Tinder Stricken (18 page)

“I'm sure Rooftop will find guards,”
Atarangi murmured. “Such beautiful trees.”

“Not as many guards here as past the
snowline. Plenty of rangers, though, and they've got cat's feet.
Don't harvest any branches.”

“Oh, I won't risk my sigil for cedar oil. If
I keep anything here,” Atarangi said, her voice falling to a
conspirator's murmur, “it'll be a mushroom.”

Through the towering cedars, Rooftop called
out clear — and he came soaring, rushing past the two of them and
whirling back around on finger-flared wings.

“Welcome back, my kin!” Atarangi raised a
bent arm, offering her elbow like a comfortable stool, and Rooftop
landed so short that he wobbled, fluttering. His crests undulated —
friendly and relieved, Esha's lungta traces said — as Atarangi
stroked his ruffed neck. And then to Esha's bright surprise he
turned gaze to her and repeated the friendly crest gesture.

Active guards were all headed away from
them, Rooftop reported and Atarangi helped translate. They were
free to seek a handful of the trees' mushrooms.

They considered making hurried camp among
the cedars, and said as much aloud several times. But a campsite
appeared in a bamboo grove at the cedars' edge, a newly minted site
with only a trace of ashes in the hearth pit and a market-new clay
statue of Parvati.

Dusk veiled the sky by the time Esha was
setting a cookpot into burning bamboo. “No mushroom hunting
tonight, I suppose,” she said, dry. She was privately grateful for
it; the day had already demanded too much of her bones and
Atarangi's provided pain herb wasn't hurrying to get to work.

“There's gathering I can do without leaving,
at least.” With her dagger point, Atarangi gestured to the
white-filmed bamboo stick she was fiddling with in her lap. “These
have more mushroom on them than I've seen anywhere.”

“Yaah,” Esha said, “that's a mushroom?”

“A colony of them, yes.”

Atarangi held up her dagger, showing the
harvest scraped onto the tip. Even gathered up, it looked more like
the residue on a rice pot than any mushroom Esha had ever seen.

“It's a wholesome enough food to bother
with, I've found,” Atarangi said. “Seems as though it draws lungta
from the bamboo and refines it further: there's plenty of
thought-sharpening essence in this mushroom and yet Tselayan folk
don't seem to know it's here.”

“We call it gwara spit,” Esha said. “I've
always heard tell that it's poisonous.”

“Mm, everything is poisonous if you eat too
much.”

“No one's ever reported a death due to
excess yams.”

From around the fuel shed, Rooftop's tufted
head appeared.
“Ee-am-zz?”

“Ah,” Atarangi beamed, “you've summoned him.
For another deliberation on the merits of yams.”

Bringing some bamboo sticks with him — wound
loose into his stringfeathers and dragging a path through
shrivelled-dry bamboo leaves — Rooftop strutted around the fire to
sit by Esha. He croaked something Esha didn't have enough speaking
lungta to sort out, something ending with a permission
question.

“One moment.” She dug into her satchel for
more of Atarangi's green snack foods: the arrival of bitter lungta
herbs in her diet had turned out to be a boon, improving her energy
without any of the stomach upset Esha would have expected from a
less human gut. “Alright, Rooftop, what is it?”

He fidgeted his wings, crests flared eager.
“I want to ask: you green-grow yams?”

“Yes, I work on a farm. Atarangi has told
you what castes are, hasn't she?”

Across the fire and the simmering lentils,
Atarangi smiled and held her peace.

But Rooftop bobbed agreement.
“Humans on
Tselaya Mountain are born to their work.”

“That's right.” It sounded simple, phrased
like that.

Rooftop trilled, and fidgeted more.
“Kin
Precious One? You dig in the ground, yes? With a
metal-foot?”

“A what?”

“Shovel,” Atarangi corrected.

“
Zz-ohh-vel. Can I look at your
shovel?”

“When it's this small, it's called a spade.
But very well.” She produced it from the bottom of her satchel, and
set it on the leaves for Rooftop to pick up tentative in his beak.
Esha had never considered how metalwork must look and feel to a
phoenix — but if she had only ever wielded raw pebbles of iron ore,
she would be impressed by a shovel blade, too. Or impressed by a
khukuri blade.

“
How does one use a shovel?”
Rooftop
asked, breaking Esha's thoughts.
“The same as a digging foot?
Dig for me to see, please!”

Esha smiled crooked; miracles came in simple
forms, sometimes. So for this bird's education, she drove the spade
into the earth like she did on any common day.

They ate dinner while Esha dug holes, just
like she would during Janjuman's workday. She even cut up a
spring-harvest yellowmeat and buried the slices near the bamboo
coppice, for Rooftop to see how to his beloved yams were
cultivated.

Once the last piece was buried, a whim bade
Esha to leave it there. That one yam would grow plenty more. Maybe
make a meal for some hungry traveller.

Esha was giving — because now, in these
irregular days, she was suddenly
able
to give. She wasn't a
faceless servant in Janjuman's roster, nor a failure to be erased
from history. She was a person, and she had lived and loved and
cried, and now, she could share. It was a feeling warmer than any
hearth coals. She even asked Rooftop if there was anything else
he'd like to know.

“It's fine to see you two getting along,”
Atarangi said, scraping gwara spit from the last bamboo stick.
“Please, Esha, answer all his questions so I won't need to.”

“Yaah, I'm no tutor.”

“You say that after teaching a fine lesson.
Hypocrisy!” Turning her dancing eyes toward them, Atarangi said,
“In seriousness, though — Rooftop, you should stop speaking Grewian
words. She needs to grow accustomed to the true nature of Tselayan
phoenix tongue.”

It felt like a door thrown open to winter
wind. Rooftop was speaking a mixed-breed pidgin language for her —
and the thief phoenix wasn't going to offer so much courtesy. Esha
turned her wide-open eyes to Rooftop: he shrank with
disappointment, too, and that was a pinch of solace.

But still, they talked. Talked well into the
depth of night, after Atarangi crawled into her tent and went
silently still, Esha and Rooftop kept talking. They shared more
thistle and kudzu and all the other indeterminate green bits the
good diplomat was feeding them.

Rooftop's phoenix cries still came through
the lungta as rainbow-coloured riddles, but with practice and with
Rooftop's cheerful patience, Esha began sorting them. All of his
colour words made sense except when they didn't. Lighter shades of
yellow stood for joy, warmth and new beginnings, or else
child-hearted whimsy. Green meant wholesome food or a constructed
object — unless it meant the uneasy mysteries of blue-green water.
Red was usually something good; white represented heat or light;
and every shade of brown under the sky seemed to mean something
starkly different. Phoenixes, Esha determined, spoke a thousand
colours of house flags.

Eventually, the late hour weighed insistent
on her eyelids. Esha had stretched her mind more today than in the
last decade of harvesting: that was ample to start with. She crept
into her tarpaulin tent and enjoyed collapsing into her blankets,
particularly the motion of her freed hair spilling as far as the
spiral goat horns would allow.

“
Precious One?”
came Rooftop's voice
at the tarpaulin's opening.

Panic bound Esha, the shame of her weak
humanity exposed for all to see— but the feeling had no teeth this
time because Rooftop was a
bird
, for gods' sake.

“Yes?” she answered soft. “I'm awake.”

Rooftop's head snaked around the tent's
edge, silhouetted by the dying embers. His crests were fluid shapes
that matched worry-flat human mouths in Esha's mind. Step by step,
he crept to Esha's bedside.
“Can we-two share more
cream-yellow-conversation?”

She stifled her groan. “Aren't you
tired?”

“
Sand-small. Kreh ...
stone-moderate.”
he admitted. His feet shuffled on leaves.
“Kin, I give you a fog-blue question. Maybe you will give me a
sight of white truth. You slime-green-hate us, we phoenix-kin? Yes,
or no?”

She pooled full of answers, there in the
dark. Esha wasn't sure she hated anything as much as the squelching
green mold that ruined food — but she had called phoenixes vermin,
and wished them death. Sometimes over a petty handful of
rupees.

“I used to hate phoenix-kin,” she murmured.
“Now ... Well, I'm not sure. I don't think I do, now that I've met
a phoenix. Doesn't seem like there's anything to hate about
you.”

His crests bounced high; that was how Esha
knew she had answered true.

“Do you like humans?” she asked.

Rooftop bobbed agreement.
“I do!
Sometimes humans make dust-brown-stupid mistakes. But I golden-like
humans. Some are bad? Purple. Orchid-purple-true. But turn this in
your grasp, my kin: if I eat a rotten fruit, my gut is
brown-rolling-sick — but I have no blue-green-hate for fruit. I
cannot do that. I will starve. Yes?”

However much it made Esha's mind throb, this
was a thought any wordsmith would call elegant.

“Yes,” she managed. “That's a fine thing to
say: a lot of people aren't that forgiving. Ah, well, maybe
Atarangi is.”

Fidgeting, Rooftop ducked low, his crests
disappearing and his voice rasping with Grewian again.
“Let me
say this so you will hold and understand, Precious One. Morning Sky
is my closest kin, my heart-wood.”
He clacked his beak.
“Heart-fire?
Krrek.
My close-friend.”

“Treasure those when you find them,” Esha
said soft.

“
I do, I treasure-hold her. Same with all
we phoenix-kin, we wearing Morning Sky's tail tags.”

“She chose you to come on this trip?
Fortunate for you.”

“
I have ... have the most lucky.”

“Mmm.”

“
Morning Sky is a rare-special friend.
But ... humans are maybe all good kin, I think. When they learn how
to be.”

Esha meant to answer, she truly did. But in
the time she took grasping a thought, Rooftop trilled a good-night
wish like a lullabye and shuffled away into the dark.

As she wafted into sleep, like lungta
through gathered clouds, it occurred to Esha that purple was the
song-flower hue, the rare colour hoarded by noble-born humans.
Purple, to a phoenix, meant greed.

Chapter 11

They packed up camp in the fog-hung morning,
the sky's lungta falling as a mist of silver-green through the
cedars. Atarangi looked well this morning, her topknot immaculately
braided and her every movement brisk.

“We should depart,” she said, “if we're
going to go to market and still reach the spire pass. Rooftop, we
haven't spoken with our dealmaker in these last days — please find
her and advise her that we'll arrive in, hmm. Two days. We will be
sure to bring trade goods the likes of which she's never seen.”

Esha had to admit it sounded tempting, the
idea of all the magic-rich delicacies Atarangi could possibly yield
from her deep pocket. She could only assume that a wild bird, used
to scratching for its own meals, would feel the same.

“Am your kin,” Rooftop agreed. He snapped up
a last dry kudzu shard from Atarangi's fingers, and flapped away,
upward.

As the fog lifted, Esha and Atarangi
reloaded wheeled pack and piled some of Esha's split bamboo on top,
to make one cart ready for market.

“Whoever made this device of yours made it
well,” Esha said, watching a spoked wheel's movement as they
pulled. “It doesn't even groan under this much weight.”

“It's been dependable as a dog for me. When
I was first leaving Tselaya's foothills, I had so many lock-chests
that ...”

Atarangi's steps slowed and the cart drew
past her: her gaze was trained on something in the lowgrowth.

“What is it?”

“That's ...?” Her pack strap tossed aside,
Atarangi hurried away crunching into the whipgrass. “It is! What is
the name— Bankakri flower!”

Well, Esha thought, she wasn't about to pull
the load alone. As she followed Atarangi and peered over her
shoulder, she saw what the commotion was: a frail plant with leaves
like lax-spread hands, topped with a pink bud.

“This was the first lungta foods I bought
with my diplomat's salary. A real taste of Tselaya, the herbalist
said. These last few years, I can seldom buy it, though.”

“Rangers cut too much, probably,” Esha said.
“And nobles hid anything that remains in some hothouse.”

Tracing the leaves with one finger, Atarangi
hummed. “Esha, may I borrow your spade?”

Old wariness returned to Esha, that feeling
that broken laws hung in the air. “You're digging it up?”

“For preservation,” Atarangi replied. “By me
or by the dealmaker phoenix: I haven't decided yet.”

Diplomats had wildflower harvesting rights,
but only when the proper reams of permissions were filled out. Esha
shifted on her feet. “If you think it's best.” She pulled her spade
from her belt — where she was once again wearing it, for Rooftop's
sake.

Atarangi had collected wild plants before;
it was clear from her technique with the spade, her careful teasing
of root threads from the moist-crumbling soil. She grew kudzu and
gods only knew what else in her esoteric house, so Esha supposed
she shouldn't have been surprised.

With the bankakri flower freed and cradled
in Atarangi's hand, Esha began twisting where she stood, scanning
the forest around them. Nerves pushed her to it: Atarangi was
wrapping a pocket-cloth around the root ball, the theft nearly
complete.