Tinder Stricken

by Heidi C. Vlach

  “That's the way with all humans,” Esha said. “We've all got parts to be covered.”

  “Why, though?”

  Esha had wondered why ten thousand times in her life. She tried to recall the last time she wondered such a thing and found herself travelling back years, decades into the dusty past. It was around the time her heart was scabbed over from the divorce, when the sight of the divorcee flag was ceasing to sting, that Esha Of The Fields gave up and supposed the world was just unfair.

  “We humans can only keep our civilized world if we control our fears, I think.”

  With a bitter sorrow in her mouth, but still with a spark of hope in her eyes, Atarangi asked, “They told you that humans aren't beasts, and they must act as such. By maintaining a haughty boundary, just as the emperor avoids his lavatory janitor.”

  “That's ... I guess that's right.”

  “By the wide waves,” Atarangi said, “I don't understand it. As sure as we're born into humanity, we're going to leave it behind. It's a constant of the world, in any weather, no matter where we're from. Why do the people of this mountain hate other creatures so much?”

  “You might ask my parents.”

  Esha had said too much. But it felt good to say it, to finally spit out the bitter pulp she had held in her mouth all these years, long since chewed but too unseemly to spit out. She might not ever go to market again, might not lie about her name again if Atarangi kept providing so well for her.

  All of that was a night's awful dreaming compared to Atarangi's face — confused but still bright with the shared knowledge. “Six years old, you said? It starts that young for Grewiers?”

  “No.”

  Silence fell. Esha picked through the maize kernels in her palm.

  Atarangi ventured, “How old does a typical—“

  “Adult years. Perhaps twenty, or twenty-five. My horns broke skin when I was seven. There was no record of such early onset in my family line; the physician thought the horn buds might in fact be ingrown goat hair but that proved to be a false hope. It was simply— I was just unfit for my own blood.”

  “Oh, Esha ...”

  “I was moved. Showed no aptitude for leatherwork, so I renamed again and moved again. This time to Yam Plateau. And with that, I was a farming woman. And as much as I cried, I at least began understanding that I had to work if I didn't want to fall any farther.”

  “Would they truly demote a noble-born child all the way down to untouchable? You did nothing to deserve it!”

  “I don't know,” Esha sighed. “It doesn't matter now. I started learning to be a working member of this society, and it must have been good enough. I've been working the soil ever since I was ten years old. Well, until these last weeks when I demoted myself to thieving.”

  Sitting in silence, grasping her own hands like selfropes, Atarangi shook her head. “I knew that Grewiers feared losing their station in life. But that ... Who could put a child to work like that?”

  “Childhood is like a painted vase. It's lovely, but not very useful, and fragile as hell, too.”

  “Well, yes. But breaking it like that can get someone cut.” Atarangi's mouth flattened. “Tselayan humans have their skills and their failings, my friend. I've always found your castes obtuse, and prone to judging people like they're pigs to be cut apart. Pigs are smart creatures, you know that?”

  Esha tightened her mouth, and said nothing.

  “But after hearing what the caste rules have done to you,” Atarangi went on with a firework's passion, “and for no crime of yours, only for your goat trait showing itself early ...”

  “Life is what it is,” Esha sighed. “Maybe I'll be happier as a simple-minded goat, climbing the cliffsides.”

  Atarangi took a handful of popped maize and chewed, watching the sky. Her gaze drifted to Rooftop sometimes, their sentinel by the serpents' pond.

  “I'm trying to change this place,” she finally said.

  “Change?” She couldn't mean this present place, the simple few hectares of wilds that Clamshell called hers. “You're trying to ...?”

  “Gather properties. Small ones such as Gita's, that can pass through many hands without garnering notice. Gather allies who can be my eyes and my tongue.”

  Rooftop, she meant, and phoenixes like him. Rooftop was a treasure to Atarangi's cause — partly because at that moment, he stood at the pondside while a serpent's nose parted the water.

  “Someday,” Atarangi murmured, scrambling to her feet, “maybe I'll put together a plateau where everyone can live free.”

  Esha could only watch her stride away to join Rooftop, removing her cloak and dropping it careful along the way.

  Again, Rooftop looked like a red crumb, croaking upward to a towering blue water serpent who dripped from every fin. This time, the serpent noted Atarangi's approach — Atarangi bare-faced and bare-shouldered. And it kept clicking in simple rhythms.

  Soon enough, the serpent took its bribe and retreated. Atarangi gratefully put her warm cloak back on, and she and Rooftop left the pondside to report their progress.

  “Well, then?” Esha asked. “They don't like our head coverings?”

  “True,” Rooftop said. “This serpent we meet every time is a ... krrah.”

  Measuring dinner rice into a pot, Atarangi squinted thoughtful. “He's a ... journeyer? Venturer? One who takes a chance by going.”

  “Ffen-chur-rr,” Rooftop decided. He took delight in the difficult word, rolling the burred sounds in his throat. “Venturer serpent does wish to have talk about Clamshell's debt. But he thought you were deceiving him by not showing your skin. Like you were tying tricks and building lies.”

  Esha frowned. “Because he thought we were liars, he was speaking in riddles? Really?”

  “Like the way we spoke riddles,” Atarangi said, quietly realizing, “when we were strangers to each other, trying to trade drugs and ill-gotten property.”

  That truth slapped Esha cold in the face. All the quaint idiocy the two of them acted out, dropping pebbles down pipes and intoning about supplies.

  With uneasy-flexing crests, Rooftop went on, “I told him your coverings are the human way, and you regret any offense given.”

  “I think it'll be alright if we explain that we're keeping warm with most of these things we wear.” Atarangi plucked at the fibre-furred shoulder of her cloak. “I get the impression that serpents don't like the wind or sun, so they should be able to understand our clothing once we explained it.”

  “If I lived underground and liked the dark,” Esha supposed, “I wouldn't care much for glare and gale, either.”

  “There — now you're thinking like an animist.”

  Esha still wasn't sure whether to like that thought.

  Over the next three days, Atarangi stayed by the camp site like she was tied there, preparing her sprouting lungta beans and her bitter herb-stalk cakes, waiting on serpents to break the pond's wind-rippled surface. She wore her mask only sometimes; she sent Rooftop checking for guard patrols and wandering fuelcutters as often as she kept him pondside for translation help.

  “I haven't felt this free in a long time,” Atarangi beamed, touching her beak tip.

  Esha kept her headwrap on, except when serpents were present to take offence. She crept closer to the negotiations sometimes; the serpent regarded her with an undulation of fins, eyed her warm sleeves and sari, and silently permitted her.

  The venturer serpent shared his name with Atarangi. It was a precise grinding of teeth, a rising arryyk sound like the one buildings made under immense strain. Sureness, said Esha's head full of lungta. The serpent sure enough to negotiate was named Sureness.

  Odd name, Esha thought, at the same time she found it an unwavering match: the coiled fish-beast towering over Atarangi's head looked nothing more than sure of himself.

  Atarangi shared news after each meeting. Sureness was one of the serpents watching this territory, the surface territory occupied by the landholder-female phoenix. This p
lace had strategic value for serpentkind. Currently, their kind needed lungta herb and Clamshell was obstructing it.

  “He won't say why their need is especially great,” Atarangi sighed. “I think there's some nuance I'm missing in the way he says needing lungta herb.”

  “Don't poison yourself,” Esha muttered. She dished up a large bowl of rice for Atarangi, the better to buffer anything else she planned on swallowing.

  “I think I'll manage. The translation is coming easier now that he's meeting me partway along. He doesn't seem comfortable discussing Clamshell's involvement in this, though. Which is ...” Atarangi grimaced. “A problem.”

  “Thinks it's none of your business?”

  “Or he's bound by another's rules.”

  Rice lump lifted halfway to her mouth, Esha stared. “Serpent rules?”

  “Rules-of-under — that is what Sureness called them,” Rooftop added. “He called them rules-of-under before, when he disliked your clothing-wrapped faces.”

  Serpents had risen from the depths, to speak aristocratically about how offensive clothing was. What a shock it all would have been to Esha the farmwoman who struggled under ordinary days.

  They were scrubbing the dinner pot, with Atarangi eagerly anticipating one more negotiating session before nightfall, when another earthquake took the land. An earthquake barely enough to sway their balance and slosh the potful of drinking water.

  Maybe an aftershock, Esha hoped. Maybe the month of heaving land was finally over.

  But Sureness didn't appear in the pond that night. And he was absent the next day, too.

  Chapter 18

  There was nothing to be done for it but stockpile more herb, refill the tea and butter reserves, and wait. Atarangi put her mask back on and asked Rooftop to mind the camp — while she brought Esha to market. Pulling her on the wheeled pack to spare Esha's worsening knees, like hauling a sick yak to the veterinarian.

  It was the kindest thing anyone but Gita had ever done for her. Esha held that truth warm against her heart, even while stifling her smile at the looks passers-by gave them. A diplomat was, against all things decreed and decent, bending her back to pull a low-caste on a cart. How nobility would grip their brocade collars at the sight. At least, Esha thought, this arrangement was somewhat proper: she was following behind Atarangi.

  Millworks's market district brought her no joy, though. Brick piles marked where buildings used to stand; roofs sagged into jumbled walls. The alleys around the market were a forest of fabrics strung into tents. If the money hadn't been present to build quake-resistant homes, surely it would be slow in coming to rebuild.

  At the market checkpoint, guards noted Atarangi and Gita's names into the records and turned immediately back to an engineering overseer, a headwrapped man who gripped a task sheet with pale knuckles.

  To her credit, Atarangi paid generously for what she bought.

  “The spiral road must be in shambles,” Esha said, on the way back. Underneath her, the pack wheels weren't squeaking anymore; Atarangi, in her wisdom, had bought and used a vial of mineral oil on them. “Anyone willing to climb spires will make coin in times like these.

  Atarangi hummed, her voice low and strained with effort. “I wonder if Sureness is experiencing the same difficulty human beings are.”

  Esha nearly spoke, but yanked her mouth shut. Reactions balled together inside her and anything she said would have been poor representation.

  “Serpents move through waterways, after all,” Atarangi went on, “and we can't begin to say how much damage these earthquakes have wrought underground.”

  “Water always finds a way through,” Esha tried. She didn't like how that sounded, faltering in her own voice. “I don't mean to wish spite on Sureness or ... or his kind. But what about Clamshell's claim that the serpents were going to raise the water, Atarangi? We ought to be talking about that. Can they summon water from the bowels of the earth?”

  Adjusting the pack straps on her shoulders, Atarangi huffed an unsure sound. “Have you ever heard tell of such a thing?”

  “You don't need to mock me.”

  “No, I'm not! Tselayan folk say that serpents appear on the surface to snatch. It seems that they do: they want our lungta-rich plants, and they surely need to hurry back into safe quarters after taking any. Tselayans say that serpents are drawn by deeps. That seems true, too; Sureness comes swimming up from somewhere in that pond's recesses.”

  “And through water veins. I can't get my mind around how that's possible.”

  “How what's possible?”

  “A monstrous — monstrously big, I mean — thing like Sureness wriggling up through fonts we can't even see flowing. Most of them are just damp earth! But he does it, somehow, if Clamshell is to be believed.”

  Atarangi turned a sidelong glance over her shoulder, smiling mild and fey like she used to. “Do you believe her?”

  “Yaah, I don't know. She was right about the serpents, and she's got reason enough to fret. But I still feel like she'd turn us in to the guards for two grains of rice.”

  “Not at all — she hates guards more than most other humans.” Raising a hand, stifling her chuckling, Atarangi added, “We shouldn't speak this way about our kin. We only need to keep trying to unwind knots. This is diplomacy, Esha. There are many, many knots sometimes.”

  Though Atarangi couldn't see it, Esha nodded. This was definitely no time for cutting through any tangled strings, if she wanted her plenty-knotted khukuri brought down from the forest canopy.

  Rooftop sang a glad greeting as they returned. He wasn't alone by the hearth pit, though: Clamshell's chick sat with him, his indistinct brownness blending into the swept dirt but his black eyes ever alight.

  “You've got the small one!” Atarangi dropped the pack straps and went to the chick, kneeling and pulling morsels from her cloak.

  “Clamshell-kin has flame-negotiated beside me,” Rooftop said. He stood proud but his crests wavered half-spread. “While you were gone, Sureness has come and left three times.”

  “Oh. We were just wondering about him — is he well?”

  “Well, yes! Blocked from the surface after the earth-quaking, but ...”

  Esha stared for a moment at Clamshell — who sat beside a pine tree overhanging the pond. She brooded over the muskmelon Esha had seen earlier in a treetop — now balanced on her feet, steadied by a wrapped and tied yankvine she held with her beak. She had no words for her returned kin, not even for Atarangi who stuffed treats into her chick's mouth: Clamshell simply stared at the pond's surface, waiting.

  Maybe was irritable about trading her troves away, Esha supposed. Or from dragging the melon around; the fruit had to weigh as much as Clamshell herself did. After watching the pond for a moment, herself, Esha listened again to Rooftop's report on the serpents.

  It was a challenging time for everyone, the summary seemed to be. With the ongoing earthquakes, Sureness's superiors needed lungta-rich plants more than ever; Sureness lacked the permission to say why, either that or he simply preferred staring at surface dwellers.

  “Wait,” Atarangi asked, scratching the phoenix chick's downy ruff, “did he say speaking plants? Or lungta-rich plants?”

  “Any kind,” Rooftop said, his crests spread surprised. “Speaking is good. Moving is good. Serpents want lungta plants, that plain-showing truth.”

  Atarangi hummed. “Clamshell?” she called, her voice gusting with herb, “When you were, ah, first asked for plants, were you asked for speaking lungta?”

  “Speaking lungta always scarlet-shines precious,” Clamshell creaked back. “Regardless, yes. The water-snakes wanted lungta-food for their black tongues.”

  “Their needs have changed,” Atarangi murmured.

  Sitting on flat earth and oblivious to what laid underneath, Esha feared the answer and she asked anyway: “What does that mean?”

  With hands nearly used to the motion, Atarangi removed her mask. “I'll need to speak to them more. Until then, I can
't begin to guess.”

  As the afternoon wore on, their supply of fuel dwindled, the tea-boiling embers receding into their own ash. With Atarangi poised to negotiate and the phoenixes mantled helpful around her, Esha was wordlessly drafted to the job — wheeled pack, walking pole, goat legs and all.

  “Be careful, sister,” Atarangi said regretful. “Don't strain yourself.”

  Esha waved a hand, batting the thought away. “If I'm going to strain something, I'll at least be useful in the process.

  With all the cooking their group was doing, they were straining the bamboo supply by the serpents' pond. Esha had cut most of the thick-grown, dry bamboo — everything that didn't resonate too hollow when she tapped it. She still didn't know whether serpents were actually drawn to hollowheart bamboo; it was a trouble she thought about a lot and hadn't managed to ask about yet.

  Gradually, in a three-part dance between her feet, pole and pack wheels, Esha headed edgeward, south toward the thin stands of bamboo with wind-bent tops.

  It was a soothing day, at least. Strung thin with white clouds; full of rainbow lungta flakes wheeling down from on high; warm as oncoming summer but with enough breeze to lift sweat off Esha's neck. A handful of low-castes walked a ghost of a pathway, away from a distant thicket with bundled fuel under their arms. Esha followed their guide and, after a mere hour's shuffling, came to a stand of bamboo. She drank deep from the wheeled pack's water skin; this was a fine choice of time to give up eating millet. And after careful tapping to choose a bamboo stem, Esha lined up her broken khukuri blade and her striking rock.

  She was just getting a notch going, her arm cocking back for a first hard strike, when she heard clicking. Rhythmic clicking. Like serpent's teeth.

  Esha whipped around. There were no lakes or ponds here, no skythreads within sight. Water veins might have riddled the ground under her feet but she couldn't dig up every pace she took.

  “Hail?” Esha called to the empty air. “Is someone here?”