Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  “Thank you,” Aurilon said. “I would not ask it of you, but I still fear the soul-changer. This is what the Lakekeeper conveyed to me of the One Forest henchman, prince of Airakland. He was by the lake at the Temple of Ehkis. Ilan had been cut from the straps on his back by one who did not recognise her true nature. She was dumped into the lake, sleeping even as she sank into the water. The prince slew the man who had cut the straps, and turned as if to dive and retrieve her, his best key to unlocking the barrier. But then his body shuddered. He fell to his knees. He lifted his hands and gazed at them. The whites of his eyes showed. ‘No! Sikakis, no!’ That is what he screamed, over and over.”

  “Core Kirrik,” Unar said flatly.

  “Indeed. He was no longer the prince Sikakis but the sorceress, Kirrik. She saw the Lakekeeper skirting the lake, coming to kill her again, and she dropped, climbing with her spines down the side of the tree. By the time the Lakekeeper reached the place where she had begun to descend, she was gone, and the child, Ilan, drowned.”

  All Unar could think was If Ilan is dead, Kirrik can’t come through the barrier again. Even if she has taken Sikakis’s body.

  True, Unar had sent Audblayin below the barrier, but nobody else knew of Ylly’s true nature besides Aurilon; perhaps Sawas, if she’d been listening closely, but Sawas was even less likely to jeopardise her daughter than Aurilon was to endanger Canopy.

  “Sawas,” Unar said. “Go down the ladder. It will take you home.”

  Strangely, with Aurilon staring at her, Sawas didn’t argue. She climbed down nimbly until Unar couldn’t see her anymore. When she passed through the barrier, Unar’s sense of her life force faded.

  “Three hundred boy babies were born in Odelland last night,” Aurilon said.

  “Lead me to them,” Unar answered thickly. She drank water from a gourd that Aurilon put to her lips, and let the Bodyguard take some of her weight. “I’ll listen to them cry. And then I’ll find the goddesses who died. You must watch over them, too, Aurilon.”

  “It will be my pleasure. They will not even see me. I have a new chimera skin, and this one I do not intend to mount for display.”

  * * *

  THREE DAYS later, Unar parted ways with Aurilon and went into Understorey.

  Aurilon was content. She’d knelt at the feet of an out-of-niche woman who was beatific in her status as a new mother at the age of fifty-two. Odel’s newborn head had been spotty and squashed-looking. He’d had hair on his forehead that the midwife assured them would fall out soon enough.

  The Lakekeeper, one of the rain goddess’s Servants, hadn’t been best pleased to see Unar, but she’d forced on him every detail she could remember of Edax’s fate. Aurilon’s mildly threatening presence had convinced him to come with them to the House of Itit, where a jeweller’s daughter, only one day old, already preferred blue gemstones to green.

  How can you be sure she’s Ehkis? the Lakekeeper had asked, fists on hips.

  Unar is the Godfinder, Aurilon answered. She crosses into all niches. Canopy is hers now.

  It wasn’t the title Unar had yearned for, but the Lakekeeper had repeated it with bafflement and a little awe. His respect meant nothing. He wasn’t Aoun, or Isin, or Audblayin.

  He was nobody. Unar would have despised him if she hadn’t been numb on the inside. She would have flung the undesired bestowment back in Aurilon’s face.

  I’ll find one more goddess, Unar had said. Then I’m done.

  She found that child, the child that would be Ilan, goddess of justice, in a prison cell in the queen’s palace in Ilanland. The child’s mother, Ear, despite being heavily pregnant, had been arrested for insulting the royal heir, and had given birth that night in her cell.

  I would have protected my baby anyway, goddess or no, Ear said earnestly. I would have bought Odel’s protection if I’d had to lie with the jailer to earn it.

  You don’t have to, Unar had said. Aurilon, can’t you—?

  I can, Aurilon sighed, and filled Ear’s cupped hands with coins of silver and gold. This is for you. We had it from the Servants of Ilan, when we brought them the body of their drowned goddess. The Servants are no longer starving themselves because they cannot find the one they serve. Call on me in Odel’s Temple if you need more. You are free to go.

  Unar rolled up her sleeves and carefully set her spines in the side of the tallowwood tree.

  She, too, was finally free to go.

  The much-reduced river sang to one side of her, and the autumn wind made the forest moan. Gods died and returned to life, but Unar was seventeen years old, significantly older than the girl child who would be Audblayin. Unar would die before Audblayin was reborn a man. When Unar was born again, unlike Audblayin, she wouldn’t remember anything of her past lives.

  With the finding of the last deity, she was set adrift. How strange to feel, while not performing Understorian magic, less solid than the trees that turned the wind. To have felt for so long that she was a tool constructed for a single purpose, only to discover she was as fit for being a Bodyguard as a frog was fit for flying. But there was still the question.

  She would have an answer.

  The opening she’d made into the brothers’ home was now neatly fitted with a door. It opened when she pushed against it, and she walked down the stairs into light and warmth. The new addition had been modified to accommodate candle niches. A second fireplace had been built in the enlarged storeroom-turned-permanent-bedroom. Unar smiled at the candles. The bear that had died so that its fat could produce that smoky, flickering light; the grasses whose twisted fibres had made the wick and the trees, not pillars of the world as the emergents were, but smaller, unnoticed in the dark, that had provided the wood for fuel for the hunters’ dwelling; those transient things were her kin, unmourned and unremembered, interchangeable as individual breaths.

  “You are back,” Hasbabsah said, sounding surprised and pleased, a knitted cap pulled down over her almost-bald head. She looked up from the rope jig with its metal weights, where she and Oos formed uniform lengths that must have pleased even Esse the perfectionist.

  “I’m back,” Unar agreed. “How is Sawas settling in?”

  Hasbabsah grunted.

  “She will take some more time to adjust. You kept your word. You have done what you promised to do in the Garden and more. You do not need to worry about Sawas anymore.”

  I have not done what I promised, Unar thought, because the Garden has not kept its promise to me, to raise me into the sun.

  But the Garden hadn’t made that promise. Unar didn’t know why she’d promised herself something that could never come true. Nobody else had stood over her, insisting that she take what she deserved; it had been her own inner voice, all along, and she had trusted it. But why not? Who else in the world was trustworthy?

  “Where’s Esse?” she asked. “I must make more rooms.”

  “He is sleeping,” Oos said. “He has been making more defences around the tree, further down. He said that those men should never have reached as high as they did.”

  Unar walked through the brothers’ house. She smiled at faces that smiled at her, but didn’t speak to any of them. Ylly and Issi fought over a floppy black hat that had golden imitation chimera’s eyes sewn onto the sides of it. Sawas sat in Bernreb’s lap, picking bones from her plate of roasted fish.

  The brothers’ bedroom was cramped. Unar pushed back the curtain to enter, and tried to straighten once inside, but her head brushed the curve of the spherical ceiling, and the three free-standing bunks in the centre of the room looked like a stack of rough-cut, storm-felled debris. Esse slept on the top, covered in an itchy-looking fur.

  Unar sang the godsong to herself as she reshaped the bed into a thing of elegance and added space, waking up the last still-living cells at the timber’s rim. They’d been part of a sweet-fruit pine tree, once. The tallowwood walls of the room were easier to flex and widen. The great tree told her which parts of itself were safe to hollow and which m
ust remain sound, which carried the sap and which carried the incredible burden of the weight of the top of the tree.

  Before she had finished, she saw Esse’s grey eyes, open and watching her. He didn’t move a muscle of his long body.

  “I’m sorry for disturbing you, Esse,” she said. “But there’s one more favour I need from you. Not monsoon-right, this time, but a right to sleep here, in the new part of this room, for fourteen or fifteen monsoons, or however much time passes before the younger Ylly feels in her bones it’s time to wake me.”

  “Is this Canopian double-speak?” Esse asked. “Is it death that you want?”

  “Not yet,” Unar answered. “I must deliver the goddess Audblayin to the Garden first. Help me to get up there, please.”

  Esse sat up. Before she’d changed his bed, he would have struck his head, but now there was room for him to stand on the top bunk, if he wished, without touching the domed ceiling. He examined the niche she’d made, high in the wall, with its brackets shaped like loquat trees, and a hammock-sized space that a large human or a small dayhunter could have crawled into.

  “How will you breathe in there?” he asked.

  “I’ve made a small, hidden, ventilation hole. The mesh over it is magic. Nothing will crawl down it, I promise you.”

  “That is good. I would not want cockroaches gnawing on you while you are sleeping. Mind your spines, Canopian. You still do not use them very well.”

  Esse lifted her to kneel on his shoulders. From there, she was able to use her forearm spines to pull herself into the space. It was cold, but her body heat would soon be enough to keep her warm. Esse took a few steps back and peered in at her.

  “What if Ylly dies?” he said. “What if she never decides it is time to wake you?”

  Unspoken prophecies can come true, too.

  “Good night, Esse,” Unar said, forming the pattern that she had seen Frog form outside the Great Gate. She wrapped the deep, hibernating sleep around herself like a blanket, being careful not to let it touch any of the other lives nearby.

  And she closed her eyes.

  PART IV

  Season for Growth

  SIXTY

  UNAR HAD hoped it would be dreamless.

  I love you, Isin.

  Edax died over and over again in a world made of steam.

  I love you, Isin.

  Frog’s body fell apart into blobs of muscle and bone.

  I love you, Isin.

  Unar beat against the wards that protected the Garden, with no hope of passing through. Not unless she sabotaged her own memory, and if she did that, her desire to enter the Garden might be lost, too; her memory of how to do magic, how to find goddesses and gods. What if she died, was reborn, and walked into the Garden as a supplicant, with no power of her own?

  It would be better to sleep until Audblayin grew as old as Hasbabsah and died. Sleep until he was born a man. But, no. She must wake sooner than that. She must ask the question.

  * * *

  SOMETHING PRESSED down on her.

  The ceiling had collapsed. Kirrik had returned and was cutting down the tallowwood tree.

  No. Not that. It was two small, muffled, giggling bodies. Sitting on her. Crushing her so she couldn’t breathe.

  “Ylly! Issi!” Oos was a threatening presence below and to one side, outside the sleeping place. “Come out of there, right now!”

  Hands scrabbled around in Unar’s clothes, catching dirty feet and pulling hard. Wailing children’s voices receded. Unar slept again.

  * * *

  I LOVE you, Isin.

  * * *

  BREATHING BESIDE her. Sharing the air.

  It was Esse. His long legs didn’t fit. They hung off the edge of the ledge.

  “Move over, little tree bear,” he muttered, and squeezed her deeper into the crevice, so that he could fold his limbs in beside her. “It is cold outside, even if Sawas and Bernreb do not feel it.”

  Quiet for a while. Sharing the air. Heat, from Esse’s body. Moaning, from the main part of the room.

  “Let Marram pretend he does not mind the cold and wet,” Esse growled. “This is my house. I am not leaving just because she says she cannot relax if people are listening. She should be quieter, then, should she not? I brought us here. I made the very first mark in the bark.”

  Esse, breathing. Bodies in Bernreb’s bed, breathing. High above Canopy, the leaves of the great tree, breathing.

  * * *

  YOU SPEAK to the dead, Frog sighed. Well, the dead will answer you, this one time.

  * * *

  A BOY’S piping voice.

  “Great-Grandmother is dying.” He was close. Inside the crevice with Unar. No, outside of it, standing on something to make him taller. “She said to tell you. She said to thank you.”

  “She will not answer, boy.” That voice was Bernreb’s. “She is sleeping. Here. I will set you down.”

  Not a ladder. Bernreb. Holding the boy up to Unar’s hollow.

  Who was his Great-Grandmother?

  Maybe it’s me. Maybe Audblayin will never be a man, and I’ll sleep for eternity.

  * * *

  YOU SLOW grey mould! Frog cried. You one-fingered worm!

  * * *

  “WAKE UP, Godfinder,” Audblayin whispered in her ear.

  Unar opened her eyes.

  The lanky young woman who pressed her hands into Unar’s hands had a Canopian’s dark skin, an Understorian’s long, straight hair, and a Warmed One’s soulful, sepia eyes. She wore a yellow silk robe. It was cut off at the elbows. Unar saw the crease and sensed the magic of the spines. She smelled quince blossom and wood fern.

  “I’m awake,” Unar tried to say, but her mouth felt adhered shut. Another young woman of about the same age—Unar’s age—with a rounder face, short hair, snub nose, and mischievous grin, stepped forward with a leather cup. She helped Unar to sit up and moisten her mouth with water.

  “I am Imerissiremi,” she said. “You can call me Issi.” She had spines, too, and armour of overlapping metal scales that slithered as she moved. Weapons hung about her, as they had hung around Edax. “Ylly says it is time to go to Canopy.”

  Edax.

  Imerissiremi’s eyes glittered with excitement.

  Unar heard weeping and lifted her head, blinking in the firelight. She’d been pulled out of her recess and into Bernreb’s bunk, the lowest one; at least, it smelled like him. She imagined she didn’t smell particularly pleasant herself. Her nostrils flared, perhaps expecting to find the smell of Edax’s broiled flesh, or Frog’s violated innards.

  She’d thought time would heal her, but it seemed to her as if no time had passed.

  “Is that what Ylly says?” she wondered. She looked into Audblayin’s eyes again. “Have you had a good childhood, Holy One?”

  Audblayin’s smile was very kind.

  “I have. I had more time, I think, because I’m down here. It’s been very different from my usual style of childhood. Enlightening, you might say.”

  “You told them you were a goddess?”

  “Only a few hours ago. I’ve been myself, properly, for a week, I think. The memories came slowly. I had to wait, to be sure. To remember everything that happened with you and Kirrik.”

  “How could you remember that? You were a babe in the House of Epatut.”

  “I remember everything that is done with my power. Every spell. Every new life. Every person the gift passes through. What you, Frog, and Kirrik used was my power, Unar.”

  Unar’s hands, which had lain quiescent under the girl’s slender fingers, now seized Audblayin’s wrists, grinding them, before she could remember not to lay hands on a goddess.

  “Do you mean to say that you could have stopped it?”

  “Not at all. I was as helpless as you were at your worst, when you felled the great Temple of Airak. Let go of me.”

  Unar let go. “Forgive me, Holy One. Please. I have a question for you, if you care to answer it. Long ago, when you too
k power from the Old Gods, why did you and the others fashion a barrier that would allow Canopians through, but not Understorians or Floorians?”

  Audblayin’s large, dark eyes grew solemn.

  “There are things I cannot share with you,” she said, “but trust this to be true. The barrier must stay the way that it was made until the Old Gods are forgotten.”

  “That can’t be the answer, that you are afraid of the resurrection of the Old Gods,” Unar said, despairing. “Couldn’t you just make people forget?”

  “No. To change people’s minds, to force them to forget, is to cut off their arms and legs. It is to cripple them. The barrier was my idea. I am the Waker of Senses, not the diminisher of thought. The death god, Atwith, suggested that those of Understorey and Floor who remembered the old ways should simply be killed. I opposed him.”

  “But, Holy One. Now you’ve seen what it’s like to live down here. In the dark. Do Understorian children deserve to fall to their death because Odel isn’t here to protect them? Must Marram risk his life in the monsoon because there are no safe roads between villages, no defences against demons? Couldn’t he be allowed through the barrier, even to trade? Wouldn’t he be grateful to the new gods then, and more inclined to uphold your rule?”

  “The barrier isn’t intended to be cruel to Understorians, Unar. It’s to protect Canopians, whose tribute gives us the strength to defend them. Unfortunately, the two peoples must remain apart. If the barrier were open for folk to freely trade, ideas would be exchanged as freely. Ideas that must be left in the dark to die out. Canopy could be contaminated. The risk is unacceptable.”

  “But owning humans is acceptable?” Unar burst out angrily.

  Audblayin smiled and shook her head.

  “That’s something that may be changed. In my own niche, at least.”

  Unar looked around, at last absorbing the tear-tracked faces of Ylly, Sawas, and Oos. Ylly’s hair was white, and her cheeks age-spotted. Sawas was even rounder, with crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Oos had lines on her neck and pouches under her eyes which hadn’t been there before, but her weak, endearing, watery smile was the same.