Tinder Stricken (24 page)

Perching beside a garlic garden inside a
half-rotten cedar branch, Clamshell frowned with her crests.
“This is the only way to keep food territories away from enemy
theft. Sky protects, cloud-blue is refuge.”

“Is that why you're planting in trees?”
Atarangi tried. “Someone is stealing your plants?”

Clamshell stared at the garlic's green
spears like into a mug of rice beer.
“Why! Before my egg
movement-spark-lived, I readied growing-ground. Burned the unfood
plants, waited for the ( )-lungta to rain-blue-drift down into the
earth. I earth-planted seeds. This is custom! Care for divine fire,
and as yellow deepens to red, divine fire will feed body and
being.”

Phoenix fires were grudgingly accepted in
wild areas, when they only burned a pittance of gumgrass and
brown-mounded leaves. This was a truth Esha knew but had never
lived herself.

“
Before any seeds sprouted, my territory
lines moved. My earth-wisdom said not here. What can a winged-one
do? I heart-gathered kindling orange. I burned more and I
earth-planted new seeds. The territory lines moved again.”

She swooped at the ground, claws bared —
only to rake up mulch-chunky dirt and fist it in her scaly feet,
and fly back to the garlic garden.

“
I puke at circumstance!
Blacken-sky-whitely! I've finished!”
She patted the soil fierce
into place around tender greens.
“No more moving. This is home
territory; this one will not move again.”

Clamshell flew away, a low, loping flight
toward her next miniature farm. Atarangi hurried to keep up, her
cloak a shaggy torch-light through the trunks and needles.

Left peacefully behind, Esha dragged herself
upright and balanced on her rusty-sore legs. Rooftop perched in a
juniper beside her, watching her every movement like it was his
care-laced responsibility.

“As much as I spit on my lot in life
sometimes,” Esha murmured to him, “I'm blessed compared to our new
kin. I'd be angry if I had to abandon my home and my garden plot
for no plain reason like that.”

Rooftop creaked sadly, a sympathy echoed in
his wilting crests.
“Kin Clamshell needs help. Morning Sky can
give that help, I yellow-fire-hope.”

“Does she really help phoenixes? Gathering
them all into her one home?”

Rooftop tipped his head, crests adjusting
like levelling sand:
please explain,
he silently said.

“Aah, what I mean is ... Clamshell's wild
territory is big enough to fly around in. She has rangers nosing
around in it and mountain cats to watch for, but she can spread her
wings and grow any seeds she can snatch. Wouldn't ... wouldn't
phoenixes rather be free? Would you rather live in the forest than
in a house on Yam Plateau?”

Cackling mild in his throat, Clamshell
followed alongside the rolling pack with wing-buoyed hops.

“
I go anywhere Morning Sky goes. Big
human-house, small human-house, it doesn't heart-matter. But
Precious One ...
Krrrih.
We phoenixes follow rules, too.
Forest birds aren't free. Clamshell is black-fright-trapped by
living here – you see?”

“That's true.” Esha rubbed at her neck and
the welling goat hair kept itching. “Sorry. I'm trying to learn all
these phoenix ways.”

“
Growing-mounds of learning,”
he
agreed.
“I think Clamshell-kin will teach, too.”

They lagged behind Clamshell and Atarangi,
catching up in time to glimpse a new garden in the trees before
they were left behind again. Atarangi gave them a regretful smile;
she had a far smaller pailful of regrets but Esha appreciated the
fact of it.

“Rooftop,” Atarangi said after another bare
meeting, “I'd like you to run a wing errand for me.”

“
Am your kin.”

“Bring herbs from our home reserve. A
green-gradient variety, and as much as you can carry.”

Rooftop bobbed affirmative.

“And I don't imagine I need to say such, but
check that all is well at home. Bring a new report about this trip
to the rest of our tagged friends — however much you're honour-able
to tell them about Clamshell.”

Esha hadn't considered it before: in a
walled and windowed house, four phoenixes waited for Atarangi. She
suddenly hoped for their health, left alone without their human
flock-leader or whatever they considered Atarangi.

“The others are minding our Yam home,”
Atarangi explained for Esha's sake. “And they're tending my plants,
since phoenixes have such a way with a garden.”

It was a picture Esha simple couldn't
imagine. Not for lack of seeing clever phoenixes — just for
wondering where the hell Atarangi grew anything in such a
mostly-ordinary Yam home. Rooftop winged away through the
rain-darkening clouds, and Esha resolved to ask him where the
plants were secreted away in Atarangi's Tselayan life. In her side
room, maybe. Or somewhere more clever than that.

When Esha looked to Clamshell, there was a
wondering shine in her eyes.

“
A flock of six?”
she asked.
“All
wing-sure, all white-blaze-blooded?”

“They are,” Atarangi said proud.

“I've met some of them,” Esha added. “They,
aah ... seem like fine birds.”

With considering crests, Clamshell resettled
her wings. She turned one direction on her perch, then another,
like her whims were changing.

“
I will show you,”
she decided then,
a choice spat like relief.
“Kin, follow this way. You red-gather
and spark-kindle; you should meet my chick.”

Clamshell led them through charred pines
with grey soil at their feet, and past rocky sand with stones
lancing up, heavenward. Up a hillock's faint-worn path and into a
stand of leafless, brown bamboo. There were cut stumps standing
knee-high; Esha parked the wheeled pack against one of them before
she sat.

After flying up high and wheeling twice,
Clamshell landed and gave a low croak of explanation:
“They
won't claw-dirt-disturb this place. Green draws green: this is why
I chose it.”

With no pause for questions, she faced the
dead bamboo and began to sing. It was a creaking-voiced song with a
binding beat too vague for Esha to grasp, a line of phoenix words
arranged to make a mosiac of a tune. As she pressed her whole
head's worth of kudzu lungta, Esha managed to match Grewian to it:
beige, cream yellow, honey
. All colours — Clamshell was
singing a list of colours, more finely distinguished colours than
Esha's human tongue could describe.

Atarangi shifted close enough to clasp
Esha's arm, tight with excitement; maybe one of her known languages
had the right words.

Clamshell stopped when her colour-song
reached daylight yellow hues. She canted her head, and listened.
Whistling answered her — a smaller whistling than any wind could
make.

There in the bamboo's papery base — where
Esha had looked two heartbeats ago and noticed nothing — was a
squirming bundle of motley brown feathers. A head stretched out,
squinting black-glass eyes like its mother's, and at a touch of
Clamshell's beak it gaped a seeking mouth.

This was a phoenix chick, the thing Esha had
never seen, never even considered to exist. She might have walked
past dozens of these hidden in plain sight. Crafty birds. She
helplessly smiled, watching Clamshell chose nuts and greens from
her stringfeathers to fill that beak with.

“Rooftop looked like that,” Atarangi
murmured by Esha's ear, “when I first came upon him.”

That was no cure for Esha's smiling
problem.

They sat, at Atarangi's suggestion and
Esha's legs' insistence. Lungta food disappeared down the chick's
scrawny throat, gulp by gulp until it closed its cavernous mouth
and looked, blinking, to Esha and Atarangi.

“
These two, they are humans,”
Clamshell said. She shuffled her feet in the leaf rot.
“They are
kin of our new ally—“
she said with a beak-drawn line in the
air, a scribbled approximation of Rooftop's name shingle,
“—and
the knot tightens now to make them our kin.”

The chick kept staring, and blinking. It
looked as bleary as Gita after a night's smoking and gossiping;
that thought was plenty warm but it evaporated as feathers lifted
off the chick's head. Not full, expressive crest fans yet, but
still a question piped in a silent voice.

“
The blood-hot words I said at
humans,”
Clamshell began,
“are sometimes true. Only some
humans. Some orange-bind and yellow-sparking-share.”

She picked the chick up in her beak, set it
on her back like a shawl too small to wear, and she walked on
meticulous steps toward them.

“
This way,”
Clamshell said. She
sounded more tired, suddenly, than Esha ever had after a day in the
fields.
“I move him like water, ever-shifting. To
withered-dun-brown trees for shelter.”

“That's fine for keeping rangers and plant
poachers away from him,” Esha said. “But any person coming to cut
fuel for their fire ...”

“Clamshell, my kin.” Atarangi reached into
her cloak and produced herb candies, bittersweet morsels to match
her words. “Your son is a treasure and he should live in a
verdant-calm home. Please, tell us who these enemies are, and why
they want so much lungta.”

“
Water-snakes,”
Clamshell said. It
burst from her like a cannon shot and hot confession followed:
“Water-snakes! They purple-swim under the earth, they watch
every wingbeat I make. This land, this territory, they're taking it
by fading-cooling sparks!”

That did sound like water serpents, Esha
thought. And as she looked at the bamboo stems all around, a
shudder flensed down her back.

“Wait,” Atarangi said, “they're watching
your every — They're
watching
you with their
eyes
?”

Clamshell bobbed hard. “
Water-eyes in
holes — they rise from the earth when no-kin watches.”
Shuffling, turning to touch her chick's downy head, she added,
“Maybe blue-green serpents watch this shelter-gathering, and
hear these flame-words ... Redden it. Redden everything, no more
silence from me. You-kin will have my truth.”

They scraped a fire pit into the sand and
stones, and lit a handful of twigs and green pine; the smoke would
guide Rooftop to them. There in a grove of wilted things, Esha
listened as Atarangi sifted Clamshell's words.

She and her mate worked this plateau's
wilds, two phoenixes matched like a pair of striking-rocks and just
as glorious when they worked fire together. They had seeds and
stalks planted in the winter soil, and yearling bushes ready to
blossom: a supply of nourishing lungta food for the egg they bore
and hatched.

Until one day, her mate didn't return from
seed-foraging. This was a provision of any phoenix's life: flames
leaped bright only until they faded.

“Umber and azure to your heart,” Atarangi
said, blanket-soft. “It must be trying, without him.”

“I can feed my own flame. I could feed my
young one with this territory that is mine. But these most recent
season-fragments, the earth shakes and the lines move, always
moving ...” Clamshell tossed her head low, like a human might spit.
“The shaking and the water-flows rearranging — maybe these brought
the serpents.”

Rooftop arrived, crying a dawn greeting as
he glided to earth. He was so laden with herbs in his
stringfeathers and twine-wrapped shoulders, and burdened by the
clay pot of sprouts in his claws, Esha wondered that he had flown
at all.

But all of them, human and bird alike, took
a rejuvenating moment to chew shared lungta foliage. When one leaf
snapped in Clamshell's beak, the phoenix chick gaped his own .

“He knows which cart brings his rice,”
Atarangi laughed. “Let us mind the little one, kin Clamshell.
Please, take some green-bracing food and continue giving us your
story.”

She crest-flexed and considered it. She
stuffed a bouquet of green into the chick's mouth. And after a
glance around — lingering on Esha too long to be a compliment —
Clamshell shrank with resignation. She put her chick on the ground,
careful as though he might tip over and break. The moment Clamshell
reached for herb, her child stood on scaly, elastic stubs that
passed for legs and tottered toward Rooftop. Fine choice of
playmate, Esha thought.

Still watching — always watching — Clamshell
ripped and swallowed the green-frilled edges of a pak choi
leaf.

“You think the earth-shaking and
water-flowing brought the serpents?” Atarangi prompted her.

With a drawn breath and a rueful pause,
Clamshell kept speaking.

The serpents appeared first in her
waterways, she said. Ponds, and the Millworks's fish-lakes. They
stole germinating things from Clamshell's burned gardens — and she
related it with her feathers rising, with a hotly returning
spite.

But that was ordinary for a phoenix, to lose
a leaf one day and a seed the next. Ordinary to glimpse a sinuous
shape in the water's shadows. For a time, Clamshell ignored them
and kept her chick well away from water's banks. Soon, the serpents
began rising more menacing in her territory — up from the
ground.

“Did they rise near bamboo?” Esha asked: she
couldn't contain her need to know.

“
Some cloud-sky times? Yes and no?”
Clamshell clacked her beak and kept on.

“Humans just— We say they rise near bamboo.”
Esha resolved to hold her tongue from then on.

The serpents rose, in any case, and they
spoke to Clamshell —spoke in a clicking she didn't understand until
she had eaten most of the leaves off a kudzu one day. The serpents
wanted her territory. Her land and all its troves. If she left
without resistance, there would be nothing for her to fear.

“Good grace,” Atarangi murmured,”I've never
heard of such. Humans pushing phoenixes out, or other birds, but
never this. They wanted your lungta reserves?”