He nodded. “We have accomplished little this season, and lost much.” He considered again what she had said. “And soon a year will have passed since your tribe was destroyed.”
Emil followed the direction of her gaze. She was staring into the few flames that flickered red in the hot ashes of the cookfire.
He was tempted suddenly to douse them. Much had burned lately in South Hilclass="underline" farmsteads, the garrison, and too many funeral pyres. When Emil thought about it too long he too would despair, as though he saw the whole of South Hill and even all of Shaftal in ashes.
When he looked up, Zanja was holding out the teacup. He took it from her and absently packed it away.
“Emil, with your permission I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow.”
He felt an overwhelming envy. “Of course. For what, may I ask?”
“I’m trapped m the past and must cross over into the future. The gods demand it of me.”
Emil rubbed his face, feeling harassed again. So quickly did his peace fray away lately. “When you know how to get there, take me across with you,” he said.
She looked bleakly amused, as though he had asked, like a naive child, for something no one in their right mind would want. She took her leave without replying.
Zanja arrived early at the grove, and hid herself in the bushes to wait. Medric also arrived early, carrying a basket in one hand and a book under his arm. He looked like a Sainnite today, in leather riding breeches and a shirt of bleached linen, though he wore no cuirass and carried no weapons that Zanja could see. His hair lay loose upon his shoulders and kept falling into his eyes as he studied the book in his lap. Before he started to read, he exchanged his spectacles for a second pair that he kept in a pouch around his neck. When Zanja at last decided to come out of hiding and approach him, he peered at her over the top of his lenses. “Zanja, is that you?” Considering that he was a seer, he could not see very well.
She squatted beside him, and he gave a start when she felt the front of his shirt, but he did not pull away from her. His boots concealed no blade; even the basket contained only food. Zanja said, “How were you going to cut the cheese without a knife?”
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 night’s 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 thisworld,” 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 areyoung 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 for–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 Carolms, 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.