Navid wanted to tell them to smile. To explain how good the storm was, that he could fix it now, but they wouldn’t understand, and if Father found out what Navid had done, he would be furious. Navid had no idea what he would do then. Father was a pious man, and Navid had never blasphemed where he could hear.
Navid left the house next morning in a peach-colored dawn. Dark clouds still brooded in the mountains, but here they were shredded and the soft light flowered over the city. The river was bloated and racing. The stones beside the bank were under the floodwaters. Navid hung his clothes on the corner of a shed at the canal docks, a few hands above the water.
He went in, walking out instead of diving down. His hands touched the water and they burned again, hot and then cold, and when he looked, the characters like towers from the handle of his Father’s fire-carrier were burned in white relief onto his palm, but then he blinked and they were gone like ghostlight. He rubbed his palm; no pain. No time to wonder; he had work to do.
The Winter Serpent nearly ripped his feet from under him before he was waist deep. The current was a rain of fists against his side. The ropes of pressure that had wrapped him before were tree-trunks striking him end-on this time. He fought for every span toward the bottom while the flood forced him downstream fast as a running horse. The river was cold and wild and stiff as metal, and it was full of bones.
He caught three hands floating before he even found the bottom. The silt was churned and ragged. It seemed like the hands were reaching for him, it was so easy to pull them up. His bag was full before he found the surface for a breath again.
He was a long walk from his clothes, but the sun was warming. He walked slow and easy, composing himself for another fight. People were out repairing, bailing out, and shoring up now that the rain and wind were still, and Navid heard whispers follow him. No one dove the day after a storm. It was too dangerous. He piled the hands on the roof of the half-sunken shed. No one would touch another diver’s bones, not with the risk of a double curse for thieving and ghost-baiting.
He went in again, and this time a twisting current dragged him straight down and pressed him into the mud. He curled tight to give it less to grab and managed not to get stuck. He pulled up bones as fast as picking berries. He had to fight back up against that dragging current, but he kept calm. He had the time. He hadn’t wasted all his breath searching for nothing in the silt. Maybe the fire was angry for his blasphemies, but something had answered his prayer. He had a real chance to save his family.
By the time he walked back to his clothes with the second load of bones, there were people watching. Sepehr was there and Haleh and others who had no work on a wet morning. They looked at him with wide eyes, like he was a grand show. He didn’t stop to talk. He needed to finish this before the river changed its mind.
In again, and the current shook him back and forth while he went down. He nearly cracked his head on the bank, but he twisted to hit with his feet and push off.
The next time he came back to his bones and his clothes there was a larger audience. His family was there. Father didn’t smile. He stared at Navid. He knew something. Maybe he even suspected what Navid had done. None of them called out from their place above the flood. Neither did he. They could see the bones. They knew the stakes of this last toss. He had to finish it.
Nine times into the flood, with only walking back to his beginning for a rest, and he was finished. He borrowed a fisherman’s basket to carry one hundred and twenty-three hands up to his father. Dorre clapped and praised him. Mother drew him close and hugged him. Father looked grim. Probably he had discovered the stolen fire-carrier and suspected what Navid had done. Maybe he was only angry at the risk Navid had taken diving in the flood.
He looked unhappy, but he said nothing, and held out his hand to take one of the basket’s handles for the walk home.
Su Linzhe knew his coat was ready, and he had heard the same rumors about how it was done as the rest of the city. On the thirtieth day, his servants came in ahead of him with the payment.
The first of them brought a gold and silver fire-carrier and presented it to Father. They brought his sister a dress of yellow silk embroidered with serpent dragons, and a necklace of pearls and coral beads for his mother, and one gave Navid a protection charm, a bronze hand holding a coal from the temple fire that would never lose its warmth. He had to stifle a gasp when he took it. It burned in his hands and felt white hot against his skin when he hung it around his neck. He had to stare at his chest to be sure it wasn’t burning him, and he strained to keep a fixed smile on his face.
After the gifts, they brought heavy chests of silver coins, and one of raw gold, and lacquer cups, and bales of silk thread, red and midnight blue and pure white. And when it was all carried in and piled in the main room, Su Linzhe came in, dressed only in his light shirt and loose trousers, and Mother and Father hung the thirty-eight-hundred bone coat on him.
The bones were black against the bright red, so many that the cloth under them was like a sullen ember under a night’s worth of soot. The silver buckles glittered cold. He raised his arms and the bones rattled. The room smelled of cold earth and black ash and the sharpness of the boiling kettle. Navid could feel the ward twist the air. The pressure was more than the bottom of the Winter Serpent. He could feel the power waiting to throw him back with enough force to break his bones if he took a single step toward Su Linzhe with anger in his heart,. He heard the whispers of two hundred ghostlight hands rubbing finger against finger.
Su Linzhe clapped his hands together and bowed once, until his back was nearly flat. He went out and his servants followed him and left them alone among the piled treasure. When the last one was gone, and his family was distracted by the piled wealth, Navid took off the hand talisman and put into a pocket, away from his skin. The burning stopped, and his hands showed no scars. The Prophet’s flame had not forgiven his blasphemy.
Dorre was nearly crying. She would have a place in a respectable trading house this year, and a household of her own when she found someone to share it. Mother smiled. She could weave that silk thread to whatever she wished and not need to sell it to keep them, or put away her loom and pay others to weave for her if that was what she wanted.
Father still scowled at Navid. They had not spoken alone since his blasphemy and his diving, but Father’s fingers, still stained black from boiling so many bones, tapped the rhythm of a sacred song against his thigh. He would have the time to study in the temple that he always wanted. They had done this. They had lifted themselves up, and Navid hadn’t failed his family.
What would he do now? He was brave enough, and he could hold himself steady against a current, but why would a wealthy boy dare the Winter Serpent for a crop of old hands and curses? He would never dive again. It would be a stupid risk. He would have to find something else he was good for. That was almost as frightening as remembering the white faces he had seen through his eyelids when he drank and dove, or the burning when he touched a piece of the Prophet’s flame. Today, though, he would lie on the riverbank and let the sun warm him deep inside his bones, and that would be enough.
© Copyright 2019 R.K. Duncan
R K Duncan - [BCS277 S02] - The Thirty-Eight-Hundred Bone Coat (html) Page 3