Tinder Stricken (5 page)

Esha had never understood why a fieldwoman
would do that. Farming life wasn't much. It was sweat and dust, and
eating millet more often than good rice. But compared to
untouchable caste — a life spent underfoot, scrubbing everyone
else's leavings — field caste was a gift, if a shoddy one.

Esha shook her head. She didn't know, she
said. Maybe Gita
had
deserted. She hadn't said anything
about it ...

The lie caked inside Esha, gritty against
her conscience. Gita was no deserter: she had only ever talked
about helping Esha. And if a deserter seal branded her records,
what little honourable record she had would be gone like steam in
the wind.

It didn't matter: Gita was dead, said the
burning memory Esha couldn't look away from. But they were kin in
their hearts as well as in their sealed contracts. This wasn't
right.

“Maybe something happened to Gita,” Esha
tried. “We were in fallow field, near the worldedge ... M-Maybe she
fell somewhere. Or a demon came, or a bandit, during the quake
while the guards were occupied? Could Janjuman advise the town
guards? To look for her?”

Esha stole a glance at the clerk's face, at
the calm, even paleness of a minor noble. Someone who never saw
sunlight if he didn't care to. He leaned forward, tassels shifting
on his headwrap, and pushed the silver sharing dish full of betel
nut slivers toward Esha. His silent command was to eat, then
listen. The clerk was honouring her with confidence: her heart sank
like water vanishing into dry earth.

“
With due respect,”
the clerk said in
rustling tones,
“she is as good as gone.”

This was the Kshatri tongue: Esha couldn't
understand it without aid but she recognized the sharp-cut sounds
underneath the lungta.

“
She must have followed some
temptation,”
the clerk went on,
“something she found more
likeable than her duty. That is what deserters usually do.”

He was discarding Gita like turned meat,
mere moments after she was reported gone. What if she came back?
But she wouldn't come back. She was taken from this world — and the
clerk could never know that. Hot pain seized Esha's throat; she
held her face steady.

“I-I have never known Gita Of The Fields to
desert anything. But you are likely right, sir.”

The clerk's stare was impassive, as a higher
caste's stare should be.
“Does she have arrangements for her
estate?”

“She does.” Esha and Gita were as good as
blood sisters: Gita's land allowance was bequeathed to Esha in her
official records. Esha nearly had a right to carry the property
token in her satchel. “But if she does return ...?”

The clerk rearranged some wax-dappled
sheets.
“She will be noted as missing, and her work quota will
be offered to all the field workers of Janjuman. If she has not
returned three months from this day, she will be classified as
dead. If activity under her name is found at that time, appropriate
measures will be taken.”

That meant demerit points — which were
strikes against caste rank.

The clerk's gaze pressed into Esha like a
knifepoint.
“I presume a person like you knows what that
means?”

“I do,” she murmured.

Shifting more paperwork, the clerk turned
away.
“Gita Of The Fields has three months, in case she should
change her mind. If she is not dead and you should find her, she
must be urged to return. She might only receive one demerit if her
work load can be made up. But I doubt that. Heaven be with you,
Esha Of The Fields.”

This was an ice-edged kindness, Esha knew as
she gestured namaste and turned to leave. Iciness was the only
grace higher castes knew how to give — when giving downward, at
least. But Gita's good name had a whole season of grace. If Esha
could stomach the dishonour, she could make use of that grace.

She returned to the field's tilled rows,
taking her place among the gold-lit formations of stooped women.
Menku turned a glance to her. No one else did; these were the last
moments of the farming day, loaded down with work to be
completed.

Just like any other day, like her life
hadn't quaked underneath her, Esha bent and drove her hands into
the earth. But her mind was roaming farther than ever before.

While Esha laid in her bed, sore and hoping
for sleep, she saw only Gita's face. Heard Gita crying out as she
was swallowed by the sky. Breathed the dust clouds raised by
beating wings, and knew revelations as clear as rain telling her
that this, all of this, could have been avoided. Esha and Gita
could have tried harder to toss rope around the phoenix from above.
They could have tied Gita's selfrope to a different spot on the
fence, and swung at the phoenix from a sturdier point. And as a
smallest precaution, they should have waited longer after an
earthquake — gods' teeth, they had both been foolish, rushing into
precarious work when the earth had barely finished heaving. Why had
they been so stupid, Esha wondered in the suffocating dark? For
want of a little money? Why were all the bloodlines of Tselaya
Mountain so fixated on the coins that ought to serve life, instead
of the reverse?

With her pulse drumming and her heart full
of bile, Esha heaved her sore body out of bed. She folded her legs
to sit at her working mat, and she wound thread and bamboo leaves
together and she made a doll. A ragged one, with dry bamboo leaf
skirts and looking out at the world with a blank expanse of face. A
little coal ink gave it eyes, nose and mouth. It looked like a
person now.

Esha stared at the creation in her hand,
calm now but filled to her brim with all the sights she had ever
seen. The dark blots of the doll's face looked like Gita, the wet
ink shining just like Gita's eyes shone with plans. Esha sifted
through her scrap box and found leather and cloth shavings. She
tucked two slips of leather into the doll's leaf head — like the
horns Gita had confessed to have, the deer horns rising from the
crown of her head like pale shoots. Then Esha cut a strip of fabric
and wound it to cover those horns, and tied it in the front like
Gita had. She tied on a thread of selfrope and the doll looked
right now. A tiny, sad imitation of a person who had lived and
breathed, but it looked right.

Esha put the doll among others, among all
the painted leaf faces she had made in her lonely moments, and with
that she had no strength left. She snuffed her pine candle and fell
into bed like a dropped sack of grain. She had no more thoughts —
just memories dull enough to forget about.

In her dreams, the namesmith returned. She
hadn't dreamed of him in decades but he was silhouetted by smelting
fire again, a monstrous figure taking Esha's nameplate from her
powerless hands so he could worsen its caste markings yet
again.

This time, she wasn't scared. She was too
canny to be scared; she could salvage these last months of her life
if she held on to Gita's abandoned nameplate — and used it like the
opportunity it was.

Chapter
3

For days afterward, Esha was bound too
tightly by her heart to act. She cut spring's emerging bamboo
shoots for her solitary breakfasts. She ate pork with the other
fieldwomen. She rose with the sun and sank her hands into the
earth, and stayed late in the fields three extra hours portioned
off from Gita's working days, hours that stood out blatant in
Esha's sense of passing time.

“Where
is
Gita?” Menku finally asked
one morning. She patted the plough yak on its shaggy head, while
peering curious past it and its water cart burden.

Esha could only adjust the water cart's
trajectory for so long before she answered. “I don't know,” she
said. “I saw her when we were chasing a phoenix in the fallow
fields. I lost sight of her.”

“And she didn't return? That's not her usual
colour at all, is it?”

Esha mutely shook her head.

Menku hummed and tugged the yak's yoke. The
water cart rolled with a groaning of iron axles, leaving
black-soaked channels in the dirt at Esha's feet.

“I thought she went visiting someone,” Menku
said, “or maybe cutting. But if she didn't tell you...” She turned
to the fieldwomen spreading manure with long-handled shovels.
“Sisters, have you heard word of Gita? Esha hasn't seen her.”

Their faces broadened with surprise, and
they called the news to the next pair of field women. The news
spread through the field as finches would spread it, called out
urgent; Esha kept her face turned to the dirt.

Menku's voice came again, gentle. “You
looked for her ...?”

“I was out in the fallows for hours.” That
wasn't strictly untrue.

“And she didn't leave you any sign at
all?”

“Something has surely happened to her,” Esha
murmured.

“Oh, Esha! You two are sky and air!”

Menku raised her voice again and spread the
news, so it echoed away in other women's voices. It stung with each
repetition but in Esha's bruised heart, she wanted them to know.
They deserved to know the barest fact of Gita's disappearance.

“You were in the fallow east?” one
fieldfellow asked. “She might have met a windsickle.”

“Or a water serpent,” added another.

“What? Don't be stupid, serpents don't dig
out that far.”

“I was cutting bamboo there last year and
cut into a hollowheart stalk! That means serpents!” In a prouder
voice, the woman added, “I ran as soon as I saw the hollow inside
of that bamboo. It felt like claws were going to snatch me from
behind in any moment, but I made it home safely. Didn't even go
back for my saw.”

“Fine waste of a saw — there aren't any
serpents that near to a worldedge!”

They kept arguing it. More discussions
swelled in the fields' distance — talk of bandit cutthroats, and
demons, and all the reasons a farmwoman had to simply run away.

Esha listened, silent and guilty behind the
water cart. And that day, not one fieldfellow accused her of a
crime. They thought Esha Of The Fields was too honourable for
that.

Under the weight of such thoughts, all her
ideas and experience compressed into a sure plan. She would lay
traps while out cutting bamboo, and sell her game to a blackflag
for savings money. Trapping wild animals was a skill forbidden to
all except the leatherworker caste — but Esha hadn't always been a
farmer. She would be careful, working by moonlight — and if she got
caught, she had Gita's nameplate armouring her true identity. One
Grewian fieldwoman was just like another, to every guard she had
ever met.

Esha visited Janjuman's fallows again. She
found a damp patch of soil — from underground water tables, shifted
after the earthquake no doubt — and harvested the yankvines snaking
through the ground where any ordinary plants' roots would be. With
hefty coils of it in her satchel, Esha returned to her shack home
and by the metallic light of the moon, unfurled the piece of pig
leather she had been saving.

Its tannic smell brought an avalanche of
memories. Kettles full of precious spruce bark; dinners of turnip
greens and grilled pheasant on rice; the leathersmith's gruff
voice. Esha had lacked practical skill, back then. Noble children
were taught to hold inked quills, not knives.

Now, Esha poised her khukuri over the
leather, holding it by both its handle and the curve of the blade.
She set the point to the leather, and after a steadying breath, she
began the long, even cut to make a snare line.

She didn't complete that cut before the
khukuri gave sideways. Esha swore. She glared at the wrinkles
bubbled throughout the blade, and threw the now-scrap metal against
the wall.

It took a moment to gird herself for it, but
Esha used her digging spade on her carefully tamped floor dirt. She
unearthed the lid of her savings chest and opened it — not to add a
rupee or two, but to take away from her own future. She had no
choice: her savings contained the only other khukuri she owned.

The Kanakisipt khukuri was no tool for a
farmwoman. It was weighted perfectly, the treewood handle fitting
Esha's hand like a blessing, the angled blade flashing silvery. The
notch at the blade's base was shaped like a cow's hoof; Kanakisipts
were worthy of using a cow's sacred image. On the end of the
handle, the resin jewel caught light on its many faces. In this
light, Esha could hardly see the orchid bloom immortalized inside
but she remembered its shape plenty well.

The age-dried memories were simple enough to
push aside. Gripping this fine blade, Esha poised again over the
leather and resumed her plan.

With five traps made and the night half
over, Esha left home on silent feet. Flags hung calm in the
windless dark. Stray dogs bayed, far distant. The other farmers'
homes were lightless and silent, their occupants asleep like Esha
would have given her right eye to be.

She headed toward town, quicker than her
joints agreed with. She skirted the well plaza, with its chain pump
a looming shadow and its four guards sitting as still as carved
jade. Esha slipped between shacks in square-edged movement —
keeping to shadows — winding westward through the houses. The wind
began to smell cleaner. More bamboo forest appeared.

This part of the free-use forest was called
the Farback. It was dangerous, the whispered rumours said. Many of
the bamboo stalks looked ordinary but were actually hollow, like
they had been scraped inside with a knife even while they grew.
Those bamboo stalks were filled with foul air and bad luck. One of
the Janjuman's fieldsisters disappeared eight or nine years ago —
and her husband said she cut the wrong stalk of bamboo, and was
swallowed up by a water serpent. The rumour spread so fervently
that the Yam Plateau arbiters had to restore order: they examined
the bamboo and the torn ground and the woman's bloodied khukuri,
and they said no human could have committed the crime.