Tinder Stricken (14 page)

“It's permission to work my craft. I'm
simply not sure I can accept everything this rank tells me.” Taking
her caste sigil between her fingers, Atarangi turned it on its
brass pin. “Nets can bind a creature, but they can't take the ocean
from its heart.”

The words were a jumble. But somewhere,
maybe in her own heart, Esha felt like she understood.

“I shouldn't speak of this,” Atarangi went
on, “even in confidence. Getting instated to this rank isn't
something to question. It's just that dignity should be for all. A
food producer like you would be treated better in my society.”

“Really? As well as your bird?”

“Better, even“ Atarangi said, laughing. She
took a heaping bite of her meal — just as the phoenix

“Truly?” Atarangi asked him.

More croaking and chirping. The phoenix's
crests worked, almost like he was gesturing.

“You can if you want to,” Atarangi said.
“We'll see.”

With a last rasping sound, the bird strutted
around the fire pit — toward Esha. He stopped by the piled fire
fuel, eyeing it, considering. Just as Esha feared him reaching for
his tail-held iron and pyrite, he chose a cloven bamboo stick and
plucked a thumb-sized sliver from it. And then he approached Esha,
coming near enough to see the ribs of his feathers and the living
wetness in his eyes.

Esha wanted to move but she sat, politely,
clutching her tea cup like a life rope as the phoenix laid down the
sliver of woody stem beside her bent knee. Then the bird
straightened, and stared.

“He's giving you fuel for a fire,” Atarangi
said. “It's a friendship gesture.”

“... Are you joking?”

“Not at all. He's not, either.”

What an eerie thought, like a waking dream —
that a field-destroying bird had any idea what friendship was, and
that Atarangi would talk about it like the thought was as plain as
potatoes.

“Should I,” Esha asked, “take it?”

“You said you need more friends, don't
you?”

Esha pushed her hovering hand toward the
sliver; her fingers were thick and numb. “I think what I said was
that I don't need more enemies.”

“Just pick it up and thank him. Why throw a
gift away?”

Atarangi was damnably right. Maybe
befriending an animal wouldn't be the worst decision ever made by
Esha Of The Fields, long since reduced to lying and thieving. She
took the sliver from the leaf-pillowed ground, and pushed her gaze
toward the phoenix. She couldn't meet its prying eyes. Maybe its
ruff of chest feathers would be enough.

“Thank you,” Esha mumbled.

He chirped — a clear and lilting song,
nothing like the phoenixes Esha had ever heard before. And with
that, he galloped back to Atarangi and sat bundled against her
side, feathers puffed and crests low. Like a child — a boy child
smitten with a pretty woman.

“There. You've brightened his sky,” Atarangi
said warm. She turned her attention to draining her tea cup.

Bemusement rose warm in Esha and she smiled
herself, raising tea to her mouth. “If it's that easy to please
him, he's welcome to it.”

In the mundane moments Atarangi spent wiping
out her cookpots with sand, Esha supposed she did miss having
friends.

They didn't linger long, only enough for
Atarangi to wipe sand in her cookpots and Esha to stub out the
half-burned fuel for the next travellers' use. With the wheeled
cart loaded again, the group of them — Esha, good Atarangi and the
companion presence of the phoenix — kept walking. After more bamboo
stands, and a reeking pig farm, and a gumgrass field alive with
finches, they reached the mountain's face. Climbing spires led up
the cliffside, metal poles bristling from the rock like hair from a
boar's nape.

A few hundred meters to their left, a
curtain of shadow dropped down from Maize Plateau, along with the
cable rig for low-caste cargo. To the far-off right, where Yam
Plateau narrowed and became the spiral road, earthquake repairs
were under way. The guards' station was crowded with metal and
stoneworkers, their materials heaped near the worldedge and their
scaffolds lowering workers over the road's side. Some gathered
workers parted so a carriage could squeeze through, a wood-coloured
bulk drawn by pure white yaks that must have cost a fortune to
breed.

“Here's one small blessing the gods spat
onto us,” Esha told Atarangi. “We don't need to pass through that
checkpoint.”

“Mm, I'll be thankful for that. They're
trouble enough when the path is firm.”

They approached Maize Plateau's shadow and
checked the pulley rig. The mechanism moved with just enough
resistance to be useful and the cables were in good condition for
an Empire-funded piece of equipment, showing only a few pinpricks
of rust and one bent spot in the looped length. Together, Esha and
Atarangi loaded their supplies into the basket and pulleyed it
skyward.

“Bring it back down,” Esha said after they
hooked on stone counterweights. “Halfway between plateaus is the
least tempting for thieves, since it'll take time to retrieve from
either direction. Can't just snatch it and run.”

“Ah,” Atarangi said, smirking. “That's
clever.”

“It's one of many tricks. Have you climbed
spires before, or only travelled by carriage?”

“I've taken the spires before, I'll manage.
Your knees ...?”

Sore though they were, Esha waved the idea
away. “It won't be the first day I've put up with them.”

They unwound selfropes. Atarangi paused to
tie her walking staff to her pack, and to give a few calm words to
her phoenix. And then she and Esha threw selfropes over climbing
spires, and they began working upward, step by rope-guarded
step.

Wind pried into Esha's clothes as they
climbed, more insistent than she remembered. The effort burned in
her arms but gave her her knees sweet moments of relief. She
imagined that the phoenix would fly ahead free but he only
fluttered upward one spire at a time, meticulously following
Atarangi's climbing pace. Every few moments, scaly feet clattered
on the ridged iron and his gaze fixed again on Atarangi, except for
the rare moments he watched Esha.

For a moment, Esha wondered if the phoenix
could think — and comprehend the spiritual pinnings of life, like a
person. He might be watching the humans gripping their selfropes,
thinking that they might fall and be no more.

Esha walled the wingbeats and claw
clattering out of her mind, to focus on her footing.

The spire pass veered over toward a toehold
plateau after forty meters. This plateau was large enough hold two
or three farming shacks, but no one would live on such a small,
wind-gripped crumb of land. There was only some juniper and
gumgrass here, huddled against the cliffside and stamped flat where
travellers passed through.

The day was still long, the sun robust. Esha
and Atarangi gathered their selfropes into their laps and ate
on-the-run foods — Esha her popped maize, and Atarangi some pieces
of dry-frizzled leaf that Esha couldn't identify.

Atarangi shared her food with the phoenix,
as was their way. But the moment Esha dropped a maize kernel, the
phoenix snapped to attention,

“Now you'd like maize, too?” Atarangi smiled
wry, realizing some tiny fraction how spoiled her bird was. “Ask
Esha nicely, then.”

The phoenix shuffled sidelong toward her,
looking again like a shy child. He croaked — but not like any
phoenix cry Esha had ever heard in all her years. Atarangi's bird
rasped out sounds that didn't sound meant for a phoenix at all,
some mimickry Esha felt she was supposed to recognise. She put it
from her mind immediately and flicked the dropped maize kernel away
from her, for the phoenix to snatch up from the dirt.

“Thank her, too,” Atarangi said.

The maize gulped whole, the bird looked
straight at Esha and dipped his head. Nearly like a gracious bow,
near enough to surprise Esha into something like delight.

“He knows plenty of tricks,” she
commented.

“He's been my partner for eight years. He's
figured his way around humans in such—“

She stopped, her face wary. Esha felt a
matching portent in the ground her rump rested on.

“Did you feel that?” Atarangi asked.

“I did. An aftershock ...?”

The phoenix cackled urgent at Atarangi.

“The lines are moving, he says. Maybe lines
of phoenix territory, maybe something else — I can't say, but
moving lines sometimes means an earthquake is nearing.”

“He can predict earth movement? How often is
he right?”

“I've never counted. Perhaps two in three
times? If I knew the bricks and beams of his talents, I might
understand them better. It's a sense in his head, I know that.”
Atarangi waved a spread hand over her face, encompassing eyes, ears
and all else. “Every phoenix I've ever met hates lodestones, so I
think they wield a similar type of earth magic. Similar enough to
clash.”

That was a far broader answer than Esha had
expected. “You ... You give your bird a lot of thought.”

“You're going to find that there's much to
think about.”

That put a speck of terror into Esha,
drifting through her blood while Atarangi smiled and gave her bird
more kudzu. Atarangi spoke like she knew Esha's reasons for guilt —
but she couldn't know everything Esha had salted away in her head.
Maybe Esha was showing a reaction on her human face when she looked
at the companion phoenix and thought of others past, phoenixes
vanishing through trees and over cliffsides. Maybe those things
just curdled when they met the memory of Atarangi's bird offering
Esha a sliver of friendship.

“You,” Esha tried, “said there might be an
earthquake. How long do we have?”

“That, I can't say. We should keep on.”

They stepped back onto the spire pass and
kept climbing, kept throwing their selfropes upward. There was more
wind and more of the phoenix's staring as evening fell golden on
the cliff face. An hour later, they heaved themselves up over the
plateau's edge, grasping the spires that rounded the travel-worn
curve like wheel spokes. Together — gripping the pulley cable with
clumsy, overlapping hands not used to each other — Esha and
Atarangi drew their supplies up and hauled the wheeled pack up onto
Maize Plateau.

They sat, Atarangi catching their breath,
Esha merely waiting for the fatigue to drain from her limbs. The
phoenix watched them but with divided attention: the pulley drew
his attention and he paced closer to peer at the gearworks.

Her breath returned, Atarangi lifted her
gaze to the sky. “I don't think we have enough daylight to climb
another spire pass.”

“No, no,” Esha said. “It'd be a bad idea,
regardless — you're not from Tselaya. You'll fall ill if you climb
too quickly.”

“Truly?”

“It's been proven by hundreds of
newcomers.”

A pause hung while Atarangi thought on that.
“Is that why the carts travel so slowly?”

“I don't know. Likely.” That, and Tselaya
nobles getting queasy when they moved quicker than a stroll.

“It's a trouble for humans,” Atarangi
supposed, “not for birds.”

“We are fortunate to have your bird checking
ahead. About that — there'll be a rest site around half a kilometre
from here, if my memory is to be trusted. Can your bird look for
it? That's something he can understand ...?”

It was indeed something the bird understood.
Once Atarangi distracted the phoenix from his gear-prodding and
asked him to search the pine forest, he circled high over the
campsite like a beckoning flag. Dogs and yaks couldn't do that.
Esha was beginning to understand why some went to the trouble of
keeping a phoenix.

She didn't like the sensation, but she was
beginning to understand much broader facets than that.

This campsite was well used, with bamboo
staggered like staircases from all the fuel cuttings. Together,
Esha and Atarangi cut bamboo into fuel sticks, discussing in loose
maybe
s how much they would keep or sell. If they worked
enough, their trip could pay its own wages.

In the fading daylight, under leaves'
shadows, Esha grilled bamboo shoots on smoky coals. Atarangi sat
with some of the fuel sticks in her lap, scraping something from it
with the tip of her dagger; Esha couldn't discern what the crumbs
were but the phoenix nibbled some from Atarangi's offering
fingertips.

“So,” Esha asked, halting, “you said the
bamboo sliver was actually offered friendship. What does friendship
mean to a phoenix?”

Atarangi eyed her. “What do you suppose it
means?”

Another answer that wasn't an answer: Esha
stifled most of her sigh. “I'd ... guess that it's the same thing
friendship means to any animal. Food, and safety from hunting
beasts, and wearing away their fear of human presence. But there's
more to it than that, isn't there, good diplomat?”

The smile Atarangi wore was full of secrets,
and spreading like satisfaction. Esha was beginning to grasp the
face underneath, the shape of the bones under the mask.

“You know a handful about diplomacy, Esha.
Think of Tselaya's history. Many human tribes lived here and bore
arms against each other, until they realized that their needs
weren't so different. They used their breath-of-life to translate
each other's tongues, and through that they learned to truly speak
to each other. Like plant roots crumbling a stubborn rock, people
are learning to understand. That fact has allowed Tselaya Mountain
to lay down its weapons — for most of the castes, that is.”

Esha held her tongue. She hackled at the
sight of soldier caste but she had to admit that a guard's
polearms, bows and fine-tooled khukuris were mostly for show; for
better or worse, everyone worked under the Empire since the Accords
were struck. Esha and other Grewians worked in unity with Sherbu,
Gwung and plenty more of Tselaya's children. Humans were able to do
that, to look at a stranger's face and learn that they were a new
ally.