Tinder Stricken (32 page)

After nerve-strung moment, Sureness's teeth
began to clack and Esha's lungta translated:

“
Admonishment: we ignore our guests.
Proclamation: let us speak with toothtap and rudiment fins, so
those ones may understand. They apologize for their crudeness, but
most forms of braidspeak are incompatible with their physiology,
and beyond their understanding.”

Hurt flared in Esha's chest: she wasn't
crude for being born a finless human. It was a nearly familiar
feeling of indignity, a feeling like counting goat hairs in the
mirror — but at least none of these serpents stared much at her
bared horns and ears. Their gazes stayed mostly at Esha's hip
level. Like her relaxed arms and hands were the most alarming thing
they could imagine.

“
Statement:“
Nimble tried, his
clicking uneven,
“these ones are capable of reading basic runes
through lungta application. Suggestion: if...”

He trailed off as Atarangi strode forward.
She looked as sure as royalty; Rooftop sat on her shoulder, tail
feathers spilling down her back like a makeshift cloak. Her
lungta-thick voice rustled to command the room:

“Request: these ones need lodgings, and
sparing amounts of Deepling patience. Statement: Humans suffer from
cold if we do not cover our bodies. Humans speak almost entirely
with our mouths and any dishonesty will come from there. Request:
try to understand. In exchange, these ones will provide what lungta
two humans can.”

Quiet bolted through the gathered serpents,
a lull in a windstorm.

“
Statement:“
Rooftop croaked into the
quiet,
“these humans are this-one's closest allies. These ones
are worthy of trust.”

His words moved serpent fins.

“
Query:“
the lead guard clicked at
them both, paced out as though for a child,
“why do these ones
pursue serpent affairs?”

“Statement: dealings with a landholder
phoenix led Human Triad to these ones. Now, this one believes that
Human Triad and Deepling Community might benefit from each
other.”

“
Query: is that benefit meant to be the
provision of binder-food? Simple grass seed with less than ( )
rises of lungta per ( )?”

Atarangi hesitated. Offering popped maize
didn't usually meet with spite; Esha felt that chill of confusion,
too.

“Statement: there are many more plants these
ones might offer. Request: tell us which are valuable to the
Community. This plant, for example.”

She came to the wheeled pack and nudged
Esha's legs aside, to open the side compartment full of lock-boxed
plants.

“This plant,” she repeated, and flicked open
locks as she strode sure into the brunt of serpent attention.

They watched, postures coiling wary. Then as
Atarangi opened the box — and lifted out the wilting but whole
bankakri flower — the serpents loosened like the welcome warmth of
spring.

The negotiations came more freely, once a
guard serpent accepted the boxed bankakri flower and bolted
quicksilver away. Atarangi gave their names — including a more
mangled version of her own name, Water Light, since
morning
wouldn't seem to fit through lungta's discerning mesh and
sky
garnered reactions like it was serpent profanity.
Rooftop's name didn't translate, either: he became Ceiling, a word
Esha supposed was a compliment. Serpent ceilings were beautifully
decorated, if nothing else.

Soon, the lead guard serpent issued
small-circuit security clearance to two humans and a phoenix, they
who are Human Triad. With their stone leaves full of earthshifted
writing, the guard serpents dispersed, to disappear into water
pools at the room's corners. Some of the guards slipped into the
water but circled immediately back out, and took posts along the
walls where they stood sentinel, watching.

Sureness was the only guard serpent by their
sides now; Nimble's fins trembled with the exertion of waiting and
Sureness wound a barbel brief into his, a sharing of calm. Then
they both circled away.

Another wall of serpents waited, with their
attentions fixed hopeful on the Human Triad. These ones were closer
to Nimble's size, and carrying lumps of glinting metals. As a brave
few approached, they shifted their lumps into writing leaves the
size of blankets.

Once Esha understood, she didn't mind their
gathering enormity so much: these serpents were scribes. They came
to document everything worth knowing.

They begged attention from Atarangi and
Rooftop, the more skilled speakers who had aphorisms worth
recording. Esha sat on her wheeled cart, uneasy no matter how she
shifted her shrieking joints. But soon, a triad of serpents noticed
her and approached, slithering gradual and fluid as though sharp
motions might make Esha somehow capable of bolting.

“
Query:“
one asked her,
“this one
is Precious One?”

“Statement: this one is.” Their language
made a building effort out of even the simplest ideas; Esha hoped
she had enough bricks for anything she might want to say.

“
Request: will you answer our
queries?”

She supposed she could try.

In the unchanging light of the glass bulbs,
she answered their endless questions. About all the reasons she was
wearing clothing, and how flexible her hands were, and how she
survived in the wind-scoured, light-baked conditions of the
surface. It seemed, Esha thought with a patience-sugared amusement,
that serpents found humans as hardy as yaks and only a little more
intelligent.

“Query:“ a scribe asked, “the human species
cannot earthshift, not even slight?”

“No, we can't. Lungta is for speaking, and
nourishing our bodies. That's mostly it.”

The flexing fins around Esha spoke one clear
message:
oh, poor things.

“
Assurance:“
another scribe clicked,
“your kind will reach ( ) advent, in some future pulse.”

That felt like sincerest reassurance — but
it was a thought that rippled uncomfortable through the rest of the
scribe triad.

“
Addendum: human ones earthshift with
muscle-force?”
one tried.
“With claws,
hypothetically?”

“Claws? Oh.” Esha held up her hand to smile
at her hoof-thick fingernails. “These aren't claws, they're only
nails. Mine are thicker than most humans', but it's no matter: I
don't dig with them. We use spades for that, we farmers. It's
something I always—“

Esha was explaining, digging into the pack
underneath her and drawing out her farming spade — and in that
simple instant, the serpents' pinning fins made no sense. Neither
did their scrambling, climbing backward over themselves in panicked
loops as their toothy mouths opened and barking cries tore out.
Ringed with the chaos, holding the ordinary handle of her farming
tool, Esha didn't understand and she sat frozen as a guard serpent
darted to the forefront and threw their spread hands against the
floor. A force like gale wind crashed against Esha and she was on
the rock ground, joints stabbed with the impact — and Esha couldn't
move, couldn't even draw a breath.

“No!” came Atarangi's shout. She ran to a
guard with open hands, and her terror-wide eyes locked with Esha's
for a heartbeat. “Query: what wrong did she commit?”

Statement,
the guard was clacking
fierce.
Weapon. Not tolerate hostility.

“C-Can't,” Esha murmured with what air she
had. There was rock curled cold and enormous around her, so tight
that she could feel her hammering heart against her emptied
lungs.

“It wasn't— Statement: the situation was
misunderstood. Esha, what was your—“

Their eyes locked again. This time, Atarangi
saw the full trouble.

“Alarm: this human is dying! Release her!
Release her body, she needs air!”

Clicking rang harsher. Black spots consumed
Esha's vision. Serpents came wet-sliding to her side and then the
pressure was gone, and Esha was staring at wet-speckled rock while
gasping deep and thanking each and every god.

“Esha!” Human hands laid on her, Atarangi's
warmth with Rooftop's thin keening above her. “Breathe, kin. Just
breathe.”

“I—I thought ...”

“It's alright.”

She left too soon, to ask in a steely voice
what the meaning of that was.

The meaning, it turned out after a timeless
moment of discussion, was an imagined attack. A glimpse of steel in
a human's hand: that typically meant blood spilling a moment later.
An idiotic assumption, said Esha's gut. It was a demeaning,
gossip-slimy thing to claim, on a mountain where guards carried
blades and humans shunned anything not like them.

The scribes had fled. Esha climbed back onto
the wheeled pack, and dug out herb to chew, and waited for her
shaking to subside.

In the shadows of Esha's side vision, a new
serpent crept closer.

“
Request:“
she asked, clicking quiet
and steady as two sewing thimbles,
“may this one make
queries?”
She straightened to full torso-height: she stood
barely taller than Atarangi, with a round-eyed face as delicate as
a cat's.

Esha took another deep breath for good
measure, deep enough to taste the moisture and must of the cave.
She rubbed her face, though her terror tears were already gone.
“You may.”

“
Query: that one was unable to respire,
despite your head remaining fully freed. Are human lungs not the
round nodes on the sides of your heads?”

That took a moment to percolate into
understanding. Then Esha buried her forehead in her palm and smiled
the widest, purest smile she had ever known.

“Ears. We call those ears.”

Esha spent more time with Bravery, the new
little scribe. Together, they drew ugly but highly accurate
diagrams of humans and serpents, with arrows detailing how each one
drew breath.

“
Gratitude:“
Bravery told her,
rolling the metal leaves into manageable tubes,
“this
information enriches the Community. Query: may this one ask further
queries later?”

With her tired-wobbling vision and her body
sore in new and old places, Esha nodded. “I see no reason why
not.”

Atarangi lost her strength soon after that.
She sank against the wheeled cart and ate the slightly crushed
chapattis Esha passed her.

“
Morning Sky learned a lot today,”
Rooftop said, while sharing the pack's sitting space with Esha.
“This is a new-growing field for us to take seeds from.”

“That's fine,” Esha said. “I hope I'm not
the pigshit turned into the soil, though.”

“Language,” Atarangi murmured.

It was the last time she spoke that evening:
some serpents dragged mats of green-dense moss over and laid them
out as a semblance of human beds. Despite the pond slime smell, it
was the most welcome thing Esha had ever laid her head on.

Chapter 21

Time didn't make any more sense when Esha
awoke. She felt in her sinews that it was morning. Rooftop tried to
explain the pulses — apparently some timing system related to the
golden tube along one wall — but he folded his crests confused once
Esha asked how long a
pulse
was supposed to be.

With water, betel nut and cold rice sitting
uneasy in her belly, Esha called a guard serpent over. It made
everything inside her shake with fear, her ingrained obedience and
her fear of gigantic strangers, too, but she couldn't live in a
place where a digging spade was an object of terror.

“Statement:“ she said uneasy, hoping she was
getting the patterns right, “my spade, the metal thing I had
earlier. It can't injure anything. Request: I can show you?”

After fin-folding hesitation, the serpent
went to a phalanx of others. They all came, fanning to surround
Esha: one held the spade in a tight-wound barbel, high above Esha's
reach.

“You can hold it lower. Statement: it's for
growing plants. The edges aren't sharp. You— Query: you must have
noticed that it isn't sharp?”

Surprise rippled through the serpents
present. They were astonished that humans were complex enough to
plant things and then wait, Esha gathered from their flicking and
tendril-folding. Graceful of them to discuss it in front of a yam
farmer.

But they gave the spade back, poised for the
consequences. With open hands, Esha reached to the spade's metal
edge and put the pad of her thumb against it. She pressed, and then
lifted the thumb so the serpents could see the complete lack of
blood. They clicked; their snake bodies untensed.

“We use these to scoop the soil. Because we
don't have earth-moving lungta — you recall?”

“
Query:“
one clacked,
“humans use
metal tools for more than aggression?”

“Yaah, yes, we have plenty of tools.” Esha's
eyes went wide. “Did you think that every metal thing we hold is a
weapon?”

Around her, leviathans shifted, shrinking
like folding up their sensibilities.

“
Statement: the matter has a long
history,”
one guard said.
“Abbreviation: yes.”

Atarangi must have overheard the discussion:
she came to Esha's side, with Rooftop still an assistant fixed on
her bare shoulders. She took over explaining and she used the
eloquent words the matter needed.

Esha listened for a while to Atarangi's
summary of human peace talks. Serpents came, offering baskets of
lichens and pondweed and even arrays of whole fish dressed with
fragrant vinegar; serpents took from these baskets and ate;
Atarangi did the same, her hands raising tempted toward the fish
but she apparently had no plans to swallow one whole like the
serpents did.

Esha drifted away, chewing the foulness from
a lichen branch. She hadn't looked close at the fine-etched walls
yet.