“I discovered it,” he panted, “not in the streambed but in Hunger’s nest. With furs. Human bones. Golden statues of herself. The armour of the slain Bodyguard. The decaying body of the hatchling.”
“You saw her?” Atwith wanted to know, standing cautiously back from the bone. “You saw my Bodyguard?”
“I saw her armour,” Aforis said again, stiffly. “One who walks in the grace of Airak is regretful to report that he believes the winged one may have consumed her flesh.”
“Oh.”
“So the hatchling is definitely dead?” Unar took the bone from Aforis. “And this is definitely the bone of the Old God that we need?”
“The wounds inflicted on the hatchling by the Bodyguard were indeed mortal. As for my identification of the claw, I assume it is correct. I’ve received no sensations from this remnant as a Skywatcher would expect to do within the sphere of the gods’ influence, yet the crusting of crystallised stone around this end suggests the watercourse—”
Leaper tried to laugh loudly and triumphantly, but only managed to squawk and set his throat cartilages in disarray.
Unar knelt by him, placing the bone carefully down beside her. She helpfully straightened out Leaper’s neck while he tried to ignore the feeling of blunt knives scraping up and down his skin.
“Eat that,” he told her, in between slow, determined breaths.
“It’s a big old bone,” Unar said, scowling. “How am I supposed to eat it?”
“There was a stone mortar and pestle,” Atwith said. “In the graveyard, do you remember? Aforis said it was a kind called granite. He said the woman who died and was buried there had to be an alchemist or a healer.”
“I never said that,” Aforis said tiredly. “Night has fallen. I came through the graveyard by touch.”
“Not to worry. I’ll fetch it.”
Time stretched out as Leaper waited for Atwith to bring back the mortar and pestle, half excited and hopeful, half filled with dread that the bone wasn’t Bria’s after all. It seemed to take an eternity for Aforis to cut slivers off the bone with Atwith’s little bronze belt knife, and for Aforis and Unar to take turns grinding it under the granite pestle.
Finally, they had a greyish paste for Unar to swallow. Aforis supported Leaper’s neck, while Unar stood over him.
“You’d better be right about this, Leaper,” Unar said, grimacing as she forced it down, lump by lump, swallow by swallow.
Her hands, fingers spread wide, hovered over him. Her face relaxed; became impassive.
Leaper smelled quince and wood fern. His spirits soared.
It is Bria’s bone. They have saved me!
I wandered far from home, as you prophesied, Ulellin, but now my friends have found me and saved me.
Feeling in his body returned in oddly disconnected, nonvital places; there was tingling in the back of his left knee, under his floating ribs on the right side, between the bones of a wrist, inside the arch of one foot.
Tingling turned to pressure. Numbness to pain. For a terrible moment, his body felt like a loosely knotted series of overinflated bladders about to burst. He closed his eyes, because he didn’t want to see his bloody insides splattered all over Unar’s and Aforis’s watching, anxious faces.
It’s not working Something’s gone wrong. Audblayin’s bone has turned rotten so far from her soul!
Then a familiar jolt of lightning heralded another invasion of memory.
Leaper stood outside the Gates of the Garden, trying to protect something important to him, and Unar was trying to kill him with love.
He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew.
How is she doing this? he wondered with fear and fury. She doesn’t love me. If she loved me, she wouldn’t be striking down my mother, my sorceress, my ladder back into the sun! She’s just like all of them. They don’t believe in One Forest. They only want to keep everything for themselves!
Leaper opened his eyes in the city of Time, locked gazes with Unar, and the pain drained away, starting at his scalp, ending at his tapestry-wrapped toes.
His first words should have been words of gratitude, but other words erupted from his dry mouth.
“You freed Hasbabsah,” he gasped. “You knew her treatment was wrong; you took one step on a godless path, but then you stopped and you went back to serving them at their most vulnerable and helpless. Instead of taking them to their Temples, you should have put a knife in every one of them. So slow. So stupid. Why did you stop?”
Unar’s expression, in the firelight, looked as though he’d stabbed her through the heart.
“Got comfortable, I suppose,” she said hoarsely. “I had to hate myself to get away from you. That’s a wound that takes some time to heal. Meanwhile, very little was asked of me. I had my birds, I had you, and they left me to myself. It was peaceful. The pain went away. Or I got better at ignoring and forgetting.”
Whatever wellspring of agony had spoken through Leaper fast faded. The things he’d said abruptly made no sense to him. Only searing resentment of the goddesses and gods of Canopy remained.
“Audblayin sent us both away to guard her own power,” he said. “You were banished so that Aoun, her Gatekeeper, couldn’t be poisoned by notions of inequity. I was banished so that her Bodyguard, my middle-father, would belong to her alone. Airak scarred me and betrayed me. He hoarded lightning so that the winged ones would stay weak.”
“Leapael—” Aforis tried to interrupt, but Leaper talked over him.
“Airak and Ehkis together drowned thousands of Rememberers. They swept the consort of the queen of Wetwoodknee, along with half the fishing fleet, out to their deaths at sea. Ehkis keeps all the rain for the forest. Just look how barren that plateau is outside. Its herds must once have supported the people of Time. The white-skinned people of Time, who became the Bird-Riders of Floor, who became the villagers of Understorey, who became the slaves of Canopy. Our gods and goddesses allowed it all.”
“Atwith would have killed every one of those humans,” Unar whispered, wide-eyed. “He would have killed everyone who knew anything about the coming of the Old Gods or the existence of the winged. Audblayin opposed him. She told me so. She saved what she could save.”
Leaper wanted to sit up, but he was still rolled in the tapestry. He glared at the dark brown faces of the three Canopians instead. Atwith said nothing to defend himself; perhaps he couldn’t currently remember.
“Maybe she did save what she could save,” Leaper said. “Maybe she even had help. Odel was on her side.” He only knew it because of his stolen vision. “But maybe before the forest and the barrier were raised, we all had long memories. Maybe we all had access to our previous lives, as the gods and goddesses do. Is that the bargain Odel and Audblayin made with Atwith? To make us forget, so we’d never know that the deities we worshipped were nothing special? They were sorcerers and sorceresses who just happened to come upon unguarded power!”
“I don’t know, Leaper.” Unar rubbed at the crease between her brows.
“He does.”
Atwith raised his palms in a defensive gesture.
“I don’t know either. Not while I’m here. I’d never be him again, if it were up to me, but you heard what the Servant of Airak said before, that people are suffering. Atwith is needed to put them out of their misery. Don’t you think I noticed how much of that bone is still unused?”
Unar jerked back from him, patting something beneath her Godfinder’s cloak which must have been the remnant of Bria’s claw.
“This bone is of no use to you,” she said.
“No? If your healing powers are so legendary, Unar, don’t you think you could heal this hole in my soul where Atwith is waiting to enter and take control again?”
“No! That is, even if I could, even if Audblayin’s power could come into contact with Atwith’s without causing destruction, who knows how much you’d need for that? In case you hadn’t noticed, if we want to get you back to Canopy, we have to battle our way pa
st a winged one. You think that little bronze knife you’ve got is going to get you past her unscathed? Forget the hole in your soul. You might end up with holes in your body that you’ll want healed!”
Leaper squirmed, compressed tightly inside the rolled weaving.
“Help me out of here, Aforis,” he said.
“Calm down,” Aforis replied, hands at the knots beneath Leaper’s chin. “You’ve been at the brink of death. You’ve seen things that only your previous incarnations could have seen. Breathe in slowly through the nose. Breathe out slowly through your mouth.”
Leaper did as he was told. The tapestry’s stifling embrace began to loosen.
“I saw visions at Dusksight and Dawnsight, too, Aforis. I saw the creation of the forest. I saw it end.”
“Did you, now?”
“Aforis, you saw those things, too,” Unar said. “You told me so. When those bones destroyed each other. You said you saw the Old Gods killing one another, soaking the ground with their blood and souls, and the great trees growing up. You said you saw the night-yew.”
“If I knew it then, I don’t know it now.” Aforis grunted as he loosened the final binding. “Perhaps I’ll keep the memory of this conversation, Godfinder. Perhaps not. In this state, the intensity of events seems to have no bearing on whether I keep them in my mental cabinet or not.”
Aforis and Unar both stepped back as Leaper unrolled himself and sat up, working his muscles and joints one by one.
It was then that he saw the climbing spines in his forearms had been healed out.
He remembered begging Imeris to help him convince their parents to put them in. It wasn’t fair, he had argued. All of them had spines except for him. He wasn’t a baby anymore. What if enemies came, and he was the only one of the children who couldn’t climb, and was left behind?
The final argument had been the one that worked. But the implantation had been much worse, and taken much longer to heal, than he’d expected. Once he’d climbed into Canopy, to live out his dream life in the sunlight, his spines had sometimes come in useful. Other times, all they’d done was mark him out as different.
He’d taken the medicine of justice, instead of the medicine of the birth goddess.
Now his warrior’s spines lay on the ragged tapestry, completely separate to him. He saw them for what they were: sad trophies taken from slaughtered snakes to make him fit for a life his ancestors would have baulked at.
“I’m so sorry,” Unar said, amplifying the distress she assumed he was feeling. “It was my first try at being a bone woman, Leaper. I didn’t mean to.”
“I don’t care. I don’t need them,” Leaper said, startling himself with the truth.
It felt amazing simply to be higher than ankle level above the ground.
Moisture seeped into his eyes.
When he lifted his chin to look at her, he couldn’t stop beaming.
“Thank you, Unar,” he cried. He looked past her, to the others. “Thank you, Aforis, for finding the claw. Thank you, Atwith. You carried me. You found the mortar and pestle. I thought it was all over. I thought I was done.”
“I’ll take that tapestry for a blanket,” Aforis said, smiling. “I’m exhausted. I need to rest. By all means resume your squabbling, but elsewhere. When I wake, we’ll pool our resources and knowledge. We’ll find a way to take Atwith back to his worshippers and Leapael back to his newborn babe.”
THIRTY-TWO
AFORIS TOOK the tapestry with him and all but collapsed in a heap by the fire.
Leaper leaned against Unar’s offered arm, getting completely to his feet.
“Are you well?” she fussed. “Is everything in working order?”
“Yes, I think—”
His gut made a sound like rusty hinges. Organs shifted, gases collected, and he realised the goat which had gone in salty and hard as rock was ready to come out the same way. All the muscles in his belly clenched.
“What’s wrong?” Unar demanded.
“Ah. Would you perhaps help me to a more … private … part of the temple?”
The tears of joy and relief were drying on his cheeks as Unar led him to an antechamber. During the subsequent hourlong evacuation of his bowels, he cried like a woman giving birth, and streaks of fresh blood decorated what he’d produced, but he decided it was too humiliating to ask Unar to heal him again just for that.
“You were a long time,” she said, when he returned.
“I think I need to walk,” he said, pretending a stiffness in his joints that he didn’t feel. “Walking will put everything back in order.”
“We can hope so.”
Unar took a long, burning timber from the fire, so that he could light his way. It was heavy, but his arms felt fresh.
Leaper made his way to the graveyard. Heard the sound of running water and found the spring beneath a fallen gatepost of pitted limestone. He washed his face, drank from the spring, and touched the smooth skin of his shins and forearms.
This is how I was born. This is how my mother made me.
The scars left by Atwith were gone. His nose was straight, as if it had never been broken.
My baby, he thought with wonder. My new child. I can’t wait to see you as your mother made you. And if Aforis had discovered the thieves’ lantern only a few minutes later than he did, I never would have known you existed.
More tears threatened. He turned back to the graveyard.
It was a field of overlapping circles. Upheavals in the ground had disturbed some of the skeletons, but the plan of the graveyard was clear, even where the bones didn’t protrude through the fine grey limestone silt.
Each circular plot, perhaps a family plot, contained at its centre a knee-high, finely chiselled mountaintop of green soapstone capped by paler marble suggesting snow. The feet of all the corpses were arranged so that they touched this central stone.
It was as though the dead were standing on these small stone mountains.
Leaper stared at them for some time.
Our graves are so different. Just look at the Crocodile-Riders, avoiding their dead. Hasbabsah, her body hidden in a sealed room in our tallowwood tree. Oldest-Father, trapped in Ulellin’s emergent by Kirrik. My previous body, when I was Unar’s sister, Frog, fallen to pieces and also fallen to Floor in the careless, Canopian way.
My sister Ylly will have her bones ground to powder and scattered in the moat around her Temple.
Ilik, who I thought had fallen, is still alive, but now Aforis will age backwards. Will his bones dwindle to nothing at the end, after sixty-two more monsoons? I’ll be lucky to live that long.
Leaper’s guts groaned, and he moved on along a randomly chosen road. Despite the world’s worst and longest squat, he was wide awake and full of energy; he suddenly felt like he could walk for fifty days straight, all the way back across the plateau to Canopy. He wanted to plan their escape now—now!—but he had to let the old man sleep.
Old man. Aforis. Becoming younger by the day.
Leaper strode over the arch of a stone bridge that crossed the old water course, to explore one of the wall-hugging houses with tapering walls. This one was somewhat larger than the others. Although the upper storeys were crushed, Leaper passed through a series of rooms, each with a stone basin, each with a stone peacock sitting on the rim. The blue gems set into their grey stone feathers shone in the light of his torch.
I could pry those loose. I could use them for Ilik’s giant statue.
The final room held a white marble throne on a dais. Cast golden falcons perched on the arms and back of the chair, while big golden cats stretched out at the foot. The sight of it depressed him.
Some things stay the same, wherever humans are.
Some want to be knelt to. Others kneel.
In the centre of the audience chamber, on the floor, there was a miniature stone replica of the city, crafted in metal and stone. It was part gravestone, part freestanding sculpture, part relief.
Time was a circular c
ity, or had been, with a circular wall, protected by its ring of unassailable mountain peaks. The city wall was interrupted by gates at the four points of the compass. Miniature devices like bronze pinwheels made the miniature bronze falcons over the miniature stone gates flap their wings when Leaper blew into the pinwheels to make them turn.
Ilik would love this. If only I could pry it loose and take it with me. His carrysack was still strapped to his back, badly damaged from its travels and having Aforis erupt out of it; it would never bear the weight of anything made of stone. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Ilik were to come through the lantern.
Only, there’s still the problem of Hunger.
Their reunion could wait.
In another house, on another throne, he found the odd remnant of a seated, artificial woman or man. It was a ruin of degraded leather, lacquer, wood, and old glue. Paint and possibly plaster on the face had peeled away from straw stuffing, but visible in the metal chest cage, behind rotted silk robes, were brightly painted wooden lungs, a heart, and kidneys.
Leaper risked putting his burning timber down on the slate tiles, so that he could pull the mannequin’s heart out and examine it. Eerily, the disturbance made the whole artificial person collapse forward onto the floor.
He put the heart on the back of the split leather head and left that throne room, brand in hand, with a backwards glance to make sure that the creepy life-sized doll wasn’t coming after him.
Probably would have made as effective a king as Icacis.
Funny. When he’d thought Ilik was dead, he’d stopped caring whether or not she loved that fool of a king of Airakland. Now, though, he hurried along a different road to distract himself from wondering how Ilik felt about Icacis now. Obviously she feared him, or she wouldn’t have fled to Unar’s farm. But what if she was contemplating reconciliation? Icacis had said to Leaper that his throne would go to the blood of a slave.
No. I’ll be back in Airakland to convince her otherwise before it even occurs to her to take our son back to that palace. That palace, where they wrecked her childhood creative building projects and trapped her in service to an imbecile.
Tides of the Titans Page 26
