Tides of the Titans Page 16

  A lone queen at the heart of the palace. Secluded and surrounded, a pearl smothered by the meat of its mother. Leaper, the grandson of a king, nonetheless too lowly to be seen walking openly. Whispering. Hiding. Slinking. And what if he had brazenly strolled where he wished? Used his gods-given powers to strike King Icacis dead as he’d struck Orin’s beast? Would she have forgiven him, in the hours they would have had before Airak destroyed him?

  “Ilik,” Leaper whispered, staring at nothing.

  He saw her as he’d first seen her, bottom in the air as she stretched her arms under the bed in search of her sash. Heard again the pleased sound she made when she seized on the returned pocket-clock. The babbling he’d made when all those languages had burst out of his throat. He’d been mortified. Then shy. Then grateful to have escaped with his life.

  The second time, months later, when he’d snuck back in to see her again, he’d found her weeping with frustration, sprawled across her bed, her chain-and-lantern trappings scattered on the floor, overdue at dinner but too tired of the courtiers’ connivances and ambitions to face them and their pregnant wives.

  She’d given him that elucidation later on. Explained how her life’s path had been laid out by Ulellin at birth. How her mother had learned her future husband’s name. That Ilik’s life had been aimed entirely at giving children to Icacis, but that no children were coming. The king had gone, ostensibly to see his mother-in-law, but actually to see Ulellin again.

  What King Icacis had discovered on this second visit to Ulellin, not learned by Leaper until after Ilik’s death, was that Icacis would die without any direct descendants.

  Middle-Mother sometimes cried the way that Ilik had cried on that royal bed, but there was often something calculated about Middle-Mother’s timing. What Leaper had seen in Ilik was genuine distress, at a time when Airakland was still celebrating the success of the Hunt, Imeris’s peace with Understorey, and the eradication of the sorceress Kirrik. Leaper had been sixteen years old. Brash. Made belligerent by his disgrace at the Temple. Utterly incapable of understanding.

  A queen’s life must be truly terrible, he’d remarked scathingly.

  Ilik had sat up swiftly, snatched a screwturner to hand and raised it threateningly against him.

  Get out, she’d seethed. There will be no language lessons today, Understorian!

  I’m not Understorian, he’d answered angrily.

  “Lee,” Mitimiti hissed on the stair, bringing him back to the present. “Move!”

  When Leaper met this queen, the queen of Wetwoodknee, he would say the opposite. He would say, I am Understorian. No, he couldn’t say that. Mitimiti would know it wasn’t true. He would tell this queen the truth. That he had been a Servant of Airak, but that he must find a new home outside the forest now. That a Canopian queen, his lover, had been killed because Leaper hadn’t followed the rules.

  The rules were that Canopians should not go to Understorey. Understorians should not go to Canopy. Leaper himself, specifically, should never go to Floor. Unless his master told him to go to Floor. Deities should be respected and paid tribute, even when they disagreed.

  Even though they are imposters. Mere men and women with the looted spirits of selfish, deformed lizards.

  Oldest-Father had served them. Had served Audblayin, unknowing, by refusing to join a raid on Canopy. All his life, he’d protected the tree where he lived, but it was also where the birth goddess had her Temple, and so he had protected her.

  Oldest-Mother had spent most of her life a slave in that same Temple. Serving.

  Middle-Father had served as Bodyguard to Audblayin. He’d taken hundreds of lives in her service, even though he was Understorian.

  Middle-Mother had suckled the future incarnation of the goddess with her own teats.

  Youngest-Mother had wielded Audblayin’s magic as Servant.

  Youngest-Father had pursued Kirrik for the better part of his life. Kirrik, whose crime was to desire the new gods be cast down, and the future shown by Dusksight be made manifest.

  “Lee! What is wrong with you?” Mitimiti demanded. Musical notes fluttered up the spiral stair. Voices floated down. But Leaper couldn’t move. He had to follow his train of thought to its logical conclusion.

  Casting the new gods down is the wrong way to go about it. Kirrik was wrong. Resurrecting the Old Gods only leads to more death and suffering.

  It wasn’t just Understorey that served the Canopian gods against its own self-interest. Folk of Airakland took food from their children’s mouths to bring to the lightning god. Leaper had served Airak’s Temple. Imeris had given a whole chimera skin to Odel. Unar, once obsessed with serving the Garden, was now the Godfinder, in service to them all, despite everything they had done, or failed to do for her.

  The Rememberers’ way is the wrong way, too. Making a direct strike against Airak was bound to draw his attention, even if only at the last moment. It has to be something less noticeable. Something slow and steady like a water clock dripping.

  Aforis had served with every fibre of his being. Skywatcher. Servant. Skywatcher again. Nothing was good enough for the lightning god. Nobody was exempt from retribution.

  I have to bring the adepts out of Canopy.

  Leaper saw the scars on his forearms. Heard himself promise to prostitute himself to the god who had scarred him.

  Not by force, as Kirrik did, to use as puppets in a futile war. By convincing them. By finding another way.

  Mitimiti had vowed, mere moments ago, to defy Canopy, and Cast, not with violence or rage, but with love and protection.

  I have to show them how people can live outside the forest.

  Leaper’s nostrils opened to drink the air of the City-by-the-Sea; it was salty, mangrove-sour, and permeated with the hot stone smell of a storm’s aftermath in a wealthy, glass-roofed district of Airakland.

  I’ll have the slaves wind them twice a day, King Icacis had said indulgently.

  What say you, Atwith? Ulellin had cried. Will these things die without our leavings to feast on?

  Mitimiti grasped Leaper’s arm, her pincer grip painfully tight, trying to turn him by force. He looked into her eye, at the blue and brown stripes radiating out from the dilated pupil. There had to be some way to break the curse on him and return to Canopy. He had to show everyone in the forest, from root to leaf tip, what he had come to know.

  If only my eyes had bones in them. If only I were a god. I could die and leave them my magic bones and show them everything, from my beginning to my ending.

  I could show them this one-eyed woman. This kind, happy, godless city. I’d give them my earbones. The splinters of my broken nose. They could listen to the music and smell the briny sea.

  If ordinary Canopians saw what Leaper had seen, they’d see Orin’s Servants, suffering, melded into a single grotesque shape, through no fault of their own. They’d see the flood that Airak brought to Floor and the woman’s face, the one who lost her bundle, who haunted Leaper as much as memories of Ilik. They could see how little their deities cared.

  He doesn’t care, but without his people, without worshippers, Airak will fade away, the same way that Tyran faded on the battlefield of the Old Gods.

  “We can help you, Master,” a woman’s voice said from around the curve of the stair, and Leaper thought he must still be lost in a dream of past disasters. The voice was Ellin’s, speaking the language of the Rememberers. “The Wetwoodknee woman says they’re too poorly provisioned themselves, but she’s lying. She says all their boats are gone, but it’s an excuse not to help us. Let me find their hiding places. Lend me sails and an outrigger to fetch back my temple from the open sea, and in exchange I’ll root out the best—”

  A dozen people came into view, descending the stair. Mitimiti stopped trying to pull Leaper away. She pulled down at his elbow instead, growling at him to kneel, to bow his head. Shocked by the sight of Ellin and Estehass, Leaper dropped obediently, straight into Mitimiti’s shadow on the step below her,
where the pallor of his skin would be less apparent. He had to hope his emaciation and his silence would help hide him.

  Mitimiti didn’t bow.

  “I see why they say the sun rises over Cast both from the east and the west,” she called drolly in the language of the Bright Plain.

  She folded her arms and stood wide-legged on the stair. Leaper glanced briefly upwards and saw an amused smile playing about Mitimiti’s lips. Ellin broke off midsentence. Her pockmarked cheeks flushed, and her grip tightened on the short horn bow in her hand. The man she addressed, the man at the head of the party, wore trousers, shirt, and sash similar to those of the attackers in Leaper’s earlier encounter; in fact two such men flanked him, seed-beaded, as towering and lean as their predecessors.

  The leading man’s beads were green and white polished stones. His broad shoulders and great girth bore them without strain. More beads hung from his black, braided beard and shoulder-length hair. They were even strung between his fingers and toes, making him useless to run or to fight.

  “You’re slow returning, Cast’s Master,” Mitimiti accused. “Sunset’s well in yesterday’s window.”

  “Her illustrious majesty invited us to stay late, Queen’s Maid,” the big man answered, smiling.

  Mitimiti shook her head, amusement deepening.

  She knows when people are lying, Leaper thought.

  “The music enchanted me,” the Master of Cast said. “I was incapable of moving.”

  Mitimiti silently refuted him a second time.

  “It was to save a life,” whined a different voice, one that Leaper recognised with mixed hope and despair. “My new, great, and most generous Master was bringing me before the queen’s physician. My journey has been long and terrible.”

  Yran. He wore a pair of green-and-white seed-strung trousers and held a red-and-white cap in his hands, but his gleaming white teeth and tight black bun were unmistakeable.

  Mitimiti pursed her lips.

  “You saw the physician,” she conceded. “And your journey was long. I wish you all pleasant dreams in the sanctum of Mooring. Even you, forest dwellers, who keep our cousins of Gui as slaves in the dark and now have had darkness visited upon you.”

  Estehass and Ellin stared so hard at Mitimiti as they passed that they didn’t seem to see Leaper at all.

  She sighed when the Master’s party was safely gone.

  “Stand up,” she muttered. “Her illustrious majesty will be displeased that I needed to insult them to keep their attention on me. That Crocodile-Rider. He was your travelling companion?”

  “Yes,” Leaper replied soberly. “His name is Yran. He and his crocodile saved my life. But he tells a lot of lies.”

  “I’m surprised he was able to steer his animal into the mangroves,” Mitimiti mused. “Crocodiles don’t normally come near the city. The prop roots are pointy on the crocodiles’ soft underbellies, and the larger roots can trap them and kill them. This Yran must be a very skilled trainer.”

  Leaper said nothing to that. He followed Mitimiti up the spiral stair. Intermittently, it gave way to lavishly appointed circular rooms with cushions, balconies, and cooling breezes, before resuming its inexorable rise.

  When they reached the apartments beneath the eaves of the conical roof, Mitimiti used a hanging block of hollowed wood to tap against the frame of the closed door in a musical combination.

  “Enter, saltling,” called a muffled voice, and Mitimiti pulled on a carved fish with seashell eyes, opening the door into the stairwell and stepping lightly inside.

  A raised bed draped with insect netting dominated the room. Two wide women sat on the balcony with their backs to the door, legs dangling through the balcony railings. Silver bells hanging from the arched opening, alternating with the lanterns, tinkled in the wind.

  The women reluctantly clambered to their feet, helping one another, coming to face the new arrivals. One was middle-aged with inviting lips, deep creases of amusement fanning from the corners of her blue-and-brown streaked, deep-set eyes. Her thin neck was unbent by the dozen strings of pearls that encircled it, all but burying the front of a windturner stitched from cured crocodile hide.

  Silver strands escaped the long braid of the second, older woman. Black paste coated the inside of a mostly empty bamboo cup in her wrinkled hands. Her windturner was sheer and dyed purple, as Mitimiti’s was, but without the pearls, her saggy, bare breasts were visible beneath. Her eyes were black, and her small mouth solemn.

  “My Guiding Tide of Wetwoodknee,” Mitimiti said, grinning and bowing briefly to the woman with the pearls. “I went to bring you a sweet platter and found this fish head instead, washed up in the Reeds.”

  Leaper wasn’t sure if he should bow to the queen; he managed a wobbly half bend, knees shaking from climbing the tower stairs. Lips or no lips, she isn’t as beautiful as Ilik.

  “Should I thank you, saltling, or send you away in disgrace?” the queen answered wearily. She dusted her hands together, and salt from the balcony floated away. “A Bird-Rider or an Understorian? He’s very pale.”

  “He said he was seeking his lover’s killer. Sorrow soaks the colour from an already well-washed waif. I had a thought to put him to work in Blackpress. Let charcoal and sweat disguise him.”

  “Disguise him?” The queen shared a glance with the old woman. “From whom?”

  “His name was Leaper,” Mitimiti said meaningfully, looking ruefully at him over her shoulder. “I’ve given him a new name. Lee.”

  The queen thoughtfully licked a black smudge from the corner of her mouth.

  “He still isn’t tall enough to be a charcoal burner,” she said.

  “The men of Cast can’t see past a windturner. Look how skinny and starved he is, and bitten by crocodiles besides. Did you tend to one called Yran, Physician Unsho?”

  The old woman raised her eyebrows.

  “I did,” she said. “Yran’s otherwise very pretty teeth are loose from eating poorly, but a month of mangrove fruit and red banana will cure him.”

  “We can’t call the court of acceptance,” the queen interrupted. “Not while Cast is crushed up against our eastern edge. Too many of them would want to stay, without realising what becoming a pact-keeper of Wetwoodknee would mean.”

  “You could make the pact with Lee right now,” Mitimiti said quickly. The queen looked at her keenly.

  “I should have bought you a parrot for a pet. From that half-a-moustache sailor.”

  “You know he wanted to trade them all for me.” Mitimiti grimaced. “Even with a full knowledge of what happens to slaves taken from the City-by-the-Sea.”

  “What happens?” Leaper interrupted, sick of being ignored. He took another step forward from the doorway, not caring if he was violating taboo. If the City-by-the-Sea had no slaves, why was he being ignored and discussed as though he wasn’t in the room?

  “You speak the language of the Bright Plain,” the queen observed. “I am Erta, seventh monarch of that name. Please forgive our poor manners. We’re all caught unawares by this monsoon. Many matters require my attention, and I am tired.”

  “We don’t keep slaves,” Mitimiti told him, “nor can slaves be taken from our peoples. Removed from the City-by-the-Sea, those who’ve given their heart and mind to it go to sleep and never wake. They dream of floating into the sky and returning home.” Mitimiti shared a glance with Erta. “Men of Cast keep their Bird-Rider slaves in the dark. They say it reminds the Bird-Riders of the forest floor and keeps them calm, but there’s no calming the enslaved of Wetwoodknee. Their souls fly back to the sea.”

  “I understand,” Leaper said. I know a suicide pact when I see it.

  “It will happen to you, too, if you make the pact.”

  “I don’t want to make any pact. I want to go back to Canopy, but there’s a curse on me. The wind goddess put it there.” He met Erta’s gaze. “Please help me.”

  The queen tilted her head to one side.

  “How do you propose we d
o that?”

  “And why should we?” added the queen’s physician. “Why, when your goddesses are so generous?” She set the bamboo cup onto the floor beside the bed and pulled a large, brass-bound wooden chest from under it. Unsho threw open the lid to reveal thick, beautiful tree-kangaroo hides and rolls of bear leather. Leaper’s heart sank. There was only one place those could have come from. “Look what the one called Orin sent us, in the hopes we might reciprocate with your head. Or the heads of the ones called Imeris and Anahah. And the contents of this chest are but a taste of the promised reward. We have no great trees here, at the edge of the sea, and yet great trees we must have to replace our lost ships. Sending dead heads to your deities may be the only way we can get wood without inviting their wrath.”

  Erta tsked.

  “Put the chest away, Unsho.”

  Leaper stared at the edge of the bed where the chest had been restowed by the physician. Ulellin’s curse keeps me from Canopy, but Orin’s memory is just as long, and she wants me dead, too.

  “I’d prefer that my head and body return to Canopy together,” he said lightly. “The one way I know to break the curse is impossible, so I have to find a different way.” I’ll beat them both. I’ll live, defeat Ulellin and her winds, and steal every adept in Orin’s niche. If I can’t make the people see what I see with magic, I’ll do it with words, poor substitute that they are.

  “Queen’s kisses are good for breaking curses,” Mitimiti said impishly, puckering in a manner that made Leaper suspect she’d tasted Erta’s mouth before.

  “Enough, Mitimiti.” Erta frowned at Leaper, in almost the same way Ilik had once frowned at him, and he suddenly found himself tearing up. “Let him live here for a time, rather than bind him before he knows his mind. Find him a place to sleep in the kitchens. In the morning, put him to work with the charcoal burners, as you wanted, and tell the others to keep him behind them whenever the Master passes. Cast was surely bought with a fortune in furs and feathers, too, and they need wood from the forest as much as we do. But we of Wetwoodknee do not use lives as currency. Are you thirsty, Lee? Will you take a drink of water before you go? It is meaningful to us, the sharing of fresh water.”