The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (40 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“Tell Lana about Leipaluka,” the little soul said, so it whispered the name in her ear.
“Who’s Leipaluka?” Lana said—
 
—as though she were speaking to someone else entirely. Yechtak remembered that Iolana often did that. But the pale one, the one with the hard, wary, fire eyes to her left, answered the question. “She decided to fight yesterday, but she made our meals sometimes.”
The black angel grimaced. “I think she’s dead,” she said. The pale one looked at her in horror. Yechtak thought it strange that of these three, only the hard one knew the name of the woman who made their meals. Among the wind tribes, the privilege to bring the evening meal to the chief was a highly coveted honor. And no chief would ever dare not know and respect the one who performed this service for him. Binders, as he had often realized these past months, had no end to their strangeness.
“I come as the black angel’s ambassador,” he said, reciting the words he had learned by heart on the journey, “with a pledge of support and reinforcements from the people of Okika, who sympathize with the plight of the brutalized Esselans.”
“Okika?” she said. And then, more softly, “…and the Maaram army invades.” Yechtak didn’t know what to make of this, so he didn’t respond.
“We are at your service, black angel.”
The pale one spoke up. “I thank you for your help so far, ambassador, commander. But I should make it clear that I lead the rebels in all matters. Lana is an adviser.”
Yechtak blinked and struggled to keep his composure. He hadn’t planned for this contingency. How could the black angel herself not be the leader of her own army? “Do you agree to this?” he said, finally.
Iolana looked as though a bone had lodged in her throat. She glanced back at another young woman who seemed so tired and worn that she might faint into the snow. What had happened between those two? What were these strange, tense undercurrents? Behind Yechtak, his own army was growing restless. All the weeks he had envisioned this reunion, himself at the head of a victorious army swooping in to save the day, he had never thought it might end like this: tense and potentially self-destructing.
“Well?” the pale one snapped, but she was nervous as well.
“Lana?” said the other one, the quiet man on her left side. “What is it?”
“Sabolu is dead, Eliki,” Iolana said, her voice scraping. “One-hand ripped her throat out.”
“Not here, Lana,” said the pale one, with quiet urgency.
“And she is dead,” continued Iolana, “because you devised a crude geas and gave it to Sabolu so she could murder Nahoa’s infant daughter in the hopes of breaking up a political alliance.”
The quiet man seemed as sickened and shocked by this as the other two. He stared at the pale one, but he didn’t speak. She went very still. She denied nothing. Yechtak had to admire her grace.
“I’m glad it didn’t work,” she said. “I didn’t want to do it.”
“Spirits bound, Eliki,” said the quiet one.
Iolana looked Yechtak right in the eyes. His heart started to pound. “Arrest this woman, Yechtak.
I
am in charge of the rebel army.”
The black book
 
Nothing changed, because everything did. We lived for a time in a corner of a local farmer’s house spared by the earthquake while we rebuilt our own. Tulo and I found our joy in each other whenever we could—which wasn’t often, given the lack of privacy. Parech said nothing. Tulo and I hardly referred to the new dimension of our relationship. In truth, we didn’t need to. It seemed so natural, so right, that I only thought about it as something new when I noticed the occasional reserve in Parech’s demeanor. Sometimes I felt the distance between us like a block of ice. I knew that we had hurt him and I knew that he felt angry with himself for being hurt. Perhaps Tulo knew as well, but if so she said nothing. I watched Parech, like I always did. I wondered, like I always had. Only now, I had something of my own.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, Tulo’s fortune-telling act proved particularly lucrative. Everyone in Essel plunged into religious frenzy, sure they had done something to anger the gods or the spirits or their ancestors. She spent long hours past sunset touching people’s foreheads and pretending the spirits cared about their problems. Though her Essela was excellent, she affected tortured syllables and half-Kawadiri phrases to aid her reputation. After all, her primary appeal was her exotic appearance once she decked herself in pelts and feathers. In the meantime, I helped Parech salvage what materials we could from the collapsed house, and we began to build again. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing another house, and so in the evenings I redoubled my studies of the napulo philosophy and spirits and geas. I was determined to become an Ana so powerful I could keep everything I loved from destruction and decay. I had high ambitions. But I would start with a house.
After we spent the day driving the piles for our foundation deep into the ground (so deep, we hoped, that this time the earth would have to split apart to dislodge them), I forced Parech to stop and give me the metal knife he had purchased soon after we landed. The blade was almost supernaturally sharp, which was to my purpose.
“Ana,” he said, keeping a wary hand on the corded grip while I attempted to take it from him. Our fingers touched and lingered. “The spirits are so fond of your blood, are they?”
He smiled, he always smiled, but I felt like I had that night when he saw Tulo and me tangled beneath the blankets: punched in the gut and unable to breathe. Something in the clear quiet of his gaze. Something about the care he had always shown us, shown me, that I understood was extraordinary. And so I treated it as ordinary as the wind. “Would you rather spend all night on your knees?” I asked, my voice high and thready.
“Rather than watch you cut your arms like stripping barkcloth? I think we could all manage.”
I shook my head. “It’s no good, Parech. Those sacrifices aren’t nearly as strong as blood.”
“And what use does some wandering Kukichan farm girl have for that sort of strength?”
“You can’t bait me, Akane. I couldn’t bear to see this destroyed again.”
Parech let go of the blade abruptly. It fell onto the upturned earth. He turned away from me, toward the grassy dunes and the unseen ocean. The day had been unseasonably warm, but the sun was sinking now and the ocean wind was brisk. “I saw you before she did,” he said. “The first day we met.”
I was so astonished that I said, unthinking, “But she couldn’t see me.”
He smiled but still didn’t turn back. “Well. Obviously. She was the first thing you noticed, right? Not the poor soldier bleeding to death by her feet. But I knew you were there, even before you stepped into the grove.”
“How?”
“I felt you. I felt lots of things. Dying is a curious sort of procedure, I think. You felt powerful and hungry and watchful. I thought you might be my death, until I saw you.”
“And what did you think then?”
He grinned and leaned against one of the new foundation piles. “That I was lucky to die in the presence of such formidable women.”
I blushed, but it was a warm and friendly sensation, like the gentle pressure I felt when Tulo kissed me.
“When I saw you. . .” he began, but he shook his head and reached down to pick up the fallen blade. He wiped it on his loincloth. “Will the spirits disdain some Akane blood, then?”
I grabbed the knife. This time he let me take it. “Haven’t you spilled enough already?”
“Haven’t you? Just this once, Ana. It’s
our
house, after all.”
I let him. It wasn’t so much blood, I reasoned. And I wanted, I confess, to test the theories of some napulo philosophers about the relative merits of self-sacrifice versus the willing sacrifices of others. He seemed pleased and grim all at once, which reminded me of how he had been at the tensest moments of our grift back in Okika. Perhaps this side of Parech was the one he showed in battle: focused yet subtly joyous. I knew I loved him then. Like a fool, I thought his shedding blood might prove he loved me, too.
I invoked the geas I had devised for the task, one of water and earth, because I had not yet learned how to master more than two of the great spirit manifestations within one binding. I did not want to risk this going badly for the sake of experiment.
“I bind you for protection, to keep this house from decay and destruction so long as there are those with the ties to sustain it.”
The sun had set, but the stars and moon provided enough light for our task. I wondered if Tulo would return soon, and what her spirit sight might make of these proceedings.
“I bind you as well,” Parech said, and I felt the redoubled tension in the geas like a bath of ice water on my skin. I glared at him, but he just smirked. Nothing for it, now.
“I offer you his sacrifice,” I said.
“I offer you my sacrifice,” he said, and I threw up my hands and told him to get on with it. He cut beneath his collarbone, since he determined anywhere else would prove difficult while building the house. He walked to each of the six sheared tree trunks, orphaned upright in the earth. He allowed some of his blood to drip on each of them, an expression on his face of such solemnity I found myself comforted. This felt right and proper. This felt powerful, as though whatever else Parech had given the spirits with his sacrifice had been worth more than his blood. When he finished, I knew they were bound so tightly it would take all three of our deaths to release them. The house would be safe. Parech looked at me when we had finished.
“Was that fine, Ana?”
I grabbed a handful of switch grass and pressed it against his collarbone to stop the bleeding. His eyes and his two-toned hair. The laughter in his voice. The house we would build together.
I laid my head on his chest, not speaking, and he held me until Tulo came home.
 
The first Maaram ships were spotted a week later by soldiers on outposts deep in the northeast coral atolls. The Esselan army was already on high alert, having been warned of the impending Maaram attack by their numerous spies in Okika. As we’d noted at the time, the Maaram had done a very poor job of hiding their intentions. The first battles were minor and deep out at sea. They affected no aspect of life on the mainland, and so we only noted their existence as a curiosity, a topic of conversation late at night when we spoke to each other in contented exhaustion. Progress on the house proceeded. Tulo knew of the geas I was binding into the very cords and timber and wattle of the building, but she seemed disinclined to ask questions. Perhaps she knew everything I could have told her—she could actually see the spirits I had bound to the preservation of our home. After the first night, Parech silently brought home small animals—macaques and pigeons and once even a rat—that I could use as minor, unwilling animal sacrifices. It was enough for our purposes, though I hated the sensation of their screams and their squirming bodies before I gave their souls to the spirits. Parech didn’t seem to care one way or another. He ate their flesh, after all, when most Esselans followed the custom of avoiding meat.
Three weeks after the quake, after enough work to make the three of us want to sleep for days in exhaustion, we raised a rudimentary roof over the first room of our new home. We paid the farmer who had been kind enough to let us stay with her and relished our newfound privacy. Parech tactfully went to collect food for our evening meal so Tulo and I could give the house a proper welcome. If it was cold, that only made our pleasure that much more urgent. Parech gave us a lopsided smile when he returned with breadfruit slung over his shoulders and found us seated side by side, naked to the waist, sweaty and grinning like two little girls.
“Have fun?” he said.
“Think you want to join?” said Tulo, giggling. The two of us stared at her, as though we didn’t quite know what to say.
A storm blew in the next day, making us grateful for the rudimentary straw thatch we’d put over our heads that kept out most of the water. I didn’t fear for the structure of the house, but the leaks were uncomfortable, so Parech and I spent a wet, miserable day thatching what we could with large pandanus leaves coated in thick resin. The rains provided plenty of fresh water for our barrels, but unfortunately the winds and rain compounded the effects of the earthquake, devastating the irrigation ditches and reservoirs deeper in the city. They overflowed with muddy streetwater that brought a pestilence to all who drank it. It spread through all of the city. Essel’s chiefs might have taken their boats to Okika and finished this war once and for all, if not for the fire sickness that devastated their people.
The symptoms began with a deep flush, as though one had smoked too much amant, followed by violent vomiting and watery stools. A rash bloomed at the throat and, in the worst cases, spread down the body to the arms and torso. At least half of those who contracted it were dead within a week; others lasted a month. By the time the storms abated and the pestilence passed, one in ten Esselans had died. Bodies piled in the streets and every stretch of beach reeked with the scent of charred flesh and blackened bones. Tulo told me later that the death spirits swarmed there like flies. She said that for a time they crowded my shape so thickly she could only see me for the darkness. I asked her for whatever details she could remember about them and wrote them down in a book.

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