Текст книги "Fire Logic "

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Dinal passed a crew of blank‑eyed, starved and sore‑riddled street sweepers, who were so numbed by smoke that they did not even flinch when the foreman laid into them with a switch. Other than these, Dinal did not see another living soul until noon approached. Then, a few early‑rising whores came out to sit naked in the sun. Their pierced and bejeweled nipples glittered; last night’s golden paint peeled away in patches to reveal bruises, scars, scabs, and bloody wounds. Lounging in chairs dragged out into the middle of the road, they cushioned certain parts of their bodies with pillows, and watched Dinal pass with the same stunned and incurious gaze they turned upon each other. A street doctor made her rounds, dispensing poultices and headache remedies.

They smoked to dull the pain, Dinal supposed. But a whore under smoke was helpless to defend herself against injury. So the trap closed, and there was no escape.

Dinal’s horse stopped dead in the middle of a deserted square and looked at her over his shoulder. Dinal could offer him neither explanation nor purpose for their continued wandering. It was her lot and joy to serve at the beck of the G’deon. She would have to remain in this cursed town, and await either the bidding of her heart or the long‑expected word that the G’deon had finally breathed his last.

She allowed the horse to drink from one of the pornographic fountains, then she turned him toward the eastern end of town. Here, the nearby ocean scented the air with a sweet reek of seaweed and salt. In the debris of narrow alleys, rag‑dressed people huddled against moldy stone. When the sun suddenly came blazing over the edge of the rooftops, they began to awaken, in a mutter of groans and curses.

The narrow street led Dinal to a plaza, where a broken‑wheeled carriage stood with the horse still in the traces, and the driver, asleep or dead, slumped to one side with the reins in his hands. A few newly risen drunks had gathered to dunk their heads in the fountain. Two shouted at each other, and seemed on the verge of blows. One vomited onto bare stone, as another looked speculatively at the carriage. Others still lay like soldiers mowed down in a desperate rout and left behind to rot. Dinal’s horse picked his way squeamishly among the fallen.

Not much liking the look of this plaza or its occupants, Dinal turned her horse toward the nearest alley. Directly across from her, in a windowless wall scabrous with the remains of a decaying mosaic, a door opened. Out came a barefoot girl, dressed only in a night shift, with a water jug balanced upon her hip. She was extraordinarily tall and thin. The invading sunlight passed across her face as she stepped through the human debris. At Dinal’s hail, the girl neither stepped forward nor stepped away.

Dinal held out a hand, with a silver coin in the palm. “I have lost my way. Will you take me back to the main road?”

The girl examined Dinal from toe to head, her gaze lingering longest on the telltale gold earrings: three of them, marking her high rank. “All roads lead to the main road. No one will ever believe you are lost. Who are you?” Her body was all arms and legs; she had been growing with astonishing speed and her breasts had started to form. And she had come into her power, and had only just begun to realize what she was. This Dinal saw, imprinted in the girl’s very flesh. She was earth.

“I’m Dinal Paladin. I’ve come here to find you.”

“Now there’s a story,” the girl said. Yet her body had shivered, as with yearning, before she spoke with such quick cynicism. Perhaps she had half expected someone to come and find her, thinking that surely someone, somehow, would realize that an earth witch had emerged in the back streets of Lalali.

“I was sent by the G’deon,” Dinal said. “I am the mother of his children.”

After a moment, the girl said, “You must speak to my master and hire my services. Do you have a kerchief or a length of cloth, something to cover your face? And let loose your hair.”

Dinal untied the thong that bound her hair, so that it fell forward and covered her earrings. She took a black scarf out of her baggage, and the girl helped her to tie it so it covered her entire face, except for her eyes. “Now, stand so, holding the reins.” The girl demonstrated an attitude of impatience and boredom. “You must seem eager, but do not agree to pay more than you have there in your hand.”

The girl’s master, a thin, hard‑faced man with a grimy red ribbon tying back his greasy hair, seemed none too willing to let the girl go with Dinal, even for so little time. They dickered until the girl reappeared in the open door, fully dressed in a plain, serviceable tunic and trousers. Dinal, who had been holding the coin between her fingers where the girl’s master could see it, abruptly closed her fist and mounted her horse. “Never mind, then. I was particularly taken with your girl’s unusual appearance, but I will find someone else.”

“Lady, if you knew what it costs me to keep her!” Defeated, the girl’s master reached behind himself to grab the girl and shove her forward, but smacked her cheek when he got a good look at her. “What are you wearing? Will you shame me before the entire city?”

Dinal said, “Her plain clothing pleases me.” She held out the coin. “Come here, girl, and take your payment.”

Expressionless, the girl took the money and dutifully delivered it into her master’s hand. A handprint had appeared on her cheek. “Bring her back by sunset,” the man warned, as the girl mounted behind Dinal.

When the girl pressed against Dinal’s back, the tension in her muscles belied the calm, even indifferent expression on her face. They rode down the cluttered alley. As they turned the corner, Dinal said, “He assumed I wanted a whore, and I let him believe what he liked. But you must understand that you are free now, and it is your choice whether or not to come with me. I intend to take you to the House of Lilterwess, where you belong. Will you come with me, of your own will?”

The girl said, “Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“Karis,” she said.

The girl directed Dinal safely to the main boulevard, where masked men and women now sauntered arrogantly down the rows of whorehouses, surveying the exotic beauties beckoning wearily from the steps. At the city gate, a dozen boys and girls now gathered, each more beseeching and desperate than the last. Dinal rode past them, as a bell tower counted the second hour of the afternoon, and a drunken troubadour balanced his way along the top of the wall, incoherently singing.

Then they passed through the gate, and Karis sighed, as though she had been holding her breath. Dinal never felt her turn to look back at the city, not even once.

Several days later, Harald G’deon vested Karis with the power of Shaftal, and died. It was the last night that the walls of the House of Lilterwess would remain standing.

In the twilight, Zanja spotted Karis coming toward them across the ragged plain, stumbling because her head was tilted back so she could watch the sky. Zanja stood up, unsteady from the lingering weakness of starvation. “I want to be alone with her for a while.”

“See if you can get her to sleep,” J’han suggested, offering a blanket. “She doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

Zanja walked across the treeless heath. Karis was a tattered shadow, with fraying hair and raveled shirt. Her hand caught Zanja by the shoulder as if starlight had blinded her, and she said in a voice as rough as a hoe’s edge, “Zanja, what am I going to do?”

Zanja said, “Lie down with me and I’ll tell you the stories of the stars.”

Karis lay down where she was standing, and starlight filled her eyes as water fills a cup. Zanja had to fit herself around the sharp stones and prickly plants that Karis had not heeded. The blanket that she drew over them smelled of smoke and mildew and the detritus of a long, hard journey; a journey far from over, perhaps never over.

Karis said, “Emil fought me for Mabin’s life. And even now I wonder if it was wisdom or cowardice that I didn’t simply kill her. I could have.” She sounded both amazed and horrified. “Accept the burden of responsibility, Emil says, or become what Mabin imagines I am.”

Zanja said, “Now you will become something else.”

“Something better, or something worse?”

They lay in silence. Zanja said, “It ispossible to exercise power well.”

“You think so? Did I exercise it well when I deceived you?”

“I suppose you thought I wasn’t strong enough to let you choose to go to certain death. I admire your courage now, of course, but in the moment of decision, I would have begged you not to take the risk.”

Karis said, “I never feared that you would hold me back. I did fear that if I made you part of my decision, you would choose to die with me if I died.”

They had been quiet long enough for the crickets around them to start to chirp, when Zanja finally said, “Karis, thank you for this year.”

“What? It’s been the most lonely, miserable, forsaken year…”

“But even the gods must be amazed by it.”

“Amazed?” Karis said in a choked voice.

Her shirt smelled like plain lye soap, with a lingering scent of old sweat and coal smoke. That smell was the only ordinary thing about her. Zanja got up on one elbow and stroked the springy tangle of Karis’s hair. It pushed back against her palm, and when she raised her hand, it went back to its wild shape. Karis took a shaky breath. Perhaps Zanja had frightened her, or perhaps the tenderness had sunk through senseless flesh to some deep place where Karis could feel it.

Zanja said, “Of course you are uncertain. That’s the way it is.”

“For everybody?”

“Do you think I know what I am doing? I see a universe of possibilities, and some of them are very unpleasant. Perhaps the people of Shaftal will turn against each other. Or perhaps they will destroy the Sainnites, trading one massacre for another. Perhaps the people will claim you as G’deon and you’ll be consumed by them until nothing is left. Perhaps our little tribe will come apart like a herd with too many stallions.”

Karis uttered a hoarse, ragged gasp of laughter.

“Perhaps desire will never be fulfilled. But to live is only worth the effort if you live in hope. And living in hope is a discipline, a practice that can be learned.”

“Is that why you insist on teaching it to me? I’ll never do it as well as you do.”

“But I do it so badly. Blundering through the thickets like an ox, tripping and falling into traps of despair, bleeding and raving and starving like the refugee I am …“

“How could anyone resist the attraction of such a life?” said Karis.

Side by side, they gazed up into the close crowded constellations. At last, Karis added, “Weren’t you going to tell me the stories of the stars?”

“That’s what I have been telling you.”

A long time they lay talking, a peculiar, fragmented, spiraling conversation that Zanja filled with pieces of stories which Karis kept interrupting with stories of her own, so that none of the tales were finished. The silences grew longer, and then silence took over the entire conversation. Zanja opened her eyes, and realized she had been dozing. Karis lay prostrate, wholly surrendered to sleep. Zanja rolled her onto her side without awakening her, and cleared away some of the stones from underneath them both, then folded herself against Karis’s back. Karis’s shirt had slipped down from her shoulder, and Zanja kissed the bare skin that pressed against her cheek.

She dreamed that the kiss had been like flint on steel, and Karis had ignited like tinder.

Zanja awoke at dawn, but Karis slept well into the morning, utterly collapsed in the greensward, with the ripening seedheads bobbing over her and the sun bringing out beads of sweat on her forehead. J’han checked on her and said simply, “Let’s leave her alone unless Mabin comes after us.” So they improvised a sunshade for her, and spent the morning in aimless repairs to their gear, sorting their baggage and sharpening their knives, like soldiers awaiting orders. After eating three servings of camp porridge, Zanja found she finally could walk steadily. Emil sewed up her breeches, where they had cut open the seam to splint her leg. Norina and J’han seemed engaged in extremely complex negotiations, which no one dared interrupt. Medric was suffused with restlessness until he calmed himself by reading out loud from a book of poetry J’han carried with him. Zanja had never before heard such poetry, in which the words worked like glyphs or like doors, doors upon doors upon doors.

In the middle of a poem, Karis came stumbling groggily over to the smoldering cookfire and half sat and half fell onto the stone chair that Emil vacated for her. Medric finished the poem and looked up from J’han’s book.

“I think I had a dream,” Karis said uncertainly. Had she never dreamed before? She rubbed her face with her hands. “Dreams are like poetry, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Medric said.

“Well, I’m no good at metaphors. I dreamed I was naked and so I started to put on my clothes, but then I looked down and realized that I was putting on my own skin. What does that mean?”

“Oh, my.” Medric closed the book and hastily put on his other spectacles.

Emil, squatting by the coals to pour water into a fresh teapot, set the pot of water down suddenly. “Karis, I’ve been thinking that perhaps the best gift we might give you is a season of solitude.”

Karis looked at him, and finally said in a voice gone blank with shock, “What?”

J’han had been examining her from across the cookfire. Now he said, “Certainly, it doesn’t look like you need me anymore, and Norina and I have already agreed to return to our daughter, to raise her together through winter, anyway. The spring is still an open question, of course, but the sooner we leave the better.”

Karis glanced at Norina, who neither spoke nor looked away. In fact, Zanja realized, Norina had yet to speak a word in Karis’s presence, which surely required an inhuman discipline on her part. “Of course you don’t know what to do in the spring,” Karis said, as though she had not realized before now exactly how much her friends’ decisions depended on hers. She accepted a steaming porringer from Zanja, along with the spoon from her belt, and obediently stuck the spoon into it.

Emil said, “Medric and I can go to my winter home, perhaps. It’s distant, but not so far that we couldn’t visit you if we needed to, or you us. Medric, what do you think? It’s a lonely and wild enough place. Will we get sick of each other?”

“We’d better not. You’re going to help me write my book–”

“I am?”

“–and there’s that library to build.”

“Hmm. Not this year, I don’t think.”

“That’s what I mean,” Medric said. “You are I are in it for some years at least. Karis–”

She looked at him, sullen as though she were the youth and he the elder telling her what to do. “Go back to Meartown,” Medric said.

“Why?”

“Because the most important journeys all begin at home.”

Karis opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Zanja said, “Then we all should come to Meartown. The tribe should stay together.”

They all looked at her in some surprise. Then Medric said, “Tribe? A community, maybe, after Mackapee.”

“No, a company,” said Emil.

And J’han said, “Or a family, perhaps.”

Norina put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from speaking. Perhaps she would have demanded that they found a new order.

“But not yet,” said Emil. “The last thing you need, Karis, is to be surrounded by people who are slavishly waiting for you to tell them what to do with their lives. You must answer your own questions first.”

Karis said mutinously, “So you’re all going to abandon me out here in the wilderness instead?”

Emil said, “Why, yes, I believe we are.”

Medric added irrelevantly, “Slavish? That’s a bit of a hyperbole, isn’t it?”

They argued amicably and finally settled on “obsequious.” Norina seemed to be trying to tear her hair out of her head. Karis glanced at her and said irritably, “What?”

“Eat your porridge,” Norina said.

Karis seemed flabbergasted. “The first words you’ve said to me in ten days–”

“Eat your blasted porridge,” Norina amended.

“You’ll be a rotten mother,” Karis muttered. She put a spoonful of porridge into her mouth.

There is a stillness that comes across the earth sometimes, at dawn, or just before a storm, a stillness as if the entire world lies stunned by possibility. So Karis became still, and so the agitated, half‑hilarious talk of her friends fell silent, and so the breeze itself seemed to take its breath. Karis looked at the bowl of porridge as though she had never seen food before.

“Porridge is pretty dull, as food goes,” Norina said.

“Dull?” Karis took another taste. “This is dull?”

Comprehension struck Zanja like a stinging slap in the face. “Dear gods,” she whispered.

“Oh, my,” said J’han.

But Medric grinned complacently and gave J’han his book, and Emil calmly poured out onto the ground the pot of tea he had just made, and packed his tea set away. Zanja caught a glimpse of how irritating fire bloods could be when they have realized a truth before anyone else. J’han got up and began fussing in his saddlebags, taking things out and putting them in again. Norina laced her fingers across her knees and in silence watched Karis eat another astounded spoonful of porridge. Of course, to a Truthken there is no such thing as privacy, but Zanja felt it proper to look away, if only to hide her own expression. She would have found something to do, like Medric and Emil, who were fretting now over how to distribute the weight of books and food between their two horses, but it just would have made her feel as foolish as they looked.

Karis scraped the porringer clean. Zanja took it from her and filled it up again with oats and dry fruit, and set it in the coals. Norina stood up without a word, and went to help with the packing. Karis wiped her face with the ragged tail of her shirt. “I think I’m hungry,” she said, as though there were nothing extraordinary about her hunger. Then she looked at the cloth of her shirt, and touched it to her face again. “What–”

Zanja felt the shirtcloth. “It’s soft, the way old shirts get.”

Karis alternately felt her face and the cloth. Then she looked at her callused, soot black hands. “I am alive,” she said. “It feels very odd.”

The flat heath spread out before Zanja, oddly out of kilter. When Zanja looked at Karis, she hardly could endure the sight, and had to look away again. The silence became awkward, and at last Karis said in a strained voice, “Well, I must ask you, since you haven’t volunteered. Where are you going to go?”

Zanja turned, startled, pained that Karis would even think of sending her away.

“Because I’m going with you,” Karis continued.

“I think I’ll go to Meartown.”

“Well.”

“Karis–”

“Be careful,” she said hoarsely. Her attention seemed intensely concentrated, as if she had been rescued from deep water and needed to breathe.

“With your permission,” Zanja said, very carefully, “I’d like to court you.”

Karis uttered a sharp laugh, but even her laughter had no peace in it. “And up until now, what have you been doing?”

“Well, if this whole year has been a courtship …” Zanja paused, and said, “Perhaps it has.”

“I don’t think the earth sent me out to rescue you on a whim.”

“It seemed whimsical enough at the time.”

Karis was smiling, her panic passed for now. But Zanja knew, quite clearly, how uncertain was the path on which she trod.

Zanja said, “I would like to make a suggestion. Take Norina into your good graces again.”

“Have you forgiven her?”

“I will, before I bid her goodbye. She makes amends the same way she goes into battle. Gods help the fool who gets in her way. If you forgive her, we all will be the safer for it.”

Karis uttered a snort of laughter and unfolded herself a bit. “Well, since you’ve gotten in her way before, you know what you’re talking about. Nori!”

Norina came over with J’han’s book of poetry and gave it to Zanja without a word. Without a word, Zanja stood up and gave Norina her seat, and pointed out to her the porridge cooking in the ashes.

Karis said to Norina, “You must be bored with penitence by now.”

“My boredom is only just beginning,” said Norina morosely. “But J’han is never bored. Why couldn’t he be the one with the breasts? That’s what I want to know.”

Zanja went for a desperately needed walk across the flat, rocky countryside. The yellowing grasses were weighed down by seedheads, which in places had been cropped neatly off by their wandering horses. She reached the clear rivulet that had served as their camp’s water source. When she looked back, Norina sat at Karis’s side, talking earnestly. Karis listened somberly, speaking little. It seemed like old times.

Zanja walked in a wide circle around the camp. The next time she looked at the cookfire, Norina had been replaced by J’han, who seemed to be systematically giving Karis most of the contents of his healer’s pack: a brown bottle of something to soothe her throat, herbs to build her strength, and a great deal of advice. But in the end he seemed to offer some kind of reassurance, and Karis must have said something amusing, because he burst out laughing.

The next time she looked, Emil and Medric sat on either side of Karis, and all three of them were roaring with laughter. The sound of it carried far across the plain. J’han and Norina were saddling their horses. Zanja started back toward the camp. By the time she reached the fire Karis was sitting alone, with packets and bottles piled at her feet like homage. Zanja took the small fortune that the people of Meartown had collected to fund her rescue of Karis, and divided it up among them. At least none of them would go hungry or cold this winter.

Zanja first said goodbye to Norina. “Karis should never have to choose between us,” she said.

“You’ll wish a thousand times that you had never said those words.”

“I already wish I hadn’t.”

“That’s once.”

Zanja said seriously, “If you have any advice, I would hear it.”

The sardonic side of Norina’s mouth lifted at the corner. “You’re the one who threw yourself into the middle of this avalanche. Are you trying to tell me now that you’re worried about where it’s taking you?”

“Not at all,” Zanja said. “And I’ll never forgive you for trying to murder me.”

Norina said, “In all my days of seeking the truth, I’ve never met a worse liar.”

When Medric embraced Zanja in farewell, he said, “Do you ever think about that other Sainnite seer’s vision? The one that predicted that the Ashawala’i would defeat the Sainnites?”

“I try not to,” Zanja said.

“That’s good,” Medric said. “I never would have told you about it had I known who you were. But if the fate of my people is in your hands–”

“Then that puts it in your hands, doesn’t it?”

Medric looked taken aback. “It does? Oh, it does.” She left him fumbling for a different pair of spectacles.

Emil’s hug was bracing. “You know where to find me,” he said.

*

Her arms were aching and empty as she stood beside Karis and watched the four of them ride away. Homely, laden with their food and bedrolls and a book each from Medric and Emil, nibbled a few sprigs of grass and then snorted impatiently at them.

Karis said, desolate, “How I’ll explain all this to the townspeople I have no idea.”

Zanja’s patience had never been so tried by travel. Karis slept insatiably, ate ravenously, and in what daylight remained dawdled on the path, infinitely distracted by a curiosity as global and undisciplined as any child’s. The barren heath was to Karis an extraordinarily complicated living puzzle that she could not resist figuring out. But the more she understood, the more there was to understand, and they would starve to death before Karis was satisfied. The rigors of the last month had melted Karis like a candle. It had taken only a sense of taste to make her devoted to food, and when Zanja pointed out their shrinking food supply, their pace picked up substantially.

Still, Karis touched everything, meditatively, absorbedly; and often smelled and tasted it as well. She wore herself out with sensation, and Zanja wore herself out with trying to explain to her the marketplace of physical experience that she had always taken for granted. Karis could not distinguish between hunger and thirst, between tiredness and sleepiness, between softness and smoothness; and teaching her the difference was not nearly so simple as one might think.

Late one afternoon, after several days of leisurely travel, they climbed steadily up the steep road to the Meartown gate, but long before they reached the gate, people had begun to come rushing out and down the road, one or two at first, and then dozens more as the word spread of Karis’s arrival. Faster than seemed possible, the entire town turned out to welcome her home. In the heart of a celebrating crowd, Zanja clung grimly to Homely’s reins and to Karis’s elbow, tempted sometimes to beat the people back so that Karis at least could breathe. Karis, however, seemed resigned to the attention, and patiently embraced the babies born since her disappearance, and shook the hands of forge‑jacks and forgemasters and hundreds of other muscular, smoke‑begrimed people who had not even taken the time to remove their scorched leather aprons.

They sat Zanja beside Karis in a place of honor in the town’s largest tavern, into which the townspeople packed, elbow‑to‑elbow, like beans standing in the pickling jar. The tavernkeepers did not have enough tankards to go around, and a dozen toasts had to be drunk, with the tankards being passed from hand to hand until everyone in the tavern had drunk at least a swallow to Karis’s health. All this took an inordinate amount of time, and at one point Karis glanced aside at Zanja’s face and said dryly, “You endure some trials more gracefully than others.”

“We should have crept to your house under cover of darkness.”

“Sooner or later they’d have discovered I was home. We might as well get this whole thing over with.”

She disappointed the folk of Mear later, though, when they demanded that she tell what had happened. “I was kidnapped by brigands, and Zanja found me and saved my life,” she said. “So I’ve learned the value of having a hero or two among my friends. Now are you going to hold me hostage to your good will much longer? Surely you have work to finish, and the day is nearly over.”

The townsfolk dispersed reluctantly, clearly unsatisfied with the two‑sentence tale, but sunset was drawing near and they all knew that Karis had to smoke or die. Karis gravely bid her well‑wishers farewell, and only Zanja knew what the glitter in her eye was all about. At sunset Karis often was overwhelmed by desire for smoke, and by a lingering fear that somehow her miracle of liberation would prove to be illusory. After sunset came the jubilation at seeing the stars, yet again. She had gone through the cycle enough times now that she seemed to be starting to trust the jubilation and to distrust the fear.

Now they stood alone in a surprisingly empty street rimmed by soot‑gray walls. Someone had taken Homely to the common stable; others had carried their gear away. Karis hesitated in the street, as though she had abruptly lost her sense of direction. After a while, Zanja sat down upon a stoop and tightened her bootstraps. When she looked up, Karis was gazing down at her with a curious expression. Zanja looked at her curiously in return.

“You’ve been very patient,” Karis said.

“Actually, the discipline of peaceful waiting is one I never learned to do with grace. Emil is a true master of patience. You should watch him sometime. The contrast will show you how deliberately and awkwardly and unnaturally I wait. We na’Tarweins are notoriously impatient.”

Karis seemed bemused. “But I don’t want you to wait on me, well or badly. Why don’t you just stop doing it?”

Zanja stood up and took hold of Karis by the shirtfront, and dragged her, startled, to the high stone stoop. With Zanja standing on the stoop, she could kiss Karis’s mouth without having to climb her like a tree. Though Karis seemed affrighted, she did not pull away. Instead, in a moment Zanja felt a shudder run through that long frame, and Karis’s fist clenched in the cloth of Zanja’s shirt. She seemed to want to crawl inside Zanja’s very skin. The shirt cloth started to tear. It was Zanja who took a step back, unnerved by the sensation that she had not so much chosen this moment as she had been delivered to it. Karis lost her balance and sat down upon the stoop as though her knees had given out on her. The breeze, cool with the coming evening, inserted a curious finger into the hole in Zanja’s shirt. She and Karis both were breathing as though they had just sprinted up a hill.

“Blessed day,” Karis gasped.

Zanja knelt at her feet and said with mock seriousness, “The Ashawala’i call that feeling ‘being struck by lightning.’ Shall I explain the sensation to you?”

Karis said shakily, “I understand enough.”

Zanja felt the entirety of Karis’s attention focus upon her. She thought of Karis exploring the landscape of her body the way she had been exploring the heath, and her heart began to wobble in her chest. “Would you rather I go back to being awkwardly and unnaturally patient?” she said.

“Could you?” Karis asked, then answered her own question. “No. And if you could, I’d be offended.”

Zanja grinned. “Well then, it’s completely impossible.”

Karis looked away. Her hands clenched each other like shy children before a stranger. “Zanja, it’s not you I’m afraid of. It’s my ghosts.”

“I have my ghosts too. So what?”

“So maybe lovemaking will be an embarrassing, disastrous farce.”

“We’ve survived so much worse than that already.”

Karis looked back at her, stricken.

Zanja said, “Karis, I can always find a way across. It’s my gift.” She gave her a hand, and helped her to her feet. They walked all the way to Lynton and Dominy’s house without saying another word, and without letting go of each other.

*

The delivery of their gear had prematurely announced their homecoming to Lynton and Dominy, and they arrived to find everything in chaos as the two men frantically tried to make Karis’s bed with fresh linens, cook a celebratory dinner, and heat the bathwater, all before sunset. Karis left Zanja to sort things out while she walked off by herself toward the green trees that clustered around a small pond. The sun was nearly down.