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.”