“My god,” Unar gasped.
“No.” Odel smiled. “I see that I am not, in fact, your god, and even if it weren’t for those clothes, you have the smell of the Garden on you. You serve Audblayin, who has died this day. Have you come looking for newborn babes?”
“No!” She didn’t know what to do. She should stay where she was. She shouldn’t approach a god without permission. But she was higher than he was. It was disrespectful to be higher than a god.
“Sensible of you. There are no women here, after all, but my Bodyguard, and she will carry no children. She mustn’t be made vulnerable by their potential to fall.”
Unar tried to look everywhere at once. There was no sign of the Bodyguard.
“Where is she?”
He ignored the question.
“I recognise you from a long-ago dream. You had a sister who fell.”
She gazed at him helplessly. For a moment, she couldn’t answer. Finally, she said, “It wasn’t your fault, Holy One. They didn’t come. My parents.”
“No. They didn’t.”
“Did you think I came here to kill you, Holy One?”
“Many attempts are made.” Odel shrugged. “Sometimes they wish to release my soul from this body. Their own offspring are almost ready to draw their first breath, the breath that brings the soul into the body, and they would have a god’s soul in the ether, waiting. Others wish for revenge.”
Unar shifted in her seat and realised the weights of her valuable bore-knife and machete were gone from her belt. Twisting, she saw them only an arm’s length away, unsheathed in the grip of a beautiful, naked woman whose amputated breasts allowed her to press, flat as a lizard, against the bark of the tree.
“Those are mine,” Unar cried.
“Give them back to her, Aurilon,” instructed the god, and the Bodyguard, quick as a hunter spearing a snake, drove the weapons back into their sheaths, making Unar cry out wordlessly again.
The Bodyguard fitted her fingers back into leather gloves tipped with claws as long and keen as knives, which had clung by themselves to the bark while she stole the tools, and tightened the leather wrist-straps in their black-painted buckles with her teeth. The back of her body from nape to heels was criss-crossed with raised scars to look like the brindled bark. In the dark, still naked but for the clawed climbing gloves, she was all but invisible.
“Chimera claws,” Unar blurted out. “They are real. You have a chimera skin here. I came to see it.”
“That old thing?” the god called up to her. “It’s rotted away. But why should you want to see it?”
“I have to see it. I’m losing belief in Audblayin. I’m losing hope. I need the proof that female can turn to male. I need to see that she can return to us a man, if she chooses.”
“Come down here,” Odel said. Unar was afraid to come close to him, and he must have known it. He stepped back, still smiling, to give her room. She hated herself for trembling, for feeling like bursting into tears. She bowed to him, deeply, and didn’t rise.
“Were there not elders in the Garden,” he asked quietly, “Servants of Audblayin, whom you might have gone to for guidance?”
“I hate them,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“I wasn’t chosen.”
Her heart pounded. Why was she telling him this? She was wicked; she’d always known it. She hadn’t obeyed her parents. In the end, although they’d given her life, the most precious commodity of Audblayinland, she hadn’t loved them. Grub gathering as a child, by crossing the border of Oxorland, she’d thought to be rewarded by her mother’s love, but instead had been rejected even more harshly. Failing to learn from this, she had crossed the barrier into Understorey where, instead of finding the fallen baby, Isin, she’d weakened the Garden’s hold on her, wakening something she feared might be desire.
As incapable of obeying the Servants’ laws as she was of obeying her duty to family, she’d treated the Great Gates like streams to be stepped over instead of walls to keep her safe, and now she stood in another niche insulting one god to another. He’d have her thrown down, one thousand paces into darkness, to break in the boneyard of Floor as her baby sister had broken before her.
She raised her eyes to his face, briefly, expecting scorn, but found only understanding.
“I can’t see the future,” Odel said. “Not yours, anyway. It’s only the deaths of children that I see. Since I turned sixteen, whenever I close my eyes, it’s little children falling who fill my dreams. I am the forty-fourth incarnation of Odel, and I will find no peace until I die. Here’s a thing that I have learned, little Gardener. Sometimes, it’s best to not be chosen.”
TEN
ONCE SHE returned to the Garden, Unar burrowed into her hammock.
She fell into a nightmare sleep of broken children being eaten by demons, a tiredness so deep that when morning came, she resisted being awakened. The new Gardeners carried her across the shallow part of the moat to the Temple. Some part of her was aware of entering the great egg’s shade.
She woke in a dim room with Oos’s cool hand on her forehead and the sensation of being fully refreshed.
“It worked,” Oos exclaimed in delight.
“Is this a dream?” Unar asked.
“You’re a fast learner, Oos,” a hooded old woman—Servant Eilif—said with satisfaction, ignoring Unar, before turning to leave the room. It was barely three paces across, with only a bed and a chair to furnish it. Bird droppings littered the sills of the three circular windows, which let in light but had no visible way to close them.
“Where are we?” Unar wanted to know.
“One of the treatment rooms,” Oos said. “Oh, Unar, I wanted to speak to you after the ceremony, but we couldn’t—”
“Treatment? For what? I’m not sick.”
“You were. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin cured you.” By that, of course, Oos meant herself.
“You cured her of tiredness,” said Aoun sombrely. He’d been sitting on the floor, below Unar’s line of sight. When he stood, his dark hair brushed the curving outer wall of the small room.
Unar’s heart fluttered. Aoun had been waiting for her to wake.
“Are you still angry, Unar?” Oos wrung her hands. “Are you so upset by not being selected that you haven’t slept since?”
“How did you do it?” Unar asked. “How did you cure my tiredness?”
“By opening channels in the mind with magic. It’s like opening channels in plants to help them draw water. Watch, I’ll show you—”
“No, you won’t,” Aoun said sternly.
“Will you punish her if she does?” Unar sat up sharply. “Will you throw her off the edge of the Garden like a slave too old to work?”
He hadn’t been waiting out of concern for her, then, but so he could berate her.
“Oos isn’t a slave. Disobedience here is punished by a draining of magic. Any two Servants can perform this upon a third. There’s no need for citizens to fall.”
Neither Oos nor Aoun had reacted with shock to the notion of throwing slaves to their deaths. Of course not.
“You’ve learned many things in just one day,” Unar observed, glaring at them in turn. “Many things that Gardeners aren’t permitted to know. You’ve changed. I don’t know you.”
“You know us,” Oos protested, and Unar pressed her momentary advantage.
“What’s this room for?” She waved her hands around at it. Here I am in the Temple at last, but not the way I wanted.
“The women who pay tribute, who come to have their fertility enhanced. They’re treated in the rooms.”
Worse. I’m in the room for noninitiates.
“Can I see where you sleep?” Unar sat up and swung her feet over the edge of the bed, struck by the fact her feet were clean. She was wearing a clean red robe. Who had changed her? Aoun? A thrill went through her before she realised it had to be Oos. The long sleeves had been taken in to fit Unar’s arms. Only a few quick sti
tches, but nobody else would have noticed or cared.
“I don’t—” Oos said breathlessly, darting a glance after the departed old woman, at the same time as Aoun rubbed his temple and said with exasperation, “No!”
A fantail flew into the room by the open door and departed by one of the round windows. Able to move freely where Unar was not.
“The women don’t mind the bird droppings?” she asked jealously.
“Birds are beloved of the goddess,” Oos said. She sat on the bed next to Unar and put her hand consolingly in the small of Unar’s back, as if Unar were a decrepit crone in need of support.
Unar knew about the beloved bloody birds. One day separated them, and Oos was already treating Unar like some empty-headed supplicant.
“Oh, great teacher!” Unar said. “Wiser than Eilif already!”
Oos’s chin jerked upwards.
“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin admits one’s nervousness about one’s ability to convey the desires of the goddess—”
“He’s a god, now,” Unar said, and Oos took her hand away as if burned.
“How can you know that?”
Oos and Aoun both stared at her as if she’d added her own shit to the neat piles of bird droppings.
“Trust me,” Unar said stubbornly. “I just know.”
ELEVEN
IN THE afternoon, Oos came out of the Temple to give the new Gardeners a lesson.
Unar would have gone to sleep early, but Aoun came to the loquat grove to tip her out of her hammock and tell her she was needed in the grass plot, that she must undo the blow she’d delivered to Oos’s confidence.
“I’m still recovering,” she answered, made hostile by guilt, sprawled on the ground and gazing up into his carob-brown irises, which gleamed under the pronounced shelf of his brow. Somehow, her hostility lessened. She didn’t want it to.
She wanted to make fun of him for turning out so hairy, not be made breathless by the sudden, masculine smell of him mingling with the perfume of the grove.
“You’re recovered,” he said calmly, offering his hand, which she didn’t take. “Oos saw to that.”
“I still don’t have any magic. It hasn’t grown back.”
“Have patience. Watch. Listen.”
“In the Temple, you were worried about me. You waited for me to wake up.”
For someone who had just advised patience, Unar found the manner in which Aoun lifted her by the shoulders and set her on her feet rather impatient.
“You don’t seem worried by how Oos will feel if you don’t bother going to her lesson.”
Remorse made Unar snap her jaws shut midyawn.
“Fine. I’m going.” She was of a mind to push him out of her way, but by the time she fixed her hair, found a jacket, gobbled the lumpy, cold, ant-infested seed-porridge portion she’d dumped in a branch-fork and filled a leaf-cup with water to gargle in, he was gone. Unar crossed five bridges to reach the grass plot, which graced one of the eastern arms of the Garden.
The exotic plot was filled with rare blue and bronze-coloured grasses from the places where Floor met the edge of the forest. A messy hedge of maroon guavas, interspersed with purple sugarcane thickets, formed a semicircle around the western boundary. A family of purple wrens peeped a warning as Unar stepped off the bridge. Maroon hummingbird hatchlings were almost too big for their falling-apart nest in the jacaranda tree that formed the centrepiece of the plot. It had flowered during the wet and would drop its lush, ferny leaves at the very end of the dry.
The other Gardeners clustered by the jacaranda, waiting in silence. Unar should have known all their names but didn’t. Oos had chided her for not knowing the intimate life histories of Servants who should have been her role models, but Unar didn’t care for role models; at least, she hadn’t until she’d met that Bodyguard of Odel’s.
What was her name?
“If you’re quite ready for the lesson to begin,” Oos said.
Oos stood at the focus of the loose semicircle of Gardeners, the snowy pistil to their bloody stamens. She’d procured a white hat-peak, complete with white ribbons, to lace into her white-beaded hair. She always wore hat-peaks, even in the shade, in the belief that it would keep her skin smooth and soft. Unar wouldn’t have been surprised to see Oos wearing one in the dark. She’d heard that at internoder balls, the dancers wore hats indoors.
“Sorry,” Unar said with as much sincerity as she could gather. Oos was her friend. She didn’t deserve to be punished for the stupidity of the other Servants. Unar didn’t really want to ruin her first day as a teacher.
“Today we’ll learn to determine,” Oos said, raising her voice to reach all of them, smoothing the perfect folds of her white robe, “whether a seed will give rise to a plant showing mostly the character of the plant that contributed the pollen, or the plant that contributed the ovum. In the case of self-pollination, we’ll still be able to predict indicators relevant to our interests, such as leaf blade length or the sweetness of fruit.”
And then Unar, who had fully intended to be attentive and courteous, found herself irritated beyond her ability to hide it.
She didn’t care about the sweetness of fruit, but she cared that the vizier’s daughter’s belaboured, noble-born speech had reasserted itself so strongly with her promotion.
O great teacher!
Oos’s fingers stilled on her robe. Her eyes narrowed, and Unar realised she had spoken out loud.
“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin begs your pardon, Gardener Unar. Perhaps you would like to teach the class.”
“Teaching is for Servants only.”
“Rightly so.” Oos’s arms, straight at her sides, clenched handfuls of her robe. “Do you have any other questions, child?”
Child.
Unar’s anger blazed up, as Oos had no doubt intended.
“Yes. I do. Why are the plants allowed to breed, and the slaves, and the birds, but not the Gardeners or the Servants? Because I think you and Aoun might breed a sort of perfect hat-wearing offspring with his boring seriousness and your dim-witted conceit.”
Oos could have struck Unar, could have given her the same black eye that the other initiates had once given her. Instead, she lifted her chin and swallowed hard. When she spoke again, her voice became shrill, but, shockingly, she answered the question.
“Once, long ago, it was the duty of Gardeners and Servants to give up their wombs or their seed for the use of worshippers who could get no children of their own. That practice faded as our skills improved. But the tradition of magically enabled freedom from lust was adopted by all deities of Canopy once it became clear that such freedom reduced split loyalties between blood relatives and service to the Temple.”
Unar stared into Oos’s eyes. How many times had they puzzled over this matter, in their hammocks in the loquat grove? All of Oos’s questions would be answered, but none of Unar’s.
Tell me more, Unar begged silently with an open expression of longing. Tell me everything you know. I belong with you.
Oos’s large, liquid eyes softened with sympathy.
Then she turned away. She plucked a disc-shaped, hanging seedpod from the jacaranda tree. In her hand, it darkened from brilliant green to very dark brown, and split, first into a wide frog grin and then into separate halves, revealing the papery-winged seeds inside.
Unar barely felt the magic that Oos had used. She was still exhausted by her effort on Ylly’s behalf and the slowed recovery caused by Audblayin’s death. Something tiny and bright did seem to unfold in Oos’s breast. Unar couldn’t tell if the smell of sweet rot and crushed jacaranda flower in her nostrils was from the magic or the actual tree, and she certainly couldn’t discern the qualities the seed had gained from either contributor to pollination.
The place inside her where her magic lived was hollow, and it ached.
Instead of dwelling on it, she remembered how her whole body had thrummed, like a hanging bridge in high wind, at the thought that Aoun mi
ght have undressed her.
Freedom from lust, she thought. It’s not working for me, but I don’t care. When I have the ear of the god, I’ll put a stop to that tradition. Or at least change it so that those within the Garden can be with one another. There’ll be no split loyalties then.
For Unar might have become newly, uncomfortably aware of Aoun, but worried about her or not, he was incapable of becoming similarly aware of her. Despite all his working parts, magic made him impotent, and although they were both have-nothings, only Unar was a wrongdoer; Aoun would never willingly weaken his bond with the Garden, never break any of its rules.
It’s in me to be law-abiding.
Wait.
He had broken a rule, after all. He’d let Unar out of the Garden. Why make an exception for her? There was no good reason.
Unless.
Abruptly, the emptiness where her magic should have been didn’t hurt quite so much. Suppressing a smile, Unar arranged her face into an expression of interest.
Have patience, Aoun had told her. Watch. Listen.
* * *
DAYS AND nights passed slowly while Unar waited for her magic to regrow.
Watch. Listen. If you say so, Gatekeeper Aoun.
By trial and error, she discovered a place directly across the moat where she could best position herself, hidden by painfully prickly pomegranate bushes. There, she could listen for snatches of conversation to float out through the windows of the treatment rooms at the side of the Temple and across the fish-filled water.
It wasn’t enough. She couldn’t hear anything worth hearing, couldn’t eavesdrop with magical ears on whispered incantations nor see, with her magical sight, how the patterns were performed.
She had to get closer.
While she waited for a new plan to come to her, she performed her usual duties. Unar weeded, harvested, planted seeds, separated clumps of colourful grasses, slept at midday when she should have been mingling with the other Gardeners at luncheon, and spent the hours after sundown helping Ylly with her ever-increasing workload. There was no Bodyguard to spy on her out the crescent windows anymore.
Crossroads of Canopy Page 6
