Tides of the Titans Page 17

  Leaper accepted a bamboo cup of water from the queen’s hand. It tasted strangely sweet. Then salty. He realised he was crying after all.

  “If my head really can buy something so valuable to you,” he asked, “why haven’t you simply called your warriors and had me killed?

  “As we have already explained to you,” Erta replied kindly, “that isn’t our way.”

  It was a question Leaper had asked Ilik, at their first meeting. Why hadn’t she called her guards? Weren’t they right outside her bedroom door?

  I’m not used to being threatened, Ilik had admitted. I suppose I don’t know enough to be afraid. I hardly ever meet anyone new, and my teachers never prepared me for assassins. Besides, what would be the benefit in killing me? Killing a goddess to get her soul for your child—that I understand. The gods wield the real power around here. But me? She’d laughed in self-deprecation. My blood is no help to anyone.

  TWENTY

  LEAPER COULDN’T see Canopy—it was too far away—but he gazed south anyway, hesitating with bunches of bulrush stems in his scratched, stinging hands.

  In the daylight, the variety of plants growing in and around the City-by-the-Sea became apparent. It wasn’t all mangroves and bulrushes. Red banana trees and black-stemmed bamboo stood up from the water, and every house on the side of Blackpress that faced the palace showed fruit and fragrant flowers being cultivated on flat, woven-seaweed roofs. Herons and egrets perched on eaves as easily as they did on mangrove branches. Black-and-white-flecked geese and purple-eyed pelicans sailed about in flotillas, and flowerfowl pecked at bamboo seeds in bamboo pens stacked on top of one another. The birds of prey from the palace, which Leaper had learned were ospreys, circled hopefully over the Mooring, which remained empty of the fishing fleet.

  A riot of life, in the absence of immortals.

  The goddesses and gods of Canopy should fade away. I’ll make them fade away. We don’t need them.

  Ulellin’s powers didn’t reach this far from the forest, but were Leaper to attempt a return, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the stiff winds would pick up again. The curse. If only he could remember exactly how it went.

  I doom you.

  By my power.

  To wander.

  Your heart’s desire.

  Loves another.

  “Heart winged to her already?” the senior blackpresser asked him, breaking Leaper’s reverie, and it occurred to him that by gazing south, he was gazing at the palace where the queen likely still slept, even as the squat, shortening shadows of the mangroves slid off the platforms and into the water that swirled around their submerged roots.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Or maybe to her maid, Mitimiti? It’s no use, lad. They’ve been paired ten floods or more, those two.”

  He took the bulrushes from Leaper and stuffed them through a fuse-hole in the bottom of the kiln. A boy with a kind of small, web-footed pig for a pet ran forward with a taper to light the fuse. They all stepped back, and a girl with a necklace of tiny turtle shells brought a bamboo ladle of fresh water to each worker.

  “My heart’s content to stay in my chest. But thanks.” Leaper smeared his charcoal-dusted forehead with the sweaty back of his hand.

  The blackpresser unconsciously altered his stance so that the flat, protective face of his windturner faced the heat-radiating row of clay kilns. Dried reeds and the broken branches of mangroves had been smouldering down to charcoal in their airless prisons since sunrise.

  “She’s watching, you know. Our queen. She has a collection of mountain eyes. Those long tubes with the glass in them? Look too long, and she’ll wonder if you’re planning to climb the tower and try to kiss her.”

  Last night, in her presence, he had wanted to kiss her. What was it about queens?

  It’s not trusting myself, Leaper concluded glumly. It’s trusting another man’s judgement, or another society’s standards, more than I trust my own judgement, my own standards.

  “I could fall in love with her,” he confessed. “If, as you say, her fondness for Mitimiti wasn’t so apparent.” He’d come a long way in his observations of human interaction since playing with ants in the isolated tree hollow of the three hunters’ home. And his paired mothers had never been reluctant to express their affection. “Who, if I may ask, is the queen’s heir?”

  The senior blackpresser grunted.

  “Well, that’s the maid Mitimiti also. The queen’s consort’s firstborn.”

  “The queen has a consort?”

  “Had. His name was Eturis. Getting his bright and beautiful blood for her heirs was the main reason she married him. Saw how pretty his grown daughter was, but couldn’t get heirs from the daughter, now, could she?” The blackpresser paused in his explanation to pick up a made-for-purpose timber, turning the hinged, circular plate on top of the kiln so that it was completely sealed but for the vents at the bottom. “Eturis was a diver. Everyone thought the job would kill him, as it killed the mother of his children, so many years ago. He and his first wife competed on the water, pushing each other to greater depths. She went first, tragically, making way for him to become queen’s consort, but who could have guessed that this early monsoon would sweep him and his safebucket out to sea, along with most of the other divers and half the fishing fleet?”

  “I’m sorry,” Leaper started to say, but it appeared the time for action had come. The blackpresser beckoned him past the active kilns to a second platform, where another row of kilns seemed to have been left to cool overnight. Women brought buckets of bulrush-root porridge, but not for consumption. Leaper was given the least skilled job, that of breaking the flaky black charcoal up with his hands and mixing it with the porridge. The slurry was poured into moulds, compressed with plates and hammers, and then ratcheted free to join the great piles of cubic, turd-looking fuel for the cooking fires of the city, not to mention the royal water distillery. He hadn’t seen briquettes before.

  Wood is more precious than magic here, and yet they were barely tempted to trade me.

  He needed to find out who wielded magic in the City-by-the-Sea. Only magic could defeat Ulellin’s curse. Was it the physician, Unsho? Or the queen herself? Mitimiti had spoken of a way to bind a person to the city. Could the agreement he’d thought was a suicide pact actually be magic? Or was it simple conditioning and suggestibility that caused those taken away against their will to die in their sleep?

  He’d need to get closer to Erta in order to find out. If the blackpressers thought he was in love with her, so be it.

  Leaper wiped his face again, forgetting the charcoal slurry, and wondered if the queen truly was watching him at that moment. If she was, he was hardly at his most attractive. He knew Ilik hadn’t found him attractive, at first, and that she’d dismissed him as a child. Her clock collection, as it grew, bound them tighter and tighter.

  Until it ended. Until their bond snapped like an overwound spring.

  “I’m to take the new ’presser,” the kid with the web-footed pig was saying to the senior blackpresser. “Queen’s maid asked for him. Is his name Lee, or what? They need four buckets of briquettes to the kitchens, and then he’s to wait there for her.”

  “But we’re almost done. He’ll miss worship.”

  “Miti says she’ll take him to worship after.”

  Leaper tried not to show his interest. Worship? Is there more than magic here? Are there gods after all?

  The senior blackpresser curled his fingers into a makeshift spyglass, peered through it at Leaper for a moment, then gave him an I-told-you-so grin.

  “Off you go, Lee,” he said. “Lad, show him where the dried briquettes are. Get him some buckets and a long handle from the storm cupboard.”

  The palace kitchens were packed with bustling bodies and brushing windturner fringes. Leaper put the buckets where the boy told him. Somebody seized on the buckets at once, taking them to the ovens. Leaper waited by a cold fireplace for Mitimiti to appear. When she did, she wore not a w
indturner, but a kind of skintight, abrasive, grey leather suit that went from wrists to knees; its dried seaweed collar and cuffs seemed to have been sewn shut onto her body, along the seams. Only her face, bare lower legs, and hands were unenclosed.

  “Stingray skin,” she said. “Greased with whale oil to keep me warm. It’s strong enough that small sharks and crocodiles can’t bite through it, and rough enough that big ones don’t like the feel of it in their mouths.” She held out a second suit of the skin, folded over the crook of her arm. “If you’re feeling shy, I can string up a curtain for you. Otherwise, there’s whale oil in that tin can there for filling the lanterns. Get your clothes off and slather it on nice and thick. You’re too skinny to stay warm without it.”

  Leaper swallowed his questions about worship and bent obediently to open the lid of the can.

  The powerful fishy smell washed over him, transporting him back to Ilik’s wardrobe.

  It’s useful for maintaining the clocks, she’d said.

  He realised he was on his knees, insensible in his distress. That Mitimiti’s gentle hand lay on his shoulder, under the edge of the windturner, warm and smooth against his skin.

  “What is it, Lee?” she asked.

  “Why are you taking me fishing?” he mumbled.

  “To teach you about tides. To hide you, while the Master of Cast takes a tour of Blackpress. To discover all I can about your feud with the goddess. How you were able to strike at her, and whether sheltering you without first forcing you to make the pact places my queen in danger.”

  “It might.” All mortals are in danger from the deities of Canopy. Everyone, from the ones who grovel at their feet to the ones who toil at great distances. “Do you have gods here? Do you have magic with which to defend yourselves?”

  “Our gods were driven out long before living memory,” Mitimiti murmured, and Leaper’s heart sank. “We have no magic but that which washes out to sea. The scraps from Canopy’s table. How is it you were able to harm Orin?”

  Leaper laughed hopelessly.

  “By using Airak’s power.”

  Mitimiti’s eye lingered on him a long time, her lips pressed tightly together.

  “There was almost no lightning,” she said at last, “with that early monsoon. Did you notice? In regular years, most monsoon nights, your god would whiten the skies, brighter than day. I’d see the purple lines up and down my eye, long after it was over, and smell that lightning smell. We’d get it, even here. But not this year.”

  Leaper put his hand into the whale oil, staining it with charcoal, letting it run over his fingers. Each viscous drop hitting the surface made a crater, but no ripples. Who cares if she knows? What can she do? What can any of us do?

  “It’s almost as though he paid for that flood with his own power, isn’t it?” Leaper said. “I hope his part of the barrier is too weak to keep the demons out. To Floor with the agreement between Canopy and Loftfol. I hope Understorey is tempted to raid. I hope it rises up and its people slit the king’s throat while he’s sleeping.”

  She ruffled the stubble on his head, a consoling motion.

  “We need to get you a better razor, Lee,” she said quietly. “Also, a patch for that eye. Now that I know what to look for, I can see you’re squinting with the white one. Come on. Let’s get you out of those clothes.”

  * * *

  THE FISHING grounds, Leaper guessed, were beyond the edge of the mangroves.

  Mitimiti didn’t lead him from the palace to the Mooring; that precinct was too close to Cast. Instead, they crossed Saltdeck and entered the precinct of Diverdwelling. There, the houses had garden beds built from shells below every shuttered window, and the network of floating mats was so extensive that each mangrove was encircled; every open stretch of water was webbed with strings of the pale, bobbing pads.

  Many of the divers had already returned from their day’s work, their floating wooden buckets full of plate-sized white shellfish, things like enormous leeches, or many-legged things like the hand-sized crayfish of Canopy that here were each big enough to fill a bucket. Mitimiti laughed when she saw Leaper staring. She named the fruits of the divers’ labour in turn.

  “Sea oysters,” she said, “much bigger than their cousins that stick to the mangroves. Those black ones are sea cucumbers. We dry them over fires and eat them during the monsoon, when it isn’t safe to dive.” She paused. “This season, we have no choice but to be unsafe. There isn’t enough food stored, and our fishermen haven’t returned with holds full of the salted deep shoals. May never return. You need to know the dangers, and to know our ways, if you are to become one of us. Those giant lobsters we call bluebloods, but the men of Cast call them ‘bites-back,’ because of the power in their claws. They don’t actually have teeth. Well, they do, but down in their stomachs, not their mouths.”

  “Are we … are we going to catch those?” Leaper looked askance as Mitimiti tied a rope around his waist, over the tight leather suit she’d sewn him into. A wide wooden bucket was knotted by the handle to the other end of the rope.

  “No,” she said. “We’re catching killifish. This is as low as the tide will go, with the river still running. I promised to explain the tide to you.”

  “You did.”

  “One day, the goddess Orin came to this shore in the shape of a giant crocodile. The waters were sweet in those days, and the great and glorious winged would come to perch on the red banana trees to sip from the edge of the clear, pure sea.”

  Leaper didn’t say what he now knew of Orin, that she, or her predecessor, was only one part of the many-faced being first considered to be a titan and that he suspected she couldn’t survive except in close proximity to her other parts. He didn’t ask about the winged, which he had seen the smaller, fragmented titans mention as thieves banished by their betters. He didn’t tell Mitimiti that the mortals who had come upon the souls of the titans had called the souls of winged and chimeras “candles” in comparison.

  “Orin wished to eat the largest and most beautiful of the winged,” Mitimiti went on, “whose name was Wept. Wept was always crying because her children had left her to become the stars, and because she cried, she was always thirsty. Orin lurked in the mangroves, a voice out of sight, urging Wept to drink more of the wondrous water, drink more! Orin knew that eventually, Wept would grow too heavy to fly, with all that water in her belly. Then Orin could catch and kill her without difficulty.”

  Mitimiti climbed down a rope ladder onto one of the floating platforms, beckoning Leaper to do the same. She made it look easy, but Leaper swung about on the ladder, one-handed, clutching his bucket in the other hand, wishing he weren’t in a tight leather suit so that he could extend his forearm spines and catch the wooden piling to steady himself.

  “Drop the bucket into the water,” she called, and when he did so, she went on with the story. “Wept drank until the water level went down and down, exposing the roots of the trees, leaving the killifish to flop about on dry sands. Orin thought her time had come and tried to spring at the winged from behind the trees, but the roots of the mangroves pierced her belly, and she bled to death beside the flopping fish.”

  She never did think very far ahead, Leaper thought, stepping onto the floating mat. But then again, neither did I.

  “Wept tried to fly, but when her wings wouldn’t lift her weight, she gazed up at the stars and started to cry again. Her tears turned the ocean to salt and gave us the livelihood we have today. Eventually she grew light enough to leave us again for the sky, but ever since that day, the ocean has risen and fallen in a steady rhythm, to remind us that the goddesses and gods of the great forest are never to be trusted.”

  If only Unar had told me this twenty years ago. She and Aforis, who should have known. They would have saved me a great deal of heartache.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “DON’T TAKE the ones with brown spots,” Mitimiti warned.

  Leaper poked distastefully at the fish packed tightly inside the rotten mang
rove branch. He’d broken it where the queen’s maid had suggested, and been startled by the prominent, globular fish eyes staring at him from the soggy cavity.

  “How do they get inside the tree branches?”

  “The river practically disappears during the dry season.” Mitimiti’s nimble fingers expertly flicked the killifish into her bucket. The fish had pale brown bodies as long as Leaper’s forearm, muscular pectoral fins and cockleshell-shaped tails. Some were spangled with blue spots, some with brown. “You’d never guess at how these fish battle for territory during the wet, the way they cuddle up and hibernate together inside old worm burrows when the estuary starts getting too salty for them.”

  Leaper got a grip on one behind its tiny, rubbery lips and bulbous eyeballs. He’d only gotten it halfway to the bucket before it gave a powerful twitch and escaped him into the water.

  “That one had brown spots anyway,” he said hastily, recalling too late that Mitimiti magically sensed when he lied and trying to change the subject. “What’s wrong with the brown-spotted ones?”

  “Those are the ones that went into hibernation too early.” Mitimiti grinned at him. “They eat the brown algae that grows inside the branches and turn toxic after a while. Eating their flesh will make you dizzy. Your mouth will go numb. You’ll feel hot and cold. In a day, or a week, you’ll die. Cooking the fish makes no difference, and there’s no antidote to the poison.”

  “Right,” he said, pulling another fish out with a pincer grip and juggling it into his bucket. “I understand. Blue spots only.”

  “You found one with blue spots?” Mitimiti gasped, grasping his bucket to check inside.

  Leaper grabbed her bucket in turn, and found himself squinting down at two dozen killifish with red-spotted tails.

  “Let me guess,” he said wryly. “The blue ones kill you if you touch them, and I’ve only got hours to live.” He let her bucket float away on its rope tether and joined her at the edge of his own bucket again, thinking that the blue spots were glowing a little in the dim bucket-bottom. Like his thieves’ lantern had at the outskirts of the forest.