Tinder Stricken

by Heidi C. Vlach

  They reached a Sky Thread, one of the rivers formed of pure meltwater from Tselaya's peak. This one was lined with people scrubbing clothing in soap-frothed buckets, pouring filmy water out onto the ground and stooping for more clean water. Pants and saris hung from rows of bamboo drying racks, like house flags but far more colourful.

  Esha and Atarangi kept on and soon came to one Yam Plateau's camp sites. This site straddled water divergent from the Sky Thread — a trickle of water that people flattered by calling it a stream, but it ran clear and had a well-used fire pit close enough for convenience. A clay statue of mother goddess Parvati sat there as a beacon to travellers, her back to the mountain and her hands offering namaste to all who passed by.

  “I'd like to take some tea before we climb,” Atarangi said, drifting toward the fire pit. “And a meal.”

  “That's fine.”

  “Oh, good — I don't know how you Grewians manage on just two meals.” She let go of her cart strap, with her phoenix clinging to his tilting perch and fluttering like protest. “I feel like an empty sack if I go all day without something more than tea.”

  “I thought the small foods in your home were for your birds. Do you shovel them into your mouth when no one is watching?”

  Atarangi laughed, an honest sound like thunder. “They're for diplomacy, fieldwoman!”

  Esha managed to smother her grin until she turned away, to check the tiny shed beside Parvati. It was half filled with ragged-split bamboo sticks.

  “Fuel in these travellers' sheds is meant for anyone passing through,” she said, taking an armload, “so we're welcome to what's here. Have you travelled by foot on this plateau? Or Lentil?”

  “Not this high up the mountain,” Atarangi said, “no. You are fortunate to have this much wild land. Betel Plateau is more tightly packed than this.”

  “We do have plenty of free-growing bamboo,” Esha admitted. “The Empire hasn't taxed that yet. And these rest sites are open for everyone's use. We'll find more like this, at least as far as Maize, maybe the lower end of Rice. Beyond that, I can't say.” Esha remembered nothing about the mid-peak plateaus, just that she had sat in a cart while being escorted away from them.

  Atarangi hummed. “We'll manage, I'm sure. My friend?”

  Esha turned, startled — to see Atarangi speaking to her attention-taut phoenix.

  “Some tinder, please.”

  With a creaking answer, the bird flapped away. Foolish of Esha to think that Atarangi was talking to her. She just missed having a sister-friend to talk to, she supposed. Maybe the journey wouldn't be so bad.

  By the time Esha split bamboo into kindling, the phoenix returned with his beak packed full of withered pine needles.

  “He'll look after it,” Atarangi offered. And so Esha put down the kindling and watched the phoenix work — arranging a tent of sticks around his gathered tinder, and picking open two knots in his stringfeathers to release his iron and pyrite, and proceeding to strike sparks.

  For all the terror it stirred up in Esha's farming mind, the technique certainly was arresting to watch. The bird held the glittering pyrite in his beak, and the iron between his talons; a liquid snap of his long neck brought the two together. Into the fire pit sprayed hot sparks, once and twice and again until smoke began twining out of the tinder. A flame needled up and the phoenix immediately hopped away to set his striking tools on bare ground, in plain sight. And then, stick by stick, and he dropped bamboo fuel onto the growing flames.

  It was exactly the way a human being would strike up a fire. The phoenix had the same intent in his eyes, the same practiced sureness in his every movement. Esha had never noticed before; she had always just sprinted toward wild phoenixes while fearing for the yam plants.

  Gradually, Esha noticed Atarangi's attention — watching her, smiling.

  “I'm going to cut more fuel,” Esha hurried to say. “Call me when the meal is ready, if you would?”

  “Of course.”

  The camp site was ringed with bamboo coppices, tiered with old stumps and green growth. Esha used her broken khukuri blade and a rock to hammer stalks down and she returned as Atarangi was drawing breath to call out.

  “If you cut any bamboo here,” Esha told her, while holding a hot bowl, “be careful which stalks you cut. Someone here before us found a hollowheart — so there might well be more.”

  “The ... bad luck bamboo?” Atarangi ventured.

  “That's right. Someone cut into one and flagged it for everyone else's safety, with a marked cloth.” In honesty with herself, Esha had admired the jute rag with hollow inside written on it in gobbed pine pitch, tied around a gouged bamboo stalk. Whoever left that warning had been lucky as well as resourceful; the serpents must not have noticed that cut on their bamboo.

  “Truthfully,” Esha added, “we should all flag hollowhearts when we find them. Everyone would be safer.”

  With a toneless hum, Atarangi stirred her steaming rice and onion with a careful finger. Beside her, the phoenix did the same with his beak. “I've never understood why Tselayans fear hollow bamboo. Has anyone really vanished after cutting one?”

  “The arbiters say it's true. They've been wrong before, but ...” Esha waved a rice-sticky hand. “One of my fieldfellows disappeared some years ago when she was out cutting fuel. There was no trace of her at all, so it must have been a serpent. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe it was a tiger, or some cutthroats. All we know is that there hasn't been trace of her since.”

  “My apologies,” Atarangi murmured.

  “Thanks. I hardly knew her, though.” Esha chewed, and swallowed. “It happens to fieldworkers. We disappear, and someone takes our place, and life keeps on.”

  Atarangi had comments to make, judging by her yearning frown. She stirred more steam out of her meal and kept eating, and put another dollop of rice in the phoenix's bowl.

  “People disappear and life moves on,” she finally said. “That's why you're using Gita's life as yours.”

  “That's right.”

  “This mountain ...” Atarangi shook her head, and asked, “If we should meet guards, are you going by Esha or Gita?”

  It was a decision Esha did need to make. She sighed. “I hope no one needs to know. But I'll be Gita.”

  “To everyone, or only human beings?”

  The question was a cold blast of wind, too surprising to understand. “My name to everyone? What?”

  “Well, give this phoenix some recognition: he knows that I'm Birdnose or Atarangi, depending on what I'm doing.”

  The phoenix watched them in this moment, bright-eyed. He was either trained to do long chains of tricks or he was truly a comprehending creature. Which meant Esha and Atarangi were not alone — and they hadn't been alone at any point a phoenix was present, which was as mesmerizing and terrifying as watching the bird work flint and steel.

  Atarangi stood and removed the rice pot from the coals. “I'd like to be just Atarangi,” she added, quiet. “I think I owe you a weight of secrets, Esha Of The Fields, since I searched out your records. So I'll tell you this: Birdnose is just who the people of Tselaya Mountain would like me to be.”

  “A blackmark herb dealer?”

  “An owner of a human face.” Smile splitting into a grin, Atarangi turned firelight eyes to Esha. “You didn't suspect anything, did you? Looking on me as Birdnose?”

  Nightmares tumbled through Esha's mind, all the stories ever whispered about demons taking human faces for their own. Nonsense, she scolded herself. “Ah. Didn't suspect what?”

  “That the human nose wasn't mine. Here, I'll show you.” After a moment unbuttoning her pack flap and digging under cloth assortments, Atarangi pulled a limp, brown thing from her supplies. It looked like the brow, nose and cheekbones of a human face — a face Esha had seen before.

  “Wh-What ...?” She stared riveted, her blood chilling.

  “It's made of rubber tree sap, heated and set into shape.”

  “Another face?!” Esha couldn't
rip her eyes away from the translucent thing in the firelight, much as she wanted to.

  “My trait shows on my face,” Atarangi said. “Just the hooked tip of my beak. I'm going to become a sea eagle. The ones from my home. I watched them diving for fish when I was small — magnificent creatures.”

  Her mind numb, Esha nodded.

  It wasn't convincing; Atarangi smiled small and embarrassed. “No one minded the sight of my beak in Manyori lands. But on Tselaya, there are rules to follow.”

  “I thought folk called you Birdnose because of the ... because of that other face's shape.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the big nose.” Esha waved toward the tree-sap mask dangling from Atarangi's hand, like her hands might explain. “Sticking out and coming to a point like that ... It's like a junglefowl's beak.”

  Turning the mask to scrutinize her own face, Atarangi said, “Oh. It somewhat does! I picked the name for my own bird nose, since no one can see it. It would upset folk, wouldn't it?”

  “Traits showing on your face? Very much so.” Esha could only recall one Grewier wearing a mask, and that was a frail old man. He was fortunate to have reached such an age in his human body — but what a price he had paid, wearing heaped cloaks and wraps, walking in a silent storm of pitying glances.

  Atarangi rotated her bowl in her fingers. “That's the only reason I wear this,” and she pointed to her mask, “is to be polite company for the people of this empire. And Birdnose is because of your senseless laws against herb use.”

  “Speak more truth,” Esha said, “I'll keep agreeing.”

  “Gladly.” Atarangi smiled, crooked and wry. “I think the burden of secrets is even now — although a diplomat and a farmer should never speak so frankly with each other. That's how Tselayans do things, is it not?”

  “We've broken a hundred rules already, why not one more?” Esha blew out a breath she didn't know she had been holding. “Gods help me, though, I've never heard so much raw honesty at once. Is this always how you speak?”

  “Oh, not at all,” Atarangi replied. “I've just been bottling my frustrations with your rules and your ways. I hope I'm not troubling you.”

  “I suppose not.” Esha herself had thought the caste divisions unfair, thought it small and fearful like a passing guard might demand to see the contents of her mind. “But the ways of Tselaya are yours too, if you've got a caste.”

  “It's permission to work my craft. I'm simply not sure I can accept everything this rank tells me.” Taking her caste sigil between her fingers, Atarangi turned it on its brass pin. “Nets can bind a creature, but they can't take the ocean from its heart.”

  The words were a jumble. But somewhere, maybe in her own heart, Esha felt like she understood.

  “I shouldn't speak of this,” Atarangi went on, “even in confidence. Getting instated to this rank isn't something to question. It's just that dignity should be for all. A food producer like you would be treated better in my society.”

  “Really? As well as your bird?”

  “Better, even“ Atarangi said, laughing. She took a heaping bite of her meal — just as the phoenix

  “Truly?” Atarangi asked him.

  More croaking and chirping. The phoenix's crests worked, almost like he was gesturing.

  “You can if you want to,” Atarangi said. “We'll see.”

  With a last rasping sound, the bird strutted around the fire pit — toward Esha. He stopped by the piled fire fuel, eyeing it, considering. Just as Esha feared him reaching for his tail-held iron and pyrite, he chose a cloven bamboo stick and plucked a thumb-sized sliver from it. And then he approached Esha, coming near enough to see the ribs of his feathers and the living wetness in his eyes.

  Esha wanted to move but she sat, politely, clutching her tea cup like a life rope as the phoenix laid down the sliver of woody stem beside her bent knee. Then the bird straightened, and stared.

  “He's giving you fuel for a fire,” Atarangi said. “It's a friendship gesture.”

  “... Are you joking?”

  “Not at all. He's not, either.”

  What an eerie thought, like a waking dream — that a field-destroying bird had any idea what friendship was, and that Atarangi would talk about it like the thought was as plain as potatoes.

  “Should I,” Esha asked, “take it?”

  “You said you need more friends, don't you?”

  Esha pushed her hovering hand toward the sliver; her fingers were thick and numb. “I think what I said was that I don't need more enemies.”

  “Just pick it up and thank him. Why throw a gift away?”

  Atarangi was damnably right. Maybe befriending an animal wouldn't be the worst decision ever made by Esha Of The Fields, long since reduced to lying and thieving. She took the sliver from the leaf-pillowed ground, and pushed her gaze toward the phoenix. She couldn't meet its prying eyes. Maybe its ruff of chest feathers would be enough.

  “Thank you,” Esha mumbled.

  He chirped — a clear and lilting song, nothing like the phoenixes Esha had ever heard before. And with that, he galloped back to Atarangi and sat bundled against her side, feathers puffed and crests low. Like a child — a boy child smitten with a pretty woman.

  “There. You've brightened his sky,” Atarangi said warm. She turned her attention to draining her tea cup.

  Bemusement rose warm in Esha and she smiled herself, raising tea to her mouth. “If it's that easy to please him, he's welcome to it.”

  In the mundane moments Atarangi spent wiping out her cookpots with sand, Esha supposed she did miss having friends.

  They didn't linger long, only enough for Atarangi to wipe sand in her cookpots and Esha to stub out the half-burned fuel for the next travellers' use. With the wheeled cart loaded again, the group of them — Esha, good Atarangi and the companion presence of the phoenix — kept walking. After more bamboo stands, and a reeking pig farm, and a gumgrass field alive with finches, they reached the mountain's face. Climbing spires led up the cliffside, metal poles bristling from the rock like hair from a boar's nape.

  A few hundred meters to their left, a curtain of shadow dropped down from Maize Plateau, along with the cable rig for low-caste cargo. To the far-off right, where Yam Plateau narrowed and became the spiral road, earthquake repairs were under way. The guards' station was crowded with metal and stoneworkers, their materials heaped near the worldedge and their scaffolds lowering workers over the road's side. Some gathered workers parted so a carriage could squeeze through, a wood-coloured bulk drawn by pure white yaks that must have cost a fortune to breed.

  “Here's one small blessing the gods spat onto us,” Esha told Atarangi. “We don't need to pass through that checkpoint.”

  “Mm, I'll be thankful for that. They're trouble enough when the path is firm.”

  They approached Maize Plateau's shadow and checked the pulley rig. The mechanism moved with just enough resistance to be useful and the cables were in good condition for an Empire-funded piece of equipment, showing only a few pinpricks of rust and one bent spot in the looped length. Together, Esha and Atarangi loaded their supplies into the basket and pulleyed it skyward.

  “Bring it back down,” Esha said after they hooked on stone counterweights. “Halfway between plateaus is the least tempting for thieves, since it'll take time to retrieve from either direction. Can't just snatch it and run.”

  “Ah,” Atarangi said, smirking. “That's clever.”

  “It's one of many tricks. Have you climbed spires before, or only travelled by carriage?”

  “I've taken the spires before, I'll manage. Your knees ...?”

  Sore though they were, Esha waved the idea away. “It won't be the first day I've put up with them.”

  They unwound selfropes. Atarangi paused to tie her walking staff to her pack, and to give a few calm words to her phoenix. And then she and Esha threw selfropes over climbing spires, and they began working upward, step by rope-guarded step.

&
nbsp; Wind pried into Esha's clothes as they climbed, more insistent than she remembered. The effort burned in her arms but gave her her knees sweet moments of relief. She imagined that the phoenix would fly ahead free but he only fluttered upward one spire at a time, meticulously following Atarangi's climbing pace. Every few moments, scaly feet clattered on the ridged iron and his gaze fixed again on Atarangi, except for the rare moments he watched Esha.

  For a moment, Esha wondered if the phoenix could think — and comprehend the spiritual pinnings of life, like a person. He might be watching the humans gripping their selfropes, thinking that they might fall and be no more.

  Esha walled the wingbeats and claw clattering out of her mind, to focus on her footing.

  The spire pass veered over toward a toehold plateau after forty meters. This plateau was large enough hold two or three farming shacks, but no one would live on such a small, wind-gripped crumb of land. There was only some juniper and gumgrass here, huddled against the cliffside and stamped flat where travellers passed through.

  The day was still long, the sun robust. Esha and Atarangi gathered their selfropes into their laps and ate on-the-run foods — Esha her popped maize, and Atarangi some pieces of dry-frizzled leaf that Esha couldn't identify.

  Atarangi shared her food with the phoenix, as was their way. But the moment Esha dropped a maize kernel, the phoenix snapped to attention,

  “Now you'd like maize, too?” Atarangi smiled wry, realizing some tiny fraction how spoiled her bird was. “Ask Esha nicely, then.”

  The phoenix shuffled sidelong toward her, looking again like a shy child. He croaked — but not like any phoenix cry Esha had ever heard in all her years. Atarangi's bird rasped out sounds that didn't sound meant for a phoenix at all, some mimickry Esha felt she was supposed to recognise. She put it from her mind immediately and flicked the dropped maize kernel away from her, for the phoenix to snatch up from the dirt.

  “Thank her, too,” Atarangi said.

  The maize gulped whole, the bird looked straight at Esha and dipped his head. Nearly like a gracious bow, near enough to surprise Esha into something like delight.