The hut was dim, but outside the heavy clouds allowed in a promise of sunshine. The people within breathed in and out, some snoring, others mumbling vaguely in their sleep. Zanja took out her glyph cards and whispered a question. “If I leave, will Karis and I be separated forever!”
She looked down at the card her fingers had picked. It was Unbinding‑and‑Binding, with its illustration of two people tied at either end of a rope looped around a rock, hanging helplessly from a cliff. For one to climb, the other must fall. Zanja put the card back into the deck. She felt very strange: empty–so empty she felt almost light–and giddy, though not with joy. She stood up and went out.
J’han was asleep with the others, but Lomito was waiting outside near her pile of gear to bid her farewell. J’han would remain with Karis while Lomito traveled west and Zanja east, to teach the Juras how to prevent the illness and how to care for those who were already sick, but above all to persuade them to avoid the gathering.
Lomito said, “Be at peace, Tarwein‑zan‑ja. There never was a sham‑reof the Ka clan that could be easily killed.”
“Thank you,” she said distantly. She felt like she was falling; Lomito was far away, and Karis was even farther. “Safe journey,” she said to him. She picked up her gear, and walked away.
From one crowded Juras camp to the next, as the rain gradually let up and the earth began to warm, Zanja traveled, told her story, saw the people institute J’han’s plan for killing fleas and preventing infection, and traveled on. It took fifteen days for the clouds to break apart and drift away. That day found Zanja alone as the vivid green plain unrolled before her feet like a bolt of green silk. Blue sky met green horizon, featureless and flat in all directions, and only Zanja’s own shadow could tell her which way she was going. She had spent much of her life alone, but never had she been without a tree or hill to inform her of her place on the world. Now, as she walked, her interior spaces remained empty as the plain and the sky: disconnected, all her ties illusory, all her hopes a vacancy. She became convinced that Karis was indeed dead, and wept as she walked, dazed by sorrow, dazzled by light, through a thick steam that began to rise as the sun warmed the wet sand.
The air even smelled of death: a faint, sweet stink that gradually became overpowering. She wiped her eyes and looked around herself, for she had gotten completely disoriented and might have been walking in aimless circles for all she knew. Ahead of her, a sturdy caravan rose out of the mist, still and derelict as a wrecked ship lying askew on the shore. A broken axle, Zanja thought, but her nose told her that something worse than a mere mischance had befallen this house on wheels.
When she drew close, she saw the remains of the dray horses, dead in their traces, half eaten by scavengers before the winter cold froze the remains. Now, fat flies blew up in a cloud as Zanja approached, and vultures fled in great, ungainly hops through the calf‑deep grass. The message of the dreadful scene was not too hard to read: the horses, trapped by the broken wheel, had died of starvation with grass just out of reach. But what of their driver?
The caravan door was tilted skyward, and the wood had swollen from the long rain. She levered the door open with her knife blade, and then fell back, gagging from the stink. She caught only a glimpse of what lay within: a man’s dead body, rotting in a tangle of ruined trade goods. Holding her nose, she kicked the door shut, and fled beyond range of the smell to collect herself. No wonder her very thoughts had been infused with the stink of death.
In the warmth of the afternoon, the steam began to burn away, and Zanja noticed that underfoot, beneath the shelter of the grass leaves, a second plant was thriving and had almost completely matted over the sand’s surface with its small, lobed leaves. Looking closer, she saw the tiny green buds swelling. In a few more days, the sand would be decorated with flowers. She spotted a small eruption in the sand, and there emerged a fat black bee the size of her thumb tip. He basked in the sunshine after his mead‑sipping winter underground, buzzing his wings occasionally, no doubt planning what he would do when the flowers came into bloom.
So Karis now sat, somewhere on this same empty plain, with the sunshine in her face, thinking how to restore her life after the ravages of illness and the hardships of that winter. Zanja sat back on her heels, beside the sleepy bee, and let her fear and sorrow go. She had chased Little‑Biting‑Dust across the plain, from one Juras camp to the next, and in each camp she had found fewer sick and greater surprise at her urgent message. Now, she had reached the end: a dead man, a peddler, with illness carried in his trade goods, and perhaps in stowaway rats as well. Here the plague’s journey had finally ended.
She slept for a while beside her buzzing companion until she was awakened by goats bleating in the distance. She followed the sound to the flock, which meandered its lazy way across the grassland, driven, or perhaps merely followed, by a loose cluster of heavily laden Juras. The giants lightly carried their children, their early kids, their furniture, and their very houses upon their backs. When they spotted Zanja’s approach, they stopped dead in their tracks, staring. One of them said, “Look: it is a very small person made of shadow.” Some rather ostentatiously loosed their clubs, which they generally used only to defend the goats from predators, but they relaxed quickly enough when Zanja gave proper greetings to the headwoman. She explained that they should give wide berth to the wrecked caravan in the distance, and eventually, when she had explained enough, they gave her some provisions, and loaned her a small ax, which she promised to return when she found them again at the gathering of the Juras.
With this ax she chopped apart the rolling mausoleum and used its wood for fuel with which to build a pyre. By noon the next day only black skeletons of wood and bone remained.
Zanja’s boots had fallen apart at the seams, and she arrived at the gathering of the Juras barefoot. She had let her long hair out of its braids to dry, and had never bothered to plait it up again. As she made her way among the gathered flocks of goats, where many a goat lay in labor or nursed her newborn kids, the old does kept a close and hostile eye on her. At the center of this tremendous goat gathering lay the camp, where several hundred goatskin tents stood like tan sails on a green sea. Here, the Juras people sat in the sun, and talked, and sang, and roasted fresh meat on open fires. For once, it was not goat, but buffalo, and it smelled delicious. Like the goats, the people turned in astonishment to watch Zanja pass.
When she returned her borrowed ax, the children of that household followed her through the camp, asking question after question and begging to be allowed to touch her hair. They trailed behind her like a pack of enthusiastic but clumsy puppies, until at the very heart of the camp they suddenly disappeared. She lifted her gaze at the sound of a familiar, hoarse croak. A lone raven had landed on the tip of a tent pole. “Raven, is Karis here?” she cried.
“Follow me,” said the raven.
He led her to a tight circle of tents, where she found a big Juras woman sitting among her cousins, with her hair cropped short and tied in tiny bunches all over her skull. Karis’s face had gotten more alien as well: pale and hollow, gaunt with illness. She listened attentively to an elderly woman as though she could understand her, while at her shoulder Lomito struggled out a framework of Shaftali words, with all the heart stripped out of them.
Zanja knelt behind Karis and asked quietly, “Is this your mother’s relative?”