The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Oh no. They’re often around you. You and Parech are like torches in a swamp—you draw all the creatures closer. But I think the death finds you curious. They do something else when they’re going to take someone. Something with their keys, but I can never quite see it.”

  I thought again to that glimpse I’d had of Tulo’s world when I had smoked the Maaram Ana’s herb. How strange to have to interact with this world when you could only see the other. And that reminded me of what Parech had said, of how the people Tulo so proudly defended had taken her sight and left her to die.

  “Why did they blind you?” I whispered, though there was no one to hear but Parech, and he breathed as though asleep.

  She moved closer to me, sliding her hand further across my belly. “For the warriors,” she said, her voice as low as mine. “We were losing too many battles, spilling too much of our blood. Our shaman—our Ana—thought to bind the spirits to make the warriors see farther, move faster. They needed a powerful sacrifice. So my father offered me.”

  “When? Were you young?”

  She shook her head. “My fourteenth year. I did. . .I was proud of my people, proud of our resistance. But I didn’t want to lose my sight. I wasn’t trading it for anything I’d get in return, you understand, like the shamans did in other tribes. I’d be sacrificing it in truth. And I was young and pretty and a princess, and now everything that made my life so perfect was making it. . .was ruining it. I thought about running, but they say that it matters if the sacrifice is willing. And I loved a boy who was fighting and didn’t want him to die because I was a coward. So the shaman let the spirits guide him and smacked me very hard in the back of my head. I fainted. And when I woke up I couldn’t see.”

  I laced my fingers through her own and squeezed. She had grown resigned to the horror, I suppose, but for me it was fresh. And yet, even so, I found my curiosity seizing on another part of the story. “And did it work?” I asked. “Did the sacrifice of your eyes make your warriors see farther? Did they win?”

  “Yes. For a while, it was everything we could have hoped for. We thought to rid them from our island for good. And then the power ran out, and the Maaram brought their Anas and their hundreds of sacrifices and made us regret our success in a thousand ways. The boy I loved died, and he had rejected me anyway for my eyes. I was a princess, but I was blind and touched by the spirits and they all avoided me—even my own father. And then. . .well, the Maaram were hitting us too hard. We had to move quickly. They left behind what they couldn’t carry and those too old to walk.”

  “And you, too?”

  I knew she said “yes,” but her voice was so quiet and dry I heard it as only a rustle in the dark. “The Maaram captured us very easily.”

  “Then when did you get the spirit sight?”

  “Paka’paka gave it to me, a year after the sacrifice. She was an old witch. In her own way, she knew more than our shaman did about spirits and sacrifice. She stole the ancient hand and told me the spirit inside was mine now, and could help me see.”

  “But you can still see,” I said. “And Parech destroyed the hand.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I couldn’t see, and now I can.”

  “You were blinded in sacrifice,” Parech said, startling us both. How long had he been awake? “And then they gave you your ancestor’s sacrifice. The spirits can’t fully hide from you, and so you see what they see. There are shamans of my tribe who made the same bargain.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking aloud. “Once the witch gave you the old sacrifice, the spirits bound to the hand were bound to you. I saw something clinging to you when I healed Parech. Perhaps that’s what it was.”

  “But how could you know that, Parech?” Tulo asked. “When you destroyed the hand, how could you know I would still see?”

  Parech was silent for a moment. “I didn’t. But the Anas told me the hand was lighting a beacon for the enemy shamans. So I got rid of it. Lot of good it did us. . .turns out the beacon was you.”

  “I should hate you forever for what you risked.”

  “I’d never have done it if I’d known you.”

  “Why is it better if I were a stranger? I’d still be just as blind.”

  Parech shrugged and kissed her forehead. “I don’t know. That’s just how it works. I can’t afford to care for those I don’t know. Too many people in the world for that. Too much suffering. How else could I be a soldier?”

  We thought about that for a while in surprisingly companionable silence. Frogs burped and night birds trilled and monkeys slapped sleepily at each other high in the branches. I nearly fell asleep listening to the cacophony of the forest and the quiet breathing of my companions.

  “Princess,” Parech said quite softly. “You said this was the happiest you’ve ever been. Truly? Even when you had your sight, and your privilege?”

  “I’ve never been grateful for what the shaman did to me. And I’m still not. But I am happy.”

  Okika lay at the mouth of the great river, on the far southwestern side of this island. The main Maaram island was massive, even larger than Kukicha. Our forest idyll was not very far north, but it took us nearly two weeks of traveling on foot to reach the city. I had landed there nearly half a year before, determined that Maaram would offer me opportunities Kukicha couldn’t. I’d been disappointed, of course. I had no resources, no status, and as Parech would say, a slave didn’t become a master by changing owners.

  My parents were rice farmers who died in a flash flood when I was ten. An old priest in a ramshackle water temple took me in. I loved him more than my own parents, for he had achieved a sort of tranquility they never had. He was a member of the fringe napulo sect, though at the time I didn’t understand the ways in which his observance of the spirits differed from the rest of the world’s. He prized knowledge, but he enshrined unknowing. Instead of tales of capricious gods and caring ancestors, he described a world where death was the ultimate end, a gate beyond which no knowing could return. Spirits and humans fed off each other, he taught me. A binding doesn’t just invoke power, he would say, it establishes a trust.

  The priest taught me Essela and the basic script, though I couldn’t imagine why I would ever need to read. I was hardly scribe material, but he told me that no knowledge was ever wasted. He died of a flux in his chest when I was fifteen. A great windstorm destroyed his decrepit temple a few days later. I took it as a sign from the spirits and left as soon as I could burn him and salvage my things from the wreckage.

  There are no great cities in Kukicha, but there are a few towns, and so I went to those, trading my knowledge of Essela to traders in exchange for food and shelter. I would translate and write simple bills of sale with the few characters I knew, and if no one needed that, I’d fetch and carry with the boys. It was boring work and there were long stretches with none at all. I spent more than a few nights huddled against a tree and longing for my old priest’s fire, or even the sunken hut my parents had called home.

  I had long heard of the Maaram and their slow war with Essel. I had heard of Essel’s glittering capital, of the great school recently founded there and the thousand different wonders I’d never see on Kukicha. I’d heard Esselan canoes were as long as ten men and their sails so large they had to climb ladders to unfurl them. And though Maaram was far larger and had more people to defend it, they were afraid of Essel’s army. The Esselans used weapons of metal, not wood and bone and hard stone like the rest of us. I wondered at first how they could make something so soft and yielding as copper or tin into a cutting weapon, but one of the merchants showed me a knife he had purchased in the great city. Its blade was made from no substance I’d seen before—it was dark gray and shiny and so hard it held an edge that could slice a soursop rind with only the slightest pressure. The metal was made from combining two others at a precise temperature, he told me, and then shaping the blade in a fire. One of these metals, iron, could only be mined on the scattered islands off the coast of Essel. I
thought of what the blade could do to flesh and knew that the Maaram were right to be afraid.

  I was of an age to marry, but I did not want to marry. I even had an offer from a farmer on his way back to the countryside. He was ten years older than I, but handsome enough, and not cruel. I thought that a solid life like that, with a hut of my own and a harvest to trade, was probably the best I could hope for. But then I thought of my parents, who had died without ever leaving their village, who had never learned any language but their own, who had never read a book or written a phrase, and who had died as they lived—in muddy water. And I thought, “I’d rather die now than live like that.” And so I refused him. I found a leering merchant who would take me on his canoe if I worked for him. I left when he tried to rape me, and I found another boat. And so it went until I arrived in Okika for the first time, nearly starved and so used to the rocking of the water that land seemed treacherously unsteady.

  There were more people in just the area around the docks than I’d seen in my entire life. Sailors clad in nothing but wrap-cloths and straw sandals, women in divided skirts and women baring their breasts, wealthy citizens with cloth over their noses and adorned head to toe in opulent fabric. I thought I would find something exciting there. But instead I found my prospects much the same as they had been on Kukicha. It didn’t help that my Maaram was terrible, and I had little opportunity to improve it. I looked longingly at the rich houses—the first I’d ever seen built all of wood and not thatched straw. I thought that I’d like to be rich, but I didn’t know how to begin. I realized that perhaps it hadn’t been very clever of me to blithely give up what I knew on Kukicha. Perhaps farming wasn’t glamorous, but it was a life. And suddenly, I’d felt more like a spirit than a girl, rudderless and in need of binding.

  I left for the countryside in winter, when the canoes stopped coming and even the little work I used to find had disappeared. I’d meant to just stay in a village, perhaps fish in the river, but a new bout of fighting broke out between the Maaram and the Kawadiri natives who refused to submit peacefully to the yoke of their conquerors. All the roads became unsafe. I took to the forest. And there I discovered the untold benefits of battlefield looting. I was too hungry to refrain, once I saw how well I could live.

  I followed the roaming bands of warriors for weeks, hardly noticing how far they traveled. So I was surprised, when the three of us started for Okika, to find us so far north. Tulo and Parech and I encountered no other soldiers on our way down. Perhaps some kind of temporary truce had been achieved.

  Parech used the long days of our journey to grill me in Maaram, so that by the time we arrived I had finally grasped the inverted nature of their sentences and could make simple phrases with relative ease. I didn’t think I’d ever understand their thousand different tenses. Parech declared that I’d never pass for a native, but I’d do well enough for our purposes.

  “And what purposes are those?” I asked, when we were just a day or two from the city.

  He grinned that monkey grin. “You’ll see, my young Ana. You’ll see. But it won’t be street sweeping, I promise you!”

  PART II

  Chance

  3

  KAPA SMILED AT Lana the next morning and ate a few bites of pan bread before he left for the apothecary tent. Even that slight gesture, that hint that the distance between them might be bridged, left her oddly enthusiastic about the day. He still loved her, she knew that, but her father had never found it easy to adjust to new situations. The last time he’d been forced to live without her mother for months at a time, he’d ended up homeless on the streets. Leilani was his anchor, and since her transformation Lana had grown too strange for her presence to do anything other than unsettle him.

  As soon as he left, however, she contemplated the day with growing unease. Lana knew she could put it off no longer—today she would have to confront Kohaku. She’d been too surprised when she’d seen him before, caught so off guard by his impossible presence that none of what she knew about the Mo’i had seemed relevant. Now, unfortunately, she didn’t know if she could bear to look at him. But even without their shared history, she would have had to confront the Mo’i eventually. He might know something about her mother.

  Still, she lingered on her walk to his house. Like most of the third district, the streets near the Mo’i’s house bore little evidence of the eruption. Even the ubiquitous ash had been swept from the boulevard leading up to the grand wooden edifice. And yet, it looked nothing like she remembered. There were so many fewer people, for one. The large, laughing, gawking crowds that used to clog the avenue had dwindled to a few hunched, hurried figures. Perhaps one could blame the lack on the unseasonably frigid weather—persistent in the city since the eruption—but then she noted the stone-faced guards and the fear in the faces of those who passed them. She could hear the distant crash of the ocean, a sound that should never have been audible this far from the shore. Lana knew how much she should hate Bloody One-hand.

  These thoughts occupied her so thoroughly that she didn’t notice the whispers and hisses of a few people on the street until something wet cracked against her shoulder. She looked down: an egg, the yolk smearing into the white all down her arm. The woman who tossed it had readied another.

  “Go away!” she said, her voice loud enough to carry to every staring person on the street. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage? Leave us be!”

  Lana was reminded, forcefully, of the time she and Kai had been chased out of that village on the rice islands. She recognized the hate in their faces. And though she had seen it countless times since then, the woman’s unthinking fury still gave her a frisson of primal fear, as though this time the mob truly would crush her beneath their feet. Lana shook her head and tried to walk away without meeting anyone else’s eyes, but the people pressed closer to her, their murmurs grew less hushed and more indignant. How dare she, they asked each other. How dare she pretend to be one of them, as though she hadn’t brought this all upon the city?

  “I’m just a witness,” Lana said, but not loud enough for anyone but the egg-thrower and a few others to hear her. She had thought the streets unusually barren, but she realized there were still more than enough people nearby to threaten her safety. The egg-thrower raised her arm, and Lana winced in anticipation of the hit, but someone stepped up and gripped the woman’s wrist.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” her unexpected savior said, gently shaking the woman’s wrist so the erstwhile missile cracked harmlessly on the cobblestones. He was dressed in laborer’s clothing, ash-gray like almost everyone else’s, with already dark skin darkened further by the sun. He had laugh lines around his eyes.

  “You all have better things to do,” the man said, pitching his voice so the whole block could hear, but somehow without ever seeming to strain. “I expect you should go to them. The black angel has nothing to do with Nui’ahi. We got here through superstitions, and we’ll not get out with them.”

  Several members of the gathered crowd still eyed her resentfully, but more nodded with a thoughtful sort of respect and started walking past. Lana wondered what kind of laborer could defuse a mob with a few carefully chosen words.

  The woman who started it all looked angrily up at him and then spat at his feet. “I don’t care what you say, or who you pretend to fight for. That woman caused all this. And if that doesn’t matter to you, then I hope One-hand wins.”

  And then she left. Lana was virtually alone on the street with the strange man.

  “Thank you,” Lana said. “If that had lasted much longer I might have had to fly away.”

  His eyes crinkled. “I suspect that would hardly have helped your cause. I’ve heard no reports of the black angel using her wings.”

  Lana smiled a little. Except for last night, to put on a show for Sabolu. But Lana was fairly confident that no one but the girl had seen her. “I can’t hide in the city, but I don’t want to disturb people.”

  “And yet you’re still her
e. If you don’t mind my asking, why is that?”

  It was funny how no one had thought to question her presence here but this man. “I’m looking for my mother. She went missing right before the explosion.”

  He nodded slowly. “I see. You truly are one of us, then. One-hand even took someone away from the black angel.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Pano,” he said. “And if you ever need anything, black angel, you can ask for me at the barricades on Sea Street.”

  He wiped the drying smear of egg from her shirt sleeve and then walked away, hands deep in his pockets. Sea Street. The oldest and busiest street in Essel neatly bisected the island, running from the lesser bay and the old docks in the north to the greater bay and main harbor in the south. It also marked the division between the ravaged first and seventh districts and the comparatively well-off second and third districts. It had become, in the months since the eruption, the front line of the sort of conflict the islands hadn’t seen in five centuries. The rebels controlled much of the territory west of Sea Street in the first district, which meant that her unlikely savior was probably one of them. Lana shook her head, then shot a worried glance at the stone-faced guards. They hadn’t moved an inch since the confrontation began, but they must have noticed. Did they also know Pano? Would they report it back to Bloody One-hand? Would he…

  Lana shook her head, forcefully. No. She’d heard Kohaku’s voice when he saw her. She couldn’t believe he’d betray her like that.

  The death appeared moments later. It had vanished early this morning, and Lana was oddly jolted to see its familiar mask again. On the other hand, that the death still chased her meant that Leilani stayed safe. Akua had meant to kill her mother once before, using a linked necklace of a key made of bone. To save Leilani’s life, Lana had invoked the ancient geas that now bound her to the death. If Akua had meant to kill Leilani, she’d be dead by now. But though Lana thought her mother was most likely safe, she’d learned not to trust the witch for anything.