Tinder Stricken (13 page)

She regretted saying it, as Atarangi turned
a look of stony pressure toward her. The tame phoenix, mirrored the
motion but all Esha saw was her newest friend gathering
disapproving words.

“I know this has caused you difficulty, Esha
Of The Fields,” Atarangi said in crisp syllables. “But I must ask
you to be civil.”

“I'm sorry,” Esha said. She found that she
meant it, moreso when she looked at Atarangi's expression half
visible under the mask. “I shouldn't be disrespecting your birds.
It's only that the— the
wild
phoenix could have had anything
else. Some other khukuri, or ... plant food, I don't know.”

The wind blew between them, while their
footsteps crunched onward and regret soaked into Esha's heart. A
yak-drawn cart passed them by on the road; the driver stared
bowl-eyed at Atarangi and the phoenix settled peacefully on her
shoulders. The cart's dust settled and waxwings trilled in the
roadside pines.

“Life washes all manner of things onto the
shore,” Atarangi finally said. She sounded calm now, like quoting
someone's wise teachings. “All I ask is that you open your thoughts
a little, Esha.”

“Open my ...?”

“Just try to understand. I'll need to sort
out your arrangement from a clumped mess of misunderstandings and
phoenix customs — and phoenixes
do
have customs, just like
you do. So I must ask you to try.”

It was an absurd thought, that a phoenix had
the same standing as Esha. She hadn't fallen that far. She was a
person
, a child of heaven even if heaven didn't want her
back.

“I can try,” Esha pushed from her mouth. She
did have to admit, in the bitterest corners of herself, that
Atarangi's phoenix had opened a door for her and invited her
inside. That was more than any flower-crowned noble had offered her
lately.

A shadow of Atarangi's smile returned as she
said, “Good.” She turned her gaze back to the road ahead.

Her phoenix still watched Esha though, with
his head canted and eyes intent. Like a child peering at a
stranger. Esha tried deciding whether it was unsettling or charming
and couldn't choose.

“So, she asked, “does this bird have a
name?”

“He does. Why do you ask?”

“If he's going to be staring at me for this
entire trip, I'd like to know what to call him.” Esha definitely
couldn't call him
vermin
now.

“I call him kin,” Atarangi answered. It was
plainly a broken-off crumb of the entire answer. “You might earn
his friendship. Then you may know his name.”

“Ah,” Esha ventured, “it's a custom?”

“That's right.”

“I can live with that.”

They kept on as the sun reached its zenith.
They only had half of Yam Plateau to cross to get to a set of
climbing spires: to Esha, the walk was brief and yet endless.

Coming here was inevitable. In recent years,
Esha had avoided consideration of retirement farms but also
wordlessly hoped for a good one. Maybe one of Maize Plateau's
renowned retirement farms, the free-roaming kind where a wretched
woman could grow her hooves under treeshade. Esha had never been so
ambitious, though, that she imagined hiring a cart to get there.
She knew she would climb the spires herself: the dream had involved
Gita travelling with her. One last secret plan. The plan was
unfolding, just not nearly the way Esha had imagined.

They reached a Sky Thread, one of the rivers
formed of pure meltwater from Tselaya's peak. This one was lined
with people scrubbing clothing in soap-frothed buckets, pouring
filmy water out onto the ground and stooping for more clean water.
Pants and saris hung from rows of bamboo drying racks, like house
flags but far more colourful.

Esha and Atarangi kept on and soon came to
one Yam Plateau's camp sites. This site straddled water divergent
from the Sky Thread — a trickle of water that people flattered by
calling it a stream, but it ran clear and had a well-used fire pit
close enough for convenience. A clay statue of mother goddess
Parvati sat there as a beacon to travellers, her back to the
mountain and her hands offering namaste to all who passed by.

“I'd like to take some tea before we climb,”
Atarangi said, drifting toward the fire pit. “And a meal.”

“That's fine.”

“Oh, good — I don't know how you Grewians
manage on just two meals.” She let go of her cart strap, with her
phoenix clinging to his tilting perch and fluttering like protest.
“I feel like an empty sack if I go all day without something more
than tea.”

“I thought the small foods in your home were
for your birds. Do you shovel them into your mouth when no one is
watching?”

Atarangi laughed, an honest sound like
thunder. “They're for diplomacy, fieldwoman!”

Esha managed to smother her grin until she
turned away, to check the tiny shed beside Parvati. It was half
filled with ragged-split bamboo sticks.

“Fuel in these travellers' sheds is meant
for anyone passing through,” she said, taking an armload, “so we're
welcome to what's here. Have you travelled by foot on this plateau?
Or Lentil?”

“Not this high up the mountain,” Atarangi
said, “no. You are fortunate to have this much wild land. Betel
Plateau is more tightly packed than this.”

“We do have plenty of free-growing bamboo,”
Esha admitted. “The Empire hasn't taxed that yet. And these rest
sites are open for everyone's use. We'll find more like this, at
least as far as Maize, maybe the lower end of Rice. Beyond that, I
can't say.” Esha remembered nothing about the mid-peak plateaus,
just that she had sat in a cart while being escorted away from
them.

Atarangi hummed. “We'll manage, I'm sure. My
friend?”

Esha turned, startled — to see Atarangi
speaking to her attention-taut phoenix.

“Some tinder, please.”

With a creaking answer, the bird flapped
away. Foolish of Esha to think that Atarangi was talking to her.
She just missed having a sister-friend to talk to, she supposed.
Maybe the journey wouldn't be so bad.

By the time Esha split bamboo into kindling,
the phoenix returned with his beak packed full of withered pine
needles.

“He'll look after it,” Atarangi offered. And
so Esha put down the kindling and watched the phoenix work —
arranging a tent of sticks around his gathered tinder, and picking
open two knots in his stringfeathers to release his iron and
pyrite, and proceeding to strike sparks.

For all the terror it stirred up in Esha's
farming mind, the technique certainly was arresting to watch. The
bird held the glittering pyrite in his beak, and the iron between
his talons; a liquid snap of his long neck brought the two
together. Into the fire pit sprayed hot sparks, once and twice and
again until smoke began twining out of the tinder. A flame needled
up and the phoenix immediately hopped away to set his striking
tools on bare ground, in plain sight. And then, stick by stick, and
he dropped bamboo fuel onto the growing flames.

It was exactly the way a human being would
strike up a fire. The phoenix had the same intent in his eyes, the
same practiced sureness in his every movement. Esha had never
noticed before; she had always just sprinted toward wild phoenixes
while fearing for the yam plants.

Gradually, Esha noticed Atarangi's attention
— watching her, smiling.

“I'm going to cut more fuel,” Esha hurried
to say. “Call me when the meal is ready, if you would?”

“Of course.”

The camp site was ringed with bamboo
coppices, tiered with old stumps and green growth. Esha used her
broken khukuri blade and a rock to hammer stalks down and she
returned as Atarangi was drawing breath to call out.

“If you cut any bamboo here,” Esha told her,
while holding a hot bowl, “be careful which stalks you cut. Someone
here before us found a hollowheart — so there might well be
more.”

“The ... bad luck bamboo?” Atarangi
ventured.

“That's right. Someone cut into one and
flagged it for everyone else's safety, with a marked cloth.” In
honesty with herself, Esha had admired the jute rag with
hollow
inside
written on it in gobbed pine pitch, tied around a gouged
bamboo stalk. Whoever left that warning had been lucky as well as
resourceful; the serpents must not have noticed that cut on their
bamboo.

“Truthfully,” Esha added, “we should all
flag hollowhearts when we find them. Everyone would be safer.”

With a toneless hum, Atarangi stirred her
steaming rice and onion with a careful finger. Beside her, the
phoenix did the same with his beak. “I've never understood why
Tselayans fear hollow bamboo. Has anyone really vanished after
cutting one?”

“The arbiters say it's true. They've been
wrong before, but ...” Esha waved a rice-sticky hand. “One of my
fieldfellows disappeared some years ago when she was out cutting
fuel. There was no trace of her at all, so it must have been a
serpent. Maybe we're wrong. Maybe it was a tiger, or some
cutthroats. All we know is that there hasn't been trace of her
since.”

“My apologies,” Atarangi murmured.

“Thanks. I hardly knew her, though.” Esha
chewed, and swallowed. “It happens to fieldworkers. We disappear,
and someone takes our place, and life keeps on.”

Atarangi had comments to make, judging by
her yearning frown. She stirred more steam out of her meal and kept
eating, and put another dollop of rice in the phoenix's bowl.

“People disappear and life moves on,” she
finally said. “That's why you're using Gita's life as yours.”

“That's right.”

“This mountain ...” Atarangi shook her head,
and asked, “If we should meet guards, are you going by Esha or
Gita?”

It was a decision Esha did need to make. She
sighed. “I hope no one needs to know. But I'll be Gita.”

“To everyone, or only human beings?”

The question was a cold blast of wind, too
surprising to understand. “My name to everyone? What?”

“Well, give this phoenix some recognition:
he knows that I'm Birdnose or Atarangi, depending on what I'm
doing.”

The phoenix watched them in this moment,
bright-eyed. He was either trained to do long chains of tricks or
he was truly a comprehending creature. Which meant Esha and
Atarangi were not alone — and they hadn't been alone at any point a
phoenix was present, which was as mesmerizing and terrifying as
watching the bird work flint and steel.

Atarangi stood and removed the rice pot from
the coals. “I'd like to be just Atarangi,” she added, quiet. “I
think I owe you a weight of secrets, Esha Of The Fields, since I
searched out your records. So I'll tell you this: Birdnose is just
who the people of Tselaya Mountain would like me to be.”

“A blackmark herb dealer?”

“An owner of a human face.” Smile splitting
into a grin, Atarangi turned firelight eyes to Esha. “You didn't
suspect anything, did you? Looking on me as Birdnose?”

Nightmares tumbled through Esha's mind, all
the stories ever whispered about demons taking human faces for
their own. Nonsense, she scolded herself. “Ah. Didn't suspect
what?”

“That the human nose wasn't mine. Here, I'll
show you.” After a moment unbuttoning her pack flap and digging
under cloth assortments, Atarangi pulled a limp, brown thing from
her supplies. It looked like the brow, nose and cheekbones of a
human face — a face Esha had seen before.

“Wh-What ...?” She stared riveted, her blood
chilling.

“It's made of rubber tree sap, heated and
set into shape.”

“Another
face?!”
Esha couldn't rip
her eyes away from the translucent thing in the firelight, much as
she wanted to.

“My trait shows on my face,” Atarangi said.
“Just the hooked tip of my beak. I'm going to become a sea eagle.
The ones from my home. I watched them diving for fish when I was
small — magnificent creatures.”

Her mind numb, Esha nodded.

It wasn't convincing; Atarangi smiled small
and embarrassed. “No one minded the sight of my beak in Manyori
lands. But on Tselaya, there are rules to follow.”

“I thought folk called you Birdnose because
of the ... because of that other face's shape.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the big nose.” Esha waved toward the
tree-sap mask dangling from Atarangi's hand, like her hands might
explain. “Sticking out and coming to a point like that ... It's
like a junglefowl's beak.”

Turning the mask to scrutinize her own face,
Atarangi said, “Oh. It somewhat does! I picked the name for my own
bird nose, since no one can see it. It would upset folk, wouldn't
it?”

“Traits showing on your face? Very much so.”
Esha could only recall one Grewier wearing a mask, and that was a
frail old man. He was fortunate to have reached such an age in his
human body — but what a price he had paid, wearing heaped cloaks
and wraps, walking in a silent storm of pitying glances.

Atarangi rotated her bowl in her fingers.
“That's the only reason I wear this,” and she pointed to her mask,
“is to be polite company for the people of this empire. And
Birdnose is because of your senseless laws against herb use.”

“Speak more truth,” Esha said, “I'll keep
agreeing.”

“Gladly.” Atarangi smiled, crooked and wry.
“I think the burden of secrets is even now — although a diplomat
and a farmer should never speak so frankly with each other. That's
how Tselayans do things, is it not?”

“We've broken a hundred rules already, why
not one more?” Esha blew out a breath she didn't know she had been
holding. “Gods help me, though, I've never heard so much raw
honesty at once. Is this always how you speak?”

“Oh, not at all,” Atarangi replied. “I've
just been bottling my frustrations with your rules and your ways. I
hope I'm not troubling you.”

“I suppose not.” Esha herself had thought
the caste divisions unfair, thought it small and fearful like a
passing guard might demand to see the contents of her mind. “But
the ways of Tselaya are yours too, if you've got a caste.”