Three weeks after the quake, after enough work to make the three of us want to sleep for days in exhaustion, we raised a rudimentary roof over the first room of our new home. We paid the farmer who had been kind enough to let us stay with her and relished our newfound privacy. Parech tactfully went to collect food for our evening meal so Tulo and I could give the house a proper welcome. If it was cold, that only made our pleasure that much more urgent. Parech gave us a lopsided smile when he returned with breadfruit slung over his shoulders and found us seated side by side, naked to the waist, sweaty and grinning like two little girls.
“Have fun?” he said.
“Think you want to join?” said Tulo, giggling. The two of us stared at her, as though we didn’t quite know what to say.
A storm blew in the next day, making us grateful for the rudimentary straw thatch we’d put over our heads that kept out most of the water. I didn’t fear for the structure of the house, but the leaks were uncomfortable, so Parech and I spent a wet, miserable day thatching what we could with large pandanus leaves coated in thick resin. The rains provided plenty of fresh water for our barrels, but unfortunately the winds and rain compounded the effects of the earthquake, devastating the irrigation ditches and reservoirs deeper in the city. They overflowed with muddy streetwater that brought a pestilence to all who drank it. It spread through all of the city. Essel’s chiefs might have taken their boats to Okika and finished this war once and for all, if not for the fire sickness that devastated their people.
The symptoms began with a deep flush, as though one had smoked too much amant, followed by violent vomiting and watery stools. A rash bloomed at the throat and, in the worst cases, spread down the body to the arms and torso. At least half of those who contracted it were dead within a week; others lasted a month. By the time the storms abated and the pestilence passed, one in ten Esselans had died. Bodies piled in the streets and every stretch of beach reeked with the scent of charred flesh and blackened bones. Tulo told me later that the death spirits swarmed there like flies. She said that for a time they crowded my shape so thickly she could only see me for the darkness. I asked her for whatever details she could remember about them and wrote them down in a book.
But this was all later, because I was among the earliest victims of the pestilence.
Parech got sick first, but it was so mild we didn’t mark it. He went into the city and came back with a fever that lasted just a few days. We only realized it must have been the fire sickness when it caught me. That day there was a break in the seemingly relentless storms. I sat out on the beach with Tulo and Parech in a comparatively refreshing drizzle on a mild, humid day. We were bundled into the Esselan long pants and sleeved tops and nursed a fire that we’d built in the shelter of the dunes. Parech was hip deep in the waves, casting a fishing line with a hook whose design he’d learned from our navigator. He claimed it was guaranteed to catch coastal grouper, an assertion Tulo and I vocally doubted, but we were happy enough to watch and see. I’d been shivery and achy all day, but the light mist was excuse enough for that and I didn’t want to ruin our day together by complaining.
“Those waves are getting taller,” I said to Tulo, conversationally. “You think he might drown?”
“It’s Parech,” she said, as though that explained everything. “Worry about eels, not waves.”
“There aren’t any eels this close to the inner islands.”
“Well, then.” Tulo turned her head in Parech’s general direction and cupped her hands over her mouth. “Hey, soldier boy! When do you think we might eat?”
“You want to come and ask this grouper to stay on the line, Princess?”
Tulo’s smile was bright. Her eyes narrowed like she was facing battle. “That prize fishing hook not working out for you, then?”
“Just give it a little more time. You’ll see.”
I would have stayed to listen to more of their banter; I loved it almost more than anything in life. But my chills gave way to oppressive nausea and I shot to my feet. Tulo glanced up at me, but I mumbled something and staggered to the waves. I started to vomit as the rising tide brushed against my ankles. I knelt in the wet sand, nearly doubled over, and emptied myself of every morsel of food I’d eaten. I felt Parech’s hands on my shoulders.
“Ana?” he said. “Did you eat something rotten?”
I tried to speak but bent over instead, until the only thing that could come from my mouth was pale and foamy and burned my throat like fire. I groaned. The chill and aches had redoubled in the intervening few minutes. I felt light-headed enough to faint. I shivered despite the relative warmth.
Parech dropped his fishing rod and picked me up. He said nothing, but I could feel the tension in his arms.
“Parech?” Tulo said, when he reached her. “Is she. . .I see. . .it’s as though. . .”
Parech froze. “What do you see, Princess?” he said softly. I’d never heard him so serious before. It almost made me want to laugh.
“I think it’s the fire sickness,” she said. “Death spirits are clinging to her like leeches. I can hardly see her light.”
“Will she die?” he asked, in a voice so expressionless I wondered if he cared at all.
“I don’t know.”
“I can still hear you,” I muttered, and Tulo let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.
“We’ll go back to the house,” she said. “I won’t let them get you, Aoi. I promise.”
I don’t remember very much of the days that followed. I was always cold, despite the blankets they kept piled upon me. It seemed as though some constant wind howled like a mad dog outside the walls, begging to be let in. I was afraid often, particularly when I escaped from the nightmarish dreamscapes of my fever. I felt death right in front of me, its breath like saltwater down my throat. I did not want to die; more than anything, I did not want to die.
Either Tulo or Parech was always there to feed me whatever I could get down and to clean up whatever I couldn’t. Their presence was a constant, hazy comfort. I saw Tulo more than I saw Parech—neither of us knew what he did with his time, but he’d return sometimes with herbs for tea or feathers that he’d hang around the house. I heard him and Tulo argue about some of these odd trophies but could never focus for long enough to parse their meanings. The illness made me stupid, filled with the most brutish desires for comfort and survival. So long as they were near, I didn’t care how they fought. Tulo was afraid for me. I knew because she would sometimes smear her tears on my face as she lay beside my pallet. When things got very bad—when I could hardly breathe and my skin felt as though it were burning and the air itself seemed to grow a shimmering haze and I could almost see the death spirits that hung in my every painful exhale—she sat on her heels and sang. It sounded more like the plaintive keening of a gull than anything that ought to come from a human throat. It was an eerie, ululating chant that she repeated until she grew hoarse and could hardly speak. I lost consciousness sometime in the middle, obscurely comforted and frightened in a different sort of way.
When I awoke again, painfully thirsty, Tulo was curled by herself in a corner and Parech was sitting by my head, staring blankly at the wall.
“Se maloka selama—”
“Don’t, Aoi.’
He used my name so infrequently that it stopped even this pitiful attempt at humor. His face seemed so bland and disinterested. So how did his voice sound like someone had stabbed him in the gut?
“I’ve asked everyone for help. Even those women you keep company with. All those sewer-side witches.”
I frowned. “They know more than you. . .wait. Parech, how do you know the women I keep company with?”
His cheeks trembled like he might smile, but in the end couldn’t quite summon the energy. He brushed my sweaty, damp hair from my forehead. “I asked Tulo.”
“And how does she know?”
Now he smiled. “Was it a great secret, Ana? She followed you. I suppose you have a jealous lover.”
/>
This made me glance at her sleeping form and I was overcome with a sense of contented love so profound that I momentarily forgot the illness that appeared to be killing me.
“How is she?” I asked.
He sighed. “How are any of us? How are you?”
“Dying?” I couldn’t help but turn it into a question.
“That’s what they said. Those useless witches of yours. They said if you were already close enough to the gate to need a geas, none would dare say it. So there. That’s the measure of your endless studies. Cowardice and weakness and death.”
“Parech,” I said, so disconcerted by this bitter, grim side to him that I wasn’t sure what to say. “The witch has to be equal to the spirit to control the binding. Not many are equal to death.”
“Am I?”
I pushed through the weakness that gripped me and turned so I could hold his hand. “No,” I said, shivering with fear. “You would die, and I’d follow you. Would you leave Tulo alone?”
He shook his head and smiled—dark and bitter and furious, but a smile nonetheless. “You’re clever, Ana. Always making me do just what you want. Even when I’d do anything. . .”
“I know.” I hadn’t before, but I did now. And now, looking at him, I felt that same peace, that same desperate contentedness that somehow merged with longing at its end.
He shook his head and stroked my hair until I slept.
I grew worse. There were moments when I felt as though some monster were sitting on my chest, forcing the breath from my lungs. There were moments when I coughed and coughed until I could taste the metallic tang of blood and the sour bile spilling from my lips. I burned with a fever that felt as cold as the bottom of a river during winter.
I saw so much, only a fraction of which I understood. I knew I was dying, because the ever-present light of the spirit world permeated everything when I opened my eyes. I could see its inhabitants. There were spirits tied to the feathers and other objects Parech had brought into the house: giant beetles with crystal wings; a single ball of flame with uncanny, twisting images at its heart; a clam that clattered around the floor on its mouth and swiped at the air with its giant, glittering tongue. There were tiny, hunched creatures dressed in white and black that hopped around my body like waterbugs. Their heads swung back and forth, as though someone had tied them to their bodies with a careless knot of sennit braid. In their light, I could sometimes see a greater shadow—a tall, robed figure I recognized even before I could make out the frigid outline of its key, the severe cut of its mask.
The earth and water sprites bound to the feathers Parech had bought tried to keep it away from me, but eventually it blasted away those minor bindings and knelt beside me. I was sitting up to regard it, though I was dimly aware that my body was in fact still sweating and groaning on the ground behind me. I felt healthy and alive in my terror and utter fascination. It had been many months since I’d seen this full manifestation of the death. I wondered if this would be the last time we met.
“I don’t want to know,” I said to it. My voice spilled from my lips like sand. The little deaths swarmed and gobbled up that glowing dust. They laughed.
The gaping hole the death had for a mouth turned upward. “What don’t you want to know?” it asked. That voice! My nonbody shivered with something akin to pleasure. It sounded like no human ever could, and yet like the bleakest ideal a human could ever hope to achieve. I thought, for a moment, that I might love the death in its aspect, if not in its act.
“What lies beyond the gate,” I said.
“Don’t you? Most humans long to know.”
“They long to die?”
The hole stretched wider. “Clever, my Ana. Most humans long to cheat me. They demand knowledge without the final passage.”
“I only wish to know about you,” I said recklessly. “The gate —that’s your domain. But beyond it?”
The death sprites abruptly ceased their feeding. The other spirits, the strong, silent ones I had bound to the very beams of our house, pushed their ponderous heads through the floorboards and stared. The me on the floor shuddered and choked, like she could hardly take a breath. The me staring at the death began to shiver. I had touched on something important without knowing. Perhaps there was a way to avoid this final knowledge even now.
“What do you think, my Ana?” said the death spirit, its voice beautiful as a shattered geode.
“That nothing is omniscient,” I said. “Not even the godhead of a great spirit.”
I had heard this thought whispered occasionally as an example of the wild fringe of napulo philosophy. I had not believed in its truth until that very movement, when speaking those words made a great spirit flinch, as though a dying human could hurt it.
“That sounds like a binding,” it said finally. “But what sacrifice gives it power? You must know, Ana, that it needs be a truly great one.”
And I had no means of making it. My body was so weak and sick any trauma might kill me. And I would not risk Tulo or Parech for something so dangerous and possibly futile. It knew this. That’s why it still smiled.
“Time, knowledge, desire, need,” I said.
“Nothing,” it said.
“Don’t open the gate.”
It looked down at my body, uncharacteristically relaxed and breathing deeply. The tiny deaths had faded away, for reasons I suppose I still don’t understand. I could dimly make out Tulo feeling my neck and laughing.
“It looks like I might not need to,” it said.
When I tried to look up at it again, it was with my own aching neck and through my own hazy, fever-dried eyes. But I could tell even then that the worst was finally over. I lay in a tangled jumble of covers soaked in my sweat, and I felt properly hot for the first time in weeks.
“Aoi?” said Tulo. “Oh, Aoi, love. . .”
“I think it’s okay,” I said.
Tulo kissed me, long and hard, though I’m sure my mouth tasted none too pleasant. “If you ever leave me, I swear I’ll never forgive you,” she whispered. “I’ll find a shaman and curse your bones, Aoi. I swear it. You and Parech both.”
“Everyone has to die,” I said, laughing, but even then I suppose I was thinking otherwise.
I recovered. Tulo and Parech both spent more time at home than I thought was wise, given how much money I knew we must have spent when I fell ill. But in their joy at my improbable survival, no argument could move them. Even after the last of my deathinduced spirit sight left me, the world seemed to glow. Its real cause, I suppose, was almost embarrassing in its utter mundanity: I was happy to be alive and astonished to be so deeply loved. That I could have found such happiness when my parents spent most of their lives eking out the most miserable of existences made me sad when I thought on it. Whatever lay beyond the gate, I hoped it was something better than this world, or nothing at all. I could imagine no worse fate than being condemned to farm rice for all of eternity.
The first wave of Esselan soldiers had returned from the Maaram battle while I lay insensate. But the fever had laid waste to the city in the meantime, and with no one to challenge them, the Maaram regrouped and launched a new offensive during the rains that marked the start of the warm. “Only madmen or Maaram would fight in this,” the saying went. Tired, depleted, but better equipped, the Esselan army took to their canoes and fought back the invading fleet. This time, the Maaram got as far as the southeast shore of the mainland before turning back.
Parech related these developments in absurdist pantomime, mimicking Taak’s affected aristocratic accent when he wanted to portray the Maaram and a ruthless nasal drawl when portraying the Esselans. I never mentioned it but was grateful that he never evinced the slightest temptation to rejoin the army on this side. They would have taken him—questions that might otherwise have been asked were overlooked during wartime. Unlike in Okika, the Esselans paid their soldiers very well. But I don’t know how Tulo or I could have lived with that constant stress, and I suppose he must hav
e known. Instead, he spent most of his days out back, fortifying the rows of deep ponds he had dug for the fish, as his first too-shallow attempt had been destroyed in the earthquake. I had my doubts about this plan, but he swore he’d seen such fish farms before and I held my peace.
I spent the days braiding sennit from the raw strands of bark that Tulo would bring home from the market, and when my fingers cramped and turned orange from the staining, I would read the precious letters the other napulo disciples circulated among themselves, all with the goal of gaining the knowledge needed to harness the power of the spirits. Some merely wanted the wisdom, and argued against using these postulates to bind spirits, but they were by far in the minority. I considered their arguments more than most, I imagine. I was unusual in having actually spoken to minor sprites and one major spirit. I understood that while not by any means human, these creatures were capable of thought and rational action and emotion. To then bind them to our will must be a form of slavery. But on the other hand, perhaps it was wrong in the same way killing a fish for food might be. Unfortunate for the other living creature, but inevitable and in some natural way correct, because we had to do so to survive.
Humans had been binding spirits long before we had any idea what we did. Every knelt prayer to the ancestors, every jungle fowl sacrificed at the full moon to the gods both invoked something and bound it to that request. That we understood the process far better than those ancient tribes didn’t negate its ultimately natural provenance. Who was I to gainsay millennia of human history? I didn’t have the hubris to claim that bindings were morally wrong when the sweep of human civilization would hardly be possible without them. No. I sympathized with those fringe napulo, but I didn’t agree with them.
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 30