Tinder Stricken

by Heidi C. Vlach

  Phoenix fires were grudgingly accepted in wild areas, when they only burned a pittance of gumgrass and brown-mounded leaves. This was a truth Esha knew but had never lived herself.

  “Before any seeds sprouted, my territory lines moved. My earth-wisdom said not here. What can a winged-one do? I heart-gathered kindling orange. I burned more and I earth-planted new seeds. The territory lines moved again.”

  She swooped at the ground, claws bared — only to rake up mulch-chunky dirt and fist it in her scaly feet, and fly back to the garlic garden.

  “I puke at circumstance! Blacken-sky-whitely! I've finished!” She patted the soil fierce into place around tender greens. “No more moving. This is home territory; this one will not move again.”

  Clamshell flew away, a low, loping flight toward her next miniature farm. Atarangi hurried to keep up, her cloak a shaggy torch-light through the trunks and needles.

  Left peacefully behind, Esha dragged herself upright and balanced on her rusty-sore legs. Rooftop perched in a juniper beside her, watching her every movement like it was his care-laced responsibility.

  “As much as I spit on my lot in life sometimes,” Esha murmured to him, “I'm blessed compared to our new kin. I'd be angry if I had to abandon my home and my garden plot for no plain reason like that.”

  Rooftop creaked sadly, a sympathy echoed in his wilting crests. “Kin Clamshell needs help. Morning Sky can give that help, I yellow-fire-hope.”

  “Does she really help phoenixes? Gathering them all into her one home?”

  Rooftop tipped his head, crests adjusting like levelling sand: please explain, he silently said.

  “Aah, what I mean is ... Clamshell's wild territory is big enough to fly around in. She has rangers nosing around in it and mountain cats to watch for, but she can spread her wings and grow any seeds she can snatch. Wouldn't ... wouldn't phoenixes rather be free? Would you rather live in the forest than in a house on Yam Plateau?”

  Cackling mild in his throat, Clamshell followed alongside the rolling pack with wing-buoyed hops.

  “I go anywhere Morning Sky goes. Big human-house, small human-house, it doesn't heart-matter. But Precious One ... Krrrih. We phoenixes follow rules, too. Forest birds aren't free. Clamshell is black-fright-trapped by living here – you see?”

  “That's true.” Esha rubbed at her neck and the welling goat hair kept itching. “Sorry. I'm trying to learn all these phoenix ways.”

  “Growing-mounds of learning,” he agreed. “I think Clamshell-kin will teach, too.”

  They lagged behind Clamshell and Atarangi, catching up in time to glimpse a new garden in the trees before they were left behind again. Atarangi gave them a regretful smile; she had a far smaller pailful of regrets but Esha appreciated the fact of it.

  “Rooftop,” Atarangi said after another bare meeting, “I'd like you to run a wing errand for me.”

  “Am your kin.”

  “Bring herbs from our home reserve. A green-gradient variety, and as much as you can carry.”

  Rooftop bobbed affirmative.

  “And I don't imagine I need to say such, but check that all is well at home. Bring a new report about this trip to the rest of our tagged friends — however much you're honour-able to tell them about Clamshell.”

  Esha hadn't considered it before: in a walled and windowed house, four phoenixes waited for Atarangi. She suddenly hoped for their health, left alone without their human flock-leader or whatever they considered Atarangi.

  “The others are minding our Yam home,” Atarangi explained for Esha's sake. “And they're tending my plants, since phoenixes have such a way with a garden.”

  It was a picture Esha simple couldn't imagine. Not for lack of seeing clever phoenixes — just for wondering where the hell Atarangi grew anything in such a mostly-ordinary Yam home. Rooftop winged away through the rain-darkening clouds, and Esha resolved to ask him where the plants were secreted away in Atarangi's Tselayan life. In her side room, maybe. Or somewhere more clever than that.

  When Esha looked to Clamshell, there was a wondering shine in her eyes.

  “A flock of six?” she asked. “All wing-sure, all white-blaze-blooded?”

  “They are,” Atarangi said proud.

  “I've met some of them,” Esha added. “They, aah ... seem like fine birds.”

  With considering crests, Clamshell resettled her wings. She turned one direction on her perch, then another, like her whims were changing.

  “I will show you,” she decided then, a choice spat like relief. “Kin, follow this way. You red-gather and spark-kindle; you should meet my chick.”

  Clamshell led them through charred pines with grey soil at their feet, and past rocky sand with stones lancing up, heavenward. Up a hillock's faint-worn path and into a stand of leafless, brown bamboo. There were cut stumps standing knee-high; Esha parked the wheeled pack against one of them before she sat.

  After flying up high and wheeling twice, Clamshell landed and gave a low croak of explanation: “They won't claw-dirt-disturb this place. Green draws green: this is why I chose it.”

  With no pause for questions, she faced the dead bamboo and began to sing. It was a creaking-voiced song with a binding beat too vague for Esha to grasp, a line of phoenix words arranged to make a mosiac of a tune. As she pressed her whole head's worth of kudzu lungta, Esha managed to match Grewian to it: beige, cream yellow, honey. All colours — Clamshell was singing a list of colours, more finely distinguished colours than Esha's human tongue could describe.

  Atarangi shifted close enough to clasp Esha's arm, tight with excitement; maybe one of her known languages had the right words.

  Clamshell stopped when her colour-song reached daylight yellow hues. She canted her head, and listened. Whistling answered her — a smaller whistling than any wind could make.

  There in the bamboo's papery base — where Esha had looked two heartbeats ago and noticed nothing — was a squirming bundle of motley brown feathers. A head stretched out, squinting black-glass eyes like its mother's, and at a touch of Clamshell's beak it gaped a seeking mouth.

  This was a phoenix chick, the thing Esha had never seen, never even considered to exist. She might have walked past dozens of these hidden in plain sight. Crafty birds. She helplessly smiled, watching Clamshell chose nuts and greens from her stringfeathers to fill that beak with.

  “Rooftop looked like that,” Atarangi murmured by Esha's ear, “when I first came upon him.”

  That was no cure for Esha's smiling problem.

  They sat, at Atarangi's suggestion and Esha's legs' insistence. Lungta food disappeared down the chick's scrawny throat, gulp by gulp until it closed its cavernous mouth and looked, blinking, to Esha and Atarangi.

  “These two, they are humans,” Clamshell said. She shuffled her feet in the leaf rot. “They are kin of our new ally—“ she said with a beak-drawn line in the air, a scribbled approximation of Rooftop's name shingle, “—and the knot tightens now to make them our kin.”

  The chick kept staring, and blinking. It looked as bleary as Gita after a night's smoking and gossiping; that thought was plenty warm but it evaporated as feathers lifted off the chick's head. Not full, expressive crest fans yet, but still a question piped in a silent voice.

  “The blood-hot words I said at humans,” Clamshell began, “are sometimes true. Only some humans. Some orange-bind and yellow-sparking-share.”

  She picked the chick up in her beak, set it on her back like a shawl too small to wear, and she walked on meticulous steps toward them.

  “This way,” Clamshell said. She sounded more tired, suddenly, than Esha ever had after a day in the fields. “I move him like water, ever-shifting. To withered-dun-brown trees for shelter.”

  “That's fine for keeping rangers and plant poachers away from him,” Esha said. “But any person coming to cut fuel for their fire ...”

  “Clamshell, my kin.” Atarangi reached into her cloak and produced herb candies, bittersweet morsels to match h
er words. “Your son is a treasure and he should live in a verdant-calm home. Please, tell us who these enemies are, and why they want so much lungta.”

  “Water-snakes,” Clamshell said. It burst from her like a cannon shot and hot confession followed: “Water-snakes! They purple-swim under the earth, they watch every wingbeat I make. This land, this territory, they're taking it by fading-cooling sparks!”

  That did sound like water serpents, Esha thought. And as she looked at the bamboo stems all around, a shudder flensed down her back.

  “Wait,” Atarangi said, “they're watching your every — They're watching you with their eyes?”

  Clamshell bobbed hard. “Water-eyes in holes — they rise from the earth when no-kin watches.” Shuffling, turning to touch her chick's downy head, she added, “Maybe blue-green serpents watch this shelter-gathering, and hear these flame-words ... Redden it. Redden everything, no more silence from me. You-kin will have my truth.”

  They scraped a fire pit into the sand and stones, and lit a handful of twigs and green pine; the smoke would guide Rooftop to them. There in a grove of wilted things, Esha listened as Atarangi sifted Clamshell's words.

  She and her mate worked this plateau's wilds, two phoenixes matched like a pair of striking-rocks and just as glorious when they worked fire together. They had seeds and stalks planted in the winter soil, and yearling bushes ready to blossom: a supply of nourishing lungta food for the egg they bore and hatched.

  Until one day, her mate didn't return from seed-foraging. This was a provision of any phoenix's life: flames leaped bright only until they faded.

  “Umber and azure to your heart,” Atarangi said, blanket-soft. “It must be trying, without him.”

  “I can feed my own flame. I could feed my young one with this territory that is mine. But these most recent season-fragments, the earth shakes and the lines move, always moving ...” Clamshell tossed her head low, like a human might spit. “The shaking and the water-flows rearranging — maybe these brought the serpents.”

  Rooftop arrived, crying a dawn greeting as he glided to earth. He was so laden with herbs in his stringfeathers and twine-wrapped shoulders, and burdened by the clay pot of sprouts in his claws, Esha wondered that he had flown at all.

  But all of them, human and bird alike, took a rejuvenating moment to chew shared lungta foliage. When one leaf snapped in Clamshell's beak, the phoenix chick gaped his own .

  “He knows which cart brings his rice,” Atarangi laughed. “Let us mind the little one, kin Clamshell. Please, take some green-bracing food and continue giving us your story.”

  She crest-flexed and considered it. She stuffed a bouquet of green into the chick's mouth. And after a glance around — lingering on Esha too long to be a compliment — Clamshell shrank with resignation. She put her chick on the ground, careful as though he might tip over and break. The moment Clamshell reached for herb, her child stood on scaly, elastic stubs that passed for legs and tottered toward Rooftop. Fine choice of playmate, Esha thought.

  Still watching — always watching — Clamshell ripped and swallowed the green-frilled edges of a pak choi leaf.

  “You think the earth-shaking and water-flowing brought the serpents?” Atarangi prompted her.

  With a drawn breath and a rueful pause, Clamshell kept speaking.

  The serpents appeared first in her waterways, she said. Ponds, and the Millworks's fish-lakes. They stole germinating things from Clamshell's burned gardens — and she related it with her feathers rising, with a hotly returning spite.

  But that was ordinary for a phoenix, to lose a leaf one day and a seed the next. Ordinary to glimpse a sinuous shape in the water's shadows. For a time, Clamshell ignored them and kept her chick well away from water's banks. Soon, the serpents began rising more menacing in her territory — up from the ground.

  “Did they rise near bamboo?” Esha asked: she couldn't contain her need to know.

  “Some cloud-sky times? Yes and no?” Clamshell clacked her beak and kept on.

  “Humans just— We say they rise near bamboo.” Esha resolved to hold her tongue from then on.

  The serpents rose, in any case, and they spoke to Clamshell —spoke in a clicking she didn't understand until she had eaten most of the leaves off a kudzu one day. The serpents wanted her territory. Her land and all its troves. If she left without resistance, there would be nothing for her to fear.

  “Good grace,” Atarangi murmured,”I've never heard of such. Humans pushing phoenixes out, or other birds, but never this. They wanted your lungta reserves?”

  “Steel-grey surely! They came stealing my garden-plants,” Clamshell huffed. “Stealing and stealing until I became red-white one day. A serpent reached for my wing-line-tree, tried to steal! Violet hues toward my wing-line-tree!”

  “Ginkgo,” Atarangi added for Esha's sake.

  If Esha had a precious ginkgo tree that someone tried to steal from her, she knew she would defend it, too. Maybe even from an underground beast.

  “So I struck at the filth-snake. Tasted green-blue-foul. The serpent left my tree but they still return. One wears my stricken-mark and all demand in ice-black-colder voices. Give, they say. Give or they will raise water. A purple and metal-strike, that is its nature! Maybe snakes will raise all the water, maybe they devour all land. I worry; I wind-burn because I don't know.”

  “Raise all the water?” Atarangi rubbed under her mask, head shaking with the enormity of it. “In your territory? I don't know that a serpent could—“

  “I've heard tell of a serpent large enough to encircle a fieldfellow's house and swallow it whole,” Esha said. “Plenty of stories about their teeth like shovel blades. Nothing about raising water.”

  Humming, Atarangi considered that. “But we can't say for certain. And if they're paid an amount of lungta-plants ...”

  “They will leave my territory,” Clamshell snapped. “They have to. For all the sun-risings and sun-settings in my shine-kindled-life, this land is mine. But I speak this truth greater-leaping now, with my mate in dark-brown and my chick orange-rising.” She looked to Atarangi and to Esha — proud, ruffled and defiant. “Grey, like slate. I dig my claws into this earth.”

  In the calm of that thought, Atarangi blew a long sigh through her teeth. She considered Rooftop preening the chick's down into a same-looking mess, and Esha sitting on the things a diplomat could afford.

  “I will try talking to these serpents. Find out what they want of your territory, exactly, and try to negotiate a price you can give without smothering your flame.”

  “Paying them a fair price?” Esha said. The avalanche of stealing and retaliation was growing out of control, far beyond one fieldwoman's portion in life. “Cowshit. All of it. These serpents don't deserve one pine nut.”

  Atarangi held her own opinions behind her teeth, though it looked like they fought to get out. “I'll talk to them. If they speak any tongue that lungta can sift into, I'll bargain the price down — low enough that it doesn't need to include Esha's iron-tool.”

  That was the kernel of this; Atarangi hadn't forgotten. Esha could only nod.

  “Now,” Atarangi said, “where can I find these serpents? They're listening everywhere, I know — but where can I find them?”

  The fire withered away into its own ash while plans were made. Clamshell added pine sticks yanked from a treetop and them lit anew, with showers of sparks from her iron and pyrite; her chick watched, entranced.

  “Small-kept fires make the earth better for seed-nourishing.” she told him. “And they white-hot-frighten our enemies, and call orange-kin to one place. Humans use small-kept fire. Circled grey with rocks. They need the heat on their brown-skin.”

  “I light a small-kept fire every day, for Morning Sky to red-hot-cook our food,,” Rooftop agreed.

  They spoke of humans like inscrutable pets, like dogs to be brushed. Esha considered speaking on behalf of her own dignity — but then Clamshell stalked to her side and set the chick in her lap.r />
  “Precious One, I put my kin in your sight. Have yellow and red twined: vigilance.”

  Her gaze turned up at Esha was hot as pouring tin; the chick was weightlessly delicate. Esha agreed, and gathered the soft, brown thing into her nested hands. “You can trust me with him.”

  It was enough to patch over any hate Clamshell still had, because her crest feathers settled to calm. She turned away in a dragging circle of stringfeathers and tied her iron and pyrite back into her possession. The chick would have to get a set of striking rocks when he was grown, too. Esha had never considered it before, where phoenixes' striking tools came from: they seemed like mere facts of being, like gwaras' teeth and yaks' tails.

  With the wheeled pack full of provisions, and a fire's heat, and Atarangi's dagger that would serve better than Esha's snapped excuse for a khukuri, Esha was left there with a phoenix chick to hold. Atarangi left with the adult phoenixes. Off to set some mad precedent of diplomacy that she wouldn't be able to officially report, anyway.

  And with that, Esha was left alone in the forest with a child. A child not hers and not even human. Not that she would have known what to do with a child if it were human — and this, she told herself steely, was a line of thought that needed to stop.

  The chick stared up at her with simplicity in its eyes. With a twitching of budding muscles, it raised crests in what might have been a question.

  Talk to him, the others had said. What did she have to talk to this small creature about? What would any human?

  “Hail,” she stammered to it, with all the lungta she could push out on her breath. “Yaah, I mean, dawn yellow.”

  The chick creaked, one note that the lungta grasped at and couldn't match one meaning to. Maybe he couldn't speak, or didn't want to speak, Esha wondered; his voice sounded like a pump chain too rusty to flex.

  Then, she supposed, maybe he would like songs. Hymns and folk-songs were a language all people spoke, after all. Every Janjuman worker sang the same songs on Rama's Day, even the fieldworkers who needed betel to speak any Grewier at all.

  Gathering her nerve — which was trying to dig down into her gut and hide — Esha hummed a line of her favourite sky-praise hymn. It took the chick's attention, clearly enough: he stretched toward her, like trying to get closer to the music.