“Is it even still there?” she asked in a breathless grunt.
“Still clinging.”
“Amazing that it's got a grip at all.”
“They've got good claws,” Gita said. “Harder than steel. Part of why the whole bird gets a good price.” She wound her throwing arm back, and paused, and threw with limp resignation. “Let go, sister — thank you for holding on.”
Esha didn't hear her own replying voice; it was drowned out by the liberation of letting go and stretching her hands, her arms, her ever-troublesome ankles.
“I could throw until Martyrs' Day and not get the rope around it,” Gita grumbled.
“We tried, sister.”
Gita flicked tongue over her lower lip, considering. “Let’s not give up. We’ve done enough giving up. What if I just climb down and grab it?”
“What?!”
“We're good mountain children: we brought ropes.” She looked to her own hand resting on the top fence rail. “And the Empire provides us with somewhere to tie them. I'll just climb down there. We've come this far, Esha.”
This wasn't a leisurely trip down-mountain on climbing spires: there was an enormity of open air below them, hundreds of meters to the edge of Betel Plateau far below and far more open space below that. But the phoenix was only a few arm-lengths away. Well within a selfrope's reach. In the bitterest crevice of her heart, Esha agreed: she didn’t want to give up anymore. She didn't want to carry a burden of disappointment back to the clerk's office, to file a truthful report of their failure.
“Fine.” Esha unwound selfrope from her own body. “Fine. Use two ropes, though.”
Their shadows stretched in the golden evening. Gita tied a stout knot around her waist; Esha looped and tied Gita's rope around the fence's two rails. The bamboo poles looked unblemished and the iron nails untouched by rust — but to ease her mind, Esha tied her own selfrope on the next pair of rails over.
“I’ll tie the phoenix onto your rope,” Gita said. “Pull it up and get it inside a sack, then give me back your rope.”
“Will that work? It can’t burn though jute rope, can it?”
“Not unless we sit here like lard lumps, letting it strike sparks.”
Clever plans were sounding less clever by the moment. Esha pressed her mouth, and pulled her knot tighter. “You know best, sister. Be careful.”
“Always.” With her selfrope tied between the fence post and her own body, Gita wound Esha’s rope around her arm. She set her pouch aside, and toed off her sandals. For a moment, she met Esha's eyes like a real sister, as honest as their shared sweat.
And then with bare feet spread for grip, Gita stepped onto the fence and over it, off the edge of civilization. The ropes pulled taut. Esha could only watch as Gita dangled, creeping downward in the open air. The phoenix stared hot steel at her, huffing through an open beak, its warning keen rising louder than the wind. Gita shifted, leaning, and testing her own balance. Her earth-brown hand stretched toward the phoenix’s fiery feathers and its snapping beak.
Then Esha's feet slid from under her, the fence rail catching her and stunning her breathless as the earth roared. She gasped and struggled upright, grabbing the tied loops of Gita's ropes. Another earthquake was upon them — with no warning this time, not so much as a humming in the soles of Esha's feet, this couldn't be.
“Gita! Gita! Hold on!”
She grunted — but she held fast, her limbs wound into a knot around the rope and her gaze still fixed on the damned bird.
Esha looked down past them — only for an instant, all the way down at the bucking void of green below, the wilds of the lower plateau. No one could survive a fall like that. She tore her eyes away and she was cold inside, aware of her fragile life hammering in her chest, until she looked back to Gita because Gita was the only one who mattered.
But Gita was throwing herself into her reach, swinging on the ropes and managing to snatch the phoenix by its forked tail. The bird screeched, its wings thrown open, beating at the air and at Gita’s head so she bent, flinching.
Rope creaked against fence bamboo — and under Esha's feet, rock cracked like a cannon shot. The fence sagged, a feeling like molten metal in Esha's veins but the tremors were fading, settling away into the deep earth while the fence yanked farther over the worldedge. Gita's selfrope had slipped, settling in the fold of two bent fence rails that crackled under the strain: Esha gripped the knots and pulled but her pain-stabbed joints couldn't lift Gita's weight more than a fingerwidth.
“Climb back up,” Esha choked out. “Hurry!”
The phoenix screeched still; movement hummed along the taut rope.
“Take the phoenix,” Gita shouted. “Here, it's on your selfrope— Agh! Wait, wait!”
Esha leaned forward on the sagging fence, an awful idea that made her guts lurch with terror: down there dangling, Gita was still fumbling with tangled loops and beating wings.
“Forget the bird! Just come back up!” Esha gripped Gita's selfrope again but it was a useless precaution: she couldn't bear her sister's weight if the fence failed.
“No,” Gita spat, a high cry like desperate wind, “no! I’m not throwing this prize away. You're not going to be a beast woman stared at in the street. I just need to—!”
“Gita! Gods’ balls, it’s just a bird!”
The top rail cracked, jerking to a stop against the bottom rail. Time hung and the bottom rail moved as well — yielding, bowing toward the abyss.
Gita hesitated. She was bleached with fear, gripping both lifeline and the stupid, screaming phoenix. “Very well. Just—“ She reached reaching one-handed for Esha's dangling rope.
Esha looked again to the bowing fence rail, to its splintering bamboo and now its iron nails baring like teeth. “This part is failing — get onto my rope!”
And Gita did, gripping Esha's selfrope between her feet, letting slack into her own rope. Still weathering the phoenix's one-winged blows, Gita crept upward. She had to be exhausted, and more fearful than anyone but Esha could know.
Another fibrous snap — this time a cavernous sound, ringing out of a hollow-cored pole. The top rail of the second fence section was failing too, and Esha's tied rope jerked against the bottom rail, the last one remaining.
Gita looked up at her, a farmer’s worn face with eyes as wide as a child’s. She hadn’t tightened her headwrap: her fur-dense hairline showed.
Esha's hands hovered by the snapped hollowheart rail, wanting to seize her selfrope and her sister's weight but she was rotted through with terror. These rails definitely couldn't bear weight but why would they be made into fences at all?
Gita was climbing, grasping rope and pulling nearer.
Another snap from the last rail, another hollowheart pole shattering. Gita fell away, white-eyed, attached to two slack ropes — until she jerked against the fence shambles and then those gave, too, ripping from the shredded earth. Esha was screaming, kicking back against her own balance point and the cliff beyond it as Gita fell open-mouthed and silent, the phoenix thrashing in her fist.
Then there was only silence and wind.
Esha stayed crumpled on the worldedge, gripping nothing at all with her useless fists, her voice fading to wet grief in her throat. She got up and crept to the torn worldedge — dreading the sight of sari blue slumped over Betel's worldedge rails. But Gita wasn't there. Just emptiness, like Esha had come here alone.
She didn't want to imagine Gita bouncing, cartwheeling, falling even farther. She could still see the phoenix’s plumage, burned into her mind as bright as sun-blindness. For the want of that one vermin bird, Gita was dead. All they wanted was a little money. All they wanted was to retire at peace, that wasn’t so much to want. But the earthreaders gave wrong advisories and the Empire-made fence was made of garbage bamboo — and it didn't matter, because they were field women, just field women. Gita Of The Fields was dead and that left Esha even more alone.
She knelt there wet-faced, for how long she couldn
’t have said. She wiped her cheeks dry and felt every wrinkle. With numb hands, Esha touched the empty sensation around her torso where her selfrope ought to be.
And she found her gaze resting on Gita’s shoes and her satchel, laid on the gumgrass like a rainstorm’s leavings. Maybe there ought to be a funeral, Esha thought. A pittance of a ceremony. Gita Of The Fields had no family who acknowledged her blood ties: she had been disavowed just like Esha. It would only take moments to fetch some field sisters and honour Gita's life, while showing them the tragedy brought by poor official work.
Or Esha could simply acknowledge Gita’s life right this moment, alone. Quietly. Gita had returned to the sky now — likely not to the gardens of heaven, knowing her irreverence and her schemes, but it felt good to believe otherwise. Gita had died a human: some tribute needed to be made.
Turning Gita’s shoes over, finding them worn but still sturdy, Esha wondered what to throw over the cliffside. What defined a human being, other than their very body, however long that lasted?
Gita had hooves and hair encroaching on her body, just like Esha did. If Esha died and left a friend behind watching, she wouldn’t want her effects thrown away. Funerals were about honour, about singing hymns for the sky to hear. What was honour to disavowed field worker, to a grinning woman who had never cared for honour in her entire life?
Nobles would look down on this choice. Nobles hadn’t done Esha any favours in recent years. If Esha Of The Fields had been the one to fall, she wouldn’t want perfectly valuable things to be thrown after her. Let material goods serve the living. Let some field sister actually know comfort.
Esha opened her own satchel and stuffed Gita’s shoes inside. They would fit well enough when she wore her current sandals through— if her feet stayed human long enough for that.
Horror roiled in her stomach again as she opened Gita’s satchel to take the sundry goods inside. One extra throwing stone; a knuckle-sized piece of pine pitch; a paper-wrapped stick of jerky; one lone rupee coin, probably for bribing soldiers. And in a small inner pocket, Esha found a metal piece that flashed white in the setting sun: Gita’s nameplate. Her simple name, the same familiar Of The Fields strokes that she had signed on the clerk's dry paper.
Gita never had believed in wearing her nameplate in her clothing like most of the others did, like Esha did. I don’t want Of The Fields stamped into my hide if I trip and fall, she said.
Esha had always thought it foolish. Gita had always been a little foolish, for all her cleverness. But here Esha sat with Gita Of The Fields's imperial identification, the only true piece of Gita that remained. What a paradox, that if Gita had kept her nameplate on a pendant cord to keep it safe, it would have been lost. Instead, Esha held it, real and cold.
If one fieldwoman used another’s nameplate for a few trifling things, who would ever know?
With a stone weight in her gut, Esha slipped Gita’s nameplate into her own satchel. Gita had tied a leather thong onto it, to string her official property token together with her name. This made Esha the owner of two meagre farming shacks, for all anyone knew or cared.
Then she turned to the worldedge and threw Gita’s empty pouch, so it soared away on the wind. And that was all. No one would know where Gita went or how to find her, and that cunning fact could help Esha now. If only their roles really could be reversed.
Evening approached. Esha ought to return to the farm and make her report. Her field pay would be scrawnier than usual as it was — the same worry as always, Esha thought with a tired body and valuable burden in her pouch.
She stood — and that was when she saw guards approaching, three armoured figures glinting with gilt, polearms silhouetted on their backs. Panic filled Esha, cold.
“Hail, subject,” a hard voice called.
“Graciously met,” Esha replied. She signed namaste to them with arms that didn't feel like her own.
She held the gesture, frozen, while the soldiers approached — two men and a woman, strong and frowning examples of middle caste. Under the crimson mesh of their helms, their foreheads showed, smooth and respectable. They returned namaste, then slashed gaze over Esha and the broken fence.
“Are you hurt, citizen?” the lead soldier asked.
“No, ah— No, I'm still whole. The earthquake ...”
“It was unexpected, but be at ease. Early reports say that no one was killed on Yam Plateau.”
That was so wrong that Esha wanted to spit; she sobbed instead, one hot knife of a cry bursting out of her.
“It was a frightening event, to be sure,” the woman soldier said in a voice like cotton-padded steel. She came a step closer, a solid blur through the tears Esha hurried to wipe away. “What are you doing here alone, citizen?”
“I— I—“ She needed to lie, and Gita's last few moments kept overtaking her mind like an avalanche but Gita herself had given her a story to use. “The fields. I saw a phoenix, a-and I came to try catching it. To safeguard our fields.” With a scrambling in her satchel, Esha produced her permission form for the woman soldier to take and examine close.
“You shouldn’t be near the worldedge alone,” the lead soldier said. “Where is your overseer?”
“I'm not alone.” Esha gulped, and wiped her tears again; she took one last second to pray she had enough courage for this lie. “My field sister, she's searching, too. We just— We split ways to cover more ground and I haven't seen her this hour. I just thought of her now — I don't know where she is!”
“As I said, there haven't been any deaths reported. Your colleague is fine, wherever she is.”
“I'm sure,” Esha choked. “P-Please forgive my foolishness. I praise the gods you’re here.”
Her hurts were cauterized now, numb from the lying; she chanced a look up at the lead soldier and found him nodding to the quiet soldier, who was now documenting this encounter with logbook and ink stick.
“This fence is ruined,” called the woman soldier, from near the awful cliffside. “One post missing, four rails broken, six posts in need of reinforcement.”
“Tch. There won't be money for that, with the road in such bad shape.”
“Try to log it as Betel Plateau's problem?”
The leader snorted. “Good fortune to you. No, it'll just take some time.”
More and more tithes the Empire asked for, higher taxes every year on the ramshackle homes they gave to farming caste — but they couldn’t even keep their safety promises to the people of the mountain. Couldn’t even bother to use decent bamboo on the worldedges, when one or two good poles might have saved a woman's life this day. Here Esha stood, puffy-eyed and fearing for her future in front of soldiers who might even prompt her for a bribe of rupees she couldn't afford. She turned her gaze to her sandalled feet. She was just a low-caste. She trembled inside, full of catching flames.
“We’ll make a report of this broken fence,” the leader went on. “The Empire will provide.”
No, they wouldn’t. Esha nodded.
“Your identification, citizen.”
Calm now, her heart like chile pickles in a tight-lidded jar, Esha reached into her satchel and produced Gita’s nameplate. The leader took it in a gloved hand and scrutinized it, between glances at Esha’s field-worn face.
“Gita Of The Fields,” he agreed. “Unless you'd rather not be named in the report.”
“You may use my name. Heaven will judge.”
He nodded, face souring. “At ease, subject. Keep your wits about you from now on.” The other two soldiers took their positions behind him in standard wedge formation. They marched away, continuing along their token route.
It simple to speak a dirty lie and send the Emperor’s dogs on their way. That simple to steal Gita's name and avoid fines, or demerits, or a damp-walled jail cell or whatever Esha's punishment for her circumstances might have been. For want of some coin and some better-grade bamboo, Esha stood here with forty-eight years of darkness finally rising, finally swallowing her heart.
&
nbsp; She wasn't worried about honour anymore. And now, with Gita's nameplate cold in her hand, she knew what to do about her retirement.
Esha walked her sore-kneed self back the way she came. Dirt-caked and conspicuous, she stood under the farm clerk's stare.
They saw a phoenix, Esha heard stumbling out of her own mouth. They split up to chase it but the bird escaped. Then the second earthquake caught Esha off-guard, and now Esha couldn't find her coworker.
“How long has it been since you saw her?”
Esha gauged time past her racing heart. Two hours, she said. Maybe three.
With a grim mouth, the clerk shook his head. “Do you believe that she would desert her station?”
Esha had never understood why a fieldwoman would do that. Farming life wasn't much. It was sweat and dust, and eating millet more often than good rice. But compared to untouchable caste — a life spent underfoot, scrubbing everyone else's leavings — field caste was a gift, if a shoddy one.
Esha shook her head. She didn't know, she said. Maybe Gita had deserted. She hadn't said anything about it ...
The lie caked inside Esha, gritty against her conscience. Gita was no deserter: she had only ever talked about helping Esha. And if a deserter seal branded her records, what little honourable record she had would be gone like steam in the wind.
It didn't matter: Gita was dead, said the burning memory Esha couldn't look away from. But they were kin in their hearts as well as in their sealed contracts. This wasn't right.
“Maybe something happened to Gita,” Esha tried. “We were in fallow field, near the worldedge ... M-Maybe she fell somewhere. Or a demon came, or a bandit, during the quake while the guards were occupied? Could Janjuman advise the town guards? To look for her?”
Esha stole a glance at the clerk's face, at the calm, even paleness of a minor noble. Someone who never saw sunlight if he didn't care to. He leaned forward, tassels shifting on his headwrap, and pushed the silver sharing dish full of betel nut slivers toward Esha. His silent command was to eat, then listen. The clerk was honouring her with confidence: her heart sank like water vanishing into dry earth.
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