The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (16 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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She squatted beside us and carefully removed the pheasantfeather headdress from her tangled hair. Parech threw a shawl over her bare, goose-pimpled shoulders. I could only imagine how her skin must ache from so many hours uncovered in this chill, but she didn’t seem unduly uncomfortable. Perhaps her people had gone bare-chested longer into the cold season.
“Not all Maaram are bad people, Tulo,” I said.
Parech and Tulo shared tight, knowing smiles. “She’s a wetlander,” Parech said, as though in apology.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “Just that you wouldn’t understand. To be a Maaram soldier is to be guilty. Just like on Kukicha. You think a single soul who fought for you wetlanders was innocent of Akane blood? Of course not.”
“
You
were a Maaram soldier!”
His mouth quirked. “And I’ve never claimed innocence.”
Tulo had shimmied out of the pelts and replaced them with a split skirt. “Don’t worry about the soldier, Aoi,” she said. “You’ll be happy for his money when we’re in Essel.”
I stood up, furious, though I’d been perfectly fine with this scheme less than an hour ago. “How can you two be so callous? We’re about to ruin the life of another human being!”
Tulo’s lips thinned. “Another human being? I suppose he’d think of me as another human being, then, if he found my brothers and uncles and cousins defending our homes? Perhaps he’d speak to us, negotiate with us, respect our rights to our ancestors’ land? Or maybe he’d just murder us, every last one, and then find the nearest villages and murder everyone there, too. Maybe he’d even rape the women before murdering them. Perhaps we should treat the soldier like the Maaram do the Kawadiri. Like human beings!”
I sat down again. I felt myself reeling with horror for the second time in an hour. I looked at Parech. “Is it true?” I asked in Kukichan. “Did you do that?”
“The other soldiers did,” Parech said in the same language. “I hid until it was done. Taak would have done it many times.”
They were right. No one was innocent, let alone a Maaram soldier. A part of me was still disgusted at the manipulation necessary, especially when juxtaposed against Taak’s gullible joy. But we needed to get to Essel, and this soldier’s money would get us there.
I stopped arguing. The three of us followed the irrigation ditch until we reached the beach. As usual, crowds of Okikans had gathered there under the flickering light of torches to watch the rising tide and gamble and drink and smoke. The three of us traded salt for a thumb of amant and a jug of kava and sat down to enjoy the evening. A group of drummers pounded an intricate rhythm nearby, accompanied by an occasional drunken-sounding flute. At one point Tulo stood up to general approval and began gently, then more violently, swaying to the beat. She shook off her sandals and stomped her bare feet in the wet sand—smack, smack as she moved her arms and head in a traditional Kawadiri dance, silhouetted against the torchlight. She was so beautiful it took my breath away. Parech stared at her, entranced, and we moved closer together while we watched. She came back to us when she was drenched in sweat, though the crowd that had formed bellowed and cheered for more. She moved with an old assurance, without need of her stick. In the flickering torchlight, she seemed to glow like a spirit.
“How can you move like that?” I asked her, my heart still racing from the sight of her dance.
She laughed and flicked her hair over her shoulder. “I was born to dance for the ancestors.”
Parech ran a finger down her arm and then offered her our half-drunk jug of spirits. “Like a true princess of her people,” he said.
She beamed at him and then at me. I felt as though a slow fire was consuming me as I met both of their gazes. Joy and passion and desire. I sometimes thought I didn’t understand anything anymore.
“The spirits are so clear here on the beach,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s you two. You’re like a homing beacon.”
I leaned against her. Parech polished off the spirits, and I shared the amant with Tulo. The air at this time of night, so close to the ocean, had gone from brisk to frigid, but someone had built a bonfire, and so we crowded around it with the others who were too reluctant or too intoxicated to go home.
“I don’t think,” I whispered to Tulo late that night, “that he is a bad man.”
She put her arm around my shoulders and frowned thoughtfully. Somehow she knew who I meant. “You heard what Parech said. You heard what he did.”
“But so did all the others. Can you truly hate every Maaram soldier?”
“Yes. Maybe. It doesn’t matter, Aoi.” She hesitated and then flung the ashes of our amant into the bonfire.
“If he is not a bad man, then there are no bad men.”
 
For the next two nights, a young and swarthily handsome, but otherwise nondescript, Maaram trader spent and lost some modest sums in the gaming pens. The cocks he bet on were not obviously infirm, but a sound judge could have told him to bet more wisely. He chatted with the soldiers who had come there to gamble, trading innocuous stories about the sea routes and troubles in Essel. The second night, after his third loss in so many hours, the trader asked a nearby officer for advice on his next choice. The officer was happy to oblige, and their chosen cock dispatched the other with a savage swipe across its stomach that sprayed intestines and entrails all over the sandcovered pen. The officer bought the trader a cup of cane spirits in mutual celebration, and the two parted on friendly terms.
Parech was sure that Taak thought nothing of him, but would remember him clearly when the time came. And, more importantly, so would the other commanding officers who attended the cockfights with Taak. And then, finally, it was my turn. Parech had spent several days combing the city for the perfect clothes. He said it mattered more for me than he or Tulo because so much of my story depended on Taak’s perception of my station. No matter that I was some Kukichan country bumpkin—a bit of Parech’s magic, and I’d become a highborn Esselan lady in temporarily dire straits. In the end, the man selling the clothes that Parech wanted demanded an inordinate length of sennit braid and would not take salt, so Tulo had to reprise her role as street-corner spirit talker to earn the rest. Parech bound my hair in braids and pinned it like ropes to my scalp. He tied a shimmering rope of clamshells around my ankle and draped me in a tunic of patterned purple barkcloth in the Esselan style. This was a marvel of ingenuity, because the cloth he found was stained and distressed in precisely the way you’d expect of someone who had been nearly drowned in the ocean. Though I spoke Esselan with perfect fluency, I’d never been there and had not the slightest idea of how their ruling class dressed. Parech assured me that Taak had even less of an idea than I did, but a few details would help to make my case more convincing. He met Tulo and me in our room carrying a vial of green ink made from the crushed skin of a salo fruit and a row of bamboo needles.
“Parech, I don’t know how to make Akane warrior marks. You know that, right?”
Tulo looked at me sharply. “What’s he doing?”
“He has ink and a tattoo needle.”
Parech grinned. “Ana, you mistake me. It’s for you.”
Tulo looked confused. “You want warrior tattoos, Aoi? Are you going to fight?”
“Of course I’m not going to fight! And I’m not going to mark my skin like some ignorant Akane either!”
He just laughed and drew me down next to him. “I’ve seen the way your eyes trace my ‘barbarian’ marks, Ana. I don’t think you object to them very much at all.”
And I blushed so deep and hot I thought even Tulo could tell. “What do I need tattoos for, though?”
“Highborn ladies wear their family marks on their upper arms. Come, are you afraid of the pain? It doesn’t hurt too badly.”
I looked down at the ink and then back to his laughing eyes. I
was
a little leery of the mallet and the needle. I’d seen others getting their marks and the experience had never looked less than agonizing.
“Is this necessary?” I asked.
“It’s all about confidence, Ana. The more you look the part, the more confidence he’ll have in your story, and the faster we’ll be able to leave this benighted city.”
Tulo frowned. “I thought you said we should go to the city because we shouldn’t live in the forest like monkeys.”
“And we shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean we should live in
this
city. Maaram is headed for a fall.”
“They have the larger army,” I said. “And the element of surprise.”
He leaned back on his elbows, so his bleached hair brushed Tulo’s belly and his shoulders rested against her thighs. “You reveal your ignorance of politics, Ana,” he said. “Maaram is to Essel what a drizzle is to a hurricane. I’d be very surprised if the Esselan chieftains are not already quite aware of what is surely the worst-kept secret in the country. And remember, they have the trick of the metal edge.”
I found myself shivering and looked abruptly away from them both. Tulo had laid out our sleeping pallets, which took up most of the small room not already occupied by the low table. The scene was familiar, yet for a moment it seemed superimposed with something more grisly and frightening: the bodies of dead soldiers and civilians sprawled in their own blood on the dirt streets of Okika. Buildings burning and people running for their lives from the long blades that sparkle like water in the harsh sun. Taak bleeding to death on his bearskin cloak.
“. . .seems rather extreme,” Tulo was saying, oblivious to my mood.
But Parech watched me carefully. “Well, I can’t make her do something she doesn’t want to. You know my feelings on the matter, Ana. What do you say?”
I forced a smile and shrugged. A little pain now might be enough to help us avoid disaster in the future. “Why not? But try not to make it too hideous, Parech. You can’t wash off skin-needle ink.”
I thought he would respond with more teasing but he merely levered himself up and squeezed my shoulder. I bit my lip.
The pain was entirely as bad as I had expected, though Parech tapped the needle and filled the well with such assurance I gathered he had performed this service many times before. I had to raise my arm so he could make the mark all around its circumference several times over. I bit my tongue until I tasted blood and then just ground my teeth. Tulo held my other hand in silent support. I thought Parech would tease me, but he was intent on his design, and I was not inclined to disturb his work with anything other than the occasional grunt.
Eventually he leaned back and let the empty needle and inkwell fall to the floor. “There you go, Ana.”
“How is it?” Tulo asked.
I didn’t have the energy to lift my head, so I was grateful when Parech answered, “Impressive, though I suppose I would think so.” He paused. “It suits her.”
There was a certain quality of admiration in his tone that infiltrated my weariness and made me sit up and examine his handiwork. The mark moved from near my shoulder halfway down my upper arm. It was a complicated pattern, similar to Parech’s warrior marks, but more intertwined, with a distinctive knot near my shoulder. My skin was now red and raw, but even I could see how soon the marks would meld with my skin. It made me look sophisticated. I imagined myself in the purple tunic and realized I might even, in a certain light, be held to look beautiful.
“It’s. . .it’s good,” I said. My voice was uncharacteristically husky.
“Of course it is,” Parech said.
I went to sleep soon after, stunned for reasons I couldn’t articulate. I was seventeen years old, I remember. Seventeen, and I’d lived on my own for the past two years, but the night Parech marked me was the first time I felt like a woman.
 
“Please, tell me what I can do!” the foreign girl begged. She had dropped to her knees before the wild-haired fortune-teller and the bystanders who waited their turn peered curiously at the scene. “I have nothing left,” she cried, the tears on her cheeks obvious even from a distance. “My father doesn’t know where I am! It seems so hopeless.” She bent her head and heaved sobs so great the men gambling on the other side of the square paused and looked up.
I didn’t see any of that. Parech told me later. I was too focused on the tears pouring down my cheeks while Tulo placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. I found that it was easiest to work up a good torrent if I thought about Kukicha. First my parents’ deaths, then my old priest’s, and finally, when it seemed like my distress might exhaust itself, I forced myself to remember the foul-smelling trader who had tried to rape me. None of us had the luxury for mistakes now. The game had been engaged in earnest, and we had to see it through. I saw how eyes snagged on my family marks, as though evaluating my station.
We three had planned this scene carefully. This was the second market day, and Tulo had set herself up on a relatively busy street not very far from the officer’s lodge. Taak would be sure to hear of her presence, and in the absence of any obvious workings of fate would be eager to consult with her again. But it being a market day, and with Tulo’s newfound reputation, the crowd surrounding her was far larger than it had been the week prior. Taak was waiting behind several other people when I approached Tulo and began my performance. He would have been able to hear my anguished cries, but not Tulo’s responses.

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