Toads and Diamonds

by Heather Tomlinson

  Her fingers brushed the healing cut on the side of his hand. Abruptly, she remembered the danger. He had too many enemies for her to add his elder brother to the list. At any moment, the noble ladies would be leaving the audience hall. They mustn't see Zahid alone--almost alone--with her. "Transaction completed," she finished.

  "But we haven't agreed on your payment."

  Diribani slipped her hands out from under the scarf. She brought the corners together and spilled the collected gems and flowers onto the table, then draped the fabric over her hair. "You already knew most of them. No charge for practicing."

  "But this is the Mina Bazaar." Zahid left his hands in plain view on the table. "You're supposed to haggle."

  242

  "Fine." She could hear voices in the distance. She touched his first finger joint, tugged lightly on his thumb. Ten. "Standard copper weights," she said aloud.

  "For that most excellent lesson?" He clicked his tongue in disapproval and squeezed her knuckle. One hundred. "Gold."

  "Definitely not," she said, amused against her will by their backward bargaining. "I'll settle for-silver, though the outrageous price grieves me."

  Zahid's head turned. He, too, heard the others coming. "Ah, but I haven't thanked you for the beautiful flower panel in my room." Diamonds, he tapped out, then stroked a quick line across the base of her palm.

  A thousand diamonds went beyond teasing. Diribani stiffened. "Birthday gifts are excluded from the transaction." She folded his hand into a fist and squeezed it, then rested her hands on her side of the table.

  The prince drew himself up, staring down his hawk nose at her. "Offer unsatisfactory?" he said aloud.

  She hadn't taught him that one. More than ever, Diribani was convinced that this whole exchange had been a pretext for a private conversation with her. And yet he looked so insulted that she wavered. His next words made her even more confused.

  "Of course mere riches wouldn't sway you, diamond girl," he said, too softly for Mahan to hear. "Be advised. Our business is not concluded." His fingers caressed her right hand before he bowed and left her.

  With a shaking finger, Diribani traced in the flowers the sign he'd written on her skin. More study required.

  243

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Tana

  SHE had found a well pavilion. As Tana stumbled through the dusty trees toward the serpent-crowned doorway, she imagined that she could smell the water the great stone naga promised. Her skin burned. The birds' raucous nighttime noises made it hard for her to think.

  Too-ill, too-ill, too-ill, the cuckoo complained.

  What? What? owlets demanded.

  Tana's cracked lips couldn't shape an answer. Clouds covered the moon, and a fitful breeze tossed the leaves. Her teeth chattered; her legs trembled. Her vision was fading at the edges, and she feared she would topple through a dark hole in the earth.

  Then she passed under the carved snake and did fall, tripping over the foot-washing basin just inside the doorway. Stone pavement bruised her knees. A trickle of water touched her bloody, thorn-pricked feet. Dry sobs racked Tana's body. She'd come so far, and knocked over the precious water. She scrabbled around

  244

  the empty basin. The puddle she'd made was already drying on stone that still held the day's heat. Tana sucked her damp fingers. Too exhausted and feverish to stand, she struggled forward on hands and knees.

  The lamplight didn't reach far from the door niches. Loud in the dark, the birds' chatter filled her head. Tana crawled on blindly. After she bashed her shoulder against a wall, she kept one hand extended in front of her.

  A long ramp ended in stairs. Ahead, or below, she heard a frog peeping. She followed the hopeful sound. One battered knee gave way; she tumbled down several steps and cracked the back of her head so hard against the stone that colored lights shivered across her vision. She would have lain there until morning brightened the world, but thirst drove her harder than an overseer's whip. Wearily, Tana dragged herself into a sitting position. She extended her legs and half slid, half fell to the next step. Bump .

  Down, and down, and down. The stairs had no end. She would finish in the white-coats' hell, with the demons and the flames. Her head pounded. Her skin burned. The injured shoulder and knee shrieked with every movement. Perhaps she was there already? The thought made her cry out. The only noise her parched throat produced was a harsh rasp.

  It was enough to frighten her guide frog. The peeping sound stopped. Before Tana could despair completely, a soft splash renewed her will. The water was down there. Somewhere. Stretch. Slide. Bump. Her spine ached with the force of each landing. The stone steps scraped her skin. She kept on. Stretch. Slide. Bump.

  Water lapped her feet. Tana straightened in shock and slid into the blessed, blessed coolness. Weeping, she sat waist-deep in the

  245

  well to splash her face and arms and chest. She sucked up the water in great gulps and soaked the rags of her clothing, welcoming the clammy feel of wet cloth. She couldn't get enough of it. When her arms were too tired to splash, she wiggled her toes, just to feel the water moving over thirsty skin.

  But the fever inside her, briefly quieted by her bath, came back. This time it burned cold, chattering her teeth and waking goose-flesh along her exposed skin. Tana heaved her legs out of the water and curled into a ball on the step.

  With nightmare clarity, visions assaulted her: chained villagers driven from their smoking houses, fly-covered corpses rotting where they lay. Worse, she knew they weren't nightmares, but memories. Rats chewed and chewed and chewed. Obscene pieces of snake were strewn among shattered clay pots. Then the scene shifted. Wreathed in dead flowers, Diribani kept asking Tana what her soul desired. Every answer was the wrong one. Slime coated Tana's lips; diamonds cracked her teeth and turned her words into splinters. She tasted blood. She shivered. She burned. The voices shrieked in her ears, owlets and cuckoos trying to outscreech one another.

  What?

  Too-ill, too-ill.

  "Sh, now. Sh, now."

  Which bird was that? Hugging her knees, Tana swallowed pain like a handful of hot sand. A soggy, lumpish toad of a girl, she croaked in alarm at the hands that wanted to pull her apart.

  "Sh, you're safe with us, Mina. Let go now, eh, so we can move you out of this damp spot?" Callused hands, but a sweet voice.

  Light filtered through tree leaves far overhead. Day had come.

  246

  Tana relaxed so suddenly that her head thumped the stone. The bolt of pain made her groan. Her eyes squeezed shut. Her limbs flailed, and were steadied.

  "She's burning," the sweet voice said.

  "Wet clothes weigh more'n she does," a man's deeper voice answered.

  "Up we go. Let's get a look at you."

  Tana didn't recognize either of the speakers' voices. She squinted through crusty lashes and saw dark forms spattered with drops of sunlight. One held her ankles, the other her wrists. Between them, the man and woman hoisted her up the steps she had slid down. She swung from side to side like a net of coconuts strung under the rafters. Her stomach sloshed. Could a person be seasick from the waves crashing inside her?

  Tana waged a fierce struggle not to retch. She understood they'd reached the top because her guts stopped trying to turn themselves inside out. She focused on breathing without sobbing.

  "Not so young as I once was," the man said. "Hoo! Well's down another flight since yesterday, you reckon?"

  "Mm," the sweet voice murmured. A woman's work-worn hands moved over Tana with gentle authority. When they found the knot on the back of Tana's head, they woke a pain so intense that Tana fainted.

  Afterward, she didn't remember much about her illness. Light and dark, heat and coolness alternated unpredictably. She did remember people trying to carry her out of the well to the village. She resisted so strongly at passing under the snake portal, actually rolling off a

  247

  litter and crawling back
to the well, that they decided Naghali-ji wanted her there. So the villagers screened off an area for her in the entry room and took turns sitting with her.

  Hands bathed her hot face with water and spooned broth or sharp-tasting herbal tea into her mouth. They wrapped her with shawls when she shivered, and bathed her again when she kicked off the coverings. Through it all, the frogs in the well inside, and the birds in the grove outside, kept up a noisy commentary. During the day, orioles whistled, parakeets chattered, and quail clucked wordlessly. At night the owlets inquired about her progress: What? What?

  Too-ill, too-ill, the cuckoos insisted, and for a long time, it was true. Then, one evening, Tana woke with a clear mind. She was lying on a pallet, a light cotton sheet drawn over her naked body. Above the screens, the sky had turned palest pink beyond the entry pavilion's overhanging eaves. Moonbird Month had fled; in the sultry air, Tana tasted the sticky heat of Elephant Month. Tamarind season, mango season, when the only relief from the oppressive stillness was a windstorm that scoured grit into exposed skin and left a veil of dust to stick to eyelids and lips. Tana coughed and sat up, wrapping the sheet across her breasts and under her arms. Twig arms, she noticed. How long since she had eaten more than broth?

  "Ah, you're with us. All praise to Payoja-ji," a sweet, familiar voice said. A large woman in a rust-colored dress wrap bent over Tana's pallet. She held out a fruit with greenish-orange skin. "Mango?"

  Tana folded her hands in thanks, then took the mango and bit into it greedily. The pulpy flesh stuck in her teeth; juice ran down her chin. It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted.

  248

  The woman laughed in a kindly fashion. She returned to her seat in the corner of the pavilion and selected another mango from her basket. Slicing the mango, she laid the strips across a drying screen. "A messy business," she said. "Good to do at a well."

  Nodding, Tana sucked the last of the fruit off the pit. She licked her fingers and swiped at her chin.

  "How about a wash?" the woman asked.

  Tana needed help to stand. Slowly, the two of them descended to the well's bathing pool.

  "Water hasn't been this low since my grandmother's day," Tana's companion remarked. "Those three little carved frogs against the step? My mother said her mother painted the lucky spots on them. Hadn't been seen from that day to this."

  Tana brushed the stone frogs with her fingers, stroking the rounded bodies and powerful legs.

  "Lucky for you, too." The woman chuckled. "If my husband hadn't been so curious to see them before he went off to the fields that day, it would have been hours more before anyone found you." She, too, patted the frogs. "A little good fortune wouldn't come amiss for the rest of us. Crops withering in the heat, plague in the villages roundabout, not a house naga to be had in Tenth Province for charity or coin. We're hoping the well doesn't dry up before the rains." She settled herself on a ledge above Tana. "But we'll get by somehow. Everyone has his own troubles, isn't that the way of the world?"

  Tana sank into the water until only her eyes were showing. She surfaced, snorting and blowing, and shook her head like a dog. Drops flew from her shaggy hair and pattered into the water around her. She grinned with the joy of being alive, and clean.

  249

  "You're a quiet one, eh, Mina?" Tana's benefactor helped dry her shaky limbs. Tana tried not to lean too heavily on the older woman's arm as they climbed back up the stairs. They were both puffing hard by the time they reached the well's entry. Tana sank onto the pallet.

  "Will you sleep in the village tonight?" The woman sheathed her knife and set her drying tray across the mango basket. "You're welcome to stay with my family."

  Patting her pallet, Tana smiled at the woman.

  "Happy here, are you? I suppose. There's a lantern, and some broth in this jar. Care for another mango?"

  Tana folded her hands in thanks.

  The woman paused at the door. "I'll bring you a dress wrap tomorrow. Good night," she said, and left Tana alone.

  Other faces, men and women both, peeked around the screen from time to time to check on her. None spoke, and the visits dwindled as the night deepened. Tana lay on her pallet, watching the shadows from the door lanterns play across the walls. She felt empty, clean, and peaceful. Her thoughts touched lightly on her mother, her sister, Kalyan, and the villagers. She hoped they were well, and not too worried by her disappearance. Even those concerns slid away, unable to penetrate her sense of quiet ease. The moon rose, silvering the leaves overhead and waking the night birds' voices.

  What? an owlet asked.

  Tana got up and draped the sheet around herself. She prayed silently at the goddess's shrine, then sat against the door frame, under the diamond-eyed snake, and waited.

  Too-ill, the cuckoo said.

  250

  "No," Tana contradicted softly, a test. Oh, she had missed this, tiny miracles popping into life a breath away from her skin. With the word, a toad dropped. Mottled and moist-looking, it hopped into the night. Perhaps a snake would follow, and be welcome. House nagas weren't to be had here for charity or coin, the woman had said.

  But through sorrow and suffering? In love and humility? The fever that had shrunk the flesh on her bones had also burned rebellion and distrust from Tana's heart. She felt older than the anguished girl who had shaken her fist at the goddess, not wanting her strange gift. The desire of her soul had been to protect her family, and Naghali-ji had given Tana the means. She just hadn't been paying attention.

  Finally, the fever dreams had shown her. The pattern was obvious when you strung the threads together properly. Rats. Plague. Snakes.

  Out of superstition, Alwar and his officials had tried to destroy Tenth Province's snakes. But snakes ate rats and other pests. Without the snakes to keep their numbers down, a few diseased rats could multiply into a widespread threat.

  Snakes ate rats. What could be simpler? Tana had even noticed that house nagas came the most frequently of all "her" creatures. She had been irritated that people seemed to prefer the ratters to her. How silly that seemed now. Naghali-ji had made Diribani a jewel mine, Tana a snake girl, and sent them both into the world. That was the point--wherever they traveled, they could share the goddess's blessing.

  Starting here.

  In thinking about Diribani, Tana remembered her sister's

  251

  favorite song. The width of an empire and the nature of their tasks might have separated them, but Tana could be with her sister in spirit. Taking a deep breath, she added her low, disused voice to the birds' chorus.

  "Tonight, beloved,

  I light the lamp to guide my moonbird home.

  "

  Diamond eyes twinkled above her head as the serpents--ratters and boas, tree snakes and vipers and whip snakes and even a majestic cobra--flowed into the night. Lean and hungry, they hunted.

  252

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Diribani

  ARRIVING on the heels of the Mina Bazaar, the dry season's final caravan brought more than trade goods from Tenth Province to Fanjandibad, though neither party profited from the exchange.

  Within days, the putrid fever had spread through the fort. In the female guards' barracks, the few servants still able to carry a bucket were kept busy cleaning the spaces between the rows of pallets. Diribani tried to keep out of their way; in return, they ignored her. The sick didn't notice what she wore, or ask whom she worshiped, if she could bring them some relief. During the heat of midday, the stench of illness was unbearable. Diribani could only come in the flush of dawn or the barely cooler hours of twilight, to help tend the ailing. When a woman died, she was buried in her bedding. The empty slots filled quickly. In the fort's close quarters, disease spread with an arrow's speed and the same deadly results.

  253

  Nissa had protested Diribani's efforts, but then the maid had gotten sick. She lay listlessly on her pallet under Diribani's window, where a breeze might find her. They ha
d lost Mahan; Zeen was weak, but expected to recover. The minute she could walk, she had staggered to her post at Diribani's door.

  Their concern for her touched Diribani in the small part of her heart she could spare from silent prayer. She gave endless thanks to the twelve that Ma Hiral and Tana hadn't accompanied her to Fanjandibad. Thoughts of her family, who should be comfortably housed next to the sacred well by now, were all that kept her from despair.

  For Zahid, too, was ill. Ruqayya and her ladies tended him in the princess's rooms.

  Every face Diribani bathed with cool water wore his features; every small act of kindness, she did for his sake. He would never know, but that wasn't important, as long as Sister Payoja accepted Diribani's service.

  As the days passed, each hotter and more stifling than the one before, Zeen ate more heartily, and her skeletal face resumed its familiar dour contours. Nissa began to complain about her enforced inactivity. Diribani took both for good signs. On her twice-daily barracks visits, she found fewer patients filling the spaces vacated by the dead and, now, the recovering.

  The prince did not improve.

  Diribani stopped sleeping at night. As if her lonely vigils could prevent death from slipping past her and into the prince's quarters, she paced the rooftop terrace, singing quietly into her hands. Emeralds and poppies, lilies and diamonds---at dawn, Diribani

  254

  filled the iron box with jewels and annotated the ledger as scrupulously as Mahan had done. It comforted her to see the lights in distant valleys and know the builders were working on the wells. In all but the furnace heat of midday, teams of laborers were erecting dams to hold the rainwater to come.