The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “I care nothing for her,” Lana says, biting back a fear so primal and irrational she knows that alone could kill her. “I only want my mother.”

  “Then you are dead already.”

  Lana takes a breath and feels as though she is drowning. The water at the bottom of the cave has risen above her eyes and she’s pulling its salt deep into her lungs. She is going to die. She is going to die. She thinks of nothing; she dreams of no one. She is an animal, a bird struggling frantically as it’s doused again and again by the waves. For a moment, there is no one that she loves and nothing that she desires. Just to live, just to live, and for no good reason at all.

  “What will you give us?” says this horror, this godhead who now longs for her extinction. “What will you give us for your life? Your mind? Your love? Your choice?”

  Mask, heart, and key. It is a tiny thought, nearly lost in the maelstrom of inchoate fear. And yet it grows, calming the panic, subsuming the animal terror. She recalls her loves: Leilani, Kapa, Kai. She holds again her desires: peace and her mother safe and children of her own.

  “Still yet you think,” she says, her voice clear and more powerful than she’s ever heard it. “Still yet you love. Still yet you choose.”

  The water vanishes as though it never was, because it never was. “I give you nothing for my life,” she says, in the hollow silence of the cave. “Because you are bound not to take it.”

  “The splinter of our thought might be.”

  “The avatar is the death,” she says, and she sees just a hint of the surprise and amusement that mark the death she knows so well.

  “What would you see, black angel?”

  She has thought very carefully on this. If she asks about Akua’s intentions directly, it might show her any number of misleading answers. But everything she has learned seems to come back to one central event: the great spirit bindings. If she understands that, she thinks, she will understand it all.

  “A thousand years ago, there was one named Aoi. She went with another, Parech, to bind the great death. I would see what happened.”

  The death stretches wider and wider until there are two and then three expanding and expanding until the white robes surround her. Each wears a mask and key, but each is subtly different. The oblong fertility rod morphs gradually into a tablet and then a key. The mask is smoothed and grows longer, painted white and then decorated with the markings she recognizes. The deaths take a step toward her, then another. She understands that they will overtake her, and there is nothing she can do to escape. She looks at the entrance to the cave. She could try. She could run away. The deaths approach. The terror returns with their every step. She will die, she will die, she will—

  “You can do nothing to me,” she says. There it is again, that powerful voice, that unlooked-for assurance. The deaths pause.

  “What will you give us?” they chorus.

  “No,” she says. “You will show me what I asked.”

  And they do.

  It is very cold here, and she is still naked. She sees two people. They are in a different cave, standing near a rock with their backs to her. One turns and she sees it is a young man covered in tattoos. He is beautiful and has thick, kinky hair, bleached blond. She recognizes Parech like she might recognize Pano or Yechtak or her own father. The other woman must be Aoi. She is taller than Lana imagined she’d be. Her skin is lighter and her hair is long and beautiful, just like Tulo said. She wishes that Tulo could be in this vision, as well. Aoi speaks, but Lana can’t understand her. She realizes that they must be speaking Kukichan, the ancient language of the rice islands that died centuries ago. She turns to the death, frantically.

  “You must tell me what they say!”

  “What will you give us?”

  Mask, heart, and key. “A memory,” she says.

  She understands their words. “Do you want to save him or not?” Aoi says. She sounds desperate. Lana knows that she’s deceiving him to save his life.

  “If you do this, Ana, you can’t ever go back.”

  “He’s your son, Parech.”

  Parech turns away so that he’s facing Lana, but he looks right through her. “Why would you make me choose between you?” he says.

  Aoi slams her fist against the rock, hard enough that Lana winces, even from behind. “What am I? You stupid barbarian Akane, what am I compared to your child?”

  It hurts Lana to hear the hatred and self-loathing in her voice. She wants to look away, but Parech makes Aoi face him.

  “You still don’t know,” he says, and he smiles and there is laughter in his eyes. Lana remembers how Aoi first met him, a dying soldier laughing at his own death. “I told you once, and you didn’t listen. I wrote it and you never found the note.”

  She turns her face toward him a little more, and Lana feels a tingling in her throat, a panicked constriction in her chest that has nothing and everything to do with the scene unfolding before her. She recognizes that profile. Great Kai, but she could go blind and still know that long, straight nose, those thin lips, those broad cheekbones.

  “What did you tell me, Parech?” says Aoi, now Akua. Lana hadn’t recognized her voice because it was too young and clear. A millennia had roughened Akua, like sand weathers stone.

  “I said I saw you first.”

  “You can’t love me.”

  “You’ve doubted it?”

  “Not the way you love Tulo.”

  He kisses her forehead and then, as if he can hardly believe what he does, her lips. Lana shivers as she watches. Have you ever thought you might learn things you don’t want to know? The avatar asked her, melancholic. And yes, she answers now. Yes.

  He releases her and Aoi gasps.

  “Love is not like that, Ana,” he says. “To be parceled out and measured. I love you. I love Tulo. Surely, in all this time you’ve come to love me? At least a little.”

  Aoi is nodding, a puppet with tangled strings. “At least a little,” she repeats. Parech has the countenance of a starving man who finds himself in a breadfruit grove. He laughs and lifts her up, but not for very long. His skin pales with the effort.

  “More than a little,” he says.

  “You’ve doubted it?”

  “I am a stupid, barbarian Akane.”

  They have sex against the rock. Lana does not look away. She wants this to be over and she wishes that she couldn’t guess how very badly this will end. Akua had two loves and now she has no one. Eventually, they prepare for the binding. Parech holds the blade and Aoi kneels on the raised stone.

  “No matter what I say, you must do it,” she says, her voice trembling. Parech nods, too dazed perhaps to understand what her words imply.

  “Save him, Ana.”

  “Mask, heart, and key,” she says, in a language Lana recognizes as different. “I know the answer. That which the death does not know.”

  Lana steps forward, eager to at last learn the secret that might free her mother. But the death of the vision does not speak to Aoi. It enters her body and she slumps quietly against the stone. Parech is frantic until he feels her pulse, and then he looks around, as though the death might appear from the walls. The stone begins to glow, like metal before it melts in a forge. Aoi, still unconscious, starts to float. The red light turns white and misty, swirling around her like fog. Parech backs away. The light punches a hole in the roof of the cave. It seems to go on forever. Aoi floats to the top and then sinks again. She opens her eyes slowly and looks around.

  Still within the confines of the white, roiling mist, she calls out to Parech.

  “Your knife,” she says. “Take my arm with it.”

  He understands what she means. He knows that she will die if he refuses her. He doesn’t speak, but even Lana can see his grief and impotent fury as he looks up.

  He will forgive them, Aoi had written. I doubt he will forgive me.

  Lana doubts it as well. She can’t bear to watch anymore, but when she asks the death to stop it just laughs. So sh
e covers her eyes. She still hears the sickening thunk of metal into flesh, the screams that echo endlessly off the rocks. They don’t stop for a very long time.

  “The bone,” Aoi says, her hoarse voice so clearly Akua’s that Lana chokes back a sob. She doesn’t look, but she hears something rip, something crack.

  “Make’lai,” Aoi says, raising her voice again with strength Lana can’t even begin to understand. “Parech, I bind you as one. With this sacrifice, with my very bones, I make you the guardian of this death’s binding and the founder of your line.”

  And now Lana must look, because she never guessed this end to the story. There’s blood over both of them, so much that Lana doesn’t understand how Aoi is still standing. She staggers forward, her left arm aloft and wreathed in white light. Parech himself is frozen. His eyes and mouth are filling with mist. Aoi slams the bone into the rock, and the sound reminds Lana of an earthquake.

  The light from the rock solidifies into a column of air. Lana recognizes it from its cousin inside Akua’s death shrine on the lake. The death stands imprisoned inside. Aoi lies beside it, insensate and bleeding. Parech’s eyes are made of smoke. It drifts from his mouth as he speaks.

  “Ana,” he says. Where before his voice was young and filled with humor, now it aches like time. “Oh, Aoi,” he says again, and Lana wonders how it is that he still loves her.

  “Her name is Akua,” Lana says. “Aoi is dead.”

  The death beside Lana touches her forehead. They are back inside the atoll’s cave and she shivers uncontrollably.

  “What memory will you give us?” it asks eager. “And it must be precious, else we’ll take another.”

  Lana has no more defenses. The cold of the cave has seeped into her mind. She gives the death the first thing she can remember: she and Kali eating oranges in the top of a tree, tossing the peels to the floor and giggling.

  “Let’s make a pact,” young-Lana says. “To go away together. To see all sorts of things we could never see on this island and then come back and tell everyone about it.”

  And Kali, as old as she ever will be, says, “You’re the kind of person who can do things the rest of us can’t, but assumes that there’s nothing special about you.”

  The memory dwindles until all Lana knows is that there’s something missing, something precious that she’ll never have again.

  The death sits across from her in the cave, satisfied. “What is it that you do not know?” Lana asks.

  “Many things.”

  “What did Akua bind you with?”

  “Akua did not bind me.”

  Lana grits her chattering teeth. “What is it that you do not know? What is the knowledge we all seek that even the death doesn’t have? What about death is past death?”

  The death waits. She stares at it. Clear, now. She almost stumbled upon this once before, when she bound it with the nature of its leaden key, a symbol of its ties to the earth. The death is a creature of the earth, of humans, of their finity. It guards the gate, but just the gate.

  “Se maloka selama ua ola,” she whispers.

  “Ipa nui,” it says, and she knows she is right.

  18

  THE EARTHQUAKE WAS MILD, BUT POWERFUL enough for an already decimated city. Several more buildings collapsed. A few fires broke out and were quickly controlled. Thousands of citizens, without the slightest encouragement, poured into the third district, before the gates of the Mo’i’s house and the courtyards of the fire temple. Others lined Sea Street, putting down symbolic pandanus leaves and fruits and dune grass, chanting love songs. Rumors spread quickly, most false. The Mo’i had killed himself, the black angel had run away, the old nun in the fire temple had declared herself the ruler of Essel. Twelve hours passed, and the crowds did not disperse. Indeed, they swelled until an intrepid thief might have had the best year of his life among the abandoned homes of the fifth and fourth districts. Much of the city’s sentiment still lay with the rebels, particularly after people learned of how they had so quickly meted out justice to that pale, demoneyed woman who had tried to kill a baby. Still, they had all had enough of war.

  And clearly the spirits had, as well.

  Some people kept a wary eye on Nui’ahi, but most just turned away. If it would blow again, there was nothing they could do. Arai, the Okikan chief, abided by his agreement with the black angel. He and his army left a day after the quake. Perhaps he was hastened by the sight of his army’s lines of attack choked, and sentiment in the city turned so firmly against his presence. He had come here to exploit the finest trade opportunity in a century. He had not counted on the Esselans being madder than a crate of eels.

  Pano and Nahoa, aware that this unprecedented, peaceful demonstration held the seeds of a rebirth, made the arranged date and manner of their parlay with the Mo’i widely known. A day after the demonstrations began, they changed from a silent vigil into something closer to a solstice feast. The weather warmed—the three days of snow, it seemed, had finally cleared the sky of the choking ash. The farmers of the seventh and fourth districts carted their stores into the crowds, spurred by some impulse of magnanimity that would not be seen again. Flutes trilled and any surface at all turned into drums. Laughter was heard again on the streets of Essel, the sort of free and hopeful sound that the city had not known since its sentinel rained fire and ash. Owners of hookah lounges tossed amant onto the crowds like fragrant, dried flowers. Palm wine and kava kept them warm at night, when they weren’t warmed by each other. Nine months later, the babies born would be called kelala ua, sparks of peace.

  The day of the talks, a dozen new songs floated like flowers on the sea of people. They were mostly long, in the style of the old epics, with calls and responses and pauses for dancing. They told of the evil Mo’i, mad as a boar, who would kill anyone he looked upon. They told of the rebels, each one eight feet tall and more beautiful than the sun. Nahoa was a tragic figure, tied to her mad husband but in love with another (how the city had so accurately guessed this, Malie would never know, though she would eventually ascribe it to the animal wisdom of crowds). Pano grew flowers as large as palm trees and fought with a trowel. And the black angel? She was an enigma, a spirit but yet a girl, and whenever she entered a scene a melancholy strain would follow, a hint of “Yaela’s Lament.”

  The cheers echoed across the island when the rebels marched through the city to the greater bay. Nahoa waved, Pano nodded with sage dignity. They hadn’t wanted to start this without Lana, but they didn’t even know if she was still alive. Right before he boarded the ship, a rebel soldier gave Pano a note. It was brief, but Nahoa couldn’t read it. He closed his eyes for a moment. The crowd, seeing this, thought perhaps that he was overcome with the possibility of peace and plenty returning to his beloved city. Nahoa knew that something had happened, but she could not ask in front of all these people. The soldier, who had read the note and so understood Pano’s grief, said something low and regretful to his friend.

  Less than an hour later, the whole city knew what news the note contained. A new strain was summarily added to the songs for a new tragic figure, far more pitiable than Nahoa, who still had that fat baby, after all.

  Eliki, the city mourned in its own fashion, imagining a woman ten feet tall with fire for eyes and a mane of white hair, who had dedicated her life to the city and drowned herself in the ocean when her folly took her from it. They did not know of her daughter, drowned so many years past, but they weren’t far from wrong, all the same.

  Kohaku was the leader of all Essel, but he stayed silent as Makaho led the talks. Much as he had all week. Even the increasingly pointed barbs from the false ghost of his sister elicited no more than a grunt. Makaho did not mind this state of affairs. He wondered, bleakly, if she even noticed.

  “I have drafted a power-sharing agreement,” she said, without preamble, when the ship had cast off and all four were present at the table. Lana was missing. He wondered if that meant the rumors were right, and she had run away. It did no
t seem like her.

  “Perhaps you missed the crowd outside,” Pano said.

  “Perhaps you missed our superior army and resources. The crowd just wants peace. They don’t care how they get it. I wouldn’t mind some myself.”

  “I think you’d be surprised at how little love is left for Bloody One-hand in this city.”

  Kohaku hardly heard the epithet, but Nahoa winced, which was a little gratifying. She had not brought Lei’ahi. He wished she had, but he supposed that she didn’t trust him any more than anyone else did. They said that she’d found the little girl’s body. He couldn’t even bring himself to speak with her.

  “The ignorance of the commons will never surprise me,” Makaho said. “That still doesn’t mean you can win a war.”

  “We might,” said Nahoa, and Kohaku heard more than enough in that “we” to make his misery complete.

  “How loyal do you think that crowd will be if you decide to keep fighting instead of accepting our very generous offer? When the next earthquake comes? If Nui’ahi erupts again? Who do you think they’ll side with, then?”

  Nahoa glanced at Pano, her face as expressive as ever. They did not touch. He did not even look at her. And yet Kohaku knew. He had thought that he might win her back if he won this war. He saw now that he had a greater chance of learning to fly. She was lost, more permanently than he had ever suspected. Nahoa was not merely sympathetic to the rebels. He knew her well enough to recognize the signs: she was in love with Pano, the rebel gardener.

  It did not matter what happened to him now, if it ever had.

  “What are the terms?” Pano asked.

  “You reaffirm the authority of the Mo’i and the selection by the fire spirit. In return, we form a city council along the lines of Okika, with Kohaku at its head and seats for representatives of the temples.”

  “Kohaku has to go.”

  Makaho narrowed her eyes. “I believe that would violate the principle of a power-sharing agreement.”