Tinder Stricken (25 page)

“
Steel-grey surely! They came stealing my
garden-plants,”
Clamshell huffed.
“Stealing and stealing
until I became red-white one day. A serpent reached for my
wing-line-tree, tried to steal! Violet hues toward my
wing-line-tree!”

“Ginkgo,” Atarangi added for Esha's
sake.

If Esha had a precious ginkgo tree that
someone tried to steal from her, she knew she would defend it, too.
Maybe even from an underground beast.

“
So I struck at the filth-snake. Tasted
green-blue-foul. The serpent left my tree but they still return.
One wears my stricken-mark and all demand in ice-black-colder
voices. Give, they say. Give or they will raise water. A purple and
metal-strike, that is its nature! Maybe snakes will raise all the
water, maybe they devour all land. I worry; I wind-burn because I
don't know.”

“Raise all the water?” Atarangi rubbed under
her mask, head shaking with the enormity of it. “In your territory?
I don't know that a serpent
could
—“

“I've heard tell of a serpent large enough
to encircle a fieldfellow's house and swallow it whole,” Esha said.
“Plenty of stories about their teeth like shovel blades. Nothing
about raising water.”

Humming, Atarangi considered that. “But we
can't say for certain. And if they're paid an amount of
lungta-plants ...”

“
They will leave my territory,”
Clamshell snapped.
“They have to. For all the sun-risings and
sun-settings in my shine-kindled-life, this land is mine. But I
speak this truth greater-leaping now, with my mate in dark-brown
and my chick orange-rising.”
She looked to Atarangi and to Esha
— proud, ruffled and defiant.
“Grey, like slate. I dig my claws
into this earth.”

In the calm of that thought, Atarangi blew a
long sigh through her teeth. She considered Rooftop preening the
chick's down into a same-looking mess, and Esha sitting on the
things a diplomat could afford.

“I will try talking to these serpents. Find
out what they want of your territory, exactly, and try to negotiate
a price you can give without smothering your flame.”

“Paying them a fair price?” Esha said. The
avalanche of stealing and retaliation was growing out of control,
far beyond one fieldwoman's portion in life. “Cowshit. All of it.
These serpents don't deserve one pine nut.”

Atarangi held her own opinions behind her
teeth, though it looked like they fought to get out. “I'll
talk
to them. If they speak any tongue that lungta can sift
into, I'll bargain the price down — low enough that it doesn't need
to include Esha's iron-tool.”

That was the kernel of this; Atarangi hadn't
forgotten. Esha could only nod.

“Now,” Atarangi said, “where can I find
these serpents? They're listening everywhere, I know — but where
can I
find
them?”

The fire withered away into its own ash
while plans were made. Clamshell added pine sticks yanked from a
treetop and them lit anew, with showers of sparks from her iron and
pyrite; her chick watched, entranced.

“
Small-kept fires make the earth better
for seed-nourishing.”
she told him.
“And they
white-hot-frighten our enemies, and call orange-kin to one place.
Humans use small-kept fire. Circled grey with rocks. They need the
heat on their brown-skin.”

“
I light a small-kept fire every day, for
Morning Sky to red-hot-cook our food,,”
Rooftop agreed.

They spoke of humans like inscrutable pets,
like dogs to be brushed. Esha considered speaking on behalf of her
own dignity — but then Clamshell stalked to her side and set the
chick in her lap.

“
Precious One, I put my kin in your
sight. Have yellow and red twined: vigilance.”

Her gaze turned up at Esha was hot as
pouring tin; the chick was weightlessly delicate. Esha agreed, and
gathered the soft, brown thing into her nested hands. “You can
trust me with him.”

It was enough to patch over any hate
Clamshell still had, because her crest feathers settled to calm.
She turned away in a dragging circle of stringfeathers and tied her
iron and pyrite back into her possession. The chick would have to
get a set of striking rocks when he was grown, too. Esha had never
considered it before, where phoenixes' striking tools came from:
they seemed like mere facts of being, like gwaras' teeth and yaks'
tails.

With the wheeled pack full of provisions,
and a fire's heat, and Atarangi's dagger that would serve better
than Esha's snapped excuse for a khukuri, Esha was left there with
a phoenix chick to hold. Atarangi left with the adult phoenixes.
Off to set some mad precedent of diplomacy that she wouldn't be
able to officially report, anyway.

And with that, Esha was left alone in the
forest with a child. A child not hers and not even human. Not that
she would have known what to do with a child if it were human — and
this, she told herself steely, was a line of thought that needed to
stop.

The chick stared up at her with simplicity
in its eyes. With a twitching of budding muscles, it raised crests
in what might have been a question.

Talk to him, the others had said. What did
she have to talk to this small creature about? What would any
human?

“Hail,” she stammered to it, with all the
lungta she could push out on her breath. “Yaah, I mean, dawn
yellow.”

The chick creaked, one note that the lungta
grasped at and couldn't match one meaning to. Maybe he couldn't
speak, or didn't want to speak, Esha wondered; his voice sounded
like a pump chain too rusty to flex.

Then, she supposed, maybe he would like
songs. Hymns and folk-songs were a language all people spoke, after
all. Every Janjuman worker sang the same songs on Rama's Day, even
the fieldworkers who needed betel to speak any Grewier at all.

Gathering her nerve — which was trying to
dig down into her gut and hide — Esha hummed a line of her
favourite sky-praise hymn. It took the chick's attention, clearly
enough: he stretched toward her, like trying to get closer to the
music.

“Well? Good enough?”

He chirped, chain-rusty.

Well, then, Esha thought while she retied
her sari to better nestle a bird inside. If he liked songs, he was
going to get songs.

The time passed quicker than Esha
anticipated. There was ample dry bamboo to be cut for fuel —
although Esha tapped careful on each stem before she cut, too
fearful to chance a hollowheart. She scrubbed the cookpots until
they gleamed clean; she fried chapattis and popped maize for future
quick devouring; and she roasted yam pieces to poke into the
chick's gaping beak.

The whole time, every song she knew fell
from her lips. It was like she wasn't alone.

Sunset coloured the sky, warm and heavy.
Esha stacked another tower of bamboo sticks while she gave in and
sang High Plateau songs.

If we need to make a plea

Speak with grace and mindfulness

With heaven's gifts we pave the way

Each path a mesh of tasteful words

Better spoken than the rest

“
Sounds like purple-human words.”

Esha choked, and she whirled to find
Clamshell standing not a stone's throw behind her, the cunning
feather-rat.

“Gods'
assholes!
Don't surprise me
like that!”

Atarangi came up the worn path, Rooftop
perched across her shoulders. “You truly need to stop cursing in
front of impressionable birds, Esha.”

“Yaah,” was all the response Esha graced
that with. “Did you find serpents?”

“We caught glimpse of one in deep
pond-water. Too murky to see how large it really was but I don't
believe it could swallow anyone's house.” Atarangi took a chapatti
and bit deep into it, as well as holding up cold yam pieces for
Rooftop to snatch joyful. “But it showed itself after we called out
all manner of hails and offers. You're singing truth, good
fieldwoman. “

Removing the chick from her sari — and
missing his living warmth immediately — Esha placed him before his
mother's blade-sharp stare. The chick rasped greeting and leaned
stumbling into his mother's chest feathers, which blunted
Clamshell's staring at Esha only a little.

“
I kindle first sparks of gratitude to
you, Precious One. But you sing untruth. Water-snakes spoke black
fangs at my territory and they want the food pale-blue-wrenched
from my chick's mouth. For them, no grace-voiced bargains.”

“My kin,” Atarangi replied, “Please
remember: you might not have a choice.”

Chapter 16

Atarangi spent another day setting out into
Clamshell's territory, flanked by phoenixes. She came back to
Esha's hot dinner, weary but bearing plenty more ideas.

The serpents might well be everywhere: they
had underground water veins to rise from. Atarangi touched Esha's
borrowed spade where it hung on her tool-sash, and told of the wet
soil they had found in the places Clamshell recalled seeing snakes'
faces. If they squeezed through those muddy passages — to menace a
phoenix or to snatch hard-grown plants — they could appear and
disappear at will.

“It'd explain why the yankvines grow so
plentiful here,” Esha said. “They like deep-drawn water.”

“I
have
noticed the yankvines.
They're woven thick as canvas in some places. Not directly over the
water veins, though; that doesn't follow at all.” Humming as she
stored that thought for later, Atarangi went on, “But when the
serpents wish to speak to Clamshell, they surface in the same
particular pond, a quarter kilometre from here.

“
When water snakes wish to air-clear
speak,”
Clamshell added bitter,
“or when water snakes
black-venom-fill with threats for spitting.”

With a regretful twist of her mouth,
Atarangi said, “A puddle is better for swimming than dry sand:
you're fortunate they'll speak at all to you. I only wish they'd
extend such grace to me.”

Esha turned her hands skyward. “They haven't
devoured you, or dragged you down into the mountain's depths.
That's more than I'd have expected.”

Crests rising tentative, Rooftop plucked at
Atarangi's sleeve. “Kin, maybe ...” He cackled to himself, words
tumbling untranslateable. “You arrived few days ago. Maybe you are
approaching them too rushing-fast.”

“You think so? I might try a
wait-and-welcome response?”

“Ah, yes, that could work,” Esha said. “Like
on Yam. You're the masked foreigner, folk whispered about you — but
now that you're a known presence, farming caste come to you as they
need. Actually, I came to you
because
I needed something
strange.”

“Mm, I see. These serpents might be as
frightened of humans as other humans are.” Atarangi laughed with
the sore truth of it. “Very well. Rooftop, Clamshell, here is our
plan for tomorrow. I'll stay back from the speaking pond, and I'll
hold my words. Rooftop, you ask the serpent to speak with me. We'll
see how we ultimately fare.”

That next day, Atarangi returned with the
last gold of sunset and she sank to sit by the fire, limp as linen.
Rooftop pressed to her side as though he might prop her upright;
Clamshell gazed at her with something like regret before reclaiming
her chick.

“How did the plan work?” Esha asked.

“Talked to one today,” she murmured . Even
when she spoke hushed, she still enunciated, still the clear and
functional words of a diplomat. “You were right, they didn't like
me so near to the water's edge. You and Rooftop had the same clever
thought.”

“You don't look well, sister,” Esha said.
She brought Atarangi rice topped with yam-filled dumplings, leaning
on the bamboo pole she had cut for herself; walking was becoming
her greatest chore of all.

Atarangi accepted the bowl in both hands.
She was quiet for a moment, with the sticky motions of a throat
reluctant to work. Wind chattered the treetops; Clamshell trilled
with her chick.

“I did speak with the serpents,” Atarangi
said. “Never in my life have I needed so much lungta.”

Understanding dawned on Esha, a memory of
every bitter speaking herb that had ever tasted like a risk to
swallow. “You've been eating the potent ones? Losing the stomach
for them?”

Humming answer, Atarangi pinched rice into a
round mouthful. She chewed like the rice might betray her, and then
shared her thoughts:

“I've never reached my own limit before. The
most potent herbs are rare and elusive for good reason, but these
next days trying to unwind serpent speech...” She shook her head.
“I'll simply need to use as much as I can endure.”

She made it sound like a poison. But then,
Atarangi did say that everything was poisonous if a person ate too
much.

“What did the serpents say?” Esha asked. “I
hope it was worth sickening yourself for.”

“Serpent speech ... It's like three tongues
at once. I'm asking them for negotiations and trying to sort out
the answers I'm getting in return. They aren't enthused about
negotiating, I know this much: they would rather just have the
contents of Clamshell's territory.”

“
Watersnakes have no morning-orange
ears,”
Clamshell added.
“Only indigo claws.”
She was
sitting with her chick by the fire, leading him in some knot-tying
game with pieces of yankvine.

With a tightening of her mouth, Atarangi
gathered another reluctant pinch of rice. “Rooftop. We— We need to
understand the serpents' language. Actually understand it with our
own heads. I can't eat so much herb every day — particularly the
Zhong goldthread, nngh.”

“
Tell Precious One! If you move the word
ideas enough to teach-tell her, you can teach-tell
yourself.”