Tinder Stricken (15 page)

“I'm sure I see where you're going,” Esha
said. “Speaking lungta works on animals as well as humans, it's the
same breath-of-life. But Atarangi, I hope you're not going to tell
me phoenixes are thinking beings. They're not people, they're—“
Esha finally spat out the truth lodged in her throat: “They don't
have souls. How could they?”

The phoenix watched her, intent. Maybe
wondering the same —
how could I?
— because he swivelled his
curious gaze to Atarangi while she gathered her thoughts.

“How can a mere seed grow into a tree? There
can't be enough wood and sap inside such a tiny hull.”

Esha opened her mouth, and closed it again.
More truths were sticking in her throat.

Atarangi lifted her pale-palmed hands. “I
haven't discussed this with many Tselayan folk. You've seen too
many crops set ablaze by phoenixes, I suppose. Or imagined
phoenixes coveting every garden sprout, until you would swear such
greed to be true. But you've been company to my birds.”

Esha stared at her bowl heaped full of
grilled bamboo. “More company than a turd, I suppose,” she
muttered.

After a stunned instant, Atarangi stumbled
into a laugh. “Most people are, I'd say. Just keep trying, good
fieldwoman.”

Phoenixes stole seeds, and burned swaths of
fields to the ground. Phoenixes cursed Esha's every effort. But
Atarangi's bird had opened a door latch solely because Esha Of The
Fields wanted inside. Maybe she had taught him the trick, and maybe
she hadn't.

Esha set her rusty body down in her
makeshift bed: a mound of dry bamboo leaves, some blankets and a
tarpaulin for a tent. Her joints complained in new voices after the
day's travel — but her head full of thoughts was louder by far.

Chapter 8

Wind chattered all night through the pine
needles. Esha didn’t usually sleep on such a shoddy excuse for a
bed, or keep her headwraps on all night like armour.

She hefted herself up at first light and
rubbed the sore clumps from her neck muscles. When her wish for
buttered tea grew strong enough, she crept out into the dim-lit
world and relit the fire with her well-worn flint and steel — under
the phoenix's watchful eye.

He sat quietly enough to overlook. Perched
like a pile of scrubbing rags on the ridgepole of Atarangi's tent,
watching Esha with candle-flame eyes. Between strikes of the flint,
Esha glanced to the bird: he flexed his crests, and chirped a
melody.

“Hail to you,” she mumbled.

She hadn't intended to speak but there it
was, Esha's own voice in the still air. Turning back to her
firestarters, she put new strength into the striking.

The bird hopped to the ground. Step by
bobbing step, he came to the fireside and shook his feathers out.
At least, Esha supposed, he didn't seem offended at the claim that
he lacked a soul.

Fire devoured the bamboo and the tea water
sat unboiling. Esha scratched her itchy leg, watched Atarangi's
tent for movement, watched the phoenix for a token instant and took
the chance of rolling up her pant leg. In the thickening hair on
her ankle sat her itch — a fat, greasy tick. As much of a blood
thief as the tax collector, but at least this one was quick to deal
with. Esha crushed the tick's head between her nails and cocked her
arm to throw it into the fire.

But she didn't throw. Because the phoenix
still watched her, the trained, helpful phoenix that wasn't acting
like a vermin at all. He had even made the gestures of a potential
friend.

“Are you hungry?” Esha asked. Phoenixes ate
bugs, she felt two-thirds sure. She opened her hand to show the
foul morsel.

The bird's crests flicked upward as he
stood, and strutted two steps closer. Talking to the bird didn't
feel nearly as foolish as Esha expected, not when he responded so
honestly.

“Here,” she said, and tossed the tick onto
the leafy earth.

Crests still working, the phoenix came
closer, and inspected the tick, and picked it between the points of
his beak. At least Esha's stolen blood would do some good.

With that taken care of and the tea water
still heating, she opened her satchel for a pocket mirror. She
needed to be sure her headwrap was tied tight and decent before
Atarangi bothered to rise.

Her little hand mirror was old and worn, its
tin too scratched to show more than Esha's own face — but that was
all she wanted to see. She prodded the hair follicles welling
within her forehead. She pinched the base of one goat ear and felt
a sting; she counted white hairs; she adjusted the layers of the
headwrap to hide it all.

Wings rushed beside her. When Esha turned,
she found the phoenix an arm's length away. He tipped his head,
nearly asking a question.

Esha froze, her throat bound. She was near
enough to see the bristly feathers around his nostrils, and his
beak like a pickaxe, and the black depth of his considering
eyes.

Then the phoenix broke the gaze, grabbing
one of his stringfeathers and plucking at a knot.

Esha dreaded to see the contents and she
couldn't have said why, but the phoenix produced a fragment of
familiar brownness, and laid it on the ground between them.

It was a piece of roofing shingle. A
finger-sized sliver, steam-bent so it would fit tight around a
ridgepole, varnished on one flat face.

“You took that off someone’s house, I
suppose? Their roof is going to leak.”

Creaking in its throat, the phoenix bent
toward the shingle fragment — and nudged it closer to Esha. He
stretched tall and opened his wings, two cascading fans of feathers
that Esha had to admit were beautiful in the dawn light, while he
sang an iron-voiced song that was actually nearly pleasant. All of
it was a nonsensical show to make over a scrap of bamboo.

Maybe, Esha guessed, the shingle fragment
was supposed to be payment for the tick breakfast. But when she
reached for the tile piece, the phoenix snatched it immediately
back and wound his stringfeather around it. This was no human
bargain, and Esha couldn't decode it: she hadn't taken speaking
herbs or even her morning tea.

“I don't know,” Esha sighed. “Come on. Let’s
just wake your master.”

She was halfway to Atarangi's tent when the
phoenix darted ahead. It was just as well, Esha supposed, watching
him slip his head under the tent flaps: she didn't know Atarangi
well enough to risk seeing her unclothed.

Atarangi grumbled while she woke. She spoke
a low current of Manyori; her phoenix chirped and trilled and
croaked. Esha dearly wanted to know what the sounds all meant but
when Atarangi emerged from her tent, she couldn't manage to say
anything but
good morning
.

“We're visiting the market before we ascend,
then?” Esha did ask over breakfast millet. “I'd rather sell this
fuel than carry it.”

Stirring a handful of seeds, leaf bits and
utter mysteries into her millet, Atarangi nodded. Her topknot was
less immaculate today, with wavy hairs standing out of it, but her
eyes were bright within the mask. “I'd like to have variety in my
herb supply before I try convincing our dealmaker phoenix. I'm
casual with this fellow here,” and she nodded toward her bird, “but
I've found there's no such thing as too much care while negotiating
with a desperate phoenix. Yours sounds desperate, indeed.”

Atarangi slipped green confections into her
mouth more often than anyone Esha had ever met; small wonder that
she understood beasts.

“You might like some herbs, too,” Atarangi
added. “You haven't got any greens in your meal.”

“Bamboo shoots are green.”

The sound Atarangi made was almost a laugh.
“That's no way to live, squinting at green edges. Please, Esha —
have some.” She rose and circled the fire, reaching into one of her
many pockets.

“There's no need to ...” Esha said, but she
let the words whisk away into the wind; Atarangi was holding out a
month's wages' worth of dried, stacked kudzu leaves.

“It would be best if you ate more speaking
lungta,” she said, “since my kin has introduced himself to
you.”

“I-I can't—“

“Be at ease: I grow most of my kudzu. This
cost me nothing at all.”

Odd reassurance to give a farming woman, but
Esha was in no mood to talk about yam cultivation. She cupped both
hands and thanked Atarangi, accepting the small tower of riches
into her palms. “So your phoenix ... introduced himself? He knows
his own name?” The leaf she slipped into her mouth was crisp and
dry but still tasted of luxurious green.

Atarangi returned to her fireside seat, to
her phoenix's side. The look she gave Esha was a freshwater lake,
deep and with unsure things creeping in it. “You think he'd
recognise a name as his own?”

“I didn't mean to ...”

“You can believe what you'd like,” Atarangi
said, light. “I'm simply asking.”

Believing used to be simple; Esha knew
Tselaya's weft and weave and she followed those lines. She wondered
if the goat was taking her mind now, while she picked up a clump of
millet and stared at it.

“Your bird seems ... like he was raised
well. I suppose he could have a name for himself. Even if he
doesn't think of heaven while he speaks it.”

Esha had time to fear whether her answer was
the right one, and whether she even believed it herself. Then, a
smile broke over Atarangi's face.

“You’re a hypocrite, Esha of the Fields. But
the good kind. Rooftop doesn’t introduce himself to just
anyone.”

“Rooftop ...?” A strange name, off-kilter
and that made it seem nearly right. “After the piece of shingle he
showed me?”

Scratching the phoenix's head, so he leaned
in grateful, Atarangi said, “I wouldn't say he's named after a
piece of roofing bamboo. His name
is
that piece of shingle —
and the sky it touched, and the fact that it's broken away from
where it used to be. He showed you the entirety of his name.
Rooftop
is just the truest way I can think to say it with
our human tongues. ”

Names were a distinction of the heavens, a
gift to human people. But this phoenix carried an object around to
represent himself and that was very nearly a name. It wasn't even
much different from Esha's nameplate; she was aware again of the
two plates and two property tokens that had dug into her breastbone
all night.

She thought of the sharp-snapping phoenix
that accepted her half-wrought contract and left her gasping on the
ground: it was something a cowardly person might do.

“If I'm going to negotiate for your
khukuri,” Atarangi went on, “it would be best if you understood the
proceedings. Not every nuance of what we say — I wouldn't expect
such from a new raindrop in the ocean. But I think humankind can be
more than enemies to phoenixes and for that to happen, humans need
to understand. It would honour me if you'd be Rooftop's friend,
Esha. Please, extend your lungta to him the same way you would
extend it to me, or any other human being.”

In the edge of Esha's vision, the phoenix
flicked his centre crest. Meaning rose and fell before Esha could
grasp it — moved by the idea-shifting properties of lungta. The
phoenix was speaking and gesturing and he had a
name
.

Esha put another kudzu leaf in her mouth,
numb to all sensation but the lungta gathering in her tongue. She
was an even smaller entity than she thought, not just a low-ranked
human of no regard but a woman of few languages, surrounded by an
intricate world.

Atarangi gestured. Her phoenix hopped around
the fire, bouncing back to stand before Esha. He chirped two notes
— as a greeting, said the lungta's first stirrings.

It was ludicrous to greet someone after days
spent in their company. Nearly as ludicrous as Esha's idea to go on
this journey after stringing herself up like a hog.

The phoenix fidgeted on his feet, still
staring.

“It's alright,” Atarangi said, soft as
wisdom.

Esha sighed. In this loose-bodied moment,
everything she knew was a crumbling relic; she might as well build
something new.

“Good morning, Rooftop.”

He let out another pleasant sound, a
trilling melody Esha never would have expected from a phoenix.
Another friendly statement and that was all Esha could say.

“He doesn't steal from humans,” Esha asked
small, “does he?”

“He's never had a reason to.”

“Not even the shingle scrap?”

“Found it on the ground after a storm. I
wouldn't say that's Rooftop's doing.”

Esha curled her fingers around the crackling
kudzu and feared to eat any more: the phoenix's crests were
shifting and she was reminded of a wavering, nervous smile. Habit
itched in her arms.”Is ... Do phoenixes have divinity in them?
Enough to greet them?”

Shrugging, Atarangi swallowed a gulp of
breakfast. “I'm not much of a priest. You can show him namaste if
you'd like to: I've told him what it means.”

Esha considered it, looking over the phoenix
and feathers. She hit a clay wall of reluctance, a gut-filling
sense that phoenixes weren't people, weren't heaven-touched,
weren't anything except fire-starting troublemakers. Except for
this one. Esha's time was short and only now did the world decide
to

He sat there patient, regarding Esha,

“Later, Rooftop,” Atarangi called. “She
needs time to think.”

Rooftop shifted his crests, deflating and
paced away — immediate as a human would respond.

“He— How much Grewian does he understand?”
Esha asked. “He's been ...?”

“He understands most of what we say to each
other,” Atarangi agreed.

“He understands with lungta? Is that why—
All the food you give him—?”

“Partly. He needs to eat the earth's fruit
just as much as we do, to stay well.”