I wrote circumspectly to my fellow disciples about my experiences with death. I focused on what I saw as the trivial details—the shape of the little death sprites, the precise dimensions of its mask—and glossed over the critical moment. Knowledge, and the lack of knowledge. I still didn’t quite know what the death was so afraid of, but I knew that once I found out I would have access to more power than perhaps anyone else on the islands. But I needn’t have bothered. The disciples were mostly afraid of the death spirit and evinced only the mildest curiosity about my report. Here on Essel, with the constant smoking reminder of Nui’ahi, it was fire that consumed most attention. Water as well was the subject of some mutterings, though those seemed centered elsewhere in the islands.
I was poring over some of these reports late one evening when I heard Tulo and Parech talking and laughing outside, near the fish ponds. I tried to concentrate again on the words, but it was no good. I suddenly felt as though I’d been trapped inside this house for years, not just a little over a month. Surely by now I was well enough to walk around outside! So I wrapped one of the blankets tightly around my shoulders and made my slow, careful way down the stairs and around the back. I had to pause several times to catch my breath, but it worked out well enough. I didn’t even mind the cold. Water from a diverted irrigation ditch was filling the first pond. Tulo and Parech ran around it, laughing and screaming like five-year-olds. I smiled and watched them, too out of breath to even let them know I was there. Eventually, Tulo leapt over the pond and tackled Parech to the ground. They rolled over into the pile of upturned dirt. He rubbed some into her hair while she grabbed whatever object he’d stolen from her. Their laughter gave way to something quieter. I wanted to say something, but it was too late. I could only watch.
He kissed her. My own lips parted, as though it were me on the ground beneath him. She put her hand around the back of his head and pulled him in closer. Oh, I could imagine that first moment, the shock and happiness when his lips finally touched hers. I sat on the ground and closed my eyes.
I don’t know when they finally saw me. But eventually Parech tapped my shoulder, obviously concerned in a way I knew was not strictly for my health. I looked between the two of them; they were holding hands. Everything seemed to glow again. I felt so happy, yet I thought I might cry. What was so wrong with me that Parech never did more than peck my forehead? Tulo said I was beautiful, but then Tulo spent her days staring at creatures with feet for ears.
“I brought a scarf back for you,” Tulo said.
Parech just looked at me, his gaze unreadable yet almost piercing me through.
I staggered to my feet and hugged them both. It was the only thing I could do.
The day Yaela bound the great water spirit, the wind turned a human into an angel. I suppose no one but the spirits knew this on the actual day. But slowly, as the astonishing news filtered through the city (first as rumor, then as fact), we pieced the events together. Yaela, a napulo disciple who had discovered the teachings in Okika but lived primarily on an obscure outer island as a diver of some sort, had made the ultimate self-sacrifice on one of the three icebound inner islands, dedicating it forever to the service of the great binding. At the moment of her sacrifice, she had turned another man into a creature the napulo were calling a guardian—a half-spirit, half-human creature connected to the binding and capable of reining in the worst depredations of the water spirit. Now there would be no more tidal waves that could suck entire villages into the ocean without a trace, no more great floods. I thought of my parents and almost wept.
The wind spirit—sensing, perhaps that its time was not long behind—created its own peculiar hybrid creature. Not as much of a spirit as Yaela’s guardian, but still more than human, wind’s black angel was a girl who swept through the skies like a great crow. She had no power aside from her wings, but she marked the wind spirit’s stance against what was happening. Her very presence prophesied conflict. No one paid much attention—the war was far more interesting than what must have seemed to the jaded populace of Essel like an endless parade of spirit-creatures. Having recovered from the fever, the Esselan army took advantage of the dry weather and launched a sneak attack on Maaram soil. They conquered several outlying islands and Okika City itself before calling most of the troops back for the planting season.
The council of chiefs sponsored an official celebration near the fire temple and the Kulanui, and the three of us went for the dancing and free-flowing palm wine. We lasted until the sun came up, getting drunker and giddier and more exhausted until we finally collapsed inside one of the more decrepit pagodas behind the fire temple. Tulo twined her hand in my hair while Parech seemed to fall immediately asleep.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I said, staring at the war canoes still silhouetted in the hundreds against the rising sun.
“Who?”
“Taak, of course.”
“Oh, the Maaram pig?” She shrugged. “How would I know? He was stupid enough.”
This didn’t seem adequate, but I knew better than to press Tulo on the subject of her most hated enemy. No one had cheered harder at the news that the Esselans had conquered Okika, despite the fact that Essel was hardly likely to be any kinder to her tribe than the Maaram were. An occupying force is an occupying force, no matter what language it speaks.
We fell asleep and were only roused when an officiant from the fire temple hit us lightly with her broom and told us to be on our way. Tulo and I stood, but Parech stayed on the floor, moving so slowly you’d think he’d just now gotten drunk.
“Pick him up if you have to,” said the officiant, now truly annoyed.
I bent down to shake his shoulders and gasped aloud. His skin was burning to the touch. The officiant, having finally understood the situation, set off at a dead sprint back to the main hall. Tulo and I managed to lift Parech between us, but we had to hire someone to carry him back to the house. He regained consciousness somewhere along the way and looked hazily up at me.
“Maybe the death is angry you slipped from its grasp, Ana,” he said.
“You’re not going to die,” said Tulo, with such morbid determination that it surprised a laugh from both of us.
“Well, in that case,” said Parech.
It seemed to me that nothing could be worse than his illness, but Tulo gave me her word it was not half so bad as my own. The little death sprites settled for crowding the door, she said, and none seemed inclined to open the gate. We ventured into the city infrequently, though we were fairly sure that his was a relapse of the old fever, not evidence of a new contagion. While Parech slowly recovered, I took charge of his fish ponds. He told me the name of the dealer from whom he’d arranged to buy the stocks of baby fish and I purchased them myself.
“Feed fish?” I repeated to Parech in disbelief, when he’d recovered enough to give me instructions. “You eat fish, you don’t feed them.”
This made him smile. “Well, you do if you want to eat them later.”
“Technicalities. You hunt fish. This farming business is decadent and newfangled.”
“Oh-ho, the great Ana is now lecturing me about my modern ideas?”
“Spirit binding is as old as the moon.”
“Not your kind of spirit binding.”
“Ah, you’ve defeated me. I’ll feed your fish.”
A month after the celebrations, when the weather had finally turned warm enough for long evenings on the beach, Parech declared himself better. Tulo and I didn’t believe him—he was still uncomfortably thin and his skin seemed somehow ashen beneath its natural brown-red hue. But he could walk around, and there wasn’t much either of us could do but watch him carefully.
The fish in his ponds, quite improbably, grew fat and healthy. He made tentative arrangements with a fishmonger in the village to sell the first harvest. Tulo, relieved of the necessity to perform her fake fortune-telling, spent many hours helping Parech and decorating our house. I let them be. Neither my happiness nor my grief wa
s anything I felt I could burden them with.
We spent a great deal of time on the beach in the evenings, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with the other residents of the nearby village. A few weeks after Parech recovered, one such evening had turned positively balmy. Tulo and I discarded our bulky barkcloth shirts and danced together by the cookfire, much to the amusement of Parech and the other village residents. After we had dined on a feast of our very own farmed eels, roasted over the fire, Parech left the two of us to discuss supplies with the fishmonger. Tulo followed his easy movements with a frown that made me reach for her hand.
“They haven’t left, you know,” she said softly. “The little death creatures with those horrible bobble heads.”
I had to force myself to suck in a breath. “You mean. . .”
“I don’t know. I think he’s still sick. I think it hasn’t left him.”
He hid it well, but I could believe that. But I didn’t know what either of us could do. He’d get better eventually. He had to. There couldn’t be a worse time for this to happen. I’d been meaning to mention a certain issue to Tulo for a week now, but I’d found reasons to put it off. I didn’t think I could any longer.
“Tulo, you know that you’re pregnant, right? You haven’t had your period in two months.”
She didn’t look at me. “Of course I know.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
She shrugged. “Parech was sick. . .and you, I didn’t know what you would think. I thought about finding hea berry.”
“But you haven’t, have you?”
“No.” She sighed. “What sort of mother would I be, Aoi?”
“A princess,” I said.
She told Parech. He was overjoyed, swinging her around the house until I grew dizzy. He immediately started working on building the second room, in a dedicated frenzy that belied his continued pallor and the worried looks Tulo gave him. Tulo took over caring for the fishes. I spent more time away from home, studying with the napulo and learning every scrap I could about the death spirit. Parech was about to become a father. I couldn’t just let this illness eat him alive. Yet nothing I found seemed to fit.
In the meantime, a student I had known from Essel attempted to bind the earth spirit and died when he couldn’t control the geas. No one attempted in his place—the earth spirit was very ill-understood and not nearly so important as the fire or wind spirits. There were rumors that a napulo from my own Kukicha was about to attempt a wind-spirit binding. He had different ideas from Yaela—wind would have no guardian, and he would establish the physical location of the prison deep in the outer rim, among the fringes of the Akane tribes. It sounded like a fool’s dream to me, but I was curious to see if it worked.
Tulo’s waist thickened, though she didn’t look pregnant to anyone but us. Parech relapsed, with a fever not so high as the second time he fell ill. We made him rest for a week and he recovered enough to flaunt our concern. I did not ask Tulo if she still saw the death sprites. Just a look at her face was enough to tell me that. Finally, frustrated and terrified, I made up an excuse and accompanied him on the long walk into the city.
“Should I be honored the Ana has dignified me with her presence?” he said.
“You see me all the time.”
“Those witches who wouldn’t bother to help you on your deathbed see you all the time.”
“You can’t blame them, Parech. People die who lose control of geas. Who am I to them that they would risk it?”
“You sound so cold, Ana. Weren’t you afraid to die?”
I turned to him and stopped. “Aren’t you?”
He grimaced. “Ah. I see what this is. You and Tulo want me to lie in bed all day, is that it?”
“No, but you should take care of yourself. She says the death spirits haven’t left you. The fever is clinging.”
And I hadn’t said this to even Tulo, but if the fever lasted much longer, it would never leave him. It might take years, but the death would dog him, making him sick again and again until finally he succumbed. The thought of losing Parech like that made me want to scream.
“I know that, Aoi. It’s been a year now since we met. A year since I escaped a death that should have had me. You might have forgotten what you did then, but I haven’t. Every day I have is a gift you’ve given me. So even if I die tomorrow, what right do I have to complain?”
“And us? What about us?” My voice was hollow as a reed.
“You have each other. That’s more than most. Ana—listen, I don’t want to die. But there’s no sense in me railing against it. I should already be dead. I’m luckier than a hundred men I knew back in Okika. Do you understand?”
I did. But I wouldn’t accept it.
My studies of the death spirit had hit an impassable wall, and its name was the southwest atolls. I’d known of the legends surrounding the natives’ death worship for months, but it had seemed relatively insignificant until all my other leads proved fruitless. No one knew very much about them, despite their proximity to Essel. The atolls were so barren and harsh that Essel had never bothered to do more than set up a few military outposts on the coral. But the natives managed to eke out their living on coconuts and screwpines and a rigorous system of year-round fishing. I decided that I needed to take the two-day trip and learn for myself what they might know about death. I told Tulo and she agreed to go with me. To Parech we lied, using long glances and innuendo to imply we wouldn’t mind some time alone with each other. He barely said anything, just shrugged and went back to building the house. So Tulo and I hired a boat. We promised him we’d be back in a week. He smiled and told us to enjoy ourselves. This made Tulo bite her lip and me look away and we could hardly bear to speak to each other for the rest of the day.
We had booked passage on a supply canoe to the military outposts. I had only the vaguest idea of where to go, so I asked the navigator where I was most likely to find the locals’ religious leader.
“There’s only one island with a bit of soil. Most of the pierced ones live on that when they’re not on the water,” he said. “You two sure you want to go there? The natives aren’t very civilized.”
He gave me and Tulo the sort of look that made me sure I’d rather be among the pierced natives than the men of the Esselan army. He dropped us off on an ominously deserted shoreline and said he’d come back in four days if we wanted to go back to the city.
Tulo held my elbow to guide her even though we were far from any human population. I wondered about this. She’d been surefooted as a deer in the Maaram forest, and even at our house on the shore she rarely needed help to get around.
“Aren’t there spirits here?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. Her lips were drawn and her face flushed.
“Is it morning sickness? Should we sit down?”
Tulo shook her head violently and then said, in a rush, “Oh, just hurry up, you stupid witch!”
I was so astonished that I followed her orders. She seemed to relax once we cleared the immediate shoreline and climbed a shallow ridge that afforded me a clear view of some of the island. I could see the faint outline of a settlement around a lagoon perhaps a mile distant. I said as much to Tulo in a carefully neutral tone and she grimaced.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I remember my mother could be awful when she was pregnant.”
“You have siblings?”
“No,” I said, and wished I hadn’t mentioned it. “The babies both died.”
Tulo put her hand over her slightly swollen belly, as though that could protect her child from the same fate. “That’s not it. The spirits here—they’re all for the death. It sucks in all the light. Everything is so silent. I can’t see anything. It’s worse than Okika.”
I knew how much Tulo hated that final denial of her senses, so I put my arm around her shoulders and waited until she had steadied herself. “I’m here,” I said. “And we’ll be back in a few days.”
She kissed me and we lay b
ack on the rocks. “I know,” she said.
We lingered a little longer and then set out again for the tiny settlement. It consisted of little more than three long houses thatched with grass and pandanus leaves and perhaps a dozen small, traditional sea canoes settled in the waters of the lagoon. A few women were outside doing chores—some pulping long strips of bark and others cleaning basketfuls of sea worms. I didn’t see any children or any men. I saw immediately why the Esselan navigator had called them pierced—on an older woman, it seemed every inch of available skin had been first tattooed and then pierced through with a sliver of whittled bone or coral. Her eyebrows, her nose, her lips, her ears all proudly attested to her status. As she was the only one not actively engaged in work, she noticed the two of us first. She spoke to us sharply in her own language, which sounded like a twisted, high-pitched version of Essela I couldn’t quite understand. The general meaning, however, seemed clear enough: What do you want?
“Do you speak Essela?” I said, carefully spreading my hands to show we meant no harm.
She rolled her eyes and spat, as though to show what she thought of the language, but she didn’t deny it.
“We’re looking for a shaman or an elder. Someone who knows about the death spirit.”
This made half the women—who had been studiously ignoring us—look up in shock. The old woman’s eyes narrowed, drawing together the piercings in her eyebrows. “What does a city girl need with the key bearer? It comes to us all in time.”
“I’m an Ana,” I said, and was grateful that this word also held meaning for them. “I mean to learn everything I can about the great death. I’ve heard that your people call death a friend.”
She snorted. “A friend? Only a city girl would say that. What would you sacrifice for this knowledge, so-called Ana?”
“Whatever I need to.”
The Burning City (Spirit Binders) Page 31