Free Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks Page A

dozed, and awakened to find that her strength had gathered and concentrated around the center of that warmth in her belly. No, she would not step across the threshold just yet.
    “Are you still there?” she asked.
    “Yes,” said the god. The moon had crossed her small window. Pressed against the darkness, the god still perched at her head, not a handspan away, invisible.
    She said, “You say I am still bound. Perhaps you mean that I am bound to die in honor, as I am a katrim .”
    Death said, “What do you think should be done so that you could die as a katrim should die?”
    “It is the way of the katrim to die in joy.” She had spoken the words of an old lesson, a child’s lesson, easy to recite when Zanja first stood up in the presence of her clan elders and named herself a katrim and proudly said that the owl god Salos’a had chosen her to travel between the worlds. But to recite this lesson now seemed a bitter joke, though Lord Death did not laugh.
    “How might you die in joy?” asked Death.
    “You mock me with impossibilities.”
    “I do not mean to mock you.” Lord Death is a teacher, but the best teacher is the one who waits in silence. She heard the crisp sound of him unhurriedly preening his flight feathers, as though he intended to wait a thousand nights if necessary for Zanja to offer an answer to her own question.
    She did not want to wait so long. She tried to remember what once had brought joy to her life, but the massacre of her people lay between her present and her past like an uncrossable divide. So she said, “Perhaps a joyful death comes from being able to understand one’s life as part of a purpose or pattern. But that is the one thing I cannot do.”
    “Why not?” asked Death, as though he did not know.
    “Because my memory is broken to pieces, and some of the pieces are lost, and the rest don’t fit together any more.”
    “Then you must recover what you have lost, and remember who you are.”
    “Who I was.” Zanja’s bitterness brought forth weak tears, but surely there was no shame in weeping before a god.
    When it is time for a someone to die, the people of the dying one’s clan gather around and tell the stories of her life, so that when she crosses the threshold she will still remember, and be able to tell that history to the people on the other side. But Zanja was the last of her people and so she had to tell those stories of her life to herself. This must be what the god wanted of her.
    “Where shall I start?” she asked.
    “Start where it begins,” said Death.
    So she began with her earliest memories of the clattering looms and the light drifting in to make the patterns shine as they were slowly revealed on the weaver’s loom. She explained that her mother had been a weaver, and had been sorely disappointed when her daughter left the weaver’s house as soon as she could walk on her own two feet, to return only by force. She told about the first time she realized the elders were watching her, the first time she understood that she was not like other children, the first time she and Ransel became friends in the midst of a desperate fist fight. As the night cracked with cold and her heart failed in her chest and her flesh moldered in the straw, she told Death all she knew: all that once had mattered, all that shaped her and now left her, like trash tossed into a midden heap to be eaten by worms.
    When Karis awoke in the winter woods, it was still dark, and the stars were falling. They briefly flared and then were quenched, their spectacular suicides watched, surely, by none but her, for even the poorest people of the earth would have found some kind of shelter from this bitter night. Stiff hair prickled against her face. For warmth, she had curled against the belly of a shaggy gray plow horse. When she lay down to sleep, she apparently had not concerned herself with the danger that she might be smothered by her gigantic bedfellow. Stupidity, or daring, or innocence,