“Well? Good enough?”
He chirped, chain-rusty.
Well, then, Esha thought while she retied her sari to better nestle a bird inside. If he liked songs, he was going to get songs.
The time passed quicker than Esha anticipated. There was ample dry bamboo to be cut for fuel — although Esha tapped careful on each stem before she cut, too fearful to chance a hollowheart. She scrubbed the cookpots until they gleamed clean; she fried chapattis and popped maize for future quick devouring; and she roasted yam pieces to poke into the chick's gaping beak.
The whole time, every song she knew fell from her lips. It was like she wasn't alone.
Sunset coloured the sky, warm and heavy. Esha stacked another tower of bamboo sticks while she gave in and sang High Plateau songs.
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
“Sounds like purple-human words.”
Esha choked, and she whirled to find Clamshell standing not a stone's throw behind her, the cunning feather-rat.
“Gods' assholes! Don't surprise me like that!”
Atarangi came up the worn path, Rooftop perched across her shoulders. “You truly need to stop cursing in front of impressionable birds, Esha.”
“Yaah,” was all the response Esha graced that with. “Did you find serpents?”
“We caught glimpse of one in deep pond-water. Too murky to see how large it really was but I don't believe it could swallow anyone's house.” Atarangi took a chapatti and bit deep into it, as well as holding up cold yam pieces for Rooftop to snatch joyful. “But it showed itself after we called out all manner of hails and offers. You're singing truth, good fieldwoman. “
Removing the chick from her sari — and missing his living warmth immediately — Esha placed him before his mother's blade-sharp stare. The chick rasped greeting and leaned stumbling into his mother's chest feathers, which blunted Clamshell's staring at Esha only a little.
“I kindle first sparks of gratitude to you, Precious One. But you sing untruth. Water-snakes spoke black fangs at my territory and they want the food pale-blue-wrenched from my chick's mouth. For them, no grace-voiced bargains.”
“My kin,” Atarangi replied, “Please remember: you might not have a choice.”
Chapter 16
Atarangi spent another day setting out into Clamshell's territory, flanked by phoenixes. She came back to Esha's hot dinner, weary but bearing plenty more ideas.
The serpents might well be everywhere: they had underground water veins to rise from. Atarangi touched Esha's borrowed spade where it hung on her tool-sash, and told of the wet soil they had found in the places Clamshell recalled seeing snakes' faces. If they squeezed through those muddy passages — to menace a phoenix or to snatch hard-grown plants — they could appear and disappear at will.
“It'd explain why the yankvines grow so plentiful here,” Esha said. “They like deep-drawn water.”
“I have noticed the yankvines. They're woven thick as canvas in some places. Not directly over the water veins, though; that doesn't follow at all.” Humming as she stored that thought for later, Atarangi went on, “But when the serpents wish to speak to Clamshell, they surface in the same particular pond, a quarter kilometre from here.
“When water snakes wish to air-clear speak,” Clamshell added bitter, “or when water snakes black-venom-fill with threats for spitting.”
With a regretful twist of her mouth, Atarangi said, “A puddle is better for swimming than dry sand: you're fortunate they'll speak at all to you. I only wish they'd extend such grace to me.”
Esha turned her hands skyward. “They haven't devoured you, or dragged you down into the mountain's depths. That's more than I'd have expected.”
Crests rising tentative, Rooftop plucked at Atarangi's sleeve. “Kin, maybe ...” He cackled to himself, words tumbling untranslateable. “You arrived few days ago. Maybe you are approaching them too rushing-fast.”
“You think so? I might try a wait-and-welcome response?”
“Ah, yes, that could work,” Esha said. “Like on Yam. You're the masked foreigner, folk whispered about you — but now that you're a known presence, farming caste come to you as they need. Actually, I came to you because I needed something strange.”
“Mm, I see. These serpents might be as frightened of humans as other humans are.” Atarangi laughed with the sore truth of it. “Very well. Rooftop, Clamshell, here is our plan for tomorrow. I'll stay back from the speaking pond, and I'll hold my words. Rooftop, you ask the serpent to speak with me. We'll see how we ultimately fare.”
That next day, Atarangi returned with the last gold of sunset and she sank to sit by the fire, limp as linen. Rooftop pressed to her side as though he might prop her upright; Clamshell gazed at her with something like regret before reclaiming her chick.
“How did the plan work?” Esha asked.
“Talked to one today,” she murmured . Even when she spoke hushed, she still enunciated, still the clear and functional words of a diplomat. “You were right, they didn't like me so near to the water's edge. You and Rooftop had the same clever thought.”
“You don't look well, sister,” Esha said. She brought Atarangi rice topped with yam-filled dumplings, leaning on the bamboo pole she had cut for herself; walking was becoming her greatest chore of all.
Atarangi accepted the bowl in both hands. She was quiet for a moment, with the sticky motions of a throat reluctant to work. Wind chattered the treetops; Clamshell trilled with her chick.
“I did speak with the serpents,” Atarangi said. “Never in my life have I needed so much lungta.”
Understanding dawned on Esha, a memory of every bitter speaking herb that had ever tasted like a risk to swallow. “You've been eating the potent ones? Losing the stomach for them?”
Humming answer, Atarangi pinched rice into a round mouthful. She chewed like the rice might betray her, and then shared her thoughts:
“I've never reached my own limit before. The most potent herbs are rare and elusive for good reason, but these next days trying to unwind serpent speech...” She shook her head. “I'll simply need to use as much as I can endure.”
She made it sound like a poison. But then, Atarangi did say that everything was poisonous if a person ate too much.
“What did the serpents say?” Esha asked. “I hope it was worth sickening yourself for.”
“Serpent speech ... It's like three tongues at once. I'm asking them for negotiations and trying to sort out the answers I'm getting in return. They aren't enthused about negotiating, I know this much: they would rather just have the contents of Clamshell's territory.”
“Watersnakes have no morning-orange ears,” Clamshell added. “Only indigo claws.” She was sitting with her chick by the fire, leading him in some knot-tying game with pieces of yankvine.
With a tightening of her mouth, Atarangi gathered another reluctant pinch of rice. “Rooftop. We— We need to understand the serpents' language. Actually understand it with our own heads. I can't eat so much herb every day — particularly the Zhong goldthread, nngh.”
“Tell Precious One! If you move the word ideas enough to teach-tell her, you can teach-tell yourself.”
Pinning their hopes on Esha's understanding was a far reach to make; she was still trying to sort out the crowd of meanings every time a phoenix mentioned the colour brown. “I'll listen,” she offered, “but I can't imagine I'll understand much.”
“No, no, it's fine if most of this falls through your fingers — I'll still benefit from the effort of it. Rooftop, that's a well-founded plan, my friend.”
Swelling proud, Rooftop creaked a gleeful sound, then took one of Atarangi's yam dumplings for himself.
“Alright,” Atarangi said, putting the bowl aside anyway, “I need something to scratch with.”
W
ith a stick shaved off from fuel bamboo, Atarangi drew in flat-swept soil for wordless moments. First, a snake shape that Esha expected. Then a multitude of smaller scribblings, lines and waves radiating outward from the snake. Finally, when the drawing looked more like a vine full of leaves than an animal, Atarangi straightened.
“So.” Reaching into a mask eyehole, she rubbed her eye hard as though it was to blame. “This is a water serpent. Humans call them serpents, distinct from snakes such as tree snakes or vipers. The phoenix word calls snakes and serpents one family. But for our purposes, the words water snakes and serpents are two sides of the same coin.”
Esha had gathered that idea days ago. She held her sharpening tongue; the phoenixes all listened intent and there couldn't be enough common words for them to use.
“The serpents,” Atarangi pushed from her mouth, “they speak with their bodies. All living things do. But when these serpents are speaking with sounds, it's ... Well, try to imagine this, Esha: a serpent has fins on the sides of its head.”
“Where is the head?” Esha couldn't look at the lines and see anything but an uprooted yam plant.
“Right here. These fins on the sides of their faces seem to be for expressing broader forms of opinion. A sort of— Like the edges of our mouths. Or a phoenix's sidecrests. But not always. In some cases, these barbels can—“
“The what?”
“Barbels. The whiskers on a fish?” Atarangi made combing motions with her fingers, drawing long shapes away from her tattooed chin. “Have you ever seen a catfish?”
“Not a whole one, no.” Catfish showed up in Janjuman's winter stews, diced as even as anything else. It had a more agreeable texture than most water-meat and that was all Esha knew.
Atarangi nodded at this new burden. And, slowly, she drew a breath that looked like a prayer.
By the time the cooking coals died to ash, Atarangi had taught Esha a bizarre assortment of words for fish and their distinctions. She then touched the bamboo stick to her barbel-faced sketch of a water serpent and grasped at an explanation of their expressions, their gestures, their impenetrably woven ideas. When Atarangi said the serpent tongue was like three languages at once, she meant it: they fin-gestured about their barbels' motions, and clicked teeth to describe their fin gestures, and all of it in what seemed like a wary, wordy tone.
It clashed against everything Esha knew — or thought she knew, in her ever-pivoting life — about water serpents. Creatures who rose from the unseen depths, summoned like demons. Creatures who grabbed the vulnerable and dragged them beneath. Thinking creatures with a body-flicked vocabulary that Atarangi, the most worldly diplomat Esha had ever known, couldn't seem to match.
“Gods help us,” Esha murmured.
“I'll take your gods' help gladly,” Atarangi sighed. “The serpents don't speak any throat sounds similar to human tongues, or phoenix cries. The strangest part is that this braided language isn't what the serpents were speaking to Clamshell, when they appeared to her with demands or threats. They used tapping teeth and an occasional fin gesture: she understood perfectly well as long as she had a little green leaf in her stomach.”
Serpents were ambushing thinking creatures and speaking to some of them in elaborate riddles — only some of them. Confusion twisted Esha's mouth farther. “What does that mean?”
Atarangi was shaping sounds of her answer when Clamshell shrieked.
“Alarm!” She lunged to pick up her chick, before shrieking again: “Water-snake!”
“What?!” Atarangi jumped to her feet, scanning the darkness outside the fire's glow.
Esha looked, too, at the pine trunks and the leaf litter standing stark around them but there were no snakes' eyes, no fins.
“Break their wings,” Clamshell huffed, ember-eyed in a tree's shadows, “They black-stalk us!”
“Kin,” Atarangi said, “where?”
Clamshell hesitated, claws gripped hard against her perch. She picked up her chick and set him in the fork of the branch — where he settled into the crevice like caulking pitch — before gliding across the camp site, into the shadows.
“Here,” she spat, tossing clumps of dry pine needles with her beak, “here, the water snake was silent-purple watching! It fled into deep-teal-earth when I raised alarm. Puking thugs!”
“Clamshell, please.” Atarangi went to her, hands spread as if to hold but hovering cautious. “This is good!”
Huffing, open-mouthed, Clamshell glared sightless into the night. She pecked vicious at the needled ground and with that strike, her huffing began to quiet.
“I would white-tear their eyes,” she said, “I would give green-broad piles.”
Clamshell's gaze caught Esha's for an instant before she tore it away, crests deflating. At least she had the grace to feel guilty.
“I know this has been hard, my kin,” came Atarangi's voice of reason. “Fire brace your spirit. But I believe the serpents do warm-wish to negotiate, at least a little. If they didn't, they wouldn't surface at all in my presence. Why would they indulge me if not to talk?”
Clamshell stared more at the unanswering ground.
“I think,” Atarangi said, turning her masked face back to her other kin, “that we should move our fire site nearer to the pond. Fruit close at hand is soon picked and eaten: if we're close by their favoured water source, the serpents will overhear more of our discussions, our turns of phrase. That's never a hindrance to understanding someone.”
“Good thought,” Rooftop said — murmured and meek but not crying. “And we can walk-journey less.”
“I will not,” Clamshell spat. “I will not follow. This, it is black-soaked wretched.”
“You don't need to follow us, kin. Keep your chick safe. We'll handle this.” She turned to Esha, looking pale under her mask and under the firelight. “Esha? Will you come closer to the serpents?”
“I recall signing a contract that I would aid your negotiations. No sense in refusing now.”
She had signed those papers with a false name, Esha recalled late. But Atarangi smiled anyway.
At first light, Esha limped on both legs by Atarangi's side, the two of them moving camp toward the pond. It was a clay-edged pool at the mountain's face, stretching worldedgeward like it tried to be a river and couldn't manage the strain. Up-mountain meltwater trickled to feed the pool — and between two boulders settled against each other, a tunnel opening led into the wet, reflecting dark. It looked like the sort of corridor that would draw things up from the deep, Esha thought with a chill.
They were laying new hearth fire rocks when tremors began, an earthquake that forced Esha and Atarangi again to their hands and knees. It lasted the span of one held breath but the sound of rocks grinding and settling in the water made it feel all the more powerful.
Their small tribe was well, Atarangi hurrying to help Esha back onto her rickety knees, Rooftop drifting down from his safe cloud cover. The mountain still stood. There was nothing to be done but light a fire and put on breakfast rice.
Esha was gathering sesame seeds and tsupira leaf into a bite of rice when Atarangi hissed — urgent and expressive. When Esha looked, she tilted her head toward the pond.
It looked ordinary at first. Glassy green surface with clumps of floating dust. Wavering reflections of boulders. Lungta drifting into the mirror surface, flecks of blue and gold. Then two points cut through it all — two fin tips attached to something fish-shaped and huge. It drifted near the boulders, whipped to the bottom with a roiling splash, and drifted again. It turned, raising black discs of eyes above the lapping water — then it darted into the tunnel opening, away into the mountain dark.
“Was that ...?” Esha asked.
“A serpent,” Atarangi said. “I may have met that one. Their colour patterns are beginning to look familiar.”
Under a jail warden's duress, Esha wouldn't have been able to say what colour that liquid fish-creature had been.
“That serr-fent saw us,” Rooftop chattered. H
is feathers vibrated with excitement, his crests high and glad. “Maybe he will return for meeting Precious One!”
Esha didn't have anywhere else to be. She kept eating her rice, with her gaze pulling to the empty water.
They didn't have to wait long. The pond roiled with fins within the hour.
And the creature that rose from the water was the strangest Esha had ever seen. Covered in fins and tendrils like a dragon kite, its body rising three metres above the water with a cobra's upright poise, its black pupils round as nail heads. It stood dripping, regarding Rooftop — who stood on the pond shore like a welcoming candle flame — and turned a look to Atarangi and Esha both.
It clicked teeth to Rooftop. A bouncing of its long jaw, white flashing of shovel-blade fangs, and shifts of the spined fins on either side of its jaw.
Esha knew then that she hadn't eaten speaking herb today. Stupid oversight if she was supposed to be understanding. She crept for the wheeled cart while picking words out of Rooftop's door-hinge voice.
“With ( ), my kin sit ( ). They hope to share words and ( ) ( ).”
“( ): more kin?” the serpent clacked.
“Truthfully, yes. This new human woman is named Precious One; she is kind.”
That was a compliment, Esha numbly understood while Atarangi rose beside her. Under her mask, her jaw worked a last wedge of betel.
The serpent's gaze snapped to Atarangi; its fins rose like the hair on a hackling cat.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her words herbaceous with lungta. “We still wish to negotiate with you.”
The serpent stared. It held still as a varnished statue — until its chin barbels wound together like boneless fingers interlacing, and its fins flickered, and its tooth clicks became a rolling scale.
Atarangi paused — a thinking pause, one that grew fear in Esha's belly because Atarangi had to understand, she had to.
Tinder Stricken Page 19