Fire Logic (8 page)

She had been dreaming of all the people of her village, gathered beside their summer fires in the Land of the Sun, chasing children, strutting before their rivals, stirring pots of fragrant
kich
. But just as the path Zanja followed seemed about to deposit her in their midst, it turned her mysteriously away, back into the wilderness, and she was lost again, trapped once more in a stinking box of straw, where she had been laid some months earlier like a side of meat being cellared for the winter.

She heard a dry, rasping sound, and turned her head. The moon shone through the barred window, as it briefly did sometimes, and faint light shimmered on the ice-encased walls of her cell. The floor by the window was white with drifted snow. Silhouetted against the white, a raven stood on the edge of her box, near her head. He preened his wing feathers, just like any other bird after a long flight, but she knew him: the Messenger, He Who Decides. At last.

She tilted up her chin so that his blunt beak could better reach her throat. “I have been waiting for you a long time, Lord Death.” Her voice whispered like dry wind.

“It is not yet time for you to die,” said Death. His voice was harsh, and echoed of the deep canyons where he made his home.

“How could it not be time? I have no home, no kin, no clan, no companions. I am broken, paralyzed. That smell—do you smell it?—that is my flesh rotting from my bones as I lie in my own shit. What more can the gods expect me to accomplish? What is left for me except death?”

“You are still bound.”

“Bound to what? The gods?”

“To earth,” the raven said, implacably. In the silence, he paced the length of the box, perhaps inspecting her in the darkness. The blanket covered some parts of her ravaged frame, but to cover her feet required that she lever herself up with her arms to toss the blanket, and she had not been strong enough to do this in quite some time. Surely the sight of her feet, spastically curled and with half the toes hacked off, would convince even a god that her usefulness in this world was at an end. But Death paced back to her head again, unperturbed, and fed her a crust of bread, dry and stale and hard as stone, as if she were his fledgling. Her mouth was dry; she could not chew. He brought her a beakful of snow from the drift by the window, and she managed to swallow the dry crumbs. They burned within her like coals in a hearth, and warmed the parts of Zanja’s body where she could still feel the warmth: her torso, her arms, the shattered places of her heart. But the physical agonies that had only recently been numbed at last by cold were not renewed. For a while, she dozed, and awakened to find that her strength had gathered and concentrated around the center of that warmth in her belly. No, she would not step across the threshold just yet.

“Are you still there?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the god. The moon had crossed her small window. Pressed against the darkness, the god still perched at her head, not a handspan away, invisible.

She said, “You say I am still bound. Perhaps you mean that I am bound to die in honor, as I am a
katrim
.”

Death said, “What do you think should be done so that you could die as a
katrim
should die?”

“It is the way of the
katrim
to die in joy.” She had spoken the words of an old lesson, a child’s lesson, easy to recite when Zanja first stood up in the presence of her clan elders and named herself a
katrim
and proudly said that the owl god Salos’a had chosen her to travel between the worlds. But to recite this lesson now seemed a bitter joke, though Lord Death did not laugh.

“How might you die in joy?” asked Death.

“You mock me with impossibilities.”

“I do not mean to mock you.” Lord Death is a teacher, but the best teacher is the one who waits in silence. She heard the crisp sound of him unhurriedly preening his flight feathers, as though he intended to wait a thousand nights if necessary for Zanja to offer an answer to her own question.

She did not want to wait so long. She tried to remember what once had brought joy to her life, but the massacre of her people lay between her present and her past like an uncrossable divide. So she said, “Perhaps a joyful death comes from being able to understand one’s life as part of a purpose or pattern. But that is the one thing I cannot do.”

“Why not?” asked Death, as though he did not know.

“Because my memory is broken to pieces, and some of the pieces are lost, and the rest don’t fit together any more.”

“Then you must recover what you have lost, and remember who you are.”

“Who I was.” Zanja’s bitterness brought forth weak tears, but surely there was no shame in weeping before a god.

When it is time for a someone to die, the people of the dying one’s clan gather around and tell the stories of her life, so that when she crosses the threshold she will still remember, and be able to tell that history to the people on the other side. But Zanja was the last of her people and so she had to tell those stories of her life to herself. This must be what the god wanted of her.

“Where shall I start?” she asked.

“Start where it begins,” said Death.

So she began with her earliest memories of the clattering looms and the light drifting in to make the patterns shine as they were slowly revealed on the weaver’s loom. She explained that her mother had been a weaver, and had been sorely disappointed when her daughter left the weaver’s house as soon as she could walk on her own two feet, to return only by force. She told about the first time she realized the elders were watching her, the first time she understood that she was not like other children, the first time she and Ransel became friends in the midst of a desperate fist fight. As the night cracked with cold and her heart failed in her chest and her flesh moldered in the straw, she told Death all she knew: all that once had mattered, all that shaped her and now left her, like trash tossed into a midden heap to be eaten by worms.

When Karis awoke in the winter woods, it was still dark, and the stars were falling. They briefly flared and then were quenched, their spectacular suicides watched, surely, by none but her, for even the poorest people of the earth would have found some kind of shelter from this bitter night. Stiff hair prickled against her face. For warmth, she had curled against the belly of a shaggy gray plow horse. When she lay down to sleep, she apparently had not concerned herself with the danger that she might be smothered by her gigantic bedfellow. Stupidity, or daring, or innocence, she never knew what to call the peculiar logic of herself under smoke.

She got clumsily to her knees in a loud crackling of frost. The horse lifted his huge head and yawned, ground his teeth, then snorted wetly. They had made their bed in the undergrowth at the edge of a wood, where the snow had largely collected overhead rather than on the ground. That had been sensible of them, though most of the sense had probably come from the horse.

Karis tried to stand up, but staggered to her knees again. The horse blundered to his feet, dislodging a sudden avalanche of snow from overhead. He nosed her encouragingly. “Smoke,” Karis explained. “But never graceful. No more than you.”

With the help of a slender tree trunk, she hauled herself upright. Despair was always worst in the morning; she fended it off with curses and eventually was able to drag her ungainly body onto the horse’s back. Stung by her urgency, the horse jumped forward. She clung to him grimly, angry at her weakness, angry at the irresistible impulse which drove her out on this insane fool’s errand, angry at the bitter poverty of spirit from which her anger came. This dark and frigid morning, where dawn seemed unlikely ever to break, did not bode well at all for the day that lay ahead.

Zanja’s voice gave out. In the bitter cold, the god stood sentinel, silent long after she had ceased to weep. When she turned her head, the straw crackled where her tears had frozen. A hush had fallen, and she saw the faint shimmer of snowfall outside the window.

Zanja’s story was nearly done, and soon Lord Death would let her go free. She continued, “I don’t know why the Sainnites didn’t kill me. When they reached their garrison, it seems they were disgraced. Perhaps, in the confusion, orders were bungled, papers were mislaid. Perhaps they simply wanted to get me out of their sight. I don’t know how, but somehow I ended up here.”

“Ha!” said the god.

“So I did not set out to cheat you. Haven’t I spent my days in pleading with the gods to allow me to die? I am tortured even in my dreams. I walk the path to my village and I see it filled with my people. Ransel is there waiting for me. How will I explain my long delay?” The raven seemed to shrug, and Zanja was tempted to grab hold of him and twist his neck until the backbone popped, just to let him know what paralysis was like. She could no longer take deep breaths to calm herself. The god moved cautiously out of reach. Zanja spoke, her voice shaking. “You bid me die in joy rather than in despair, but the only joy I can imagine is to walk down that path, to enter the Land of the Sun and be free of this body, this prison. Is that too much to ask?”

The god said, “You ask not for too much, but for too little.”

“What?” Zanja peered into the shadows at the black shape of the raven, who she suddenly remembered was a trickster. “I am too stupid for riddles.”

“It is no riddle, but a choice. Do you
choose
to die?”

She stared at him. Her heartbeat sputtered like a candle about to go out. In the silence, she thought she could hear a quiet footstep in the hall outside her door. But it was too early for the guard to make his noisy rounds. Bewildered, she whispered, “Now you mock me, Lord Death.”

“No,” said the god gently. “I am giving you the choice.”

No keys jingled in the frozen silence, but Zanja heard the lock of her cell door turn. The guard had not come in to feed her for days, but the door swung open without a creak from the rust-caked hinges. A presence filled the doorway. Lord Death spread his wings and lifted suddenly into the darkness.

Zanja spoke to the vacancy where the god had been. “Then I choose to live.” Then, she lay stunned by her own stupidity, asking herself what she wanted to live for.

She heard Lord Death’s voice in the darkness, but he was not speaking to her. “I am your witness.”

“I heard, good raven,” rasped a voice as harsh as Lord Death’s laugh.

Zanja heard a sound like the snapping of two fingers. A red spark danced like a firefly in the darkness, then flared, and became a sputtering flame. The flame advanced until Zanja could feel its faint heat upon her frozen skin. Her heart managed another weary pulse.

An enormous, long-fingered hand held up the burning wand. Another reached down to turn aside the decayed blanket and uncover Zanja’s ravaged remains: ulcerated skin, tightly stretched over thinly clad bones, a stick-fingered hand still curled into a fist. The stink rose up, muted but not conquered by the cold.

The hand touched Zanja’s emaciated chest. Like a coal in a snowdrift, heat shocked into her flesh. Zanja’s heart gave a mighty thud. She grunted, as if she had been struck, and gasped burning air into her lungs. Her heart thudded again. A river of heat rushed through the conduit of her flesh, up her neck, and into the vessel of her skull. Color exploded across her vision. Bedazzled and stunned, she uttered an animal cry.

The voice spoke again, in Shaftalese. “Do not be afraid. I have come to help you.”

Zanja would not have been surprised to discover that those warm fingers had folded back skin and bone to lay bare her faltering heart. “I’m not afraid,” she lied.

“Tell me your name.”

“Zanja na’Tarwein,” said the raven, who now rode upon the woman’s broad shoulder.

“Zanja na’Tarwein, my name is Karis. My raven has traveled ahead of me, and kept you alive at my command.”

“Your raven?” Zanja said. “He is not a god?”

“You thought he was a god?” The woman dropped down beside the box of straw, never lifting her hand from Zanja’s breast. “No, he is just a raven. And I—Take the light and look at me.”

The slender, insubstantial rush light was placed between Zanja’s fingers. The sputtering flame trembled in her weak grasp as she lifted it to illuminate clearwater eyes, a sun-bleached thicket of hair, deeply drawn lines of worry, weariness, and perhaps some laughter. The woman smelled of sweat and woodsmoke, and there were pine needles trapped in her hair. Her ragged shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing bulky, muscled forearms. The palms of her hands were gray with ground-in soot. She had strolled through the locked door of this prison like a phantom, yet she was substantial, physical, powerful. The vitality coursing through Zanja’s veins gave her an eye-aching clarity, and as she looked at Karis she could not help but know what she was made of. She said, “You are neither god nor ghost, so you must be an elemental. I think you are an earth witch.”

Karis said, “And you’ve gone from mystery to understanding without asking a single question, so you must be a fire blood.” She turned her head as though she heard something, and said, “I think the prison guards are up and about. How long until they come this way?”

“Not until after dawn.”

“It is well after dawn now. A storm rolled in before first light, which is why it seems so dark now. Good raven,” she added, “Your work here is done.”

The raven lifted from her shoulder, flew to the window, and was gone.

Zanja said, “Perhaps your raven is no god, but he taught me something I did not know.
Serrain
, I am dying, but even crippled as I am, I’d rather live. I ask your mercy.”

Karis gazed at her as though astonished by her good manners. But it seemed that Zanja’s careful words had not struck Karis as ridiculous, for she said, “As it happens, I am a great mender of broken things. Let me see what I can do.” Karis took the rush light and wedged it in a crack between stones. “I need to touch you,” she said, as though Zanja’s heart were not still beating eagerly against the palm of her hand, and as though her callused fingers did not scratch Zanja’s bare breast every time she shifted her weight. The shock of heat again, and Karis lifted and turned Zanja as easily as if she were an infant, so that she faced the ice-clad wall. Karis stroked a hand firmly down the weeping sores of Zanja’s back. Zanja expected pain, but she felt something else: the startling warmth of Karis’ touch, and an eerie, crawling sensation as her ruined flesh hastily knit itself together.