Echoes of Understorey

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Imeris’s heart sank.

  “I have negotiated away the threat of one group with a grudge against me, and now I must avoid another?”

  “You killed her beast.”

  “I had no choice! I was called to the Hunt by the power of a different goddess, by the order of a king. This is not justice. Ilan should—”

  “Ilan has power in her own niche, Issi. Only her own niche, if she does not wish to make enemies of her own kind.” Middle-Father’s gaze left Audblayin for just long enough to assess the weapons that his other daughter carried on her person. He grunted his approval. “Just watch your back.”

  “I always do,” Imeris answered. “This may be Audblayinland, but it is still a part of Canopy. I may be brown, but my spines are white. I will see you again soon, Middle-Father.”

  * * *

  TWO HOURS later, she was watching her back when she saw somebody familiar bounding up to her from the direction of the silk market.

  Oh, no, she thought despairingly as Epi, heir to the House of Epatut, approached her along an almost-straight mulberry path. Once she’d arranged for him to become a student of Loftfol, she thought she’d seen the end of him and her birth family. Her debt to them felt like it was sufficiently discharged, that no more visits, no more awkward conversations, would be required.

  He wore silks as ornately embroidered as the ones he’d worn in the king’s court, but the puppy fat in his face was gone and the sashes at his waist were definitely wound tighter than before.

  Imeris stopped to wait for him. A white-skinned slave girl in a plain brown silk wrap followed a step behind him, carrying a small wooden chest. If he had gifts for her, she would take them. She would buy metal with them.

  “My Lady Hunter,” Epi said, eyes bright, stopping at arm’s length and bowing his head. Imeris spotted a jewelled knife handle half buried in his sash. Pale ridges of callus lined the outer edges of his hands and splotched his knuckles where his skin had been sleekly soft before.

  “Call me Imeris,” she said. “Or sister.”

  He jerked a little in surprise, bulging eyes widening, and her suspicions were confirmed; Epi, like his mother, wanted them married.

  “C-c-cousin,” he spluttered. Oh, yes. Cousins can marry. Brother and sister cannot. “Are you thirsty?”

  Before Imeris could say she was not, the slave girl opened the chest and Imeris’s attention was drawn by the wave of cold that floated out of it. It held glittering, white, feathery-looking stuff in which two wine gourds nestled.

  The white stuff was not duck down.

  “Is that … ice?” She silently calculated the season. Three months of spring. Five months of monsoon. One month of autumn. Three of winter. It was winter.

  “Snow,” Epi answered, grin wide and white teeth perfect. “Oxor is weak, for the first time I can remember. She died recently, so we’ve had less sun. Have you ever seen snow before?”

  “No.” Imeris stared. The slave’s hands trembled. She must have been instructed to keep the lid of the thick-walled chest closed at all times to keep the snow from melting. Her blue eyes darted nervously at Epi. “I have seen slaves before, though. What is your name?”

  Epi moved between them before the girl could answer, lifting both gourds out of the snow and pressing one into Imeris’s hands, looking embarrassed.

  “The girl’s mother was freed,” he said quickly, “as first payment for my tuition. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin will free this slave next, once his hired servant has been trained. I beg you, cousin, drink while it’s still chilly. You’ve never tried anything like it.”

  Imeris frowned. Perhaps he was nervous because he wanted to impress her.

  Or perhaps he was nervous because Loftfol had not forgiven her, after all, but slipped him a poison to use on her. He was not her real family. She could not trust him.

  Yet the gourd was so deliciously cold.

  “I do not want wine,” she said, pressing the gourd back on him, to his great consternation. “But I will take the snow.”

  She took the chest from the white-skinned girl. Scooped out half a handful of the stuff, which felt grainy and sharp like broken glass or honey tree sawdust. Wondered at the sensation of her fingertips growing numb.

  Snow.

  She put it in her mouth, and it turned to cool nothing against her tongue.

  “Epi,” she said between her third and fourth scoop, “this stuff is amazing.”

  His face glowed with pleasure, and he swigged both gourds of wine and said nothing as she ate it all.

  When there was no more snow, Imeris gave the wet box back to the slave.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was very refreshing. Now I must go to Odelland.”

  “Stay,” Epi implored her. “Marry me. Be my wife.”

  “Forty days at Loftfol,” Imeris said, shaking her head, adjusting her harness, “and a box full of snow, and you imagine to win my favour?” And Wife-of-Epi is a foolish-sounding name.

  “Yes! My teacher Kishsik says I’m at least as gifted as you were when you began.”

  “Does he say so?” Imeris asked dangerously.

  “It’s because I’m a man.” Epi nodded to himself stupidly, and Imeris realised the two gourds of wine had affected him.

  “It is because you are paying him,” Imeris murmured, turning away, but Epi bumped up against her, blustering.

  “Shall we race, then, cousin?”

  “No,” Imeris said.

  “You’re afraid of being beaten!” He put his hand to the hilt of the jewelled dagger as though it had a hope of availing him against her. His chest could not be puffed any higher. “They put your name with the other Hunters on the monument tree, but you’re not so great! If you don’t race me, I’ll tell everyone you were afraid to face me!”

  Imeris smiled thinly. It was not fair, to punish him for his pride, but her own pride demanded it. He called her Hunter, but that was not what he saw when he looked at her.

  “Very well,” she said. “A race. To the Falling Fig on the border of Audblayinland and Ehkisland. It is seven thousand paces away. To win the title of Heightsman and become accepted at Loftfol, I won a climbing race, but you have no spines. A climbing race would not be fair. We will run a footrace.” She had to go in that direction, anyway, though she hadn’t intended to run.

  She felt the drag of her heavy weapons, tools and three golden seeds. Her muscles were fatigued from the climb, but most of that was in her shoulders and back, and she had no glider to tangle her heels or bang against her legs as she ran.

  Epi laughed triumphantly, as though the race were already over.

  “I have a lesson, later on,” he informed her. “If we waited, they could witness.”

  “No.” He would be pleased, later on, that there were no witnesses. “Let Loftfol wait.”

  “If I win the race, will you marry me?”

  “Yes.” She said it easily. He would not win.

  “When do we start?”

  “We start now, of course.”

  Epi stared at her a little longer. Then he gave a single, decisive nod. Stripping off his ridiculous heeled boots and the outer layers of his fancy garb, he gave them to the girl, instructing her to take them back to his stall at the silk market.

  “Who will say when?” he asked, swinging his bared arms back and forth as though limbering up. How his arms would help him in a footrace, Imeris couldn’t be sure.

  “Count to three,” Imeris told him, cinching her harness tighter behind her, drawing the adze and the bore-knife into the small of her back. She took note of the position of the sun; it was behind thin cloud cover and still low in the east. The Falling Fig lay due south. It would not do to lose her way.

  “One,” Epi all but shouted, abruptly quivering with excitement. His gaze turned from her to the mulberry branch ahead. The high road narrowed as it curved gently towards the next crossroads, a meeting of mulberry and floodgum. There, a couple of merchant women with barrows, their h
eads together in deep conversation, provided the first obstacle. “Two. Three!”

  Imeris leaped into the lead.

  FORTY-FOUR

  IMERIS TOOK the low roads.

  For a while, as she warmed to the task, when she turned her head she could see Epi labouring along the high roads, mouth open in a ragged O, armpits damp, the silk streaky with sweat, his eyes bulging more than usual.

  Then she forgot him, lengthening her stride, enjoying the wind of her passage as it broke over her brow. The dappled sunlight of Canopy made patterns on the road that were unique, never to be repeated again. As the day grew hotter, less suitable for trussing a squealing tapir calf and taking it to market, most people retreated to the shade if they were able, so that sometimes Imeris was the only witness to the shadow-play.

  Any snow that had fallen overnight without being saved in a box would have melted ten times over. The air smelled of human waste that had not quite made it over branch edges, lemon ironwood and sweet-fruit pine oils, the powder down of parrot flocks, banked fires of floodgum bark, and winter flowers with a whiff of flying fox.

  She was perhaps a quarter of the way to the Falling Fig when the sound of heavy shapes slapping the leaves of the passionflower-vine-covered gap-axe she was in made her slow down in order to search out its origin. One of the leaf-concealed, rapidly moving shapes gave a long, wild wail. Imeris glimpsed golden fur.

  Gibbons, she thought. Their meat tasted tolerable when well spiced but otherwise worked better as bait. Nothing to worry about.

  Still, she wanted them to pass before she sped up again. She could not keep an eye on the troupe and run safely at the same time without slipping. Something about the answering wails of the other gibbons recalled the wildness of the bone sword Anahah had made for her, made an image of Orin’s many-eyed monster flash though her mind.

  Then she remembered where she’d last seen a gibbon: the cave-like entrance of the palace in Orinland.

  From a branchlet that split off from the high road, an ape swiftly arced, one-handed. It was the size of a just-walking human child. Its fine yellow body fur turned white in a ring around its black, bare face. White canines gleamed in a black hole-mouth as it swung towards her, screaming.

  Imeris sidestepped the fast-flung, hairy body, feeling the wind of its passage. The gibbon’s long arms caught in a hanging vine beside her and its trailing legs, feet as dexterous as hands, grabbed the harness across her back. Imeris felt it with the finality of dropping to the end of a rope. It jerked her towards the edge with surprising strength. When she braced herself and spun, swinging angrily at it with her spines, the gibbon did not abandon her.

  Instead, holding on by its feet, it swung the opposite way and wrapped itself around her eyes, a smothering blanket that smelled of rancid oil.

  A second gibbon slammed into one shoulder, unbalancing her again towards the edge. Then a third. She couldn’t turn her forearms around enough to cut the first animal; the angle needed was one as if to cut her own face. Blunt teeth chewed her ear in a lightning strike of pain. Blood ran down her neck.

  Imeris reached her adze. Freed it with difficulty. Wedged the blade of it between the first gibbon and her forehead, prising it loose. Once it was away from her, she was able to insert her other forearm into the gap and cut through the animal’s hide. It took a piece of her ear along with it when it fell. The other two gibbons, swinging about with their feet open, seeking a hold, she didn’t strike at directly. Instead, she slashed with her spines at the vines they were using as ropes.

  They fell, but not far. Almost faster than her eye could follow, they swung back to the high road and aimed themselves at her from different directions.

  Now that she was prepared for it, Imeris had no trouble slicing them along their breastbones as they came. Her spines stayed magically sharp, unlike the skinning knives she’d used on monkeys under Middle-Father’s eye. Their naked lungs deflated as their chests opened. Imeris blinked more ape blood out of her eyes.

  She stood, red-smeared and panting, on the gap-axe road, trying to look in all directions for more gibbons.

  Covered in gore, she must have presented a curious sight to Epi. She heard him coming, puffing and wheezing like forge bellows. She saw his face, a hundred paces back along the high road. Goggling at her. No sign of recognition.

  He was so absorbed in the spectacle of her that he made a misstep. The branch road kinked. Epi kept running straight ahead.

  He seemed to hang in the air. Imeris’s heart seized; for a moment she thought he was young enough that the protection of Odel would still hold. He opened his hands and waved desperately about. Passionflower leaves came loose from their vines in his grip but failed to slow or check his plunge.

  Imeris started running towards him, spreading her arms as if to fly and catch him, but her glider wasn’t there.

  He plummeted into darkness. Imeris fell to her knees.

  Her chimera wings. The angles were all wrong. She couldn’t have caught him anyway.

  I still would have tried.

  FORTY-FIVE

  CAKED IN dried ape-blood, Imeris entered Odel’s Temple.

  She half expected Aurilon to descend on her, but once again, there were only worshippers in the wide main chamber.

  Her gore-covered right forearm spines needed to be cleaned before they could be retracted. Flesh seemed to stick where sap never did. Canopians, citizens and slaves alike, performed a slow but sure evacuation, edging away from her in a strained silence, all but tossing their tributes in retreat and warning the others they met along the paths in whispers.

  “Aurilon,” Imeris said loudly, hoarsely, but nobody came. She placed the three golden seeds one by one on the floating dish and added, “Ibbin, a Hunter of Irofland. He is still a child. That is for him, if Orin has not murdered him yet. The second seed is for the not-born child of Sorros the Silent Smith and his wife, Nin, the moonflower seller of Gannak. The third is for the child of Anahah, who was once Bodyguard to Orin. I do not know if that baby is born or not.” She smiled, and the movement stung her bloody, chewed ear.

  Imeris went to the sweet-fruit pine plug in the floor, sunk her left forearm spines into it and tried to pull it open, but it resisted.

  “Protector of Children,” she shouted. “Holy One!”

  There was no response. When she peered through the fish-mouth door, she saw the whisperers, heads together, still blocking the roads to the Temple. She wondered if someone had gone to the palace to alert the king’s soldiers.

  She needed to ask for her gifts before she returned to Wife-of-Epatut in disgrace.

  Imeris began washing her bloody arms in the clear, perfumed water on top of the central platform where the bronze tribute-dish floated. If anything got a reaction, desecrating the water would.

  Moments later, the trapdoor in the floor flew open.

  Odel’s amber eyes were red-rimmed from crying. Imeris was shocked by his dirt-streaked face. Scabs covered his head where he’d apparently inexpertly shorn off his own hair. The strong, ink-stained hands were uncovered. He wore a loose, pink, rumpled robe and a long wrap skirt slit up the side, but nothing on his feet.

  “How dare you pollute my—” he snarled before encompassing her own wretched appearance. His mouth flattened. His nostrils flared. He swallowed. “Orin attacked you.”

  “I have not seen gibbons attack of their own accord before,” Imeris said, staring at him, wanting to ask why he looked so dishevelled, but knowing there could only be one answer, and that the answer was one she did not want to hear.

  “Imeris, Aurilon is dead.”

  “No,” Imeris whispered.

  “I’ve summoned the king’s vizier, who was once my Servant, back to be my new Bodyguard. You bring tribute for Anahah’s child, oblivious to the harm he has done the balance by becoming pregnant, an essentially female act, but if Orin can’t contain the damage by killing him, I’ll counteract it in the opposite direction by making my new Bodyguard a man. I’ve g
iven him three days to bid his family farewell. Three days, I hoped to have to mourn my most faithful Servant in private. Yet somehow here I am, talking to you.”

  Imeris hardly registered what he said about Anahah.

  “No,” she repeated. “Aurilon cannot be dead.”

  “Many gifts intended for you, as Hunter of Odelland, were brought here.” Odel was now calm. His voice held no further trace of bitterness. “Aurilon opened them all to be certain they were safe. This one looked like a knife but it was a mirage. Orin’s doing. A rival god’s spell that reached out and borrowed power from the blade you brought to trade for the skin.” Imeris hung her head, but Odel hadn’t finished speaking. “The spell compelled her to take up the blade, and to use it. Aurilon couldn’t let go of the bone sword’s hilt once she seized it. She leaped to her death rather than start laying about her and slaughtering innocents in my Temple.”

  No. Imeris couldn’t say it anymore; she could only think it. My miscalculation again.

  “Orin’s magic in the seat of my power.” Odel sighed. “If I had power to harm her, I would, but I can’t withhold my power from her niche and let children die. I’m not the Mistress of the Wild, to be fickle with my people’s lives. But nor can I forgive her. Oxor is weak this season and so even gods can’t find it in their hearts to love and forgive.”

  Imeris wiped tears from her cheeks and made a sound suspiciously like a sniffle.

  “Please forgive me, Holy One.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Odel said. “I blame Orin, and I blame the chimera’s curse. The chimera Aurilon killed, the one that killed me, was of the wild before it died. Orin may be to blame for sending the box, but Aurilon shouldn’t have succumbed to the spell in the seat of my domain. Would not have, if not for the curse on her. I suppose I was lucky to keep her as long as I did. Could anyone but Aurilon have survived twenty years with a chimera’s curse hanging over them?”

  “No,” Imeris said, trying to smile.

  “I’m sorry you weren’t able to beat her, Imeris. She would have liked to die that way, too old, her reflexes too slow, with young blood come to take her place. But I never believed that you would have stayed. Would you?”