“At her hand? How?”
“Well, not from pleasure!” The woman leered at her in a dreadful display of gums and occasional teeth. “By fire,” she said, “and plague, and floods. By mountains falling on your heads and trees crushing you under their weight. By freezing wind and heavy snow and—of course—by bloody battles.”
Sweating in her filthy uniform, Clement felt a chill. Wasn’t this in fact how Shaftal was killing them, quietly, steadily, irresistibly? She said, “Such things happen naturally in this bloody, bitter, hostile land.”
“Is that a question?” the woman asked. “You expect an answer?‘
Clement contemptuously tossed the coin to her. “Yes, do tell me why I should be afraid of this supposed G’deon’s supposed threat.”
The smoke user said, “Because the supposed G’deon can make these things happen onlyto you.”
“I’ve heard enough nonsense,” said Clement. “This soldier will show you out.”
But after the smoke user had gone, her stink remained. Clement had left the windows in Cadmar’s quarters closed to retain the cool of morning, but now she flung them open, and looked out over the wrecked garrison. As she watched, the crazy, tilted remains of a building collapsed in a cloud of ashes and dirt. Two months after the fire, debris was still being cleared, even as, here and there, a few buildings gradually rose, the construction fraught with error and delay. Ellid’s rebuilding strategy was dictated by the rapid changes of Shaftal’s seasons. On the foundations of the burned buildings, new timber frames were constructed, and on those went the roofs, so that the walls and windows could be built during the rain of autumn and even the snow of winter.
By freezing winds and heavy snow we’ll die,thought Clement, remembering the smoke-user’s hollow, ravaged voice. To this drug-addicted informant, there had been no reason to make a distinction between the acts of an individual, this supposed G’deon, and the acts of nature. Gilly had more than once called the abilities passed from G’deon to successor as the power of Shaftal, and what was Shaftal’s power, if not the very powers the smoke user listed, of fire and plague and generally rotten weather? Powers of irresistible destruction, whether slow or sudden. Looking out at the evidence of the burned garrison, remembering the horrors of that night, Clement saw the full scope of her own lingering despair.
The summer was already two-thirds passed. At the main gate, a crowd of witnesses maintained their vigil, but their numbers were few enough now that the siege gate had been opened, and it was usually possible for a guarded wagon, or a company of soldiers, to pass in and out. Clement went out a postern gate, though, alone on horseback. The bored gate guard, an old man whose job it was to ring the bell for help if the iron-banded gate happened to be assaulted, had no choice but to let Clement through. No doubt her exit would be reported to Ellid, who later would berate Clement as much as she dared. Clement went out into a lavender twilight that suffused the narrow streets of Watfield with an unearthly blend of vivid light and purple shadow. Late shoppers, hurrying home with baskets of bread and eggs, pressed themselves to walls decorated with blooming vines to let her pass. Drinkers in taverns, who escaped the outdoors into the cooling streets, looked at her askance and, scowling, nudged their neighbors.
By the time Clement reached Alrin’s pristine townhouse, the shadows had nearly overcome the light. In the spotless parlor, a painted screen concealed the cold fireplace, and the discreetly drawn summer curtains billowed delicately in the evening breeze. Here Alrin sat with her feet on a stool, dressed in clothing as light and loose as her billowing curtains. Her gravid belly, her rich breasts, these were discreetly displayed by the light cloth. She offered her hand, apologizing that she did not rise. Weak-kneed, Clement bowed over her cool, delicately scented fingers, and said in a rough voice, “I trust that you are well.”
“I miss your company, of course.”
“Of course,” said Clement, trying not to sound skeptical. With the garrison tight as a lockbox and every last soldier working dawn to dusk on rebuilding, Alrin’s business must have suffered terribly. Clement did not quite know what to make of the message, passed on verbally through the gate guards, inviting her blandly to supper. Was Alrin resorting to unseemly recruitment? Yet Clement had come, and had even, with some effort, taken something resembling a bath, and put on a uniform that wasn’t as filthy as the others.
Alrin, never awkward, created topics of conversation from thin air. Over hot buttered bread and deliciously vinegared vegetables, she pretended interest convincingly as Clement obliged her with an account of the garrison attack. Over fowl in aspic and jellied fruits as lovely to look at as they were to taste, Alrin entertainingly described a disastrously bad concert she had recently attended. Over peaches and cake they both praised the fine weather and expressed hopes that it would be a late autumn. Clement turned down brandy, accepted tea, and sat sipping it by the window, stunned by such a quantity of tasty food after so many months of deprivation. Alrin asked her for the fourth time if she had eaten enough, and if she didn’t want a few biscuits or a nice piece of cheese.
Clement said, “If I ate any more I’d fall unconscious. It’s very kind of you to rescue me for a few hours—but the commander will go into a panic if I don’t return soon.”
The courtesan smoothed the cloth over her pregnant belly.
Clement, who had only observed pregnancy from a distance, caught herself examining Alrin’s round, taut abdomen with fascination. Alrin said complacently, “My last child.”
Clement glanced up at her face. “How do you know?” she asked. She had heard that Shaftali people knew some methods for preventing pregnancy besides the obvious one practiced by the Sainnites, of simply forbidding sexual congress between men and women. Clement herself felt no particular desire to do what men and women do with each other, but soldiers of both sexes would bless her if she could learn the Shaftali secret.
Unfortunately, Alrin’s answer was unrevealing. “You haven’t heard that I’m leaving Watfield in the spring? Marga wants to move south, where the winters aren’t so hard. So I’m going into the window and bottle business, purchasing a glassworks.”
“I hadn’t heard,” said Clement. “Windows and bottles?” she added, trying not to sound overly doubtful.
Alrin said gravely, “I do understand business.”
“Of course you do. You’ll be missed. I wish you well.”
“Thank you. Marga and I will be very preoccupied with running the enterprise, we expect. This child—it’s unfortunate, but we can’t possibly raise it. It will go to its father, as is proper.”
Quite belatedly, Clement realized, as Marga came in to clear the table, that the stout woman was not Alrin’s housekeeper, but her wife.
“If the father is interested,” said Alrin, as Marga left with a loaded tray.
Clement, feeling dreadfully embarrassed, poured both of them more tea to save Alrin the trouble of standing up, and also to give herself a chance to recover her own composure. “I heard there were several interested parties,” she said.
“Oh, well,” said Alrin vaguely. “Sometimes fate intervenes.” She accepted the teacup with a gracious smile. “It is presumptuous of me to even suggest you might help me a little. But I valued our friendship, Clem—”
Clement, though she was commenting to herself on Alrin’s acting ability, felt a brief surge of desire.
“—and I dare hope you might sometimes think of me fondly,” continued Alrin. With the teacup at her lips, she gave Clement a steady, suggestive look.
Clement said, “All officers are lonely. You gave me something I wanted, and I did appreciate it. Is there something I can do for you?” Of course there would be—Alrin had not invited her to supper out of compassion because the people in the garrison had nothing but slop to eat.
“A great man like the general must want a legacy,” Alrin said.
“Cadmar?” said Clement. “Good gods!” And she began to laugh, and could not stop herself. “I beg your pa
rdon,” she managed to gasp at last. “This child is his, then?”
“It might well be,” said Alrin stiffly. “As you know perfectly well.”
Clement wiped her eyes. “I’ll mention it to him. But I can tell you now that you’d better find another candidate.” She set down her teacup and stood up. “I’m sorry I offended you. Thank you again for the delicious meal.”
“Must you go?” said Alrin. She offered her hand for Clement to clasp. “Must you?” she said again, pointedly.
But Clement’s flush of desire had evaporated. She bid Alrin farewell. She’d never see her again, probably, and she certainly would not even mention this absurd conversation to Cadmar when he returned. But it would be great fun to recount to Gilly.
Five days later, a bugle signal at the main gate announced Cadmar’s return to Watfield. Clement was in the middle of dividing, replanting, and top dressing her mother’s flower bulbs. She went down to the main gate with horse manure caked on her knees and her pockets bulging with bulbs. There was a scuffle outside the gate as soldiers forced back the crowd to allow a clear passage for Cadmar, who glared with fierce dignity from the back of his magnificent, nervous horse. Once or twice, Clement spotted Gilly, gray and drawn, mounted on a sturdy brown nag. Both he and his horse looked rather bored, though they were tangled in a knot of escorting soldiers who were busy with their clubs. She had missed that ugly man! When they were in, and the soldiers had gotten the gate shut, then the soldiers on the walls remembered belatedly to cheer the general’s arrival, though the angry shouts of the crowd outside the gate were louder, and less demoralized. Ellid had arrived, and stepped forward to make the official greeting. Cadmar dismounted and clasped the garrison commander’s hand with every appearance of geniality. But Clement heard him say, “Shoot the rabble.”
“General,” said Clement, stepping forward hastily. “We’ve tolerated these people’s presence—better a few people at the gate than a roused city. And the weather will drive them away soon enough.”
“Tolerate?”Cadmar’s gaze was without comprehension. “Are you a farmer now, Lieutenant-General?” He wrinkled his nose at the manure stink she carried with her.
“I beg your pardon, General. You’ll find your quarters ready for you. And the stable has been rebuilt, so your horse will also be comfortable.”
Looking past his shoulder, she caught Ellid’s gaze. The commander looked rather pale, but at Clement’s glance she gave a slight nod. Clement soothed Cadmar until he allowed that he was tired, and let himself be convinced to go to his quarters and be looked after by his long-suffering aides. When he was gone, Clement said to Ellid, “Give the citizens fair warning first, and then shoot over their heads. They’ll run out of shooting range, at least, and then you can send the guard out to disperse them.”
Clement turned and found that Gilly had been helped from his horse and was leaning unsteadily on his cane, observing her with a rather red-eyed, dubious expression. She offered him her arm, and he leaned on her heavily. “The horsewill be comfortable?” he rasped, apparently in the throes of a summer cold.
Clement said, “Actually, the horses are uncomfortably crowded because the stable is now the barracks for the soldiers displaced by Cadmar’s arrival. We’ve cleared the soldiers out of your room, too, and I think I’d better put you to bed. You’re uglier than ever,” she added affectionately.
“You’re crabbier,” said Gilly hoarsely. “For a moment I thought you were going to clout him.”
“What does he think, that I’ve saved a clean uniform to wear for his arrival? The laundry hasn’t been rebuilt, and I gave Ellid half my clothing, since hers was burned.”
“You’ve been free of Cadmar for two months. You’ve got nothing to complain about.”
They moved down the road, Gilly leaning heavily on her arm, at more of a shuffle than a walk. The horses were led past them in a clatter of shod hooves on cobblestone. Behind them, Clement could hear the gate captain shouting orders. “I wouldn’t clout Cadmar,” Clement said. “His fists are twice the size of mine.”
Gilly chuckled, then coughed wretchedly.
Gunshots. Clement flinched. Fearful cries. She said loudly, “What is written on those pieces of cloth those people wrap themselves with? Did you notice?”
“It was names.”
Someone was screaming. Apparently, injuries had not been entirely avoided. “Gods of hell,” Clement muttered.
“Some veteran you are,” said Gilly dryly.
“Why don’t they give up and get busy breeding more children? It doesn’t take any particular effort!”
Gilly looked at her. “It’s not children they want,” he grated. “It’s those particular children. No, never mind—you’ll never understand it.”
She took him to his room and put him to bed. She told him about Alrin’s attempt to sell her child to Cadmar, but she could not remember why it had ever seemed funny.
Chapter Thirteen
In those days before autumn mud, Norina Truthken observed some remarkable things, and commented on them to nobody. She was famous for her acerbic tongue and quick temper: brutal weapons in the control of a subtle mind that no one underestimated more than once. In those days, she found herself exercising that subtlety without the weaponry, and though she saw much worth commenting on and even criticizing, she merely watched in silence.
Dust gathered in their half-abandoned house; what vegetables had survived in the neglected garden went ungathered; their storerooms that should have been filling up for the long winter lay empty. Wherever Karis had gone, she had taken the household concerns with her, and had a neighbor visited their home he would have concluded that they were soon to become burdens on their community.
Karis also remained silent: present in her ravens, but speechless. She had removed herself beyond Norina’s ability to know her truths, yet that very act of removal signified to Norina a truth that the fire bloods could not perceive. They saw rejection and refusal, and perhaps even Karis herself thought that her absence meant anger. Fire bloods see in the heat of passion and imagination, and air bloods see coldly, clearly. Sometimes that dispassion was a distinct advantage.
Emil wrestled with himself in a way that was painful to watch. As commander of South Hill Company he had regularly sent friends to their deaths, but he and Zanja had an intimacy that could not be described as simple friendship, and to kill her with his own hand would kill him as well. This Norina saw, and as she watched him work his slow way to acceptance of this unacceptable, mad plan, she knew that in the end to fulfill his role would literally break his heart. Yet Norina held her tongue.
Medric, as always, was more enigmatic. Flippant and sorrowful by turns, he read his books of history frantically, looking for a fact or story that would trigger his insight and give him the broad vision that might explain their actions to themselves. So seers always spend their lives, seeking a perfect understanding that inevitably eludes them; some finally fall into madness, while others realize at last that their purpose lies not in the unachievable goal, but in the seeking of it. Medric was terribly young, still in his mid-twenties, and perhaps he was too young to bear such a personal burden for the hopes of his friends. He grew haggard from forgetting to eat and sleep, and Emil and Zanja were too preoccupied to look after him. Norina started bringing him bowls of porridge and supervising while he ate, though he complained about her miserable cooking. She watched him flounder like a fish caught in the jaws of destiny, and wondered whether he would change his shape before he was swallowed. She made no comment, though.
Zanja waschanging, and this was the most remarkable thing Norina found to watch. If ever Norina, in all her skeptical life, had been tempted to believe in divine intervention, it was during those weeks of harvest as she watched Zanja’s metamorphosis. Zanja, oblivious to the changing season, appeared to be writing a book. Norina glanced at her work one day, and found that it was a collection of Leeba’s favorite stories, mixed in with other stories that Norina had never h
eard: more complex stories, stories that Leeba would love in a few months, or a year, or several years. One of these was an exceedingly strange tale of a woman who murdered herself to save her daughter’s life, and how her daughter never forgave her for it. Norina could imagine reading that story to Leeba one day, though she could not imagine how the world around them might have changed by then.
Except for her work on the book for Leeba, Zanja seemed—not aimless, for she was too quiet for that—but distant, waiting. Examining her, Norina saw a mindless preoccupation, like a caterpillar starting to weave a silken coffin around itself, or a bear getting ready to bury itself in a winter’s grave. But that peaceful purposefulness was always threatened by a pain as intense as Emil’s. Zanja called herself a crosser of boundaries: her gods had named her so. And every boundary crossing, she said, was a death. So she was accustomed to dying, and knew how to go about it. But she who had endured such terrible losses in her life could not endure any more, and so she kept pretending to herself that when she died, her lover, her child, and her dearest friends would not be lost to her. It was an extraordinary act of self-deception: the kind of magic that fire bloods excel at. Norina was there when that self-deception failed, and Zanja began to weep.
She wept for days. And then she took the dagger Karis had forged for her, and laid it on the bed she and Karis had shared all these years, and she roughly bound the pages of her book with a leather seam and set the book aside, and, as the apple harvest began, she started to go out walking, from before sunrise to past sunset. Every night, when Norina saw her at supper, she saw a woman who had become a little less familiar. And still Norina did not talk about what she saw, to Zanja or to anyone.
A letter came from J’han, much dirtied by its hand-to-hand journey, that told of births attended, bones mended, and lives ended, and finished with a sentence that his raven had begun to talk to him, occasionally. Norina wondered if she would ever see him, or her daughter, again. So even she lived through the harvest season in a state of loss, but she was never bewildered by it. She had never hesitated to sacrifice passion to principle; she was an air blood and she knew no more rational way to live. So, like Zanja, she was uniquely qualified for the task that lay before her.
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