Bernreb was with her. He wiped the sweat from her forehead and the bloody sputum from her lips with a woven cloth.
“What’s the matter with her?” Unar asked.
“I do not know. She bleeds from the tongue. The sickness has spread from there, down into her lungs.”
Unar felt stuck to the floor, glued by guilt at the stupidity of her mistake. She’d thought their escape was in the service of saving Hasbabsah from certain death, only to discover that her people’s cruelty was more cunning than that; in the old and long-encumbered, the mark couldn’t be completely removed, not even by passing beyond the scope of the magic that had placed it there. Ylly had proven recoverable. Hasbabsah was not.
“Oos could have healed her,” she said. “Oos should have healed her. Couldn’t you climb with Hasbabsah, and with Oos—”
“No,” Bernreb interrupted. “We cannot pass through the barrier, and by now, neither can any of you. We must do our best for her here, without the working of gods.”
“Are there no healers? Herb women? Blasphemers of that sort?”
“Not in the monsoon. Nobody travels in the monsoon.”
Unar turned on her heel in frustration. In the fishing room, thin beams of moonlight struck the edge of the river where it flowed over the entrance, making a moonbow overlaid on a soft wall of white. She stopped to gape at it. As she watched, the fleeting moonlight faded, leaving the room cold and dark and wet again.
She filled the toilet bucket with water, then with waste, and finally, wrinkling her nose, she poured it away. She crushed a soapleaf and lathered her hands before rinsing them. Then she cupped the river water directly for drinking.
It tasted a little like tannins, a little like rotted leaves. Not much like rainwater, but at least she hadn’t caught any fish in her hands.
As she was backing away from the water, ready to go back to Esse, something came through the entrance, splitting the water—something that she couldn’t quite see, which she assumed in a panic was a demon. She groped for her knife a second time and loosed a cry of startlement and fear.
“Hush,” said Marram. His voice was higher pitched than Bernreb’s, not as coldly menacing as Esse’s. “What were you doing? I hope I did not walk in through a tossed bucket of solid waste.”
“No,” Unar managed, mortified.
Marram pulled something like a blanket away from his head and the dark bulk resolved into his slender, pale shape. He carried a long, curved stave and a basket on his back. A thick coil of sodden rope hung at the waist of his short wrap. Coarse-woven cloth to provide better grip was laced onto his insteps and the tops of his knees, leaving his shins bare with their spikes hidden in the seams. The rope coil ended in a metal spike with a round eye for attachment, and when Marram turned to drape the blanket from a hook, the glow of luminescent fungi revealed that the stave was an unstrung, powerful-looking longbow of three different laminated woods.
The blanket took on the colour of the fungi-covered wall, and Unar gasped.
“Chimera skin,” she said. She couldn’t help but look into the basket as Marram unstrapped it. “Those aren’t tallowwood leaves.”
“No,” Marram admitted.
“But nobody travels from tree to tree in the monsoon. Hasbabsah said so, and Bernreb, too. Where did these leaves come from? How did you get them, if you stayed only on this tree?”
Marram smiled. “Nobody travels in the monsoon,” he said, “because wet bark means that resin glues for sticky-climbing will not properly attach. Spikes may not penetrate properly through loosened, sodden bark to the safety of the wood. And traditional leather skins for gliding hold too much weight in water. The glide cannot be sustained, and the hapless hunter falls to Floor.”
Unar glanced at the chimera skin again.
“Traditional leather,” she repeated. “Is that why Bernreb hunted a demon for you?”
“It is.”
“So you can glide from tree to tree, even in the rain?”
“I am the first one. The only one. Only I can move through the trees during the monsoon.”
“You,” Unar said, “and your two brothers, you mean.”
“No. Bernreb is too heavy, and Esse is a barkclinger; he does not fancy flight. But I do.”
Hope rose in her chest.
“Then you can go to this barbarian village, Gannak, or whatever you call it. You can find medicines for her. Save her life.”
“You forget,” Marram said, shaking his head, “we are exiles. I would be killed on sight if I showed my face in Gannak.”
“Let me go, then!” Unar grasped his hand. “Teach me to fly!”
“Flying is the easy part. Flying isn’t the difficulty.”
“What is the difficulty, then?”
Marram pulled his fingers out of her grip. He raised his forearm, held it vertical high above the level of her eyes for a moment, and then brought it down sharply against the fishing room wall.
When Unar looked closely, she realised he had extended his spikes and driven them deeply into the wood.
“The difficulty,” he said, “is landing.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN OOS woke, she emerged into the workroom where Unar was busily stripping fibres from the strap-like leaves.
Oos’s white robe was stained by bark, glue, and fish slime. The beads and ribbons in her hair had congealed with woodchips and pallet-straw into an awful-looking, trussed-up, kicked-beehive shape.
“I’m hungry,” she said to Unar in a small voice.
“Go on, then,” Unar replied, jerking her head towards the hearth room. “They’re in there, the three of them. There’s fruit and fish.”
Since his return with the leaves via the fishing room, Marram had shrugged off his clothes, dried himself, dressed in a clean waist-wrap by the fire, slept for three hours in the bedroom barred to guests, and then risen, refreshed, as if three hours sleep per day were all that he needed. Bernreb had passed Unar once or twice to check on the baby, Issi, only to find Ylly had everything in hand. As for Esse, Unar didn’t think he’d slept at all.
“I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to see them. Can’t you…?”
Unar sighed and put the leaf to one side. After six hours or so of stripping, her fingers had blisters aplenty, but there was something soothing in the leaf sap that allowed her to keep working stubbornly through the pain. She needed that knife back. From her sitting position on the wooden floor, she looked up at Oos.
“We wouldn’t be here at all if only you’d helped instead of hindered.”
“How can you say that? You’re the one who dragged us into the river, to death, as far as you knew, but you did it anyway. Besides, how could I turn against the Servants? I am a Servant. I can’t turn against myself.”
Unar didn’t say haughtily that they wouldn’t have died because she had a destiny, even if she was the only one who could see it. Aoun knew. Aoun said that the wards had stood four hundred years, that Unar had the power to destroy everything, that she was practically the goddess reborn.
“You can still think for yourself, can’t you?” Unar tossed her head angrily. “You can decide which traditions are important and which are needlessly cruel. Is Audblayin a god in want of human sacrifices?”
“Of course not—she is the giver of life!”
“Then you failed her when you failed to give life to Hasbabsah. Can’t you hear her, coughing, dying in the other room? You can’t fool me, Oos. We were friends for too long. It’s not those men you’re afraid of, it’s watching an old woman die.”
They glared at each other for a moment. Then Oos brushed past Unar, kicking her pile of fibre in petty vengeance as she went. Unar scraped the pile together again, silently, on her hands and knees, before moving to where she could eavesdrop on the conversation in the hearth room.
“Is it morning?” Oos’s voice sounded timid through the curtain.
“The last dawn that your ex-slave is likely to see,” Esse said. Hasbabsah’
s hacking halted the conversation momentarily.
“If I could send a message up to the other Servants,” Oos said into the pause. “Servant Eilif could come down here. She could do something to help.”
“No message,” Bernreb said. “If the Servants knew we were down here, they would poison the river, or dam it, for a chance of getting rid of us. Parasites on their very own tree!”
“Servant Eilif, as you call her, would not venture where her magic could not protect her,” Esse said. “Not for the sake of a slave. Or is it you in need of help? A thousand soldiers could not carry you through the barrier now, even if they left us dangling with our throats cut.”
“There must be a way.” Oos’s voice became so quiet that Unar had to lift a corner of the embroidered hanging. “Hasbabsah came to Canopy from Understorey, once.”
“There is a way—” Marram began to say, kindly, but Esse interrupted.
“If Hasbabsah decides to tell you how she did it,” he said sharply, “I will not stop her. But we three will not tell you. You had better do everything you can think of to help her to get well.”
“Magic is the only thing I can think of!”
Nobody had anything to say to that. There was no magic in Understorey.
Or was there?
Unar sat back down on the floor and took a deep breath. She pinched her left forearm with the fingers of her right hand, feeling the two long bones beneath the skin. She closed her eyes and ground her jaw; teeth were bones, too. Focus on the bones. Bones and magic.
Nothing.
Issi started crying in the former storeroom, now guestroom. Unar heard the shuffling sounds of Ylly dragging herself upright, murmuring platitudes over the cot, lifting Issi into her arms. Then there was the pungent smell of soiled wrappings being changed, just as Bernreb pushed the hanging up onto its hook and passed through the workshop. He nodded briefly to Unar before ducking into the storeroom.
“I will take those,” Unar heard him say.
“Take the baby,” Ylly said. “I’ll wash these now and hang them up right away.”
“The old woman,” Bernreb said. “Her fever has not broken. She takes water, but she will not wake. I do not know what to do.”
“Neither do I.”
Silence.
Issi complained again, loudly.
“I will feed you, then, little black duck,” Bernreb said soothingly. “Getting to be a fat, heavy little chick, are you not? With only a few little fuzzy feathers. It is no good talking to me in the language of the chimera. You are with your own kind now.”
“Ba,” the baby said.
“Bernreb,” Bernreb encouraged her.
“Ba.”
“Close enough.”
Bernreb took Issi back past Unar to the hearth room, with Ylly not far behind him. They left the curtain on its hook, and Marram’s voice floated through the open doorway.
“I think it is the smell of the baby bringing that dayhunter around to this side of our tree.”
“Did you see it?” Esse asked.
“I saw scales rubbed onto bark, three and four trunks from here. Claw marks. Long streaks of dayhunter waste with insects trapped in it, only hours old and not set. The same fully grown male animal that left marks around your nets, Esse. It is not afraid to swim from tree to tree down at Floor.”
“Surely our pet corpse-lover has better pickings at Floor than at this level. Surely it remembers that it has never, in its long life, found anything to eat below the Garden.”
“No matter how we try to hide the baby’s smell in the centre of the river, I think it smells her anyway. Its ancestors spent many centuries plucking bald newborns from hollows in trees. I think even fresh corpses from the fighting at Floor cannot tempt it away from its goal. And Bernreb’s weapons will not puncture its hide.”
“Tonight, I will reset the traps sprung by the Canopians. Trussing it, weighting it, and drowning it remains our best option.”
“I agree.”
Esse sighed. “I need sleep. You should put this Burned One to work with the other one, Marram. Idleness breeds mischief.”
“Not Burned One,” Oos corrected him, her distress obvious. “Warmed One.”
“Warmed One,” Esse repeated mockingly, his voice coming from higher up as if he’d gotten to his feet. “I put some cockles in the fire. To feast on flesh of Floor. One was cold and one was warm. One placed after and one before. I burned one, I splayed one. I’ll turn one, I’ll trade one. All by the Old Gods sowed and made, found by me with my trusty spade.”
“It is a rhyme,” Marram said. “He is not threatening you. Look at me, Servant Oos of the Garden. Forget him and forget the dayhunter. You are in no danger.”
“Marram always wanted a wife,” Esse said, laughing his nasal laugh.
“Go to bed, Esse.”
“Now he thinks he will not have to wait for that squeaky infant to grow up. But the truth is that someone like you can never see him as anything but a slave.”
Esse’s chair scraped as he pushed it back in to the table. There was silence from Marram and Oos. Unar stripped the fibre, her head bowed over the stems, more slowly than she had at first but still working. Esse thought he knew everything, but he was wrong about Oos. Unar had made a similar accusation, and while it was true that Oos had traded Sawas and her child with as much consideration as she might show a hand of plantains, she’d done it for Unar. She had a good heart. She hadn’t known, as Unar had, that those acting, however treacherously, from a place of motherly devotion could be forgiven anything.
That Unar would have battled any demon, sacrificed any dream, if only her mother had wanted her.
Oos would come around, soon enough. She would grow calm. She would feel safe. She would realise that the strata of human life in the Garden were artificial. That her refusal to share knowledge with Unar was wrong. They’d become a team again. Oos would help Unar to first heal Hasbabsah and then find the reincarnation of Audblayin. Aoun would be sorry he’d stayed behind.
“I cannot be your wife,” Oos blurted out.
“I am not asking you to be,” Marram said. “And if I did, it would be entirely your choice to make.” He was silent for a while, then asked, “Is it true that no music is permitted in the Garden?”
“It’s true.” Oos sounded relieved. “But I played the bells as a child.”
“Then let me lend you my thirteen-pipe flute. It is not difficult to play.”
TWENTY-NINE
AFTER SUPPER, when it seemed like time for sleeping, though Unar couldn’t guess the hour with the constant falling water sounds of rain and river and gloom of the interior, she lay down on her pallet in the storeroom with the others, staring up at the living ceiling that was connected to the well-tended beds of the Garden.
The wood was oil-rich. It shone a polished yellow-brown, lacquered in places where the sapwood must have oozed for a while after it was cut, until the gum hardened in the air. The dwelling was a shallow one, not penetrating anywhere near the heartwood of the tallowwood trunk, but blessedly free of insects. Unar supposed they had the river to thank for that. Not a single flying creature fluttered near the flames. The candles, true tallow, stuck fast by their bear- and tapir-fat drippings, weren’t especially bright, but they seemed brighter against the soot-stained niches where they sat.
Unar’s pallet was made up of straw beneath bear pelts, black with yellow circles on them, and she couldn’t tell if they still smelled of bear, if the stench was the candles, or if it was her own smell. She didn’t want to shed her red Gardener’s shirt just yet, though it had gathered rainwater, glue, humus, solvent, fish grease, and leaf sap so far.
While she wore it, she could pretend she was still somewhat part of what she’d left behind.
“Oos,” she whispered, not wanting to wake the baby. Nor Ylly, snoring softly on the other side of the cradle, who hadn’t spoken a word to either one of them all day. She blamed them for Hasbabsah’s state, and Unar couldn’t fault her for
doing it. “Oos, are you awake?”
Oos’s back was turned to Unar, but her fingers tightened on a corner of her blanket.
“No.”
Unar smiled. It was like old times in the hammocks in the loquat grove, like their early years in the Garden before Oos was made a Servant and Unar was left behind. Unar had wanted to sneak a look at the goddess, and at her Bodyguard, too, until Oos had reminded her about the moat. About the fish. Do you think she can fly? Unar had asked, and Oos had snorted and said, No.
“Oos, won’t you please tell me everything you learned about healing so we can both find a way to make the magic work and heal Hasbabsah?”
“Are you stupid?” She rolled over angrily. “The magic won’t work for you, for me, for anyone, Unar! Maybe not ever!”
“You don’t know that.”
“And why should one who walks in the grace of Audblayin want to heal Hasbabsah?” Oos’s tone had turned haughty. “Why should I care if she dies? She’s supposed to die, for betraying the Garden. You and me, too. If there’s justice, we’ll all die.”
“You don’t really want to die,” Unar said calmly, “or you’d have jumped into the river already.”
“I want you to die. You ruin everything you touch.”
Unar seized Oos’s wrist, keeping a hold on it despite Oos’s attempt to pull away.
“Did we betray the Garden?” Unar demanded. “We saved it from becoming stained with slaves’ blood. The Garden is still pure. Did we somehow admit murderers, rapists, or thieves?”
“You stole two slaves. You are a thief.”
Unar fought to keep from laughing in her face.
“I am a thief if a person is a thing to steal.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Oos,” Unar said urgently, “tell me what you know. Hasbabsah doesn’t have much time. Please.”
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