Crossroads of Canopy Read online

  Fear paralysed her limbs in the face of her own imminent dive. More and more Gardeners leaped carelessly from the platform. Aoun already stood on the distant steps that led to the oval doorway in the egg-shaped Temple.

  “You’ve done a poor job, slave,” Oos admonished, taking up the brush herself and drawing it lightly across Unar’s inadequately dusted breasts, her pupils widening as she did so. Unar noticed she was holding her breath.

  “You have a secret,” Unar said.

  Oos dropped the brush.

  “It’s the death of the goddess,” she breathed. “The oaths we took are weakest while she has no bodily form.”

  So. That explained why Unar had become so conscious of Aoun. The magic enforcing her promise of chastity was falling away, as it had done when she’d ventured into Understorey. And now Oos’s eyes were glued to Unar’s breasts the same way that Unar’s eyes had been glued to Aoun.

  “You must go, Warmed One,” the slave said. Unar recognised the middle-aged hawk-faced woman she’d helped the previous night. “The others have all gone.”

  “What’s your name, slave?”

  “It’s Ylly, Warmed One.”

  Oos tried to take Unar’s hand, but Unar pulled away sharply.

  “I’m going to be sick again,” she said.

  Tears filled Oos’s dark eyes and ran down through the mother-of-pearl dust. She looked as though Unar had stabbed her with a bore-knife.

  “No,” Unar said shortly, angry with herself for being too consumed by her terror of the fish to consider Oos, but also angry with Oos for thinking so poorly of her. “Not because of you.”

  Oos blinked, relieved. She dusted over the tear trails with the powder. Unar retched over the grassy end of the platform. Then she turned, straightened, and ignoring her shaking knees, took the hand she’d shaken off just a moment ago.

  “Ehkis give me courage,” she said, naming the rain goddess.

  “You shouldn’t swear by other gods!” Oos said, scandalised.

  “I can if I want. When my goddess is dead, anyway. Ehkis holds sway over fish, doesn’t she? She can keep them away from me!”

  They jumped off the platform’s watery edge together.

  FIVE

  THE WATER was cold, like death.

  Like slow falling.

  Unar’s arm jerked in its socket. Oos was trying to pull her up towards the surface. Unar imagined there were slimy fish all around her. She sucked water into her lungs. White lights burst behind her eyes. She curled her body and tried to cough.

  Something powerful uncurled her. It was water weeds, in the grip of Oos’s magic. Just as Oos was able to coax seedlings up towards the light, she was able to form a floating, moving mat of weeds that drew Unar up and flattened her, belly-up, on the surface of the lake.

  “Relax,” Oos said soothingly by her ear. Unar found her chest full of air again. The urge to choke and thrash was gone. Streaks of powdered mother-of-pearl dripped from Oos’s hair.

  “I don’t know why there isn’t a bridge.”

  “It’s so we can be reborn by passing through water.”

  “I don’t want to be born again. Once was enough. Please get me out. I’m scared of the fish.”

  “You really should have thought of that before you gave yourself to the Garden.”

  They climbed out together beside the others, who had already been robed in red by waiting slaves. Twenty-eight Gardeners ascended the ivory steps into the egg-shaped Temple they’d pledged themselves to but had only ever seen from the outside.

  Sunlight penetrated the translucent white walls, making them glow, making Unar’s eyes widen in awe. Inside, the promised white-and-purple banisters spiralled up to a ring-shaped platform that rested against the widest circumference of the egg, halfway up the sides of it.

  But the sky-coral and the birds had fallen. Broken shells, yolk-matted feathers, and honeycomb-structures made an ugly mess on the floor. The power of the goddess had held them suspended.

  The goddess is dead.

  Unar climbed the staircase at the end of the single-file procession, combing her wet hair back from her forehead with her fingers, pulling stray weed strands away, treading barefoot in the little drips left behind by the others. Soon, she saw the white-robed Servants standing in a semicircle on the annular platform, most of the men grey-bearded, the women white-haired. They’d served a long time. This incarnation had been long-lived. Gardeners had come and gone without the opportunity to be promoted.

  Until now.

  Unar was one of the youngest, but she knew the magic was suited to her nature. Ambition, desperation, single-mindedness, and strength; these were all the qualities of unborn life. Her mother had cursed her for selfishness, for striving above her station, but striving was the basic nature of a seed and selfishness the basic nature of a newborn child.

  Her magic was powerful. Perhaps the most powerful of all the candidates.

  I will be chosen. I must be chosen.

  She bowed her head with the others as the old goddess’s Bodyguard came up the other staircase, carrying a white-shrouded body in his thickly-muscled forearms. Unar studied him intently. At last. Her chance to see him up close, to speculate on the qualities Audblayin’s Bodyguard must cultivate.

  The man had wide shoulders and a tree-trunk neck. A broad nose like a bracket fungus. A potbelly that he actually rested the weight of the corpse on as he walked. He wore an open, elaborately embellished jacket over a tunic and long, split skirt, the same as Edax had, but his were white instead of black; pristine, as though he’d never left the Temple.

  And perhaps he hadn’t, since the foray that had separated him from Audblayin the one and only time that Unar had laid eyes on her living goddess.

  Unar was utterly dismayed. This man was nothing like the skilled, athletic Edax. She chastised herself for not realising what was obvious: Why should the Bodyguard of Audblayin leave the Temple when the deity did not? He was never required to fight. Even if the Understorians staged a raid and penetrated the local niche, how could warriors hope to pass by the wards that protected the Garden?

  This Bodyguard had spent his tenure watching from the high, crescent-moon-shaped windows, and when he didn’t watch, he ate. Food was the most common tribute to the gods, and how much could one little old woman, imprisoned in an egg, possibly eat?

  He looked up from his burden and met her gaze blackly, as though he knew what she was thinking. When he opened his mouth, she expected to be chastised, but instead, he said, “Our Audblayin has gone at last to Atwith, as Atwith must go to her when he is born. Her body will remain in the Temple until we find her—or him—again.”

  He took a step back and, with his magic, lowered the shrouded shape through the central hole in the platform. It floated gently down to rest upon the shattered corals and ruined nests.

  One of the Servants stepped forward. Unar recognised the Gatekeeper of the Garden, even as the old woman set the heavy bronze lantern and red-and-green stole of her office down by the hem of her white robe, relinquishing the role.

  “I will join you in the search,” she said. Five others mimicked her, stepping forward, saying the words. Six ex-Servants would leave the Garden with the ex-Bodyguard, making a total of seven. They would make note of new babies that had been born, even though the incarnation wouldn’t reveal itself until puberty. They would wander, without magic, naked as when they were born out of respect for the birth goddess, living from charity, speaking only to each other, for ten or fifteen years, watching the children from afar as they grew.

  Some of the searchers, Unar realised, would die of old age before the new god or goddess was revealed.

  In the meantime, the Servants who remained in the Temple would train the seven new ones to be raised. The new Servants would learn to perform everything from the subtlest hidden magics to the most blatant and most powerful. Many spells would be effective only within the Garden, but Unar yearned for mastery over them. She could already do things he
r parents could never have imagined.

  The Bodyguard came to stand before her, his palm hovering over her heart.

  “Your magic is weak,” he pronounced. “You will not serve.”

  Unar’s eyes blazed. She bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood. Her magic was weak because of her efforts germinating seeds the previous night. Couldn’t he divine it? Didn’t he sense the sign that the goddess had given her, the first time it occurred to her to seek out the Garden, the seed of power that had sprouted in her chest and the smell of quince and wood fern that had surrounded her? She had to tell him.

  She couldn’t tell him. The candidates must respect the silence of grief. The silence was enforced by the magic of the Servants; Unar could feel it. She suspected that even if she opened her mouth to object, the words wouldn’t pass.

  “You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Oos.

  The glance that Oos gave Unar was frightened, not pleased. Unar didn’t know why. Was Oos frightened of her? Of her anger? Or frightened for her? Frightened of what punishments might be meted out if Unar publicly rebelled?

  “You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Aoun.

  Unar had time to think about ways in which she might rebel. She might leap off the edge of the platform and die in a broken, bleeding mess on top of the corpse of the goddess. That would show them. What could they do about that?

  They might catch her with magic and prevent her from falling. How could they not know her destiny? How could they not sense that she was greater than Oos, greater than Aoun, greater than all of them?

  The ones who had been chosen separated themselves from the ones who would go back to the Garden. Oos and Aoun received white robes from the ex-Servants who would shortly pass through the Gate on their way to examine every cradle from beggar’s to queen’s. Unar couldn’t bear to raise her eyes to them. She stared down through the hole at the lifeless shape below.

  Audblayin, hear me. She moved her lips without sound, invoking the birth god inaudibly. I’ll prove myself to you, I swear. I’ll show them. I’ll be the one to find you. I have an advantage! I already know you’re reborn a man.

  A hand seized hers in a brushing of robes. It was Oos on her way back down the stairs, white-robed in the company of Servants. Her eyes locked with Unar’s, begging for forgiveness, and for patience.

  Then she was gone.

  Unar’s new conviction wavered as she realised she’d have to face the moat alone. She wondered if she might drown herself and be eaten by fish, polluting the purifying moat with her death. But the returning Gardeners were permitted to wade through the shallow part of the moat, the ford where women seeking enhanced fertility were allowed to cross and enter the Temple, and she couldn’t drown where she was able to stand.

  She couldn’t drown. She had to show them. She would teach herself. She was like a seed.

  Ambitious. Desperate. Single-minded. Strong.

  SIX

  UNAR SLEPT early and woke when it was still dark.

  Unfamiliar shapes snored in the hammocks to either side of her. Newly admitted Gardeners. Unar hated them. Oos hadn’t snored. The fresh arrivals’ magic hadn’t been wakened yet. She could have put seeds in their nostrils and germinated the shoots into their brains.

  Scowling, she climbed out of her hammock and left the loquat grove, only to find the pasty-faced slave woman, Ylly, beating clothes against a rock by the waterfall to clean them. Dirty water fell through empty air down to one of the pools. Tiny, chirping, insectivorous bats flew through the edges of it, snatching mouthfuls of water on the wing.

  “I suppose this is the old woman’s work, too?”

  Ylly shrank back, folding herself into an uncomfortable bow with her forehead in the moss.

  “I’ll accept your punishment, Warmed One,” she said. “If not for me, you would have been chosen to serve today. When I saw you didn’t have enough magic to swim through the moat, I knew the disaster that would fall on you. The young gap-axe trees were knee-high in the morning!”

  “Sit up. It wasn’t your fault. It was their fault. They’re stupid. How can stupid select for smart? Can a monkey choose a checkers player?”

  Ylly sat back on her heels and risked the suggestion of a smile.

  Unar remembered another woman sitting back on her heels in that spot.

  Another hesitant smile.

  The vizier’s daughter, beautiful and haughty, had clutched a wooden rod in her right hand and the rim of a wide, evil-smelling glass bowl in her left.

  She’d also had a black eye that Unar knew was payback from the other Gardeners for some decision the king of Audblayinland had made two generations ago. Having received more than her share of beatings in life, Unar wouldn’t have cared about one black eye on a rich girl; only, she’d expected a vizier’s daughter to run to her superiors at the first sign of trouble, and this one had not. She’d taken the punishment with unusual equanimity.

  Inside Oos’s bowl had been half a dozen handfuls of fresh, scarlet poinsettia leaves and something that had once resembled a lopsided, misshapen man’s tunic. The red tunics handed out to the Gardeners were sometimes made of leathery, stitched-together leaves, and sometimes the wispy, white wool inside seedpods. This one was the latter.

  Oos had altered it to a slim-fitting woman’s shirt that crossed over in front, tied with ribbons, and boasted a roomy bust and tight waist. Unar had seen the vizier’s daughter working on it under the eaves of the pavilion during their break for midday meal.

  They don’t mind which style we use, so long as the colours are correct, she had said shyly. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin thought it would better glorify the goddess if the colours didn’t fade, too. This mordant was gifted as tribute in the Temple. Servant Eilif said one who walks in the grace of Audblayin could use it.

  What is it?

  Green vitriol. It is of iron and the milk of mudwasp stings. One of my minder-women used to make it.

  I’ve never made anything like that before, Unar said, wrinkling her nose. But I have mixed leaves and mud to make a poultice for bringing bruise swellings down.

  Unar had helped Oos with her swollen eye. Oos had offered to treat Unar’s red Gardener’s shirt so that the colour wouldn’t fade. And that was the last involvement with laundry that Unar had had, because it was slave’s work.

  Until now.

  “I’m almost finished,” the slave woman said.

  Unar came closer to the baskets of clothes. They were the dirty slept-in clothes she and the other Gardeners had shucked off by the moat the previous morning. She picked up a shirt. It was Aoun’s.

  He wouldn’t need it again. He wouldn’t return to the Garden to toil with his hands again; only to toil with his magic. The sleeve was worn over the upper arm on the left side. He still missed his brother, the one who had drowned.

  We used to fight all the time, he told Unar once when they’d been given the job of finding some escaped flowerfowl together. My mother kept a great sack full of all the wishbones from every fowl she ever ate, and we’d snap a dozen a day, deciding who would get a new shirt or which of us would have a bath first and which would get the dirty water.

  He’d gone shirtless while they climbed after the foolish, easily frightened birds that day, and Unar hadn’t bothered to look. As a Servant, he’d be wrapped up tight in a white robe all the time; now, when it was too late, was when she wanted to look?

  Unar sighed. She wet the shirt and began beating it, hard, against one of the rocks that protruded into the stream of falling water. It felt good. Like she was beating the fat Bodyguard.

  “Forgive me, Warmed One,” Ylly said, “but you shouldn’t strike so hard. You’ll distort the weave.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  They beat clothes together in silence for a while. Ylly wrung them out and placed them in another basket. When the shirts were done, she brought out the red robes that the Gardeners had worn to the ceremony, their hems feathered and pale with mother-of-pearl dust.

/>   Unar sighed again as she remembered the sight of a glittering Aoun diving into the water. It was a new and strange sensation, being so fixated on his beautiful form, on the slabs of muscle that covered his once-skinny ribs, on his bulging arms and the shadow of a man’s growth deepening the darkness down his throat. How long would she have to wait before all such urges were repressed once again? She had no time for distractions if she was to meet her destiny. Hopefully this wouldn’t go on until Unar brought Audblayin back to the Garden.

  “Ylly,” she mused, to distract herself. “It’s a funny name. I never heard of it before.”

  “It was my mother’s name, Warmed One,” Ylly said. “Her only gift to me, other than the gift of my life. We of the Understorey believe it’s good luck to have names that sound the same forwards and backwards. Warriors should be able to travel up and down the trunks of the great trees.”

  “Do you really think that if your name was Unar, you’d be able to go up trees but not down again? That is just as stupid as the Bodyguard.”

  “Whatever you say, Warmed One.”

  “You know what else is stupid?” Unar went on, feeling her face become heated. “Pushing old women off the edge of the Garden when they’re too weak to wash clothes. Surely there’s other work she could do, elsewhere. Cooking. Caring for children.”

  “She cannot be sold elsewhere, Warmed One. She knows the secrets of the Garden.”

  “What secrets?” Unar said scathingly. “She doesn’t know any secrets.”

  Neither do I, she thought. But I’m going to discover them. Somehow.

  They lapsed into silence again as they cleaned the thicker, heavier robes. Unar found Oos’s robe, smaller than the others and, like the shirts, more fashionably tailored, and wondered if her friend would enjoy sleeping in the feather beds of the Temple, and whether she’d get fat from an oversupply of food tributes, too.

  “Ylly,” she said at last when the laundry was done and they bent to lift the heavy baskets and take them to the drying bushes, “what would happen to a baby who fell from Canopy? If your mother’s people found it alive, would they care for it?”