The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

“Hurry, wetlander,” he said.

  Words. I had to muster the words the Maaram Ana had chanted to blow the dead souls to the gate.

  “Mask, heart, and key,” I began. The feeding spirits paused and turned toward me, and I saw their tense attention like ribbons of gray light reaching out to bind me. Fear trapped my voice in my chest and emptied my mind. What next? What came next? I wondered how it would feel to be devoured by a spirit.

  Parech’s flame flared and then guttered. The spirits crept closer. The girl whispered, “Overpower them. Quickly.”

  I closed my eyes and bit my lip until it bled, hard enough to push aside the fear and focus. Mask, heart, and key, the Maaram Ana would chant, wafting the thick resin smoke over countless battlefields. And next? Great hunter, make’lai, take these ones beyond the gate. Water, wind, and fire begone and leave the death to its business .

  I prepared to begin again and spat on the ground beside me. But the spirits surrounding me recoiled, and my strange herb-sight rendered my innocuous bloody saliva green as the trees and bright as Parech. And there, if I looked closely, I saw strange ribbons wafting from me toward the spirits, shifting in an unseen wind. I took another breath, and all paused, as though what I had to say had now gained utmost importance.

  “A sacrifice,” the girl whispered.

  But I hardly knew what a sacrifice was, let alone how to manipulate spirits with one. “Mask, heart, and key” I repeated, and then continued, “Great hunter, make’lai. . .”

  Where a moment before there had been nothing in front of me but a few greedy spirits and the glowing auras of the trees, I now saw a tall figure dressed in white robes and wearing a crude mask. Two parallel red lines, like unknown tribal marks, slashed its cheeks diagonally. Its eyes were black as two bogs, much like the girl’s in this dream world. A rope was lashed around its waist, with a single key attached. Mask, heart, and key. I knew upon whom I looked.

  Parech knew as well, for I could feel his fear like burlap on my skin. The death itself. The lesser spirits slunk away from us, fading and slithering as though they might escape its notice.

  “Would you bind me with that?” the death said, nodding its head toward the still-glowing mess of my saliva and blood. The wan strands of power that emanated from it were so clearly unequal to the death’s power that I found myself, unexpectedly, laughing.

  “I’m not so foolish,” I said. “I beg you to clear this battlefield. To take this one’s spirit.”

  Its mask turned to Parech. “That one has not yet given up. Time enough and he will come to me. What do you sacrifice to make me take him so soon?”

  A sacrifice? Surely I’d never seen the Maaram Ana make a sacrifice on the battlefield. I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong, how I’d summoned so great a power. I wanted to tell it to leave, that all I knew of spirits and sacrifice was what I’d overheard in towns and trade boats. But Parech was lying there in agony. I had to do something.

  And then, the solution came clear.

  I reached into Parech’s belt and withdrew his fighting adze—sharp and crusted with someone else’s blood. The death looked at me, and though its mask remained impassive, I could have sworn it looked curious.

  “And what is that for, girl?” it said.

  “I. . .he won’t be needing you after all,” I said, strangely giddy with the audacity of my plan.

  “Won’t he?” The death paused, and then inclined its head. “I think we will meet again, wetlander.”

  The spirits began to creep back once the death disappeared. I didn’t mind. It would only make my task easier. I took the adze and swiftly slit my left wrist.

  My blood soaked the earth; I was suddenly suffused with power and light. The spirits stared at me, as though transfixed.

  “I bind you, spirit of earth,” I said, and as the words left my mouth, bands of my light encircled a stout root that waved its shoots about like antennae. I had it. Its power was my power—my joy was sharp and sweet and clear, like the juice from a grapefruit. The girl whimpered, but gripped my hand more tightly.

  “What are you—”

  “Save his life,” I commanded the spirit, minor though it was. “Heal him as far as you are able. Stanch his blood, save his soul, and then you shall be free of me.”

  Parech lived, as I had known he would. Tulo—the girl’s name was offered to me grimly in the first silent minutes after—bound my arm and then helped me move him away from the battlefield. We never discussed staying together. We never discussed leaving. We simply knew.

  We had seen death.

  I had conquered it and tasted the purest power, the dominance of humans over spirits.

  Parech had burned hot as the heart of a volcano and laughed even as he lay dying. And Tulo was fierce and loyal and half-hated us for being foreign and somehow complicit in the decimation of her people. But she followed us. Later, Tulo told me it was because we both burned bright as torches, and we dazzled her eyes.

  For a while we lived in the forest. It was fruiting season and easier to stay there, despite the occasional bands of roaming soldiers, than to scavenge in towns. None of us had any goods to trade in a town, and Parech was still too weak to work. Tulo liked it better in the forest. She said it was easier to see there. I thought this was curious, but she said that there were more spirits in the ancient forests than in the new towns—and fewer people to cast their bright lights. The subject of her blindness, and of the ancestor’s gift that Parech had destroyed, was still raw between them. It took several weeks before I learned the full story of what had happened before we met.

  Tulo and I built a crude shelter of branches lashed together with bark, dug half into the earth for warmth. We covered the ground with moss and covered our heads with the largest leaves we could find to keep out the rain. When he was well enough to walk, Parech helped us craft spears for fishing. He knew better than either Tulo or I which fruits and ground roots were good for eating. I was surprised he knew this land so well, but I suppose I should have expected it. I’d only traveled from town to town. He had lived in this forest for at least a year as a soldier fighting off tribal incursions. The Maaram paid their soldiers haphazardly, and supplied them with even less frequency, so he’d needed those skills to survive. I wondered if he would go off and join the army again once he recovered, but he made no mention of it. I think maybe he was tired of war, or perhaps saw in us an even brighter adventure. I know he smiled often, even when his wounds surely hurt him greatly. He took the unexpected gift of his life with a resigned cheer strikingly similar to how he had anticipated his death. It bound both Tulo and me closer to him, I suppose, though I doubt either of us realized it at the time.

  He still called her Princess, and me he called Ana, always mocking. I called him a barbarian Akane and let my hands linger on his chest when I changed his bandages.

  One evening, three weeks after we met, he sat beside me before the fire and declared, “We should go to Okika.” That’s how the Maaram now styled their new capital city, after the name of a beautiful flower their enemy Esselans prized. It was fashionable to speak Essela, for all that the Maaram were at war with them.

  Tulo and I stared at him. “But,” I said, “we have no sennit braid save that bit of Tulo’s, and no mats, or anything at all.”

  “I heard the Maaram devils enslave anyone without passes in the streets after dark,” said Tulo.

  “And you’re still hurt,” I said.

  Parech smiled indulgently at these objections. “Are we to live in the forest forever? Become monkeys and climb the trees?”

  Tulo stuck out her chin, a sure sign that she’d once again found another reason to take offense. “My people have always lived close to the forest.”

  Parech flexed his hand. I knew his wound pained him, which perhaps made him respond more harshly than he would have otherwise. “Well, your people struck you blind and then left you to die in the ‘life-giving forest,’ so you think you’d be a little more curious about how civilized peo
ple do things.”

  Tulo was on him in a moment. Parech was still too weak to do more than roll away before the fire scorched them both. He started to laugh as she smacked his face, but stopped abruptly when she kneed him in the side.

  I cursed in Kukichan and moved to haul Tulo away.

  “Bastard!” she yelled as I drew her arms into a lock and we fell onto the ground. “Scum of a slug! How dare you insult my people? How dare you, you craven peasant! You Akane never tried to fight back. And now you’re vermin, less than human. We Kawadiri will die before we become like you!”

  Parech’s face had gone oddly pale and tight, and I saw fresh blood staining his bandages. And yet, he had laughed off worse.

  “You don’t know anything, Princess.” His voice sounded as though it were being scraped from his chest. I wanted to punch Tulo myself, but didn’t dare release her arms.

  “I know you Akane do whatever your Kukichan masters tell you.”

  He had his breath back now, and the hard stare he leveled at Tulo was tempered by a certain gentleness in the set of his lips. “Are you so sure of that? No one likes to be another’s slave.”

  “And yet you happily help the Maaram enslave my people.”

  “No. I happily eat.” Then he laughed abruptly and shrugged. “And maybe enjoy being on the other side, too. Who wouldn’t rather be the master?”

  Tulo swatted at me and I reluctantly released her. She probably wouldn’t attack him again. “I would never,” she said, her voice so stiff with pride that even I nearly laughed.

  Parech eased himself carefully upright and raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t you? And yet you were a princess of your tribe, and you possessed more than anyone else. And I’m sure you had servants who worked harder than you and received barely a fraction of what you wasted in the evenings just by virtue of your birth. And I’m sure there were others even lower than that, who ground your corn and dug your privy holes, and you never once thought of how much your life differed from theirs. Now tell me, Princess, how was their lot any different from yours now? How are they any more conquered under a Maaram slave master than under a Kawadiri princess?”

  To my surprise, Tulo started to weep. She trembled with the force of it and Parech shot me a worried glance. I shook my head. Tulo’s shoulders were still rigid with righteous fury. She wouldn’t appreciate any comfort from me. “It is not the same,” she said, barely able to choke out the words.

  Parech moved toward her slowly and reached out to touch a coil of her wild, springy hair. “No,” he said, with such resigned tenderness that my heart seemed to wring itself like a rag. “Not quite the same. And I’m too much of a hypocrite to rail for justice. My parents did, you know. The Akane might be meek now, but perhaps only because there are so few of us. We rebelled thirty years ago. And the Kukichans slaughtered every adult they could find until the only ones left were squalling babies.”

  Tulo, of course, couldn’t see the look he gave me as he said this. Parech could not be completely serious about his own death, and yet now he could pose as a spirit of implacable fury. Tears stung my own eyes. I hadn’t been alive, I wanted to say. But my parents had been. Had they taken part in this massacre?

  “I didn’t know,” I said, but I could hardly hear my own voice.

  “I’m sorry, Parech,” Tulo said, as his fingers traced her jaw. She tipped her head onto his palm.

  “I’m sorry, too, Princess.”

  We prepared to leave the forest. Parech recovered faster every day. We wove baskets from drying breadfruit tree bark to carry our supplies. We washed our worn clothing in the river, though I’d taken to leaving off my shirt in the Kawadiri manner. It was much too hot and wet in the forests at this time of year to behave like I was still on Kukicha. I was not used to eating meat, but Parech caught one of the pygmy boars that rooted around the undergrowth and roasted haunches of its flesh over the fire. The smell revolted me, but he assured me that we might have need of it in our trek. I thought, but kept to myself, that surely the fruit and fish would be plenty. Parech found a tree with green salo fruit, the juice so sour it could stop your tasting for a week, and went off to the river. When he came back, his wavy hair was close-shorn, and bleached the same shade of pale yellow favored by the upper castes in rural Maaram. And, indeed, when he cocked his head just so, and spoke with the right accent, the effect was fairly convincing.

  “But what about your tattoos?” I asked. “Maaram yeomen aren’t covered like warriors.”

  He laughed and stretched his arms high above his head, for he had somehow divined that I found this ensemble attractive. “And I doubt most Maaram yeomen have battle scars. People see what they want to see, Ana. Most aren’t as perceptive as you. Also, you’re a wetlander. A Maaram couldn’t tell a warrior mark from an ink stain. Don’t worry.”

  “What are you two speaking of?” Tulo said, not bothering to look up from her weaving. I realized that I had spoken to him in Kukichan.

  “Of his brilliant plan to play a Maaram farmer in the city,” I explained in Essela. “But what about us? I don’t speak Maaram very well.”

  Tulo gave a wicked little smile and said, “Then we should only speak Maaram, Parech, so Aoi can practice.”

  I stuck my tongue out at her—a petty pleasure, since she couldn’t see it. “Is that really necessary? Kukicha isn’t at war with anybody.”

  But, oh no, there was Parech grinning like it was the fire festival, and I knew that Tulo had gotten her revenge. She probably thought that I spoke to Parech in Kukichan to share something with him that she couldn’t. She probably thought I was jealous of whatever was weaving between them, leaving me as the onlooker, and she was probably right. Tulo was far prettier than I, and far more compelling in her harsh, proud way. I had thought I was willing to concede the competition, but maybe not entirely.

  “When we get to the city,” Parech said in Maaram, “I think Aoi should work as a road sweeper, don’t you?”

  Tulo laughed. “Yes, and I’ll weave baskets you can sell in market.”

  “I have no intention of sweeping anything,” I said in Essela.

  “Hmm?” Parech said, touching my hand. “What’s that? You love the idea?”

  I ground my teeth. “Want. . .don’t,” I said, forgetting the proper Maaram word order and making Tulo and Parech break into laughter.

  After a moment I joined them. Parech grabbed me and we fell to the ground beside Tulo, giggling and dirtying our clothes again in the soil.

  “We’re almost ready,” Tulo said. “Why don’t we just enjoy ourselves today? We can leave at dawn tomorrow.”

  This seemed like a marvelous plan, even in hideous Maaram, and we all decided, as though we could read each other’s minds, to strip and race to the gully a few minutes upriver and swim.

  Even Tulo jumped in from the ledge, though I saw Parech’s tension in the water below and the careful way he made sure she surfaced. In many ways, she could see far more than either Parech or I. But in everyday, practical ways she was as blind as any ancient soothsayer. I wasn’t only jealous when I saw them together. Or even mostly. The way my heart squeezed, I thought, sometimes, was just love.

  We played in the water until the sun reddened and dipped below the trees. Then Parech went upriver and came back with two plump catfish so quickly I’d have thought he’d used a geas, if I wasn’t already familiar with his skill at fishing. We ate them under the waning rays of the sun, giggling, delighted by the salty-sweet taste, the languor in our muscles, and the drowsy beauty of the late-summer forest.

  “I think,” said Tulo, her head on Parech’s chest and her hand splayed across my bare stomach, “that it is impossible for life to be any better.”

  “Here?” Parech said, gesturing toward the forest like a Maaram lord would at his peasant’s hovel. But the laughter, as always, lurked just beneath his words. “Scavenging in the woods like buzzards?”

  “No!” I said. “We’re like the gods in the legends, the ones that lived before
the age of the spirits. This forest is our perpetual garden, filled with all the bounty we need to be happy.”

  I said this in Essela, but they were too punch-drunk to chastise me for it.

  “So what is it?” Tulo said. “Are we buzzards or gods?”

  “Is there much difference, Princess?”

  “There’s all the difference. It’s between the highest and the meanest. A peasant like you and a royal like myself.”

  “Squint at it another way and it all comes back around again. The buzzard and the god, eating catfish together by a pool.”

  “And what does that make me?” I said.

  Parech rolled on his side to look at me more directly. “The great spirit, tempting us outside.”

  I could not breathe. His nose was an inch from mine. What did that mean? That I tempted him? That I had power? How was the spirit bound with the gods in the garden? Didn’t it push them away? Banish them to another garden and await the coming of people? I wished I remembered the story more clearly.

  Then Tulo smacked Parech playfully, and the moment ended. “Aoi luring us outside? You’re the one who insisted we go to Okika, Parech! Having second thoughts?”

  Parech smiled his monkey smile, full of sly knowledge. “Oh no,” he said. “I predict good times for us in the Maaram city.”

  We were silent for a while after that, watching the sunset burn into night, and no one was eager to take the necessary steps back to our tiny shelter. Besides, what need had we of it on this warm night? Tulo was right. I’d never been happier than I was here, with these unexpected people.

  “What spirits are here, Tulo?” I asked, when it seemed the starlight was tricking me with glinting objects just outside of my field of vision.

  “There’s a water sprite in the pool who looks like a million tiny fishes all in one. And two creatures of the earth lumbering past. They always look like animals or plants, or both at once. And a death sprite is watching you, Aoi. I can always tell those by the little keys they wear.”

  I was too tired, too happy, for this fact to properly worry me. “Will I die tonight, then?”