Tinder Stricken

by Heidi C. Vlach

  They approached a temporary exemption, Atarangi explained over dinner lentils. An invitation to deal with serpent society, despite the indiscretion of being humans.

  “They aren't typically so forthcoming with our kind,” Atarangi said, weighted sad. “Serpents deal with phoenixes, where the two encounter each other. Allowing trade with us seems to involve the bending of phoenix trade rules.”

  “To get my khukuri back?”

  It was a pitiful request and Esha knew it; Atarangi tightened her mouth around bad news.

  “Kin,” Rooftop told her, “your knife has just one song-flower, yes?”

  “A flower worth more than I can pay. But yes.”

  “Flowers wither-die in cold wind. That always happens, every four seasons.” He shuffled to Esha's side, plucking at her shirt sleeve with a gentle beak. “Maybe new flowers will grow; you can pick those.”

  It was true, he was right and Esha hated it with a coolness like a round stone.

  “I haven't made a habit of giving up,” was all she said.

  “We'll try,” Atarangi assured her. “Once we know what circumstances we're even trading under.”

  Word would come within eight pulses, Sureness told them. They were advised to stay in the vicinity of the serpents' pond and wait for word.

  The thought made Esha's imagination take hold. Thoughts of serpents proceeding like nobles, in groups armoured by guards and by authority. If Sureness was any typical serpent size, Esha didn't want to see that; it made her stale old fears glow like hot iron.

  She passed the time helping Atarangi study the serpents' fin language. They sat with heads uncovered, the wind a treat on Esha's skin while she scratched in the dirt, etching out evocations of Sureness and Nimble's piscine movements. Atarangi dug in her cart to produced slightly creased bamboo paper and pine ink, and they wrote their gathered ideas more permanently.

  “Making this your sixth language, are you?” Esha asked.

  “I believe I will. It doesn't seem that anyone else on Tselaya Mountain has a distinction like that.”

  “When you claim that you speak five languages, do folk ever ask you to prove it? I'd like to see you speak serpent for them. Or your squid language.”

  That yanked a laugh from Atarangi, golden and honest. “I'd like that a lot.”

  They were gathering the pages into some semblance of order when movement splashed in the pond. No procession of serpents came out — just a round object floating in the middle of the water, the shape and colour of a potato but glinting like no root could. Rooftop flew out to it with claws ready to snatch but he thought better of committing himself to an unidentifiable object, and instead fluttered laboriously over the thing while he kicked the floating, bobbing thing toward shore. Atarangi bared her feet and waded out to pick it up.

  The object was a glass-like ornament, a glossy bubble of material light enough for Atarangi to turn on lax fingertips. The bubble had a formed loop on its bottom — a fixing point for the paper-thin facet of metal dangling underneath.

  “Oh,” Esha blurted, “a metal sheet. They write on those — Nimble showed me.”

  Atarangi hummed curious, still handling the whole assembly like a porcelain relic while she turned the pockmarked metal to the light.

  “Addressed to— Hold on.” She fished a green sweetmeat from her cloak to chew on. “Addressed to the Human Triad. Triad? I suppose myself and you two?”

  “Triads are like flocks, maybe,” Rooftop said.

  “Such seems reasonable.” Atarangi went on, “These individuals have been granted exemption under ... I think that's a numerical legal precident — At the recommendation of the venturer Sureness of ... something Triad. A musical scale ...?”

  “I'm not paying you enough to translate this,” Esha muttered.

  “I'm inclined to agree. Rooftop? Come here, kin.” She knelt, turning the metal leaf to him. “What do you make of this notation here? Is that music?”

  He stared, and tipped his head, and flexed his crests in considering waves. “Looks like music. Orange-spoken music.” He creaked a string of notes that came together in Esha's ears as Azure.

  “Azure Triad. I hope they don't mind that translation.” Atarangi went silent, her eyes raking along the rest of the text. After a long moment, she said, “The Deepling Community will consider collaboration with the Human Triad, pending security evaluations. Sufficient service to the Community may be rewarded.”

  “With my khukuri's return?”

  “Possibly. Or striking Clamshell's troubles from their record. Maybe possibilities no human has ever laid eyes on.” Atarangi looked up at Esha, a plainly honest look without her mask obscuring it. “Keep your mind flowing like water, sister.”

  Esha did need to stop fussing over something she likely wasn't getting back. She looked at the needled ground, and nodded.

  The water rippled then, and serpent frills broke the pond's surface. Sureness broke first, laying his black eyes on Esha and Atarangi before rising fully. He came to the pond's edge, followed close by Nimble. They represented Azure Triad, it seemed; Sureness was some sort of guardian provider, and Nimble was the triad's heart if not its common sense. That only left the question, Esha realized, of who their third member was.

  She and Atarangi signed namaste to them. The serpents responded with their own hallowed greeting, a vibrating of fins plus a dip of their coiled bodies that was nearly like a bow.

  “Query: those ones received the message?” Sureness asked.

  “We did,” Atarangi said. “We would be honoured by any accomodations your Community can make for us.”

  Leaning onto her less sore leg, Esha gathered her will to speak. “I'd like to ask a question, if I may.”

  “Permission: granted,” Sureness tapped.

  “What are these unusual circumstances you're talking about? Is it the earthquakes ...? We've had a lot, these past weeks — humans' buildings and roadways are damaged from it, so I thought ...”

  She didn't expect the reaction: Sureness's fins all rising like hackling hair, before he turned to Nimble for frenetic fin-signing and clicking and barbel braids. He turned back slow, and stiffer.

  “Statement: those ones must pass security evaluation before the information may be shared.”

  “Suggestion:“ Nimble clicked, peering around Sureness's fins, “full disclosure cannot happen. But I wish to show those ones my project.”

  Sureness held his teeth tight.

  “Suggestion: it would impart a sense of scale? Contextualized?”

  Sureness flicked his smallest barbels.

  “Suggestion: only this one's ( ) lichen.”

  “Permitted,” Sureness said.

  With a garbled, excited clicking along the lines of one moment; I'll retrurn; wait until those ones lay eyes on it, Nimble dove back into the green pond depths. He popped back up a moment later and came to Esha and Atarangi on whip-quick slithering — holding out a dripping chunk of richly blue-purple stone. It was plain greystone encrusted with growing matter, some lichen or fungus in a colour dyemakers would sell their shoes for.

  “Great waves,” Atarangi breathed. Gradually, like asking permission, she laid fingertips on the lichen-thing's crusty edges.

  “Proclamation: this one is assisting with the lungta production,” Nimble chattered. “These root-growings will be held in esteem by the physicians.”

  A bone-chilling scrape came from Sureness's mouth; Nimble wilted like cold-touched petals.

  But still, Nimble had a growing rock to show them, a rock he bent to let Rooftop inspect. With meek, steady toothtaps, he even called an invitation to Clamshell, who alighted in a pondside tree long enough to stare like a polearm blade.

  Staring at the growing rock's violet patterns, Esha couldn't begin to guess where this negotiation was going to lead. All she hoped was that she wouldn't need to walk there.

  Two hours later, Sureness and Nimble returned with a dimpled metal sheet for proof: the Human Triad was permitted
into their underground.

  “Imperative: these ones must descend now,” Sureness said. These ones rang oddly, a broader sense more like we. “The individuals poised to meet these ones have many broader responsibilities.”

  “That's fine,” Atarangi said.

  Esha thought again of gilt nobles, but she nodded.

  Sureness and and Nimble began a procedure then — although what it was, Esha couldn't begin to guess. They slithered around the pond's edges, fish fins dragging like old sacks, and they touched patches of earth with their barbels. They clicked and gestured and used rock-related ideas that an earthreading scholar might have understood. Rooftop followed them through treetops, listening, watching every motion.

  After intense discussion, Sureness and Nimble stood opposite other, under pine trees' canopy. Their concentration strung the air bright like flags: it called Esha and Atarangi's attention even as they tried to load the wheeled pack, as they packed their tarpaulins and belt-holstered tools and other things not needed for diplomatic discussion. The two serpents bent again. They stayed bent, staring, focused.

  Tremors ran through the ground at Esha's feet — unfamiliar ones, motions that reminded her of digging with her own hands even while she braced on hands and knees against the brown-needled ground.

  “Esha,” Atarangi called, “it's our friends' doing! Look!”

  Atarangi must have traded her mind away because she climbed back to her feet and, over the still-shaking earth, she went toward the serpents. They now bent shoulder to shoulder — bent downward where flat ground had just been.

  As fast as her malformed feet and walking pole could carry her, Esha went to the serpents, too. Sureness and Nimble bent, fins quivering, into a tunnel that yawned where solid ground used to be. The tremors grew stronger with every step closer because they were digging somehow, mining without ever putting shovel to earth.

  The shaking stopped after a long moment. Waving their neck fronds, Sureness and Nimble circled away to let Atarangi peer inside.

  “Query: those ones can traverse such an angle?”

  “Esha, look! You too, Rooftop!”

  He dropped onto her shoulder on spread wings — which must have hurt, without her cloak to catch Rooftop's claws, but Atarangi bubbled with too much enthusiasm to care.

  Breathing an oath, Esha joined them both and gazed down into the dark. It was a tunnel graded downward, curving leftways — like their own spiral road carved into the middle of Tselaya.

  “I think we can manage that,” Atarangi told the serpents. “This is incredible! How ...?!”

  Sureness clicked a statement — earth-shifting, it sounded like.

  “Statement:“, Nimble admonished him, “humans are barely capable of earthshifting.”

  “We— We can't do that — move things outside ourselves, that is. Have you ever heard of anyone shifting earth, Esha?”

  “Nothing that the arbiters could confirm.”

  “Yes, precisely. We—“ and Atarangi grasped for words with the furrow of her brow, “we use lungta inside our bodies. For strength in our arms and legs, or for maintaining vigor for long periods of time. We only extend it to speak. Such as right now.”

  Silence from the serpents: they stared, fins minutely shifting.

  “Query:“ Nimble asked, “without earthshifting, how are you capable of cultivation?”

  “Admonishment: we depart. Discuss this in transit.”

  Clamshell refused to join them; she sat watching, hawkish, from the safety of a tree. That left Atarangi with Rooftop on her shoulders, and Esha tottering on her fading legs, to follow Sureness and Nimble down into their impossible passage.

  The rock floor was smooth as if thousands of feet had polished it; the declining angle was pleasing to Esha's toes that tried to be hooves, yet it strained her ankles and knees until their pain burned away everything else. Esha sat on the wheeled pack, chewing pain herbs; Atarangi pulled back against the pack's wheels, refusing to accept an apology.

  The serpents snaked on ahead, leading the way downward. Daylight faded and spots wavered in Esha's vision — some of which turned out to be pinpoint lights on the serpents, tips of their fins and barbels that glowed like candles under paper shades. Each flick of their fins was a bright-outlined signal in the dark.

  They came to dead ends, periodically. Sureness and Nimble applied themselves and parted the earth, making it pour aside and away as though invisible water washed through it. More path revealed itself.

  After one such earthshifting, they faced a plane of glittering-still water. Nimble twisted his body to eye Esha and Atarangi.

  “Query: humans prefer to breathe air?”

  Blinking, Atarangi opened and closed her mouth. “Ah, yes. We can only breathe air. If a human tries to breathe water, we ... we die very quickly. Phoenixes are the same.”

  Tapping his teeth, light and rapid like fingernails on a tabletop, Nimble thought. He and Sureness conversed with rapid flickering. Esha strained her lungta and understood what she could: it was a cascade of words with air and water in them.

  Sureness then clicked a interrogative: “Can those ones breathe air that is extremely humid?”

  “Yes,” Atarangi said as though hesitant to commit to the word. “As long as it is air.”

  “I can't swim,” Rooftop said, possibly to himself.

  Sureness chittered a sigh. “Assurance: ( )-Eight District has dry spaces that should be suitable for those ones. As for this passage ...”

  With light-waving fins, he and Nimble kept discussing.

  Eventually, Nimble dove into the pitch blackness. Moments later, a sensation ran through the stone floor; it was too faint to call a tremor but still, it closed Esha's throat with terror. The water gurgled away. They carried on.

  After what felt like hours, Sureness and Nimble earthshifted a wall face that didn't grind solid: it shattered, collapsing into a pile of stone chunks that Sureness swept to one side with his tail. They were in a cave — and, hobbling in under her own power, Esha found a cave nothing like the fusty hole she had expected.

  No, the walls around her were as textured as any temple's stones would be, marked with patterns Esha dimly recognized as serpent writing. Coiling lines were interspersed with holes large enough to lodge a young bamboo pole. Up the walls and across the cavern ceiling, hazy glass bubbles hung suspended from copper threads, full of a blue-tinted inner light. Esha was in a place as deliberately made as any town full of buildings. Her hands rose to her mouth, and her gaze followed the ceiling's grand lines up and outward until she couldn't ignore the serpents gathering near — many more, a wall of undulating pond colours.

  The largest newcomer spoke a mash of languages to Sureness, who flickered occasional response. These new serpents looked like guards, said Esha's gut. Guards, or else soldiers. They wore no armour and carried no polearms, but their stiff bearing and steel tones said they were guards. Each one held metal sheets in their neck barbels, sticking out like quill pens tucked into a clerk's headwrap.

  After nerve-strung moment, Sureness's teeth began to clack and Esha's lungta translated:

  “Admonishment: we ignore our guests. Proclamation: let us speak with toothtap and rudiment fins, so those ones may understand. They apologize for their crudeness, but most forms of braidspeak are incompatible with their physiology, and beyond their understanding.”

  Hurt flared in Esha's chest: she wasn't crude for being born a finless human. It was a nearly familiar feeling of indignity, a feeling like counting goat hairs in the mirror — but at least none of these serpents stared much at her bared horns and ears. Their gazes stayed mostly at Esha's hip level. Like her relaxed arms and hands were the most alarming thing they could imagine.

  “Statement:“ Nimble tried, his clicking uneven, “these ones are capable of reading basic runes through lungta application. Suggestion: if...”

  He trailed off as Atarangi strode forward. She looked as sure as royalty; Rooftop sat on her shoulder, tail feathers sp
illing down her back like a makeshift cloak. Her lungta-thick voice rustled to command the room:

  “Request: these ones need lodgings, and sparing amounts of Deepling patience. Statement: Humans suffer from cold if we do not cover our bodies. Humans speak almost entirely with our mouths and any dishonesty will come from there. Request: try to understand. In exchange, these ones will provide what lungta two humans can.”

  Quiet bolted through the gathered serpents, a lull in a windstorm.

  “Statement:“ Rooftop croaked into the quiet, “these humans are this-one's closest allies. These ones are worthy of trust.”

  His words moved serpent fins.

  “Query:“ the lead guard clicked at them both, paced out as though for a child, “why do these ones pursue serpent affairs?”

  “Statement: dealings with a landholder phoenix led Human Triad to these ones. Now, this one believes that Human Triad and Deepling Community might benefit from each other.”

  “Query: is that benefit meant to be the provision of binder-food? Simple grass seed with less than ( ) rises of lungta per ( )?”

  Atarangi hesitated. Offering popped maize didn't usually meet with spite; Esha felt that chill of confusion, too.

  “Statement: there are many more plants these ones might offer. Request: tell us which are valuable to the Community. This plant, for example.”

  She came to the wheeled pack and nudged Esha's legs aside, to open the side compartment full of lock-boxed plants.

  “This plant,” she repeated, and flicked open locks as she strode sure into the brunt of serpent attention.

  They watched, postures coiling wary. Then as Atarangi opened the box — and lifted out the wilting but whole bankakri flower — the serpents loosened like the welcome warmth of spring.

  The negotiations came more freely, once a guard serpent accepted the boxed bankakri flower and bolted quicksilver away. Atarangi gave their names — including a more mangled version of her own name, Water Light, since morning wouldn't seem to fit through lungta's discerning mesh and sky garnered reactions like it was serpent profanity. Rooftop's name didn't translate, either: he became Ceiling, a word Esha supposed was a compliment. Serpent ceilings were beautifully decorated, if nothing else.