“That is lucky,” Unar said. “I think Aoun knows I’ve been working with you at night. He said something about doing my own work, work assigned specifically to me.”
“That is the name of the Servant, the Gatekeeper, who told me this morning to go below,” Hasbabsah said. “He changed the mark in my mouth. Once I go down, I will not be able to come back up, Ylly.”
Ylly’s expression didn’t change. Unar began to step back, to withdraw so they could show their true feelings in private, but other Gardeners and slaves were around the next corner and she didn’t want to rouse suspicion.
“This is farewell, then,” Ylly said.
They embraced tightly.
“I thought that the Warmed One might go with you to the lower branches. She could meet Sawas. Perhaps watch her work for a little while.”
“And her allotted Gardener’s work?”
“Oh, that,” Unar said. Turning carelessly to the wall of vines, she reached out to pollinated seeds too small to see, her magic drawing them out from the husks of faded flowers into beans that were brilliant green and a hand-span across. “There. I’ve done it. Enjoy the picking, Ylly.”
“Hasbabsah will need your help on the descent, Warmed One,” Ylly said. “I beg you, however she grumbles, not to let her fall.”
Unar began to take the old woman’s arm, but Ylly’s hiss recalled to mind that any assistance was to occur once they were out of sight.
The slave’s loose, spotted skin abruptly reminded Unar of how her mother had looked, wasted by illness, on the day she’d come to demand compensation from the Garden for her runaway daughter. That was the first time Unar had climbed the walls of the Garden. She thought she’d recognised the source of the disturbance as a woman she’d hoped never to see again and was horrified to discover she was right.
I’m old, Mother had raged at the white-robed figure outside the Great Gate. I must have what I’m owed. You serve life. Do you want me to die? Because I will die, without silver, without children to do the work.
Unar had resisted the urge to answer in the affirmative. She’d leaned with one foot against the wooden wall, the other foot braced back against the trunk of a coconut palm, her hands slashed by the sharp edges of the fronds, her ears straining to hear the Servant’s reply. Anxiety had twisted her innards. She hadn’t been of age when she’d pledged herself to Audblayin. Was it possible that she’d be sent back?
Give me what I am owed! Mother had screeched.
And Unar remembered Isin and the broken lock. She said fiercely under her breath, You are the one who owes us, Mother. You are a murderer, and the Garden will never let you pass.
Yet the Servants who passed freely through the wards every day had pushed slaves to their deaths; how did that work? Unar had touched them with her magic to find out, and realised that just as the wards could be fooled by her insistence she was a seed, they could also be fooled by the magical sigils on the slaves’ tongues into thinking that aged humans were discarded refuse, no more significant to the goddess than the used leaf-plates tossed away once they were emptied of porridge.
“I won’t let her fall,” Unar told Ylly, grimly.
Delve as she might with her magic, though, she could neither figure out how the sigils were made, nor how they might be removed. She would have to ask Oos.
SIXTEEN
UNAR STOOD at the woody water’s edge.
There were no fish in this pool. These storage hollows, shaped in the clefts where the great branches of the tallowwood met the trunk, were the recipients of carved channels and leaf-nets designed to capture and divert as much rainwater from the lateral branches as possible. Underwater tunnels and tubes with various mechanisms inside them became frequently blocked by debris.
Sawas, submerged, was a darker brown shape against the brown bowl of water. It reflected the sky in some places, the smooth trunk and overhead Temple in others. The bastard child of an Odelland king popped her head out of the pool. She dumped two handfuls of soggy leaves on the edge, where they were swept up by another slave and taken away.
“So.” Hasbabsah sat on a blanket with the sleeping baby, not far from the edge. “Why does the Warmed One wish to learn to swim?”
Unar shivered. She didn’t wish to. Not really. She had no choice, if she was to grow in magical power.
“Hasbabsah!” Sawas said.
“It’s all right,” Unar said. “I’m not like them. I don’t toss old women from treetops.”
“I would like to see them try,” Hasbabsah grumbled. “I would take that Servant Eilif down to the forest floor with me.”
“Hasbabsah!”
“Down you go again, little duck. Let the Warmed One worry about me.” When Sawas had obediently dived again, the old slave indicated the baby on the blanket. “This one is fourth generation.”
“She’s pretty,” Unar said, keeping her distance. Babies didn’t really interest her, except for their potential to house the souls of gods. Their screams were high-pitched enough to split heads, and they couldn’t do or say anything interesting. A pet bear cub or a trained parrot was more entertaining. Isin had been different. Isin had been her own blood.
“She will never be a warrior,” Hasbabsah said, “up here in Canopy.”
Unar shrugged. “Can’t you teach her what she needs to know?” She hadn’t come to chat about the baby. She’d done her duty by it. Odel’s protection lay over it. “She’s got a good name, right? She’ll be able to go both up and down.”
It was a sop; baby Ylly was owned by the Garden, and even if someone tried to take her down, it was more likely she would stubbornly float, buoyed by the power of the god. Unar was trying to put a good face on the fact that names were the only inane influence slaves had over their children.
Sawas surfaced with another two handfuls of leaves and sticks. Her breasts, swollen with milk, bumped like clinked goblets on the surface while she pushed the little pile away from her.
“Only if her tongue carries the correct glyph,” Hasbabsah muttered, and Unar realised she was thinking of her own demotion, and that she might never see the elder Ylly again.
“Are we talking about tongues, now?” Sawas asked with a sparkle in her eyes. “I heard it was the handsome new Gatekeeper who changed yours, Hasbabsah. I wish he’d give me a kiss and change mine.”
“You have done enough harm by kissing, Sawas. Look at the child you unthinkingly brought into the world. Into a life of misery!”
“My life isn’t misery.” Sawas laughed. “What do you think of Servant Aoun, Warmed One?”
Unar felt the blood rush to her face.
“He was … is my friend,” she said. “Are the marks on your tongues truly changed by kissing?”
“They can be, if the man is an adept. Perhaps one day he’ll come to me. Sawas, he’ll say, I cannot live without you! He’ll kiss me and carry me up into the Garden proper. Perhaps Ylly will have a sister.”
“No!” Hasbabsah raged.
“I think I know why the Warmed One wishes to swim. So she can swim across the moat and spy on the Gatekeeper without clothes on, while he’s sleeping in the Temple. He has such fine, fleshy fruit. I would wake it with my marked tongue. I would take it between my thighs. It would reach so far up inside of me!”
“Sawas! One birthing was not enough to sting some sense into your empty head?”
Sawas turned lithely in the water and went under, bubbles of laughter trailing in her wake, while Unar stood, stock-still, trying not to picture Aoun’s so-called fine, fleshy fruit. She didn’t want to imagine it reaching up inside of her. It was indeed bigger than others she’d seen. She knew that, like monkey’s parts, men’s grew bigger in preparation for mating. That was a slightly stomach-turning thought. She had sworn to Audblayin not to try it, and she didn’t want to try it.
A kiss, though. That would be safe. A kiss would break no oaths. Being held by Aoun might not be too much of a transgression, either. But Unar didn’t serve the love goddess, Oxor. T
his was Audblayin’s emergent.
“You spoke of Old Gods, Hasbabsah,” Unar said. She hoped her voice sounded normal. She hoped the old slave, behind her, couldn’t read her thoughts from her body language. Even if she had, who would she tell? Hasbabsah would never return to the upper levels of the Garden. It was a mean thought.
“I did speak of them, Warmed One.”
“You mentioned their bones. When I stole those chimera cloths from the princess of Odelland, there were broken bones inside of them.”
Unar had found more bits after she’d left the palace, and had shaken the old, yellowed fragments into the forest. They’d fallen quickly out of sight. Old bones weren’t what she’d wanted to give to Odel as tribute. The chimera skin was the prize.
Or so she had thought.
“Chimera skin keeps its magic for many hundreds of years,” Hasbabsah said quietly. “I know the cloths you speak of. I was there when my mistress hid them under the floor. The cloth shields magic-imbued objects from one another. She did not want them interfering with the bone-magic of the bed.”
“The platform? That was bone? It was too big.”
“It was a neck bone of the Old Gods.”
“How could something so big be raised from Floor without any enemies noticing?”
“You are young. Understorians do not always raid Canopy. In hungry times, they trade. In prosperous times, they buy back captured slaves. That bed was once part of a Floorian place of worship. Understorians carried it up to Canopy, to purchase the lives of their loved ones.”
Unar was astonished.
“I’ve never heard of slaves being bought back.”
“These are not times of prosperity.”
“You must have hoped. When you were first captured. You must have hoped they’d bring something like that floating bed and buy you back with it.”
“I still hope it,” Hasbabsah said.
The baby woke.
“Come, Sawas,” Hasbabsah called as the young mother surfaced again. “It is feeding time for baby Ylly.” She put her little finger into the baby’s mouth to mollify it for a moment. “There are no spells to stop the menstrual cycles of slaves. The Garden can always use more hands. How convenient for them that we multiply.”
SEVENTEEN
THAT NIGHT, Unar climbed down to the pool for her first lesson.
It was different in darkness. She couldn’t see its depths. Shapes she thought looked like fish in the moonlight were the long, shining leaves of neighbouring trees.
“Sawas?” she whispered as loudly as she dared.
Streams of dirty wash water falling from the edges of the Garden splashed into hollows that were lined with the purifying pith of fiveways fruit. The pith strained and sweetened the water before it joined the main pool. Unar paced along the path. Somewhere below her, a baby cried.
The slaves slept in small hollows in the branches. Some of them would have smoke holes bored through to the branch-top paths, but Unar couldn’t smell any smoke. It was a mild winter and a still evening.
“Sawas,” she whispered again.
“I’m here, Warmed One,” Sawas said cheerfully, scrambling up from underneath onto the path. “Let’s go to the pool.”
She had something like a wooden turtle shell on her back. When they reached the water, where an Airak-lit brazier was reflected, blue-white and blazing, Unar saw that the shell was a shallow, smooth, baby’s sleeping-bowl, one that could be rocked with a foot to settle a bundled child. Sawas set her clothes beside it.
“Are you cold?” Sawas asked. “Are you going to swim with your clothes on? They won’t keep you warm, and they’ll grow heavy. It’s dangerous.”
“Aren’t you going to show me some swimming movements first? Can’t I practice the movements? Build the correct muscles?”
“You can’t build the correct muscles without the resistance of the water.”
Unar took her clothes off. There was nobody to see her but Sawas. Had Aoun looked at her, the day she’d woken in the Temple? Or on the day of Audblayin’s death? Or had he only looked forward, towards the Temple? She should’ve only looked at the Temple, too. Maybe then she’d be a Servant, like him.
“Hold the bowl with both hands,” Sawas said. “It floats. It’ll hold you up. Don’t let go. The first action you must practice is kicking. Don’t use your magic.”
Unar’s skin crawled as she slid into the cool water. She gritted her teeth to stop from reaching for the power and found that her body did float without it, after a fashion; feet deep down and flailing, her back bent and her eyes upwards, clutching the wooden bowl to her chest.
“Your teeth are chattering,” Sawas observed, laughing. “You must be cold. Look what happens to you, away from sunlight. Gardeners must be a little bit like lizards. You can only move about in the heat of the day.”
“It’s nothing like that,” Unar said. “I feel like I’m falling!”
Sawas swam around her in circles.
“Everybody is falling,” she said. “Everybody grows old and dies and is born again. The water will catch you. The water will hold you up.”
Unar waited. She floated. The fear ebbed from her.
“I don’t like fish,” she said at last, to break the silence.
“I’ve never tasted one,” Sawas replied.
EIGHTEEN
IN THE morning, Unar had barely started work when Ylly flew out of nowhere at her.
“They’ve taken her away to sell,” Ylly sobbed, her arms wrapped around Unar’s knees. “Sawas and the baby. They must have seen you. She’s being punished because of you!”
“Quiet, slave!” Unar hissed, in case anyone was close by, but a quick flick of her magic showed they were alone by the watercress beds. “Nobody saw me with Sawas, Ylly.”
Ylly’s whole body quaked.
“Hasbabsah sent me a bird with a message. At daybreak, a Servant went below to grow a new room in Sawas’s hollow. A separate sleeping room for the baby. Sawas and the Servant spoke. Hasbabsah couldn’t overhear them. But then the Servant took Sawas and baby Ylly away, out of the Garden, in the direction of the market. Where else could they be going?”
“Maybe the Servant needed a slave to carry her basket?”
“Then why take the baby?”
Ylly was frantic. Unar didn’t know what to say to calm her. Her magic warned her that others were coming.
“Don’t shake me,” she said. “If anybody sees you, they’ll sell you as well. Listen, you said that Hasbabsah couldn’t be sold because she knew the secrets of the Garden. Doesn’t Sawas know any secrets?”
“No! She’s always stayed below!” Ylly released Unar and crumpled to the earth, burying her face in her hands.
“I’ll find out what’s happening,” Unar said in a low voice. “Oos will tell me. My friend. You remember her. She’s a Servant, now.”
Ylly shook her head.
“Your friend,” she repeated huskily, hopelessly, “she was the Servant who took my daughter and granddaughter away. Oos, the vizier’s daughter.”
Unar grunted. Had Oos been sent on some grim errand to prove her loyalty to Servant Eilif? Or had she thoughtlessly gone to buy glass goblets, jewelled shoes, or other fineries she’d grown accustomed to having in her father’s home, enjoying the freedom she had as a Servant that had been denied her as a Gardener? Not that Oos had wanted to leave the Garden, since passing through the Gates.
“How old is this news?” she asked.
“Three hours, by the water clock. Hasbabsah had to find chalk and paperbark. She had to steal grain to entice the messenger bird to come.”
“Come with me.”
Unar went to the Gate. Ylly followed. The market wasn’t far from the Garden. If Oos had gone there, she’d be back soon; Unar bit her lip and gazed at the open archway with the beautiful carved doors thrown back, wondering if she dared leave the Garden in broad daylight.
She’d almost been a slave. Her parents had all but agreed to sell her. The Ga
rden had saved her. It was her home and her shelter. She wouldn’t risk being expelled for the sake of a rescue mission that might be completely unnecessary. Not when she had so much to learn, and more to accomplish.
Before Unar could decide on anything drastic, Oos returned, alone, along the steep path up to the Garden Gate. Ylly, rocking on her heels at Unar’s side, stiffened at the sight of her but said nothing.
“Unar,” Oos said breathlessly, ignoring the crouching slave. “Were you waiting for me?”
“Yes, I was,” Unar said, relieved to see Oos pass easily through the wards. Oos had neither stolen, raped, nor killed. Nothing bad could have happened to Sawas. She’d be along, soon, carrying some bought trinket or other. “Where have you been?”
Oos seemed taken aback.
“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin has been to the home of the weaver, Epatut. It grows cooler at night, and the Temple was in need of some new blankets. I took two slaves from the low levels for the trade. They weren’t needed here. They’re with Wife-of-Epatut, now. She’s pregnant again, by the grace of Audblayin, and wanted a wet nurse in waiting.”
Unar couldn’t bring herself to look at Ylly.
“It has been cooler at night,” Unar repeated stupidly.
“I don’t need you now, slave,” Oos told Ylly. “I’ll walk alone with this Gardener.”
When Ylly had gone, Oos seized Unar’s hand and dragged her into the green shade of the ferns, where they were concealed by a profusion of new fronds.
“What are you doing, Unar?”
“What do you mean?”
“That slave girl, Sawas, came to me this morning. She said you were learning to swim. She said you wanted to sneak into the Temple and make babies with Aoun. You aren’t loyal to the Temple, she said, but she offered to report everything you did to Servant Eilif, if only she would be allowed to keep her child with her until it was of age, instead of being at the mercy of the Garden’s needs. I had to get rid of her and the child before she could tell anyone else!”
Crossroads of Canopy Page 9
