by C. L. Clark
“They are. All over the city,” Priya agreed.
“Did a merchant get his head chopped off again?”
Priya shook her head. “I know as much as you do.”
The girl looked from Priya’s face down to Priya’s muddied sari, her hands empty apart from the sack of kachoris. There was a question in her gaze.
“I couldn’t get any beads today,” Priya confirmed. She watched the girl’s expression crumple, though she valiantly tried to control it. Sympathy would do her no good, so Priya offered the pastries out instead. “You should go now. You don’t want to get caught by the guards.”
The children snatched the kachoris up, a few muttering their thanks, and scattered. The girl rubbed the bead at her throat with her knuckles as she went. Priya knew it would be cold under her hand—empty of magic.
If the girl didn’t get hold of more sacred wood soon, then the next time Priya saw her, the left side of her face would likely be as green-dusted as her eyelid.
You can’t save them all, she reminded herself. You’re no one. This is all you can do. This, and no more.
Priya turned to leave—and saw that one boy had hung back, waiting patiently for her to notice him. He was the kind of small that suggested malnourishment; his bones too sharp, his head too large for a body that hadn’t yet grown to match it. He had his shawl over his hair, but she could still see his dark curls, and the deep green leaves growing between them. He’d wrapped his hands up in cloth.
“Do you really have nothing, ma’am?” he asked hesitantly.
“Really,” Priya said. “If I had any sacred wood, I’d have given it to you.”
“I thought maybe you lied,” he said. “I thought, maybe you haven’t got enough for more than one person, and you didn’t want to make anyone feel bad. But there’s only me now. So you can help me.”
“I really am sorry,” Priya said. She could hear yelling and footsteps echoing from the market, the crash of wood as stalls were closed up.
The boy looked like he was mustering up his courage. And sure enough, after a moment, he squared his shoulders and said, “If you can’t get me any sacred wood, then can you get me a job?”
She blinked at him, surprised.
“I—I’m just a maidservant,” she said. “I’m sorry, little brother, but—”
“You must work in a nice house, if you can help strays like us,” he said quickly. “A big house with money to spare. Maybe your masters need a boy who works hard and doesn’t make much trouble? That could be me.”
“Most households won’t take a boy who has the rot, no matter how hardworking he is,” she pointed out gently, trying to lessen the blow of her words.
“I know,” he said. His jaw was set, stubborn. “But I’m still asking.”
Smart boy. She couldn’t blame him for taking the chance. She was clearly soft enough to spend her own coin on sacred wood to help the rot-riven. Why wouldn’t he push her for more?
“I’ll do anything anyone needs me to do,” he insisted. “Ma’am, I can clean latrines. I can cut wood. I can work land. My family is—they were—farmers. I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“You haven’t got anyone?” she asked. “None of the others look out for you?” She gestured in the vague direction the other children had vanished.
“I’m alone,” he said simply. Then: “Please.”
A few people drifted past them, carefully skirting the boy. His wrapped hands, the shawl over his head—both revealed his rot-riven status just as well as anything they hid would have.
“Call me Priya,” she said. “Not ma’am.”
“Priya,” he repeated obediently.
“You say you can work,” she said. She looked at his hands. “How bad are they?”
“Not that bad.”
“Show me,” she said. “Give me your wrist.”
“You don’t mind touching me?” he asked. There was a slight waver of hesitation in his voice.
“Rot can’t pass between people,” she said. “Unless I pluck one of those leaves from your hair and eat it, I think I’ll be fine.”
That brought a smile to his face. There for a blink, like a flash of sun through parting clouds, then gone. He deftly unwrapped one of his hands. She took hold of his wrist and raised it up to the light.
There was a little bud, growing up under the skin.
It was pressing against the flesh of his fingertip, his finger a too-small shell for the thing trying to unfurl. She looked at the tracery of green visible through the thin skin at the back of his hand, the fine lace of it. The bud had deep roots.
She swallowed. Ah. Deep roots, deep rot. If he already had leaves in his hair, green spidering through his blood, she couldn’t imagine that he had long left.
“Come with me,” she said, and tugged him by the wrist, making him follow her. She walked along the road, eventually joining the flow of the crowd leaving the market behind.
“Where are we going?” he asked. He didn’t try to pull away from her.
“I’m going to get you some sacred wood,” she said determinedly, putting all thoughts of murders and soldiers and the work she needed to do out of her mind. She released him and strode ahead. He ran to keep up with her, dragging his dirty shawl tight around his thin frame. “And after that, we’ll see what to do with you.”
The grandest of the city’s pleasure houses lined the edges of the river. It was early enough in the day that they were utterly quiet, their pink lanterns unlit. But they would be busy later. The brothels were always left well alone by the regent’s men. Even in the height of the last boiling summer, before the monsoon had cracked the heat in two, when the rebel sympathizers had been singing anti-imperialist songs and a noble lord’s chariot had been cornered and burned on the street directly outside his own haveli—the brothels had kept their lamps lit.
Too many of the pleasure houses belonged to highborn nobles for the regent to close them. Too many were patronized by visiting merchants and nobility from Parijatdvipa’s other city-states—a source of income no one seemed to want to do without.
To the rest of Parijatdvipa, Ahiranya was a den of vice, good for pleasure and little else. It carried its bitter history, its status as the losing side of an ancient war, like a yoke. They called it a backward place, rife with political violence, and, in more recent years, with the rot: the strange disease that twisted plants and crops and infected the men and women who worked the fields and forests with flowers that sprouted through the skin and leaves that pushed through their eyes. As the rot grew, other sources of income in Ahiranya had dwindled. And unrest had surged and swelled until Priya feared it too would crack, with all the fury of a storm.
As Priya and the boy walked on, the pleasure houses grew less grand. Soon, there were no pleasure houses at all. Around her were cramped homes, small shops. Ahead of her lay the edge of the forest. Even in the morning light, it was shadowed, the trees a silent barrier of green.
Priya had never met anyone born and raised outside Ahiranya who was not disturbed by the quiet of the forest. She’d known maids raised in Alor or even neighboring Srugna who avoided the place entirely. “There should be noise,” they’d mutter. “Birdsong. Or insects. It isn’t natural.”
But the heavy quiet was comforting to Priya. She was Ahiranyi to the bone. She liked the silence of it, broken only by the scuff of her own feet against the ground.
“Wait for me here,” she told the boy. “I won’t be long.”
He nodded without saying a word. He was staring out at the forest when she left him, a faint breeze rustling the leaves of his hair.
Priya slipped down a narrow street where the ground was uneven with hidden tree roots, the dirt rising and falling in mounds beneath her feet. Ahead of her was a single dwelling. Beneath its pillared veranda crouched an older man.
He raised his head as she approached. At first he seemed to look right through her, as though he’d been expecting someone else entirely. Then his gaze focused. His eyes n
arrowed in recognition.
“You,” he said.
“Gautam.” She tilted her head in a gesture of respect. “How are you?”
“Busy,” he said shortly. “Why are you here?”
“I need sacred wood. Just one bead.”
“Should have gone to the bazaar, then,” he said evenly. “I’ve supplied plenty of apothecaries. They can deal with you.”
“I tried the Old Bazaar. No one has anything.”
“If they don’t, why do you think I will?”
Oh, come on now, she thought, irritated. But she said nothing. She waited until his nostrils flared as he huffed and rose up from the veranda, turning to the beaded curtain of the doorway. Tucked in the back of his tunic was a heavy hand sickle.
“Fine. Come in, then. The sooner we do this, the sooner you leave.”
She drew the purse from her blouse before climbing up the steps and entering after him.
He led her to his workroom and bid her to stand by the table at its center. Cloth sacks lined the corners of the room. Small stoppered bottles—innumerable salves and tinctures and herbs harvested from the forest itself—sat in tidy rows on shelves. The air smelled of earth and damp.
He took her entire purse from her, opened the drawstring and adjusted its weight in his palm. Then he clucked, tongue against teeth, and dropped it onto the table.
“This isn’t enough.”
“You—of course it’s enough,” Priya said. “That’s all the money I have.”
“That doesn’t magically make it enough.”
“That’s what it cost me at the bazaar last time—”
“But you couldn’t get anything at the bazaar,” said Gautam. “And had you been able to, he would have charged you more. Supply is low, demand is high.” He frowned at her sourly. “You think it’s easy harvesting sacred wood?”
“Not at all,” Priya said. Be pleasant, she reminded herself. You need his help.
“Last month I sent in four woodcutters. They came out after two days, thinking they’d been in there two hours. Between—that,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the forest, “and the regent flinging his thugs all over the fucking city for who knows what reason, you think it’s easy work?”
“No,” Priya said. “I’m sorry.”
But he wasn’t done quite yet.
“I’m still waiting for the men I sent this week to come back,” he went on. His fingers were tapping on the table’s surface—a fast, irritated rhythm. “Who knows when that will be? I have plenty of reason to get the best price for the supplies I have. So I’ll have a proper payment from you, girl, or you’ll get nothing.”
Before he could continue, she lifted her hand. She had a few bracelets on her wrists. Two were good-quality metal. She slipped them off, placing them on the table before him, alongside the purse.
“The money and these,” she said. “That’s all I have.”
She thought he’d refuse her, just out of spite. But instead, he scooped up the bangles and the coin and pocketed them.
“That’ll do. Now watch,” he said. “I’ll show you a trick.”
He threw a cloth package down on the table. It was tied with a rope. He drew it open with one swift tug, letting the cloth fall to the sides.
Priya flinched back.
Inside lay the severed branch of a young tree. The bark had split, pale wood opening up into a red-brown wound. The sap that oozed from its surface was the color and consistency of blood.
“This came from the path leading to the grove my men usually harvest,” he said. “They wanted to show me why they couldn’t fulfill the regular quota. Rot as far as the eye could see, they told me.” His own eyes were hooded. “You can look closer if you want.”
“No, thank you,” Priya said tightly.
“Sure?”
“You should burn it,” she said. She was doing her best not to breathe the scent of it in too deeply. It had a stench like meat.
He snorted. “It has its uses.” He walked away from her, rooting through his shelves. After a moment, he returned with another cloth-wrapped item, this one only as large as a fingertip. He unwrapped it, careful to keep from touching what it held. Priya could feel the heat rising from the wood within: a strange, pulsing warmth that rolled off of its surface with the steadiness of a sunbeam.
Sacred wood.
She watched as Gautam held the shard close to the rot-struck branch, as the lesion on the branch paled, the redness fading. The stench of it eased a little, and Priya breathed gratefully.
“There,” he said. “Now you know it is fresh. You’ll get plenty of use from it.”
“Thank you. That was a useful demonstration.” She tried not to let her impatience show. What did he want—awe? Tears of gratitude? She had no time for any of it. “You should still burn the branch. If you touch it by mistake…”
“I know how to handle the rot. I send men into the forest every day,” he said dismissively. “And what do you do? Sweep floors? I don’t need your advice.”
He thrust the shard of sacred wood out to her. “Take this. And leave.”
She bit her tongue and held out her hand, the long end of her sari carefully drawn over her palm. She rewrapped the sliver of wood up carefully, once, twice, tightening the fabric, tying it off with a neat knot. Gautam watched her.
“Whoever you’re buying this for, the rot is still going to kill them,” he said, when she was done. “This branch will die even if I wrap it in a whole shell of sacred wood. It will just die slower. My professional opinion for you, at no extra cost.” He threw the cloth back over the infected branch with one careless flick of his fingers. “So don’t come back here and waste your money again. I’ll show you out.”
He shepherded her to the door. She pushed through the beaded curtain, greedily inhaling the clean air, untainted by the smell of decay.
At the edge of the veranda there was a shrine alcove carved into the wall. Inside it were three idols sculpted from plain wood, with lustrous black eyes and hair of vines. Before them were three tiny clay lamps lit with cloth wicks set in pools of oil. Sacred numbers.
She remembered how perfectly she’d once been able to fit her whole body into that alcove. She’d slept in it one night, curled up tight. She’d been as small as the orphan boy, once.
“Do you still let beggars shelter on your veranda when it rains?” Priya asked, turning to look at Gautam where he stood, barring the entryway.
“Beggars are bad for business,” he said. “And the ones I see these days don’t have brothers I owe favors to. Are you leaving or not?”
Just the threat of pain can break someone. She briefly met Gautam’s eyes. Something impatient and malicious lurked there. A knife, used right, never has to draw blood.
But ah, Priya didn’t have it in her to even threaten this old bully. She stepped back.
What a big void there was, between the knowledge within her and the person she appeared to be, bowing her head in respect to a petty man who still saw her as a street beggar who’d risen too far, and hated her for it.
“Thank you, Gautam,” she said. “I’ll try not to trouble you again.”
She’d have to carve the wood herself. She couldn’t give the shard as it was to the boy. A whole shard of sacred wood held against skin—it would burn. But better that it burn her. She had no gloves, so she would have to work carefully, with her little knife and a piece of cloth to hold the worst of the pain at bay. Even now, she could feel the heat of the shard against her skin, soaking through the fabric that bound it.
The boy was waiting where she’d left him. He looked even smaller in the shadow of the forest, even more alone. He turned to watch her as she approached, his eyes wary, and a touch uncertain, as if he hadn’t been sure of her return.
Her heart twisted a little. Meeting Gautam had brought her closer to the bones of her past than she’d been in a long, long time. She felt the tug of her frayed memories like a physical ache.
Her brother. P
ain. The smell of smoke.
Don’t look, Pri. Don’t look. Just show me the way.
Show me—
No. There was no point remembering that.
It was only sensible, she told herself, to help him. She didn’t want the image of him, standing before her, to haunt her. She didn’t want to remember a starving child, abandoned and alone, roots growing through his hands, and think, I left him to die. He asked me for help, and I left him.
“You’re in luck,” she said lightly. “I work in the regent’s mahal. And his wife has a very gentle heart, when it comes to orphans. I should know. She took me in. She’ll let you work for her if I ask nicely. I’m sure of it.”
His eyes went wide, so much hope in his face that it was almost painful to look at him. So Priya made a point of looking away. The sky was bright, the air overly warm. She needed to get back.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Rukh,” he said. “My name is Rukh.”
if you enjoyed
THE UNBROKEN
look out for
SON OF THE STORM
Book One of The Nameless Republic
by
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
The first book in a major new epic fantasy series, set in a world inspired by the empires of precolonial West Africa.
In the thriving city of Bassa, Danso is a clever but disillusioned scholar who longs for a life beyond the rigid family and political obligations expected of the city’s elite. A way out presents itself when Lilong, a skin-changing warrior, shows up wounded in his barn. She comes from the Nameless Islands, which, according to Bassa lore, don’t exist—and neither should the mythical magic of ibor she wields.
Now swept into a conspiracy far beyond his understanding, Danso will set out on a journey with Lilong that reveals histories violently suppressed and magic only found in lore.
