Jay Lake - Endurance

C OMING DOWN OUT of the hills with Chowdry, I decided to follow the route I’d taken while fleeing Choybalsan’s army at the beginning of the summer. This was a rough track, so I carried only my knives, some small essentials for cooking and sleep, and of course my belled silk with the needles, thread, and cache of bells. That line of work had been broken too often. I would not abandon it yet again. I did roll the cloth carefully so as to pad the bells that I did not jingle as I walked.

I stayed away from the Barley Road and the banks of the Greenbriar River, and instead traveled along the ridges following goat tracks, tracing the crumbling high road of former times where possible, and indulging in a fair amount of plain old bushwhacking. Following me, Chowdry was not so pleased.

“It was taking a long day to find your cottage from the city as it is,” he complained in Seliu as we rested in the shelter of a wisteria. The weather was sunny but sharp, somehow the worst of both summer and winter in one difficult walk. We shared our bower with a mass of late-season mosquitoes, but I was more interested in being out of the biting wind than in fleeing from the insects. Besides, they were more attracted to Chowdry than to me. He continued his litany: “Now we are walking several days for no reason.”

“You’re spoiled,” I announced with a grin, watching him slap at himself like one of the rough-trade Blade Mothers after a bad night in the rack. “When I met you, you were crewing the rankest little coaster ever to sail Selistani waters. You would have been glad of fresh squirrel over an open fire and a dry place to sleep.”

“I am not seeing fresh squirrel here,” he grumbled.

“You will. But first understand that I have my reasons. I am coming with you. Surely that will be enough, for now. As neither of us answers to the other, nothing else is possible.”

The look Chowdry gave me suggested that he had different theories on who answered to whom, but then he shook his poor humor off and smiled. “Then I am to be cooking the squirrel this evening, so long as you are to be killing it.”

“Perhaps,” I told him.

We made camp that night in a rotten-roofed barn that still sheltered one dry corner. I managed to bring in two squirrels, some windfall peaches, and a collection of herbs and green onions from a long-neglected garden near the foundations of the vanished farmhouse.

Once the supplies were in place, I pushed Chowdry aside and began to do the cooking myself. That was one of the few undiluted gifts of my childhood training. I was able to do far too little of it. What I made was not even stew, for we had no stock and no time to prepare it. Rather I heated a piece of old iron on our little fire, smeared it with squirrel fat and the juice of several onion stalks, then fried the squirrel meat together with the peaches, seasoned nicely enough in the Stone Coast fashion.

Even such primitive cookery was a pleasure. I was glad enough of the good food, and even more glad of the company. Otherwise this would have been the first night I had spent completely alone since arriving at Ilona’s cottage these months past.

As we cracked the bones in our teeth, I turned my thoughts to what lay ahead. “Tell me more of why Endurance wishes me back in Copper Downs.”

“You are already saying how the god has no words.” He toyed with a squirrel thigh, picking seared meat from the bone and flicking the bits into his mouth as he watched me for a reaction.

“Well, yes. A mute god seemed… safer.”

“I am not to be saying you are wrong. Still, this makes troubles.”

“You never meant to be a priest,” I offered.

That made him laugh. “I am never being a priest. I am servant to a god. Others dance in robes and light incense and make up new books of ancient ceremony. I do what Endurance asks of me.” He paused, his mirth falling away. “Demands of me.”

I allowed my voice to soften. “In what manner does the god compel you?” I had already enjoyed far too much experience of divine influence in my own life. Though I only suspected it then, more was all too definitely to follow.

“Dreams,” Chowdry said slowly. “Pictures. Thoughts without words. So I know that such a thing should be done, without it being said. This is not like Utavi ordering a sail to be reefed back aboard Chittachai. Or you, pushing me where I would never be going of my own.”

“Do you dream with Endurance in Seliu?”

He gave me an odd look. “There are no words, I am already telling you.”

Somehow this became very important to me. “But where are you in dreams? In a field under our hot sun?” My father’s paddies, where Endurance the ox had lived and died. “Or on the cold streets of Copper Downs?” This northern city was a strange place for any Selistani.

Almost helplessly, he replied, “I am with the god.”

Having stood far too close to Blackblood for the comfort of any sane person, and been called by the Lily Goddess, I could take his meaning. Gods happened in a place where the everyday world was an incidental detail. As if one could see and hear everything. Which, while possible for the divine, was very difficult for the merely human. As an ant might be confused to view the world as seen from a person’s eyes.

“I understand,” I told him, patting my silk, which awaited this evening’s sewing of the bell.

Gratitude flashed across Chowdry’s face. “So you see, I cannot be saying exactly what the god wishes of you. Only that the god wishes you to return to his domain.”

“Is he afraid?”

That provoked a thoughtful silence. Finally: “That I cannot say either.”

I let the matter drop then, and tucked into the last of my fried squirrel with peaches. I had eaten far worse.

Two days later we arrived at the place I’d had in mind on choosing this difficult path back to the city. The last of the inland hills petered out several miles from my goal. They terminated in a final upthrust knee of rock, soil, and trees from where I’d observed the condition of Copper Downs under occupation at the time I’d previously made this journey.

I wanted that hawk’s-eye view again, from the branches of the great oak spreading amid a stand of bayberries. Not to seek out the disposition of armies, for surely they had not gone that seriously wrong, but just to take the mood of the city. I would count the chimney smokes and look for evidence of either riot or festival. In Kalimpura, those two were nearly synonymous. These Stone Coast folk celebrated with a reserve that was almost depressing.

I had thought also to be able to number the masts in the harbor, which was perhaps the best indication of the health and welfare of any trading city. In that I was disappointed-memory did not supply the view, and in reality too much of the city intruded for me to accurately gauge the density of shipping. At least the day remained clear, instead of misty along the waterside as this season so often could provide. The scattered clusters of hutments and wayhouses at the outer edges seemed normal enough, but that told me little.

Chowdry sat and watched me watch as the sun trundled along the trackway of the sky. Finally, as I paused from my study to sip at my waterskin, he spoke.

“You hunt the city far more carefully than you hunt our dinner.”

“It is bigger game,” I said, meaning that for a joke. The humor rang flat in my own ears. Nothing in his eyes suggested that he took it any better.

“They fear you and love you.”

“Who?” This line of conversation was making me want to change the subject.

“The people. Of this city. Also, more Selistani live here now. They buy passage, or jump ship.”

“ What would possess any of our people to emigrate here?”