Wind, and her own pulse, and a distant thrush calling.
Esha looked back to her notched bamboo, mustered her strength to raise her striking rock, and then it came again. Clicking — in a pattern she nearly recognized.
There was a face under an upheaved patch of earth. Eyes with whites, and a water-green snout. Barbels like the straggled roots the serpent wore on its head. If there was a water vein under this ground, it couldn't have been wider than this serpent's body but here it was, watching her, close enough to throw the rock at.
The serpent clicked, its white teeth flashing. “Greeting: this one extends a request!”
Lungta rushed in Esha's ears, from some plant born of water and rustled by cave wind. It was hailing her. Gods, she was cutting bamboo and a serpent was rising from the earth to hail her, and Esha knew it was tactless to think but she wondered if she was about to be snatched into the deeps.
“W-wait,” Esha said, She was no diplomat, no skilled animist regardless of Atarangi's compliments, and she certainly couldn't interpret other tongues without betel. Even if the serpent was using lungta. She simply needed betel.
After a moment of digging through the pack and swallowing half-chewed lumps, she looked again to the serpent. It waited, packed there in its earthen channel, watching her with nail-head eyes.
“Aah,” Esha sputtered. “Alright. Hail to you.”
Half-hidden by soil, its barbels twitched. And the serpent flinched, and shifted something Esha couldn't begin to see, and it pushed its head out of the soil crevice. Two blue-dappled fins popped free and a dozen various-sized barbels with it.
“Query: that one is associated with the landholder phoenix-bird resident to this area?”
“Me?” It was a stilted mess of a question, but still aimed right at Esha. “I-I am, yes. Associated with a phoenix-bird.”
Its fins waved, its eerily pale mouth opening like a crude-drawn grin. “Jubilance! This one has located the other!”
“W-well, if you were looking for me—“
“Hail, there?” came a man's voice behind Esha.
Her heart leaped against her breastbone; she tried to turn on her planted, aching joints and twisted too far over, falling onto her rump.
There on the faint-trod path stood a young man — Grewier, thin as a whip, wearing a millworker's caste sigil and wide eyes. He carried a sheathed khukuri and a sack bigger than he was.
“I heard a voice. Is everything alright, mother?”
Caught talking to a serpent, caught with animism lungta still on her lips. But the young man stared only at Esha. She chanced a look behind her; the earth clump was replaced. Only a few torn roots —and the protruding green tip of a single barbel — showed that anything was amiss.
“Yes,” Esha blurted. “Yes, I just— I saw a lungta mote that reminded me of my own mother. Thought I'd say hello to her.”
“Oh,” the young man said, brightening awkward like he didn't smile often. “I see. Heaven isn't far away, I'm told.”
“I am as fine as I can be. Thank you, child.”
“Apologies for scaring you,” he said, and he kept on.
With her heart still deafening in her ears, Esha turned back to the serpent's hiding-hovel. She lifted her blade remnant and stone to the bamboo. “Hey. Hail. That human is gone.”
Gradually as dripping paint, the earth clump lifted. The serpent peered out. “Statement: that-other-one is leg-walking at a bearing ( )-( ). Theory: it vacates this place.”
Esha couldn't sort out the directions: they felt too similar to up and outward to make any sense on a compass. But still, the serpent knew a surface dweller's actions. More than Esha's eyes could possibly tell past the thickets. “You can tell where he's going? How?”
“Simplicity, simplicity.”
Too simple to see the stranger approaching in the first place, though. Esha sighed, “Maybe you should pay more attention, serpent-ally. You'll get us discovered by other humans.”
“Correction: this-one did not venture here to discuss stranger-ambushes. Or instigate them.” It tapped its tongue wet against the roof of its paper-pale mouth, a sound ringing with squirming regret. “Statement: this one and that one converse through lungta, at peace.”
“Oh, gods' balls, I'm sorry.” Esha reached for her headwrap, snatching the horn curves underneath. “This covering is rude, isn't it?”
The serpent inclined its head, dirt crumbling onto his snout. “Theory: if on a serpent, similar obscurement would offend. Condition: that one is not a serpent.”
Finally, a thinking creature from the mountain wilds who made sense.
“Correction, correction! No further tangents. A serpent converses with a human this day. Such occurrence inspires this one! Historical precedent transpires!”
Through her building headache, Esha asked “Does it?”
Stretching upward, barbels spilling the serpent chattered, “Statement: these ones make precedent! Introduction: this one is—”
His tooth-sounds stopped passing through the lungta's mesh. The serpent gave her syllables — two scrapes and a tap — but Esha couldn't associate it with anything but a janitor's straw broom.
“Xi ...shi ...klak,” Esha tried. “You are ... clean-moving? I don't understand.”
He snapped fins against his body and dropped away, down into his hole with a thump of earth against earth.. Before Esha could wonder what she did wrong, he returned — popping the earth hat back onto his splay-finned head and lifting one of his large barbels in offering.
He held a piece of metal. Warm-hued like copper, and so thin that Esha took it in her fingers carefully, fearing to crumple it.
“Xishiklak,” the serpent repeated.
Light caught in the metal — in pockmarks like stray hammer blows. Esha chilled with amazement; these were too uniform and too meaningfully placed to be clumsy mistakes. No, this was writing — writing far different from any human's ink marks.
The spacing was strange, but meanings glowed in Esha's awareness once she put her lingering breakfast herb lungta toward them.
“Nimble ...?” She couldn't discern what his designation was but this serpent was part of a Triad. “Or should I say Xi-shi-klak?” Try to say it, at any rate.
“Announcement: this one has no preference,” Nimble chattered. “Request: simply address this one at all.”
Though she had never borne such a headache in her entire life — not even hung over, after talking to the yak — Esha was happy, walking back to camp with fuel piled onto the wheeled pack. She hobbled and dragged her way home, to her spot in the wilderness where she could talk to odd-minded friends who wore inhuman bodies. She never had to make up lies for a human again. Esha might know a little peace.
As she approached the camp's smoke plume, Atarangi came to meet her, with worry creased all around her gold eyes.
There was a problem, she said. Clamshell had given some trove goods to the serpents — a good faith gesture, a minimum payment on her fees outstanding.
One of those trove goods was the Kanakisipt khukuri.
Chapter 19
“I did not give your iron-tool away with cloud-grey eyes,” Clamshell said.
The assurance in her voice was worse than any screeching she could have done. Esha said nothing; she kept digging the heels of her hands into the flattened arch of her right foot. The pain there was probably the goat's doing, a pain she could do nothing to sway, but applying pressure there was a trick worth testing.
“The serpents speak a rainwater tongue now, black threats turned to beige words. They wish for speaking-plant; they green-think about forgiving my sins! I had to give a song-gift. Yours was the royal-deepest song.”
“It had to be my khukuri? You've got a farm's worth of foods tucked away in those tree gardens of yours. Why can't I have my chance to retire?”
Esha's voice simmered, rising above a whisper. She looked across the radiant hearth coals to Atarangi's tent, where no one inside moved.
Bes
ide her, Clamshell heard plenty well. She turned away, crests a stiff parody of pride, to preen her chick with the scissor-sharp points of her beak. After a long day of hearing lungta-wrapped words, the chick slept on his mother's back; the preening got no response but to nestle his face deeper into Clamshell's feathers.
“You have no young, Precious One?”
“No,” Esha sighed. “I don't have young. Even if I did, I wouldn't rob others in their name.”
Another silence, stiff with crest movement. Clamshell let out a whistling keen, a fanfare to shame as she watched Esha's working hands.
“Life flies on teal-broken wings. This was one choice-path, only one; I red-guard my decision.” She paused. “If you sharply-need help, Precious One, I owe you my wings. Our trust is white-broken but still, we are kin now.”
“I'll remember that,” Esha said flat.
In the curtain-thick quiet of night, with her back-biting well explained Clamshell should have left. She didn't.
“My chick is yellow-growing, by claw-measures each day. His speaking-feathers comes in. Did Rooftop-kin tell you?”
“No ...”
Clamshell turned, showing her own back with the chick's curled back on top. “In-the-middle of a phoenix's tail, there are two round-tip feathers. Tight together, for orange-holding the fast-rushing wind. Chicks? They have no fire, therefore no speaking-feathers. Grown phoenixes have the strength to fly and to bear words. When speaking-feathers are greening, a chick begins to speak.”
Much as she wanted to resent every feather on Clamshell's body, Esha squinted in the dying firelight. In the centre of Clamshell's forked tail there were two perfect quills, straight and round-tipped and grown as if from the same pore. The chick had a matching pair, budding in the tufted mess on its rump. Two orange nubs of oncoming adulthood.
“He will speak well. He will build-rosy-golden and fly true.”
“Well, at least some good came of it.”
That was enough, a granule of forgiveness for Clamshell to hold in her craw. She croaked resigned and left, walking away into the shadows and then fluttering out of sight.
As for Esha, she bore harder into her seized arch. Her khukuri had been within her grasp; now, it was gone. The options had changed and yet turned more the same than they had ever been.
In the marshy pre-dawn light; Rooftop's tapping beak woke Esha.
“Serr-fents are here,” he rasped.
“Nngh,” Esha replied. “Let me join you. I want to talk to them.”
He trilled, crests bouncing up pleased. They left Esha's tent and hurried to share greens — as Esha realized that she and Rooftop were speaking without one whisper of lungta between them. Maybe there was hope for her animism yet.
Atarangi stood straight-backed in the creeping dawn, her gooseflesh a stark pattern well before Esha arrived beside her. She spoke greenly with two serpents — the huge one Sureness, and a serpent half his size with a blue-dappled snout that looked familiar.
Esha's arrival was a snapped wax seal, an interrupted moment as the serpents regarded her.
“Hail to you both,” she said, and gestured namaste. She couldn't say if the idea of divinity greeting divinity would translate, and the serpents' rank was beyond guessing, but Esha was in no mind for stumbling niceties.
Both serpents flicked their head-fins — the smaller one more vigorous, with his mouth open a cotton-white sliver. Yes, Esha grew sure she knew this serpent, and she said, “I'm pleased to see you again, Xi-shi-klak.”
Trying to pronounce the sounds didn't work and it made her teeth hurt besides — but Atarangi beamed with a golden-held I knew you could. And before them both, Nimble chattered an ecstatic stream of words that Esha's wolfed-down lungta couldn't keep up with. Precedent and ally were in it somewhere.
Sureness, the most hulking creature Esha had ever seen, was beginning to look familiar. Mostly in the way he bent, listening to the entire world of beings smaller than him; he shifted like a half-opened fan when Nimble began to chatter, into a stooped angle made for listening.
When Nimble finished, Sureness kept listening. Possibly to something in his own head, because he soon flicked head-fins — in agreement, said the lungta — and stretched back into a cobra-sure posture.
“Statement:“ he clicked, “after these ones received lungta-goods fourteen pulses ago, they sought amnesty for the landholder phoenix of this region. Proposal: in the shadow of recent events, there are more important matters to be dealt with. Query: are those ones prepared to provide bolstering food?”
“We are,” Atarangi said. And she lifted the jute pouch that held their popped maize supply.
And Sureness left the water, to slither closer and reach a barbel into the bag and lift one popped kernel with fingers' precision. In an even more surreal sight, he put the kernel between white spade teeth and, experimentally, munched.
Amnesty still lodged in Esha's head, though. This hadn't been the first time the serpents described Clamshell as an offender, a breaker of some serpent law. Esha picked her memory for Clamshell's hot words.
“This is maize,” Atarangi said. “It is the seeds of a light-loving grass, cooked on a fire. You may take more, if you wish.”
Staring, scraping that trace of maize over all his teeth, Sureness stared for an inward moment. Then he clicked, “Query: is maize plentiful and easily replaced?”
“Yes,” Atarangi said. “Many humans grow maize. There is enough to share it regularly with others.”
“Request: I want one ( )-flask filled with maize, for our further consideration.”
Warm as wool, Atarangi said, “Yes, of course, we can give you that.”
Esha's first concern was how large a blank-flask was; she couldn't get any meaning from the serpent word, like it was too slippery for lungta to hold. But Sureness produced an object from the rag-looking fronds on the back of his neck — a fluted flask as tall as Esha's hand, made from something that shone like metal or glass or both. From slender neck barbels to the ropy main barbels on his snout, Sureness passed the flask down to set in the fleshy breadth of Atarangi's offered hand.
“Suggestion:“ Nimble clacked, sudden and excited, “give trade goods! Reciprocity!”
With the blank-flask out of his figurative hands, Sureness turned waving fins to the other serpent. It was another flickering that slid past Esha's lungta, some pattern of meanings like accountant's records she couldn't match actual yams to.
“You may consider this maize a gift,” Atarangi offered.
Nimble already dove, tail fin swishing against the pond's surface.
Still standing enormous before them, Sureness waited, looking around the camp clearing like he hadn't seen it before. He bent then — putting his chest barbels against the ground, Esha figured out. Feeling the earth or touching or tasting it; she couldn't have said.
But with Sureness's crocodile snout bent down to her eye level, Esha had a better look at his face. Within the blue dapples of his frog-smooth skin was a line — a slashed scar. Not unlike the one Esha wore on her own face.
The thought of Clamshell as a known rule-spurner made a handful more sense.
Nimble was back, splashing up and out of the water, flowing around Sureness to present a grey lump to Atarangi in an outstretched barbel. Smiling graceful, she accepted it. The lump looked more like caulking pitch than any food Esha had ever seen — but, she chided herself, maybe it just contained an expertly hidden secret.
“Thank you,” Atarangi said. “And please, tell your kind that we are willing to lend aid in more and greater ways. That maize is only one food crop we can obtain.”
It was a large promise. But not an untrue one.
By the fireside, Atarangi turned the grey lump between her fingers.
“Looks like rock-plant,” Rooftop said, blinking intent at it.
Esha grimaced; a distant memory told her that lichen was grainy and she had once swallowed some just to be rid of it. “Do you know what it is? Because I don't.”
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“I think I've eaten this before,” Atarangi said. After a little more staring consideration, she put the lump's edge between her teeth and bit off a speck. “It was dried and salted, but they said it was a cave plant from the high reaches of Tselaya.” Her eyes bolted open. “Language lungta. Best for ... for matching suiting lyrics to a song's melody, I think.” Atarangi hummed a thumping beat like free-galloping feet, and inspiration lit her face. “Yes, this is the very same plant.”
“Song lungta? That sounds expensive.”
Pinching off a larger speck — to put in Rooftop's beak and stop his eager nudging — Atarangi hummed agreement. “This is what they gave us in exchange for a rupee's worth of maize. They're either generous with their trade offers, or serpents have access to plants we call luxuries.”
“Clamshell-kin said the serpents want to water-cover her land to make more cave-space. Or more river-space.”
“Are,” Esha asked, “you saying they can grow crops?”
“Why not?” Atarangi turned a smiling look to her. “Phoenixes cultivate.”
“They grow small garden plots, at best.” To Rooftop, Esha added, “No offense meant.”
He ruffled a little — probably more for Clamshell's honour than his. She had been a present ghost in the trees today, not that Esha had any plans to bite down on her words.
“Still,” Atarangi said, “If serpents cultivate any amount of lungta plants, I'd be glad to establish moderate-scale trade with them. It'd make negotiations of all kinds easier if I have more to work with than Clamshell's troves and my own pockets.”
Shaking her head, Esha said, “Yaah, you want to talk to every creature on legs, don't you?”
“Not at all — squid don't have legs.” Rising, Atarangi said, “I'm going to fill the water pail. If serpents return with news, do let me know.”
Chapter 20
The next time Sureness and Nimble surfaced, they clicked about permissions and protocols and a context of circles that Esha couldn't get grip on. Atarangi and Rooftop took care of the rest of the negotiations; that was why Esha hired them.
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