The Wall of Storms, page 23
Luan made no effort to defend himself as her barrage continued. After a while, she wrapped her arms around his neck and wept.
“Mimi-tika, my stubborn child.” Luan stroked her back and sighed. “Remember what I taught you about the Fluxists. The Flow is the inexorable current of the universe. To live life gracefully is to accept it, and find joy within each passing moment. Every journey must have a final stop, and every life must come to an end. We’re like dyrans in the vast sea, silver streaks passing each other in the watery depths, and we should cherish the time we have been given.”
“I refuse to live life with such passivity!”
“Accepting the Flow is not passive. It’s to understand that there is a balance in the universe, an ultimate accounting.” Zomi looked up and saw that Luan’s face was somber. “There’s a time for Kana’s fiery call to arms, and a time for Rapa’s gentle call to slumber. I am meant to die here today, but you’re not.”
“Why? Why do you think you are meant to die?”
“I once advised a king to commit an act of betrayal that I thought was the right thing to do, and I’ve never been able to forget the lives lost because of me. . . . I’ve been trying to atone for it since. The signs tell me today is my day.”
“If you’re such a believer in the Fluxists, maybe we’re meant to end our journeys together.”
“But you’re so young! This cannot be right.”
“How can you claim to know the ways of the Flow?”
Luan chuckled. “I have never claimed to be a very good Fluxist, and I see that I cannot match you in debate.” He hugged Zomi tighter, and the child hugged him back.
By now the roaring of the fire was so loud that it seemed as if they were in the middle of a typhoon. The thickening smoke and searing heat made everything around them appear shimmery and hazy, like a dream.
But Zomi did not share Luan’s serenity; she refused to believe that the Flow, whatever that was, meant that they had to die. Certainly her teacher could think of something to do. “The act of betrayal by the earl may be a sign that we are not meant to die at all.”
“Oh?” For a moment Luan’s eyes, reflecting the approaching fire, lit up. “But what can we do?”
“You are supposed to know that!”
“Since neither of us can climb up the cliffs, we must urge the villagers to leave as soon as possible.”
But the villagers refused to abandon either Elder Comi or Luan and Zomi, and it appeared that everyone was going to die together in the oncoming conflagration. The flames were so close now that only a thin band of forest lay between them and the clearing for the hamlet.
The villagers and Elder Comi all sat down in mipa rari in a semicircle around Luan and Zomi. “Tiro, tiro,” said the elder, a peaceful smile on his face. “Tiro, tiro,” the other villagers repeated, and reached out to link their arms into a wall of flesh.
Since Luan and Zomi were guests, the villagers were carrying out the ancient duty of hosts to shield them, even if their sacrifice would only slow down the flames for but a second.
Luan and Zomi bowed their heads. “All men are fellows before the bleak, endless sea and the fiery, explosive volcanoes,” Luan said, reciting an old Moralist adage.
Once more, Zomi looked for and found Curious Turtle in the sky. Because it was so overladen, the rate of ascent was extremely slow even though the stove was working at full power. It was barely fifty feet up in the air, and it was accelerating toward the flames.
“I guess even Lord Kiji, bringer of winds, is not very pleased with the cruel earl and his lackeys,” said Zomi. “He’s pushing them toward the fire. They’ll never get high enough in time to escape being roasted.”
Luan squinted and shook his head. “It’s possible that Lord Kiji is angry at him, but I’ve learned over the years to attribute as little as possible to the gods. I’ve come to rely on the precept laid down by Na Moji: Since the will of the gods cannot be ascertained, it’s always simpler—and more likely correct—to explain things by verifiable patterns.”
“Aren’t you the son of an augur? That . . . almost sounds like the words of an atheist!”
“The best way to honor the gods is to blame them for less. They may guide and teach, when it suits them, but I prefer to think of the universe as knowable. The balloon’s drift is easily explained. As the fire heats the air above, it grows active and light, rising to leave behind a vacuum, and the cold and heavy air outside the fire is drawn toward it.”
“Like the hot-air balloon when we inflate it? When the cold air rushes in to make the flame stand straight up?”
Luan nodded and smiled. “Exactly.” He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted at the receding balloon, “Drop your anchor! You’ll never get high enough in time. You can still escape by the cliff route!”
But the men in the balloon did not respond.
“Maybe they’re too far,” mused Luan. “Can you shout at them? Your voice is higher pitched, and may be easier to hear over the roar of the flames.”
Zomi shook her head. “I will not do anything to save them.”
“That’s not the moral—”
“I don’t care! I only care about people close to me.”
Luan sighed and pulled her close again as powerful gusts of hot wind whipped around them. He hugged her and said nothing more as they watched the balloon disappear in the thick smoke over the roaring fire.
Perhaps there were screams, but the balloon was too far for them to be sure.
Suddenly, Zomi struggled and pulled away. “Teacher! I think there is a way!”
While Luan and Zomi remained where they were, the villagers ran into their houses and emerged with jars of cooking oil, medicinal liquor, rags, sheets, small tables, cradle beds.
Instead of sacrificing themselves for their guests, it looked like they were ready to escape with whatever possessions they could carry. Elder Comi stood in the middle of the hamlet, gesticulating and calling out orders.
But instead of heading for the cliffs, the villagers smashed the wooden furniture apart and wrapped oil-soaked rags around the ends of the pieces of lumber. Then they divided themselves into two groups. One group lit the makeshift torches and carried on their backs bundles of firewood and more jars of oil; another grabbed shovels and hoes. Both groups then headed for the raging flames advancing on the hamlet.
The heat was like an invisible wall. A few stumbled, fell, got up again, and pushed on. Rags soaked with an infusion made from herbs intended to reduce fever were wrapped around their noses and mouths so that they could breathe in the suffocating smoke. A few daring ones had chewed herbs that could fool the mind into believing anything. There is no fire. There is no danger, they muttered to themselves, and pressed on.
The running villagers in their ragged clothes flapping in the wind resembled a swarm of moths headed for the flame.
By the time the rising heat made it impossible to move forward another inch, the villagers had reached the shrubs and saplings at the edge of the woods. The forest fire, like a caged monster, was about to smash through this flimsy screen and emerge into the clearing for the final carnage.
Séji shouted the order, and the villagers went to work. Those with shovels and hoes started to dig a shallow ditch, ripping away the grass, fallen leaves, and surface soil. They worked quickly and efficiently, and carved out a shallow defensive moat at the edge of the forest—but what could such a small ditch do against the rampaging flames that they faced? The fire would easily be able to leap across it and devour the hamlet.
The other group, meanwhile, had spread apart and dropped bundles of firewood in an arc on the farther side of the shallow moat. They emptied bottles of oil and liquor over the firewood, and then they set the bundles alight.
In the face of fire, they added more fire.
An observer might well wonder if the desperation of their situation had driven them into the belief that it was better to die in flames started by their own hands.
The villagers continued their work, extending both the ditch and the arc of flames at either end. They seemed intent on surrounding the village with it.
The new fires grew stronger, brighter, louder. Soon, they were as high as a man, and then two men, three men. The crimson tongues extended to lick at the trees at the edge of the forest.
Strangely, instead of leaning over to jump over the shallow, apparently useless ditch, the new wall of flames leaned toward the greater fire in the forest, like a child yearning for a hug from its mother. The wind grew even stronger, whipping the new flames into a frenzy.
The trees at the edge of the forest caught, and the flaming arc roared in joy as it rushed for the embrace of the much greater fire on the other side, consuming anything that stood in its way: undergrowth, fallen logs, living trees, thick layers of half-rotten leaves. Branches snapped, green leaves curled and burst into bright sparks, columns of smoke merged and thickened.
The villagers, their hair singed and throats parched, stumbled back into the clearing. The wall of flames they had nursed had carved out a much wider swath of land on which nothing combustible remained.
Fire, driven by the hungry winds generated by the forest fire, had deprived itself of fuel.
“A bold move,” said Luan, his voice full of admiration.
“All thanks to your teaching, of course,” said Zomi, inflecting her voice as though she were an old man. “Combining the preference for fire from Incentivism and the understanding of wind from Patternism, it required but the confidence and grace of secure Fluxism to implement a Moralist plan.”
Luan stared at her, mouth agape. “I’m not sure that this interpretation, um . . .”
Zomi’s face twitched, and she broke down into peals of laughter.
Luan shook his head and sighed. “You are clever, Mimi-tika, but I’m afraid you are a ball of wax too slippery for me to carve.”
Zomi grabbed him by the arm and tried to get her giggles under control. “You have to admit, that was a pretty good impression of you.”
“Not a good impression at all! Have I been playing the zither to a stubborn calf?”
“All right, all right. I apologize for mocking you,” said Zomi. “But to tell the truth, you did give me the inspiration.”
“Oh?”
Zomi pointed to the logogram Luan had carved on the ground with the carrying pole.
A river flowing. A volcano. Skin-of-fire.
“This is a single-logogram epigram from Ra Oji,” said Luan. “It speaks of serenity in the face of all-consuming death, of letting go into the Flow.”
Zomi shook her head. “That is not how I read it.” She pointed at the components one by one, and intoned, “A flowing current. A mountainlike wall. Fire-on-the-outside.”
“But that is not how—”
Zomi wouldn’t let him finish. “I don’t care how it’s supposed to be read. I reorchestrated the components of your logogram into a new idea-machine to accomplish a new purpose: Instead of giving up in the face of death and feeding myself reasons, I sought to preserve life through an agent of destruction.”
“You are truly a Pearl of Fire,” said Luan. He rummaged through the baskets that Séji and Képulu had left by their side and retrieved the bright-red zomi berries. “It was fate that led us to these berries today, and may your mind ever stay as sharp as their scent and your will as strong as their shell.”
As the teacher and the student sat stringing the berry-beads on a string to make a necklace, the villagers approached with bowls of refreshing, cool well water. In the distance, the forest fire was already weakening and burning itself out, powerless to intrude upon this peaceful haven.
For years, the teacher and the student wandered the Islands of Dara.
Sometimes they traveled by balloon, sometimes on horseback. They spent summer evenings drifting over the Zathin Gulf in a small fishing boat, counting and classifying the fish and seaweed they hauled out of the water. They spent winter mornings gliding through the snowbound forests of Rima on sleds pulled by teams of dogs and hiking up the mirror-hard glaciers of Mount Fithowéo. Once, they soared through the skies over the hidden valleys in the Wisoti Mountains on two stringless kites, though the huntsmen who happened to be glancing up thought they were watching two eagles circling overhead.
While they studied the wonders of the book of nature in their travels, Luan also took care to give Zomi a classical education whose breadth and depth even the famed academies of Haan could not match. Luan taught her the surviving fragments of the dialogues of Aruano the law giver; the epic tales of the heroes Iluthan and Séraca during the Diaspora Wars; the treatises of Kon Fiji and the commentaries by other Moralist masters; the witty epigrams and fables of Ra Oji and his Fluxist disciples; the principles and best practices of engineering as laid out by Na Moji and the accumulated elaborations thereon by Patternist thinkers; the political and legal essays of Gi Anji and the differing Incentivist developments under Tan Féüji and Lügo Crupo; the lyrical poetry of the great Classical Ano poets like Nakipo and Lurusén; and even selected excerpts from the Hundred Schools like Pé Gonji’s military strategies, Huzo Tuan’s biting criticism, and Mitahu Piati’s memoirs of life in Rima during the early years of the Tiro period.
Gradually, the movements of Zomi’s carving knife and writing brush became more confident, more expressive. “The art of calligraphy is for the mind like the art of dance is for the body,” as Luan reminded her again and again.
She learned to carve logograms with sharp, simple surfaces in monochromatic wax, like the ancient Ano who had first come to the Islands and left their tales in stone steles scattered in ruins; she learned to write in the florid style of the Amu poets, where every edge or arris was chamfered, every corner rounded and polished, and liberal use of color for shades of meaning and emphasis was an art in itself; she learned to compose in the abstract, lyrical style of the Cocru scribes, full of abbreviations and simplified logograms whose clean lines and rough surfaces evoked the sword dance of Cocru soldiers; she learned to draft in the unique plain brushstrokes of Xana engineers, who combined zyndari letters with barely sketched flat projections of Ano logograms to create a script that eschewed the emotive qualities of language in favor of the precision and elegance of numbers. She learned the one thousand and one semantic roots, the fifty-one groups of motive modifiers, and all the phonetic adapters, inflection glyphs, and tone elevation techniques that allowed a scholar to wield the knife and the brush to marshal the Ano logograms into complicated idea-machines for purposes of persuasion, explication, exploration, and artistic pleasure.
From time to time, the two visited towns and villages to obtain supplies and to rest. They never stayed long, as Luan preferred the solitude of the wilderness to the bustle and complications of modern life. But one evening, as they walked along the beach outside a small town in Haan after a long trip down the Miru River in a flat-bottomed boat to study the construction of water mills, Luan and Zomi stopped to admire an astonishing sight.
Thousands of baby turtles were emerging from their nests. The hatchlings struggled out of the sand, and after some time spent stumbling about and observing their surroundings, they awkwardly headed for the white surf, where the rhythmic pounding of the waves promised them a watery, vast world where their flippers would give them the freedom to move through it with grace and ease, instead of the difficult, halting steps they were forced to take on land.
Luan glanced at the pier in the distance and realized where he was. He remembered the crisp morning, so many years ago, when he had dived from that pier into the ice-cold sea to retrieve an old fisherman’s shoes like a baby turtle’s first tumble into the sea.
Perhaps this is a sign.
Luan turned to look at Zomi thoughtfully. She was now as tall as he was, no longer a child.
“This is where my teacher met me and also said good-bye,” he said.
“Was it a long time ago?” asked Zomi.
“It was,” said Luan, and for a moment he looked wistful. “There comes a time when every hatchling is ready for the sea, and every student is ready to say good-bye to her teacher.”
Zomi looked confused. “But I still have so much to learn!”
“As do I. Do you not feel the call of the world, though, Mimi-tika? There will always be more books to read, but I think you’re ready to perform your own deeds that will be written about one day.”
“What about you? If I leave you, who will make your tea in the evenings? Who will argue with you at lunch? Who will ask you—”
“I will be all right, child.” Luan laughed. “Besides, I have been thinking of starting another adventure. There are intriguing pieces of wreckage we have seen in our travels that suggest new worlds beyond the sea.”
“Like the pieces you showed me with the strange winged and antlered beasts carved into them? I told you my mother and I found them when I was younger, too.”
Luan nodded. “I’d like to ask the emperor for help to find those new worlds. There has always been a restlessness in my soul that cannot be denied.”
“Then let me come with you!”
“I am content to drift through the world in a balloon or on a barge, letting the Flow take me where it will. But I’m an old leatherback; you, on the other hand, are not yet ready to embrace life as a Fluxist. As the waves pound the sand, so does the empire call for men and women of talent. The Grand Examination will be next year, and you’re ready to make your mark. You must enlarge your spirit and take up your duty.”
He reached out and caressed the necklace around Zomi’s neck. The berries had long since dried out, and over time, contact with skin and clothes had polished the surfaces to a smooth, shiny sheen, though the bright red hue had not faded one whit. “We will set out for Dasu in the morning so that you can attend the Town Examination, the first step in a long journey to the sea of power.”
“Teacher, I must ask you for a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Is it all right if I never mention that I am your student until after the examination?”
