Tinder Stricken (20 page)

“It's like a natural-grown stick of incense,
in a way.” After pouring their remaining water supply into a pot of
dry millet and lentils, Atarangi put the pot in the flames and sat,
staring daggers at its lack of boiling.

Then a voice rang from the trees — a
phoenix's accusing shrill.

“
Kin?”
Rooftop took flight toward it.
Esha had no lungta to translate with but he cried patterns that
meant
yellow
and
red
and
friend
, she could
tell that much.

The other bird had nothing so kind to say.
It sat hackled, rust-orange feathers standing like spines, eyes as
hot as hate. Esha knew those eyes — and as this bird scraped
accusations at Rooftop, Esha was sure this was her thief.

Rooftop shrank before her, but he protested
–
azure
and
mistake
and
night-time.

Atarangi was digging through the pockets
lining her cloak, chewing hurried. She put betel shavings in Esha's
hand — belated but appreciated — and went to the phoenixes with her
face turned skyward. “Acquaintance-kin, dawn yellow to you. Please
take our apologies.”

The thief whipped her stare onto Atarangi,
head tilting by a slightest degree.

“We three group-kin have black-withered
regret. All sun-white yesterday, we ascended without wings and
walked bamboo-green-striving. searched for phoenix-orange-lines and
saw beige here.?”

Emotions flickered in her three crests.
“You speak with truth hues.”

With a smile like catching flame, Atarangi
signed, “I can, yes. I speak with human kin and phoenix kin, to
help both live at peace.”

“
Phoenix-kin,”
Rooftop said,
“it
would aid you to take my humble-green request. Speak with my ally,
this human. She is my kin; we are one flock.”

The thief phoenix stretched to full height,
feathers bristling like an old brush.
“Humans are
not
my
kin: none contain the true-blaze-orange of phoenix-kind.”
She
placed her glare brief on Esha.
“And this human, the
stupid-minded one with a tall head — I will not rescind the trade
to her. You tall-monkeys are not welcome in my territory. Time is
flying away; don't white-vex me.”

Atarangi was speechless, mouth working.
“Please, kin—“

“
Leave this territory! I
brown-rumble-warning: I will set fire to it! Truth free
me!”

She exploded into the air on beating wings,
and was gone.

This was what Esha had always imagined, when
she thought of human diplomats offering reason to phoenixes. She
imagined spite as hot as stricken sparks, spat from a creature too
small-minded to see reason. It was a stale and familiar bitterness,
as Esha looked to Rooftop: he only creaked his unease, and shifted
his crests like a frown.

Heaving a sigh, Atarangi pushed herself off
the ground. “Set fire to this ground if necessary ... Graces
forbid.”

“Is she bluffing?” Much as Esha had learned
about phoenixes, they did still strike fires and let them burn:
Esha had seen smoke at field edges and run toward it, she had seen
elder fieldworkers with burn scars like bunched yarn on their
hands.

“Phoenixes don't just set their whole
territory alight, that would be sinking their own boat. When
territory lines shift or when a patch of earth isn't growing
productive plants anymore, phoenixes start controlled burns to
enrich their land with ashes. Or sometimes to intimidate a
predatory animal — rare times.” Head shaking, eyes distant,
Atarangi said, “This isn't just a failed deal. This would be like
if you offered me Gita's property token and I didn't like your
terms, so I set all of Yam Plateau afire.”

“I would be ... crazy?”

“
Desperate.
Our dealmaker isn't
telling us something. But,” and Atarangi glanced soft to Rooftop,
“we already know that.”

Still sitting in a low-towering pine tree,
still meek all over, Rooftop fidgeted.

“Regardless, our negotiation partner is
unsettled by our presence here. We need to move.”

“Right now? Can't we eat first?”

“A small and bitter seed can grow vast
roots. Help me pack, Esha.”

They moved half a kilometre to a stream
bank, a clear, rock-bottomed flow that sprang from the mountain's
face instead of from any skythread. They were placing stones for a
fire pot when a handful of labourers arrived with washing pails;
with no hesitation, Atarangi insisted on moving a third time, to
put a screen of trees and scalebushes between them and any prying
eyes.

By the time they got the millet and lentils
boiled enough to eat, the sun had climbed high and Esha was
considering grazing on gumgrass instead. She got her human meal but
here was no time to savour its taste. There was fuel to be
gathered, if Esha wanted to save any bamboo to sell.

There were few young bamboo stalks on this
plateau, however: Esha saw mostly old growth as thick around as her
leg. Excellent for burning, although she didn't look forward to
blistering her hands with so much chopping. Esha kept on — and she
hadn't walked more than twenty metres from the camp site before a
strange-shaped bulk in the treetop caught her eye.

“Atarangi, is that another phoenix
trove?”

“It is,” Atarangi confirmed, once she joined
Esha and stared upward. “We haven't entered another phoenix's
territory, have we, Rooftop?”

“
No, no. This trove has the same
knot-tying owner.”

“You can tell?” Esha asked.

“It's a clear distinction if you look at
enough knots, yes.”

Curious though she was, Esha didn't ask. She
only wondered how birds tied knots that could possibly be distinct,
and whether her own knots looked like they were tied by a
fieldwoman's hands.

“Strange to see two troves spread out like
this,” Atarangi went on. “A single wild bird doesn't typically
scatter their things so far. She
is
a flock of one, isn't
she?”

Arriving on foot beside her, Rooftop shrank,
his feathers tightening close even as his middle crest lifted
determined.
“Maybe I can quiet-blue share with my human kin.
Just one truth-ember.”

“Any direction you can give me, friend. I
know this is violating your rules.”

“
She ... My acquaintance-kin (
)—“

He made the circling neck gesture again,
some description that didn't match a phoenix's looks at all.

“—
needs to forage-gather and provide. She
is a flock of two.”

Odd phrasing even for Rooftop, Esha
wondered. But as she watched Atarangi's illuminating expression,
Esha soon understood.

Phoenixes, Atarangi went on to explain, laid
one egg at a time. Occasionally two, but nearly always one. When
the world was kind to them, the parent birds lived together in a
territory, taking turns minding the chick and minding the food
plants around them.

They didn't have nests. That was why
Janjuman workers never found phoenix nests in the fallows or in
their chopped bamboo. If Esha ever stumbled upon a phoenix nest, it
would be merely a parent bird posturing over a pile of sticks — to
distract from the flightless chick secreted somewhere nearby.

The chick didn't get a nest, Esha asked?
Phoenixes didn't give them homes?

What did they need built homes for, Atarangi
replied? They had the sky and the earth around them, layered
feathers for warmth and the love of their kin.

That still sounded like a lack of walls to
Esha, but she minded her tongue.

The trouble came, Atarangi went on, when the
parents grew too bold in their food-gathering. Sometimes, Atarangi
was called to fields for a troublemaking phoenix, and what she
found was a phoenix with eggs, or chicks, or wing-broken kin to
care for. Sometimes, the farm didn't call an animist but an
archer.

And that might well have left a lone phoenix
raising her chick, spitting spite at humans. This wasn't a known
fact but it was a possibility among all else. Maybe the thieving
dealmaker was an opportunist even in plentiful times — but they
needed to consider that this phoenix was primarily interested in
feeding her child. No one could be blamed for that.

“Weigh all this carefully, Esha,” Atarangi
said. She rubbed her face under the mask's edge, her voice
roughening with use. “All of these customs still don't fully
account for our dealmaker's behaviour. She's stealing from humans,
and storing troves within her territory, and burning hot at my
requests to talk. That's the behaviour of a phoenix straining to
feed five or six kin, not one.”

Toward the end, among all her uncertain
feelings, Esha noticed that Atarangi had explained everything.
Rooftop sat listening to the lesson on phoenix parenting customs:
he didn't say one confident word.

They adjusted their food-buying plans, while
following the orange flags and brick-paved road that led to
Millworks's market.

“I'll see about wild foods,” Atarangi said.
“You may use the pack. Would you indulge me and buy some rice,
Esha? We'll be beside a river until this negotiation is settled:
there's no need to gird yourself with millet lungta.”

“If it's on your coin, I'll eat
anything.”

“That's a fine attitude,” Atarangi beamed,
counting rupees out of her purse.

The rice merchant was easy to find here, his
wares mounded gleaming in the light of brass lanterns. At the sight
of his square, Ghyeer-blooded jawline, Esha took a sliver of betel
from a guard-watched hospitality table. Then, with lungta-wrapped
Grewian, asked the rice merchant if he would trade for fuel.

“For a traveller, I will,” he replied in
Grewian, warped by his accent but intelligible. “Whole rice or
polished?”

Whole
nearly came from Esha's lips on
force of habit. The rare time she indulged in rice, she wanted
every mote of bran left on it, the better to keep her stomach fill.
But she caught herself: rice hull was more useful to a field worker
than to a noble. Atarangi likely wanted a whole meal of
tongue-loosening polished rice — and gods only knew which one a
phoenix preferred.

Esha decided, “Half of each, please.”

The merchant scaled rice, and bagged it in
kilogram portions.

Past the liquid rattling of pouring grain,
Esha heard a female voice intoning earthquake — from the incense
stall nearby, stood out from them.

“It's only that,” she went on, “if I can't
make an offering tonight...”

“I have no more juniper,” the merchant
blurted. “My apologies.”

“None at all?”

“I can't keep juniper on my table. All these
earthquakes ...” A rueful pause. “Arbiters say the earthreaders are
working on a new timetable formula whatsit.”

“The priests told us to burn juniper and
pray. I'll keep to that. Do any of the other merchants have juniper
— even one branch?”

While unloading bamboo sticks for the rice
merchant to claim, Esha recalled seeing juniper near the river's
shore, its steel-green branches hiding in the lee of a rock
outcropping. She gave silent thanks to the stranger for such a
suggestion: invoking the gods might do her good.

She didn't have her clay-brick prayer stand
and there was no sense making one for a single use, so Esha
arranged river stones into a flat-topped pile. She tucked a sprig
of juniper into the top, and wound bamboo leaves and gumgrass into
a doll. It wasn't like Esha's home — with high-borne winds overhead
and Rooftop beside her, staring fascinated — but the motions still
soothed.

“
The juniper stick and the
toy-green-person,”
he asked,
“these are needed? Gifts for
your
gh-odds
?”

“The juniper is a gift. The doll ... That's,
ah. Just my addition.”

“My kin,” Atarangi said mild, “don't bother
her. This is a human's truth.”

As though truth was a solid thing they had
carried back from the market. Rooftop gestured silent apologies; he
kept watching as Esha brought a burning bamboo twig to light the
juniper, and knelt, and sang the hymn of invitation.

Gods to be present here, she asked with her
heart and her voice. Grant her forgiveness for everything, and
safeguard the people of the mountain from the earth's violent
forces. It was a lot to ask — but while she sang this melody, Esha
mustered some faith.

When it was done, she stayed where she was,
kneeling with eyes closed and her breathing flowing steady as a
wheel on glass. Peace felt good.

“Esha. Esha!”

She shot a questioning look to Atarangi —
who pointed, face urgent.

“Your dealmaker is here.”

In the thin-growing saplings some fifty
metres away, Rooftop stood with the drabber-coloured thief phoenix,
speaking to her with croaking sounds and undulating crests.
Song,
Esha recognized among his rhythmic throat-words. They
were talking about Esha's song.

Atarangi hurried to her side and held out a
containing fist; Esha took stumbling moments to understand and then
held out her hand for the contents, a dense round of fibrous
green.

“It's huang qi. Chew quickly,” Atarangi
said.

Obediently, Esha bit into the cake — and
winced at the bitterness Atarangi was entirely right about. It had
a green flavour sharp as sewing needles, and Esha wondered about it
while watching Atarangi walk measured away from her.

She stared through him, and started sideways
as Atarangi approached, wings poised half-open like she might need
to flee.

“Dawn yellow,” Atarangi said, with lush
lungta like rain pattering on leaves. “I am grateful you came to
speak with me.”

“
I have no words for you,”
snapped
the thief.

“Mm,” Atarangi said mild. Kneeling, her
cloak overtaking her shape, she laid something on the ground.

“I give you a peace-orange-gift: kudzu-plant
that a human violet-grey-took from your territory. I give it back
to you.”