Tinder Stricken (27 page)

She left like a duty dragged her, with
Rooftop flapping regretful after her. Their little negotiating
party was nearing a breakthrough: they only needed to put words to
it.

Chapter 17

Esha stayed by the fire, alone with the
dusty wind and the pond's dank scent. She wouldn't have minded
walking for bamboo shoots — and wouldn't have minded calming
Atarangi, either. Unfortunately, her ankles and knees were as
useless as ropes made of porridge, so Esha sat, staring at them.
They felt more misshapen every day. More like she had no business
putting weight on them — like she had forgotten how to balance on
foot and ankle joints. Animal traits took hold of humans in patches
and spurts — but still, Esha had always hoped that a nimble
cliffside animal wouldn't rob her of mobility in her last human
days.

Since no one was around to witness it, Esha
removed her sandal, unlaced her sock and peeled free her misshapen
foot. The fleshy pads of her heels were shrinking away, refusing to
take weight; her blackening toenails capped her entire toetips now,
like she had dipped them straight downward into tar. Shoes were
soon going to be more challenge than help. In a more fortunate
life, Esha would be showing her feet to a nurse. Maybe getting them
washed, to perfume the sweat stink out of the fur.

But this wasn't such a life, and Esha looked
around in a thorough circle so she wouldn't offend some imperial
guard division with her hoof-foot abomination. She saw no red
uniforms. Just a fluttering in a pine tree's crown, which she
watched until Clamshell's tawny head peered out.

Esha touched her palms together, a sloppy
namaste that she didn't expect returned. “Hail, kin.”

“
Morning Sky — she
chartreuse-gave-up?”

“No,” Esha said. “She's just walking a
little. Clearing her head, then she'll try again to speak with the
serpents. Am I enough company?”

Clamshell fluttered to the ground beside
Esha; that seemed to be her answer.

“We're trying to speak with them, but it's
impossible to know their answers. Everything they tell Ata— Morning
Sky is a blue-spilled mess.”

Esha was so busy wondering if
blue-spilled
was right, she was caught unbalanced when
Clamshell snapped.

“
You-humans speak bluer messes!
Half-plum-shows and taupe-knotting changes! Phoenix words are
simple. Move one crest, two crests or all crests to show our
feeling, and use one orange-breed of sounds for all-things outside
ourselves. It is divided into simple territories. Humans have of
sounds, and faces that melt like snow into too many shapes. They
won't speak to other humans because of small-signs of colour or
place. They claim to honour sky's-blue, but they kill feather-kin
whenever they can. Humans should not call other creatures
confusing.”

Humans made
sense,
Esha wanted to
snap. But that was an echo, a futile shout from her past. She knew,
with a shocked and pained heart, that Clamshell was right.

She hummed a yielding note. “We have no
right to accuse. If humans are going to give everyone a fair
portion, we'll need more humans like Atarangi.”

Clamshell resettled her wings, satisfied but
still simmering.

“Where's your chick?”

“
He is hiding. Golden-tucked,
secret-safe.”
Clamshell strutted closer, to crane her neck at
Esha's exposed foot.
“Human feet, do they always have
cream-yellow-drifting hair?”

“No.”

She studied Esha's foot more intently. If
Clamshell got it into her head to tweak the goat hair, Esha
promised herself she would tweak some bristly nostril-feathers in
return.

“Tell me,” Esha asked, while she was feeling
honest and feeling new to the world, “do phoenixes change when you
grow old? Do you ... turn into something else?”

“
We grey-flame-drift. We join the
sky.”

Grey-flame-drifting made a hazy kind of
sense. Esha asked anyway, “What does that look like?”

“
I have not seen it, but I have heard
golden-truth-stories.”
Turning her eyes upward, watching that
very sky, Clamshell said,
“Phoenix-kin, after long lives,
fire-change into ashes. First our stringfeather-tips, then
slow-ember-burning. In the end, no phoenix. Only flying.”

That sounded like a beautiful way to pass,
was Esha's first horrified thought. Simply flying away mote by
mote, like turning back into heaven's lungta. She didn't say so;
she didn't trust her tongue to say anything.

“I'm glad to know that.” Now she wanted a
walk more than ever, to cover distance if she had to crawl to do
it. Esha put her sock and sandal back on, and waveringly rose. “I'd
like to go walking now, too. Will you tell Morning Sky and Rooftop,
if you see them?”

Clamshell bobbed, and strutted away. By the
time Esha gathered the wheeled pack and her walking pole, and left,
Clamshell was picking through pine needles and thornbush saplings,
as thought humans had never bothered her at all.

Esha didn't delude herself: she wasn't going
to make it far. But she leaned on the pole, and sank to sit on the
wheeled pack when she grew too weak, and by degrees she walked a
quarter kilometre through the cedars. By the time she circled back
to camp, she was breathless and agonized and feeling very slightly
accomplished.

Atarangi was back, sitting fireside with the
two phoenixes beside her. “Esha! We thought you had made off with
all the supplies. Brought them to market for the blackflags to
have.”

She wheezed a laugh, shuffling by degrees
into the fire's warmth. “I wouldn't be stupid enough to come back
if I did that. You sound in good spirits.”

Atarangi waved a hand. “It was nothing a
little time and sweat couldn't cure. I was just telling our friends
about how challenging diplomacy used to be, when I was only used to
one variety of animism.”

That sounded like a tale worth hearing.
Biting back her groan, Esha sank to sit.

“Do you need herb, Esha?”

“Save it for later,” she muttered.

With a press of her mouth like a shadow of a
smile, Atarangi kept telling her story to Clamshell. “I simply had
to learn how to read Rooftop's crests, when he was so small that
his crests moved like. I had never even been kin with a bird
before!”

“You had talked with other
intelligent-beings before,” Rooftop said.

“Not
birds
. The squid use different
means, they're ... well, I suppose more like humans. Their changing
colours are like our changing faces.”

“But,” Esha said, “you still learned to read
phoenix crests and grasp what they meant. Without ever having done
it before.”

She had wedged a silence into this
conversation. But somehow, it was a good silence: Atarangi and
Rooftop looked to her with bright-wondering eyes. “What are you
thinking, Esha Of The Fields?”

She was committed now, bound by a will to
share. “It's a long enough story. Would you fill a water cup for
me, Atarangi?”

Atarangi did, unhesitating. Esha didn't even
know what was inside her own mind — just a sense that the many
languages of people and creatures could fit together in strange
ways. And that all the emotions she had grappled with as a new
bride might suffice for this moment, in the same way a rock could
be used to hammer a nail.

“I was ... just thinking about my yak,” she
said quiet, winding her hands around the water cup. “I— Rather, my
former husband had a yak. I had drained a few cups of beer and I
got scared enough one day to speak to it. The yak was a gentle
beast, she didn't mind speaking with me. Didn't understand much of
what I said but I didn't much care. She just ... asked me why my
ears didn't move.”

Esha swallowed, the past feelings of shame
welling up her throat.

“She meant my human ears. But I wondered if
my other ears—“ and she waved a loose hand toward her wrapped head,
“—could move. They didn't have any hair on them when I was that age
but they were still shaped a little like the yak's ears. I didn't
want to think about that at the time so I pretended I didn't know
what the yak was talking about. But ... what if I had showed the
yak my other ears? What if I had tried harder to understand her?
I've been thinking about that day. And now, however shameful it
might be ... I don't know, I'm speaking nonsense.”

“No, not at all,” Atarangi said in silk-soft
voice. “It's true — we have these traits we don't show, because
it's the human way to pretend they aren't here. Mm ...”

Esha she mustered the will to look at the
others. The phoenixes stared at her, considering — and Atarangi
drifted in thought, her eyes wide as Empire-dug wells.

“Humans using our traits, instead of trying
to pretend they don't exist,” Atarangi murmured. “Maybe we could.
It would be another challenge but— One we might not have to
undertake! Because—“ She stopped and sat straighter, smoothing her
composure. “Well, diplomacy has four rules. The most important is
that your message is only half of what you're saying. The other
half is the way you
say
your message. Customs and
expectations are just as important as the actual words. And Esha,
you and I ... We're humans. What are we saying when we arrive
wearing these?” She waved harsh at herself, her mask and wraps and
layers.

“We're ... we're covering ourselves.”

“We're
hiding
ourselves! We're
guilt-ridden before we've even begun negotiating! And the
serpents,” she said, hands spreading as her voice rose, “speak with
their fins even when they're
not
speaking with their fins,
you see?”

Esha blinked. “...No?”

“They gesture with their fins, and also talk
about fin position. That must be their— One of their strong social
premises! Like how important it is that humans show our feelings
with our faces. Gods, how didn't I see that? Humans cover our
bodies as much as possible and I'm
still
given a side-eye
for wearing this mask! How awful would a mask seem to a people who
don't wear any coverings at all, and speak largely with their
facial features?”

“
The
serr-fent
said you could
unmake your insult,”
Rooftop added, the enthusiasm kindling
him, too.

“And what was I doing, before he said that?
Was I touching under my mask?”

“
Yes, yes!”

Turning to Esha, Clamshell asked an
incredulous question with her crests.

“It .... sounds like we might make a bargain
after all,” Esha told her.

Atarangi produced another herbal bribe from
her cloak and asked Rooftop to deliver a message. “Tell the
serpents ... that we apologize for any offense given. We humans
will show our real selves to better express our wish for
kinship.”

Rooftop took it and swooped away to the
pond's edge, to stand there fidgeting excited.

“Should we leave?” Esha asked. “In case the
sight of us is offensive?”

“That stone's already been thrown. I think
we should ...” Atarangi gathered herself, and said, “We should just
show our faces.”

Esha wasn't the one hiding her face and she
never had been: that was a long throw away from the point. She
nodded, and waited to see if Atarangi would go first.

She was proud of her beak, she had said. Its
welling up out of her face was cause for celebration. But as honest
as Atarangi had seemed then, her slightly-ragged-nailed hands moved
hesitant toward the strap of her mask — and Esha could have sworn
she looked afraid.

Then Esha would have to share a handful of
initiative; sisters did that for one another. She took the edge of
her own headwrap and, with only a nudging of terror, pulled it off.
Up and over her markhor horns.

The terror bloomed like ink into paper, as
Atarangi's eyes bolted wide under the mask. Then she smiled. Wry
and uneven, like she was too surprised to shape the gesture
properly.

“Ears! And those fine horns ... You're a
cow?”

“No, gods, no! Do I
spend
like I'm an
empress? I've got markhor goat. Started when I was a small child, I
had horn buds hard under my skin when I was only six summers
old.”

She got her first headwrap that summer. A
burgundy silk headwrap, too fine-textured for a child to possibly
appreciate. A headwrap she hated because it mashed her hair under
lumpy folds of fabric and she didn't
want
to wear it, but
her family and her tutors all hissed to keep it on, and the one
time she threw it onto the new-powdered snow the world cracked loud
and her cheek was ablaze from Mother's palm. Esha hadn't
understood. She soon did.

But right now, there was no one but Atarangi
and some birds to see her. Maybe a ranger would patrol past and
catch an eyeful. Esha resisted the urge to throw her yellow-orange
headwrap gleeful onto the dirt; instead, she pretended to care
about her patchwork hair while Atarangi freed her own head.

The mask came away like lifting a stone out
of farm soil, a weighty peeling. But Atarangi wasn't the darker
depths of hidden soil: she was, if anything, a slightly paler shade
of sienna where she had fended the sun away from her face for so
long. Her broad nose was human, almost entirely so — except for the
hard, pearly hook at the tip, definitely the face of a hunting
bird.

“Your beak isn't so large as I expected,”
Esha said. “I was thinking of something like my horns. A full face
of beak, maybe some feathers.”

“No,” Atarangi said. “It's just this much of
my eagle, for now.”

Esha hummed answer. Then she laughed because
she had to; it bubbled inside her like beer downed too fast. “It is
rare to be free, isn't it?”

“If the serpents deem it necessary for
diplomacy, we'll need to become used to it.” Now, when Atarangi
smiled back, her crinkling eyes were part of an entire face, a
perfectly human one. “If we're afraid of storms, the best cure is
to stand in the rain.”