The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (27 page)
Read The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Online
Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson
“The death?” I whispered. “The godhead?”
“It’s never so simple as you humans like to pretend. But, certainly, yes, more than I think you’d planned to call. A word of advice, Ana. Pay more attention to detail.”
And then it was gone. No flashy exit, just vanished like a foam bubble atop a wave. I looked down at Tulo and Parech. They were staring up at me with wide eyes that caught the witchy light from the gathered spirits. But I could still feel power gathering around me, the bindings I could cast. Only now I needed a spirit I could hold.
“Wind,” I said, pointing to a bird with silver wings and a beak like a polished mandagah jewel. And from my finger I could see, like ink on paper, a line sprouting from it to yoke the hapless wind sprite around its dainty neck.
“We give you all this,” I said, “and in return you take us back aross the border into our own land, where you may see us, but we may not see you.”
It glared at me and made one frantic attempt to fly away. But the glowing line from my finger was getting fatter by the second and the sprite was caught. It squawked, as though strangled, and then settled on the mast to watch us balefully.
Halfway through the night, it started to devour the breadfruit. By the time the morning came, I could feel the power we’d generated like the air before a storm.
“Take us home,” I told the sprite.
The passage, this time, was frightening and rocky. The ship groaned as it was buffeted by winds from nowhere. The sea and sky dropped away, leaving the ship alone in an inky black. But I felt the binding hold, and knew we’d be safe. Soon enough, the real sun pressed against my eyelids and the real ocean lapped fiercely against the canoe. Above us, the sprite squawked and tore through the remainder of the binding.
“Good riddance,” I thought I heard it say, though my spirit sight was fading.
Parech scrambled to his knees and kissed my forehead. I looked at Tulo, an expectant grin on my face, but she was staring straight ahead, right past my shoulder. I said her name, tentatively. She looked at me, but her eyes roamed and I realized with a shock so sudden it made me choke.
I’d taken her home and made her blind again.
We reached Essel three weeks later, after plying a navigator from a lonesome atoll with all of the reed mats we had on the ship. He didn’t seem concerned about his return trip, and I certainly didn’t pressure him. I’d want to get off of that island myself, had I the misfortune of being born there.
We managed to save the barkcloth and the remainder of the breadfruit we didn’t eat. Parech was good at feeding us from the ocean. His Akane tribe, he said, had been coastal. It was easier to survive that way than fighting for prime river land in the interior. So he recognized when the waves changed in such a way that signaled a lagoon; he knew the best times for catching albacore and the best nights for tracking schools of humu. Sometimes he’d use a spear on a line, and sometimes he’d use last night’s fish to bait a hook. Our navigator didn’t speak much of the five languages at our command, but he understood the desire to eat. It didn’t take long before he and Parech learned to communicate quite well about islands where we might load up on fresh water and coconuts and screw pines. And when the two of them started going on about differences in fishing lures, Tulo and I politely took ourselves to the other end of the canoe.
She had not forgiven me for taking us back. Once, I tried clumsily to justify my decision, but she just stood up and walked away. She grew listless, spending long hours by herself, staring out at the sea. Sometimes Parech or I would join her. She was a little gentler with him; I could see from her face that she opened up more. By the time we reached the barrier reefs that are the first marker of Essel’s waters (though still far to the south of its main harbor) the three of us had gone nearly gray with the monotony and unrelieved tension. So I suggested that we sing together.
And with a fury made all the more frightening by its unflinching steadiness, she balled up her fist and punched me. I just stood there, shocked, while my mouth filled with blood and Parech belatedly took hold of her arms.
He led her away, though she didn’t struggle or seem inclined to any more violence. I looked after them and then spat over the edge. My jaw ached and my mouth felt bloody and torn, like someone had raked across it with an asp. I had never been punched before, but I imagined that it would swell. Our navigator was perched on the mast, drinking from a green coconut. He caught my eye briefly and grimaced.
“Crazy,” he said in heavily accented Maaram, pointing at Tulo. I pursed my lips, greatly inclined to agree with him. I understood her. I truly did. I’d seen her face when she realized she could see us, and I’d felt the constant strain of her blindness. The few days’ reprieve must have made her reality all the harder to bear.
Yes, I understood. But that didn’t mean I would silently bear her temperamental peevishness any longer. So I walked over to where she was sitting with Parech, holding his hand while her lips trembled. She looked up at my approach.
“I’m not pretending that this is as hard for us as it is for you,” I said. “I’m not pretending that your grief isn’t real. But Tulo—we’ve been walking on rockfish around you for the last two weeks. I don’t deserve it, and neither does Parech. Pull yourself together. Are you a princess of the Kawadiri or not?”
She stiffened, her back straight as a mast and her chin turned haughtily up. “What would you know of it? You’re just some wetland peasant.”
“And you were blinded by your own people and then cast out like a shard of broken pottery!”
We stared at each other, both a little shocked that I had said it.
“Aoi. . .” Parech whispered hoarsely.
I felt myself trembling. “We’re what we make of ourselves, Tulo,” I said. “No one knows what lies beyond the gate.”
“So you think I should forget what was done to me? Should I pretend that I can still see the scar on your right shoulder? Parech’s two-toned hair?”
Tears burned in my eyes. Two-toned hair. Parech’s roots had grown since he first bleached his hair with the juice of the salo fruit, and so the contrast between the black close to his scalp and the white-blond in the sun could well be called two-toned. I hadn’t even noticed until she said so. I had everything she desired, and what a waste I had made of it.
“We can’t undo your sacrifice.”
She reached out. I guided her hand to my face so she could feel my tears. “I know,” she said. “I know. I’m normally much better at this. Thank you for reminding me.” She disengaged her fingers from mine. “Would you both. . .I just need some time.”
Parech and I stared at each other for a moment and then silently withdrew as far as the small confines of the canoe would allow.
I took off my sandals and sat with my feet dangling in the clear blue water.
“You’ll look like fish to a shark from below,” he said in Kukichan, crossing his legs beneath him.
“Then you’ll just have to save me, brave Akane warrior.”
He yawned and leaned back on his elbows. “I was exiled, you know. They stripped me of my shells and cast me out without even a waterskin. I was meant to die. But you see, Ana, I’ve made a life out of cheating death.”
I had always wondered why he left. “What did you do to make them renounce you?”
“I killed the chief’s son. I challenged him and I won.”
“But then it was fair!”
He laughed and leaned back on his elbows. “No. There are no death-challenges among my Akane tribe. The shaman forbade them, on pain of exile. And so you find me fighting for the Maaram pigs half a world away.”
He seemed as easy and unconcerned as he always did, tipping his head back into the sunshine and sighing. I thought that he must have been at odds with his people for most of his life, even before they exiled him. He was too peculiar and unconcerned and stubborn to get along with many people. I splashed my feet in the water and smiled a secret smile. So of course he got along so well with us.
“Come on, Ana, aren’t you going to ask why I killed him?” Parech said.
“You just want to shock me with it. What do you think I’m going to do, Akane? Renounce you for your sins? I’ve always known you have souls on your conscience.”
“Ah yes, but this is the first soul. At least, apart from battle. I know you’re curious.”
I reached down and splashed him with some seawater. “Of course I’m curious. Please tell me, vile soldier, why would you kill some innocent boy and abandon your people for two vain and cruel girls?”
His eyes seemed deep with pleasure. He had dangled a lure and I had caught it: an ancient dance. “He raped my sister, and when the pregnancy showed, claimed she had seduced him. No one else would have her, so she became his concubine.”
“They didn’t punish her for what you did?”
His eyes grew distant, scanning the humps of atolls on the horizon. “No. Why else would I sacrifice so much, Ana? All of the boy’s widows had to be cared for by the chief until they died, and never forced to marry again.”
Instinctively, I leaned down and stroked back the thick mass of his bleached hair. “Well. We always knew you Akane were barbarians.”
This startled him into a laugh. For a moment, when our eyes met, I wondered if he too felt that delicate flowering of heat, that desperate tingling of the lips, but then we heard Tulo’s lithe footsteps walking across the boat.
“I thought we could sing,” she said, her smile tentative and genuine.
Parech leapt up and hugged her. I took her hand, my heart warring with a loss precisely equal to its gain.
Essel was everything I could have wished and nothing like I imagined. After we passed through the chain of garrisoned atolls scattered along its southwestern waters—forward guard against any of the predations from their Maaram enemies—it was a mere two day’s journey to the main harbor. The harbormaster demanded three hand-lengths of sennit braid just for one night’s docking privileges, which made me choke and which Parech paid without even bargaining. I realized that left to his own devices Parech would bankrupt us before the week was out, so I took it upon myself to inquire among the locals as to the best and cheapest place to moor a small trader’s canoe. The answer, I discovered, promised us a situation better than any of us had dared hope. Like Okika, Essel had its own farmland. Indeed, most of the rich soil south of the great sentinel of its volcano was nearly devoid of anyone but a few farmers. Certainly no one who would charge us for pushing our canoe onto the beach.
The area we finally selected was an idyll: a mile distant from a small farmers’ town but otherwise utterly still, and half wild. Tulo could see here as though there weren’t a city just a few miles inland, and the soil just past the dunes made every vegetable grow to the size of a baby. We used nearly all of Taak’s extortion payment for lumber from the dwindling red acacia forests on the eastern side of the island. In the meantime, we draped oil-infused barkcloth over tall stakes and lived like happy peasants. The land here didn’t seem to belong to anyone, and by Essel law, anyone living in a place for two years without someone else objecting had the right of ownership. When our resources started to run low despite our rationing, Parech had the idea to dig a deep pit and fill it with some of the fresh water used to irrigate a nearby farm.
“And what good to us is a mud pit?” I asked him.
Tulo grinned slyly. “You’re smarter than you let on, aren’t you, Parech? We’ll seed it with fish, Aoi. Fresh fish all year long, and we’ll always have money.”
Money was the curious form of payment the Essel chiefs had devised to help pay for their constant wars of conquest. Instead of something useful like food or mats or pottery or sennit braid, they had devised a series of stone chits that were supposed to represent value. They claimed that anyone could go to the hall in the center of the island and redeem this money for a certain length of sennit braid, but I had my private doubts. They seemed to be issuing the stone chits faster than even an army of fleet-fingered women could weave the tough cordage.
But we used the rest of the cord Taak had given us to buy the fish, and Parech spent days combing the city for advice on methods of raising them. In the meantime, Tulo and I busied ourselves drying bundles of grass and weaving them into tight mats for the floor of our tent and—eventually—the floor of our house. What extra we could make, we used for exchange. We spent most days busy and hungry and most nights exhausted and full. But we were happy.
As the cold grew bitter and thick and the wind from the ocean made the three of us huddle together like worms under a log, we decided to do all we could to finish at least one room of the house. Tulo reprised her role as street-corner spirit talker, this time for the purer purpose of relieving the gullible of their sennit braid and money. Parech used those funds and the promise of more to hire a few strong men to cut the logs and hoist them into place above the earth. They notched the logs so they would support each other, and we caulked the spaces between them with red clay. The roof we thatched with leaves and tall grasses soaked in resin over the wooden frame, and then lashed down with what sennit we could afford. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or perfectly made, but it was our own and we loved it immediately. We had plans to build one more room at least, but that would have to wait until our fortunes improved. The fish in the pond were slowly breeding. Soon, we might have enough to sell.
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