Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

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  Copyright Page

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  For Melissa Freeman Friends for the journey

  Acknowledgments

  This is my first published novel. Along this tortuous path I’ve left many beta readers broken and crying behind me (Shout-out to David Fenwick-Mulcahy! Who could have guessed that the were-platypus novel would be buried by another ten full novel manuscripts as well as various detritus left by the raising of actual children?), or something. In short, if the thought of my naked gratitude makes you squeamish, look away now. Or you’ll go blind! You have been warned.

  Most immediately and in regards to this specific book, I must thank my agent, Evan Gregory; my editor, Diana M. Pho; plus everyone at Tor involved in production, publicity, etc (thanks again for the beautiful artwork, Marc!). Next, my faithful and, necessarily, slightly cruel manuscript readers Anna Tambour, Jenny Blackford, and Kaaron Warren. Sofia Samatar, your owlish feedback was hugely appreciated, and to Rowena Cory Daniells and Jason Nahrung, for helping wrestle the stupid series proposal into shape, you have my eternal thanks. During the editing phases, kudos to Cat Sparks for the burgers, Rivqa Rafael for the tea, and Zena Shapter for the ferry rides.

  Moving further back in time, I have to thank the Australian spec fic writing community at large, too huge to name, but anyone who has been snapshotted in the last decade, you rock and I couldn’t have done this without you.

  Sincere thanks to all my small press and magazine editors and publishers, Australian and international, for teaching me not only about the industry, but to trust good people who know what they’re doing, and about my own strengths and limitations. Special indebtedness to Tehani Wessely, who believed in me from the time she pulled my very first published story out of the Andromeda Spaceways slush.

  To anyone who has helped me with critiques and/or research, whether for this manuscript or earlier ones, your patience and advice was much appreciated; to Mark Brothers, who helped with sailing; Warren Keen with rock climbing; Graeme Stockton with Scots; Peter Holz with dasyurids; Andrew Harrison with helicopters; David Dyer with the air force; Simon Petrie with chemistry; Chris Large with geology; Dirk Flinthart with bone flutes; Christopher Bobridge with the superstructure of ships; the books you helped with may someday see the light, but in case they don’t, at least I’ll have thanked you here. Because I couldn’t have written this book without first writing those ones.

  Thanks to my WoT Clan, Shen an Calhar (Look at me! I wrote a Tor book!) and other WoT players (hi, Mathias!), my Raymo board pals, and my PotBS Society, Les Condamnes. Not to mention my archery club, my Sydney Uni vet friends, my bemused coworkers at Port Stephens, and my Singo school pick-up and library book club posses. Your encouragement was fuel in my writing tank. Sunshine on my solar cells. The tide in my tidal generator, etc.

  Thank you to Juliet Marillier, mentor and role model (Margaret, you get major brownie points for introducing me to her work), to Nancy Kress, who gave me hope, and to the legendary Ursula K. Le Guin, whose writing has irrevocably shaped mine.

  Finally, to my friends Melissa, Sarah, Kelly, Danielle, Morgan, Fiona, and Jessie, and to family members of the Dyer, Bousaleh, Frankcombe, and Dillon persuasions, it is my privilege to know you. Until I find copies of books that have been signed to you in Lifeline and Salvos stores. Then I’m putting you in the next book as monkey poo collectors. XXOO.

  PROLOGUE

  UNAR LIES as still as a twelve-year-old can lie.

  Eyes shut tight, anticipating her mother’s pleased and surprised reaction to her day’s work, she breathes, deliberately and deeply, with intent to deceive, in the wreckage of the cot that belonged to her sister. A curtain divides the cot from the rest of the hollowed-out, one-room dwelling. The corner twitches. Tickles her foot. Father checking on her.

  Unar’s bent arm is her pillow. She keeps her legs curled so they won’t dangle over the splintered edges. The cot bars have been broken off to burn for fuel but the body remains whole.

  Father thinks she’s sleeping. She’s never been so wide awake. He lets the curtain edge drop.

  “It’s time to sell her,” Unar’s mother says from the other side of it, dashing Unar’s excitement to dust. Unar can’t remember if she was breathing slowly in or breathing slowly out. She can’t breathe. She doesn’t want to breathe.

  And then her old friend anger finds her. Anger heats and eases open her lungs, letting in the steamy, mould-smelling air.

  Father says in his soft, befuddled voice, “Wait a little. She’ll marry. We’ll have a dowry.”

  “A slave price is more than a dowry.” Mother is as merciless as splinters.

  “Your belly’s speaking, Erid. Eat these.”

  Unar smells nut oil. She hears the rattle of cooked grubs being shaken out of a gourd. Surely, now, Mother will show surprise, will take back what she said about selling her only remaining child.

  “What are they?” Mother asks, though she must be able to see what they are. “Why so few?”

  “She grows too heavy for the highest branches,” Father says. “Besides, she spends the mornings helping me.”

  Today, in search of prey, Unar trespassed over the border of their niche, into the Kingdom of Oxorland. She loves climbing into the mango-coloured sunset sky on the uppermost arms of the great trees of Canopy. Hugging the smooth, cool, powdery barks of gobletfruit and floodgum, she had pressed her ear to the wood, listening for the grind of grub jaws. Pried the fat, white gnawers out of their little tunnels with her bore-knife.

  “She’s fit only for the block,” Mother says, voice muffled, mouth full.

  In Oxorland, the suntrees, smothered in gleaming, poison-nectared flowers like copper bracelets weighing down a rich woman’s wrist, host many more grubs. They have softer wood, besides. Unar’s bore-knife went into them so easily.

  “What’s the use, Erid? You’ll spend it all at once if we sell her. I know you. A lode of metal. A fine gown for begging from high-borns.”

  “No! We’ll keep it. We’ll make sure it lasts till the end of our days.”

  As evening approached, from her seat in the wind-tossed suntree crown, Unar saw a woman with midnight hair bound in a yellow-feathered headdress walking lithely along a branch path. Light-footed, the woman wore nothing but two slim cloths over hips and breasts, her moonset skin covered in sunburst patterns as though gold metal had been somehow pressed into her flesh. Merchants and slaves on the path had scattered hastily out of her way. The biggest man that Unar had ever seen, holding a wooden shield and bronze sword, walked in front of her, and six Servants in hooded honey-coloured robes walked behind.

  It was the incarnation of the sun goddess, Oxor.

  “And our family?” F
ather despises his fortuneless family. Except when trying to claim a distant ancestor who saved the life of a god in disguise by sharing wood for a fire. “My blood?”

  “Your blood will go on. You said yourself just now that she’s almost old enough to breed. They’ll feed her. They’ll let her lie with whom she pleases. She’ll be happier a slave, Uranun. Happier than stricken and starving.”

  Unar has never heard a crueller lie. She half expects the tattered blue curtain that curls around the cot to be thrown back, for her mother to seize her and insist that her father take her to the market at once.

  She thinks, I can’t be a slave. That’s not what I’m for.

  This conviction shines in her mind; she turns it like a coal on a fire. What is she for? Cutting dead branches for others to burn? Digging grubs?

  Unar shivers on the broken cot in the dark behind the flimsy curtain and thinks of the proud poise of the sun goddess.

  I wasn’t born a goddess or a god, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

  She raises her callused hands to cover her mouth, to keep the sobs inside. But then her eyes open, and she stares at her hands.

  Maybe they are the hands of a goddess.

  How would anyone know if they are or not? Mighty souls don’t always choose wealthy bodies, so Teacher Eann says.

  The soul enters the body at first breath. Anybody can be chosen. Usually a baby that takes its first breath close to the place where the old body died, but not always.

  More than one goddess is missing from her Temple. Ilan, goddess of justice and kings. Irof, goddess of flowers. I could be one of them, not yet discovered.

  That would teach her mother a lesson for wanting to sell her. If Unar had the mighty magic powers of a goddess, oh, how her mother would regret her careless selfishness!

  The monsoon is over. The paths are open. Unar resolves to go to the closest Temple. How do they test for goddess souls? Does it hurt? It can’t hurt more than having a mother who hates her. The Temple lies in the crown of the biggest tallowwood tree, one of the emergent trees that rise even higher than the canopy and are always bathed in strong, full sun. Unar’s never dared dig for grubs there, because the biggest tallowwood is the sacred emergent of the goddess of birth and life, Audblayin, Waker of Senses.

  At the Temple, they’ll know how to tell.

  When her parents try to sell her as a slave in the morning, to have the sigil of obedience burned into her tongue forever, she’ll already be gone. Goddess or no, she won’t come back to the hovel.

  As soon as she makes the decision, Unar’s heart races. The smell of quince blossom and wood fern fills her nostrils. Something inside her chest, like a seed sending out a tiny root, begins to grow there. No idea she’s ever had has felt so right, yet the sensation is distressing; she clutches at her rib cage. Had she eaten a grub that somehow survived and is squirming around in there? The seed-feeling stops.

  Unar thinks the thought again, deliberately: I will go to Audblayin’s Garden.

  Her whole body thrills with it. She hasn’t swallowed a live grub; it feels more like she’s swallowed a thousand candles. Hugging herself only makes it pulse harder. A second heart she didn’t know she could have. She almost cries out to ask her parents what’s happening, but stops herself in time.

  This isn’t a thing of axe makers or woodcutters. It’s a thing whispered about in the school or the square.

  A thing of Temple Servants and gods.

  I’ll wait until they’re sleeping, and I’ll go.

  Until now, the Garden seemed a place of dread. Life-sized carvings on the Gates show soldiers and spell-casters, victorious, defending the Temple in a hundred battles. They say there’s an invisible wall around it that keeps out wrongdoers, and in Unar’s world, wrongdoers means have-nothings, so that she, a have-nothing, can’t help but be a wrongdoer.

  Yet when Unar sets out, the humming seed inside her seems to put out an added leaf whenever she takes the correct turn. The lower branch roads aren’t lit. Bats scream about their fruit-feasts, and Unar startles an owl. She carries only her bore-knife, heavy at her waist, and the night is cold and damp through the holes in her knee-length, knotted tunic. She sleeps in her father’s castoffs, too shameful to be seen by daylight.

  When she finds the Great Gates, takes a deep breath, and approaches them, she stares up at the flickering strings of lanterns for so long that she almost trips over a skinny boy, about her age, sitting with his arms around his knees on the abandoned platform before the Temple.

  “Too late,” he says softly. “The Gatekeeper’s already locked it for the night. We have to wait until morning.”

  “We?” Unar’s shoulders stiffen about her ears. Why are they being quiet? Do sleeping monsters guard those tall wooden walls with the Garden’s pointed pavilion roofs and curling passionfruit tendrils showing over the tops? “Why are you waiting here?”

  “Why do you think? I’m not trying to get pregnant, am I?”

  Disappointment drops Unar’s shoulders. Is that what the Garden is for?

  “I think you’re mean, and you look hungry. Are you going to rob the first Servant who comes out with a night soil bucket?”

  The boy’s face falls. His bare arms are brown as bear hide in the lamp light. He’s lanky and long-faced with short, sun-bleached hair, and he carries nothing. Under the loose tunic and short waist-wrap that barely covers his loincloth, it’s easy to see he hasn’t so much as a knife or a coil of rope on him.

  Wrongdoers. Have-nothings.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude to you.” He holds his knees tighter. “Forgive me. I misspoke. My brother died in the monsoon. He drowned only three days ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” Unar takes a deep breath. She kneels next to him. It’s easier to whisper. “I’m sorry I was rude to you, too.”

  His smile is hesitant.

  “They keep their night soil in the Garden. It’s good for the plants.”

  “Oh.”

  “My brother died because my parents defied the goddess. The rain goddess, I mean. I’m from Ehkisland. My parents died, too. I’ve come to serve Audblayin, the goddess of life, not just because I want to live, but because it’s the right thing to do.” He rubs his temple with his left hand. “Submit to them. Serve them. Why else are we here? What else are we for?”

  I can’t be a slave. That’s not what I’m for.

  “How do you know?” Unar asks. “Whether you can serve the goddess or not, I mean?”

  “There’s a tree growing out of a tree.” The boy’s hands relax. They rest by his sides. “The night-yew, I mean. It’s the first tree, the beginning of the forest, but it’s a parasite, like all babies when they’re new. It grows out of the host tree. When Audblayin’s a goddess, like she is now, it flowers at night and is the night-yew. When Audblayin’s a god, it flowers in the day and is the day-yew. It wakes up the magic, if you have it. And if you have it, you can serve.”

  “I have it,” Unar says at once, her certainty making her louder than she would have liked to be. Magic. That’s what she has, and she has it without even visiting the tree that grows out of the tree. Does that mean she’s something better than a Servant? Does it mean she really could be a goddess of her own? She remembers how Oxor glowed. How the seed in her chest tugged her towards the Garden. “I saw some Servants in Oxorland. Six women and a fighting man.”

  “I suppose the fighting man was Oxor’s Bodyguard. Deities in male bodies each have a female Bodyguard. The ones in female bodies have male ones. My grandmother told me that my brother drowned and I lived for a reason. She said I felt drawn towards Temple service because the deathless ones had a use for me. I’m not so sure. There’s nothing special about me. How could there be? I was a twin. There was always a spare one of me.”

  Unar stares at him. His eyes are wide, searching her face for some sort of reassurance, but she’s barely seeing him; she’s thinking about what he said.

  When Audblayin’s a god, it flowers in the day
and is the day-yew.

  Deities in male bodies each have a female Bodyguard.

  I felt drawn towards Temple service because the deathless ones had a use for me.

  Possibilities branch in all directions.

  Audblayin is a goddess now, but in her next incarnation, she could be a he.

  Maybe I’m to be the Bodyguard of the god of life.

  The seed in Unar’s chest bursts into vibrant, thrumming tangles that fill her from fingertips to toes. The smell of quince and wood fern comes again, stronger than ever. It startles her afresh. Twitches her. Sinks from her feet into the platform of living wood. The first smells are washed away, replaced by the scent of turned-over, month-old mulch and pungent tallowwood sap. The boy stares, drawing back slightly, as though he can feel it, too.

  Slowly the smells and sensations fade. Unar can’t find any trace of the seed inside her. Bats still screech and owls still hunt, but everything is changed. The goddess of life has called to her. Marked her out. Pulled her close, filling her with the belonging and warmth she has rarely felt in her mother’s presence.

  Saved her, but not her sister, from her parents’ neglect, for a reason.

  “Why don’t you want to serve Ehkis, then?” she asks the boy, as though nothing unusual has happened. The seed is gone, but the memory, the powerful conviction that she is on an ordained road, remains.

  The boy’s mouth makes a flat line, and his wide nostrils flare.

  “The rain goddess drowned my brother,” he says. He rubs his skinny left shoulder with his right hand. “He punched me in this arm, the last time I saw him alive. It went numb and then it hurt for the rest of the day. I wish I could still feel it hurting.”

  So. He might say he wants to submit, but not to the rain goddess. Not yet.

  Unar almost tells him about her baby sister, Isin. She almost shows him the indents in her skin from the cot she lay in, tells how it smells of emptiness and death, and how her cold mother thought nothing of making her sleep in it.