The snare dug into her leg, impossible to wriggle loose from — but animals wouldn't think to cut themselves free. Esha grabbed at her clothing-layered body until she found her satchel strap, and followed that to the pouch compartment. Her fingers pushed aside fabric, and more fabric, and the innumerable cool leaves of the kudzu — then pain bit her fingers. She recoiled with a hiss and saw the knife tipping, glinting, falling, and grabbed only cold air as metal thudded against the forest floor.
More damnation. Esha craned to look at the ground below, a rotating mass of dark texture around the bright shard that was the Kanakisipt khukuri. If she stretched her arm toward it, she would be precious finger-widths short; she tried anyway and only managed to swat more air.
So she dangled there for a moment, with the fact of it soaking in. This was Esha's just portion. This was her reward for being stupid and not minding her feet, and she swore a little more before she gathered the satchel into her arms and took stock of what she had within reach. Three jute sacks; five rupees to buy her way out of trouble; the kudzu plant, and in the bottom corner, a cork-dry sliver of betel nut that Esha had forgotten about. No water. No sharp tools other than the khukuri she had lost to clumsiness.
The snare was only a slip knot, though. Animals lacked the presence of mind to loosen it — and Esha was no animal, not yet. She bent upward, reaching for the leather around her ankle. Her stomach muscles blazed and her blood swelled inside her, and her fingers wouldn't reach. She tried again, throwing her weight upward, slinging her hands toward the goal. Esha could touch the snare, even grip its knot between her thumb and forefinger, but that was far different from supporting her weight.
She straightened, letting out a grunt as her limbs fell like stone weights. The movement set her spinning again, the world a whirling palette. She dangled there until the spinning stopped. Esha wasn’t sure if a person could die simply from hanging upside down: it didn’t seem deadly in the basic fact of it, but her head was throbbing in time with her pulse. She would definitely die of thirst in a day or two.
She breathed deep — an unfamiliar motion, inverted this way — and resolved to wait. Yam Plateau was home to thousands of people who walked patrols, or cut bamboo, or worshipped the placid corners of the world. Someone would happen by. Even if it was someone come to fine Esha, or report her, or jail her for everything she'd done, she would take that over dying here, alone.
Sunrise came, with patches of shadow receding all around and bird chatter rising in the trees. Esha tried to swallow the gluey itch in her dry mouth, and tried to ignore the numbness in her trap-bound leg. She straightened a few times more, as much as her weary torso would allow; that eased the pressure inside her head for welcome moments.
People would be stirring from their beds now. And what if someone did happen by, sang the hope in Esha's chest? She would gladly pay some soldier's bribe. Even if someone came who didn't speak Grewian, Esha's obvious helplessness and fear would be enough to explain.
What if they weren't, though? The hopesong changed key — and now Esha acted out tragedies behind her eyes, where her saviour vanished back into the bushes because they spoke Sherbese or Malkesh or something rarer than that, so that Esha's Grewian pleadings didn't form sense.
She was thinking nonsense; she knew that while panic welled in her chest and tears crept warm tracks along the outside of her aching head. And crying was not only useless, it was a waste of what precious little water she had left in her.
Focus, Esha growled at herself. She plucked a leaf from her kudzu plant — wilted now — and chewed. There had to be another way to escape this fate.
Through the ragged pattern of her breathing, a cadence formed in her memory.
If we need to make a plea
The memory echoed twice more before Esha recognized it: this was a rhyme from her childhood. From the time fogged over with powder snow, when she was a child learning the broadest customs of Kanakisipt family diplomacy. She remembered sitting on a stool made of snow leopard fur, petting it with restless fingers while watching the tutor's approving face. And she remembered letting new-learned melody out of her throat.
If we need to make a plea
Speak with grace and mindfulness
With heaven's gifts we pave the way
Each path a mesh of tasteful words
Better spoken than the rest
How it hurt to recall those words. Esha hadn't liked the dry, endless lessons but she had liked songs, and sang them with a full heart. She had potential, the tutor had said. She had Kanakisipt talent, as ripe as Accord Plateau's summer plums.
Dangling, farm-bruised Esha wondered whether that tutor had spoken truth to her. Whether he was flattering his superiors' child, or whether Esha Kanakisipt had heavenly talent and simply a lack of worthy flesh to put it in. It was a meaningless distinction, she decided. Neither yes nor no would light a fire she could warm herself over.
But hanging there waiting, hoping, Esha kept hearing the rhyme in her head. She gradually, stumblingly recalled all the verses detailing the eighteen races of Tselaya Mountain, their many languages and customs and oddities. Diplomats could forge compromises with any of Tselaya's people; they considered that a point of pride.
Esha tightened her grip on her pouch and the kudzu inside. She already had a little lungta gathered in her mouth, from the one leaf she had eaten. If she saw someone in the bushes, she surely could call to them.
Dawn's light became morning. Esha turned in the wind, spinning long and slow. She strained again toward her feet, toward sweet relief but her strength was gone. Childhood verses bound her memory tight and one verse in particular was gaining strength:
With lungta in our mouths and minds
We move ideas, share what's known
Then even beasts can hear our words
But glory spills upon them
Like the rain upon a stone
Extending lungta to an animal was called animism, they told her. It was disgraceful. No honourable person could condone wasting heaven's herbs to speak with an unthinking beast.
Could she talk to a dog, the child Esha had asked? There was a court dog she liked, a silky thoroughbred that smiled open-mouthed when it saw her.
No, the tutor snapped. She could not talk to a dog.
That wasn't what Esha had meant; she kept her mouth locked shut for the rest of the lesson.
It was a matter of honour, like everything nobles did. Of course, nobles thought that because they didn't need to bother themselves with the details of animal husbandry. Esha felt shock the first time she saw a diplomat walking Yam Plateau's streets with a phoenix perched on his shoulder like a mantled demon. She had wondered how that man could live with himself, sullied as he was. But that spring, he talked a wild phoenix out of Janjuman's yam fields and then, to top himself, he figured out why one of the plough yaks was limping. Esha couldn't grudge anyone as useful as that.
Animists could speak to animals. They could persuade a meddlesome phoenix to leave and never return. Listening to the bird cries all around, Esha formed a new hope: maybe she could make her plea heard even if no people could hear it.
Carefully, gripping the fabric tight against more clumsiness, she opened her satchel. She chewed and swallowed a scant half of the kudzu's leaves and strained her murky vision toward the shapes flitting in the trees — chirping birds, maybe wagtails.
Esha had performed animism before. She remembered little about it since she was shambling drunk at the time, on rice beer and grief equally — so speaking to a beast couldn't be difficult. It was simply wrong.
Esha threw more of her shame into the wind, and strained to bend herself upright, and called out with a rustling of undergrowth lungta in her voice.
“Hail? Hail, birds.”
The chirping stopped. Shining little eyes turned to her.
“Hey, ah. Hello.” There was a stilted way animists needed to speak for animals to understand: Esha suddenly couldn't remember it. “I am a friend. Help
me?”
The wagtails' chittering resumed. They weren't intelligent enough to use speaking lungta themselves — but as Esha pushed her own energy toward her ears and outward, the cries began forming sense.
“Help?”
“Friend?”
“No! Largebig!”
“Assist friend?”
“No! Enemy.”
“Enemy trick?”
“Trick?! Danger!”
They took wing, all shouting, danger, danger! Flapping faded into the distance.
“Ugh,” Esha growled, “no!” Not that she had expected much of birds, the brazen little seed thieves. She dangled because she had to, but her senses were strained toward the trees now.
She waited — for another hour, as near as she could tell. Something small and brown came crackling through the needles but it fled when Esha called out to it. Prey creatures couldn't overcome their base natures. She needed something more cunning, something crafty enough to solve problems for its next meal — a monkey, or a bush pig, or a magpie. Maybe a wild cat would even listen to her, if it didn’t decide instead that Esha was a trussed piece of prey.
Her bladder ached and her muscles all hummed; her headache was a blunted sword against her temple, pushing hard enough to pierce. Esha couldn't wait for a person any longer. There were animals around that she hadn't noticed but none of them were noticing her back.
A few more kudzu leaves went into Esha's mouth, laboriously swallowed upward. Then with all the air in her stifled chest, with all the life-movement she could shove into her words, she called out to the wilds.
“Hey! Hail! I need help. I'll— I'll give you food if you help me!”
The sky's silence answered her. Wind and clouds, and not one living thing.
“Help? I'll feed you, just— Help me!”
She closed her eyes and could barely open them again, the pressure in her head growing. Esha was mustering herself to heave upright again when she heard it — wings fluttering above her. Her hopes lapped high and she twisted to look at the creature.
It was an orange mass with long plumes of tail feathers, and bright eyes above a scruffy-looking throat. A phoenix. Staring down at her like judgement itself, and Esha wanted to glare right back but she was spinning with the wind again.
The phoenix creaked in a rusty-door voice: in Esha's seeking ears, the kudzu's green lungta sieved out words.
“Stop shouting.”
Even with lungta wasted on it, the beast couldn't see sense. Esha huffed and waved an arm up at her dilemma. “I’m trapped. I can’t get my leg free. And my knife is down there, so I need help.”
“A human is trapped in a red-food ( )? How the lake-blue ( )!”
Some of the croaking didn't make sense: it sidestepped the lungta in Esha's thoughts, too slick to grab meaning from. She hurried more kudzu into her mouth, all the leaves she could rake off the stem.
While she chewed, the phoenix sat silent. Feathered wings fluttered again and the slightest of weights jolted down the trap line, and now the brazen creature sat staring down its bristly beak at Esha.
“This is not a killing-trap for phoenix-kin? No violet-coloured ( )?”
“I ...? I was trying to catch things that walk on land. A hare. Maybe a pika.”
“It follows that you offer me red food?”
“You mean meat? You can have meat, if that's what you want!”
The phoenix grumbled, and stepped downward to examine Esha's snared leg. Jutting from the edges of its forked tail were its two stringfeathers, each one knotted around a dozen no-doubt-stolen trinkets. The phoenix's fire strikers — two rocks, one dull like iron and one glittering like fools' gold— pulled the left-side stringfeather so it plumbed straight toward Esha's face. If she saw the bird reach for its iron and pyrite, she would be as good as burned.
“I can’t untie myself.” Esha paused. “Untie — you know what that means?”
“Criss-cross, tawny to blue.” The phoenix shot a look at Esha, brief as a needle's prick. “Phoenix-kin are made of scarlet knots. Better tying-skill than ( ).”
A woman would have better luck talking to her own shoes. Esha held her tongue, and held it tighter while the phoenix worked its beaktip into the slip knot. Sharp pressure slid between leather and pant cotton but it couldn't slide far enough.
“Too tight,” the bird creaked.
“I know that. You’ll need to cut it. I think you might be large enough to hold a knife.”
“An iron-tool? Good iron, no ( )?”
“Yes, yes! The knife!” Esha flailed toward the ground. “Pick that up, and use the pointed edge on this trap. Cut it. You understand?”
It stared. And then it hopped off of Esha, sailing past with a rush of feathers. It flapped back up a moment later, alighting sideways on the trap line with the khukuri clasped in one wiry foot. For a moment, the phoenix stretched its ropy neck backward, staring at the khukuri with a gradual flaring of head crests.
“This, an iron cutting-tool with ... crawling-( )-yellow on the end? Inside the crawling-( )-yellow ... This, it is a ( )-purple-song flower?”
“Gaah,” Esha sighed, “what are you chattering about? It's a khukuri. A knife, for cutting. The golden part is pine resin with an orchid flower inside. Just use the sharp part on the trap! Not on me, though!”
Still, the phoenix sat there. It turned covetous eyes down at Esha; she suddenly dreaded the beast dropping the khukuri and splitting her skull with it.
“( )-iron cuts you free of the ( )-trap. That done, what will I receive?”
“I already told you—“
The phoenix screeched, loud and brassy. “What green-growing will you give?!”
Esha spluttered. “Yams! Millet! Sesame! Any plant humans grow, I'll get you some! Carrots! I don't know, what do you want?!”
The bird's eyes glittered. Then it turned the khukuri in its clawed grip and applied its beak to the blade. A clumsy cut, and another, and each cut brought downward movement. There was a deciding instant, a stretching like anticipation, and then the yankvine snapped like a bowshot and the ground blessedly knocked Esha's breath from her.
“This,” the phoenix above her creaked, “a tool with a ( )-purple-song flower inside. This flower is a kind of food. This, I will take.”
“No!” Esha cried. She laid there, joints searing with the night's torture, gasping on the forest floor as another phoenix sat well beyond her grasp.
It turned away, wings fanning open. “( )-blue kin, this bargain is made.” And with the Kanakisipt khukuri held tight in its claws, it winged away, gone through the pines like snuffed fire.
“No, no!” Esha pushed off the leaf-littered ground. Her head twirled and everything was hurting now; momentum carried her over onto splayed, shaking hands while her heart contorted. “Goddamned feather-rat! Why?!”
Nothing answered her. She stayed there, bowed to the forest floor, staring at her leathery hands with their hoof-tough nails.
This morning marked another ruined plan. Here was another boon slipped through Esha's unworthy hands, another pole ripped out of her shaking scaffold of retirement plans.
This time, she didn't know what to do.
Chapter 4
After gulping down cups of water, a tar-strong cup of buttered tea, and some pain herb, Esha arrived at Janjuman Farm and accepted the wage penalty for her tardiness. She worked the fields like any other day, a stranger inside her own body, numbly tending the yam sprouts. She was only one person alongside her perfectly honourable field sisters. These other women, these bent colleagues in a rainbow of coloured saris, had husbands and children and full heads of hair under their headwraps, and family names to encompass it all. That was how people deserved to live.
Maybe, Esha thought, she deserved to be persecuted after all.
She stopped thinking such things as the sun descended the sky and she left the fields, gripping her pitifully light wage packet. Habit tugged her toward the Farback, toward the trapping circuit. Esha wasn
't going back there. Her savings had suffered a blow but she wasn't going back there. She went home instead, and cooked a meal that she stuffed into her mouth, still steaming. While chewing millet and grilled onion, she counted the contents of her savings chest.
She had enough rupees for a one-week stay in a retirement shelter. Not a good shelter, either. Selling the gold bracelet and wooden spoon set might buy her another few days, or a nurse's fleeting attention. Esha had been counting on that Kanakisipt kuhkuri — the price of family esteem plus the potent speaking lungta of a preserved orchid from Tselaya's peak. If a diplomat or a historian was willing to open their purse, Esha would have gladly kept a blank face while claiming she didn't know where this khukuri came from. Some cousin of the family, perhaps. Some minor noble long since vanished, lost to time.
And those lies might have bought Esha some peace if a flea-eaten phoenix hadn't ruined everything. She didn't have the strength to be angry about it anymore; she just sat, alone, running her fingers through a small mound of clicking rupees. She needed to do something about this, or else resign herself to shifting in public, horrified faces all around as she started bleating and pissing herself. That thought made Esha sure. She was plenty sullied and incredibly tired, but she wasn't giving up.
So she needed another plan. Hunting down that thief phoenix would fix her troubles — which was foolishness and Esha knew it. She was no ranger and the phoenix had whole forests to hide in. Even if Esha didn't have retirement to pay for, she didn't have the money to have one specific bird tracked down and killed.
Gita would look after her, said a craftiness inside Esha. She still had Gita's nameplate, and the extra property token, now kept safe on a necklace beneath all her layered clothes.
Maybe this budding plan would work if a trapper wanted Gita's property token. Those sold for a tall sum if the right ownership arrangements could be made. Or Esha could enlist someone interested in capturing a phoenix — a live, intelligent one.
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