Fire Logic (24 page)

Medric shrugged, in the middle of exchanging spectacles again, with one pair in each hand. “You have one, don’t you? The Way of the Seer forbids me to eat cheese—I brought it for you.”

He put on the other spectacles and smiled suddenly, as though she had only just arrived. “But you’re no longer a fey creature bristling with marvelous rockets. So daylight pares away the nights illusions, eh? You decided not to kill me, I hope, during all that time you were studying me from those bushes over there.”

Zanja drew one of her pistols and showed him that it was not loaded.

“Then what were you watching me for?”

“To make certain you were alone. And when it became apparent that you were, I began to wonder why your people might allow you to go forth unescorted. Surely you are valuable to them.”

“They wouldn’t allow me to do it, I’m sure, had I asked anyone for permission. You’re older than I thought you were.”

“My years feel very heavy lately. You look like a little boy to me.”

“I’m almost twenty,” he said, sounding as young as he looked. “My years feel heavy also.”

To bear a seer’s burden alone could rapidly turn a boy into an old man. Certainly, though Medric’s face was young, his eyes were old. “In
this
world,” he said, “This world in which it is possible for us to be friends, perhaps you might share a meal with me. When we go out of this place, what we do here need not matter any more.”

“You
are
young if you still can believe that. Whether I eat with you or not, it will change nothing. So I say we might as well eat.”

Besides bread and fruit, the basket also contained cheese and butter and sweetmeats. Medric tasted all of these things, as if to show Zanja that they were not poisoned, but then he ate only bread and fruit: the brown bread, not the white. Where he had gotten fresh fruit so early in the season Zanja could not imagine, and she had never seen anything quite like this fruit. He called them grapes, and said that they had just arrived by wagon from the south, where summer came early. They grew on vines, and, unlike most tree fruits, could travel long distances without bruising.

“We use it to make wine, and everybody complains that it’s not half as good as the wine from the old country. I used to drink a great deal of it.” Medric offered Zanja the bottle in his hand, which contained not wine, but spring water flavored with mint.

“But spirits are anathema to seers,” she said.

“So I learned.” Medric looked, for a moment, rather haunted. “I seem destined to learn to survive by nearly killing myself first.” Indeed, Zanja thought, he must have come desperately close to being claimed by the madness which always is the dark shadow of insight, and that madness still seemed terribly near to him, as though he could reach out at any time and put it on like a hat.

“A seer should have a mentor,” she said, as though he were a young man of her clan who had come to her for advice.

“The Sainnite community treats elemental blood like a contamination, not a thing to be nurtured. When it became clear that I might be useful to my people after all, they found me a Shaftali tutor, and then had to kill him within the year for spying. I rather think he encouraged me to become a drunk, and who could blame him? But if he had helped me instead, and if I hadn’t spent all last summer in a drunken stupor, perhaps I would have come to my senses before all those people in Rees had been killed. No, I had no mentor,” he added bitterly. “Even now, all I have is this, and I haven’t had it long.” He tapped the book, which lay beside him upon its cloth wrapping. Zanja was curious enough to spell out the title,
The Way of the Seer
. The book looked as though it had been read to pieces.

Zanja ate more of the sweet grapes. For sanity’s sake Medric had embraced asceticism, but for her it was only deprivation, which was to be endured like grief and solitude and tedious hard work. Right now, there was food to be enjoyed, and she enjoyed it. For all she knew, she might have only bread and water tomorrow.

Medric smelled strongly of smoke, and she wondered how the Sainnites were enjoying living in ashes. “Did your people blame you for failing to predict Fire Night?”

“Of course they did. What good am I to them if I can’t avert disaster?” His young face looked as old and tired as Emil’s did lately. “I fear they will never see that they brought disaster upon themselves.” With his chin resting in his hands, he gazed across the lush farmlands of the valley. “Only recently, I realized it myself. Everything I have done that my people admire me fore—or at least that they don’t vilify me for—has been wrong. I am a boy, misusing my talent to prove my worth to the people who will never accept me. To be a seer, the way I have to follow is a difficult one: difficult and terrible.”

He hesitated, with his head bowed over his hands. “I have dreamed of you, Zanja, and of the Man on the Hill, your commander, many times. You have a kinship with him, a kinship I first recognized as a danger, for together you constitute a formidable enemy. Together, you do much with little. Alone, I do little with much. So my admiration, I confess, is fraught with envy. I am asking you to give me an entrance to his trust. He is the way by which I might leave my father’s people and serve my mother’s instead. You are the way by which I might reach him.”

Zanja said, a long time later, “First you must find an entrance to my trust.”

“Yes,” he said. The single word seemed heavy, an acknowledgment, an acceptance, the marking of an irrevocable step already taken. But then, strangely, he began to tell her a story.

“When my father’s people, whom you call Sainnites, first arrived on the shores of Shaftal over thirty years ago, they were the vanguard of an influx of refugees. My father was my age then, and from childhood I have heard him talk of the lands left behind, and the battles he fought there, like his father before him. In Sainna and the surrounding countries, people were born into castes, and my father’s people were the Carolins, a caste of soldiers. They were mercenaries, really, living in bands or armies rather like your tribes, except that they might be hired by one warlord or another, and they would fight against another band of Carolins like themselves. This was how they had lived, for time beyond memory. Though the old people remember those times fondly, it seems as though they were a poor and even desperate people, especially during times of peace when they had little choice except to turn brigand.

“Well, I don’t really understand the entire story, because the Carolins themselves never wholly understood it—it was their business to do as ordered, not to understand. Apparently, Sainna and all its neighboring countries went to war with each other, a war that lasted many long years, in which thousands of Carolins died on both side. It seems as though it was the nature of this kind of war that it was ultimately a war of resources: How long could the warlords afford to field their armies before the resources ran out? As it happens, Sainna began to lose, and it became apparent that all the Carolins of Sainna would be executed without mercy. So the Carolins began casting about for a place to flee, and their only choice really was to set to sea. They bought, borrowed, or stole ships and over a period of some five years many thousands made their way here to Shaftal, though thousands of others died and continued to die in the last years of the war.

“My father was among the earliest to arrive, and the people of his band found ways to make themselves welcome in a small seaside community. Others, though, were met with hostility and fell into their old habits of thievery and brigandry, which brought the Paladins upon them. The Carolins did not know about Shaftali winters, and a good many of them died because they entered the season unprepared. Tradition and ignorance made it impossible for them to farm; they got no help from the people of the coast who rapidly grew intolerant of them, and I’m sure there were good reasons for it.

“In some places they turned to old methods of slavery, which is why the drug the Shaftali call ‘smoke’ first arrived here. Enslaving the farmers was a failure, for farming is far more complex and difficult to learn than we ever imagined it to be, and once the smoke killed the knowledgeable and experienced farmers we were worse off than we had been. Perhaps some ten years had passed by then, and at last the Carolins realized that they were not going to survive except by making war upon Shaftal, and so it happened that we became what we are today: we ourselves are warlords now, and I have to say that the whole history of the Carolin relations with Shaftal has been characterized by a kind of ignorant incompetence brought about by our inability to break with the past. We can only do what we have always done, even though it is destroying Shaftal and ourselves along with it.”

He stopped to sip some spring water, and, because he seemed to expect that Zanja would make some comment she said, with genuine astonishment, “Although I have fallen in with learned friends, not one of them knows this history. And you talk about ignorance on the part of the Sainnites!”

“Well, here is an example of it. The Carolins teach their children that the Shaftali are better off because of us—that we’ve released them from servitude to the Lilterwess magicians, and that most of the Shaftali secretly love us for it. At the very least, it is argued, the Shaftali have exchanged one bondage for another, which surely is no more onerous. They have no idea that the Shaftali were never subject to the Lilterwess, but that all of them were subject to the Law. They can’t imagine that Shaftal had no lords. It doesn’t help that the Shaftali and the Carolins speak different languages,” Medric continued. “Even my parents could barely communicate with each other.”

Zanja rummaged in the basket, but she had eaten all the grapes and she didn’t like the sweetmeats. She cut herself another piece of cheese, thinking about how much more likely it seemed that Emil might accept Medric, not because of everything he had told Zanja but because he clearly was, or should be, a scholar.

The silence had lasted quite some time. She glanced at Medric, and found him staring blankly over the top of his spectacles. She did not disturb him from whatever vision he was having, but in a moment he shook himself out of his reverie and murmured in his father’s language, “Almost I can see it—an ordinary winter day, writing my book by the fire—except that it’s in a Shaftali cottage and the windows open into vast spaces.” He sighed.

“What are you saying?” Zanja asked, so he would not know that she understood Sainnese.

“I’m sorry, I was talking to myself.”

“Your mother must have had fire blood, didn’t she? Did she fall in love as fire bloods do, for no good reason, and pay a high price for it?”

Medric said quietly, “Well, she always said there was a reason, a good reason that she herself could not explain, but I always had the feeling it had something to do with me. Certainly, if ever a fire blood felt herself driven by a sense of destiny and obligation to a future she could not wholly envision, that person was my mother. You’re a bit like her, I think, else why would you be here?” He smiled his tentative smile, like a man too accustomed to receiving a hostile reception. “You know the old saying, fire bloods are the hinges of history.”

Zanja did not know the old saying, but she replied with odd bitterness. “You will not lay your mother’s project upon me, Medric. You must open and close your own doors.”

“I know.”

After a moment, Zanja picked up his battered book and leafed through it. The book surely had been through the war before it ever made its way to the hands of a man who could actually read and use it. Much of it seemed to be philosophy, but it also contained whole chapters of practical advice on how to live. One phrase struck Zanja: “Live for the future or not at all.” She shut the book and gave it back to Medric, who had been anxious during the whole time she held it.

“All my books have come from the bottoms of soldier’s footlockers,” Medric said. “They keep odd things sometimes. The soldier who sold this book to me had it from a Lilterwess school that she helped burn down.”

Zanja said, “Do you happen to know why the Carolins attacked the Ashawala’i? They were a peaceful mountain people, famous for their woolens...”

“Oh, I know all about it. That whole incident is infamous, you know. But it was particularly important to me. There was another Shaftali-born Carolin seer, a year or two older than I. She had a dream that she interpreted to mean that the Ashawala’i were going to defeat and destroy the Carolins. Not one of the Ashawala’i could be left alive, she said, or her prediction would come true.

Medric opened his book and said, as if reading from it, “Such dreams should cause self-examination, reassessment of purpose and intention. But to simply react to dreams like puppets on strings leads to panicked, superstitious insanity. The best seer in the land sees only a very small part of the truth.” He shut the book. “The Carolins don’t understand that, and neither did the other seer until perhaps she realized, after the Ashawala’i had been destroyed, that the insane enterprise itself might be the cause of the Carolin downfall. We lost an enormous number of soldiers on that one campaign, and you cannot imagine what an impact such a loss had on a practically childless people. Anyway, she killed herself.”

There was a silence. “I don’t know why I didn’t learn from her mistakes,” he added. “Why do you want to know about the Ashawala’i?”

“They were my people,” Zanja said.

She felt the presence of the ghosts: the infants burned in their baskets, the children massacred in the arms of their parents, the old people shielding the young, the
katrim
with their light weaponry broken in their hands. Medric studied her through lenses glazed with light, and said quite softly, “So now you are the arrow in the bow we ourselves have strung.”

“Tell me how I am going to destroy the Sainnites. I am very curious.”

He gazed at her steadily, long enough that she began to feel uncomfortable, and finally said, “I don’t know what you are going to do. If I did know, I would not tell you. But I will tell you this, for what it’s worth: The elemental flame either transforms or destroys, and we fire bloods have the power to choose which of those it will be. I have made my choice. When you have made yours, I will meet you here again.”