The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (9 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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Tulo, of course, couldn’t see the look he gave me as he said this. Parech could not be completely serious about his own death, and yet now he could pose as a spirit of implacable fury. Tears stung my own eyes. I hadn’t been alive, I wanted to say. But my parents had been. Had they taken part in this massacre?
“I didn’t know,” I said, but I could hardly hear my own voice.
“I’m sorry, Parech,” Tulo said, as his fingers traced her jaw. She tipped her head onto his palm.
“I’m sorry, too, Princess.”
 
We prepared to leave the forest. Parech recovered faster every day. We wove baskets from drying breadfruit tree bark to carry our supplies. We washed our worn clothing in the river, though I’d taken to leaving off my shirt in the Kawadiri manner. It was much too hot and wet in the forests at this time of year to behave like I was still on Kukicha. I was not used to eating meat, but Parech caught one of the pygmy boars that rooted around the undergrowth and roasted haunches of its flesh over the fire. The smell revolted me, but he assured me that we might have need of it in our trek. I thought, but kept to myself, that surely the fruit and fish would be plenty. Parech found a tree with green salo fruit, the juice so sour it could stop your tasting for a week, and went off to the river. When he came back, his wavy hair was close-shorn, and bleached the same shade of pale yellow favored by the upper castes in rural Maaram. And, indeed, when he cocked his head just so, and spoke with the right accent, the effect was fairly convincing.
“But what about your tattoos?” I asked. “Maaram yeomen aren’t covered like warriors.”
He laughed and stretched his arms high above his head, for he had somehow divined that I found this ensemble attractive. “And I doubt most Maaram yeomen have battle scars. People see what they want to see, Ana. Most aren’t as perceptive as you. Also, you’re a wetlander. A Maaram couldn’t tell a warrior mark from an ink stain. Don’t worry.”
“What are you two speaking of?” Tulo said, not bothering to look up from her weaving. I realized that I had spoken to him in Kukichan.
“Of his brilliant plan to play a Maaram farmer in the city,” I explained in Essela. “But what about us? I don’t speak Maaram very well.”
Tulo gave a wicked little smile and said, “Then we should
only
speak Maaram, Parech, so Aoi can practice.”
I stuck my tongue out at her—a petty pleasure, since she couldn’t see it. “Is that really necessary? Kukicha isn’t at war with anybody.”
But, oh no, there was Parech grinning like it was the fire festival, and I knew that Tulo had gotten her revenge. She probably thought that I spoke to Parech in Kukichan to share something with him that she couldn’t. She probably thought I was jealous of whatever was weaving between them, leaving me as the onlooker, and she was probably right. Tulo was far prettier than I, and far more compelling in her harsh, proud way. I had thought I was willing to concede the competition, but maybe not entirely.
“When we get to the city,” Parech said in Maaram, “I think Aoi should work as a road sweeper, don’t you?”
Tulo laughed. “Yes, and I’ll weave baskets you can sell in market.”
“I have no intention of sweeping anything,” I said in Essela.
“Hmm?” Parech said, touching my hand. “What’s that? You love the idea?”
I ground my teeth. “Want. . .don’t,” I said, forgetting the proper Maaram word order and making Tulo and Parech break into laughter.
After a moment I joined them. Parech grabbed me and we fell to the ground beside Tulo, giggling and dirtying our clothes again in the soil.
“We’re almost ready,” Tulo said. “Why don’t we just enjoy ourselves today? We can leave at dawn tomorrow.”
This seemed like a marvelous plan, even in hideous Maaram, and we all decided, as though we could read each other’s minds, to strip and race to the gully a few minutes upriver and swim.
Even Tulo jumped in from the ledge, though I saw Parech’s tension in the water below and the careful way he made sure she surfaced. In many ways, she could see far more than either Parech or I. But in everyday, practical ways she was as blind as any ancient soothsayer. I wasn’t only jealous when I saw them together. Or even mostly. The way my heart squeezed, I thought, sometimes, was just love.
We played in the water until the sun reddened and dipped below the trees. Then Parech went upriver and came back with two plump catfish so quickly I’d have thought he’d used a geas, if I wasn’t already familiar with his skill at fishing. We ate them under the waning rays of the sun, giggling, delighted by the salty-sweet taste, the languor in our muscles, and the drowsy beauty of the late-summer forest.
“I think,” said Tulo, her head on Parech’s chest and her hand splayed across my bare stomach, “that it is impossible for life to be any better.”
“Here?” Parech said, gesturing toward the forest like a Maaram lord would at his peasant’s hovel. But the laughter, as always, lurked just beneath his words. “Scavenging in the woods like buzzards?”
“No!” I said. “We’re like the gods in the legends, the ones that lived before the age of the spirits. This forest is our perpetual garden, filled with all the bounty we need to be happy.”
I said this in Essela, but they were too punch-drunk to chastise me for it.
“So what is it?” Tulo said. “Are we buzzards or gods?”
“Is there much difference, Princess?”
“There’s all the difference. It’s between the highest and the meanest. A peasant like you and a royal like myself.”
“Squint at it another way and it all comes back around again. The buzzard and the god, eating catfish together by a pool.”
“And what does that make me?” I said.
Parech rolled on his side to look at me more directly. “The great spirit, tempting us outside.”
I could not breathe. His nose was an inch from mine. What did that mean? That I tempted him? That I had power? How was the spirit bound with the gods in the garden? Didn’t it push them away? Banish them to another garden and await the coming of people? I wished I remembered the story more clearly.
Then Tulo smacked Parech playfully, and the moment ended. “Aoi luring us outside? You’re the one who insisted we go to Okika, Parech! Having second thoughts?”
Parech smiled his monkey smile, full of sly knowledge. “Oh no,” he said. “I predict good times for us in the Maaram city.”
We were silent for a while after that, watching the sunset burn into night, and no one was eager to take the necessary steps back to our tiny shelter. Besides, what need had we of it on this warm night? Tulo was right. I’d never been happier than I was here, with these unexpected people.
“What spirits are here, Tulo?” I asked, when it seemed the starlight was tricking me with glinting objects just outside of my field of vision.
“There’s a water sprite in the pool who looks like a million tiny fishes all in one. And two creatures of the earth lumbering past. They always look like animals or plants, or both at once. And a death sprite is watching you, Aoi. I can always tell those by the little keys they wear.”
I was too tired, too happy, for this fact to properly worry me. “Will I die tonight, then?”
“Oh no. They’re often around you. You and Parech are like torches in a swamp—you draw all the creatures closer. But I think the death finds you curious. They do something else when they’re going to take someone. Something with their keys, but I can never quite see it.”
I thought again to that glimpse I’d had of Tulo’s world when I had smoked the Maaram Ana’s herb. How strange to have to interact with this world when you could only see the other. And that reminded me of what Parech had said, of how the people Tulo so proudly defended had taken her sight and left her to die.
“Why did they blind you?” I whispered, though there was no one to hear but Parech, and he breathed as though asleep.
She moved closer to me, sliding her hand further across my belly. “For the warriors,” she said, her voice as low as mine. “We were losing too many battles, spilling too much of our blood. Our shaman—our Ana—thought to bind the spirits to make the warriors see farther, move faster. They needed a powerful sacrifice. So my father offered me.”
“When? Were you young?”
She shook her head. “My fourteenth year. I did. . .I was proud of my people, proud of our resistance. But I didn’t want to lose my sight. I wasn’t trading it for anything I’d get in return, you understand, like the shamans did in other tribes. I’d be sacrificing it in truth. And I was young and pretty and a princess, and now everything that made my life so perfect was making it. . .was ruining it. I thought about running, but they say that it matters if the sacrifice is willing. And I loved a boy who was fighting and didn’t want him to die because I was a coward. So the shaman let the spirits guide him and smacked me very hard in the back of my head. I fainted. And when I woke up I couldn’t see.”
I laced my fingers through her own and squeezed. She had grown resigned to the horror, I suppose, but for me it was fresh. And yet, even so, I found my curiosity seizing on another part of the story. “And did it work?” I asked. “Did the sacrifice of your eyes make your warriors see farther? Did they win?”
“Yes. For a while, it was everything we could have hoped for. We thought to rid them from our island for good. And then the power ran out, and the Maaram brought their Anas and their hundreds of sacrifices and made us regret our success in a thousand ways. The boy I loved died, and he had rejected me anyway for my eyes. I was a princess, but I was blind and touched by the spirits and they all avoided me—even my own father. And then. . .well, the Maaram were hitting us too hard. We had to move quickly. They left behind what they couldn’t carry and those too old to walk.”
“And you, too?”
I knew she said “yes,” but her voice was so quiet and dry I heard it as only a rustle in the dark. “The Maaram captured us very easily.”
“Then when did you get the spirit sight?”
“Paka’paka gave it to me, a year after the sacrifice. She was an old witch. In her own way, she knew more than our shaman did about spirits and sacrifice. She stole the ancient hand and told me the spirit inside was mine now, and could help me see.”
“But you can still see,” I said. “And Parech destroyed the hand.”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I couldn’t see, and now I can.”
“You were blinded in sacrifice,” Parech said, startling us both. How long had he been awake? “And then they gave you your ancestor’s sacrifice. The spirits can’t fully hide from you, and so you see what they see. There are shamans of my tribe who made the same bargain.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking aloud. “Once the witch gave you the old sacrifice, the spirits bound to the hand were bound to you. I saw something clinging to you when I healed Parech. Perhaps that’s what it was.”
“But how could you know that, Parech?” Tulo asked. “When you destroyed the hand, how could you know I would still see?”
Parech was silent for a moment. “I didn’t. But the Anas told me the hand was lighting a beacon for the enemy shamans. So I got rid of it. Lot of good it did us. . .turns out the beacon was
you
.”
“I should hate you forever for what you risked.”
“I’d never have done it if I’d known you.”
“Why is it better if I were a stranger? I’d still be just as blind.”
Parech shrugged and kissed her forehead. “I don’t know. That’s just how it works. I can’t afford to care for those I don’t know. Too many people in the world for that. Too much suffering. How else could I be a soldier?”
We thought about that for a while in surprisingly companionable silence. Frogs burped and night birds trilled and monkeys slapped sleepily at each other high in the branches. I nearly fell asleep listening to the cacophony of the forest and the quiet breathing of my companions.
“Princess,” Parech said quite softly. “You said this was the happiest you’ve ever been. Truly? Even when you had your sight, and your privilege?”
“I’ve never been grateful for what the shaman did to me. And I’m still not. But I am happy.”
 
Okika lay at the mouth of the great river, on the far southwestern side of this island. The main Maaram island was massive, even larger than Kukicha. Our forest idyll was not very far north, but it took us nearly two weeks of traveling on foot to reach the city. I had landed there nearly half a year before, determined that Maaram would offer me opportunities Kukicha couldn’t. I’d been disappointed, of course. I had no resources, no status, and as Parech would say, a slave didn’t become a master by changing owners.
My parents were rice farmers who died in a flash flood when I was ten. An old priest in a ramshackle water temple took me in. I loved him more than my own parents, for he had achieved a sort of tranquility they never had. He was a member of the fringe napulo sect, though at the time I didn’t understand the ways in which his observance of the spirits differed from the rest of the world’s. He prized knowledge, but he enshrined unknowing. Instead of tales of capricious gods and caring ancestors, he described a world where death was the ultimate end, a gate beyond which no knowing could return. Spirits and humans fed off each other, he taught me. A binding doesn’t just invoke power, he would say, it establishes a trust.

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