Tinder Stricken (28 page)

Esha shrugged. “Rain does good for any crop
worth eating.”

At the pondside, Rooftop still stood
vigilant, his fire-bright back set to them. Esha would have to
tease him about yams later, possibly while feeding him some. For
the moment, she and Atarangi had strategy to discuss between their
honest faces.

They discussed the serpents' fins and
barbels a little more, over popped maize and kudzu.

“Barbels seems like the closest word Grewian
has got,” she hazarded. “Or any other mountain tongue. Water
serpents' barbels have a flexing and grasping quality to them, more
like a tentacle. Mm, but you've never seen those, either, have
you?”

“Not unless they're on a clam or a
snail.”

They were not, apparently. So Atarangi
described other extravagant ocean animals she had known. Things
with tentacles that snatched and strangled, or else picked up beach
glass with an unwavering curiosity.

“I was always good at speaking with the
squid,” Atarangi said. “My tribe lives on the sea's edge, and I
swam with the squid whenever I could. They speak with coloured
spots on their skin, so as long as I ate enough gourd beforehand I
could understand them. Sometimes I'd stay out all day and my lungta
would fade, so I'd eat seaweed. After some years, I knew where the
best lungta kelp grew, nearly every leaf in the northern sea.”

“Sounds as though you were born to
diplomacy.”

“You might say that. I had a skill Tselaya
Mountain coveted, so my family applied for a caste designation for
me. That was in my tenth summer — actually, we received word back
just before my sixteenth solstice.”

She stopped to take a mouthful of millet,
rolling the hot grain careful on her tongue. Esha waited, trying to
imagine the child Atarangi floating joyful in a vast sea. It was an
image too far away for a mountain woman to truly know.

“My beak-touched nose was a thing of joy
among my people. My family couldn't believe it when the Tselayan
Empire rejected my application to diplomat caste.” She glowed with
the memory. “I didn't think about it among the squid. But now ...
I've stopped noticing how much I cover myself. It's something my
bones have accepted even while my tongue speaks protests.”

“That's the way with all humans,” Esha said.
“We've all got parts to be covered.”

“Why, though?”

Esha had wondered
why
ten thousand
times in her life. She tried to recall the last time she wondered
such a thing and found herself travelling back years, decades into
the dusty past. It was around the time her heart was scabbed over
from the divorce, when the sight of the divorcee flag was ceasing
to sting, that Esha Of The Fields gave up and supposed the world
was just unfair.

“We humans can only keep our civilized world
if we control our fears, I think.”

With a bitter sorrow in her mouth, but still
with a spark of hope in her eyes, Atarangi asked, “They told you
that humans aren't beasts, and they must act as such. By
maintaining a haughty boundary, just as the emperor avoids his
lavatory janitor.”

“That's ... I guess that's right.”

“By the wide waves,” Atarangi said, “I don't
understand it. As sure as we're born into humanity, we're going to
leave it behind. It's a constant of the world, in any weather, no
matter where we're from. Why do the people of this mountain hate
other creatures so much?”

“You might ask my parents.”

Esha had said too much. But it felt good to
say it, to finally spit out the bitter pulp she had held in her
mouth all these years, long since chewed but too unseemly to spit
out. She might not ever go to market again, might not lie about her
name again if Atarangi kept providing so well for her.

All of that was a night's awful dreaming
compared to Atarangi's face — confused but still bright with the
shared knowledge. “Six years old, you said? It starts that young
for Grewiers?”

“No.”

Silence fell. Esha picked through the maize
kernels in her palm.

Atarangi ventured, “How old does a
typical—“

“Adult years. Perhaps twenty, or
twenty-five. My horns broke skin when I was seven. There was no
record of such early onset in my family line; the physician thought
the horn buds might in fact be ingrown goat hair but that proved to
be a false hope. It was simply— I was just unfit for my own
blood.”

“Oh,
Esha
...”

“I was moved. Showed no aptitude for
leatherwork, so I renamed again and moved again. This time to Yam
Plateau. And with that, I was a farming woman. And as much as I
cried, I at least began understanding that I had to work if I
didn't want to fall any farther.”

“Would they truly demote a noble-born child
all the way down to untouchable? You did nothing to deserve
it!”

“I don't know,” Esha sighed. “It doesn't
matter now. I started learning to be a working member of this
society, and it must have been good enough. I've been working the
soil ever since I was ten years old. Well, until these last weeks
when I demoted myself to thieving.”

Sitting in silence, grasping her own hands
like selfropes, Atarangi shook her head. “I knew that Grewiers
feared losing their station in life. But that ... Who could put a
child to work like that?”

“Childhood is like a painted vase. It's
lovely, but not very useful, and fragile as hell, too.”

“Well, yes. But breaking it like that can
get someone cut.” Atarangi's mouth flattened. “Tselayan humans have
their skills and their failings, my friend. I've always found your
castes obtuse, and prone to judging people like they're pigs to be
cut apart. Pigs are smart creatures, you know that?”

Esha tightened her mouth, and said
nothing.

“But after hearing what the caste rules have
done to you,” Atarangi went on with a firework's passion, “and for
no crime of yours, only for your goat trait showing itself early
...”

“Life is what it is,” Esha sighed. “Maybe
I'll be happier as a simple-minded goat, climbing the
cliffsides.”

Atarangi took a handful of popped maize and
chewed, watching the sky. Her gaze drifted to Rooftop sometimes,
their sentinel by the serpents' pond.

“I'm trying to change this place,” she
finally said.

“Change?” She couldn't mean this present
place, the simple few hectares of wilds that Clamshell called hers.
“You're trying to ...?”

“Gather properties. Small ones such as
Gita's, that can pass through many hands without garnering notice.
Gather allies who can be my eyes and my tongue.”

Rooftop, she meant, and phoenixes like him.
Rooftop was a treasure to Atarangi's cause — partly because at that
moment, he stood at the pondside while a serpent's nose parted the
water.

“Someday,” Atarangi murmured, scrambling to
her feet, “maybe I'll put together a plateau where everyone can
live free.”

Esha could only watch her stride away to
join Rooftop, removing her cloak and dropping it careful along the
way.

Again, Rooftop looked like a red crumb,
croaking upward to a towering blue water serpent who dripped from
every fin. This time, the serpent noted Atarangi's approach —
Atarangi bare-faced and bare-shouldered. And it kept clicking in
simple rhythms.

Soon enough, the serpent took its bribe and
retreated. Atarangi gratefully put her warm cloak back on, and she
and Rooftop left the pondside to report their progress.

“Well, then?” Esha asked. “They don't like
our head coverings?”

“
True,”
Rooftop said. “
This
serpent we meet every time is a ... krrah.”

Measuring dinner rice into a pot, Atarangi
squinted thoughtful. “He's a ... journeyer? Venturer? One who takes
a chance by going.”

“Ffen-chur-rr,” Rooftop decided. He took
delight in the difficult word, rolling the burred sounds in his
throat. “Venturer serpent does wish to have talk about Clamshell's
debt. But he thought you were deceiving him by not showing your
skin. Like you were tying tricks and building lies.”

Esha frowned. “Because he thought we were
liars, he was speaking in riddles? Really?”

“Like the way we spoke riddles,” Atarangi
said, quietly realizing, “when we were strangers to each other,
trying to trade drugs and ill-gotten property.”

That truth slapped Esha cold in the face.
All the quaint idiocy the two of them acted out, dropping pebbles
down pipes and intoning about
supplies
.

With uneasy-flexing crests, Rooftop went on,
“I told him your coverings are the human way, and you regret any
offense given.”

“I think it'll be alright if we explain that
we're keeping warm with most of these things we wear.” Atarangi
plucked at the fibre-furred shoulder of her cloak. “I get the
impression that serpents don't like the wind or sun, so they should
be able to understand our clothing once we explained it.”

“If I lived underground and liked the dark,”
Esha supposed, “I wouldn't care much for glare and gale,
either.”

“There — now you're thinking like an
animist.”

Esha still wasn't sure whether to like that
thought.

Over the next three days, Atarangi stayed by
the camp site like she was tied there, preparing her sprouting
lungta beans and her bitter herb-stalk cakes, waiting on serpents
to break the pond's wind-rippled surface. She wore her mask only
sometimes; she sent Rooftop checking for guard patrols and
wandering fuelcutters as often as she kept him pondside for
translation help.

“I haven't felt this free in a long time,”
Atarangi beamed, touching her beak tip.

Esha kept her headwrap on, except when
serpents were present to take offence. She crept closer to the
negotiations sometimes; the serpent regarded her with an undulation
of fins, eyed her warm sleeves and sari, and silently permitted
her.

The venturer serpent shared his name with
Atarangi. It was a precise grinding of teeth, a rising
arryyk
sound like the one buildings made under immense
strain.
Sureness,
said Esha's head full of lungta. The
serpent sure enough to negotiate was named Sureness.

Odd name, Esha thought, at the same time she
found it an unwavering match: the coiled fish-beast towering over
Atarangi's head looked nothing more than sure of himself.

Atarangi shared news after each meeting.
Sureness was one of the serpents watching this territory, the
surface territory occupied by the landholder-female phoenix. This
place had strategic value for serpentkind. Currently, their kind
needed lungta herb and Clamshell was obstructing it.

“He won't say why their need is especially
great,” Atarangi sighed. “I think there's some nuance I'm missing
in the way he says
needing
lungta herb.”

“Don't poison yourself,” Esha muttered. She
dished up a large bowl of rice for Atarangi, the better to buffer
anything else she planned on swallowing.

“I think I'll manage. The translation is
coming easier now that he's meeting me partway along. He doesn't
seem comfortable discussing Clamshell's involvement in this,
though. Which is ...” Atarangi grimaced. “A problem.”

“Thinks it's none of your business?”

“Or he's bound by another's rules.”

Rice lump lifted halfway to her mouth, Esha
stared. “
Serpent
rules?”

“
Rules-of-under — that is what Sureness
called them,”
Rooftop added.
“He called them rules-of-under
before, when he disliked your clothing-wrapped faces.”

Serpents had risen from the depths, to speak
aristocratically about how offensive clothing was. What a shock it
all would have been to Esha the farmwoman who struggled under
ordinary days.

They were scrubbing the dinner pot, with
Atarangi eagerly anticipating one more negotiating session before
nightfall, when another earthquake took the land. An earthquake
barely enough to sway their balance and slosh the potful of
drinking water.

Maybe an aftershock, Esha hoped. Maybe the
month of heaving land was finally over.

But Sureness didn't appear in the pond that
night. And he was absent the next day, too.

Chapter 18

There was nothing to be done for it but
stockpile more herb, refill the tea and butter reserves, and wait.
Atarangi put her mask back on and asked Rooftop to mind the camp —
while she brought Esha to market. Pulling her on the wheeled pack
to spare Esha's worsening knees, like hauling a sick yak to the
veterinarian.

It was the kindest thing anyone but Gita had
ever done for her. Esha held that truth warm against her heart,
even while stifling her smile at the looks passers-by gave them. A
diplomat was, against all things decreed and decent, bending her
back to pull a low-caste on a cart. How nobility would grip their
brocade collars at the sight. At least, Esha thought, this
arrangement was somewhat proper: she
was
following behind
Atarangi.

Millworks's market district brought her no
joy, though. Brick piles marked where buildings used to stand;
roofs sagged into jumbled walls. The alleys around the market were
a forest of fabrics strung into tents. If the money hadn't been
present to build quake-resistant homes, surely it would be slow in
coming to rebuild.

At the market checkpoint, guards noted
Atarangi and Gita's names into the records and turned immediately
back to an engineering overseer, a headwrapped man who gripped a
task sheet with pale knuckles.

To her credit, Atarangi paid generously for
what she bought.

“The spiral road must be in shambles,” Esha
said, on the way back. Underneath her, the pack wheels weren't
squeaking anymore; Atarangi, in her wisdom, had bought and used a
vial of mineral oil on them. “Anyone willing to climb spires will
make coin in times like these.