to accept that I willdie.”
She saw a movement in the shadows: Emil shaking his head in refusal, though for fifteen years his friends had gone to their deaths at his command. “I am to kill you with my own hand, for the mere hope that someday I’ll understand why? No, I won’t do such a thing.”
Zanja said, “Somehow, it will make posit
ive action possible. But, Emil, if I am to die—”
“No,” he said.
“You’re the only one—”
“Do not ask me!”
“—the only one I trust to do it properly.”
There was a sound of wings flapping. Somewhere nearby, the ravens roosted in the darkness. Or were they listening, silently— and did Karis sit awake, alone, by an open window in their sprawling house, also listening?
Zanja got up from the bed and took up her still unpacked traveling gear: a blanket to lie on or to cover herself with should the nights turn cool; matches; a few essential tools; spare socks; a dagger at her hip; a knife in her boot, and the glyph cards in their pouch dangling from her belt.
Medric had put on his spectacles, and now they were gleaming in the faint moonlight. “You’re leaving?”
“I can’t endure to be with anyone. And Emil can’t endure to be with me.”
“Of course not,” said Medric. “Well, you’ll know when it’s time to come back to us. Do you want some money? Karis gave me a great handful of it.”
Zanja accepted a few coins to make him feel better and kissed him good-bye. She said nothing to Emil. She went down the stairs and out into the quiet night. The moon was obscured now by the rooftops, but she could tell by the glow of light in which direction it lay. She followed, and behind and above her there was the whisper of ravens’ wings.
Chapter Eleven
For twenty days, Zanja lived off the land or worked for meals, for farmers always welcomed more hands at this time of year. As she drew close to the borderland, that hazy edge where Shaftal ended and the western wilderness began, she met a man as wild and solitary as she, who volunteered to cook the rabbit she had snared with the mushrooms and wild vegetables he had gathered, and soon served her one of the best meals she’d ever eaten. They were in the woods, had come across each other by chance, and parted with scarcely a word having been exchanged; but nothing seemed strange to Zanja anymore, and the wandering cook never asked her a single question, so perhaps nothing seemed strange to him, either.
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