LUDIC LOG

Morning, her first in the city. She had slept little, and alone (alone not from lack of choice; a dozen men asked her company in rude terms); the city, the attainment of her ambition, the huge sprawling possibility of it, demanded her attention. New still to urban ways, she was not ready to walk the streets at night, but the anticipation of what she would see when finally she awoke made restive her sleep. She had taken a room in a boardinghouse in the Lower City (further vexing her dreams was the knowledge that above her towered wealth, grandeur, a city hewn from stone and containing multitudes), and the shutter was loose and the door out of true. Cold leaked through from the windblown alley, and noise from the tavern next door, where a brawl had broken out around midnight; she had scampered out of bed and fumbled in the dark for her sword. She had peered out the shutter and seen city guardsmen swarming over the place like hogs on slop; she instinctively dropped the sword out of sight, although she knew that it was legal for women to be armed in the city. She watched the guards as they dragged drunken toughs away: something sordid and banal as this excited her. They were entirely different from the soldiers garrisoned near her village, who wore crisp uniforms of midnight blue, were clean and sharp-edged and as bright and straight as their swords and pikes. These, though, were brutes, in rough brown tunics and days of beard, helms instead of caps, and great iron clubs instead of swords, which they whirled as if threshing wheat. The soldiers had been barely more than boys, young and slim like her and always aching for war, for rampage and riot, for something to give them purpose. These guards were men, huge like her father, lumbering slabs of angry meat whose great arms moved slow as if in water. They carried out their duties with a resigned half-joy and smiled with the fear and pain they caused. They led off the brawling louts, gripping them by hair and throat and artfully twisted arms, wielding them like tools. She'd not been able to sleep at all after that.

Her dreams had flitted between vivid fantasies about what she would find in Kurtana's vastness on waking, and sinful sweating fantasies of men and boys for which she would pray for forgiveness, her pale hands laced together in a sword-grip, later that day. It was late morning before she rose to escape soldier and city dreams; she lay in bed a long time, flushed and guilty.

She remembered the boy, Rudan: he came from her village, and like her had dreams of escape, of glory, of newness. He was nervous and poorly spoken and without hopes of the priesthood, so from the time he was a child he played at war and prayed for a military career. They would meet in those awkward days, when he was free from his father (a tyrant farmer of berries, a man who could of an evening be heard under the moon shouting at either his fruits or his children to grow larger and bolder, hoping to put money in his purse by the pure force of volume; he was short and wide like an unearthed stone and when he wasn't shouting he spoke in a rustling river-silt voice composed almost entirely of obscenities, and he had impregnated his wife to death and used the resulting brood like pack mules to carry his deaf unworthy berries to the city) and she from her hers, at the river banks. Here was the sole private place of beaten nature in the town, the one place not conquered by planning and cultivation and bitter killing reason, with its insistence on making wildness useful, this insistence that turned wonder to ash.

Here were jutting shelves of white stone, spit out by the earth (Vedra, mother of the earth, was infinitely forgiving and had not yet denied man, who pummeled her grace into machinery, a bounty of useless beauty), on which they lay, kissing and talking over the coughing stutter of the chained river, made the slave of wooden wheels and calculating earthen dams. On these rock ledges, made for their bodies, undergrown by moss and chalky white under her rust-red hair, with trees (free trees, not the trees of the village governed by practicality and placed by geometry) and fast water and fat skittering insects, she fell to sin with the boy Rudan. In the crook of a huge complicit tree with two trunks, its branches as high as she could see spewing foliage like smoke blowing downward, she established a shrine of rebellion and impudence. Resting there, her bare back (pallid and cold like the flat tables of stone that leered over the river) cushioned and wetted by moss, her burning hair spilling over his skinny worried shoulders while he kissed her breasts, she gave herself to him and imagined she loved him, as if to lessen the sin. In that same crook, after, he would tell her stories of the great cities, of Karalûn and Kurtana, where he went to sell his father's disobedient fruit. She lay in his lap and gripped his buckskinned thigh, watched the movement of his lips as he talked. He told of how Kurtana was a city built into a mountain, of seeing beasts at the fair that spoke like men and juggled and spit lightning, of how in Karalûn there was a brown-skinned man with a shop that sold everything in the world. He told of rich men who took snuff from gold and velvet boxes and daring masked riders who robbed the rich men and disappeared into the empty air. He told of the Lord Mayor of Kurtana, who was a madman; he alternately appalled and frustrated the nobles and guilders but who was beloved by the people, and had been elected four times already. He told of wealth and fame, of a hundred languages and a thousand cultures, and of the great kingdom said to be beneath the very earth of Ronomo.

Each time he would return from the city, she would salve his young uncertain body ­ bruised from paternal whippings and scuffed from hard toil packing and hauling and selling berries ­ and beg him for more stories. He in turn begged for her love; more tales led to more sin and begat more desire in her heart to wander and in this way did she fall. He would say what he saw and tell what he heard, from floating cities in the sky to dragons that were real to the Forest of Thieves where every bad man dwelt. He was a bad storyteller and had no trust in his words; he forgot details, which irritated her, and lost his point constantly, which enraged her. But still he was all that she had of the cities, of the world that surrounded her village, of any future other than childbirth and adult death. She would kiss him more, and tell what she could tell: that she read this or that book (her mother taught her to read, over the fuddlement and vague worry of her father), how she was going to be an acrobat, how sometimes she hid in the thickets outside the garrison and watched the soldiers drill. Here he would become excited, because he wanted to be a soldier and be sent away and have adventures, and to see places without his dwarfish crushing father always pounding at him like hail. He wanted to conquer the floating city, to slay the dragon, to lay waste to the Forest of Thieves. She never dared to tell him the greatest of her secrets: that his dreams were her own, that she had stolen them,, like she stole a lantern, like she stole from the barn of a greasy wheezing oat farmer a padlock, which, dark-shaded by the branches of her sin-tree and lit by her stolen lantern, she had learned to pick. Most especially she did not tell him that here at this river's edge, here in this green and white and black place free from the brown and gray and white of home, she had ten years before found wedged between two jutting spiteful thumbs of cold white rock a sword, and that she had made that her totem.

When he went to join the army he cried to leave her, but she did not. When he returned, not three months later, his sad uncertain boy's face cracked by bitterness and his heart pummeled by orders and drills and shouting and beatings not very different than those of his beast of a father, returned by command to the town he tried so hard to escape: then she cried. But never did she tell him about the sword. She was six years old when she found it and knew it was destiny though she didn't know the word. It was then too heavy to lift; it was hard enough to pull it out of the stony grip where she found it. With the lack of purpose that marks childhood, when actions need no reasons, she wrapped it in a piece of oilcloth she stole from home and hid it again; she came to visit it when she could. There was no one to teach her, for the laws of the city are not those of the village. As the years passed it became lighter to her hands and easier to her touch, and her fear-filled spying in the garrison's brambles gave her a confused formalism in its use. It was (she realized later) not of local origin; it was short and broad and with pleasing curves, not like the long flat straight blades the soldiers bore. She was sure that she did not learn it right, but it was the learning that thrilled her, not its application. It was not for her an instrument of death but a means of escape. Even seeing and touching it she was free, as the only time she saw it and touched it was there by the river, lit by sun through thwarting trees instead of by harsh oily lamplight, favored with the smell of green things and moisture and black earth instead of burning wood and roasting meat and other people, and the danger was snakes, and being found out. That danger made her free, but not free enough. The riverside, with its white ledges of rock and creeping death and memories of sin, was soon only a retreat. It was one place, and one more place was not enough. She was like her beautiful broken boy Rudan: she had found a release but at the end it led her back home. She wanted to go where the river went, where her sword was forged, where her lock was made. She wanted to see the things she had hear in Rudan's awkward pointless stories, and to leave world of drudgery and motherhood and never-change behind. She knew she would be damned, but better spectacularly damned than saved by an empty lifetime. The river was apart, and she wanted away. The sword would be her deliverance; either it would be the key for unlocking the world away, or, if she could not succeed where Rudan had failed, it would be a good place to fall. And so she had learned, through sin: she learned of maps and roads and places and ways from the soldiers (who had their own desires, as she also learned).

She learned of tricks and traps and snares from her regimented and protected little town, for every place has something to teach, even if it teaches by expression of fear. She studied words and history and ideas from the meager books her mother showed her. All that she learned was forbidden or sinful or impractical but she learned it just the same, until inside her grew a world as vast, secret and invisible as the sky-vistas of the gods who spelled her sins. The boy Rudan was forever in her thoughts though he would not talk to her or look at her since coming home, for he was her first great sin and by sin would come her liberation.

On her seventeenth birthday she arose before her mother and father and younger brother but rather than feeding the hogs or gathering well-water she wrote a crude note (she could not write well, having no formal education) in which she claimed to have been spirited away by pirates, which later struck her as unrealistic but too late, too late to do anything about it by then. Walking on the highway out of the village, just as the sun was rising, gave her a strange sense of unreality: never had she been on this road so early, never heading in this direction, never going so far away. The sensation of doing things she had done before towards a new end was thrilling and held as much fascination for her as doing something she had never done before. She wore a pack she had taken (indeed, it was the book-sack of the boy Rudan, from his sadly hopeful schoolboy days, left behind with her, exchanged for a soldier's pack) and filled with dry food, with clothes, with odd knick-knacks she imagined (by a process of elaborate scenarios played out in her head, all coincidentally hinging a critical heroic swing on some item like a sewing kit, a lock-pick, a spade) would be useful to her on her journey. Her head was wrapped in a dull gray scarf and her sword, her totem, her precious liberating steel, was encircled with the ancient oily rag and held in both hands with a strangulating grip. Out of the village, past the farms, beyond the hidden stone refuge, and even past the garrison she walked, unimpeded, and shocked beyond reason that she was able thus to walk away. It seemed impossible that no one saw her, stopped her, that the ground itself did not open up and eat her, that the wind did not immediately blow her back home. Soon there was in her eyes no flat subdued farmland and no impatient mocking squeal of hungry pigs, but gorgeous miles of trees, clustered together and ominous, and so much unknown land that she nearly wept from fear, and joy.

Soon, though, mean reality began to dog at her with its implacable demands of body. She ran out of food and the weather turned cruel, with the nights punitively cold and the peace of long walking days worried by jabs of hunger and directionless wandering. She was lost and if she went too much longer without eating anything but the few berries and herbs she knew to be safe she would become weak and die, or worse, be found and sent home. But it was then, and by then she was seventeen and nine days old, she saw a party of riders, two women and a man, dragging behind them a sled weighted down with a fine buck. The women had bows (city women could hunt, too), and the man was the sort of curl-headed fop she had often seen in the officer corps at the village garrison. She had so far stayed off the road, picking her way laboriously through the hedges and the skirts of the forest (partly from practicality, for it was there she found food and shelter, but partly for its own sweet sake; she saw no drama to be had from walking in the footsteps of a thousand dull farmers and traders) but now she followed so as to remain close to these three. On the first night they camped down she was seized with a wild notion that she thought in hunger and confusion would be her doom: around her face she wrapped a black cloth and smeared it with wild designs of demonic excess, making her seem some sort of nightmare-thing. Once the hunters were settled she tossed in their campfire an eastern fire-crack she had bought from a soldier; their horses panicked and bolted, freed from their slain burden, and she leapt madly into their presence, screeching hysterically in a gibberish tongue she invented on the spot, waving and overfueled torch and swinging her fat sword like a moonstruck butcher. So bizarre was her behavior that she did not even threaten them to get their money: they dropped in front of them, like hot coals, their full purses, with hardly a prompting, as if real gold (and it was, too: a dozen pieces or more ­ her father all his life had never held a piece gold, nor had Rudan's father, with all his shouting at fruit, and now she had a pocket full of them) could buy off the devil. With a lunatic trill she sped away, fast as her nervous-sick colt legs could run, tearing off her improvised demon's mask and laughing like a baby as hell-red hair trailed behind her, rich and free like she was. Not one bit did she care for the money but she had had an adventure to be sure, a story she could tell, and there were more to come, she knew it then, she stood against the gods themselves, with their sin and kings, to commit a crime for the sake of fun. This was all she wanted in the world, the freedom and excitement blazing against the heavy night, against the green fire of her eyes.

She heard the three, far away now, calling out for help to the great woods of no one, screaming in gentrified terror at the loss of their purses, as if it had been their children, and she laughed like what she was, but did not seem: a 17-year-old girl who has been very naughty. This is what she would have until she died, she decided then, stumbling giddy in the night over blue-snake tree trunks, frowned on by Elspeth's disapproving moon: to get away with things, to find enjoyment in those places it is not supposed to lie, to sin and flaunt gods and their kings and not get caught.

Then, in those woods, on that day, a runaway and a thief and a breaker of maternal hearts and paternal plans, a criminal and a rebel and a sinner, she became also an adventurer and was going to stay that way forever. She ran and laughed and screamed to the noiseless trees almost until sunrise, and fell asleep on her feet, walking into the same western sunrise that had faced her through 17 years of boredom back home, but now she was free.

So now she looked through the impolite shutter at a bright and crowded dawn, at the great stone city lurking above her, blooming with possibility; she looked around at the shabby, lonely bed on which sat her pack, her few meager clothes, her pouch of stolen gold, and her beautiful savior sword. She let her robe fall to the floor and stood before the sun, pale and smooth and light and radiant with life to come. Above her towered the Upper City, all cold stone and wealth, capped by the great manse of the Lord Mayor. Around her the Lower City spread out like a rolling flood, filled with life and madness and pathways to everywhere, roads to everything. Below her feet, she knew, knew inside where she could feel only truth like love and faith and life, there was still another city, dead a thousand years and speaking with a real voice, begging her to come. She felt as if she stood upon the surface of the sun, hot as fire, and out of her body radiated pure light in a million rays, any one of which she could follow to wherever she wished. The whole world was lit by her. She pulled a peasant girl's blouse over her head and donned buckskins and buskins, hitched on her pack, and lifted her sword, touching it with a lover's touch. Out at the waiting world she looked, with the eye of an owner, not a worker. Everything belonged to her. She was bored already.