Tinder Stricken (26 page)

Pinning their hopes on Esha's understanding
was a far reach to make; she was still trying to sort out the crowd
of meanings every time a phoenix mentioned the colour brown. “I'll
listen,” she offered, “but I can't imagine I'll understand
much.”

“No, no, it's fine if most of this falls
through your fingers — I'll still benefit from the effort of it.
Rooftop, that's a well-founded plan, my friend.”

Swelling proud, Rooftop creaked a gleeful
sound, then took one of Atarangi's yam dumplings for himself.

“Alright,” Atarangi said, putting the bowl
aside anyway, “I need something to scratch with.”

With a stick shaved off from fuel bamboo,
Atarangi drew in flat-swept soil for wordless moments. First, a
snake shape that Esha expected. Then a multitude of smaller
scribblings, lines and waves radiating outward from the snake.
Finally, when the drawing looked more like a vine full of leaves
than an animal, Atarangi straightened.

“So.” Reaching into a mask eyehole, she
rubbed her eye hard as though it was to blame. “This is a water
serpent. Humans call them serpents, distinct from snakes such as
tree snakes or vipers. The phoenix word calls snakes and serpents
one family. But for our purposes, the words
water snakes
and
serpents
are two sides of the same coin.”

Esha had gathered that idea days ago. She
held her sharpening tongue; the phoenixes all listened intent and
there couldn't be enough common words for them to use.

“The serpents,” Atarangi pushed from her
mouth, “they speak with their bodies. All living things do. But
when these serpents are speaking with sounds, it's ... Well, try to
imagine this, Esha: a serpent has fins on the sides of its
head.”

“Where is the head?” Esha couldn't look at
the lines and see anything but an uprooted yam plant.

“Right here. These fins on the sides of
their faces seem to be for expressing broader forms of opinion. A
sort of— Like the edges of our mouths. Or a phoenix's sidecrests.
But not always. In some cases, these barbels can—“

“The what?”

“Barbels. The whiskers on a fish?” Atarangi
made combing motions with her fingers, drawing long shapes away
from her tattooed chin. “Have you ever seen a catfish?”

“Not a whole one, no.” Catfish showed up in
Janjuman's winter stews, diced as even as anything else. It had a
more agreeable texture than most water-meat and that was all Esha
knew.

Atarangi nodded at this new burden. And,
slowly, she drew a breath that looked like a prayer.

By the time the cooking coals died to ash,
Atarangi had taught Esha a bizarre assortment of words for fish and
their distinctions. She then touched the bamboo stick to her
barbel-faced sketch of a water serpent and grasped at an
explanation of their expressions, their gestures, their
impenetrably woven ideas. When Atarangi said the serpent tongue was
like three languages at once, she meant it: they fin-gestured about
their barbels' motions, and clicked teeth to describe their fin
gestures, and all of it in what seemed like a wary, wordy tone.

It clashed against everything Esha knew — or
thought she knew, in her ever-pivoting life — about water serpents.
Creatures who rose from the unseen depths, summoned like demons.
Creatures who grabbed the vulnerable and dragged them beneath.
Thinking creatures with a body-flicked vocabulary that Atarangi,
the most worldly diplomat Esha had ever known, couldn't seem to
match.

“Gods help us,” Esha murmured.

“I'll take your gods' help gladly,” Atarangi
sighed. “The serpents don't speak any throat sounds similar to
human tongues, or phoenix cries. The strangest part is that this
braided language isn't what the serpents were speaking to
Clamshell, when they appeared to her with demands or threats. They
used tapping teeth and an occasional fin gesture: she understood
perfectly well as long as she had a little green leaf in her
stomach.”

Serpents were ambushing thinking creatures
and speaking to some of them in elaborate riddles — only some of
them. Confusion twisted Esha's mouth farther. “What does that
mean?”

Atarangi was shaping sounds of her answer
when Clamshell shrieked.

“
Alarm!”
She lunged to pick up her
chick, before shrieking again:
“Water-snake!”

“What?!” Atarangi jumped to her feet,
scanning the darkness outside the fire's glow.

Esha looked, too, at the pine trunks and the
leaf litter standing stark around them but there were no snakes'
eyes, no fins.

“
Break their wings,”
Clamshell
huffed, ember-eyed in a tree's shadows,
“They black-stalk
us!”

“Kin,” Atarangi said, “where?”

Clamshell hesitated, claws gripped hard
against her perch. She picked up her chick and set him in the fork
of the branch — where he settled into the crevice like caulking
pitch — before gliding across the camp site, into the shadows.

“
Here,”
she spat, tossing clumps of
dry pine needles with her beak,
“here, the water snake was
silent-purple watching! It fled into deep-teal-earth when I raised
alarm. Puking thugs!”

“Clamshell, please.” Atarangi went to her,
hands spread as if to hold but hovering cautious. “This is
good!”

Huffing, open-mouthed, Clamshell glared
sightless into the night. She pecked vicious at the needled ground
and with that strike, her huffing began to quiet.

“
I would white-tear their eyes,”
she
said,
“I would give green-broad piles.”

Clamshell's gaze caught Esha's for an
instant before she tore it away, crests deflating. At least she had
the grace to feel guilty.

“I know this has been hard, my kin,” came
Atarangi's voice of reason. “Fire brace your spirit. But I believe
the serpents do warm-wish to negotiate, at least a little. If they
didn't, they wouldn't surface at all in my presence. Why would they
indulge me if not to talk?”

Clamshell stared more at the unanswering
ground.

“I think,” Atarangi said, turning her masked
face back to her other kin, “that we should move our fire site
nearer to the pond. Fruit close at hand is soon picked and eaten:
if we're close by their favoured water source, the serpents will
overhear more of our discussions, our turns of phrase. That's never
a hindrance to understanding someone.”

“
Good thought,”
Rooftop said —
murmured and meek but not crying
. “And we can walk-journey
less.”

“
I will
not
,”
Clamshell spat.
“I will
not
follow. This, it is black-soaked
wretched.”

“You don't need to follow us, kin. Keep your
chick safe. We'll handle this.” She turned to Esha, looking pale
under her mask and under the firelight. “Esha? Will you come closer
to the serpents?”

“I recall signing a contract that I would
aid your negotiations. No sense in refusing now.”

She had signed those papers with a false
name, Esha recalled late. But Atarangi smiled anyway.

At first light, Esha limped on both legs by
Atarangi's side, the two of them moving camp toward the pond. It
was a clay-edged pool at the mountain's face, stretching
worldedgeward like it tried to be a river and couldn't manage the
strain. Up-mountain meltwater trickled to feed the pool — and
between two boulders settled against each other, a tunnel opening
led into the wet, reflecting dark. It looked like the sort of
corridor that would draw things up from the deep, Esha thought with
a chill.

They were laying new hearth fire rocks when
tremors began, an earthquake that forced Esha and Atarangi again to
their hands and knees. It lasted the span of one held breath but
the sound of rocks grinding and settling in the water made it feel
all the more powerful.

Their small tribe was well, Atarangi
hurrying to help Esha back onto her rickety knees, Rooftop drifting
down from his safe cloud cover. The mountain still stood. There was
nothing to be done but light a fire and put on breakfast rice.

Esha was gathering sesame seeds and tsupira
leaf into a bite of rice when Atarangi hissed — urgent and
expressive. When Esha looked, she tilted her head toward the
pond.

It looked ordinary at first. Glassy green
surface with clumps of floating dust. Wavering reflections of
boulders. Lungta drifting into the mirror surface, flecks of blue
and gold. Then two points cut through it all — two fin tips
attached to something fish-shaped and huge. It drifted near the
boulders, whipped to the bottom with a roiling splash, and drifted
again. It turned, raising black discs of eyes above the lapping
water — then it darted into the tunnel opening, away into the
mountain dark.

“Was that ...?” Esha asked.

“A serpent,” Atarangi said. “I may have met
that one. Their colour patterns are beginning to look
familiar.”

Under a jail warden's duress, Esha wouldn't
have been able to say what colour that liquid fish-creature had
been.

“
That
serr-fent
saw us,”
Rooftop chattered. His feathers vibrated with excitement, his
crests high and glad. “
Maybe he will return for meeting Precious
One!”

Esha didn't have anywhere else to be. She
kept eating her rice, with her gaze pulling to the empty water.

They didn't have to wait long. The pond
roiled with fins within the hour.

And the creature that rose from the water
was the strangest Esha had ever seen. Covered in fins and tendrils
like a dragon kite, its body rising three metres above the water
with a cobra's upright poise, its black pupils round as nail heads.
It stood dripping, regarding Rooftop — who stood on the pond shore
like a welcoming candle flame — and turned a look to Atarangi and
Esha both.

It clicked teeth to Rooftop. A bouncing of
its long jaw, white flashing of shovel-blade fangs, and shifts of
the spined fins on either side of its jaw.

Esha knew then that she hadn't eaten
speaking herb today. Stupid oversight if she was supposed to be
understanding. She crept for the wheeled cart while picking words
out of Rooftop's door-hinge voice.

“With ( ), my kin sit ( ). They hope to
share words and ( ) ( ).”

“( ): more kin?” the serpent clacked.

“Truthfully, yes. This new human woman is
named Precious One; she is kind.”

That was a compliment, Esha numbly
understood while Atarangi rose beside her. Under her mask, her jaw
worked a last wedge of betel.

The serpent's gaze snapped to Atarangi; its
fins rose like the hair on a hackling cat.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, her words
herbaceous with lungta. “We still wish to negotiate with you.”

The serpent stared. It held still as a
varnished statue — until its chin barbels wound together like
boneless fingers interlacing, and its fins flickered, and its tooth
clicks became a rolling scale.

Atarangi paused — a thinking pause, one that
grew fear in Esha's belly because Atarangi had to understand, she
had
to.

“I ... I don't know. Please repeat
that?”

More staring. The serpent didn't move, just
loomed wetly.

“That fellow human female,” Atarangi tried,
“is Precious One. Her lungta plant was taken by the landholder
phoenix.”

Betel nut began conversations, but this
conversation with a demon-like snake couldn't be flung open so
easily. It was an order of magnitude away from a Grewier speaking
with a Sherbu, a challenge well beyond the safe confines of human
order.

Then the serpent clicked and fluttered.
Something phrased as
command
, Esha grasped that much.

“I—I can't ...” She let out a string of
voiced sounds like a baby's round-mouthed, simple cries. They were
nothing like tooth clicks but through Atarangi's panic and lungta,
she hit pitches and rhythms.
“Question with left side frill?
Raised swimfin—
Keh, how to say ...
Circle-sway brow
whisker?”

The serpent flicked its largest barbels —
dismay, Esha nearly tasted.

Atarangi tried again, another series of
pitched notes with her hands flicking wild. And as the serpent
wound its body in a retreating circle, Atarangi groaned frustrated
and raised a hand, the motion of rubbing under her mask.

The serpent froze. It rotated back toward
Atarangi, black eyes searching her face. But as her hand drifted
back to her side, the serpent clacked teeth in a harsh song.

“Apologies,” Rooftop cried, “Apologies!
Please, water-friends, let me give lungta.” He fetched green stems
and shuffle-stepped into the pond's shallows, stretching up toward
the monstrous serpent's grasping barbel.

With a ludicrously small herb gift in its
grasp, the serpent left. It wound along the mud bottom, fins and
fronds rippling down to his fish-like tail fin, until he submerged
— next to a second serpent, a quiet pair of fins barely breaking
the surface. And they both sank away into the depths.

“Another chance tangled up,” Atarangi
sighed.

“You did better than anyone else would,”
Esha said. Tale-spinners talked about monstrous serpents, behemoth
things that could wrap the mountain's circumference within their
coils — but it was more real and more frightening to see that
smaller creature and the muscle under its clammy skin.

“It's clear enough I'm saying something
wrong. Or doing something wrong, perhaps. Did you see how he
hesitated, near the end? Rooftop?”

Bobbing agreement, Rooftop tilted his head.
“That water-snake said you could have ... unmade your
insult?”

“I came close, then,” Atarangi said, “even
if by chance. I'm going walking.”

“What for?”

“To think.” Atarangi paused, eyes darting
with thought. “Maybe to see about cutting some bamboo shoots. We
haven't eaten any lately.”