“I don’t want to make babies with Aoun!”
“Is that all you have to say? Have you been learning to swim?”
“Just one lesson, Oos. I’m trying to conquer my weaknesses. You know I’m afraid of the water!”
“Don’t you have enough work to do?”
“Don’t speak to me like I’m a slave. I lied for you, when you made music in the loquat grove. I hid your bells under the avocado tree so you wouldn’t be cast out of the Garden.”
“And now I’ve sold two slaves for you.”
“She was lying about me,” Unar spat, eye to eye with Oos.
“Are your oaths unbound, Unar?”
“No!”
“I think they might be. I think when you went into Understorey, something happened—”
“Nothing happened! I love the Garden. I’m loyal to it. Don’t you believe me? Don’t you know me at all? If my oaths are unbound, why haven’t I bled?”
“Haven’t you?”
“I should hate you for that,” Unar said, but she knew she couldn’t hate Oos, not really.
Ylly’s hatred would surely be enough for both of them.
NINETEEN
ON THE first day of spring, word reached the Garden that Wife-of-Epatut’s child was lost.
Ylly no longer spoke at all to Unar, even though they worked together every night by the light of the moon or stars. No longer required as a child-minder, Hasbabsah had been returned to the Garden proper, where she was, as before, physically incapable of doing the work she was assigned. Though Ylly clearly despised Unar, blaming her for the loss of her daughter, Unar fell again into the routine of helping to hide Hasbabsah’s weakness in order to keep her alive.
Unar couldn’t help but overhear the Gardeners’ gossip at mealtimes. Soon after the miscarriage, Wife-of-Epatut came again to be blessed. It was late in the afternoon. She didn’t bring Sawas with her to carry her tribute; she carried it alone.
It was a basket of metal-stone fruit from Akkadland. The fruit goddess could cause the great trees to draw up metal through their mighty roots and form it into seed-shaped ingots at the heart of her emergent’s stringy, yellow fruit. It was a power that Audblayin didn’t have, even during her incarnation’s prime of life.
“I must have a son this time,” Wife-of-Epatut said to Unar, who had sensed her coming and met her at the Gate. “Please, Gardener. Lead me to the Temple.”
Unar tried to take the basket, but Wife-of-Epatut resisted.
“I must carry the offering,” she said. “I must show my humility to Audblayin. I couldn’t carry the last child that she gave to me. The fault must be mine.”
She was a wide-built woman with an unblemished brow, colourful silks woven into her hair to advertise her trade, and a bosom that caused the front of her gown to fall a foot-length in front of the rest of her body.
“It’s not your fault,” Unar said. She tried to think of a way to ask about Sawas, about baby Ylly, but Wife-of-Epatut’s protuberant, pain-filled, expectant eyes, turned in the direction of the Temple, and she began to lead the way towards the shallow ford where penitents crossed the fish-filled moat.
Unar glared at the water that she wasn’t allowed to trespass through as Wife-of-Epatut waded awkwardly onward, struggling under the weight of the basket. Aoun came out of the egg-shaped Temple to meet her. He looked even taller than the last time Unar had seen him, and there was two days’ growth along his jaw as though he’d been too busy with his new and very important training to take the time to shave.
Wife-of-Epatut allowed him to take the basket.
As night fell, Unar stayed standing by the ford. She should have retreated to the loquat grove, but she didn’t care about being reprimanded. Aoun emerged, carrying his Gatekeeper’s lantern. He walked across the surface of the water without sinking, his magic more luminous than the lantern. Unar hadn’t seen any of the Servants do such a thing before. His sandals were dry.
“Go to bed, Gardener,” he said wearily.
She fell in beside him.
“Have you helped her?” Unar wanted to know. “Have you guaranteed a son to her, who dropped one daughter and miscarried another?”
“We’ve done nothing yet. Wife-of-Epatut gives tribute. She prays to Audblayin.”
“Where is Audblayin?”
“It doesn’t matter where. She hears our prayers.”
“He hears them, you mean. He hears them, even though he’s a screaming infant. That’s ridiculous. We both know he hears nothing until he comes of age.”
“What do you want, Unar?”
“Show me what you’re going to do to Wife-of-Epatut. How is it that you make a woman more fertile? Is it the same as plants? How is it that you choose the baby’s sex?”
“That’s for Servants to know.”
Unar shot a sideways glance at him as they walked, but his expression was blank. She couldn’t tell if his word choice reflected her rudeness to Oos in the grass plot.
“Unless somebody pushes Servant Eilif off the edge of the Garden, I will never be a Servant!”
“Is that something you have considered? Pushing Servant Eilif off the edge of the Garden?”
“Of course not.”
He hesitated within arm’s reach of the Gate. “Go to bed, Unar. Go on.”
She left him, fuming, but she didn’t go to bed. Instead, she crept back to her old listening post in the pomegranate bushes, directly across the moat from the treatment room where Oos had once cured her tiredness.
There were voices. Wife-of-Epatut’s voice. The words were indiscernible, but the sounds drifted out of the round, open windows in the white egg of the Temple.
Unar stripped off her robe, leaving her loincloth and her breast-bindings in place. She was too angry to care about fish or drowning. She was going to see, at last, the Servants’ way. She would be tutored whether her tutors wanted her or not.
The water was icy, as it hadn’t been during daylight. So high, and exposed to winds that normally broke against the green roof of Canopy, it was probably the coldest water in all the land; it was rumoured to have frozen, once, many centuries ago, when Audblayin had fallen to Floor but not been killed, so that he was the farthest he could be from the Temple and not have his spirit returned to a body that was closer.
Unar tried to think of a seed in warm earth. It was spring, after all. She convinced her body that it wasn’t cold. Using a fraction of her magic, she summoned a raft of watercress to hold on to and floated across, not high and dry as Aoun had done, but neck-deep and gasping.
When she reached the little island, she crouched on the tiny ledge of rotted leaves under the window, arms around her knees, shivering and listening.
“I’m so afraid, Servant Eilif,” Wife-of-Epatut said. “And I’m tired of being afraid of my husband’s wrath. But if this doesn’t work, I don’t think I could bear to try again.”
“It will work,” Eilif said comfortingly. “Lie down, please.”
There were sounds of clothes being shifted and feet shuffling. Unar forced her frigid body to uncurl. She had to look through the window if she was to see with eyes of power the procedure that Eilif was about to perform.
When she peered over the edge of the open window, Eilif stood there, waiting calmly. Her eyes met Unar’s. Her hood and cloak blocked Unar’s view of anyone else in the room.
Unar’s rage died. She felt like crying, again.
“Wait only a moment, Wife-of-Epatut,” Eilif said without turning. Without blinking. “My assistants must see to a troublesome weed that is growing by this window. Go.”
The unseen assistants left the room, but Unar knew who they were even before she saw them wading in the muck, one hand each on the outer wall of the Temple, the other holding their robes away from the rotted leaves that their sandals sank into. She thought about running away from them, but it would only have postponed her punishment.
“Oh, Unar,” Oos said, lip trembling in the light that came from the window.
Aoun said nothing.
They slung her arms over their shoulders so that she was between them. It seemed like a group embrace until their combined magic groped around inside of her, seized hers like a weed, and pulled it out by the roots.
Unar did cry, then. She had no strength to speak or to stand. Those she had once called friends supported her weight between them. They walked across the moat without sinking, carrying her all the way to the loquat grove, and laid her down in her hammock. The lorikeets roused, but none of the other Gardeners so much as raised their heads.
She was still crying long after they left her alone.
TWENTY
BLOSSOMS RAINED on Unar’s bent back that spring.
As the season drew to a close, the first stirring of her magic sprouted up again. She’d spent those months on her knees, weeding the orchid garden, and the sensation was strange enough for her to cradle her midriff, mouth open in surprise and relief. She had wondered if it would ever return, so deep and dark had the empty places seemed.
There was nobody for her to share her excitement with. Nobody to tell. As the weather warmed, Ylly still accepted her help in silence. The other Gardeners had given up trying to get to know her, both in response to her brusqueness and in the full knowledge that she had been drained as punishment for trying to spy on Temple proceedings.
It was just enough magic for her to unlock the Gate.
For the first time in a long time, Unar left the Garden.
Her first thought was to find the House of Epatut, to check that Sawas and baby Ylly weren’t being ill-used. Maybe if she brought news of them to old Ylly, she’d be forgiven.
But she didn’t know where it was, and she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by asking for directions from strangers. Her second thought was to practice swimming by herself. She couldn’t do it in the moat, and she couldn’t do it in the Garden pools without the slaves seeing.
Ehkisland. The home of the rain goddess received more rain than any other part of Canopy. There were hundreds of pools, claimed by no one.
Unar crossed the border at the Falling Fig.
She found a suitably desolate pool just as a light rain began to fall. It wasn’t quite yet time for the summer monsoon, but many dry-season shops and dwellings had been shuttered in anticipation. Some of the drizzle penetrated past the leafy roof over the pool, but most collected on the leaves and fell, slightly delayed, as fat drips, heavy with dust and dead insects.
Very little light came down from the high paths lit by the lightning god, but it was enough that Unar could see the complex and hypnotising patterns formed by the drops. Tiny fish and frogs came to eat the dead insects. Unar made herself look at them with determination.
Eilif had sensed her approach because of her magic. She must learn to swim without it. She was not beaten, would never be beaten.
Unar disrobed, keeping her loincloth and breast bindings as before. She put her toe in the water.
“She’s not in that one,” an oddly familiar voice said.
Without her magic and without proximity to the Garden, people could creep up on her unawares, but this man, she suspected, could creep up on anyone he wanted to. She looked up and around for him but didn’t withdraw her toe.
“It’s you,” she said steadily. “Edax. The Bodyguard who doesn’t sleep.”
He walked, upside down, along the underside of a branch too small to form a safe path in its own right. Talons didn’t need to dig into the bark. In his own niche, he walked where he wanted. His long black hair hung like moss. The tear-scores on his cheeks bunched as he smiled, turning his brown skin to polished tigereye.
Upside down, the effect of his bared teeth was gruesome.
“It’s you,” he said. “The little Gardener who wanders away from safe places.”
“Doesn’t the blood rush to your head?”
“No. This is part of my gift from the goddess. There is no up or down underwater.”
“Can you fly, then?”
“Oh, no. I may be owl-footed, but I have no wings. Flying is for the Bodyguard of Orin, Queen of Birds, and the Bodyguard of Audblayin, Waker of Senses.”
“I never saw him fly,” Unar said scornfully. “Probably because he was too fat.”
“Was he fat, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
Edax laughed in his low, rich voice. He was much older than Aoun and his face more expressive. His nose was sharper, his cheekbones were more prominent, and he had a shorter, squarer jaw. When he walked to the tree trunk, set his bare bird-foot against it, and pressed, hard, as though realigning himself horizontally, the weapons at his belt and over his shoulders swung vertical, popping out of his clothes like uncurling creepers.
He strode down the trunk, set himself upright on the path beside her and approached with interest. She tried not to look at his feet. They were the only part of him she didn’t like, because girls should not be attracted to birds, but the rest of him was so attractive.
“What are you searching for in the bottom of the pool, Gardener? More new life on the brink of death?”
“Who says I’m searching for anything?”
“Many things fall in. Heavy things. Valuable things. Coins. Jewels. Very few can dive deep enough to find them.”
“I’m not diving for treasure. I’m learning to swim.”
“Where’s your teacher?”
Unar started to say that she had none, but then her mood darkened.
“They took her away from me,” she said. “She was a slave.”
“I can teach you.”
“I’m not allowed to learn the powers of other goddesses and gods.”
“It’s not magic.” He put his warm hand on her bare shoulder and stroked down her spine. “It’s only movement. A thrilling kind of movement. A secret kind.”
Unar grew heated at his touch, in the place, low in her belly, where her magic should have been; she met his laughing eyes and wondered if he was still talking about swimming. She wanted to learn from him but felt too much at a disadvantage here, in Ehkisland, where his powers worked but hers didn’t.
“If it’s not magic,” she said, “you can teach me in Understorey.”
“There’s a pool close by the barrier,” he said without hesitation. “These final few weeks of spring are weeks of relative safety. When the monsoon begins and rivers run down the great trees, the enemy warriors of Understorey are confined to their dwellings. They’ll already be confined, in anticipation. But we couldn’t stay there for very long at one time, or we’d risk being barred from Canopy forever.”
“Would you miss your goddess so very much?”
“She’d miss me. Three men tried to drown her today.”
“Did they?” Unar turned so his hand fell away from her lower back. She’d liked having it there. Oos must be right about her oaths. If they hadn’t broken by now, when she went with Edax below the barrier again, they would surely tear in two. She’d crack like an egg full of blood.
“I needed only to keep the men under,” he said, “after they realised she couldn’t be drowned. They tried to let go of her. To give up their attempted murder. I pulled them down and fixed them by their foot bones to the bottom, next to all the others who have tried to harm her. Their finger bones wave in the current like water-weeds.”
“They do?” Unar was fascinated. “In which pool?”
“Not this one,” Edax said. “In the great fig-pool where my goddess dreams. In Ehkis’s emergent, the Temple of the Bringer of Rain. But that’s not where we’ll go.”
TWENTY-ONE
“I CAN’T help you work tonight, Ylly,” Unar said, two weeks later.
She had to shout to be heard over the roaring wind and rumbling of the storm. This wild night belonged to Ehkis and to Airak. The monsoon was very close. The Gardeners wouldn’t know for sure until the storm broke. If the rain stopped when morning came, then this storm was but a precursor, and the true storm was still to come. If it didn’t stop aft
er a day, they could be almost certain it would continue for five months. Unar didn’t even bother to try to stay dry. She’d left her sandals behind at her hammock, along with her waterproof leaf-jacket. It didn’t matter. The driving rain was blood-warm.
Ylly said nothing. She’d said nothing since the day Sawas was taken away from the Garden. Unar pressed her seed porridge portion into the older woman’s hands.
“Take my supper. You’re losing weight. I’ll help you again tomorrow.”
Ylly took the porridge and turned away.
Unar dashed across the bridge, not worried about being seen. Who but Ylly would be out in this weather? She went to the Gate, locked hours before, and early, by Aoun, and pushed it open a body’s width, boring a hole through the lock with her magic and sealing it again behind her with the rich scent of thirsty soil thick in her nostrils.
The water above her, below her, to both sides of her, made her feel like raising her arms, winglike, and swimming through the air. She laughed with the joy of it as she flitted over the slippery, winding paths towards Ehkisland.
When she came to the lowest branch over the Understorian border, with the pool she and Edax practiced in yawning black and tantalising below, she laid her wet red tunic and green trousers over the peeling bark and stretched her arms above her head.
“Wait for me, Audblayin,” she said. “Keep your gifts until my return.”
She dived smoothly, several body lengths, down into the pool. Somewhere in midair, she lost her magic, but she was used to that sensation now. It would be there when she came back up to get her clothes.
Thunder seemed to shake the great trees. The myrtle pool quivered, hissing where rain sheeted into it. Unar swam confidently to the edge. She hardly needed Edax now. Only there was something about his gaze on her, about his wiry arms and clever fingers, that drew her back again.
She climbed out of the pool, stood in the warm rain, and waited for him.
For the longest time, he didn’t come. A twinge of worry twisted her gut. Had an attempt on the goddess killed Edax instead? Perhaps he’d forgotten this night was a lesson night.
Crossroads of Canopy Page 10