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 katrimshould die?”
“It is the way of the katrimto 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 katrimand 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 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 fistfight. 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 that 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.”