Tinder Stricken (2 page)

Menku's trait animal was a rat, or maybe a
mouse. It was a vulgar joke, but those in farming caste were close
to the earth in more ways than one: laughter burst from the woman
at the thought of a rat buried under mounded yoke straps, with a
baffled farm overseer commanding it to get to work. At Esha's right
elbow, Gita coughed through her mouthful of food and laughter,
sudden enough for Esha to laugh more and harder.

As the joke dissipated, everyone returned to
their meals, stirring wedges of chapatti bread deep in hopes of
finding millet. In the corner of Esha's vision, one of the new
farming girls leaned nearer to Menku.

“Since you've given us your confidence,” she
said, “I have a favour to ask. Have you any suggestions for
emerging ears? Mine get itchier every day.”

“Ah,” Menku said, smiling around the bone
she chewed, “I'm well versed with that. My eldest son has ear edges
emerging and he's always complaining.”

She hesitated. She glanced at Esha — a
snatched look that rippled through the other women, their eyes
landing on Esha and skating abashedly away. Then it was over and
they listened to Menku's story again, listening close as Menku
lowered her voice.

Esha carried on putting pork morsels into
her mouth and forcing them down. She couldn't have said where this
idea came from, that she was too frail of heart to think about
other women's plentiful families.

Other conversations muttered back to life;
clay clicked as fieldwomen gathered each other's clean-licked
bowls. Esha sat there, searingly aware of her stained self — until
Gita nudged her arm and spoke, near enough for Esha to feel damp
breath against her exposed human ear.

“Try not to think about it. I've got a
plan.”

“For what?” Esha asked low.

“Work,” Gita said simply. “Bring an extra
sack tomorrow.”

And then she hurried food into her mouth,
and blurted a joke to another harvest woman like she was as
innocent as a new day. Esha turned her face back to her own meal,
no longer seeing the pork and millet she put into her mouth. She
needed to support herself: she was low-caste, and a failure at many
things, but she was still a human being. That truth was easier to
swallow than the pork.

They gave their bowls to the dish-scourer —
a lanky Hendi man, who spoke not one word of Grewan but was always
quick to sign namaste to his fieldworker superiors. Then they
returned to work. As the sun rolled downward and the fieldwomen's
shadows stretched, Esha's bones were a bright-lit arch of effort.
Still, she reached the end of her row.

Gita was going to get both of them arrested
someday. The Empire punished cunning behaviour and even Janjuman's
field sisters couldn't know about Gita's ideas. But Esha and Gita
were alike: unmarried, and childless, and fallen through the
lattices of honourable custom. Esha needed coins in her pocket and
more than that, coins in her savings chest, because the goat loomed
over her human self and she was forty-eight, only forty-eight. She
was in no position to refuse a plan.

Knowing that Gita needed an accomplice at
least made one decision easier. If she was going to do any service
to her best friend's plan, she would surely need to walk. She
couldn't let her goat-plagued body get in the way.

The Janjuman clerk checked her nameplate
despite knowing perfectly well who she was, and then Esha received
her day's packet of rupees to hold tight.

She was dusty and sweat-damp, but her
blackflag trader wouldn't mind. Esha set out for Jhamsik District,
passing droves of other farmers headed for their homes. A few
walked the same direction as Esha, toward market. Hopefully they
needed millet or pine pitch, not contraband herbs; Esha was in no
mood to fake innocence to her caste-fellows.

The central road led past Yam Plateau's
other farms, the footprint-speckled dirt expanses that Esha's
memory coloured vivid with healthy leaves. Then came a patch of
free-use forest — bamboo and pine trees cut to stumps, with
replacements already racing skyward. Sunset painted the road
orange, illuminating every cartwheel groove and hoofprint. Houses
sprang up again — higher-caste ones with more tin and brick than
bamboo, crowded together under the blaze-coloured evening sky.
Above all of it, the skybound lungta was gold now, like warm stars
too joyful to stay still.

Housing lots grew larger near the plaza.
Fine-dressed merchants and craftsmen passed between houses of
lacquered bamboo and holy-scripted bricks. Flags fluttered messages
on every roof edge: green prayers for health; yellow requests for
jute fibre and goat milk; red marriage flags twirling like the very
young women who sought husbands. Most of the other fieldworkers
joined the nameplate-checking line, where guards permitted access
to the market. A few had vanished, and it was time for Esha to do
the same.

Esha turned toward the mountainside, into
the single great shadow cast down from Maize Plateau. She wound her
arms together against the chill and walked a long-remembered
pattern of turns between homes. With side-cast eyes, she checked
often to make sure she wasn't being followed: the red-uniformed
guards paid her no mind. Even if they decided to interrogate her,
she would say that she needed cloth dyed for a new, proper set of
houseflags. That was a reasonable enough excuse.

Her preferred blackflag trader was Ren the
dyemaker. He lived in a mid-caste neighbourhood — able to work with
moderately precious herbs, yet only suffer guard inspections twice
each month. He was a foreigner from distant Zhongmin State, but he
had stayed rooted on Tselaya long enough to look familiar to Esha's
eyes.

And despite his rank, Ren's home was exactly
as shabby as the last time Esha had seen it. A hole still showed in
the bamboo shingle roof, crying out for repair. Gwara demons still
piled beside the front door, featureless mounds of hair slurping at
the street dirt. Damned things ate perfectly good dropped rupees
and then hung around advertising the fact. Esha shooed them with a
slow-swung kick and they rolled away, scattering into the alleys
with a rustle of dry hair.

Before she knocked, Esha checked the
houseflags. Someone in guard caste wouldn't know to look for it,
but Ren's leftmost white flag still had a black resin smudge on its
edge. Still marked an ignoble, under-table trader — marked by Ren
himself. Esha doubted this man would ever change, but it was
prudent to check before she spoke dishonourably.

He welcomed her inside. In the stinking
light of a tallow candle, Ren looked rougher-hewn than the last
time Esha had seen him: thinner in the arms, strained in the face,
his headwrap sitting low enough to touch his eyebrows. But he
freely returned Esha's namaste and welcomed her inside with a
jabbering of Zhong, hurrying to shave a betel nut against his
straight-bladed knife. That was a comforting truth, along with
rain, taxes, and the fleeting nature of humanity. Betel nut could
always begin a conversation.

“Good evening,” Ren finally bade her after a
moment's chewing. His voice came out with the rattling echo of
betel growing in a windy valley; his teeth were dark-stained from
many such greetings. “What would you like this time, Esha?”

This time,
as though Esha came every
day. She was no such addict. But she held back her tart thoughts
and asked for painkiller. For her bones.

“Bones?” He hissed, and turned toward his
supply cabinet while slipping another shaving of betel between his
front teeth. “Not much a small-time dealer like me can do about
that. I've got a little tsupira that's yours if you have the coin,
but for more of it, you'll need to ask my associate.”

“That Manyori woman?”

“That is her, yes.”

Esha had heard of the new Manyori family
living on Yam Plateau. It was rare enough to see ocean-farers so
far up Tselaya's peak, but rarer still that one of them had been
granted diplomat caste. The diplomat's sister, however, was less
honourable: she dealt gladtar right under the diplomat's nose. In
Esha's life-seasoned opinion, knocking on that household's door
would be a better way to get demerits than medicine.

She threw a hand. “Yaah, I don't want to
seek out anyone else — and especially not some stranger. The most
potent thing you have will do fine.”

Ren shook his head, a wagging of headwrap
ties over his hunched shoulders. But he produced a folded slip of
bamboo paper with neat-trimmed stems inside; Esha gave in return
five rupees from her day's earnings, wooden coins she barely got to
touch before they were gone.

“This is all I have,” Ren said. He slid the
rupees apart, counting them again for good measure. “I hope heaven
smiles on you.”

“Kind thanks to you. Stay honourable.”

“I surely won't!”

That stale joke gave Esha a smile, same as
always. Walking back through the mountain's shade, beginning to
shiver in the night's chill, she had to remind herself that honour
was something to want.

One rupee remained in her pocket. It went
immediately into Esha's savings chest — one more little coin that
couldn't pay for discreet walls and a kind-tempered nurse. Virtuous
hard work wasn't going to pay Esha's bills — but maybe Gita's plan
could.

Chapter
2

That morning, over millet, pickles and
buttered tea, Esha stared at her painkiller contraband in its slip
of paper. Eventually she took a quarter of the herb into her mouth,
one musk-fragrant twig, and chewed thoroughly. The full painkilling
effect would take time and digestion, but she already felt the
lungta energies releasing with each bite, the creeping
breath-of-life tingling in her spit and soaking into her head. The
pain in her ankles began to subside.

At least, Esha convinced herself, she could
be strong hands and feet to aid Gita's keen mind.

“So,” Esha asked, bent over a new day's yam
row, “What are my extra sacks for?”

“A phoenix,” Gita said. Her black eyes
shone, lacquered over with impish ideas. “I saw it in the fallows.
The two of us can surely outwit one bird. We'll share the
bounty.”

Esha tightened her mouth. “If we don't share
demerit points on our records. Or a jail cell. I'll be in a jail
cell with you one day, Gita, I'm sure of it.”

Gita spat a laugh, waving her hand. “Believe
me, the edge guards never check our fallow fields more than twice a
day. They always follow our east rail a little before sunset. We'll
have time.”

That wasn't the kind of detail Esha noticed:
she kept her eyes on her hands because careless work killed
perfectly good plants.

“If you're sure,” she ventured.

“Entirely.”

“We'll claim to be defending the
fields?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And then we'll say that we failed to catch
the bird?” A claim made after the bird was safely in a blackflag's
hands, and the reward safely split between their two pockets.

Gita turned back to planting. “If anyone
thinks we've lied, how will they prove it?”

“Sky as my witness,” Esha murmured, “This is
madness. All I want is a nurse to wash my hair.”

“Spit on that — I'll be washing your hair.
Until I can't find a human hair left on you.”

Much as she felt guilty for it, Esha was
glad. Gita was the only one who had laid eyes on Esha's goat horns
— and Esha was largely sure that Gita hadn't shown her deer pelt to
anyone else. As the elder of the two, Esha would succumb first and
be released to the mountain slopes, like they planned.

Some farm women weren't so fortunate. They
worked slower each day, bodies warping, their rags and wraps
overgrowing them like blight but unable to hide the inevitable.
Eventually, the moment came when they weren't a person any longer.
Just a confused animal making a scene.

“Well?” Gita asked. “We're doing this?”

In her sweat-clammy clothing — humble, faded
things with fur hidden underneath —Esha hesitated. They were just
trapping a phoenix, a nuisance animal by anyone's standard. How,
she asked her sullied self, was this plan any worse than buying
unlicensed medicines? It wasn't, really.

“When?” she decided.

Gita showed her betel-stained teeth,
delighted. “Later. So there won't be enough light to bother
reporting back to the field.”

It was amazing how little a person could be
grateful for. But Esha was still kindled at the thought of a
bounty. They wouldn't even need to report it to Janjuman's
overseers — overseers who would report the phoenix catch
honourably, to a registered trapper, and take a fat cut of the
payout.

“I'll do whatever you wish,“ Esha told Gita.
“Just don't ask me to chase the pest on these legs.” Regardless of
that thought, she was smiling.

The evening meal was still mostly pork, with
watery gravy, a spoonful of millet and even some string-thin shreds
of cabbage. It was enough green food to prevent a civil war.

While Esha ate her humble meal, she listened
to the other women Of The Fields, their voices familiar as the
wind.

“When I say a fatty salve helps the itch,”
Menku said today, “I truly mean a fatty one. Mostly lard.”

“That's what I used,” the new girl insisted.
“I prayed it would work, but it didn't!”

Menku hummed. “I've heard tell that horns
are worse.”

That was true; Esha held her peace and
watched Menku turn to a stoop-backed elder field worker — the only
one with taller headwraps than Esha.

But she didn't get an answer before the
conversations all died. The plough yaks' panicked grunting rose
loud outside, and then the nowhere-and-everywhere humming of an
earthquake was upon them.

Bowls fell to the floor, wobbling in
circles. Everyone was wide-eyed and surging toward the walls,
pressing as far from the ceiling's midpoint as possible. Dozens of
arms clutched field-sisters close, shielding youngest and oldest as
the tremors worsened; Esha had Gita's hand laced tight in hers and
she didn't remember when that happened.