The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (17 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“If you show patience, my lady,” Tulo was saying in that gentle, almost musical tone she affected for this work, “the spirits will lead one to you who can help restore you to your family and proper position. You need only be prepared to receive.”
She lifted my face from her skirt with her finger and I nodded earnestly.
“But I don’t know how much longer I can stand this wretched existence away from my people!”
Tulo bent over and began expelling great seismic coughs. A moment later Taak pushed his way through the crowd and knelt before her. A few of the people in the line grumbled, but I thought they noticed his uniform and didn’t dare raise too much of a fuss.
“My lady,” Taak said, placing a hand on Tulo’s trembling shoulders, “Are you well?” Before she could compose herself and respond, he turned to me with an expression so fierce I flinched. “What have you done to her?” he said.
“She has done nothing, young soldier,” Tulo said, no matter that Taak was at least five years older than she. “Indeed, perhaps it is I who have wronged her.”
Taak looked puzzled at this. “But she’s one of the miserable Esselans. What harm could you have done to someone like her?”
“The worst harm in the world: I might have given her false hope. When I read the spirit paths for her five days ago, I thought I surely saw a fortuitous meeting in her future, some heretofore unseen method of returning her to her prior station. But she now says she has no more options and is close to begging on the streets. Perhaps the spirits led even me wrong this once.”
I kept my dry eyes on the ground, deliberately not even looking at Taak in my assumed pose of abject misery. I released a muffled sob, as though I was too overwhelmed to even pay attention to the crowd surrounding us and the soldier by my elbow. In reality, I could tell the number of breaths he took in a minute. Would he take our bait?
“Indeed, lady,” Taak said after a moment. “I cannot doubt your skill. I can almost feel the spirits when you’re nearby! But I too haven’t. . .” he trailed off and looked around nervously. The waiting crowd seemed to have grown a little too quiet for privacy. He lowered his voice. “I too haven’t met the one you saw in my future. The crossroads of the spirits. The method by which I can achieve my destiny.”
Tulo looked up to the sky, her hands raised dramatically. She could not have known it, but she stared directly at the bright afternoon sun. Its light seemed to set fire to her hair. Even knowing all I did, I shivered. Tulo truly
was
uncanny, just not in the way all these people thought.
“And yet,” she said, her voice colored with the slightest tint of otherworldly mistiness, “I see both your roads so clearly. An opportunity and a destiny.”
Taak glanced at me. His curiosity was clearly piqued, but not enough to inquire who I was. I played an Esselan, after all, and he was part of an army about to lead a war against them. I’d need to be more explicit.
“I don’t believe you!” I shouted. “What destiny is this? My father is the high chief of all Essel and here I am, stuck in this backwater drainage hole with nothing and no way to ever get back to him!”
There, that ought to do it. I glanced surreptitiously at Taak, worried that I might have been a little too transparent in my desire to transmit this information to him. But a deep line creased his forehead, and his expression was one of such furious speculation that I knew he only suspected what we’d arranged for him to know.
Tulo couldn’t see his expression, but she had other ways of sensing people’s moods. She smoothed the back of my hand in a way that reassured me.
“My dears,” she said in the gentle manner of a mother coaxing her children to stop playing and weed the garden, “I regret that I cannot help you more. But there are others waiting their turn for me to peer into the spirit realm, and even one such as I must eat.”
Taak stammered out an apology and signaled to one of the other soldiers who had been waiting behind. He paid her with a bushel of breadfruit. I nearly drooled onto it: we’d eat well by the fire tonight!
Taak backed away with his friend and after a moment, making sure I had composed myself, I stood and wandered dejectedly away, toward the coop of green and red plumed jungle fowl clucking complacently on the road. Perhaps a dozen other stalls filled the clearing, making up all of Maaram’s fabled market day. At the time this had seemed like an unbelievable cornucopia of worldly goods. But Parech was right: Maaram is to Essel like a drizzle is to a hurricane. I loitered by the chickens so I could keep a surreptitious eye on Taak. He was talking in low tones with his friend on the other side of the square. My stomach knotted. I certainly hoped this friend had no great knowledge of Essel or its customs. Taak I knew well enough by now to feel safe about our prospects. But it would be hard for me to fool anyone even slightly less gullible or more intelligent.
Finally, just when I was wondering if I should break the plan entirely and approach Taak myself, he started walking toward me. His friend stayed behind, frowning and crossing his arms over his chest.
My hands were trembling entirely of their own accord—no need to feign nervousness.
“You,” he said, peremptorily enough that the woman minding the chicken coop gave him a speculative glance. I took a step back. He had begun in Maaram, but now he switched to heavily accented Essela. “You’re the daughter of the Esselan chief? Truly?”
“Yes, s-sir,” I stammered, pitching my voice so it sounded high and innocent.
His eyes widened and a smile trembled at the corners of his lips. “Just as I thought,” he said, his voice strained with tamped-down glee. “Perhaps this is the lady’s sign of destiny.”
I contrived to look even more timid and confused than before and said simply, “Sir?”
He gave a curt nod to the overcurious chicken farmer and grabbed me by my elbow before I could do much more than squawk. I had a moment of genuine panic—had Tulo and I misread him this badly? Would he try to force me? Then I realized that Parech would almost certainly kill him before he got very far, and so stumbled along behind him. He took me inside an open-air hut with a cockfighting sandpit that doubled as a kava hole during the day.
“Who are you, sir?” I asked, as the proprietor poured two bowls of scummy kava. I stared down and wondered if I saw drowned ants in the brew. The light was too low to be sure.
“An o—” He swallowed down the real answer and regarded me with an expression he fancied guarded. “Just a soldier,” he said. “How did you come to our city? It’s an unlikely place for a highborn Esselan. And you seem to be in trouble.”
I attempted to make my bottom lip quiver, but when I realized I more likely resembled a gawping fish, I stared at the table and gripped the edge. I told him my carefully rehearsed tale of woe. How I had been on my father’s own ocean canoe, traveling toward the fire shrine on Holoholo, when the water and wind had risen and swirled into a storm so great that the proud ocean canoe had been reduced to kindling. All of my companions had drowned, and I was only saved by clinging to the splintered mast. I floated for two days before I washed ashore on the mainland. I went to Okika to see if there was anyone who could help me reach my father, but the world was a cruel place and now I would surely die before I saw my homeland again.
I actually managed to work up a few tears to cap the end of this speech. Honestly, I’d cried more in the last few hours than I had in the past five years. But the tears were well worth it, because by the end he grew florid with a crude, avaricious joy. I pitied him. I’d never met a mind more ill-suited for scheming, but that very quality made our game possible.
“Indeed,” he said. “I’m sorry you’ve suffered such great misfortune. And I think. . .yes. . .yes, it’s just as the spirit talker told me it would be. And you, too, I gather. Together we can each find our destiny!”
“Destiny?”
He put his hand over mine and for a moment I saw a spark of something, a certain tilt to his head, that made me blush and wonder if I might not be a little pretty, after all.
“My dear,” he said, “I have a proposal for you.”
It went just as Parech said it would. I, a helpless chieftain’s daughter, would be given resources sufficient enough to travel back to Essel in some style and comfort. When I arrived there, I would simply contrive to send Taak a “few simple notes” regarding army size, naval capabilities—and the infamous edged weapons. I pretended not to understand their import. I even pretended not to know that the two powers were approaching confrontation, though that was increasingly obvious by the day. As a guarantee of my delivery of these notes, Taak would send a soldier friend of his to escort me back home. Parech looked slightly discomfited that Taak had already suggested someone else for the role he had meant to play, but there were many methods of discouraging a soldier from making a long sea voyage, and he quickly set about applying them. A powder slipped into the surly friend’s palm wine gave him the runs right before he was to leave for the cock pens with Taak.
Left without a companion, Taak looked around and recognized the amant-smoking trader from previous nights of gambling. The trader was a good gaming companion, and soon they’d nearly doubled their stakes and become too drunk to walk a straight line. The trader said something offhand about leaving for Essel soon to finish some business there. Taak, thinking again about his friend with the runs, conceived of a brilliant plan. Did the trader know of a great chief of the Esselan army with a pretty young daughter? (“Did he use that exact word?” I demanded of Parech later. “What,
daughter
?” Parech teased.) Tattoos right there? Parech made a great show of drunkenly attempting to recall. Oh, yes! Of course. That one. The second highest in the Esselan army and he doted on his daughter, it was said, more than was seemly. He described me in a roundabout way that left no doubt as to my identity.
Taak proposed a deal. In exchange for a fee, would Parech convey the girl safely to Essel and see that she gave him a sealed missive before he returned to Okika? The full sum was larger than I’d ever imagined it could be, though we’d only see half. The other was to be payable upon Parech’s return. All told, in motley payment we would be leaving Okika with enough resources for both the journey and to secure a place of our own in the great city.
To celebrate, the three of us went to the beach again, though by now the fingers of chill had turned to an angry, icy fist. We huddled around the bonfire with the other itinerants and revelers, singing songs in twenty different languages and sharing our food with each other. I roasted the breadfruit Taak had given Tulo, and we three gorged on what we could and then shared the rest with the others huddled beside us. There were some divers from the outer islands here, their necks adorned with the shining blue and white jewels of their trade. Their skin was dark and kissed by the sun, and they huddled so close to the fire I was afraid their voluminous cloaks might catch flame. The older one started a droning chant and was soon joined by the younger, so that their voices twined in a dissonant yet eerie harmony.
“What does the song mean?” I asked them, deep into the night, when the moon had set and those remaining on the beach were either copulating quietly or having low-voiced conversations.
The older one looked at the younger and then raised her eyes to the sky, as though reaching back for an answer. “
Death guards the gate
,” she said finally. In Esselan, for we both spoke that language better. “
Its key unlocks our souls. Its key unlocks the gate.
It’s an old poem. My ancestors have dived with mandagah for generations. There is much death all around us. We understand the great water spirit, Kai. We worship make’lai.”
I stared at them both, fascinated. There had been only one death shrine in all of Kukicha. These deep island customs had never reached us. I knew nothing of this conception of death: a key to unlock a soul, a key to unlock a gate.
“And what of afterward? What happens once death opens the gate?”
The younger one laughed. “Oh, you are young! Beyond the gate? No one knows.”
“No one?” I echoed. “Not even death?”
She paused, bemused. “Well, but when will it get a chance to tell us, eh?”
We all three laughed and then the older one caressed the younger one’s shoulder. “Come, Yaela,” she said. “We’ll be warmer lying together.”
And so the one called Yaela smiled and kissed her friend in that particular way and I was left feeling utterly alone. Tulo and Parech were speaking to each other in soft, throaty whispers, and I thought it would not be very long now before there was another couple sharing warmth on this winter beach.
We nearly lost everything. I came to the inn to meet Taak and the Maaram trader he wished me to travel with. I had thought, given Taak’s utter lack of suspicion, that Parech’s entire twisted scheme would conclude easily. But we had not counted on his friend, well acquainted with Taak’s ruinous gullibility, being quite so observant. As soon as I saw the scowling man—the same one to whom Parech had given a generous case of the runs—I felt my stomach knot. The friend moved with a certain deliberateness that made me think the effects of Parech’s potion still lingered. Please, I thought, let him desperately need the back trench for the next half hour! But he sat down across from me. His expression was grim, though Taak grinned.

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