Echoes of Understorey

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “You were a Servant of Audblayin in the Garden.” Imeris felt her way, hesitantly, towards what she wanted to say.

  “I was,” Youngest-Mother replied. It was no admission. She had said so a hundred times before.

  “Did you mark the tongues of slaves?”

  In the fishing room, there were only the luminous fungi to light Youngest-Mother’s face, but Imeris saw her plump mouth flatten and her broad, black brows draw down.

  “I was shown how. I wasn’t a Servant for very long before Unar dragged me down here. I used the spell they showed me on Aoun, in practice, and he practiced on me. But I never marked anyone for the first time. I did change Sawas’s mark, and your sister Ylly’s, from the mark of the Garden to the mark of the House of Epatut. It was Unar who removed them.”

  “There is no mark of the Garden anymore,” Imeris said.

  “No, there isn’t.” Youngest-Mother’s shoulders were hunched. Tense. “Your sister put a stop to it in that sanctuary, at least. I’ve heard that Odel doesn’t keep slaves, either. Nor the wood god, Esh, but his ways are strange and frightening, and nobody really understands them.”

  Imeris raised her fingertips to her lips.

  “Did you kiss them?”

  “Did I kiss whom?” Youngest-Mother’s eyebrows shot up. “Odel and Esh?”

  “No!” Imeris dropped her hand from her mouth to her side. “The Understorians you were turning into slaves. To make the mark on their tongues.”

  Youngest-Mother sighed.

  “No,” she said. “Though kissing was said to decrease the pain.”

  “By magic means? Or because of the distraction?”

  “I don’t know, Issi.”

  They stood together, sad and contemplative, for a minute or two, before ribald gibes and indignant squawks announced the return of Middle-Mother and Oldest-Mother from the marketplace.

  Imeris found them in the hearth room. Over the wide quandong table they spread bags of salt, baskets of fruit, bottles of coconut oil, and gourds of medicine-precursors and mordants. Oldest-Father had always provided enough animal skins and dried fish to allow them to trade for whatever they needed. They might have to be more frugal without him.

  “Issi!” Middle-Mother cried, flinging her arms around Imeris. Her birth name was Sawas. She was plumper than Imeris’s other mothers and smelled of expensive stone powders that prevented perspiration. “We feared you’d been killed by that monstrous fiend Aurilon!”

  “Sawas feared you’d been killed,” Oldest-Mother said, smiling wryly, kissing Imeris on the cheek, “as she does, dramatically, every year. Aurilon is no monster, Sawas, but a role model for our dedicated warrior daughter. But, Issi, you can’t have surprised Aurilon, either. You can’t have beaten her, or you’d have stayed on in Odelland as her disciple.”

  Imeris grimaced, still squeezed in Middle-Mother’s enthusiastic embrace.

  “I did not surprise her. I failed again.”

  “You’ve plenty of time.”

  Middle-Mother put her hands to Imeris’s cheeks, inspecting her foster daughter’s face critically, Imeris knew, for the appearance of wrinkles.

  “You don’t have plenty of time,” she corrected Oldest-Mother, scandalised. “You have twenty-one monsoons behind you. You want to kill, because your friends were killed, because your father was killed, but killing is not the way to defeat death. Death is defeated by new life.”

  Imeris couldn’t help but smile.

  “New life? Now you sound like the great goddess Audblayin.”

  “She’s the one who sounds like me. I came first,” Middle-Mother said, jiggling Imeris’s squished cheeks between her palms. “She can’t take her own advice, though, and give me grandchildren, so it’s up to you, Issi.”

  “What about Leaper?”

  Middle-Mother released Imeris, throwing up her hands.

  “I never see him. I never hear from him. It’s like I never gave birth to him at all. Worse than my husband, and did you see Bernreb while you were in Canopy? Did you tell the great goddess Audblayin that I need my man back? Five years is too long! It’s about time she chose herself another Bodyguard.”

  Audblayin asked me to do it, Imeris thought. I could stay in Canopy, safe from Kirrik. I could forget every claim that Nirrin and Vesev and Oldest-Father have on me.

  “Can I sleep in Youngest-Father’s bed?” she asked. Her old bed had been removed when she went to Loftfol. Youngest-Father’s wooden slab was now her favourite napping place. The room where the three children had slept had been turned into a workshop divided in two. Half the workshop was for Youngest-Mother to fashion the musical instruments she sold in her occasional dry-season tutoring forays. The other half was for Oldest-Mother to concoct healing unguents and home remedies. Those had been taught to her by a deceased friend of her mother’s, one whom Imeris could barely remember, an old fighter and herbalist called Hasbabsah.

  “I’ll give you clean sheets,” Youngest-Mother said, stoppering the coconut oil she’d been smelling and twining her fingers in her hair again.

  Imeris enjoyed a few hours of dreamless sleep.

  When she woke in the early evening, she acquiesced to Middle-Mother’s desire to swim before supper.

  Imeris tied sturdy knots in the rope ladder that would allow Middle-Mother to climb down to the pool. It was a diversion of the river that ran down their tree. Oldest-Father had fashioned it, decades ago, to trap dayhunters. Imeris knew there were old bones in the bottom of the pool, but it was deep and dark in the hollow of the tree, and she’d never been able to see them.

  Middle-Mother couldn’t convince Imeris to dive down and try to touch them, but then Imeris had never been as good a swimmer as Middle-Mother. They left their clothes and Middle-Mother’s harness on a railing Oldest-Father had fashioned for the purpose.

  “I’d a child by the time I was your age,” Sawas said, sighing, standing on a carved shelf, tracing the stretch marks on her naked belly and thighs before reaching across to pat Imeris’s smooth skin.

  Imeris batted Middle-Mother’s hands away and slipped into the water. She splashed out into the middle of the pool. It was twenty body lengths across. Water poured in from the river through a bored chute and overflowed from the lip. There was a good arm’s length of air between the surface and the domed wood ceiling. She couldn’t see it, but Imeris knew the engraving was still there, of her name, and Ylly’s, and Leaper’s, done with a bore-knife one day after a writing lesson with Oldest-Mother. Leaper had been the youngest, but his writing had been the tidiest.

  Imeris had punished him for it with repeated dunkings. He’d been forced to become a better swimmer than she was, just so he could escape her.

  “Tell me again about Ylly’s father,” she said.

  Middle-Mother dived neatly, entering the water without a splash and emerging on the other side of Imeris, spouting water playfully.

  “He was a thatcher from Oxorland,” she said. “They’ve got ridiculous names. His was Ofondness. Ofondness thought he’d heard Audblayin’s call, but he was wrong. Just farted too hard, or something.” Middle-Mother laughed. “I liked his long arms and legs and his little brown bottom. His teeth were all crooked, but Ylly’s teeth grew straight, like mine. Mostly, I wanted a baby, and there he was. You know that most men who serve a deity have a spell on them so they don’t want sex. I suppose your brother has a spell like that on him. He’ll be a dead end like the rest of the Servants.”

  “That hardly seems fair. What good is an oath to remain chaste when it costs no effort to keep it? Without temptation—”

  Middle-Mother splashed her.

  “Oh, so you know something about temptation, do you? Tell me about those Loftfol boys. Or is there somebody else? Are you sure that you keep going to Odelland to fight that monster Bodyguard? Are you sure you don’t love the feel of her skin against yours? Or is it the handsome young incarnation of Odel?”

  Imeris hardly heard her, so vividly was she picturing the lanky Canop
ian thatcher with crooked teeth. Of course he would want to make love to beautiful, mischievous Middle-Mother. But with no intention of going away with the man to Oxorland, hadn’t Middle-Mother cared that her child would be a slave?

  “Middle-Mother, how could you be with that thatcher while he was free and you were a thing owned by the Servants of Audblayin?”

  “Was he free?” Middle-Mother shrugged. “He woke up in the morning, and he went to work. He hauled bundles of cut windgrass up the sides of great trees from Floorians even poorer than he was. He ate tasteless food. Slept on splinters. I ate meat and beans and nut porridge and slept in a bed in the great Garden.”

  “Of course he was free,” Imeris said angrily, but Middle-Mother splashed her again.

  “Nobody is free,” she said irritably. “Not the goddesses, not the gods. Is my husband free to return to me? What about my baby, whose body is home to the most coveted soul in Canopy? She ended up trapped in the Garden just the same as I was trapped. Worse. Until death.”

  When they climbed back up to the dwelling, Imeris using her spines and Middle-Mother the rope ladder, they found Youngest-Father at home. He’d also brought in a net of fish, gutted them, and spitted them over the fire.

  “Now everyone is here,” he said warmly. The family sat around the quandong table to eat fresh-caught fish together.

  “How can you say that?” Middle-Mother wailed. “What about my husband? What about my children?”

  Youngest-Father ignored her, which spoke eloquently of how often the lament came up at the supper table. Oldest-Mother reached across her for the salt.

  “I ruined the ropes and mechanisms of some of the ballistae I used between Loftfol and Wissin,” Imeris told Youngest-Father. “I wonder if you would help me to fix them. It would be faster with both of us. And with some of”—she almost turned to ask him, as if he might be sitting there, silent and scowling—“Oldest-Father’s rope.”

  Youngest-Father said, “I have fixed them, Issi. It was my excuse for staying in Wissin.”

  “Did you hear any rumours about Kirrik?” Youngest-Mother asked quietly. Only one finger and the thumb of her right hand were greasy; she ate fastidiously.

  “No,” Youngest-Father admitted.

  One by one, they left the table, heading for their beds, until Youngest-Father and Imeris were the only ones left in the hearth room. Youngest-Father watched in silence as Imeris put more wood on the fire.

  “Short sword,” she said to him after a while.

  “What about it?” he asked, bemused.

  “You have not asked me which discipline I will take up next. Short sword, I think.” She mimed a few experimental slashes and thrusts.

  He nodded. “You will do well at it. You do well in all the fighting arts.”

  Imeris gazed at his boyish, carefree face. She thought about how he had never had a spell on him to inure him to temptation.

  “What will happen if—” She wanted to ask, What will happen if the short sword is a waste of time, too? What will happen if I never kill her? If she kills me? She couldn’t finish the question, couldn’t speak it aloud. Instead, she asked the lesser question, the one that never troubled her sleep, but which clearly troubled Middle-Mother. “What will happen if I never fall in love?”

  Youngest-Father looked surprised.

  “Do you ask because you think I have never fallen in love?”

  It was Imeris’s turn to be taken aback.

  “Have you?”

  “Yes.”

  “With Youngest-Mother?” she guessed. “Before you knew that she loved Oldest-Mother?”

  “No!”

  They both stared, astonished, at one another. Then they looked away. The firelight leaped higher over the fresh fuel. Smoke ran over the drying racks of fish like an upside-down river.

  “Listen,” Youngest-Father said. “Our mother, Moonoom, was a travelling wet-nurse. She was even smaller than me, and as a girl she loved to fly, but there was one thing she loved more than flying, and that was babies.”

  “I suppose she could not fly pregnant or with young children?”

  “You suppose right. Esse, when he was born, was everything to her. She nursed two other babies between him and Bernreb and three more before having me. We were all born in different towns. Her husbands kept dying, but she was happy. Just like Sawas was happy when Oos, Ylly, and I went travelling. She didn’t envy us our adventures. Sawas loves babies. She loves children.”

  Imeris looked at the remains of the fish bones in the fire and thought again about how much easier it seemed to be for Canopian women to fall pregnant. Maybe it had nothing to do with the food. Maybe it was simply that Audblayin walked among them.

  But maybe Sawas would have had more children if she had stayed a slave. Imeris shook her head to be rid of dark thoughts.

  “Yes.”

  “This is what our mother told us, many times,” Youngest-Father said. “Boys, if you wish to father children, be sure to choose a wife whose dream is the raising of children. You will be hunters, and that is a dangerous trade. It is unlikely you will see your children grow. Especially you, Marram.”

  Imeris tilted her head, not understanding.

  “Why especially you?”

  “Because I love flying, the same as she did.” Youngest-Father squeezed the back of Imeris’s neck. “The same as you do, wild child. I have beaten chance to live this long. Twice I have been saved just in time from the sorceress.”

  “I have been saved twice, too,” Imeris said, ashamed, touching her amulet. “Once when Kirrik took Nirrin instead of me. The second time, with you, when I tried to fly to you but crashed into the tree instead. Oh, Youngest-Father.”

  “Bernreb has escaped his likely death at the claws of a tree bear or the coils of an embracer by being snatched up to Canopy by your sister.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Yet he chose well with Sawas.”

  “He chose her?” Imeris teased. “The way I heard it, it was Middle-Mother choosing from the three of you.”

  Youngest-Father shook his head ruefully.

  “I did fall in love, once. Her name was Immi. She was funny and lighthearted—and careless, Issi. She hated the sound of babies crying. Though she sang like the goddess of beasts and birds and wept when I went, I had to leave her. Better to leave her before giving her a child she did not want than leave her afterwards.”

  “Yes,” Imeris said after a while. “You were a good boy for listening to your mother. How did Moonoom die?”

  “She took her wings from the peg one morning and never returned.”

  Imeris shivered.

  “I do not want that to happen to you.”

  Youngest-Father laughed softly.

  “I am completely safe. For the near future.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You messed up my bed,” he said, “and did not change the sheets, but I am too tired to change them now. Crawl in, if you like, or sleep in the chair after you have finished your forms. Tomorrow when you go, I may still be sleeping. But I will not have you walking on the bridges to Loftfol like a lead-footed Canopian. You will take my wings.”

  Imeris gazed at him for a long moment. Since she’d stolen the chimera cloth twelve years ago, he hadn’t needed to tell her again not to lay a finger on it. Bringing the wings back to their home after the futile attack on Kirrik had been a necessity.

  “But you need them.”

  “I will come for them. After I have crafted a new set of wings from dayhunter hide for you.”

  He went to bed, and Imeris struggled to tip the great table, by herself, onto one side. She stacked the chairs and benches against it, to make room for her daily exercises.

  Oldest-Mother emerged from one of the hanging tapestry flaps before Imeris had finished the Discipline of the All-Body Breath.

  “Did the sound of dragging furniture wake you, Oldest-Mother? I am sorry,” Imeris said.

  “Not that,” Oldest-Mother replied, her smile reassuring. She
moved stiffly over to the fire and put a kettle over it. “I’ve got this pesky pain in my lower back. Crushed snake vine stems with a little warm water and fish fat helps.”

  “I am not listening,” Imeris said, smiling. “No matter how you try and make me a healer, I am a warrior, Oldest-Mother.”

  Until Kirrik is dead, at least.

  She moved easily through the Discipline of Balance, followed by the Discipline of Strength. With a pause for a sip of water and to help rub the fish-stinking ointment into Oldest-Mother’s lower back, she carried on with the Disciplines taught to her by Middle-Father and her Loftfol teachers respectively.

  The Discipline of the Knife.

  I was never so clumsy with a knife when I was at Loftfol, Oldest-Father had muttered one day when she was practicing under Middle-Father’s eye. He had been full of needling remarks like that—I kept the tidiest bunk at Loftfol; I was the best dressed at Loftfol; my fish fed a thousand warriors at Loftfol—until Youngest-Father revealed to Imeris that Oldest-Father had never been to Loftfol.

  The Discipline of Administering Poison. Taught to her by the Odarkim, whose faint praise after a year of study had been that he had never seen a woman do better. This could have been because he had never taught a woman before, but Imeris knew she excelled at the subtle discipline. The problem was that Aurilon’s skills were simply superior.

  The Discipline of Cord Strangulation. Taught by the Scentingim. Rope use had always been one of her weaker areas. She did not have the strength in her hands nor the knot-tying knack Oldest-Father owned, but she had tried her best to improve.

  Finally, Imeris danced the Discipline of Spines.

  “That last one,” Oldest-Mother remarked as a sweaty, tired Imeris came to sit beside her, “is terrifying.”

  “Why are you waiting here for me to finish?”

  “Oos and Sawas were whispering about you. They said you had unusual questions.”

  “Ha!” Imeris banked the fire. She moved all the furniture back to where it belonged, as quietly as she could. There was no need to disturb Youngest-Father; the chair in the hearth room would be fine to sleep in. She sat back down beside Oldest-Mother. “Maybe I do.”