Crossroads of Canopy

by Thoraiya Dyer

  Oos freed herself with a sharp twist. “Never,” she said, turning her back again.

  Unar listened, but she couldn’t even hear any coughing now. Nor harsh breathing. If Hasbabsah died, all her efforts were wasted. The extra chores, which had left Unar unsuitable for selection. The nights and nights of washing clothes by moonlight with Ylly and the lunatic leap from the lip of the Garden.

  “If it was your grandmother dying, I’d want to help her,” Unar said. “She stood outside the Gates and cried that you were killing her, remember? She said you were the birdsong in her heart and that, without you, her heart would turn black and silent. Like Hasbabsah’s tongue, Oos. It’s wrong to mark slaves in such a way, can’t you see?”

  “I remember your mother came to the Garden,” Oos said. Her voice was muffled. “I remember her at the Gates. She said she could have sold you for one thousand weights of silver but that you’d run away. She demanded that Audblayin pay for you and cursed us all when the Servants told her it was too late. I wish she had sold you. I wish it was you with a black and silent tongue. Be quiet now. I want to sleep.”

  Unar sighed.

  She gave up the conversation, rolling flat onto her back. Staring at the ceiling again, she imagined the patterns of sap were the shapes of herself and Aoun on that first morning, when they had waited outside the dew-covered Gates for the dawn.

  We’re so high up, Unar had said, staring at the sky. And so exposed.

  Look, Aoun had marvelled, nudging her. The sun.

  It had risen over the endless forest’s distant horizon, first making the trees black and stark, then burnishing their many shades of green. Both children had been astonished by the unfiltered heat of it, even so soon after dawn.

  If they let us stay, Unar said, we’ll be warm all the time.

  We’ll be Warmed Ones, Aoun had said, grinning.

  The Gatekeeper, the woman with the lantern, had been an indistinct shape in the shadow of the half-open Gate.

  Applicants, she had muttered. When we haven’t even announced the deaths of the old Gardeners. How did you know to come, fledglings?

  Unar and Aoun had looked at one another. They hadn’t known that old Gardeners must die before new Gardeners could be admitted.

  We just…, Unar began uncertainly.

  Came, Aoun finished awkwardly.

  Has the plague been through your houses? demanded the Gatekeeper. Are you in good health?

  Yes, they both said at once. The Gatekeeper put her cupped palm through the gap in the Gate. She held a handful of soil.

  How many seeds do I hold? she’d wanted to know.

  Three, Aoun said.

  Three, Unar said, wide-eyed with astonishment that she should be able to answer such a question, having expected a lengthy, labouring trial period before any testing took place. That way, if she failed to gain entry, at least she would have time to formulate another plan to stay free. Three, she said again, and they are passionflower seeds, and there are fern spores in the soil, but you did ask about seeds and not spores.

  Yes, the Gatekeeper agreed. I did ask about seeds. The pair of you may enter the Garden. Give thanks to Audblayin.

  Unar and Aoun had given thanks, profusely. They’d gripped one another by the hand as they stepped over the threshold, and Unar had felt that sense of smelling deeper than ordinary smell, the one with which she’d scented the seeds, sweep down into her chest and coil behind her breastbone. She felt reassured of that other sense, the one that ordinary people didn’t have, and remembered that first fierce prickle of providence.

  After the announcement had been made that six Gardeners had died of plague, more applicants came to the Gate. Oos had been among them. Rich crown and internoder girls, robed in silk, giggling, painting their lips with pomegranate juice to make them pink and pretty.

  Unar ate a pomegranate on the inside of the Gate, spitting the chewed seeds with hardly a care except to avoid getting them on Aoun, who sat beside her, his eyes closed and his oily, spotty face blissful in the sun.

  They’re fools, Unar observed. Do they think the Garden needs human flowers?

  Were we less foolish, Aoun asked without opening his eyes, when we stood there, not ten days ago?

  The Garden needs us, Aoun. The Garden needs this.

  She had taken his hand again. The source of power inside of her, between her breasts, had fluttered, and she felt an answering flutter in Aoun, lower down in his belly, and was startled all over again, for she hadn’t been able to feel that, the last time she had held his hand as they passed through the Gate.

  And that had been the last time she had deliberately taken his hand. His hammock had been far away from hers in the loquat grove. He rarely spoke to anyone at mealtimes or during lessons, so conscientious was he and so intent on submitting his will to the deity’s.

  Oos, who could talk happily about anything and everything, had become Unar’s only real friend.

  Until now.

  In the home of the three huntsmen in Understorey, Oos’s soft snores joined Ylly’s, and Unar stared at the ceiling as if she might, with enough effort, see through the solid, living tissue of the tree to where Aoun might stand, right now, by the Gate, in the monsoon rain.

  Had announcements been made that one Servant and one Gardener had fallen from Audblayin’s emergent? Were the young and curious queuing already at the Gate where Aoun would test them with a handful of dirt?

  Unar thought about how much bigger his hands were now and sighed again. She pictured him, naked and brushed with pearl dust, poised to dive into the moat, and shivered with yearning.

  He would not desire her. Not for as long as the magic of the Garden held him. But what if he, too, ventured into Understorey? What if Unar led him to the place where Edax had led her? Beneath her blankets, she tucked one hand between her thighs, imagining it was Aoun’s.

  She hesitated. It was hopeless even to imagine. He was Gatekeeper, and would not leave the Garden, ever. Not until he died, or was sent, like the prior Gatekeeper, to search out a new incarnation of Audblayin.

  But what if he did leave? What if he came into Understorey in search of her?

  Unar closed her eyes, the better to imagine Aoun descending on pulleys and ropes to the platform outside the river entrance. He’d wonder who had built it and why it was there. And Unar would sense his nearness. She would appear, wet and gasping, beside him, and he would feel what he’d never felt before, and take her into his arms.

  Parting flaps with her fingers beneath the bedclothes, Unar found their inner, silken counterparts already slippery with lust, and felt a brief surge of rage at the Garden, and the Servants who maintained its chastening spells. Was it Servant Eilif who, by casting the magic, had made Unar so disinclined to touch herself or others, ever, that she didn’t even know what these parts of her own body were called? Flaps? The only word for women’s parts she’d ever heard was “hole,” and it was thanks to Edax that she even knew how to find that.

  Oh, yes, there it was, secret and tight, unchanged by the stretching that the rain goddess’s Bodyguard had given it. Aoun would find it, one day; he would make it his own place; it was where he belonged, only he didn’t know it; couldn’t know it, until he left the Garden and came to find her.

  Unar’s breath caught as Bernreb walked, bold and oblivious, into the room.

  His bulk blotted out the light from the tallow candles. Unar squeezed her legs together. Hopefully the biggest of the brothers would be too busy checking on the baby to notice what she was doing.

  No such luck. He looked at her and his eyes widened.

  “You are Unar, is that right?”

  “Yes,” she whispered furiously.

  “Do you need a father for your child?”

  “No!”

  “I am only asking. Just in case. You did not seem particularly interested in the baby. Not like Ylly. But here you are, obviously frustrated—”

  “I’m not interested in babies!” Not unless they were re
incarnations of gods, anyway. “And I’m not frustrated.”

  “As you say.” His impudent smile made Unar want to throw something heavy at him. “Women do not often visit during the monsoon. Esse has moonflower, though, when you need it, to soak up and disguise the scent of your bleed. If you change your mind, you know where I sleep.”

  Unar scowled in his direction long after he was gone. Change her mind, indeed. How could she ever be attracted to Bernreb, with his pinkish, fishmeat-coloured skin? You know where I sleep? Pah!

  She put her hand under her pillow and tried not to smell her fingers. Moonflower, to soak up and disguise the scent of her bleed. Thanks to the combined controlling nature of her tight-lipped, hateful mother and the unforgiving Servant Eilif, a stupid, bearded brute from Understorey knew more about her bodily functions than she did herself.

  It took a long time for Unar to fall asleep. As she hovered on the brink of it, she thought she heard the sound of Marram’s thirteen-pipe flute. It was haunting, like wind over hollow bones.

  Something like a deep sense of smell stirred inside Unar’s chest, but it wasn’t quite Canopian magic.

  It was colder. Blacker. Lighter.

  Like being weightless in a pool with no water. Or floating in an egg-shaped Temple where the light never shone.

  * * *

  IN THE morning, Unar emerged to find Hasbabsah, not dead, but awake and cognizant, out of her chair and kneeling by the fire with an entranced expression on her sagging, yellowish face.

  Oos sat up at the enormous table, sullenly prodding pieces of fruit around her leaf-plate, while Marram held open a rotted-looking old palmwood chest. It appeared to be the chest contents that had stirred the sickly ex-slave from her stupor.

  “What’s in there?” Unar asked.

  “My mother’s birth-crown,” Marram answered. “Moonoom gave it to me when we went into exile in case one of us fathered a child. The crown is part of the ceremony welcoming a life. The newborn passes through it.”

  Ylly came through the curtain with Issi in her arms.

  “Hasbabsah,” she cried. “What are you doing out of your blankets?”

  “Come and see, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said in a slurred, slightly delirious voice, and both Unar and Ylly were drawn towards the hearth to look inside the chest.

  Unar had expected something shinier. The so-called crown was a ratty, shrivelled circle woven of the same brownish-green leaf fibre she’d been stripping for Esse. Black-flecked, emerald night-parrot feathers and dried gobletfruit were knotted around the edges. It would barely have sufficed as a stricken man’s tribute in the Temple. The chest also contained an assortment of musical instruments, none of which would have been allowed in the Garden at all.

  “Ylly,” Hasbabsah said, “let these men perform the ceremony to birth you into your new Understorian life. Let them lower the crown over your head.”

  Marram’s gaze flicked between Hasbabsah and Ylly.

  “We have the means to make the markings,” he admitted after a while. “White clay and orange ochre from Floor. Indigo from Canopy. My mother told—”

  “Your mother told you to keep them for your wedding, boy, but these women can help you to get more when—” Hasbabsah’s interruption was interrupted in turn by a coughing fit that forced her to let go of the edges of the chest. She covered her mouth to keep the bloody sputum from spraying over all of them. Ylly passed the baby to Oos without a word of acknowledgment and forced Hasbabsah back into her chair, bringing water for Hasbabsah to sip and rubbing her back until the coughing eased.

  “I don’t think your hand will be steady enough, old woman,” Marram said, smiling sadly.

  “Your hand will do,” Hasbabsah managed, and he gaped at her in sudden distress. She gulped at the water and went on in a rush, “I have heard that in Gannak a man does not paint a woman’s face except on the occasion of their marital consummation, but that is not the custom in Nessa.”

  “I was born in Het,” Marram said, but Hasbabsah ignored him, speaking over him.

  “Do this for me, Marram, third son of Moonoom. Bring my old friend’s daughter to this life soon, today, before I leave it.”

  Marram, contrite, did as she asked. He mixed different kinds of coloured dirt with oil and traced them on Ylly’s arms and face. He combed out her hair. Until then, it had resembled an egret’s straw nest tangled with white moulted feathers; when Marram finished winding it tightly around crossed pairs of polished purpleheart sticks, it formed a complex tower of violet and silvery-yellow almost too wide for the crown to fit around. He wrapped her tightly, breast to ankle, in an indigo silk blanket woven with the same white and orange designs he had drawn on her.

  Then he stood behind her, his back to the fire. Only the top half of his face showed above Ylly’s carefully arranged hair. He lowered the ugly woven thing from the chest around her neck, saying sentences that sounded the same backwards and forwards, and made no sense to Unar at all.

  Hasbabsah glowed with contentment, though, and Ylly seemed as shy and pleased as a girl half her age.

  Marram blushed deeply when his hands came to rest on Ylly’s painted collarbones, but Unar suspected it wasn’t over what he considered to be the inappropriate intimacy with Ylly. He wasn’t looking at Ylly at all. His cloud-coloured eyes lingered on Oos.

  Oos, for her part, had eyes only for Ylly.

  Probably just wished she was still in the Garden so she could try doing her hair with those fancy crossed sticks.

  And then Hasbabsah slipped back into unconsciousness, and the small happiness brought by the ceremony turned to cheerless deathwatch once again.

  THIRTY

  OOS’S BLEED began before Unar’s.

  She reacted the way that Unar expected her to react, which was with more crying. It was while Unar was holding the back of Oos’s shirt, to keep her from falling headfirst into the river as she washed her red-streaked legs, that they both heard the crack, like a lightning strike, and the great tallowwood tree shook as they had never felt it shake before, even in the strongest winds.

  “What was that?” Oos whispered.

  “Maybe one of the big branches breaking,” Unar said. It happened sometimes. The poor hollowed their homes out of the load-bearing parts of too-thin limbs without regard to structural integrity. Nervously, the two women pressed back against the fungus-covered wall. Unar wondered if they would hear another crash when the branch hit Floor, whether it would be too distant or whether the rush of the river would disguise it. One-handed, Oos pulled on a pair of borrowed breeches, the crotch stuffed with dried moonflowers. Her other hand held the door latch down, keeping it from being lifted while she was still half naked.

  “What was that?” Ylly bellowed from the other side of the door, trying to lift the latch.

  Unar threw herself to the floor, arms protecting her head, as splinters and spray exploded through the wall of water. The tallowwood shook again, hard. Unar imagined Gardeners on swinging bridges in Canopy being tossed to their deaths. Something blocked the thin light that came through the water entrance. Luminescent fungi went dark in long, black scrapes.

  The tree hummed as vibration slowly died. The wet tallowwood beneath Unar’s cheek became still.

  She sat up. Through the falling water, the trunk of a yellowrain tree protruded far enough into the fishing room that it brushed the door where Oos had held the latch. Ylly shouted and pounded on the other side of the door, managing to open it only a handbreadth before it jammed on the intruding beam. The tree trunk parted the river. Its hard, black, close-pattered bark was blotched with frost-green moss and it led like a log road out into sheeting monsoon rain.

  There was daylight out there, glimpsed in a narrow pair of triangles beneath the log, in between its rounded edge and the room’s floor. Unar searched for Oos, horrified by the thought that she might have been crushed. Then the silhouette of a heavy-breathing head popped up beside the log, close to the river. Oos’s shape scrambled up onto the log, rolli
ng up her breeches so that her bare feet could get a grip on the bark.

  Taking a deep breath, Oos then clawed her way, on all fours, through the vertical river, to freedom.

  “Oos, wait,” Unar screeched. Oos didn’t wait. Unar went after her.

  The river water was relentless, as if a whole tree-crown had fallen on her. Though only a few days had passed, the weight of water was twice what it had been when they had first come to the three brothers’ house. It almost carried her away, but then she was through, and she saw Oos ahead of her, fleeing down a road straighter and longer than any that existed in Canopy. The other end of it, where the fallen tree’s roots must have been, was lost in murky greyness.

  “Where are you going?” Unar shouted, but Oos didn’t hesitate or even turn her head.

  Rain, everywhere. Rain and gloom and the river. The trunks of the closest trees to the tallowwood were shadowy giants. The sound of Oos’s breathing was already lost in the downpour, and the Servant’s shape was indistinct with distance. A mosquito half the size of a sparrow whined at Unar’s ear, and she slapped at it.

  The yellowrain trunk that she stood on might not be stable. She might get a few more footsteps along it, only to join Oos in the abyss. She was not Marram, to extend her spines and stick like a burr to the closest tree.

  But Isin, Unar’s sister by blood, had fallen. She couldn’t let Oos fall, too. Not her sister by soil, seed, and the Garden. No matter how much Oos liked hats and hair-sticks and wouldn’t tell Unar what she’d learned in the Temple.

  Unar touched the empty sheath at her waist, which she wore to remind Esse of what he owed her. If she slipped, she wouldn’t even have the bore-knife to save her.

  “Audblayin’s bones,” she swore, and dashed through the rain after Oos.

  THIRTY-ONE

  WITH HER arms out for balance, Unar sprinted along the fallen tree.

  It held her weight without moving, which was encouraging. Though the tree’s crown was missing, the occasional lateral branch thrust directly up, forcing Unar to skirt around. She couldn’t see Oos anymore through the monsoon, but where else could Oos have gone? There were two options, straight ahead or straight down, and Unar hadn’t heard any screams.