And every direction seemed the same.
The bamboo turned Ousos’s lantern light to splayed bars of bluish white, striping Ellin’s brown limbs and bared back. Leaper had seen bamboo before, but only as single clumped specimens in cultivated gardens, not erupting like mushrooms from every bare bit of earth.
“So?” he repeated.
“So they don’t squeezing look like Floorians. Why aren’t they white? Ask them.”
Leaper asked them. The scarred woman, Ellin, only glared back at him from her position in the lead, but behind Leaper, Estehass laughed and answered.
“He says the white-skinned people, the ones that ride birds and eat figs, were brought to the Titan’s Forest by the brown-skinned human servants of the immortals,” Leaper translated. “The Bird-Riders and Fig-Eaters were refugees fleeing the ruined mountain city, taken captive. He says Crocodile-Riders invaded the roots of the trees from their villages in the Bright Plain, when the rains stopped coming everywhere and only came to the Titan’s Forest. There was no choice but for them all to share, he says, but only his people are true forest people. When his ancestors’ forest was crushed by the titans, this one sprang up in its place. He says it’s theirs to protect now.”
Ousos guffawed. Parted a fern frond with her axe. Batted aside a bitter melon vine heavy with long, lumpy, gently curving fruit.
“If all they want is naked dirt and darkness, they’re welcome to it.”
It wasn’t all naked dirt, not anymore. The bare, soggy ground had long since given way to a wet, clinging, relentless undergrowth, which only parted slightly to either side of the so-called path. Leaper, in his grief and exhaustion, had lost track of time. He thought the sun had risen and set while they’d walked in the dark, deep part of the forest and now that it was night again, they were nearer to the edge. His sense of direction was confused. Yet at some point in daylight hours, he suggested to his guide, direct sun must fall on the bamboo, ferns, and wrist-thick creepers that surrounded them.
“Yes,” Estehass agreed, “sunlight reaches here.” But he would say nothing more. He trod amazingly lightly for such a big man. Bringing up the rear, he practically floated over the deep footprints left by the Canopians. Leaper couldn’t at that moment see the glowing sigil in Estehass’s back, a snake eating its tail around a five-pointed star, but Ellin’s leaping fish was plain.
“What does the symbol on your skin say?” Leaper asked her. Ellin ignored him. “What’s the difference between the Eastwood and the Westwood?” She ignored him again. “If you’re brother and sister, why are your sigils different?” No answer. “How much longer until we reach Gui?” He didn’t mention that he expected to meet Slehah on the way, nor that he hoped to meet the buyer of the crocodile jaw, whom he would make pay.
“What are you asking them?” Ousos asked, and this time Leaper didn’t react by assaulting her.
“I’m asking whether we’re there yet. Does it seem to you that we should have come out into the open by now?”
“It seems to me that we haven’t stopped all day, and my water gourd’s almost squeezing empty,” Ousos grumbled. “Wonder if the fat man’s got snacks in those pockets of his, or if the woman’s on heat with a husband at home and that’s why we can’t take a bit of time to hunt and eat.”
Ellin stopped short and turned to face them, her face furious.
“If you did not have the hair, half white and half black,” she said in heavily accented Canopian, “I would never believe you were first among a god’s slaves.”
“We’re not slaves,” Leaper said calmly, thinking, Ellin’s been able to understand us this entire time. Did I say anything I shouldn’t have? Did Ousos? “But perhaps you were.”
Ellin lifted her chin haughtily.
“I have traded emeralds and freshwater pearls for canoe paddles and pulley blocks with the House of Amborab in Eshland. Pretty rocks are yours to own. For the most part, in our territory, there is no light, and what matter how a thing shines where there is no light? We of the Eastwood are not pretty rocks. We are not yours to own. We have never been yours to own. And our wild brothers and sisters are not yours to slay. You will eat in Gui. They understand you there. They discard their dead underneath or on top of the dirt, as you do, instead of lighting fires to bring embracers and send them back into the cycle.”
Ousos’s fists pressed into the flesh of her hips.
“I’ll squeezing eat what and when I squeezing please,” she said balefully, “and the when of it is now, or I’m not taking another step. What time do you call this? The boy needs some squeezing sleep.”
“Squeezing,” Estehass repeated faintly, chortling.
“I’m no boy,” Leaper objected as Ellin and Estehass stepped aside from the trail to confer among themselves.
“Does the brother speak our language, too?” Ousos asked Leaper. “Because I can’t see him climbing a tree to trade with Eshlanders. Just look at the size of him. Like one of the great trees, isn’t he? Solid, real solid. Take a dozen guards to shift him against his will.” She winced, as though aware of the weirdness of what she’d said, tugging at her collar and ducking her head.
“No,” Ellin said, turning to glare at Ousos. “He does not speak your language. He does not trade.”
“What’s in the pouches?” Ousos’s chin was level again, her eyes full of fire.
“Bones. He is a bone man.”
“What the squeeze is a gods-kissing bone man?”
“Why do you say the word ‘squeezing’ so often?”
Ousos reached for a bitter melon growing beside her and yanked it off the vine. Leaper expected her to hurl it childishly at the other woman. Instead, she bit off and spat out the pointed end. Then she took a wide-legged stance, stuck the fruit under her silver Servant’s skirt, and wriggled her buttocks until it had vanished between her legs.
“God’s bones,” Leaper gasped in Canopian. “Didn’t I say nothing that would reflect poorly on—”
After a moment of fierce concentration, Ousos pulled the bitter melon out again. It was crushed into halves. Pulpy in the middle. Barely hanging together by the skin. Leaper was speechless.
“Squeezing,” Ousos declared. “It’s a skill. Mess with me, and I’ll send you back into the cycle.”
This time she did fling the fruit, at Ellin’s feet.
“Here is not a safe place to stop,” Ellin said stonily. “We must go a little further.”
“No tricks.” Ousos seemed disappointed not to have gotten a better reaction.
“No tricks.” Ellin remained grimly focused on their destination. As though she couldn’t wait to part company with the Canopians. “We shall camp close by until morning.” Ellin turned her back, leading on.
“Squeezing,” Estehass said again, this time with awe.
The place Ellin selected was some way to the left of the narrow, overgrown path. A dense stand of bamboo completely encircled a cluster of ten tree ferns. The woody green bamboo stems were twice as tall as the black trunks of the tree ferns, which were themselves twice Leaper’s height.
Ellin set about slashing the bamboo at waist height, each stem cut at a sharp diagonal, so that they became a razor ring of upright spears in the ground. She instructed Estehass to find and purify enough water for them all; when he took Ousos’s hand and whispered the word “squeezing” invitingly in her ear, she let him lead her into the undergrowth, unresisting, leaving both lanterns behind with Ellin and Leaper.
Leaper watched Ellin work, warily. He did not collect bamboo shoots for boiling. Nor did he fold palm fronds or cut bamboo segments into makeshift containers. His arms were ugly, the skin streaked with black, yellow, and green, bloody in the crevices. Pain shot from wrist and elbow to armpit and shoulder, even at rest. Leaper remembered again the infected wound of the man with the hook and could only hope that the potion of justice had some lingering effect.
He did nothing to help while Ellin cut a fork into the end of a fresh length of bamboo. She used it
to trap the head of a black snake, coiled and sleeping in the heart of a tree fern top. Then she decapitated the reptile with the heavy-bladed knife in her other hand.
After she’d skinned and gutted it, she sliced the snake flesh thinly and offered it to him raw. Despite what she’d said about Leaper and Ousos not being permitted to hunt her wild brothers and sisters.
“That lantern,” he told her reluctantly, not reaching to take the cold pink flesh, “will start a cooking fire. Even wet wood will burn.”
“No fire,” Ellin said curtly. “You forget, there are demons. The lights on our skins can be seen by human eyes only, but open flame carries no such protection. We eat raw food. We sleep in the tree fern hearts.”
Leaper glanced up at the spreading fronds.
“In the tree ferns?”
“Yes, in them. Where the snake was sleeping. Snakes know as well as people do that needleteeth find the tree fern difficult to climb. The bark is like burned moss. It crumbles.” She put her hand to it, to demonstrate. “Even if the spotted swarm smells us, they’ll move on. Dayhunters hunt in the day. Obviously. Fiveways prefer the Westwood to the Eastwood.” She tapped a spear of bamboo with her knife. “Embracers don’t like to crawl over cut bamboo, but they will, if they smell smoke from a fire. You and your friend brought light and heat, which are useless here, but no food.” She offered him the snake a second time, tight-lipped. “You need sustenance if you are to go on.”
We didn’t bring food, Leaper thought, frowning, because we’re supposed to be in Gui by now. He supposed that, injured, he was moving more slowly, and perhaps Estehass and Ellin were showing them the easier, yet more circuitous way.
“There’s one type of demon you left out.” Leaper accepted the morsel, resigned to the pain of movement. “You didn’t say anything about making us safe from chimeras.”
“We just have to take our chances with chimeras.”
The meat was almost tasteless, the sample sinewy and peppered with small, sharp bones. Leaper made himself eat some more. It waked his gut, until he was forced to ask Ellin to dig a hole for him to squat over.
By the time Ousos and Estehass returned, bearing bamboo segments brimming with clear water, Ellin had tried and failed to drag Leaper up a leaf-lashed bamboo ladder into one of the tree ferns. It was decided, much to a flushed Estehass’s disappointment, that Ousos and Leaper would share one tree fern nest, while the Rememberer siblings shared another.
Estehass crouched down obligingly. Ousos helped Leaper onto the bulky man’s shoulders. Then Estehass straightened slowly while Leaper clung painfully to down-hanging tree fern fronds and tried to keep his balance. Ousos scrambled ahead of Leaper, up the bamboo ladder into the black snake’s nest, where new, hairy fern fronds remained tightly curled. With Ousos pulling him by the climbing harness and Estehass shoving him by the calves, Leaper was able to tumble awkwardly into his sleeping spot.
Ellin tossed a few bamboo-leaf-wrapped packets up to Ousos, who showed no signs of dismay at the raw snake contents.
“I’ll take first watch,” the Shining One called down to Ellin, jaw working tenaciously at the rubbery tendons. “Leaper, tell them I’ll take first watch.”
Leaper told them.
“No,” floated Ellin’s reply from the ground, where she squatted over the same hole she’d dug for Leaper. “Servants of the lightning god don’t know what to watch for. We will watch. I will watch first. Estehass will watch second. You will put out those lights.”
Taking a moment to spit with displeasure, Ousos packed her lanterns into her carrysack. She then arranged it for a hard, no doubt uncomfortable pillow. Her curled body took up most of the soft, hairy heart of the top of the tree fern, leaving Leaper to try and find a comfortable position on the unevenly splayed slats of the fronds.
Without the lanterns, the only light came from the glowing sigils on the backs of the siblings in the neighbouring tree fern. When Leaper lifted his head, he saw, turned towards him, Estehass’s five-pointed star in its snake circle. Apparently the man was capable of sleeping in a sitting position, fleshy arms wrapped around his knees, back of his black-haired head drooping between them.
Ousos slapped loudly at a mosquito, and it was only then that Leaper realised they were whining all around him. He looked at Estehass a second time, but there was no sign of the insect cloud around the top of the other tree fern. In fact, the bluish glow seemed to banish the bugs.
Their sigils, he thought, unpacking a second silk robe, half black and half white, with its hood and long sleeves, for human eyes only, aren’t just for signalling. He swapped robes awkwardly, using the shorter one to cover his face below the eyes. And Ellin won’t let us have a fire for its insect-repelling smoke. Finally, he stuck his bare shins inside his carrysack in an attempt to protect them from bites. Water collected in fallen, broken bamboo. If not for the threat of embracers, it would have been a poor choice of campsite.
“Enjoyably diverted by Estehass, were you?” he whispered to Ousos as she slapped herself again. “I thought you called him a dick-flea dirt-swimmer.”
He expected to receive a slap, a curse, or a dismissive snort, but she rolled over so that their faces were half a pace apart, revealing googly, startled eyes.
“I squeezed that gods-kissed bone man,” she said. “First squeeze since I made my vows. I promised old Airak no squeezing, and now look what I’ve done.”
He wanted to laugh. What she had done. It was nothing compared to what he had done.
“You’re below the barrier.” The robe covering his mouth muffled his words, but he knew what he was talking about. The Godfinder had warned him, and he’d found the truth of it himself. “Bonds are weakened. Broken. He’ll forgive you.”
“Will he? For sure?” She glanced at the silk over Leaper’s forearms, where fluid from his burns was beginning to weep through. “Like that? I’ve seen you shaved before, seen your power drained before, but I’ve not seen that. That’s your forgiveness for squeezing the queen?”
Leaper didn’t want to talk about the queen.
“I hope your big bone man was worth it. As nimble off his feet as on them, is he?”
Ousos grimaced.
“Pretty squeezing disappointing, actually. Rather quick. Though he seemed to enjoy himself.”
“Did he say so?”
“He said plenty, but I couldn’t understand him.” She gave Leaper a cool, appraising look. “How’d you learn their language? Aforis did say he was your teacher before you came to the Temple, and what that old bastard doesn’t know could fit on a bee’s dick. Aforis taught you? You never learned a word from that runaway Hunter, your sister, I know.”
“It’s a long story.”
Her hand flew distractedly to the back of her neck; the whites of her eyes were blue in the light of Estehass’s sigil as she glanced across the gap between tree ferns at his slumped shape.
“We lay down in a kind of mud wallow. I think a boar had it for a nest. I’ve got ticks crawling all over me. I didn’t see any on him.”
Leaper wriggled imperceptibly, subtly putting more distance between them.
“I think their magic protects them,” he said. “Ours doesn’t work below the barrier, but theirs does. All we have is our lanterns, and she’s asked us to put them away.”
“We don’t get to the edge of the forest tomorrow, I’ll put her away.”
Leaper smiled under the silk where she couldn’t see.
Long after Ousos had stopped slapping herself and digging at ticks, he lay wide-eyed in the dark, looking in the opposite direction to Estehass’s glow, imagining where Ilik’s killer was, what he or she might be doing that very moment. When Leaper himself had killed Orin’s Servants to save Imeris, he’d felt irrevocably soiled. Leaving the scene hadn’t been enough; faking nonchalance in the face of Ulellin’s curse hadn’t been enough. Avoiding Ulellinland was futile, as was dodging around the subject of the beast’s demise whenever Imeris or the Godfinder tried to bring it up.<
br />
Only telling himself that he’d learned, that he’d changed, that he’d never do it again, helped the memory to subside.
Despite the evidence of Gui, it was still possible that Ilik’s killer had been nominated by their society to carry out the deed. It was possible that person felt as sullied now as Leaper had felt ten years ago. Was that why the killer had left silver and diamonds behind? A hurried escape, guilt-racked, the crocodile jawbone abandoned accidentally on the floor?
No. The night’s darkness seeped into him, so that he no longer knew whether his eyes were open or closed. Whoever killed her isn’t human. Whoever killed her is going to die slowly, after telling me how the barrier was breached. And it won’t be Ousos who does the killing. It’ll be me.
It’s not breaking my oath to put down a demon.
So what if I haven’t learned.
So what if I haven’t changed.
I was born with the soul chosen by my sister Audblayin, goddess of new life. She was the one who put the soul of Frog inside of me; Frog, who would have destroyed the Godfinder, the loved and loathed older sister whose power she coveted, if the Godfinder hadn’t destroyed her first.
TEN
LIGHT PIERCED Leaper’s lids.
It was daybreak. He, Ousos, and the two Rememberers really were close to the forest’s edge. Morning cicadas pulsed. Horizontal sunbeams pierced the undergrowth, butterfly shadows made bigger than bats by the sharp angle of the dawn. The heavy smell of Floor was like snorted water from a mulch-filled lake in all of Leaper’s sinuses.
He spent a moment lying very still, taking stock of his battered back and sore, stiff, insect-bitten limbs before he realised what was bothering him.
The sun was rising from the wrong direction. It was rising from the direction in which Ellin and Estehass had been leading them.
They have been leading us east, not west.
He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath, trying to attack the discovery from all directions. He could easily have become turned around since leaving the trail. It was the Rememberers who knew the forest floor, not Leaper. Leaper was a climbing creature, and flat earth made little sense to him. Yet only by travelling east could they have stayed within the forest, and they were within the forest, despite the siblings’ promise to guide him to Gui.
Tides of the Titans Page 8