Crossroads of Canopy Read online

  Unar had been raised to hate slaves. If they were dark-skinned slaves, Canopians who had been sold by their families to settle debts, they were weak and deserved to starve, and if they were pale Understorian slaves, they deserved to be pushed off the edge of the Garden for being enemy raiders or the descendants of enemy raiders.

  But before she could turn away in disgust, she heard her mother’s voice, saying that Unar was fit only for sale at the block. She remembered her sister, Isin, who had fallen, and the missing baby Imeris. It was too late for either of them to return to Canopy, but if they had somehow survived the fall and been found alive by the denizens of Understorey or Floor, she would wish for strangers to show them forgiveness. Kindness, even.

  She felt for, and quickly found, the strength of the life force in the seeds and their yearning to grow tall and strong. Inside the other woman was the unfurling of potential life; the slave was ovulating. The smell of earth and pulpy red arils filled her nostrils.

  “It’s that bed over there. That’s where you buried them,” she said.

  “Yes, Warmed One.”

  Unar led the way off the bridge and over to the raised bed. She began digging, and found the seeds almost at once. The slave gave a small cry of relief. Smooth, shiny shapes filled Unar’s palms. She lifted them, sniffed at them, using her goddess-given gift.

  “These are gap-axe seeds,” she observed.

  “Yes, Warmed One. Planted here in the Garden, watered by rain, they will grow to only ten paces tall. There’s something about having their roots in Floor that makes the great trees grow to one thousand paces and more.”

  “I know more than you about the great trees!”

  “Yes, Warmed One.”

  Unar didn’t feel particularly warmed at that moment. She dwelled in abundant sunshine that rarely reached Understorey, it was true, but she shouldn’t have boasted about having more knowledge than a slave.

  “Go to sleep,” she said. “I’ll plant the seeds in the spiral pattern. With magic, it won’t matter that the soil hasn’t been loosened. I’ll lend them the strength to push through compacted ground. I’ll even germinate them, so that all can see the work was done.”

  Unar saw from her hesitant expression that the slave woman didn’t believe her, and didn’t care. Were there Understorian gods? If so, they must be pathetic and powerless compared to those of Canopy, but maybe they had eyes to see; maybe they would recognise the tribute that Unar paid to them by protecting one of their own.

  And maybe they would watch over a helpless, fallen girl child in recognition of Unar’s tribute.

  THREE

  THE HAMMOCKS were tied between loquat trunks.

  Unar stopped at the paired, hollow-trunked, deciduous prison trees at the grove entrance to return the unknotted ropes of her climbing harness to the store. Fallen leaves were beginning to make paired, patterned circles around their bases. Leashed tapirs were sometimes kept there, when the wealthy brought their foliage-fattened livestock for tribute. The meat of the docile animals, captive bred and accustomed to being farmed in treetops, was a rare treat. It was generations since troublemaking slaves had been sealed up inside either of the swollen, stumpy prison tree trunks, but Servant Eilif had threatened to do it to Unar the last time she was caught out of her hammock by moonlight.

  On that occasion, Unar had been trying to sprout the seeds of the night-yew, despite knowing that it was forbidden for there to be more than one night-yew tree in the Garden. And when Unar had asked why there could be only one, Eilif’s answer had been that there could be only one incarnation of Audblayin at a time, which seemed irrelevant, but Unar hadn’t tried again.

  The scent of loquat nectar in fuzzy, still-furled flowers and the sound of snoring drew Unar along the dirt path towards the hammocks. Layered, petal-like eaves of the Gardener’s Gathering pavilion sheltered the sleepers from light rain without blocking afternoon sunlight. Streams of water, diverted from the pavilion’s peak over the edge of the Garden nearby, connected the higher platform with one of the pools below. Oos said she hated the waterfalls, because they made her need to pee, but Unar appreciated their ability to mask murmured midnight conversations.

  Midnight was well behind her now. She’d spent an hour planting, and her mind was numb, all the magic bled out of her by the task of germinating the gap-axe seeds. In hindsight, it had been a little ambitious, but Unar was accustomed to having a deeper well to draw on than most.

  “Did you find the baby?” Oos asked sleepily, invisibly enfolded in her hammock, as Unar tried to climb into the one beside it.

  “No.”

  Unar’s arms felt like logs. She slipped back to the turf, rested a moment, and then tried again to drag herself, headfirst, into the hammock.

  “It was good of you to join the search, Unar.”

  “It was stupid of me,” Unar said, her voice muffled by blankets. “Nobody lives who falls.”

  “Did you go into Understorey?”

  “Yes.”

  Oos caught her breath reverently.

  “What was it like?”

  “Dark.” Unar struggled to turn over, to lie on her back and look through the gap of her cocoon at the underside of the red-painted roof. The hammocks came from Ukakland, where the insect god imbued them with the ability to repel night invaders, but the soft silk lining was something Oos had sewn for her. “The rain was mostly stopped. The moonlight too.”

  “Did you meet anybody? Any wild slaves?”

  “I met a liar. His name was Edax.”

  Oos guffawed.

  “He was a liar if he said his name was Edax. That’s the name of the Bringer of Rain’s Bodyguard. Nobody else is allowed to take that name.”

  Unar was taken aback by the instant recognition, but she had no energy to ask questions. What did she care, or need to know, about neighbouring gods and their Servants, anyway? Her place was here in the Garden. As a Gardener, she could sense struggling life and strengthen it. Soon enough she would be a Servant and germinate more than just plants; she would help to kindle human life. When she finally became the Bodyguard, the only one to have direct contact with the deity who stayed inside the egg-shaped Temple at all times, she would be able to ask: Had her sister, Isin, been reborn?

  For just as the death god dreamed the names of those who passed into the ether, Audblayin dreamed the names of those who returned to be born again.

  Oos, in contrast, hadn’t come to the Garden with ambition. She was fifteen years old. Only a year younger than Unar, she was delighted, like a child, by flowers, the feel of soil, and the sight of fish swimming. The daughter of a king’s vizier, she had an extensive knowledge of politics, astronomy, and religion. She’d come to the Garden in pursuit of beauty.

  Unar’s mother was an axe maker, her father a fuel finder. Both were stricken, which meant they were free, but just barely. They didn’t own houses, like citizens. They were certainly not internoders, who owned whole sections of trunk between two branches, nor were they crowns, who owned the tops of entire trees. They were neither royalty nor gods.

  They still should have found the food somewhere. Somehow. They should have paid tribute to the god Odel, the Protector of Children, so that Isin could live.

  Unar would find Isin. New body or old. They would be together again.

  As she relaxed in the hammock, she let images of her family’s hovel surround her. Unar’s earliest memory was of a cramped room: a wooden hollow all yellow lamplight and sooty shadow. The rocking and the creaking of the tree sometimes seemed to possess Mother. Her rocking and creaking with baby Isin in the chair moved in time with the great tree, as if their unity was something that might calm the tree in the storm. Little Unar knew that agreeing with Mother, mirroring her, sometimes calmed Mother.

  Perhaps Mother thought rocking and creaking would calm the rocking, creaking room. Unar, blanket-wrapped, had crouched by the kettle and ashes a few paces away, mesmerised by the baby’s bright eyes and the puzzlement on the small, un
formed face. Isin’s doughy cheek slumped against Mother’s right shoulder like dropped, unfired clay.

  Baby’s puzzlement deepened. She vomited a splash of white breast milk onto Mother’s dark shawl. Then her little furrowed brow relaxed. All was well with her. She might as well have laughed with relief. Unar had laughed.

  Is something funny? Mother shouted. Are you laughing at me? Here. Take her.

  Unar took Isin while Mother rinsed the corner of her shawl in a bucket. Isin’s head wobbled and her inturned, useless feet fell out of her wrap, dragging near the rough, splintered floor. Unar was five years old, almost six, barely tall enough to hold her sister out of the dust. They stared at each other until Isin went cross-eyed and Unar had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing again.

  We’ll laugh together, she thought. When you’re big enough. We’ll laugh at all the funny things.

  A few months later, though, Isin had fallen, and Unar felt like she would never laugh again.

  Oos’s voice, insistent, brought Unar back from her dark recollections.

  “Unar?” Oos ventured.

  “Mmm?”

  “Did your oaths bind? While you were in Understorey? Could you have broken them?”

  “There’s nothing out there that I want to steal,” Unar said scornfully. “And nobody I want to rape. I have no enemies to murder.”

  “One who walks in the grace of Audblayin was only asking,” Oos replied, too quickly. “One only wanted to know how it felt. Did it feel like it did before? Before you came to the Garden, I mean. Could you care about things that weren’t birthing or sprouting? Could you think wicked thoughts?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Unar admitted, her eyes closing as she slipped into sleep. “All my thoughts are wicked.”

  FOUR

  BY MORNING, the Waker of Senses was dead.

  The high-pitched harmonising of trumpet fruit roused the Gardeners from their hammocks. Oos emerged gracefully, slipping the red woven shirt she’d adjusted to flatter her form on over soft, knitted, seedpod-down undergarments, but Unar, barely having slept, tipped drunkenly out of hers, only to have the breath punched out of her by the ground.

  “What’s that racket?” she croaked, palms pressed to her ears, the direct sunlight blinding. She blinked rapidly up in the direction of what she thought was Oos’s indulgent smile. Oos was taller than she was, curvier, and surrounded by a sweet-smelling cloud, the coconut oil she combed through her tresses. Her long hair leaped straight up like a black flame in the dry season and curled down like wet vines in the monsoon; Unar half suspected her of using magic on it. Thick, black eyebrows framed Oos’s enormous, guileless eyes, a smooth, broad nose, and bee-stung lips the carmine colour of cut tamarillos.

  But Oos wasn’t the only one looming over her.

  “It’s the transition call,” said a calm male voice from even higher up than Oos’s. “Audblayin has gone into the ether. By sundown, he or she will be born again, though we won’t find him or her for another twelve or thirteen years.”

  Aoun. The lanky boy who’d waited with Unar at the Gates. They’d rarely spoken since. Aoun spoke rarely to anyone. There had been the incident with the fish. And the bulrushes. Only crazy people from Ehkisland who lived by the side of lakes could eat fish or the nauseating, glue-paste-tasting roots of bulrushes.

  “Why don’t you lecture me for twelve or thirteen years, instead of helping me up off the ground?”

  “Aoun doesn’t touch the flesh of mortals,” Oos teased from somewhere behind Unar. “He thinks he’s a god.”

  “I don’t think that,” Aoun said. No, Aoun didn’t think he was a deity. Unar had hoped she was, once, and been disappointed to learn she was unusual, yes, but not extraordinary. Which was why she could never tell Oos about her ambition to be the Bodyguard. Oos might look at her in a pitying way, the same way Aoun had looked at her when he found out about her mother wanting to sell her as a slave, and she couldn’t stand being pitied. Better her friends looked at her with admiration when she succeeded.

  When Unar and Aoun had pledged their lives to the Garden together, he an orphan and she a short step ahead of the slave block, he’d been shorter than she, his face pimply and his voice reedy. Four years later, he towered head and shoulders above her. His curls, once sun-bleached, stayed black these days, and he spoke as deeply and ponderously as a tree bear.

  His hand, where it grasped her forearm, was as big as a tree bear’s, too. He lifted her easily to her feet, where she swayed and made whimpering noises, still covering one ear against the wild music. It was normally so quiet. Singing and the use of instruments in the Garden were forbidden.

  “We’ve got to go to the Temple, Unar,” Oos said, giggling, pulling Unar along behind the other Gardeners. “This way.”

  “I forget what happens.”

  “Isn’t it exciting? I can’t wait to see the inside of the Temple.”

  “Wait. Is this the part where we take our clothes off and swim through the fish to get purified?”

  The fish incident. Unar tried to contain her shudder. After a teaching exercise where they’d sprouted purplepea saplings from seed under the watchful eye of Servant Eilif, Unar had pulled out her tree and put it on the woodpile as instructed, but both Oos and Aoun had mysteriously vanished with their saplings.

  When Unar sneaked after Oos’s light sandal-prints, she caught her friend extracting dye from the flowers to make blue ribbons for braiding through her tall, magnificent hair. Unar left Oos to follow Aoun’s prints and found him using the purplepea leaves to stun fish in one of the smaller pools. His mouth was full of the raw flesh of one he’d stabbed after it floated to the surface. Unar had been repulsed.

  Aoun had wordlessly offered one of the gasping, scaly abominations to her. Its horrible mustaches were like slug feelers, and a row of spines stuck up on its back. Unar hit Aoun’s hand away from her so hard that the fish sailed off the edge of the Garden.

  Now she would have to get naked in the water with them.

  Oos, meanwhile, rapturously shaped the Temple interior in the air with her slim hands, made smooth by wasting her time rubbing rough skin off with sandpaper fig leaves. “My father said the inside of the egg shape is spiralled and segmented like a snail shell. It has marble steps and banisters of purpleheart. He said everything leaving the safety of the staircases, passing into the centre, becomes weightless. Great living artworks of white sky-coral cross the empty spaces, and birds build their nests upside down, but the eggs don’t fall out of them.”

  “Oos, I can’t swim. And I hate fish. They’re creepy.”

  “Your magic will hold you up. Do you feel sick?”

  The question was obsolete by the time Oos had finished asking; Unar made it to the other side of a hanging bridge before stumbling to her knees. She vomited into a stand of bulrushes at the edge of the small lily pond where the spoonbills nested. They were the same bulrushes whose roots Aoun once roasted for supper. He’d known the trick of pulling them out without cutting his hands on the sharp-bladed leaves. And then he’d eaten them laden with fish.

  “But I don’t have any magic.” Unar would have eaten a hundred bulrush roots to avoid swimming through the fish. “I need to wait for it to grow back. I used it all up. That’s why I’m sick.”

  Oos knelt beside her and whispered, “You mean you used it up when you were looking for the baby that fell?”

  “Yes.” Unar wasn’t about to admit she’d been helping a slave.

  “It’ll grow back very slowly, now that Audblayin is dead.”

  “I didn’t know she was going to die today!”

  “I’m a good swimmer. I’ll help you. Quickly. We’re falling behind.”

  The loquat grove and the petal-like pavilion were well behind them. Three bridge crossings later, they stood at the edge of the main tallowwood trunk that supported the widest part of the Garden with the Temple at its heart. On a platform at the edge of the moat, cracked halves of toucan eggshells held the pr
ecious mother-of-pearl powder given as tribute when the deity died, to beg for a speedy return.

  Unar wasn’t sure that she really believed in the ocean. She thought the mother-of-pearl, pulverised and waiting, might come from stones hidden in the muck in the foul, reeking depths of Floor. Nobody alive could claim to have seen such a terrifying thing as the sea. The moat at the centre of the Garden was terrifying enough for Unar.

  “I’m heavier than you,” she said to Oos. “What if I drown us both?”

  The morning sun turned the surface of the water to molten gold. Aoun stood on the platform, stripping off his woven shirt and untying the drawstring of his trousers. For some reason, Unar didn’t hear whatever reassuring reply Oos made. She couldn’t take her eyes off Aoun as slaves began brushing the mother-of-pearl powder over his smooth chest and naked flanks.

  Something was wrong. Unar searched uneasily inside herself for the power of the Garden, the power of the goddess.

  Oos had asked her, Did it feel like it did before? Could you think wicked thoughts?

  Unar couldn’t tell whether it was wickedness or curiosity that drew her eyes to the reddish-brown organ, like a tapir’s trunk, nestling in the curls of Aoun’s pubic hair.

  She must have had a hundred opportunities to look at Aoun naked before. She hadn’t cared. She hadn’t tried. What was different now?

  Audblayin’s absence. Unar’s forbidden excursion beyond the barrier into Understorey. Had she broken something, some vital connection, forever? No amount of enjoying the way Aoun suddenly looked to her could be worth that!

  Then Aoun turned his back to her and Unar realised slaves had helped her to take off her own clothes and started brushing her busily with the powder. She obediently raised her arms just as Aoun dived from the edge of the platform. Shards of sun from the widening ripples interfered with her ability to watch him. Squinting, she saw his wet head surface in the middle of the lake, the purifying powder washed away, left behind in the water as a tribute to the deity.