Tinder Stricken
by Heidi C. Vlach
Copyright 2015
© 2015 Heidi C. Vlach
ISBN 978-0-9869390-9-9
This novel is a work of fiction, intended to entertain and inspire but not intended as a depiction of fact. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Published by Heidi C. Vlach
Smashwords Edition
न बिराउनु न डराउनु ।
Na biraunu na darau nu.
If you do right things, you don't have to worry.
A Nepali proverb
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
About the Author
Back to Top
Chapter 1
By dawn's feeble light and one smoldering candle, Esha stared into the polished tin mirror, full of dread like any other morning. The goat had stolen a little more of her body through the night.
Esha was already well acquainted with her goat traits, particularly the damned horns. Age was changing her into a markhor goat and giving her an ever-larger profile, with two straight spirals rooted in the top of her head. Behind those grew the goat's ears. They were newer abominations than the horns, but still no surprise, drooping off the sides of her head and brushing itchy at the upper rounds of her human ears. And in patches all over her scalp, crowding out the glossy, night-dark human hair that Esha actually liked, were wiry patches of pelt. Another fraction of Esha's hairline had fallen to the beast — right above her eyebrow, five more goat hairs as pale as poison. Esha of the Fields didn't have much longer.
But that fact was as plain as garden dirt. Esha had never been promised a long life. Only the luckiest people got to see their faces turn distinguished and their human hair go silver. The heavens gave humans precious little time in their ideal bodies and capable minds, before they slid back into more bestial form. Esha had reached her forty-eighth year of life and she was still mostly presentable — after physicians telling her she would be a bleating beast by her thirty-fifth. To some degree, Esha was doing well.
There was good news in her reflection, once she decided to look for it. Her eyes were still untouched by the goat. She still had crow's feet tethering her eyes into her face, and irises as dark as good soil, and the round pupils of a human. Esha scrutinized the slopes of her weather-beaten face and the narrow rise of her upper lip and found herself still there.
Esha arranged her headwraps with a newer set of motions — starting the strips in circles around the bulging bases of her goat horns, but then winding the fabric across the stiff spades of the goat's ears and down behind her human ears. Her bones were hurting lately and her fingernails thickened, but at least she could show her face without shame. The heavens were to be thanked for that. She rose to light a cooking fire, and get on with her meagre human life.
Esha had time to dump millet into boiling water, but not enough time to eat it. Tax collectors frowned on tardiness and the last thing Esha needed was town guards wresting her door off its hinges. She tucked her nameplate into her underthings, the white-glinting metal plate with Esha Of The Fields etched there as proof of the woman who carried it. Then she hurried her layers on: charcoal-coloured pants, blue tunic, and a gold-dyed sari wound around them both. Her plain clay sigil, mark of a farmer, clipped the sari closed; her belt settled around her waist with holstered tools weighing on her right side; and her selfrope wound diagonal around her body, just in case the mountain's gods wished her to climb today. Her carrot-yellow woolen cowl came last, draped loose to obscure her horns' coiling shape. Everyone knew they existed— but it was still vital to try.
She checked everything in the mirror, and took one last glimpse of her human eyes to hold like a prayer to her heart. Then she shuffled outside, and waited.
The tax collector was new to Yam Plateau: he was a tall man with a fine, unblemished forehead. He stood speaking to the next-house neighbour. Exchanging white documents. Taking her sack of payment. Then he was striding up to Esha's door, his polished plumwood caste sigil glinting prominent on his silk shirt collar.
Esha pressed her hands together and bowed, offering namaste first as low-castes should. The tax collector was gracious enough to offer namaste in return: Esha couldn't remember the last accountant who had respected her so. But she snatched that thought immediately back when his eyes hesitated on her tall-tented cowl, and his smile faltered.
It was a typical collection day, otherwise. This collector was too slender-nosed to be Grewian but he spoke the tongue fluently, so they needed no betel nut to translate with. The tax collector could have provided the translation anyway: he had a rustling overlaying his voice — rustling like dense perilla bushes and some sparse-leafed tree, maybe a ginkgo. That meant he had eaten a handsome breakfast. Perilla and tree-nuts would cost at least forty-three rupees and that wasn't even including the cost of rice.
Esha paid the tax collector her month's property due — one hundred rupees, earned from weeks of dust-covered work. She handed that sack over with a sour pang in her heart.
The tax collector went on to assess her house, with his green-filigreed voice and his stack of wax-embossed property records.
“Six armlengths by eight,” he muttered.
He checked the bamboo walls with a measuring twine — as though Esha would bother enlarging her shack by a stolen hand-width.
“Well caulked. Good.”
Esha always filled spaces between the bamboo with a fresh lump of pine pitch, the moment she discovered them. Not because the cold bothered her but because on windy nights, the smallest draught whistled like a demon's scream: Esha couldn't afford to lose sleep to that.
“Garden plot one armlength square.“ He measured that plot, too, and eyed each onion sprout, and lifted the leaves of Esha's sesame plant to find nothing contraband underneath.
“Acceptable cord supporting the flags,” he muttered, “Farming caste, divorcee and childless flags are all present. These statuses have not changed?”
“No.”
His quill scraping on bleached paper was his only comment. In between Esha's more sociable flags was her divorcee flag, her double-pennant of shame that had pulled itself loose from where Esha had accidentally, deliberately tucked it into the bamboo shingles.
“Some of these flags are fraying at the corners,” the tax collector said. “You would be advised to replace them.”
“Kind thanks,” Esha said. Paying an indecency fine would be less expensive than replacing the flags with new fabric and dye; she kept that observation to herself.
And that was all the tax collector had to say. He scribbled and stamped his notations; he gave Esha a slip of cotton paper stamped with an accountant's seal, to pardon her from a tardiness reprimand. And then he hurried away toward other farmers' houses, to take some field-fellow's money.
It was finished, as favourably as Esha could have hoped for. She even had pardon now and didn't need to rush to work: Janjuman Farm had plenty more hands where hers came from.
She took her cooked millet off the fi
re to cool, and she checked her garden for aphids and earwigs. For a decadent moment, she stood watching the sky, eating pinches of warm millet mixed with cold lentils and pickle.
At this serene hour, with the sun barely risen over Tselaya Mountain's foothills, specks of lungta glittered pink and gold in the wind-rolled sky. Esha watched individual motes twirling and tumbling — some drifting ethereal through bamboo roofs and walls, others lodging in brick foundations or else the Tseleyan earth. One lungta mote swooped past Esha's feet, to melt into her few handspans of garden earth. If the lungta fell generous this year, her soil would be magic-rich and her plants enriched, too. Esha never turned down free breath-of-life, or the skills it gave.
Standing there chewing in the morning calm, thinking about vegetables and money, Esha was suddenly swallowed by reality. Her khukuri was failing, the blade wrinkling a little more each time she hacked bamboo sticks or pork bones. No one could live without a good knife: her khukuri had to be replaced it if it should fail. But an indecency fine was on the way, as well. But she just paid away her worldly worth a few moments ago.
There was always the savings chest — but Esha couldn't touch that, she could never touch that. Not until she was more goat than woman.
She gulped her last bites of millet. She needed to get to the fields.
Janjuman's clerk accepted the excuse seal with a tepid frown; he had a stack of identical seals by his elbow. Esha walked alone through the creaking gates of Janjuman Farms and hurried, off-tempo on her limping leg, toward the other workers.
Bent over their tilled rows, hands working fervent, the fieldwomen were spread sparse: only a few hundred of them were free from the tax reaper at this early hour. Esha walked the rows — between neighbours' brightly coloured saris — until she met the bent backside that belonged to Gita Of The Fields.
“Hail, sister. You saved me some yams?”
Gita grinned past her own knees and waved Esha to her side. “The entire field. They're your endowment.”
“Yaah, strike me down now.” Gradually, achingly, Esha folded herself over to touch fingertips to the dirt. “I didn't see you at collection.”
“I paid a little extra last month, so my due is tomorrow.”
She paused. Their spades bit, scraping, into the soil.
“You made your due?” Gita asked.
“I did. Didn't even need to rob my savings chest, praise for that.” She unearthed a shrivelled, dead husk that was once a yam plant, and yanked it loose, and replaced it with a seed. “Will you have enough, sister?”
“I will, but I won't have a fortune afterward.”
“That's my trouble, too. Got flag fines coming.”
Gita sighed, her tall-wrapped head shaking dismayed.
“And my khukuri won't last much longer ... Maybe the gods will slip some coin into my purse.”
“I'll think of something,” Gita said.
“Please — you don't have to.”
“I do,” she bit out. “We're the only ones who'll look after us.”
Esha dug down to another yam, swallowing with a throat turned dry despite the millet's moistening lungta. Gita was right. Gita was always right about these things.
Janjuman's cook put too much pork in the evening meal. In the warming winds of spring, plants were more valuable in the ground than in a low-caste's bowl. Wedged shoulder to shoulder with her field sisters, Esha turned a rib bone in its barely-spiced sauce and her stomach quavered: her changing innards were beginning to hate slick fat and gelatinous flesh, while craving fresh leaves that Esha couldn't afford.
“Thank the heavens for this meal,” one sister said, unseen beyond many others, “but, yaah, look at the meat!”
Grumbling rose from other workers.
“It's clear what this means,” came a sister's jesting voice. “Yaks are too expensive. They want more plough beasts.”
“Nonsense,” said another. “Everything will go to seed before we're any use!”
“Cheaper to just hitch us to the yokes now.”
“And plug their ears against our complaining!”
Laughter huffed all around. Every fieldwoman Esha knew was managing enough grain and pickles for mere subsistence, for living out their heaven-assigned portion of human life. But it was easy to wish for the robust health that greener meals would bring.
“The prank is on them,” came neighbour Menku's voice. “My traits will make me a terrible plough beast. Round-eared and skin-tailed, if you see what I mean!”
Menku's trait animal was a rat, or maybe a mouse. It was a vulgar joke, but those in farming caste were close to the earth in more ways than one: laughter burst from the woman at the thought of a rat buried under mounded yoke straps, with a baffled farm overseer commanding it to get to work. At Esha's right elbow, Gita coughed through her mouthful of food and laughter, sudden enough for Esha to laugh more and harder.
As the joke dissipated, everyone returned to their meals, stirring wedges of chapatti bread deep in hopes of finding millet. In the corner of Esha's vision, one of the new farming girls leaned nearer to Menku.
“Since you've given us your confidence,” she said, “I have a favour to ask. Have you any suggestions for emerging ears? Mine get itchier every day.”
“Ah,” Menku said, smiling around the bone she chewed, “I'm well versed with that. My eldest son has ear edges emerging and he's always complaining.”
She hesitated. She glanced at Esha — a snatched look that rippled through the other women, their eyes landing on Esha and skating abashedly away. Then it was over and they listened to Menku's story again, listening close as Menku lowered her voice.
Esha carried on putting pork morsels into her mouth and forcing them down. She couldn't have said where this idea came from, that she was too frail of heart to think about other women's plentiful families.
Other conversations muttered back to life; clay clicked as fieldwomen gathered each other's clean-licked bowls. Esha sat there, searingly aware of her stained self — until Gita nudged her arm and spoke, near enough for Esha to feel damp breath against her exposed human ear.
“Try not to think about it. I've got a plan.”
“For what?” Esha asked low.
“Work,” Gita said simply. “Bring an extra sack tomorrow.”
And then she hurried food into her mouth, and blurted a joke to another harvest woman like she was as innocent as a new day. Esha turned her face back to her own meal, no longer seeing the pork and millet she put into her mouth. She needed to support herself: she was low-caste, and a failure at many things, but she was still a human being. That truth was easier to swallow than the pork.
They gave their bowls to the dish-scourer — a lanky Hendi man, who spoke not one word of Grewan but was always quick to sign namaste to his fieldworker superiors. Then they returned to work. As the sun rolled downward and the fieldwomen's shadows stretched, Esha's bones were a bright-lit arch of effort. Still, she reached the end of her row.
Gita was going to get both of them arrested someday. The Empire punished cunning behaviour and even Janjuman's field sisters couldn't know about Gita's ideas. But Esha and Gita were alike: unmarried, and childless, and fallen through the lattices of honourable custom. Esha needed coins in her pocket and more than that, coins in her savings chest, because the goat loomed over her human self and she was forty-eight, only forty-eight. She was in no position to refuse a plan.
Knowing that Gita needed an accomplice at least made one decision easier. If she was going to do any service to her best friend's plan, she would surely need to walk. She couldn't let her goat-plagued body get in the way.
The Janjuman clerk checked her nameplate despite knowing perfectly well who she was, and then Esha received her day's packet of rupees to hold tight.
She was dusty and sweat-damp, but her blackflag trader wouldn't mind. Esha set out for Jhamsik District, passing droves of other farmers headed for their homes. A few walked the same direction as Esha, toward market. Hopefully t
hey needed millet or pine pitch, not contraband herbs; Esha was in no mood to fake innocence to her caste-fellows.
The central road led past Yam Plateau's other farms, the footprint-speckled dirt expanses that Esha's memory coloured vivid with healthy leaves. Then came a patch of free-use forest — bamboo and pine trees cut to stumps, with replacements already racing skyward. Sunset painted the road orange, illuminating every cartwheel groove and hoofprint. Houses sprang up again — higher-caste ones with more tin and brick than bamboo, crowded together under the blaze-coloured evening sky. Above all of it, the skybound lungta was gold now, like warm stars too joyful to stay still.
Housing lots grew larger near the plaza. Fine-dressed merchants and craftsmen passed between houses of lacquered bamboo and holy-scripted bricks. Flags fluttered messages on every roof edge: green prayers for health; yellow requests for jute fibre and goat milk; red marriage flags twirling like the very young women who sought husbands. Most of the other fieldworkers joined the nameplate-checking line, where guards permitted access to the market. A few had vanished, and it was time for Esha to do the same.
Esha turned toward the mountainside, into the single great shadow cast down from Maize Plateau. She wound her arms together against the chill and walked a long-remembered pattern of turns between homes. With side-cast eyes, she checked often to make sure she wasn't being followed: the red-uniformed guards paid her no mind. Even if they decided to interrogate her, she would say that she needed cloth dyed for a new, proper set of houseflags. That was a reasonable enough excuse.
Her preferred blackflag trader was Ren the dyemaker. He lived in a mid-caste neighbourhood — able to work with moderately precious herbs, yet only suffer guard inspections twice each month. He was a foreigner from distant Zhongmin State, but he had stayed rooted on Tselaya long enough to look familiar to Esha's eyes.
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