Tortall (6 page)

“Why would I lie about being a tree?” asked Qiom. “You must admit it is a silly lie.”

Fadal laughed and laughed. When water streamed from her eyes, she went alone into the trees. By the time she returned, it was too late to travel. They made camp instead. After supper, Qiom asked Fadal to tell him more of her religion. He wanted to get it all exactly right when he described it to Numair.

A man offered cloth shoes for Qiom and a cheese if they would do his farm’s work for a day as he cared for his sick wife. Fadal did chores inside the house; Qiom tended the animals. As Fadal set about killing and plucking a chicken, a process Qiom didn’t want to learn, he went to chop up rounds cut from a dead hornbeam tree for firewood. The chore didn’t bother him—the hornbeam would feel nothing that was done to it. Qiom envied it as he picked up the ax and began to chop.

He had only learned to use an ax recently. Soon his hands blistered. Qiom put the tool down and considered the heavy circles of wood. They were very dry; a split ran a third of the way across the topmost piece. Did he really need the ax?

He picked up the top circle of wood, set his fingers in the crack in its side, and tightened his muscles. It split in two. Qiom then broke each half over his knee. This was far easier than chopping, he thought as he worked his way through the pile.

He was nearly done when he heard steps in dirt. Fadal stopped nearby, silent. Was he doing something wrong? “It’s easier if the wood is quite dry,” he explained, facing her. “The ax hurts my hands. Am I forbidden to do it this way?”

There was an odd look in Fadal’s eyes. Qiom had to search his knowledge to find the right word for it:
awe
. “You’re very strong,” Fadal said at last. “No, you aren’t forbidden.” She went back to her work. Was it important that he was strong? Qiom wondered as he finished the wood.

The next day they walked on. The road, nearly empty for so long, filled with human traffic. It streamed through gates in a log wall. “It’s this town’s market day. Towns are risky,” Fadal explained as they approached the gates. “It’s easier to be private in the woods or on a farm. Still, towns have plenty of work, and people will pay in coin. Fall is coming, and you need a coat.”

On they trudged, part of the market-day throngs. Just outside the gates, Qiom saw a tall mound topped with strange wooden structures. Curious, he left the road to investigate. Fadal argued, saying they had to be inside before the gates closed for the night. Then, grumbling, she followed Qiom up the mound.

Qiom frowned. Why nail lengths of wood together to
hang four dead humans in the air? Buzzards, feasting on the dead, hissed at him, then left.

A board with marks on it stood halfway up the mound. “These were bandits, hanged yesterday,” Fadal said, reading the marks. “Murderers, too. I suppose they deserved hanging, but they look so sad.”

Qiom shook his head over the idea of dead men, hung like fruit on dead trees. “Twice a waste,” he told Fadal as they returned to the road. “A waste of living trees for the wood, and a waste of fertilizer.”

Fadal looked up at him. Her eyes were sad. “Lives are more than fertilizer, Qiom,” she said. “Sometimes I don’t think you even want to be human.”

“I don’t,” he replied.

They found work just inside the gates. In exchange for cleaning his stable top to bottom, an innkeeper fed them and let them sleep in his loft. Qiom woke before dawn the next day. Normally he would have roused Fadal, but not now. She had slept badly. Her nights were never as quiet as Qiom’s, who only dreamed his talks with Numair.

She always finds work, thought Qiom. Today I will find it and wake her when I do.

The town was stirring as he left the inn yard. Wagons lined up at the gates, waiting for them to open. Qiom drew a bucket of water from the well in the square between the gates and the temple, rinsing his face and cleaning his mouth. As he finger-combed straw from his hair, he looked around. He wouldn’t try the temple. Even if the priest had work,
Qiom disliked the places, with those huge fires at their hearts. Fadal had said marketplaces usually had more workers than they needed. Qiom would have to look farther from the gates.

A smith offered him coins to fetch baskets of charcoal from storage; the smith’s wife said they could spare another coin to have their garden weeded. Qiom was on his way to wake Fadal when he heard shouts. Two boys ran toward him, one bleeding from a cut eyebrow.

“We found a woman dressed as a man!” the injured boy told Qiom. “There was a fight; Jubrahal tore her shirt off, that’s how we knew. They’re taking her to the temple for correction.” He scampered down a side street, yelling, “Men of the town, come to the temple!”

Qiom frowned. A woman dressed as a man—Fadal said it was rare and forbidden. Who had been caught?

Fadal.

Qiom raced for the temple. Running, he passed the well. Fadal’s open pack sat there, unattended. Here was proof that their woman was Fadal, if he’d needed it. Fadal would never have left the pack here—it carried their money, their fishing hooks, their food, and their clothes. He stopped for a moment, breathless. The sight of that abandoned pack reminded him of the human dead, hung on dead trees.

“The temple is closed to ordinary matters!” a priest cried from the temple steps as men raced inside past him. “We must cleanse our town of this demon woman!” He entered the temple, closing the doors firmly.

Pain roared through Qiom like fire. They would throw stones at Fadal’s human flesh. They would break her kindness,
her patience, her stories, and her willingness to work hard.

Part of him cried: Fadal is no tree. You are no man. Escape! They will chop you down because you walk with her.

The heat in Qiom’s heart burned that part of him to ashes. He ran up to the closed temple doors and laid his hands on them. They were tall, carved oak. When he tried to open them, he found they were locked.

Hurry, he must hurry, before they hurt Fadal beyond repair. Qiom set his right hand on one door, his left on the other, and pushed up from his roots. The doors creaked. He pushed again, opening his mouth to let the fire out of his heart in a vast, wordless howl.

The doors exploded off their hinges, smashing the closest benches, knocking down two fistfuls of men and boys. Qiom strode in, still howling, and seized a bench in each hand.

Men charged him. He smacked them with his benches until they fell and did not rise. Once he had made sure none of them got up, Qiom looked around the chamber. A huge fire burned at its heart, its roar mingling with the moans of those he had knocked aside. There was no one left on this side of the chamber, no sign of his friend.

Qiom moved until he could look around the central fire. On its far side, opposite the door, men held on to the shirtless Fadal. Qiom would have to go close to the fire to get her.

For a moment his courage wavered. The fire would reach out to devour him.

His mind showed him a picture as Qiom hesitated. It
was a pear, on a piece of flat rock—a kind offering to a man all other humans had attacked and frightened.

Qiom stalked forward, circling the fire. Its heat pressed his skin as he walked up to Fadal’s captors. He knocked three of them into the wall, then flung the bench on top of them. He dropped his other bench, grabbed the orange-sashed priest, and tossed him into the wall. One man remained, clutching Fadal as he kept a knife to her throat. Fadal’s face was bruised; her shirt, breast band, and shoes were gone. Even her trousers were ripped.

“Cut Fadal and I will tear you to pieces.” Qiom hardly recognized the voice that growled from his throat.

The man was already white and trembling. He threw down his knife, shoved Fadal at Qiom, and ran.

Qiom slung his friend over his shoulder. It was time to go. He raced through the opening where the temple doors had been, into the square. Ahead lay the gates to the open road. Once away from the town—

The pack. Qiom swerved to seize Fadal’s pack from the lip of the well. Awkwardly he passed the bundle to Fadal. She tucked it between her chest and his back to cushion her jolting body.

Now Qiom opened his stride, his eyes on the town gates. A guard was trying to close them. More heat soared through Qiom’s heart. Stooping, he grabbed a rock as he ran; straightening, he threw it hard and fast. It missed the guard’s head by an inch. The man fled.

Qiom ran through the gates and down the road, past travelers and fields, into the shelter of the forest. Only when they neither saw nor heard more humans did he look for a
place to stop. He followed a game trail through dense brush for over a mile, until he found open space on the bank of a stream. Gently he lowered Fadal to the ground. He undid his sash, dipped it in the cold water, and carefully placed it against the worst bruises on her face.

Fadal said nothing as he cleaned blood and dirt away, but her eyes moved over his face. At last she stood and waded into the cold water, wincing. The center of the stream was deep enough that she could sit and be covered to her chin. She even ducked her head a number of times, her teeth chattering as she rinsed.

Qiom opened the pack. She had extra clothes. He shook them out: trousers, breechclout, kaftan, and another long band of linen for her breasts. She would need that until they were free of the fire god and his Oracle.

As she dressed, Qiom rolled up his trousers, removed his shoes, and put his feet in the stream. If she had nothing to say, he did. The night he’d learned Fadal’s secret, he’d told Numair about her. The mage had made an offer for them both, one that Qiom had not cared about before. The morning’s events had changed his mind about that.

“Numair says, if we go east to the sea and take a ship, we will come to his land. There many women are unveiled; they have respect and rights. He says, if we come, he will help us, because it is his fault I am a man.”

Fadal was shivering still, despite her dry clothes. She crouched beside Qiom. “I thought you only cared for other trees,” she commented, hoarse voiced.

“So did I,” Qiom said, looking at his rootless feet in the water. “But you are my friend. I care for you, Fadal.” He
sighed. “I suppose I am human now.” He pulled his feet from the stream and rose. “It is a long walk to the sea. We should go.”

Fadal stood and held out her hand. “I have only lied to you once,” she said quietly. “My name is Fadala, Elder Brother.” She grinned. “The next thing you know, you’ll learn to start fires.”

Qiom shuddered and began to pack their things.

It was late in the summer when my father brought me to the house of my aunt and uncle in the town of Hartunjur. I was relieved to be with them, because my aunt was my father’s older sister. The moment she heard his deep, racking cough, she summoned a healer and ordered my father to submit to his care. I had begged him to do so for weeks, but a daughter’s word did not have the weight of an older sister’s, even if that daughter did his reading to make up for his fading vision.

That evening, as the healer examined my father, the innkeeper next door gave two strangers permission to sleep in his loft. Helping my aunt and cousins to prepare our supper, I learned the young man, Fadal, was handsome, if beardless, and quite funny. His companion, Qiom, was very tall and dark, with an odd, slow way of speaking.

“As if,” said my aunt, “he had only recently learned to talk.”

I told this to my father as I brought his supper to him. Father shook his head. “Have you women nothing more to do than gossip about men?” he asked.

He looked weary and sad. I answered in the voice I had
perfected for his amusement, that of my grandmother, Omi Heza. “Why should we not, whippersnapper?” I asked, surprising a smile from him. “In the Book of the Distaff it says that a woman’s greatest weapon is her reason, and her greatest shield is her knowledge.…”

Father shook his head. “The temple priests are in the right of it after all, and the first error lies in teaching women to read,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “And your mother and I made our second error when we let you stay with my mother when you were young! If I did not look at you, I would swear she was alive again, and scolding me.”

I grinned at him. He did so like it when I made Omi Heza live again, even briefly.

That night I had the strangest dream. A voice that was two voices, a man’s and a woman’s, speaking as one, called to me. “Look. What lies before you?”

Before me stood veiled women, dressed in strict black from head to feet, some even covered in black to the roots of their fingers and toes. Their eyes watched me from the windows of their veils, brown, gray-green, blue-gray, all the colors of my people, set in every shade of brown and bronze skin, firmly young to dry with age.

“I see women and girls,” I replied at last. Somehow I knew the voice was that of the God in the Flame, the god who spoke to my own Oracle. “I see watchfulness and waiting. I see silence.”

“What else do you see?” asked the god’s intertwined voices.

“I see veils.”

“Then you do not see everything.”