Echoes of Understorey

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “She freed the Garden slaves,” Daggad pointed out.

  “Odel freed his slaves as well,” Imeris replied, “and he has no wards to keep me out. Even murderers love their children. Some days I like him better. He and Aurilon have done much for me, with no bond of blood.”

  The Temple itself was crowded with people bringing tributes for babies born during the monsoon, when mothers were more confined and could not come on long journeys between niches. Priceless items from tiny pearls to great chunks of pink rock salt were laid beside humbler items like leaf plates of seed porridge and tail feathers of colourful birds. Odel knew when a family or individual was making a real sacrifice and when not, and extended his protection accordingly.

  Imeris stood and watched the supplicants in silence as dusk drew nearer and Airak’s lanterns blazed to life across the high roads of the city. Daggad chatted amicably with anyone who would talk to him, and though by his speech and dress he seemed a slave, even noblewomen could not resist the chance to brag about their babes. Imeris thought on what Epatut had said about spending his fortune to recover her. If only he had thought to spend it before she fell and not after, but perhaps he had hoped, at that stage, to have plenty of sons.

  She thought on Oldest-Father, who had woven a great net to catch gold-fruit stones from Akkadland when Imeris was only a few years old. Risking the wrath of the Headman of Dul for poaching, Youngest-Father had flown out with the net and flown back with three seed-shaped ingots. Two had been sent up the side of the tree to Youngest-Mother’s old friend, the Gatekeeper of the Garden, who had agreed to send them on as tribute to Odel.

  The third metal seed had been intended to decorate a wedding headdress, but instead had been put to the exact same purpose as the others when Leaper was born.

  Three golden fruit. Three children to protect. Three fathers with nowhere near the resources of a man like Epatut, yet they had guarded their children far better than the Canopian merchant had.

  At last, the main open space of the Temple was empty but for Imeris and Daggad. Aurilon emerged with slow caution. Odel was not far behind her.

  Daggad bowed. Imeris did not.

  “I have a remnant of Orin’s creature,” she said without preamble. “An artefact of the Old Gods.”

  “I feel it,” Odel said wryly. “It itches my mind. I wish you’d take it away.”

  Imeris didn’t try to hide her disappointment.

  “I thought you would want it,” she said, extricating the bone sword from a tangle of harness and other tools and weapons. Holding it recalled the battle against the creature and the way her skin had started to transform; in that manner, it itched her mind, too. “I thought you would take it. I wanted to trade it for the chimera skin I left behind, if you felt the items were of equal value.”

  “They’re not of equal value,” Odel said, disappointing Imeris even further. He smiled. “The pelt was a welcome tribute in nobody’s name. It’s been a long time since anyone made an unspecified gift so generous. The greatest source of my personal suffering is the foreknowledge that children will fall and that I’ll be unable, in most cases, to save them. I was helpless to save even Aurilon when she fell as a child, though I knew she would one day be the most worthy of Bodyguards. I had to let her go. Nobody had brought me any gifts that day and begged me to save somebody they could not name.”

  “So Youngest-Father’s wings did some good, then?” Imeris folded her arms across her chest. “They saved someone?”

  “They saved many.”

  “But you are saying I cannot have them back.”

  Odel’s smile deepened.

  “I’m not saying that. Aurilon will fetch the wings for you. Don’t bring the sword any closer to my floating dish. Their magics will interfere with one another.”

  “But you said they were not of equal value, Holy One.”

  “They aren’t. The sword is much more valuable. Chimeras can breed and replenish their numbers. Bones of the Old Gods can be consumed, but they can’t ever be replaced. What else would you ask for to trade?”

  Imeris brightened.

  “Books,” she said at once. “Scrolls. Do you have anything that deals with metalworking and magic in combination? Could you have copies made for me?”

  He raised an eyebrow, but simply said, “I could.”

  Aurilon, when she returned, brought both the frame-strapped chimera skin that Youngest-Father had lent Imeris and the shimmering skin of the chimera that Aurilon had killed herself.

  “Let me wrap the sword in this skin,” she said, and Imeris handed her the ornate weapon that Anahah had crafted from the tusk of the monster.

  “I was warned,” Imeris said, “that this sword would make me wild. That I might, in using it, turn on my friends. I was warned that it could not be used against the wild, only against people and perhaps domesticated animals.”

  “It is not to be used,” Aurilon said, “but to be proffered as payment in turn, at some future hour when Orin rages against Odel and requires pacification.”

  “Oh,” Imeris said. She couldn’t imagine how Odel might offend Orin, but she supposed Aurilon knew best. The Bodyguard rolled the sword neatly in the colour-changing cloth, so that it became not only shielded but nearly invisible. Meanwhile, Imeris checked the struts and pins of the wings, pulling them around her, attaching them to her harness, shrugging her shoulders until they felt right.

  The two women looked up from their tasks at the same time, eyes meeting. They stood a pace apart.

  “Will you go back to Understorey,” Aurilon asked, “despite the enmity of the Loftfol school?”

  “Will you teach me,” Imeris replied just as quietly, “so that I might survive Loftfol and destroy the sorceress who murdered my friends and my father?”

  Aurilon sighed.

  “I should have told you this years ago. I am not the teacher you need. Nor are the instructors of Loftfol.” She put one hand to Imeris’s shoulder. “All you need to know is this. In battle, every technique is best suited to a certain size and shape of form and also best used against a certain size and shape of form. You will never be as tall or wide as those low-dwelling warriors, but you know that already; already you have adapted many fighting styles taught to you by men. My biggest mistake was to allow the Crocodile-Riders to remove my breasts so that I could use their men’s techniques. I would rather have spent my lifetime learning to fight in my own true style. You are your own teacher. You are the only teacher you need.”

  “No,” Imeris said, feeling like she was falling, as if a branch she had reached for was not really there, had never been there. Aurilon’s words were too similar to Anahah’s. She could not accept them. There had to be some final lesson. “You sound just like him. He would not tell me what my weaknesses were.”

  Aurilon compressed her lips. Her fingers squeezed.

  “Do you mean that I sound like the instructor that you killed? Your weakness when you fought me was impatience. Your weakness when you fought the sorceress was your care for your fathers. Fight her alone. Fight when time is not a factor. Fight without a care for anybody else.”

  “You fight with Odel as your care,” Imeris said.

  “Odel cannot be killed,” Aurilon replied, lifting the skin of the chimera who had killed Odel in her other hand. “Not truly. Nor can any soul.”

  “Then why take the chimera’s curse upon yourself, Bodyguard?”

  Aurilon smiled.

  “Because I have a gift,” she said, letting her fingers lift lightly from Imeris’s shoulder. “And gifts are meant to be used.”

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE Gate of the Garden, Imeris waited in the moonlight for the goddess Audblayin.

  “Come inside,” Middle-Father called around a mouthful of tapir in pomegranate sauce. “You cannot sit there all night.”

  In the doorway of his dwelling, he and Daggad made a matched pair, each as brawny and cheerful as the other. After a brief scuffle over which of them should’ve done what
he was told by the Headman of Gannak and which one should have killed the Headman twenty-five years ago, they shared bia and swapped gossip while Imeris practiced the seven disciplines and the six flowing forms on the platform outside Audblayin’s Temple.

  Aoun must have seen her, or sensed her, but he made no appearance; apparently Imeris had disturbed the goddess’s sleep too often of late.

  “Maybe I should go down to Gannak ahead of you,” Daggad suggested, waving his gourd full of bia. “I can take the scrolls to Sorros. Make sure ’e is well. ’Elp ’im to read them. We could ’ave a strategy all worked out before the goddess ’as even spoken to you.”

  “You could be killed by Loftfol,” Imeris called back without taking her eyes from the Gate, “before you reached Gannak. You could lose the scrolls.”

  “You could visit my wife,” Middle-Father told Daggad, “and she could berate you for a few days for not forcing me to return to her.”

  “What possible reason could I ’ave to want to do that?”

  “She would feed you while she was berating you. Also, Loftfol holds certain superstitious misconceptions about the emergents of goddesses and gods, including that they cannot be bored into. It is one reason Esse chose this tree in which to hide our home.”

  “The more people you tell,” Imeris said, “the less hidden it is.”

  “I like this man,” Middle-Father declared. “His jokes are good for a weakling from Gannak.”

  “Your jokes are good,” Daggad replied generously, “for a criminal from nowhere.”

  I have to pacify Loftfol, Imeris thought, but I have already given the sword to Odel. How else can I make amends?

  While Bernreb told stories of all the fools and madmen he’d dispatched outside the Garden Gate and Daggad boasted of all the soldiers who had wet themselves when they realised the slave they’d spoken down to easily outmatched them, Imeris wandered back to the closed Gate and put her hand to a representation of Audblayin.

  She is not doing all she can to help me.

  Imeris sat with her back to the Gate. In her mind’s eye, she saw the first time Middle-Father had asked Audblayin, Ylly as she had been then, to break the neck of a bird caught in a snare. Hit the neck bones hard between the heel of your hand and the edge of the plank, Middle-Father suggested. Or hold it by the head and whirl it sharply through the air. The neck will break.

  Ylly, frozen in hesitation, had helplessly held the woodcreeper between both hands as if it were her own child.

  Let me do it, Imeris had said. The longer you hold it without killing it, the more frightened it is.

  Ylly had fumbled as she’d passed the bird to Imeris. It had escaped in panicked flight, leaving a few red-barred feathers behind.

  She had no warrior self then. But she does now.

  Crickets droned and moths flew towards the moon outside the Gate of the Garden. Imeris let her limbs go, slumping sleepily against the carved wood. Ylly had only ever once been physically punished by Oldest-Father. That was when she had broken the rope jig that led down to the pool. Little did she know that Imeris had actually broken it, but loosely twined it back into place to give the appearance that it was still sound, not thinking that the next person to use it might be killed.

  Later, with Ylly’s weeping stirring her to unbearable levels of guilt, Imeris had cried too. She had confessed. Oldest-Father had beaten her twice as hard as usual. To remind her that he loved her, he said. To remind her that he could not keep her safe if she did not remember and obey.

  Imeris nodded drowsily. She napped. When she woke, the Gate at her back had left impressions in her flesh; it was dawn and birdsong washed over her.

  She stretched, blinking away dreams of woodcreepers and Oldest-Father with a whipping stick in his hand. Middle-Father watched her from the open front door of his house, arms folded, sleepless and alert.

  Daggad must be inside. Sleeping in the bed she’d politely refused, Imeris assumed.

  She listened to the birds again. Their chorus was a soothing wave when tuned to background noise but an ongoing war when listened to call by call, some crying for mates, others to summon their family groups to a source of food.

  Humans were savage, Imeris had decided, but birds were no better. So much of the song humans considered beautiful was actually territorial. Bird kingdoms carved by strength from the Great Trees, defended by blood when necessary, and starving hatchlings fell as often as starving children from the broad boughs.

  Imeris leaped to her feet, finding fresh spiderwebs with her face. Middle-Father laughed as she clawed them away.

  “Come inside,” he told her. “Eat and drink. Make water where the bugs will not find your bare backside so quickly. What are you so angry about?”

  “She,” Imeris said, stalking stiffly into the dwelling, “is not doing all she can to help me.”

  “And are you,” Middle-Father answered gently, “doing all you can to help her?”

  FORTY

  IMERIS LEFT Daggad snoring in Middle-Father’s bed.

  “You,” she said when the Gate cracked open and her barefooted, diamond-draped, loose-haired sister appeared, “are not doing all you can to help me.”

  The white-robed Gatekeeper, Aoun, stood silently behind Audblayin, one step back from the gap. Imeris saw in the corner of her eye that Middle-Father had moved to a position where he could better survey the scene. He held a barbed, white-apple-wood javelin in a spear-thrower in his right hand.

  He smiled at her when he saw her looking.

  Vines growing up the walls of the Garden twitched towards Audblayin’s lithe body, wanting to be closer. Flowers opened out of season, turning to green-flecked purple fruits almost immediately.

  “Perhaps you should make it clearer to me,” the goddess replied reasonably, “exactly what you’re trying to do.”

  She had always been the gentler one. The prettier one. With Middle-Mother’s smile and Middle-Mother’s laugh; Middle-Mother’s favourite, her daughter by blood, and perhaps that was why Oldest-Father had not thrashed her as much. He had always been a little bit afraid of Middle-Mother.

  “Stop the sorceress,” Imeris said flatly. “It is what I have been raised to do. What I have always tried to do. Meanwhile, you flit about pretending it is not important. You pretend Understorey is not important.”

  “You pretend Canopy isn’t important.”

  “Of course it is important. Half my family is here.”

  “I should never have opened the barrier for you,” Audblayin said, and Imeris took a step back. I called you my little sister, but your soul is by far the older. Now you dare condescend to me, to yearn to take my choices out of my hands! “It’s my fault you feel torn between two worlds. I should have made you stay below, a clean break, as clean as when you fell as a baby, but I missed you, and you wanted so badly to beat Aurilon.”

  “Yes,” Imeris replied, stung. “If you had only left me alone down there with Oldest-Father, I would be a Leader of Loftfol by now. My mission would be to hunt you. Kill you.”

  “You’d never have agreed to that. No matter what.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? You will not open the barrier for me again? Is that the help you will give me, to help me get over losing you? Loftfol will find us, eventually, if Kirrik does not.” Middle-Father, who pretended to be scanning the surroundings, gave himself away by shifting uncomfortably.

  “Make peace with Loftfol,” Audblayin said, and Imeris was taken aback by hearing her thoughts spoken aloud.

  “How?” she demanded, as if she had not been turning it over in her mind ever since the pursuit by Kishsik.

  “You’ll think of something.”

  “You are confusing me with Leaper. Our brother is the one who speaks fancy words and makes the murderous see reason. I am the hunter he taught me to be.” Imeris pointed at Middle-Father without taking her eyes from Audblayin. “I trap things. I cut their throats and skin them. Right now there is a soul I need to trap, and you know more about it t
han me. You are immortal, and you are not telling me what you know.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Help me with what you can help me with, then,” she demanded. “Grant a child to Sorros the Silent Smith and his wife, Nin. Give me three golden metal-stone fruits to take to the Temple of Odel. One for Sorros’s child. One for Ibbin, who helped me on the Hunt.” She would have liked to bestow the deity’s protection on every surviving member of the Hunt, even Oniwak, but Ibbin was the only one who was still a child. “And one for Anahah’s child.”

  Before Imeris could dwell on Anahah, Audblayin surprised her with a long, angry, incredulous laugh that made her seem more like Middle-Mother than ever.

  “You want me to give you gold from my Garden so you can pay tribute to a rival god? You’re mad.”

  “You are the mad one. You think I do not care for Canopy? I saved Canopy from a monster. My name is on the monument tree. It will be there after I am dead and born again. The king of Airakland presented me with gifts of gratitude, so why not you?”

  It was Audblayin’s turn to take a long, deep breath.

  “I’ll give you gold,” she said at last. “I’ll give you another amulet of my old bone. A piece of myself from when I was a monster. Don’t dare say I haven’t helped you. You know how I feel about such fragments of the past. Place the amulet around Nin’s neck, and she’ll conceive. Bring it back to me a month later, when she’s sure she’s carrying. I’ll open the barrier for you one last time.”

  “I will bring it back when she is sure,” Imeris said solemnly, gratefully. She heard Daggad yawning and scratching himself in the doorway of Middle-Father’s dwelling.

  One last time.

  “Promise,” Audblayin said, “not to give my amulet to Odel, whom you love more than you love me.”

  “That is ridiculous.” Imeris’s skin prickled. Could the goddess have overheard her remarks to Daggad, somehow?