Tinder Stricken

by Heidi C. Vlach

  “With due respect,” the clerk said in rustling tones, “she is as good as gone.”

  This was the Kshatri tongue: Esha couldn't understand it without aid but she recognized the sharp-cut sounds underneath the lungta.

  “She must have followed some temptation,” the clerk went on, “something she found more likeable than her duty. That is what deserters usually do.”

  He was discarding Gita like turned meat, mere moments after she was reported gone. What if she came back? But she wouldn't come back. She was taken from this world — and the clerk could never know that. Hot pain seized Esha's throat; she held her face steady.

  “I-I have never known Gita Of The Fields to desert anything. But you are likely right, sir.”

  The clerk's stare was impassive, as a higher caste's stare should be. “Does she have arrangements for her estate?”

  “She does.” Esha and Gita were as good as blood sisters: Gita's land allowance was bequeathed to Esha in her official records. Esha nearly had a right to carry the property token in her satchel. “But if she does return ...?”

  The clerk rearranged some wax-dappled sheets. “She will be noted as missing, and her work quota will be offered to all the field workers of Janjuman. If she has not returned three months from this day, she will be classified as dead. If activity under her name is found at that time, appropriate measures will be taken.”

  That meant demerit points — which were strikes against caste rank.

  The clerk's gaze pressed into Esha like a knifepoint. “I presume a person like you knows what that means?”

  “I do,” she murmured.

  Shifting more paperwork, the clerk turned away. “Gita Of The Fields has three months, in case she should change her mind. If she is not dead and you should find her, she must be urged to return. She might only receive one demerit if her work load can be made up. But I doubt that. Heaven be with you, Esha Of The Fields.”

  This was an ice-edged kindness, Esha knew as she gestured namaste and turned to leave. Iciness was the only grace higher castes knew how to give — when giving downward, at least. But Gita's good name had a whole season of grace. If Esha could stomach the dishonour, she could make use of that grace.

  She returned to the field's tilled rows, taking her place among the gold-lit formations of stooped women. Menku turned a glance to her. No one else did; these were the last moments of the farming day, loaded down with work to be completed.

  Just like any other day, like her life hadn't quaked underneath her, Esha bent and drove her hands into the earth. But her mind was roaming farther than ever before.

  While Esha laid in her bed, sore and hoping for sleep, she saw only Gita's face. Heard Gita crying out as she was swallowed by the sky. Breathed the dust clouds raised by beating wings, and knew revelations as clear as rain telling her that this, all of this, could have been avoided. Esha and Gita could have tried harder to toss rope around the phoenix from above. They could have tied Gita's selfrope to a different spot on the fence, and swung at the phoenix from a sturdier point. And as a smallest precaution, they should have waited longer after an earthquake — gods' teeth, they had both been foolish, rushing into precarious work when the earth had barely finished heaving. Why had they been so stupid, Esha wondered in the suffocating dark? For want of a little money? Why were all the bloodlines of Tselaya Mountain so fixated on the coins that ought to serve life, instead of the reverse?

  With her pulse drumming and her heart full of bile, Esha heaved her sore body out of bed. She folded her legs to sit at her working mat, and she wound thread and bamboo leaves together and she made a doll. A ragged one, with dry bamboo leaf skirts and looking out at the world with a blank expanse of face. A little coal ink gave it eyes, nose and mouth. It looked like a person now.

  Esha stared at the creation in her hand, calm now but filled to her brim with all the sights she had ever seen. The dark blots of the doll's face looked like Gita, the wet ink shining just like Gita's eyes shone with plans. Esha sifted through her scrap box and found leather and cloth shavings. She tucked two slips of leather into the doll's leaf head — like the horns Gita had confessed to have, the deer horns rising from the crown of her head like pale shoots. Then Esha cut a strip of fabric and wound it to cover those horns, and tied it in the front like Gita had. She tied on a thread of selfrope and the doll looked right now. A tiny, sad imitation of a person who had lived and breathed, but it looked right.

  Esha put the doll among others, among all the painted leaf faces she had made in her lonely moments, and with that she had no strength left. She snuffed her pine candle and fell into bed like a dropped sack of grain. She had no more thoughts — just memories dull enough to forget about.

  In her dreams, the namesmith returned. She hadn't dreamed of him in decades but he was silhouetted by smelting fire again, a monstrous figure taking Esha's nameplate from her powerless hands so he could worsen its caste markings yet again.

  This time, she wasn't scared. She was too canny to be scared; she could salvage these last months of her life if she held on to Gita's abandoned nameplate — and used it like the opportunity it was.

  Chapter 3

  For days afterward, Esha was bound too tightly by her heart to act. She cut spring's emerging bamboo shoots for her solitary breakfasts. She ate pork with the other fieldwomen. She rose with the sun and sank her hands into the earth, and stayed late in the fields three extra hours portioned off from Gita's working days, hours that stood out blatant in Esha's sense of passing time.

  “Where is Gita?” Menku finally asked one morning. She patted the plough yak on its shaggy head, while peering curious past it and its water cart burden.

  Esha could only adjust the water cart's trajectory for so long before she answered. “I don't know,” she said. “I saw her when we were chasing a phoenix in the fallow fields. I lost sight of her.”

  “And she didn't return? That's not her usual colour at all, is it?”

  Esha mutely shook her head.

  Menku hummed and tugged the yak's yoke. The water cart rolled with a groaning of iron axles, leaving black-soaked channels in the dirt at Esha's feet.

  “I thought she went visiting someone,” Menku said, “or maybe cutting. But if she didn't tell you...” She turned to the fieldwomen spreading manure with long-handled shovels. “Sisters, have you heard word of Gita? Esha hasn't seen her.”

  Their faces broadened with surprise, and they called the news to the next pair of field women. The news spread through the field as finches would spread it, called out urgent; Esha kept her face turned to the dirt.

  Menku's voice came again, gentle. “You looked for her ...?”

  “I was out in the fallows for hours.” That wasn't strictly untrue.

  “And she didn't leave you any sign at all?”

  “Something has surely happened to her,” Esha murmured.

  “Oh, Esha! You two are sky and air!”

  Menku raised her voice again and spread the news, so it echoed away in other women's voices. It stung with each repetition but in Esha's bruised heart, she wanted them to know. They deserved to know the barest fact of Gita's disappearance.

  “You were in the fallow east?” one fieldfellow asked. “She might have met a windsickle.”

  “Or a water serpent,” added another.

  “What? Don't be stupid, serpents don't dig out that far.”

  “I was cutting bamboo there last year and cut into a hollowheart stalk! That means serpents!” In a prouder voice, the woman added, “I ran as soon as I saw the hollow inside of that bamboo. It felt like claws were going to snatch me from behind in any moment, but I made it home safely. Didn't even go back for my saw.”

  “Fine waste of a saw — there aren't any serpents that near to a worldedge!”

  They kept arguing it. More discussions swelled in the fields' distance — talk of bandit cutthroats, and demons, and all the reasons a farmwoman had to simply run away.

  Esha listened, silent
and guilty behind the water cart. And that day, not one fieldfellow accused her of a crime. They thought Esha Of The Fields was too honourable for that.

  Under the weight of such thoughts, all her ideas and experience compressed into a sure plan. She would lay traps while out cutting bamboo, and sell her game to a blackflag for savings money. Trapping wild animals was a skill forbidden to all except the leatherworker caste — but Esha hadn't always been a farmer. She would be careful, working by moonlight — and if she got caught, she had Gita's nameplate armouring her true identity. One Grewian fieldwoman was just like another, to every guard she had ever met.

  Esha visited Janjuman's fallows again. She found a damp patch of soil — from underground water tables, shifted after the earthquake no doubt — and harvested the yankvines snaking through the ground where any ordinary plants' roots would be. With hefty coils of it in her satchel, Esha returned to her shack home and by the metallic light of the moon, unfurled the piece of pig leather she had been saving.

  Its tannic smell brought an avalanche of memories. Kettles full of precious spruce bark; dinners of turnip greens and grilled pheasant on rice; the leathersmith's gruff voice. Esha had lacked practical skill, back then. Noble children were taught to hold inked quills, not knives.

  Now, Esha poised her khukuri over the leather, holding it by both its handle and the curve of the blade. She set the point to the leather, and after a steadying breath, she began the long, even cut to make a snare line.

  She didn't complete that cut before the khukuri gave sideways. Esha swore. She glared at the wrinkles bubbled throughout the blade, and threw the now-scrap metal against the wall.

  It took a moment to gird herself for it, but Esha used her digging spade on her carefully tamped floor dirt. She unearthed the lid of her savings chest and opened it — not to add a rupee or two, but to take away from her own future. She had no choice: her savings contained the only other khukuri she owned.

  The Kanakisipt khukuri was no tool for a farmwoman. It was weighted perfectly, the treewood handle fitting Esha's hand like a blessing, the angled blade flashing silvery. The notch at the blade's base was shaped like a cow's hoof; Kanakisipts were worthy of using a cow's sacred image. On the end of the handle, the resin jewel caught light on its many faces. In this light, Esha could hardly see the orchid bloom immortalized inside but she remembered its shape plenty well.

  The age-dried memories were simple enough to push aside. Gripping this fine blade, Esha poised again over the leather and resumed her plan.

  With five traps made and the night half over, Esha left home on silent feet. Flags hung calm in the windless dark. Stray dogs bayed, far distant. The other farmers' homes were lightless and silent, their occupants asleep like Esha would have given her right eye to be.

  She headed toward town, quicker than her joints agreed with. She skirted the well plaza, with its chain pump a looming shadow and its four guards sitting as still as carved jade. Esha slipped between shacks in square-edged movement — keeping to shadows — winding westward through the houses. The wind began to smell cleaner. More bamboo forest appeared.

  This part of the free-use forest was called the Farback. It was dangerous, the whispered rumours said. Many of the bamboo stalks looked ordinary but were actually hollow, like they had been scraped inside with a knife even while they grew. Those bamboo stalks were filled with foul air and bad luck. One of the Janjuman's fieldsisters disappeared eight or nine years ago — and her husband said she cut the wrong stalk of bamboo, and was swallowed up by a water serpent. The rumour spread so fervently that the Yam Plateau arbiters had to restore order: they examined the bamboo and the torn ground and the woman's bloodied khukuri, and they said no human could have committed the crime.

  Esha had no plans to cut fire fuel — not this night, anyway. If it was so dangerous here, she might be fortunate enough to avoid seeing another human soul. Her heartbeat rattled hard inside her as she walked among the clattering bamboo, every shadow seeming to dart in the edges of her vision. She only wanted to set some traps.

  She only walked until she found young pine trees, well away from oak and cloveberry and any other tree heavenly enough for the ranger caste to keep watch over. As she walked, she found a rhythm. Bend a tree; attach a snare; pin down the snare with stakes lodged precariously enough for an animal to bump loose; place a pinch of cooked yam in the slack loop; hurry onward. The last trap — the largest loop made of thickest leather, maybe enough to snare a deer or a wild pig — went to a ragged-barked pine tree far from Esha's home. Then she was done. She had only to wait.

  Esha limped quick through the shadows, back home. Her vision smeared with exhaustion but her heart drummed so loud that it took her an eternity of blanket-wrapped moments to fall asleep. She was using the Kanakisipt heirloom, the one she was meant to hide, or ignore, or else quietly sell. She was farming not just dusty yam fields, but the entire body of knowledge she had acquired in her slide down Tselaya Mountain's caste ranks. As of this night, Esha was trying, really trying to snatch something better for herself — and surely, Gita would have given her a delighted grin.

  She caught nothing after her first night. But over the next two weeks of bone-sapping late nights, Esha tried different morsels of her own dinner as bait, and adjusted the tension on her snare lines, and soon began finding pikas and hares and pheasants dangling, waiting for her. Bundled into cloth sacks, they might have been jute fibre or bamboo leaves for all anyone in the market street could tell. But she didn't waste her allotted market visits on this.

  She thought Ren would introduce her to another blackflag, but he was perfectly glad to buy the game from her. Wild game tasted better than any fence-bound animal, he said, and went on to talk about stuffing these with rice and mustard greens. He gave Esha rupees, and sometimes a little painkiller herb for her trouble.

  With the extra walking she was asking of her degrading legs, Esha was tempted, always, to give back all the rupees and ask Ren for more herb. But that would render her extra work pointless. Each day, she was adding rupees to her savings chest. Her plan was working: Esha only needed to endure it.

  One night, she found one of her traps sprung, with an official warning bound in the snare loop.

  The owner of this unauthorized trap, the waxed text said, must report to a ranger or face a charge of 3 demerits.

  Panic filled Esha — before she remembered she had more demerit points than that, and so did Gita. She wouldn't be demoted again, not if she made her money before she got caught three or four times. She wouldn't even need to beg a ranger for lenience if her plan kept working.

  Esha put the summons note back into the snare loop and left it hanging there. On her limp-blighted legs, she walked away. This wasn't her trap anymore — not when she had more traps left to check, more opportunities awaiting her use.

  Much as Esha would have liked more sleep, she tried to appreciate the night. The sky glittered with lungta and with stars, too. Wind whispered in the bamboo, surely the kind of voice that a priest might be able to hear heaven's words in. And among those tall stalks, in their swaying shadows, there was a shape that demanded Esha's attention.

  Esha's breath caught. She lifted a bristly juniper branch, and there in unfettered moonlight was a kudzu plant with a spire of a flower, just like the ones in Esha's memory.

  Ceremony guests. Gleaming silks and wooden beads. Honeyed kudzu blossoms held in immaculately clean fingers, slipped into mouths before more lungta-accompanied discussion.

  None of that mattered now. Surely, the dyemaker would give her good money for this nobles' plant. Esha used the heirloom khukuri to slice the kudzu off at ground level, and she set a handful of dead leaves over the remaining stump. The whole plant went into her satchel, bent and tucked so it fit and stayed hidden. She kept on.

  Esha's second trap was empty. Her third trap was, too. Maybe last night's game was warded off by whichever ranger came stomping through this forest, claiming things for the Empire — or maybe fo
odbeasts were just more clever than Esha gave them credit for. She kept walking, dragging up memory of last night's path and the snares laid along it. Hopefully her trap near the lake would catch something the dyemaker liked to eat.

  The pine forest at the edge of the Farback was the most burdensome part of Esha's route; no paths broke the blanket of crackling orange needles, and the trees were mostly the same size, like stamped copies of one another. There was little here worth harvesting but Esha held out hope that creatures might come here to eat the gumgrass, or to just walk unbothered by human presence.

  Useless blessing that would be, though, if she couldn't find her own trap. She stopped, and pinched between her eyes so the world darkened and whirled around her. Concentration. Just a little more concentration, a little more work and she could go sleep. She might have been getting thirsty, Esha supposed; it had been hours since her millet dinner and she hadn't had the sense to drink a cup of water before walking off into the night. The kudzu leaves might make a fair substitute, green and succulent as they were. Their bulk at Esha's side was suddenly a temptation, a fixed point in Esha's hazy thoughts. She couldn't eat it, she only needed to keep going. Because the night wasn't getting any longer and she couldn't find the bent treetop that was hers—

  Something circled her ankle. It yanked Esha’s feet from under her and the world jerked wrongways, her throat yelping inside her as the braided yankvine resisted and she bobbed to a stop, dangling from one leg.

  Here was her trap. Here was her gods-damned trap and she had stepped right into it. Upside down by her own doing, Esha stared at the forest floor a few inches beyond her stretching fingers.

  Esha grumbled bitter oaths. What a stupid thing to do. At least no one was here to see it.