Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “I said that our table is yours,” the brute repeated in a gentler voice, and Hasbabsah sank into a four-legged chair by the fire with a relieved groan. Ylly went to stand slightly behind her, her back to the flames, shaking her wet hair and looking wary.

  Oos gripped Unar’s hand tightly. They stood, rigid, by the door as Esse closed it behind them.

  “Some ugly-looking fish you have caught, Esse,” said the yellow-haired man, his expression curious.

  “Don’t kill us,” Oos blurted at once. “We can pay you. Just these two slaves for now, but later, when you take us back to Canopy, we’ll pay more.”

  “I see no slaves here.” The yellow-haired man looked amused.

  “Don’t skin us alive. Don’t throw us to demons. The goddess we serve—”

  “Girl child,” Hasbabsah interrupted, “these three brothers have offered us all monsoon-right by asking that we sit at their table. You answer them with insult. They have pledged to share food and water with you until the monsoon is ended. It means that if food runs low before the rains stop, we will all starve together before they throw you to the demons.”

  “Your gods and goddesses have no power here,” Esse said, opening a bag of fresh fish before the fire.

  “I’ve made no pledge not to throw her to the demons,” Ylly said.

  “We will not run low on food,” the deep-voiced, red-haired man boomed, leaning back from his crumb-covered, empty plate. “Introductions are in order. But not before all are seated.”

  He turned unblinking brown eyes on Unar and Oos until they shuffled, still hand in hand, over to an empty pair of stools. Then he stared at Ylly until she sat down, too.

  “I am Bernreb,” he said, “second son of Moonoom.”

  “I am Marram,” the yellow-haired man said, smiling into the silence that followed Bernreb’s pronouncement. “Third son of Moonoom. Over there, gutting the fish for your breakfast, is Esse, first son of Moonoom.”

  “I am Hasbabsah of Nessa,” Hasbabsah said.

  “I’m Ylly, daughter of Ylly.”

  Oos squeezed Unar’s hand so tight that Unar couldn’t feel it anymore and said nothing.

  “You don’t look like brothers,” Unar said, avoiding giving her name. “You all look different. How can you all be sons of Moonoom? You look like you all had different fathers.”

  Bernreb guffawed.

  “Canopy must indeed be a strange and wondrous place. I never heard of three brothers all having the same father.”

  “Fathers die so quickly,” Marram said.

  “Moonoom was our mother,” Esse muttered, throwing fish guts into the fire.

  “Oh.” Unar took a deep breath. She reminded herself that the floor her feet stood on was the very same sapwood that the Garden stood on. This was still her place. The heart that beat within the great tree was her heart. “I am Unar of the Garden. This is Oos.”

  “Then we are all well met,” Bernreb said.

  “Is there nobody else living here?” Ylly asked.

  From some other, unknown place in the home wafted the bawls of a baby crying.

  Unar shared a glance with Oos.

  “Excuse me,” Bernreb said. “I only just put her down. The sound of our voices must have woken her. We try to keep her in the back where the demons will not hear her crying and come to investigate.” He stood up from the table, passed through one of the embroidered hangings, and returned with a bundle in his bulging, tattooed arms.

  Unar stared at the bundle. The blanket-edge bore the family weaves of the House of Epatut. She hadn’t cared about family colours and emblems; hadn’t taken them with mother’s milk, as Oos had.

  But she recognised these.

  “Now you have seen her,” Bernreb said, “I must clean her. Excuse me.”

  Ylly stood up abruptly, went to Bernreb, and lifted the baby’s fat brown body out of the wrappings. This child had been all but newborn when she fell at the end of the last monsoon, and now looked none the worse for it. Her bared bottom had an odorous, muddy smear across the cheeks, but Ylly ignored it.

  “She’s from Canopy,” Ylly said, with eyes only for the baby, cooing and swishing until the cries turned to uncertain smiles. Bernreb looked bemused, but he made no move to take the baby back. Perhaps he felt that babies belonged in the arms of women. Or perhaps, since it appeared they would all be living together for five months, he simply saw no sense in stopping Ylly from taking on some of his duties. He couldn’t know how Ylly had longed to hold her true granddaughter, how she’d kept bitterly silent ever since Sawas was sold away.

  “Did you steal her?” Oos asked. “Did you steal those blankets?”

  “Oos,” Unar said with wonder, extricating her bruised hand, remembering the wrappings full of rotten quandongs and satinashes she’d let fall amidst crushing disappointment. “You know whose baby this is, better than me. She is Imeris, daughter of Epatut. She survived the fall.”

  “She survived a fall,” Bernreb agreed heartily. “We had not given her a name.”

  “She is Imerissiremi,” Ylly said at once. “Issi for short.”

  “Wife-of-Epatut dropped her in the market,” Hasbabsah said. “Not at the Garden. You didn’t find her caught in this tree. How did you find her?”

  “I found her ten days ago in the mouth of a chimera that I killed,” Bernreb said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his hands behind his head, cracking his knuckles. “A chimera’s milky saliva nourishes its eggs, passing through the soft shells. Seems good enough for a human babe to survive on at that.” His eyes followed Ylly, who had left the door open carelessly as she carried the child towards the entry room. Unar heard bucket handles swing and the splash of water.

  “Is she leaving?” Unar whispered to Esse, who was half bent in the act of placing a roasted fish on a dried leaf-plate in front of her. “Is she mad? Is she leaving with the baby?”

  Esse paused to glance down the pitch-black corridor.

  “She is washing the baby’s backside,” he said. “We would trust a potplant a hundred times over before we trusted you, Gardener. Eat your fish.”

  Unar ate the fish. It tasted like flowerfowl bile mixed with cactus jelly, but she was so hungry she burned her tongue and her fingers in her haste, pausing only to extricate tiny bones from her mouth and line them up on the edge of her plate.

  “You did not kill a chimera,” Hasbabsah said, wiping fish grease from her chin with her sleeve.

  “Did I not?”

  “The chimera is life. Life must come from the ashes of its death, or the curse falls on the family of the one who slays it.” Hasbabsah began to cough so uncontrollably that she couldn’t speak. Unar worried about a fish bone, but Hasbabsah waved Marram back when he stood up and made as if to assist her.

  “Life did come from it,” Bernreb said. “The child, from its mouth, as I said. She is lucky, and she is life. We will keep her. We will care for her.”

  Unar noticed that one of the tattoos on Bernreb’s arms showed a sinuous, reptilian shape with flattened ears and claws like knives, long teeth in a mouth that opened up the whole head like a hinge, and multicoloured scales from snout to prehensile tail.

  It was fresher than the others, the skin around it still red and puckered.

  “Your markings,” she said. “They show the demons you’ve slain.”

  “I was sent away from Gannak because of this one.” Bernreb grinned and sat forward, pointing to a depiction of a man on his biceps; a man whose head with its curving, banana-shaped hat had been separated from his body. “The Headman of Gannak told me I must serve with him, on pain of death, on his fool errand to kill a Canopian god. I did not want to go with him. Nor did I wish for death. Now we three live in exile.”

  Ylly returned to the hearth room, pulling the door closed behind her.

  “What do you feed the child?” she asked. “Issi is hungry.”

  “We fed her the eggs of the chimera, at first. Now she has nut paste. Fruit mush. Insects trapped i
n sap and boiled in monkey oil.”

  Unar sucked on the fish head and waited for Ylly to deplore these barbarian foodstuffs. Babies in Audblayinland were breast-fed until their second birthday. Then again, they didn’t have Sawas with them. Breastfeeding wasn’t an option.

  “She is healthy,” Ylly said. “She’s bright. Those foods you’ve been giving her must be good for her. Where can I find them?”

  “Let me,” Hasbabsah said, but she was bent over by coughing again.

  “You must rest, Hasbabsah of Nessa,” Marram said. “I will prepare pallets for you. We have already sacrificed our storeroom, in the deepest part of the tree, for the baby’s safety and comfort, so there is no harm putting our monsoon guests in there, too. You must put up with her noise in the night, as we do, I am afraid.”

  “I can help,” Oos offered, putting her hand on Ylly’s as the older woman passed, but Ylly rounded on her with teeth bared.

  “You and your ilk took my granddaughter from me. You’ll have nothing to do with this child, do you understand me? You won’t even look at her. Not even speak her name. Now go find some sandpaper fig leaves for those soft hands of yours. Your beauty will fade soon enough, but you might find an application for it here, better than in the Garden.”

  Oos swallowed hard. She dry-washed her hands, looking with fear and awe at Ylly as though seeing her for the first time.

  “All of you need rest,” Bernreb said, shifting uncomfortably. He tried to catch Esse’s eye, but Esse was at the fire, roasting more fish, still seeming amused.

  He brought Unar and Oos another fish each.

  “Monsoon-right,” Esse said to his left shoulder, “is better treatment than these Gardeners deserve. I had thought to feed them on rotted leaves and old bones, as potplant and her ilk are fed. Not as equals. My brother Bernreb is soft.”

  “He killed a chimera,” Unar said. “And made the shape of it in his flesh with needles. You think he’s soft?”

  “He killed the chimera out of brotherly love. Marram needed the skin.”

  “What for? To make himself invisible? So that he can creep up on Canopy and kill one of our gods?”

  Esse gently touched the collar of Unar’s Gardener’s tunic, by chance a finer variety, where a green sprouting seed had been worked into the red. Unar watched him do it without shrinking back or slapping his long-fingered hand away.

  “Marram could kill a god—or a goddess—if he cared to,” he said. “But he does not need to be invisible for that. That is not why he needed the skin.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  UNAR LAY on her pallet in the dark, cosy storeroom, listening to Ylly swish and shush the baby, and to Hasbabsah’s terrible coughing.

  Despite the disturbances, she should have fallen asleep instantly, but her head whirled with thought. The monsoon would last five long months. There was no way for her to leave the home of the three brothers before then. And why should she leave? Why should she go back to Canopy at all, until the reincarnation of Audblayin was old enough for her to find?

  What would the brothers do with Oos and Unar when the rain stopped? Push them out the front door?

  She had no forearm spikes with which to climb, nor skill with an axe. Perhaps she’d better learn. Hasbabsah had said there would be no trunk crossings in the wet, but what about in the dry? How did one travel from tree to tree in Understorey, where there were, apparently, no bridges to bring demons to the door?

  Unar would have liked to visit Edax at the edge of their swimming pool, though it must be overflowing by now, rejoining a vertical river like the one outside the three brothers’ door. Fish would half swim, half climb with their fins or thin speckled legs up the river to lay their eggs in the upper pools. Then, the following year, the hatchlings would abandon the pool, too big to survive on rotting leaves and insect larvae. Many would end up in nets like Esse’s, but others would make it all the way down to Floor.

  Was that her way back into Canopy? To fool the barrier at the rain goddess’s domain into thinking she was a fish, just as she had fooled the Garden Gate into thinking she was a seed? She could swim. She could imagine a fish’s thoughts. By then she would smell like a fish, from eating so many.

  Unar bit her lower lip. It wasn’t simply climbing and axe-work she would have to learn if she was to persist in her search for Audblayin and prove herself the rightful Bodyguard of the god. She must continue her quest for magical knowledge.

  “Oos,” she whispered, but Oos was lost in exhausted sleep. Her tears had dried on her face, Unar thought, but there were plenty more where they had come from. Yet here in Understorey, Oos could tell her what she needed to know. How to enhance fertility. How to heal.

  How to drain an enemy of power, as Unar had been drained.

  She couldn’t use her magic now, but it would return to her, and when it did, she wanted to have new information in store. Have patience, Aoun had said. Watch. Listen.

  Your turn to have patience, Aoun. Your turn to wait for what you want to know.

  “Hush, my beautiful little Issi,” Ylly crooned. “My changeling child. Wife-of-Epatut holds my blood in her house, now, but you’ve been given by Audblayin in exchange. I’ll hold you. I’ll love you. I will never drop you.”

  * * *

  WHEN UNAR opened her eyes again, it was to the sound of someone pulling a blade across a whetstone.

  Oos, breathing deeply beside her, hadn’t so much as rolled over in her sleep. A low-burning candle showed Ylly asleep, too, slumped facedown over the cradle with her arms enfolding it. Baby Issi snored inside it. Hasbabsah’s coughing floated into the storeroom from the hearth room beyond the workshop.

  The person sharpening the knife was Esse.

  “Is it morning?” Unar asked him.

  “You slept through the day,” Esse answered with a small smile. “It is midnight.”

  “Is that the only knife you have for gutting fish?” She said it scornfully. Metal blades were valuable enough in Canopy. She imagined they were even more costly in Understorey. Esse might be sharpening his knife over her neck but he hadn’t murdered them in their sleep. She was starting to believe Hasbabsah about the sanctity of monsoon-rights.

  “It is your knife,” Esse said.

  Unar realised he was right, even before her hand could fumble at her empty sheath.

  “Give it back.”

  “I have taken it as payment for the net that you ruined.”

  “I’ll mend the goddess-forsaken net.”

  “Can you use a shuttle and thread without magic, then?”

  “Of course I can.” Unar kept her voice lowered with difficulty.

  “I have already mended it.”

  “I’ll gut fish, then. Give the knife to me.”

  His smile only deepened.

  “Fine,” Unar said, folding her blanket on her pallet and standing up beside him. “So you won’t give me the knife. Tell me how I can earn it back. I’ll need it when I leave.”

  She noticed that the white spikes which had protruded from his forearms and shins while he was climbing were retracted, somehow, into the flesh. They’d seemed to accumulate no debris, nor become stained by sap. She couldn’t imagine how it was accomplished without magic. Then she remembered that Esse had said the party could be sunk by the wicked words of Floorian bone women. She remembered Hasbabsah’s talk of the bones of the Old Gods, and the bone-magic of the princess’s floating bed.

  Bones hold magic in Understorey and in Floor, Unar realised, her breath catching. Esse saw her looking at his arm, where only a thin, dark seam marked the place where his spikes had been. He could have been a slave with the spines snapped off, if Unar hadn’t seen them moving in and out.

  “You will never have those,” he said. “They are not for you. I might not need you to gut fish or to mend nets, but there are leaves whose stems must be stripped for fibre. There is fibre that needs to be twisted into twine. If the twine is coarse and clumsy, you will have to untwist it and begin again. But if you
fill nine sacks, I will give you back this knife.”

  “I agree,” Unar said at once.

  Esse led her to the workshop. He showed her how to pull down the racks layered in dark green, sharp-edged, strap-like leaves. They were different from the wide, waxy, light green leaves used for plates, which were different again from the papery, absorbent leaves used for wrapping and storing the smoked fish. Unar recognised the strapleaves, and the sandpaper fig leaves that Marram and Esse must use to keep their beards from growing and that Oos used on her hands. The others were foreign to her. Perhaps the trees Unar was used to didn’t grow nearby and to the great tree size that would make them accessible. Or perhaps the unfamiliarity of the three brothers’ harvest indicated that the flowers of their host plants were unbeautiful, or that they came from trees that didn’t bear fruit. Only the rarest or most glorious of colours, textures, or tastes found a home in the Garden.

  “Here are the leaves. Go to the fishing room and make your toilet. Then I will show you what to do.”

  “The fishing room?”

  “The dark room by which you entered this place. The bucket by the right side of the river door is for filling with water, adding bodily wastes and then tossing back into the stream. Do not confuse it with the other bucket, which is for bringing drinking water into the hearth room.”

  “Hasbabsah said nobody lived downstream of the Garden because the water was polluted.”

  “This river is clean. It is the overflow of a pool that you Gardeners use for your own drinking water in the dry. The other side of the tree is foul, I grant you.”

  “And there’s nobody downriver of you that might object to the fouling at this point?”

  “Floorians have bone women for the cleansing of water. I am tired of talking to you, Gardener. Go on.”

  On her way out of the workshop, Unar brushed past a cold forge which reminded her uncomfortably of her mother, ropes and bundled nets in various stages of repair, animal whiskers waiting to be made into fishing line, and bark to be made into bootlaces. In the hearth room, Hasbabsah closed her eyes tight as she coughed, twisting in seeming delirium beneath a blanket she shouldn’t have needed so close to the roaring fire.