Tinder Stricken (10 page)

“I …“ Esha shook her head; cardinal
directions had been the last thing on her mind while she dangled
helpless in that trap. “Maybe if I went back there and looked at
the trees, I could say? Does it matter?”

“If it tells me which plateau the phoenix
lives on, then yes, it matters. Unless you're paying me to comb
every plateau between here and the skypeak.”

Esha definitely couldn't trade for that. She
sighed harsh. “Could I just bring you to the scene? I have traps
left to check, anyway—“

“What?” Atarangi’s eyes were suddenly cold
knives. “You didn’t check all of the traps?!”

“Well, no! I—”

“If you didn’t like hanging there helpless
for hours, surely no other creature would!”

“They’re just—“ Esha held her tongue before
saying
just animals.
The tagged phoenix stared at her, just
as unsettling as the whites of Atarangi's eyes. “I— I didn't have
time! If I didn't report to work ...!”

Atarangi stood, and snatched the near-empty
cup from Esha's hands. In one fury-smooth motion, she tossed both
cups of negotiation tea into the fire's ashes to hiss and
gurgle.

“Go check the last of your traps,” she said.
“We can talk when you’re not tormenting living creatures.”

She said no more, nothing to oil the
silence. The door slammed behind Esha and she was alone in the
alleyway dark again.

She straightened her headwraps in the moment
she took a considering breath. She was going back to the Farback,
then. Tomorrow. Or, her sore heart suggested, maybe tonight. Before
negotiations broke down, Esha had been starting to like the calm,
two-faced animist — and besides that, she was in no habit of giving
up.

Chapter 5

If Esha was going to spend another
short-rationed night of sleep tromping along her damned trap line,
she was going to have a hot meal first. She kindled a quick cooking
fire and made chapatti bread, and slathered it with butter and
sesame seeds, and devoured it with all the grace of a lardback
pig.

That would be the one blessing of the goat
taking her: she could eat whenever she liked. Eat any plants she
found, right out in the open, because goats cared for no laws or
licences. They didn't care about looks, or bloodlines, or about
other goats' mates and whether those pairs were blessed with kids.
And as a goat, Esha would be able to sleep, too — oh, what she
would have paid for a day entirely made of rest.

Maybe, the thoughts said, tumbling too fast
to stop, it would better if Esha walked out into the forest and
never came back. Like penniless folk did. If she needed to lie and
sneak and fight for every rupee, maybe it would be best to bear her
transformation cold and alone.

Let’s not give up. We’ve done enough giving
up.

That clear shard of Gita's voice brought
back more memory — the impossibly clear-edged sight of her falling;
her wide eyes; the phoenix's struggling. Gita had been a steady
current of heaven's wind in Esha's declining life. Gita had been
ambitious and clever, and she thought Esha deserved to retire: she
died for that belief so it had to be true.

With the last embers of the cooking fire,
Esha lit a juniper branch and put it on her prayer stand, humming a
hymn while the perfumed smoke twirled. Gods watch over this next
wretched plan of hers, she prayed. Let her have a little luck, just
a little, despite the wrongs she had committed. Her ankle bones
felt odd within her limping leg; she wouldn't be sinning much
longer.

How different it felt this time, walking the
Farback's game trails in patterns of shadow and moonbright, this
time with no defiance in her heart but instead a proper amount of
shame. She sprang her traps and dismantled them, into vine and
leather scraps she might find a new use for. The cut scraps of her
large trap had a ranger's reprimand note in them; Esha scoffed and
left those where they laid.

This snare was a small one near a
muck-smelling lake. Esha remembered the location of this trap well.
Brickmasons came for the brown-coloured clay, and a few people were
patient enough to dig for salt deposits; Esha wasn't one of them.
Trees grew sparse and sparingly in such briny soil: she had only
found one pine sapling strong enough to bear a decent-sized
trap.

As Esha drew near the trap, rounding rock
outcroppings, she saw something hanging snared — something that
still lived, because it flapped explosively as Esha approached. It
was a crane, a gold-crowned one with huge white wings and a
terrified lightning in its eyes.

Esha stood outside the range of its beating
wings, and she looked on it. Maybe the feathers would be worth some
rupees, but the time spent plucking them was worth more. She didn't
relish telling Atarangi that she plucked a bird, either. At the
base of it, Esha found that didn’t want to kill anything else, not
like this. Maybe her honour was trying to grow back.

She took a step closer, held up her forearms
to catch the battering wings, and she regarded the slip knot.

“How in the Creator's name–“

Pain bit her hand as the crane pecked
her.

“Aah! Stop that!” She reached for the knot
around the bird’s leg and withdrew her hand in time to avoid
another peck. “I’m trying to help you, stupid thing!”

A stupid thing that couldn’t understand her.
Esha recalled the way she could make the bird understand humans'
tongue. She was quick to talk with baser creatures if it meant
convenience, it seemed.

She dug the weightlessly dry slice of betel
from her satchel, and chewed until lungta trickled into her head.
Listening, guiding lungta toward the sound, Esha could hear
rudimentary ideas in the crane’s squawking.

“Bird?”

“
Danger!”
it shouted. “
Danger!
Predator!
”

“Quiet, I'm not going to hurt you.”

The crane turned one glassy eye to her,
stilling for a stunned instant. Then it flapped again, struggling
like just noticing the strap still around its feet. “
Danger! Go
away!”

“Listen,” Esha said. “I’m trying to get you
out of—“ Esha held that thought back: cranes were beautiful birds
with dancers' feet, but far duller of mind than any phoenix ever
encountered. She tried again: “I don’t eat cranes. I'm not your
enemy.”

“
Predator!”
The crane beat its wings
with new force, swinging erratic on its trap line and shrieking as
Esh grabbed its scaly, twiggy legs in one hand. “
Big
predator!”

What a waste of lungta, Esha thought as she
guided her bent, handle-less khukuri blade between the crane’s
bound ankles. She yanked the stub of a blade toward her, managing
to miss the crane's damned legs each time, until finally the
leather was cut through. As soon as Esha opened her hand, the crane
burst away in a flurry of feathers and kicking claws.

“You're endlessly welcome,” Esha
muttered.

“
Free!
” the crane shouted. It landed
a few meters off, wobbling onto its own feet and then turning its
stormy eyes back to Esha. “
Danger! Predator!”
It paused
accusingly, before stalking to the water's edge and tipping water
down its throat.

Demons take the ungrateful thing, then. Esha
cut down the trap's moorings and wound the remaining leather scrap
into a roll.

The crane waded in the lake shallows now,
its muttering carrying in the open air. “
Food? Food? No plant
food here. Water food?
”

She rewrapped her knife in its cotton rag,
ignoring the crane's muttering and letting lungta settle in her
body. She kept watching the crane, though. It plucked some round
morsel and tossed it down his throat.
Water food
, the crane
said. Maybe snails, or the clams she found sometimes in Janjuman's
winter stews. Esha had never cared for clams; foreigners said it
was because Grewiers didn't eat enough ocean food to develop a
taste for it.

But if she remembered correctly, Manyori
people did eat ocean food. It wouldn't hail from any great sea but
Tselaya's shellfish might be a welcome apology offering — an
offering Esha
did
need to make.

She rolled up her pant legs and sari hem,
and the crane fluttered peevishly away as Esha waded out into the
water.

It was an oddly warm bath to walk in, warmer
than the spring night's air. She gathered a handful of glistening,
blue-streaked snails when movement caught her eye — something
swimming in the deepest of the lake basin. Something long-bodied,
and fluid as a scarf in the wind.

Old farmers' warnings wafted into Esha's
mind: the deeps had water serpents in them.
Deep air, earth or
water, might rob sons and daughters.
She forgot that sometimes,
since she farmed the surface and only risked contact with the
mountain's depths when she cut bamboo. She shuffled back toward
shore, stumbling on algae-greased stones. And as Esha continued
turning rocks in the ankle-deep shallows, she watched the crane,
which cackled uneasily at her and at the lake depths, too.

With a damp pouch full of shellfish, Esha
walked between homes, a gut-remembered pattern of turns to
Atarangi's home. Esha stood at the door, choked by unease, until
she told herself that she hadn't wasted a night and drenched
herself and risked serpent attack for nothing. She dropped seven
pebbles down the open pipe. Then she waited.

Long moments passed. If Atarangi was out —
maybe conducting business under her Birdnose guise — then Esha had
wasted her time and heartache and she would have to eat the slimy,
gritty peace offering herself. She was considering turning away
when she saw eyes through the slit window — dark eyes on a bristly,
beaked face. A tame phoenix was better than nothing.

“Atarangi,” Esha told it. “I want to see
Atarangi.”

She lifted the shellfish pouch, however
stupid it was to think that the phoenix understood. It trilled,
though, and fluttered away. Esha recalled the tin trays of lungta
foods, left offered for the phoenixes to eat. Maybe the bird did
understand food offerings.

A quick moment later, the phoenix appeared
on the roof, hunched at the edge. It peered down at Esha, croaked
at her, and hopped away toward the house's back corner. Trying to
tell her some crude message, maybe. She followed — until the back
door and its hugely-knotted string latch came into shadowed
sight.

And Esha barely had time to wonder if it was
right to open those knots herself, when the phoenix darted down to
it on flickering wings and applied beak and feet to the task. The
strings unlaced faster than Esha could have managed. Clever
creature, Esha grudgingly thought as the phoenix finished and
landed on the ground.

She kept thinking that while the phoenix
stared at her. It looked to the dangling door ties, and back to
her. Then it chirruped and stretched its neck — pointing with its
beak. Directing Esha inside, she numbly realized.

What a bizarre way to welcome a guest, or
permit a visitor, or whatever tier of politeness Esha was being
afforded. She opened the door. And in the strangeness, she had the
presence of mind to hold the door from swinging, so the phoenix
could enter, too.

The bird led her the obvious few steps to
the living area. There sat Atarangi, a bent shape under a
bristle-fibered cloak, filmed with light from a candle. Wrinkled
pages of handwriting laid before her, and Atarangi wrote her own,
utterly unsimilar handwriting onto new sheets — translating, maybe,
since that was a diplomat's duty.

Esha's sandals rang like cannon shots in the
quiet. The tannic awkwardness of their previous day was back,
suddenly, bitter as regret.

“Well?” Atarangi asked. “Did you catch
anything in your traps?”

No,
it would have been easy to say.
But the lying wasn't easy anymore; honesty tasted better in the pit
of Esha mostly-human stomach.

“I had a crane trapped,” Esha said, slowly.
“It was alive and vigorous, though — I released it. It was well
enough to fly off right away, it went straight back to looking for
food. And I took down the other traps. They won't catch anything
else.”

Atarangi was turning toward her, drawn like
a pulled thread: the shelled food clicked wet every time Esha
shifted the bag in her grasp.

“What do you have?” Atarangi asked hard.

“Aah, well. I've brought you an apology.”
Esha lifted the bag toward the candlelight. “Your people eat
shellfish, is that right?” She rolled opened the sack to reveal its
contents, the wet-stone shine of dozens of shells.

Atarangi’s mouth pressed thinner.

“A-And I've heard that these are more
valuable to you than to Grewier folk,” Esha ventured, “We cook them
tough.”

With cautious hands, reaching as though into
a snake's burrow, Atarangi took the gathered edges of the jute
pouch.

“These are clams.”

“Mostly,” Esha blurted. “There are a few
snails as well, they're all safe to eat by the best of my
knowledge.”

A thinking weight hung in the air as
Atarangi reached inside, lifting each shelled thing into the
candlelight to examine. How gentle she was, turning each one in her
fingers like a glass treasure. One oblong-shelled snail received
more of her attention, and a tighter press of her mouth under the
mask; Esha felt dread again.

“What is this kind of snail called?”
Atarangi asked, entirely too calm.

“I— I don't know. I've never paid
attention.”

“It can't be the same breed of snail that we
see in my homeland. Your water isn't salty enough.” Between her
fine-nailed fingers, Atarangi scrutinized the patterned curve of
the shell, and the jagged-opened underside with a phlegm-textured
creature inside.