To our surprise, the Maaram army had managed to bring their fight into the southern harbor. The waters had turned a vibrant red and the air was heavy with smoke and ash. Half of the fire temple had burned to the ground, along with several ships. The old woman didn’t dare get very close. The Esselan bows, after all, would not discriminate between her boat and that of a Maaram soldier. We sailed west, past the bloody water and the burning city. Signs of the Maaram eased until they vanished altogether. Just our small boat, hugging a lonely shore. Tulo recognized our stretch of dunes even before I did—I’m not sure how, but she jumped up and pointed and, sure enough, there was the barely visible top of our house.
Parech was waiting for us by the time we pulled ashore. He looked healthier than I remembered—nothing at all like the painwracked figure the death had tortured me with in the caves. Tulo leapt out of the boat first and he lifted her up for a kiss. The old woman looked at me, curious, and I just shrugged. We pulled the canoe clear of the waves and then walked over the dunes to the house. Since we had left, Parech had managed to put up the foundations and half the walls for the new section. The old woman was particularly curious about the building style. The atolls didn’t have nearly enough wood to build an entire structure from it. She seemed to like our cozy room even more. Parech generously offered her the first pick of the food we had left and then we settled down, him beside me.
“I take it that wasn’t really a pleasure trip,” he said softly, in Kukichan.
I sighed. “No. Parech, I think I know how to save you.”
“Turn widdershins three times on a full moon? Sacrifice half of Essel to the ancestors?” He was joking, but I could see the glint of anger behind it.
“Bind the death spirit.”
This startled him even out of the semblance of humor. He took my hand and I shivered. “That would kill you, Ana.”
“No, that’s just it.” I explained some of what the death had told me. “All I need to do is discover that which it doesn’t know. And I can bind it and save you.”
“Aoi,” he said. “You can’t. How can you even think of it? Become a spirit binder? All to stave off a death that should have caught me a year ago? It will twist you. It will. . .you can’t mean this. Even you can’t mean it.”
I straightened my shoulders, flaunting his concern as he so often flaunted mine. “You weren’t so high minded about spirit binding when it helped us escape Okika,” I said. “Or when it stops our house from falling down in an earthquake. You’re the one who brought those geas-charms when I was sick.”
“You know that’s different. The great bindings. They’re abominations.”
Tulo drowsed in the corner, but the old woman was staring at us quite openly, though I doubted she could understand a word. I forced myself to lower my voice, though it nearly pulsed with my fury. “Now that sounds like the Akane barbarian I picked up on a battlefield. Would you have preferred I left you there? So your ignorant sensibilities wouldn’t be offended by progress?”
Parech was not often angry, but when he was, he turned incandescent. He moved his face so close his clove-scented breath warmed my cheek. “This isn’t progress, wetlander. It’s the peevishness of a little girl, stomping her foot at the wind that dares blow, at the rains that dare fall and destroy her fun. We are alive and so we die. That is the beginning and end of it. If you subvert that, of all things, what do you think will happen?”
“I’ll save countless people. I’ll save you.”
“And you’ll destroy yourself.”
“I don’t care.”
“What about Tulo?”
“She’ll have you.”
He closed his eyes and leaned in so his forehead touched mine. “And me?” His voice was barely audible. I gulped down an unexpected sob.
“I matter so much?”
He didn’t even answer, just stood up and walked outside. Tulo looked up and yawned. “What are you two arguing over, now? Didn’t you tell him you found a way to save him?”
“I think she did,” the old woman said slowly. “But I think he didn’t like it.”
Tulo pulled a blanket over her shoulders and settled down on the floor. “Well, don’t worry. He’ll come around.”
The woman and I looked at each other, and I realized that, in this instance, she understood Parech far better than Tulo ever would.
The pierced woman enjoyed our hospitality for the next three days, until the last of the Maaram army had been thoroughly defeated and the few survivors imprisoned. A few hundred Esselan civilians had been killed in the fighting, as well, and the city’s jubilation at the victory was more subdued than after the last battle. I helped her pull the boat back into the ocean and wished her luck.
“There aren’t many who have braved the death vigil,” she said to me as she hauled the provisions inside. “But those who do use the knowledge in different ways. If you’re an Ana, I imagine you want to bind it.”
I just nodded, since it was clear she’d already deduced the truth.
“That man of yours is very wise. Sometimes death is the easier fate than living at any cost.”
I clenched my jaw, but she was our guest and I wouldn’t violate propriety enough to argue with her. She seemed to read this struggle like it was scrawled on a piece of paper, and laughed. “But, do what you will. You were strong enough for the death, so perhaps you’re strong enough for this. He’s sick, is he not? I’ve seen those sorts of lingering illnesses before. Can last for years, if that’s any consolation. You might try blue vervain, if you can find any. It would ease him, at least.”
I thanked her profusely for the latter, grudgingly for the former, and sat by myself for a long time after her tiny canoe had vanished over the horizon. There was no hurry. If this sickness would kill Parech, it wouldn’t be fast. I had time to convince him. And if I couldn’t. . .
Somehow, I’d find a way.
Tulo gave birth to a boy we named Ileopo at the start of the cold season. He was turned the wrong way in her stomach and so she labored in agony for a full day. I realized she would die with him still unborn if I didn’t do something. The midwife told me that she knew of a way to get a living baby from the womb of a dead mother. I asked her why she could not try on a living mother and she stared at me, as if I had asked her to stab herself. She refused to do it, calling it butchery. She called me names and said she had heard I was an evil witch who practiced heinous rituals, but she had come anyway. She left us alone and Parech watched her go, his eyes wide and flat with weariness and grief. He thought Tulo would die.
“Bring her back,” I said, the only possible way appearing clear in my head. Tulo groaned and twisted, half-conscious on the floor. Her belly seemed large enough to pop. “Go and bring the midwife back. Tie her up if you have to.”
He didn’t even ask why, just slid open the door and went out into the cold wearing not so much as a shirt. He came back soon after with a squirming, breathless midwife who was red with indignation.
“I won’t do it! I won’t condone any of your heathen rituals, everyone knows what you do here—”
Parech covered her mouth with his hand and I flashed him a grateful smile. “You have to do nothing,” I said, “but tell me where to cut. And if you think you should lie, contemplate that this girl’s death and her baby’s will be your responsibility. Am I clear?”
Parech removed his hand. The woman stared at me and then nodded once. She began to tremble and muttered a stream of words under her breath that at first I thought were curses and then realized were prayers. I didn’t hear those very often in my napulo circles.
Parech gave me his sharp metal blade and told me to wash it in the ocean, because that’s what the Maaram shamans had always done. When I came back, Tulo had revived enough to stare at the blade in open terror.
I stroked her hair and murmured something comforting while I steadied myself. I’d only heard of what I was planning to do to Tulo. In some ways, I understood the midwife’s fear. I just had no oth
er choice.
“We’re going to cut the baby out,” I told her softly. Her eyes, so bloodshot they looked red, widened.
“Aoi, you can’t,” she whispered. “You’ll kill the baby. You’ll kill me.”
“Do you think I’d let that happen?” I said, hearing the cool confidence in my voice and marveling at it. “Don’t you trust me?”
I felt her relax, felt her muscles go slack and her face turn into my palm. She smiled and I didn’t think I would survive it if this didn’t work.
“The death is afraid of you,” she whispered. “You keep it away.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
The midwife refused to do the cuts, but she described the procedure with what seemed like clear accuracy. Parech held Tulo’s hand while I cut. She clenched her teeth and only screamed once, when I first put my hands inside her womb and began to turn the baby ever so gently in the right direction. There was a great deal of blood. Added to what she had lost already, I feared for her safety. But eventually I pulled the child head first from the opening in her stomach. I slapped his bloody back and he took a hiccupping gulp before screaming. The midwife, apparently astonished to see Tulo still breathing, helped me stitch her stomach back together and bind the wound. She stayed with her when Parech and I went outside with the baby.
He was grinning, staring at the baby like it was some wondrous spirit and not a shriveled up, squalling human creature. We bathed him in the ocean and cut the birthing cord with an obsidian blade.
“He has your nose,” I said, and Parech laughed so hard he had to wipe his tears away.
We wrapped the baby in a spare barkcloth and carried him back into the house.
“I sometimes envy her faith in you,” he said, just before he opened the door.
I touched his hair, which was now nearly all black again. “I love even your doubt,” I said.
Ileopo is strong like his father and agile like his mother. He learned to walk before he was a full year old and never crawled again, preferring to stumble after some hapless seabirds on the beach, shrieking with laughter. It was nearly a year before we realized he was deaf. He naturally learned to gauge our expressions and perhaps even read our lips, so that he always seemed to respond to what we said. But the closest he ever came to saying our names was shaping the words with his mouth. If I called his name on the beach, I could bellow until I was hoarse, but he’d never notice until he turned around. I think Tulo might have known before Parech or I, but the prospect scared her so much she couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.
The problem, we all knew, wasn’t so much that Ileopo was deaf. After all, there were other deaf people in the city and they seemed to speak to each other well enough using a system of language gestures. The problem was that Tulo would never be able to see her son speak. She, who should have been the closest to him of all of us, was now isolated from him as though by miles of water. She never complained, and learned what hand gestures she could from the two of us. Ileopo spoke the way he walked, with headlong, rushed enthusiasm. It made us laugh to follow his conversations, but he could never talk like that with his own mother. With Tulo, he showed the sort of insistent, loving patience that unnerved me in how much it resembled Parech. Unaided by visual cues, her hand speech remained tentative and garbled, but he always waited for her to finish and one of us to relay his words back to her. It was a slow, grinding system. More often than not, their companionship was silent.
Parech confessed that his uncle had been born deaf, along with three of his cousins. He hadn’t thought about it before Ileopo was born. He hadn’t realized he could pass on the taint. Tulo wouldn’t speak to him for three days after he told her. And then she kissed him and never mentioned it again.
We’ve had four years together, all told. I love Ileopo like my own son and spend a great deal of time with him. Sometimes being with Tulo frustrated them both, and Parech was often weak or ill, more frequently as the years went by. The tincture of blue vervain the old woman suggested had helped, but Tulo could see just as well as I could that he was slowly losing the battle. Every summer for the past two years there has been a steady stream of plague deaths in the city. And always, I would see people still alive but drained and wan in that particular, painfully familiar way, and I knew that they too were dying. Ileopo seemed to know as well, though none of us ever explained it to him.
One evening, not too long ago, when I was teaching Ileopo to swim in the ocean, he pointed to the old tattoo on my right arm, the one that Parech had given me as part of our escape from Okika.
“Parech has them too,” he signed. At the beginning, I’d chosen the symbol “irreverent” for Parech, which made him even more likely to laugh in any conversation with his son than he would be otherwise. “Do they protect you from the spirits? Tulo says there are always spirits around him. Bad ones. Maybe he should have a mark like yours to keep them away.”
Had Parech translated Ileopo’s speech back to Tulo, then? Or perhaps sometimes she spoke to him alone, when no one could tell her his responses.
“There are spirits all around us,” I tried.
“No, not these bad ones. Tulo told me. And I can tell. He has bad ones.”
I sighed. “He does.”
“Can’t you get rid of them? Everyone says you’re a great witch. All the kids in the village are afraid of you, Aoi.”
They were? I’d been so focused on Ileopo and the death spirit for so long that sometimes it was hard to remember the wider world. “Do you mind?”
He laughed. “They’re afraid of me, too. But, Aoi, won’t you save him?”
I hugged him very close, but I was done with crying.
Parech and Ileopo had a game where one would write something down and hide the note in the house; if the other one found that note, he would get whatever was written on the paper. At first, this was just our way of encouraging Ileopo to learn to read, but then it continued for its own sake. If Ileopo had been begging one of us for candied screw pine, Parech would write it down and hide it somewhere, and only take Ileopo once he found it. Sometimes both of them would forget that they’d started the game, and so every once in a while I would discover messages like little notes from the past—forgotten desires, passed over promises.
“See Nui’ahi,” said one of Ileopo’s notes that I found one evening, alone with Tulo. I didn’t think they had ever gone. The smoke from the lip of the volcano would exhaust Parech too much these days.
“It’s happening,” I said to her. She stiffened and turned her uncanny gaze in my direction. We had been conspicuously not having this conversation since Ileopo’s birth. She knew what I meant. “He’ll die if he has another attack.”
“I see the great spirit sometimes, near him. It watches Parech like a merchant would a tasty fish.”
“The great death wears a mask, Tulo.”
She glowered at me. “A hungry mask.”
“Ile told me to save him.”
“He knows?”
“I think he’s guessed. The son is as perceptive as the mother.”
“And the father. Parech will know if you try to do something.”
I took a deep breath. I had been planning this for years. It scared me more than even death itself, and I had not thought that was possible. But there was nothing left for us but to try.
“A little girl stomping her foot at the wind,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s what Parech said this crusade of mine really is, when I first told him. He might be right. It might be better to let him die than disturb so much for his sake.”
Tulo gripped my shoulders hard enough to leave a bruise. The years had not mellowed her, nor had motherhood, but they had subtly turned the planes of her face from that of a girl to a woman. They had given her an understanding and a sense of self the younger, hotter, more angular Tulo of five years ago never possessed. I loved her as much as I ever had.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
�
��No. I don’t.”
I told her my plan.
“So you figured it out?” she asked. “What the death doesn’t know?”
I told her I had, though I was by no means sure. She believed me, as always. Hadn’t Parech told me he envied her trust? I went to find Ileopo and tell him. He’s almost too young, but the calm, clear-eyed way he took the news tells me that he can do his part. Oh, when he looks at me like that, as though he can’t quite make out what I’m thinking and his very impotence amuses him, I feel his father in my heart like a scar. I could not bear Parech’s absence. Perhaps even less than I could bear Tulo’s. At least she has shared herself with me. Her heart has always been cruel and harsh, but never closed like Parech’s. We have been with each other for nearly six years and not once has he ever said what he feels for me. I think, now, that neither of us dare.
And so his son will conspire with his lover to deceive this man who has given up so much for all of us. He will hate them for it, but he will forgive them. I do not know that he will ever forgive me. I recall his fury when I first told him the outlines of this plan. I recall his horror at the thought of me entering the select ranks of great spirit binders. The Akane hate all such things, and he still shares their essential prejudices.
And they might not be wrong, at that.
Spirits above, what am I doing? Will it be enough to save him?
Tomorrow I will go to Parech and tell him that his son is dying. He has caught the fire sickness, I will say, and it’s ravaging this body. If he helps me bind the death spirit, I will say, we can save him. Parech will not believe me, of course he won’t, and so I will propose to use an old geas, one of my very first, and take us all temporarily into the spirit world. For the first time, Tulo will see her son. And Parech will see, because I have arranged it to be so, a careful convocation of death sprites, apparently attached to his son. And he will agree, because it will never occur to him that I would do so much to manipulate him.
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 33
