Tinder Stricken (29 page)

Atarangi hummed, her voice low and strained
with effort. “I wonder if Sureness is experiencing the same
difficulty human beings are.”

Esha nearly spoke, but yanked her mouth
shut. Reactions balled together inside her and anything she said
would have been poor representation.

“Serpents move through waterways, after
all,” Atarangi went on, “and we can't begin to say how much damage
these earthquakes have wrought underground.”

“Water always finds a way through,” Esha
tried. She didn't like how that sounded, faltering in her own
voice. “I don't mean to wish spite on Sureness or ... or his kind.
But what about Clamshell's claim that the serpents were going to
raise the water, Atarangi? We ought to be talking about that.
Can
they summon water from the bowels of the earth?”

Adjusting the pack straps on her shoulders,
Atarangi huffed an unsure sound. “Have you ever heard tell of such
a thing?”

“You don't need to mock me.”

“No, I'm not! Tselayan folk say that
serpents appear on the surface to snatch. It seems that they do:
they want our lungta-rich plants, and they surely need to hurry
back into safe quarters after taking any. Tselayans say that
serpents are drawn by deeps. That seems true, too; Sureness comes
swimming up from somewhere in that pond's recesses.”

“And through water veins. I can't get my
mind around how that's possible.”

“How what's possible?”

“A monstrous — monstrously big, I mean —
thing like Sureness wriggling up through fonts we can't even see
flowing. Most of them are just damp earth! But he does it, somehow,
if Clamshell is to be believed.”

Atarangi turned a sidelong glance over her
shoulder, smiling mild and fey like she used to. “
Do
you
believe her?”

“Yaah, I don't know. She was right about the
serpents, and she's got reason enough to fret. But I still feel
like she'd turn us in to the guards for two grains of rice.”

“Not at all — she hates guards more than
most other humans.” Raising a hand, stifling her chuckling,
Atarangi added, “We shouldn't speak this way about our kin. We only
need to keep trying to unwind knots. This is diplomacy, Esha. There
are many, many knots sometimes.”

Though Atarangi couldn't see it, Esha
nodded. This was definitely no time for cutting through any tangled
strings, if she wanted her plenty-knotted khukuri brought down from
the forest canopy.

Rooftop sang a glad greeting as they
returned. He wasn't alone by the hearth pit, though: Clamshell's
chick sat with him, his indistinct brownness blending into the
swept dirt but his black eyes ever alight.

“You've got the small one!” Atarangi dropped
the pack straps and went to the chick, kneeling and pulling morsels
from her cloak.

“Clamshell-kin has flame-negotiated beside
me,” Rooftop said. He stood proud but his crests wavered
half-spread. “While you were gone, Sureness has come and left three
times.”

“Oh. We were just wondering about him — is
he well?”

“Well, yes! Blocked from the surface after
the earth-quaking, but ...”

Esha stared for a moment at Clamshell — who
sat beside a pine tree overhanging the pond. She brooded over the
muskmelon Esha had seen earlier in a treetop — now balanced on her
feet, steadied by a wrapped and tied yankvine she held with her
beak. She had no words for her returned kin, not even for Atarangi
who stuffed treats into her chick's mouth: Clamshell simply stared
at the pond's surface, waiting.

Maybe was irritable about trading her troves
away, Esha supposed. Or from dragging the melon around; the fruit
had to weigh as much as Clamshell herself did. After watching the
pond for a moment, herself, Esha listened again to Rooftop's report
on the serpents.

It was a challenging time for everyone, the
summary seemed to be. With the ongoing earthquakes, Sureness's
superiors needed lungta-rich plants more than ever; Sureness lacked
the permission to say why, either that or he simply preferred
staring at surface dwellers.

“Wait,” Atarangi asked, scratching the
phoenix chick's downy ruff, “did he say
speaking
plants? Or
lungta-rich plants?”

“Any kind,” Rooftop said, his crests spread
surprised. “Speaking is good. Moving is good. Serpents want lungta
plants, that plain-showing truth.”

Atarangi hummed. “Clamshell?” she called,
her voice gusting with herb, “When you were, ah, first asked for
plants, were you asked for
speaking
lungta?”

“
Speaking lungta always scarlet-shines
precious,”
Clamshell creaked back.
“Regardless, yes. The
water-snakes wanted lungta-food for their black tongues.”

“Their needs have changed,” Atarangi
murmured.

Sitting on flat earth and oblivious to what
laid underneath, Esha feared the answer and she asked anyway: “What
does that mean?”

With hands nearly used to the motion,
Atarangi removed her mask. “I'll need to speak to them more. Until
then, I can't begin to guess.”

As the afternoon wore on, their supply of
fuel dwindled, the tea-boiling embers receding into their own ash.
With Atarangi poised to negotiate and the phoenixes mantled helpful
around her, Esha was wordlessly drafted to the job — wheeled pack,
walking pole, goat legs and all.

“Be careful, sister,” Atarangi said
regretful. “Don't strain yourself.”

Esha waved a hand, batting the thought away.
“If I'm going to strain something, I'll at least be useful in the
process.

With all the cooking their group was doing,
they were straining the bamboo supply by the serpents' pond. Esha
had cut most of the thick-grown, dry bamboo — everything that
didn't resonate too hollow when she tapped it. She still didn't
know whether serpents were actually drawn to hollowheart bamboo; it
was a trouble she thought about a lot and hadn't managed to ask
about yet.

Gradually, in a three-part dance between her
feet, pole and pack wheels, Esha headed edgeward, south toward the
thin stands of bamboo with wind-bent tops.

It was a soothing day, at least. Strung thin
with white clouds; full of rainbow lungta flakes wheeling down from
on high; warm as oncoming summer but with enough breeze to lift
sweat off Esha's neck. A handful of low-castes walked a ghost of a
pathway, away from a distant thicket with bundled fuel under their
arms. Esha followed their guide and, after a mere hour's shuffling,
came to a stand of bamboo. She drank deep from the wheeled pack's
water skin; this was a fine choice of time to give up eating
millet. And after careful tapping to choose a bamboo stem, Esha
lined up her broken khukuri blade and her striking rock.

She was just getting a notch going, her arm
cocking back for a first hard strike, when she heard clicking.
Rhythmic clicking. Like serpent's teeth.

Esha whipped around. There were no lakes or
ponds here, no skythreads within sight. Water veins might have
riddled the ground under her feet but she couldn't dig up every
pace she took.

“Hail?” Esha called to the empty air. “Is
someone here?”

Wind, and her own pulse, and a distant
thrush calling.

Esha looked back to her notched bamboo,
mustered her strength to raise her striking rock, and then it came
again. Clicking — in a pattern she nearly recognized.

There was a face under an upheaved patch of
earth. Eyes with whites, and a water-green snout. Barbels like the
straggled roots the serpent wore on its head. If there was a water
vein under this ground, it couldn't have been wider than this
serpent's body but here it was, watching her, close enough to throw
the rock at.

The serpent clicked, its white teeth
flashing.
“Greeting: this one extends a request!”

Lungta rushed in Esha's ears, from some
plant born of water and rustled by cave wind. It was hailing her.
Gods, she was cutting bamboo and a serpent was rising from the
earth to
hail
her, and Esha knew it was tactless to think
but she wondered if she was about to be snatched into the
deeps.

“W-wait,” Esha said, She was no diplomat, no
skilled animist regardless of Atarangi's compliments, and she
certainly couldn't interpret other tongues without betel. Even if
the serpent was using lungta. She simply needed betel.

After a moment of digging through the pack
and swallowing half-chewed lumps, she looked again to the serpent.
It waited, packed there in its earthen channel, watching her with
nail-head eyes.

“Aah,” Esha sputtered. “Alright. Hail to
you.”

Half-hidden by soil, its barbels twitched.
And the serpent flinched, and shifted something Esha couldn't begin
to see, and it pushed its head out of the soil crevice. Two
blue-dappled fins popped free and a dozen various-sized barbels
with it.

“
Query: that one is associated with the
landholder phoenix-bird resident to this area?”

“Me?” It was a stilted mess of a question,
but still aimed right at Esha. “I-I am, yes. Associated with a
phoenix-bird.”

Its fins waved, its eerily pale mouth
opening like a crude-drawn grin.
“Jubilance! This one has
located the other!”

“W-well, if you were
looking
for
me—“

“Hail, there?” came a man's voice behind
Esha.

Her heart leaped against her breastbone; she
tried to turn on her planted, aching joints and twisted too far
over, falling onto her rump.

There on the faint-trod path stood a young
man — Grewier, thin as a whip, wearing a millworker's caste sigil
and wide eyes. He carried a sheathed khukuri and a sack bigger than
he was.

“I heard a voice. Is everything alright,
mother?”

Caught talking to a serpent, caught with
animism lungta still on her lips. But the young man stared only at
Esha. She chanced a look behind her; the earth clump was replaced.
Only a few torn roots —and the protruding green tip of a single
barbel — showed that anything was amiss.

“Yes,” Esha blurted. “Yes, I just— I saw a
lungta mote that reminded me of my own mother. Thought I'd say
hello to her.”

“Oh,” the young man said, brightening
awkward like he didn't smile often. “I see. Heaven isn't far away,
I'm told.”

“I am as fine as I can be. Thank you,
child.”

“Apologies for scaring you,” he said, and he
kept on.

With her heart still deafening in her ears,
Esha turned back to the serpent's hiding-hovel. She lifted her
blade remnant and stone to the bamboo. “Hey. Hail. That human is
gone.”

Gradually as dripping paint, the earth clump
lifted. The serpent peered out.
“Statement: that-other-one is
leg-walking at a bearing ( )-( ). Theory: it vacates this
place.”

Esha couldn't sort out the directions: they
felt too similar to
up
and
outward
to make any sense
on a compass. But still, the serpent knew a surface dweller's
actions. More than Esha's eyes could possibly tell past the
thickets. “You can tell where he's going? How?”

“
Simplicity, simplicity.”

Too simple to see the stranger approaching
in the first place, though. Esha sighed, “Maybe you should pay more
attention, serpent-ally. You'll get us discovered by other
humans.”

“
Correction: this-one did not venture
here to discuss stranger-ambushes. Or instigate them.”
It
tapped its tongue wet against the roof of its paper-pale mouth, a
sound ringing with squirming regret.
“Statement: this one and
that one converse through lungta, at peace.”

“Oh, gods' balls, I'm sorry.” Esha reached
for her headwrap, snatching the horn curves underneath. “This
covering is rude, isn't it?”

The serpent inclined its head, dirt
crumbling onto his snout.
“Theory: if on a serpent, similar
obscurement would offend. Condition: that one is not a
serpent.”

Finally, a thinking creature from the
mountain wilds who made
sense
.

“
Correction, correction! No further
tangents. A serpent converses with a human this day. Such
occurrence inspires this one! Historical precedent
transpires!”

Through her building headache, Esha asked
“Does it?”

Stretching upward, barbels spilling the
serpent chattered,
“Statement: these ones make precedent!
Introduction: this one is—”

His tooth-sounds stopped passing through the
lungta's mesh. The serpent gave her syllables — two scrapes and a
tap — but Esha couldn't associate it with anything but a janitor's
straw broom.

“Xi ...shi ...klak,” Esha tried. “You are
... clean-moving? I don't understand.”

He snapped fins against his body and dropped
away, down into his hole with a thump of earth against earth..
Before Esha could wonder what she did wrong, he returned — popping
the earth hat back onto his splay-finned head and lifting one of
his large barbels in offering.

He held a piece of metal. Warm-hued like
copper, and so thin that Esha took it in her fingers carefully,
fearing to crumple it.

“
Xishiklak,”
the serpent
repeated.

Light caught in the metal — in pockmarks
like stray hammer blows. Esha chilled with amazement; these were
too uniform and too meaningfully placed to be clumsy mistakes. No,
this was writing — writing far different from any human's ink
marks.

The spacing was strange, but meanings glowed
in Esha's awareness once she put her lingering breakfast herb
lungta toward them.

“Nimble ...?” She couldn't discern what his
designation was but this serpent was part of a Triad. “Or should I
say Xi-shi-klak?” Try to say it, at any rate.

“
Announcement: this one has no
preference,”
Nimble chattered.
“Request: simply address this
one at all.”

Though she had never borne such a headache
in her entire life — not even hung over, after talking to the yak —
Esha was happy, walking back to camp with fuel piled onto the
wheeled pack. She hobbled and dragged her way home, to her spot in
the wilderness where she could talk to odd-minded friends who wore
inhuman bodies. She never had to make up lies for a human again.
Esha might know a little peace.