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–”