Tinder Stricken (17 page)

Her own name felt like glass beads, rolling
smooth through her lungta-charged ear canals. Esha rarely
remembered that names were older forms of Grewian words, relics of
spoken words past, but Rooftop's quizzical head tilt reminded her
now.

“
That selfname means ...?”

“Precious one.” She had long since stopped
thinking about the irony of her name, given to a child soon
disavowed.

“I don't know how she would express
Precious One
with an object,” Atarangi added in a teaching
voice. “It's an idea that's hard to hold and show.”

Rooftop's outer crests lowered and spread
flat — in disagreement, said the lungta translation.
“Many-hundreds of objects are precious. Wood for burning. First
treefruit in yellow-green spring. White seeds.”
He squawked
sudden, and chattered,
“Precious One, I gives interest! Do you
grow precious-food?”

She sorted and matched his ideas, mind
racing. “Precious food? What does that mean?” She hissed a sigh,
letting out some of the tension pent inside her like steam. “I'm
sorry, Atarangi, this must be the worst lungta-shared meeting
you've ever heard.”

Atarangi shook her head. “Not at all, you’re
handling this well. I’ve met diplomats who speak eight tongues but
they look like there’s a snake in their underclothes when Rooftop
asks them a question.
Precious-food
usually means
lungta-rich herbs, or fruit with many seeds in it. But in some
phrasings, it simply means anything a phoenix can eat.”

That made sense, Esha tentatively supposed.
Even the humblest of low-caste foods could be precious, if one was
hungry.

“Then,” she told Rooftop, “yes, I grow
precious food. Mainly yams. You know what yams are? The— The root
of a plant. Big round roots.” She spread her hands and touched
their fingertips, approximating the size and shape of a yellowmeat
yam.

“
Yes, yams!”
The eager creaking
beyond the lungta was strikingly familiar, a sound like
ee-am-zz
pouring out of Rooftop's unflexing beak.
“Ground-ball food, is what phoenix-kind would say. Morning Sky
cooks yams with grass-powder around them. They hold too much
red-sizzle-heat but wait ten flaps and then it is excellent fill-up
food. Crunch crunch, then one is full and
brown-wholesome-pleased.”

“Morning Sky?” Esha muttered. “Gods, it's a
riddle. Atarangi, you're Morning Sky? That's your selfname ...
meaning ...?”

“It is,” she said proud.

“And grass powder ... He means, what,
flour?”

“He likes your yams floured and fried.”
Atarangi glowed with amusement, looking between the two of
them.

“
Floured,”
Rooftop corrected himself.
His throat croaked
vv-ow-rr-g
.
“And fried.”
Vv-rie-d
.

“Oh, heaven help me,” Esha blurted, “he's—
Rooftop, are you saying Grewian words?!”

Glee flared his crests broad, as he tipped
his head at Esha.
“Yes, yes! I am learning greener words from
Morning Sky! You like this calling-tongue better?”

She could only mumble, and it was an
oath.

“Don't curse in front of him, please,”
Atarangi said. But she was grinning, as welcome as any yellow
dawn.

Esha kept speaking with Rooftop as the road
wore on. She knew this to be true, although she unknotted fewer and
fewer meanings from his colour-drenched chattering; she was a
spectator in her own body, less present than the wind.

Atarangi hushed Rooftop after some time, and
fed him a palmful of morsels. She asked if Esha wanted to stop and
rest — and yes, Esha said, she did. She needed to get off her rusty
legs and stop thinking.

They stopped by the roadside, to sit in a
soft-yielding patch of sand and new gumgrass. Down the road, by the
mountain's face, other travellers had a smoke-billowing fire
burning in a rest site: that was no place for a pair of false-named
animism users. That was what Esha was now — an animist. She had
spoken with animals on too many occasions to claim accident or
innocence.

Settled back on the wheeled pack, Rooftop
preened his feathers like the most commonplace of songbirds.

“Well?” Atarangi asked.

Esha rubbed her face up and down. “He's ...
He's got a mind of his own. I have to admit that.”

“Aren't you glad you agreed to try?”
Atarangi asked, low-murmured like a secret. “Most humans never get
to share company with a phoenix. They're too comfortable in their
stone-walled minds.”

“Yes, walled,” Esha murmured.

With searching eyes, Atarangi considered
her. She rose briefly to dig in a side pocket of the wheeled pack,
and produced a pine candle. A few flicks of her iron fire striker
later, they sat opposite a pungent candle flame, like a miniature
hearth fire to warm their hands by.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Esha lied. “Well ... The animism just
has me thinking about beasts and what their minds are like— And
Rooftop is plenty intelligent! It's just that ... I don't know if
I'll be able to return to Yam Plateau.”

Atarangi regarded her for a silent moment,
maybe sorting out the mess coming from Esha's mouth. “Why is
that?”

The truth didn't feel any better, spilled
out into the open like that. Esha hunched closer to the candle,
caging its warmth with her fingers. “I need the Kanakisipt khukuri
back for my retirement. That retirement is— Well, I'm ... making
bigger changes all the time. Maybe we'll get my khukuri back but
even if we don't ... I won't be able to work, soon. I need to
retire.”

Another pause. Atarangi was patching it
together but her frown kept getting more forlorn. “Making bigger
changes, you say. Already ...? I thought you were just saving for
far-off days.”

Esha's regretted the entirety of this
moment. Her beginning of a confession, and her body's continuing
betrayal, and the soil and sky of the world all around. But at
least she had someone to talk to. Two someones, she supposed, since
the phoenix was listening and Esha didn't have the heart to shoo
him away.

“I'll say it, for clarity. My ... inhuman
traits. They're taking firmer hold every day. It's why I have these
horns, obviously enough, and it's why I limp.”

“Really?! You aren't nearly old enough.”

A bitter laugh escaped Esha's throat. “I
must be, if it's happening.”

“How old are you, good fieldwoman?”

“Forty-eight years.”

A nervous shell of a smile formed on
Atarangi. “Such a jewel to know. I thought you were ... Mm, I'm not
sure what I thought.”

“Can't tell how old a fieldwoman is by
looking at her?” Esha smiled a little herself. “We're mysterious
sometimes, all sun-worn and hardy.”

“That must be it,” Atarangi laughed. Another
moment rummaging through her pack — nudging Rooftop aside this time
— and Atarangi found a waterskin. “Your traits are this prominent
already?”

This was an inevitable question: Esha must
have been raising the animist's curiosity with every detail of this
cryptic bargain. “They— They started showing too soon. When I was a
child.” She rubbed again at her face, before realizing that her
headwrap was riding up and yanking it back toward her eyebrows with
mortified speed. “Early onset traits, the physician said, and
there's no way to treat that. My forty-eighth summer and I'm
wearing out already.”

Atarangi paused, wearing some expression
Esha couldn't bring herself to look at. “I thought so. I've never
seen a Grewier wearing a headwrap if they weren't trying to cover
something ...”

“Are you the same?” Esha dared to ask. “With
your mask?”

Mad courage let her look at Atarangi now —
and she was met with a cockeyed smile and a gleaming of mask-shaded
eyes.

“I've got traits, too. This summer will be
my thirty-second, so I've got to be showing
some
trace of
what's hidden in the clouds. It's not nearly the same for my
people, though. I'm not wearing this mask to cover up shame.”

“No?”

Atarangi took a deep draw from the
waterskin, and wiped a sheen of moisture from the corner of her
honest mouth.

“The strangest part of Tselaya's children,”
she said, milk-mild, “is how scared you are of your own
selves.”

“Not ourselves — the beasts! The things
taking over.”

“What's the difference? We grow old, we stop
being the people we were. Everyone does it. I suppose we Manyori
just don't see the use in being afraid.”

She held out the waterskin in one hand — one
unblemished hand accustomed to paper and quill, although it had
dirt under the perfect nails now. Esha accepted it.

“I've got sea eagle traits,” Atarangi said.
“The same breed of sea eagles from the same place I was born, the
northmost shores of the Vast Shark's waters. I started shifting at
the end of my sixteenth year. Showed first on the tip of my nose,
same as my father.”

“What did you do?” Esha asked small.

Atarangi turned her face to the sky, seeing
something not there. “I welcomed it. Even though I would someday
cease being myself and start being the eagle, she still felt like a
cousin I had never met before, or ... like knowing who
I
was
for the first time. When the tip of my nose hardened enough to be
called a beak, my family feasted. And I got this.” She drew fond
fingertips down her ink-patterned chin. “It let my heart skip on
waves, for a while.”

Esha couldn't speak. It was a fable too
sweet to tell a child, that the animal within was a friend.

“It wasn't such a joy once I came to
Tselaya. My request for caste placement was turned down. Rejecting
someone for their trait would be absurd among my people. But I
applied again, with a more substantial payment the second time. And
I don't imagine I need to explain this part: I agreed to wear the
mask in public at all times.”

“You ... gave up what you had, for a life
like this?”

“Gave it up for the time being,” Atarangi
said. She raised “If my efforts all crumble to sand, I've got
somewhere to return to. But I've already made allies on this
mountain who are worth the heartache. I've already gathered a few
assets and learned a few tricks. There's nowhere to climb but
upward.”

“You think so?”

“I do.”

Esha couldn't speak. Atarangi had grown up
in a golden fortune of circumstances and she threw it all aside,
for the stifling caste rules of a society not hers. She covered her
face and bore the weight of whispers every day because she
chose
to.

And Esha wanted to ask more — ask what
Atarangi's gathered assets were, ask what she planned to do with
Gita Of The Fields's property token, ask why all of it was
worthwhile. But Atarangi licked her fingers and pinched the candle
flame out, before rising and stroking Rooftop's feathers.

“Are your knees able, Esha? We should keep
on.”

Chapter 10

They reached the next spire pass in the full
breadth of afternoon. After waiting for a dust-streaked merchant to
unload his wares from the pulley rig and forge away toward the
Maize market, Esha and Atarangi began climbing, themselves. The
lowest end of Rice Plateau hung above their heads — part of the
tiered waterfall of rice paddies that kept Tselaya fed.

With thrown selfropes, they climbed into
increments into the cliffside wind. Esha's joints were failing
after the long days of walking, her ankles tender and reluctant to
flex; she thought she was imagining it but no, Atarangi was
stepping slower, too. Rooftop fluttered anxious between the spires,
present alongside them but too slight-bodied to be of any help.

After a few barren toehold plateaus and more
crawling hours of climbing, Atarangi hauled herself over Rice
Plateau's edge. Her hand locked with Esha's and help bear her
weight over, and when the straining was over they both sank to the
ground to remember how to breathe.

“Are you well?” Esha asked.

“Fine, just sap-spent,” Atarangi wheezed.
“I'm not used to the climbing.”

“Messengers make these climbs every day.
Some boast twice a day.” After another gulped breath, Esha added,
“I'd hate to be one.”

Nodding — and grimacing at the thought —
Atarangi waved Rooftop nearer. “Kindly check for guards.”

He trilled, a note Esha remembered as a
dutiful
yes
. With a few effortless-looking wingbeats, he
sailed off over the bamboo stands and pine saplings, his tail tag
flashing in sunset's light.

Esha and Atarangi dragged the wheeled pack
up onto sure land. And then they sat waiting, at a path junction
leading into the plateau.

Anticipation gathered in Esha's gut. If she
chose a direction and walked, she might find a sight from her
leatherworking life — some levee or stairway she knew the contours
of, or a face that creased displeased at her.

“No campsite that I can see,” Atarangi
mused.

“This high up, it'll be deeper in the
wildgrowth. Protection from the wind. And keeping it out of sight
from anyone too high-caste to think of it; they don't like seeing
stray labourers.”

Atarangi hummed, a gradual consideration.
“Well, they'll have me to file a complaint with if they don't like
the sight of you. You've travelled this high, friend?”

“A long time ago.” Esha had no answer more
worthwhile than that. “If we search out the campsite, will Rooftop
be able to find us?”

“He should manage.” Hefting to her feet,
Atarangi said, “Please — lead the way.”

They headed inward, through the gale-bent
bamboo and pines and into taller, grander forests. Deodar cedars
stood like gathered gods, stretching meters upward and spreading
their lacy teal needles against the shining sky. The air was as
crisp as fresh incense: Esha took a homespun joy in watching
Atarangi savour her every breath.