We managed to save the barkcloth and the remainder of the breadfruit we didn’t eat. Parech was good at feeding us from the ocean. His Akane tribe, he said, had been coastal. It was easier to survive that way than fighting for prime river land in the interior. So he recognized when the waves changed in such a way that signaled a lagoon; he knew the best times for catching albacore and the best nights for tracking schools of humu. Sometimes he’d use a spear on a line, and sometimes he’d use last night’s fish to bait a hook. Our navigator didn’t speak much of the five languages at our command, but he understood the desire to eat. It didn’t take long before he and Parech learned to communicate quite well about islands where we might load up on fresh water and coconuts and screw pines. And when the two of them started going on about differences in fishing lures, Tulo and I politely took ourselves to the other end of the canoe.
She had not forgiven me for taking us back. Once, I tried clumsily to justify my decision, but she just stood up and walked away. She grew listless, spending long hours by herself, staring out at the sea. Sometimes Parech or I would join her. She was a little gentler with him; I could see from her face that she opened up more. By the time we reached the barrier reefs that are the first marker of Essel’s waters (though still far to the south of its main harbor) the three of us had gone nearly gray with the monotony and unrelieved tension. So I suggested that we sing together.
And with a fury made all the more frightening by its unflinching steadiness, she balled up her fist and punched me. I just stood there, shocked, while my mouth filled with blood and Parech belatedly took hold of her arms.
He led her away, though she didn’t struggle or seem inclined to any more violence. I looked after them and then spat over the edge. My jaw ached and my mouth felt bloody and torn, like someone had raked across it with an asp. I had never been punched before, but I imagined that it would swell. Our navigator was perched on the mast, drinking from a green coconut. He caught my eye briefly and grimaced.
“Crazy,” he said in heavily accented Maaram, pointing at Tulo. I pursed my lips, greatly inclined to agree with him. I understood her. I truly did. I’d seen her face when she realized she could see us, and I’d felt the constant strain of her blindness. The few days’ reprieve must have made her reality all the harder to bear.
Yes, I understood. But that didn’t mean I would silently bear her temperamental peevishness any longer. So I walked over to where she was sitting with Parech, holding his hand while her lips trembled. She looked up at my approach.
“I’m not pretending that this is as hard for us as it is for you,” I said. “I’m not pretending that your grief isn’t real. But Tulo—we’ve been walking on rockfish around you for the last two weeks. I don’t deserve it, and neither does Parech. Pull yourself together. Are you a princess of the Kawadiri or not?”
She stiffened, her back straight as a mast and her chin turned haughtily up. “What would you know of it? You’re just some wetland peasant.”
“And you were blinded by your own people and then cast out like a shard of broken pottery!”
We stared at each other, both a little shocked that I had said it.
“Aoi. . .” Parech whispered hoarsely.
I felt myself trembling. “We’re what we make of ourselves, Tulo,” I said. “No one knows what lies beyond the gate.”
“So you think I should forget what was done to me? Should I pretend that I can still see the scar on your right shoulder? Parech’s two-toned hair?”
Tears burned in my eyes. Two-toned hair. Parech’s roots had grown since he first bleached his hair with the juice of the salo fruit, and so the contrast between the black close to his scalp and the white-blond in the sun could well be called two-toned. I hadn’t even noticed until she said so. I had everything she desired, and what a waste I had made of it.
“We can’t undo your sacrifice.”
She reached out. I guided her hand to my face so she could feel my tears. “I know,” she said. “I know. I’m normally much better at this. Thank you for reminding me.” She disengaged her fingers from mine. “Would you both. . .I just need some time.”
Parech and I stared at each other for a moment and then silently withdrew as far as the small confines of the canoe would allow.
I took off my sandals and sat with my feet dangling in the clear blue water.
“You’ll look like fish to a shark from below,” he said in Kukichan, crossing his legs beneath him.
“Then you’ll just have to save me, brave Akane warrior.”
He yawned and leaned back on his elbows. “I was exiled, you know. They stripped me of my shells and cast me out without even a waterskin. I was meant to die. But you see, Ana, I’ve made a life out of cheating death.”
I had always wondered why he left. “What did you do to make them renounce you?”
“I killed the chief’s son. I challenged him and I won.”
“But then it was fair!”
He laughed and leaned back on his elbows. “No. There are no death-challenges among my Akane tribe. The shaman forbade them, on pain of exile. And so you find me fighting for the Maaram pigs half a world away.”
He seemed as easy and unconcerned as he always did, tipping his head back into the sunshine and sighing. I thought that he must have been at odds with his people for most of his life, even before they exiled him. He was too peculiar and unconcerned and stubborn to get along with many people. I splashed my feet in the water and smiled a secret smile. So of course he got along so well with us.
“Come on, Ana, aren’t you going to ask why I killed him?” Parech said.
“You just want to shock me with it. What do you think I’m going to do, Akane? Renounce you for your sins? I’ve always known you have souls on your conscience.”
“Ah yes, but this is the first soul. At least, apart from battle. I know you’re curious.”
I reached down and splashed him with some seawater. “Of course I’m curious. Please tell me, vile soldier, why would you kill some innocent boy and abandon your people for two vain and cruel girls?”
His eyes seemed deep with pleasure. He had dangled a lure and I had caught it: an ancient dance. “He raped my sister, and when the pregnancy showed, claimed she had seduced him. No one else would have her, so she became his concubine.”
“They didn’t punish her for what you did?”
His eyes grew distant, scanning the humps of atolls on the horizon. “No. Why else would I sacrifice so much, Ana? All of the boy’s widows had to be cared for by the chief until they died, and never forced to marry again.”
Instinctively, I leaned down and stroked back the thick mass of his bleached hair. “Well. We always knew you Akane were barbarians.”
This startled him into a laugh. For a moment, when our eyes met, I wondered if he too felt that delicate flowering of heat, that desperate tingling of the lips, but then we heard Tulo’s lithe footsteps walking across the boat.
“I thought we could sing,” she said, her smile tentative and genuine.
Parech leapt up and hugged her. I took her hand, my heart warring with a loss precisely equal to its gain.
Essel was everything I could have wished and nothing like I imagined. After we passed through the chain of garrisoned atolls scattered along its southwestern waters—forward guard against any of the predations from their Maaram enemies—it was a mere two day’s journey to the main harbor. The harbormaster demanded three hand-lengths of sennit braid just for one night’s docking privileges, which made me choke and which Parech paid without even bargaining. I realized that left to his own devices Parech would bankrupt us before the week was out, so I took it upon myself to inquire among the locals as to the best and cheapest place to moor a small trader’s canoe. The answer, I discovered, promised us a situation better than any of us had dared hope. Like Okika, Essel had its own farmland. Indeed, most of the rich soil south of the great sentinel of its volcano was nearly devoid of anyone but a few farmers. Certainly
no one who would charge us for pushing our canoe onto the beach.
The area we finally selected was an idyll: a mile distant from a small farmers’ town but otherwise utterly still, and half wild. Tulo could see here as though there weren’t a city just a few miles inland, and the soil just past the dunes made every vegetable grow to the size of a baby. We used nearly all of Taak’s extortion payment for lumber from the dwindling red acacia forests on the eastern side of the island. In the meantime, we draped oil-infused barkcloth over tall stakes and lived like happy peasants. The land here didn’t seem to belong to anyone, and by Essel law, anyone living in a place for two years without someone else objecting had the right of ownership. When our resources started to run low despite our rationing, Parech had the idea to dig a deep pit and fill it with some of the fresh water used to irrigate a nearby farm.
“And what good to us is a mud pit?” I asked him.
Tulo grinned slyly. “You’re smarter than you let on, aren’t you, Parech? We’ll seed it with fish, Aoi. Fresh fish all year long, and we’ll always have money.”
Money was the curious form of payment the Essel chiefs had devised to help pay for their constant wars of conquest. Instead of something useful like food or mats or pottery or sennit braid, they had devised a series of stone chits that were supposed to represent value. They claimed that anyone could go to the hall in the center of the island and redeem this money for a certain length of sennit braid, but I had my private doubts. They seemed to be issuing the stone chits faster than even an army of fleet-fingered women could weave the tough cordage.
But we used the rest of the cord Taak had given us to buy the fish, and Parech spent days combing the city for advice on methods of raising them. In the meantime, Tulo and I busied ourselves drying bundles of grass and weaving them into tight mats for the floor of our tent and—eventually—the floor of our house. What extra we could make, we used for exchange. We spent most days busy and hungry and most nights exhausted and full. But we were happy.
As the cold grew bitter and thick and the wind from the ocean made the three of us huddle together like worms under a log, we decided to do all we could to finish at least one room of the house. Tulo reprised her role as street-corner spirit talker, this time for the purer purpose of relieving the gullible of their sennit braid and money. Parech used those funds and the promise of more to hire a few strong men to cut the logs and hoist them into place above the earth. They notched the logs so they would support each other, and we caulked the spaces between them with red clay. The roof we thatched with leaves and tall grasses soaked in resin over the wooden frame, and then lashed down with what sennit we could afford. It wasn’t a beautiful house, or perfectly made, but it was our own and we loved it immediately. We had plans to build one more room at least, but that would have to wait until our fortunes improved. The fish in the pond were slowly breeding. Soon, we might have enough to sell.
As the cold set in, and the frantic work on the house finally eased, I began to spend hours walking through the city, silently observing what I could. That Essel was preparing for war was obvious when I looked for the signs, but those were less overt than in Okika. I wondered if we should perhaps alert the chiefs to the upcoming Maaram raid, but I didn’t feel particularly compelled. I couldn’t imagine Essel had become so great a power by being careless about such matters. But there was something else brewing in the city—another sort of war, though this one had no leaders or armies. The napulo philosophy’s influence in Essel shocked me. It seemed every third conversation I heard discussed the obscure creed my radical priest had taught me. And with its widespread acceptance came a curious new idea. If there were no gods but spirits, and if we humans could be sure of nothing save our current existence (so this line of reasoning went), then surely we could do no better for ourselves than to bind these spirits for our own benefit. As a woman selling cups of warm kava in the street told me one evening: “If we’re all gonna die, then you bet I’d like to live in the meantime!”
This idea seemed to culminate in a notion so stark in its hubris that it left me breathless the first time I heard it: a final geas to bind the ultimate expressions of each spirit to humanity’s will. How the nameless progenitors of this idea proposed to forge such an awesome geas I had no idea—my throat went dry at just the thought of summoning the death spirit again, let alone forging chains strong enough to keep it bound forever. And yet that very fear made me want to explore the idea more deeply, to seek out those women (and the few men) who understood something of spirit bindings. None of them had any more of an idea than I did about how such an ultimate binding might be accomplished, but in the smaller details they could teach me much. I became a student of geas, that ultimate practical expression of the napulo creed. When Parech called me Ana now, he never quite meant it as a jest.
I came home late one night in the deep cold—the longest night of the year, we all later learned—a little drunk on kava and amant. I had learned a dozen postulates from an old witch who lived by the great bay, and had scribbled them all down in a crabbed hand in my precious notebook (the paper inside being significantly more valuable than even the fish-leather cover). I had the giddy, freewheeling sense of coming ever closer to an achievement I didn’t even dare put into words. Almost as though I thought the spirits might be watching me.
Which, of course, they were.
Tulo and Parech were sleeping when I staggered inside the room that still smelled like freshly cut wood and drying clay. They had grown tangled in sleep—her hand on his chest, his leg straddling her dark thighs. I regarded them for a long moment and then wiped my eyes. I fell asleep quickly and was awakened not much later by a sound like a mountain groaning. Only a moment later did I realize that the ground was shaking. Our new house, our beautiful house, was creaking ominously on its new, unsettled foundations. Tulo was already awake, but glancing around the room in bleary-eyed panic. I wondered what she saw, but had no time to ask her. Parech slept like the dead, as usual.
“Wake up, you stupid fool!” I yelled, shaking his shoulders. The earth screamed again, so I could hear nothing else, and above us one of our precious new logs creaked. Parech shot to his feet and grabbed Tulo by the elbow.
“Get out!” I shouted. He hesitated for a moment and then turned. Tulo stumbled along behind him, her eyes dashing left and right at flitting ghosts. I scooped up our blankets and what mats I could hold. The ground shook again, tossing me to the floor while the logs snapped above me. I had no time. I gripped the bundle tighter in my arms and hurled myself out of the door. Our makeshift steps had collapsed, and so I smacked into the earth just as our house listed sideways. The second support cracked, and I might have been crushed under the inexorable force of our collapsing house if not for Parech, who gripped my forearms with bruising fingers and pulled me out just in time. He held me to him and I stayed there while the earth groaned and rocked around us. I could hear the fury of the waves now, even over the diminishing rumbles of the earth. I looked north, to Nui’ahi, and saw to my relief that this earthquake hadn’t fully awakened the sentinel, though it belched more smoke than usual.
Parech gradually released me and we looked at each other in wordless, thoughtless shock. I nearly jumped when Tulo put her hand on my shoulder.
“Are you all right?” she said.
Her dark brown eyes darted less—indeed, they focused on me until I thought I might drown in them. I was shaking. So was she.
“What. . .what did you see, Tulo?”
“They were everywhere. They knew what was coming. They danced, Aoi. They danced like we did on the ship. I couldn’t hear them, but I thought they sang, too.”
My teeth started to chatter loudly. I couldn’t tell if I was frightened or cold. The waves crashed against the shore, spraying high over the dunes. I wondered if the water might reach us, or if we’d be spared at least that disaster.
Parech took a long look at the two of us and shook his head. “Everything is in the house. We’ll free
ze to death out here. You two use the blanket. I’ll go into the village and see what I can find.”
He hugged us both fiercely before he went. I wondered if he would borrow or sell something, or if he would simply steal what he needed. I knew that for us, he would do whatever was necessary and hardly note the difference.
I guided Tulo over to the dunes, where we might shelter from the wind, and covered us both as best I could with one of the blankets I’d managed to save. We shivered together beneath it. She put her head on my shoulder.
“Is it gone?” she asked.
I looked at the house the three of us had built. “Flattened, I’d say, not precisely gone.”
“Oh, Aoi.”
Tulo reached up. She stroked my tightly braided hair and then began to unweave the thick plaited strands.
“You have beautiful hair,” she said. “Mine goes everywhere. Yours. . .well, if I could see, I’d braid flowers into it with five strands and make it into a crown.”
“If I could—”
Tulo put a finger over my lips. I stopped talking. I stopped breathing. We stared at each other. And then, as though falling in a pond, I inclined my head and kissed her.
We were warm, that longest night. Warm, and comforted, and filled like cups with painful pleasure. We lay tangled inside each other, beneath the blanket, and I thought unexpectedly, I miss him.
“He’ll be here soon,” Tulo said, nuzzling her face against my collarbone. She fell asleep and I listened to the waves.
I looked up when he approached, though he moved silently as always and the water boomed. I saw his face clear, clear in the moonlight: the knowing, the shock, the sad smile.
I missed you, I wanted to say, but he turned and left us alone.
PART IV
Desperate Men
9
WHEN LANA COULD SEE AND HEAR and touch and taste again, the only sensations she could quite make out were of closeness and warmth. She smelled something familiar and clean, like water from the ocean.
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 20
