Crossroads of Canopy Read online

  “An adopted fallen baby is even luckier than a good name, Warmed One. But I must tell you that they rarely survive. If the babe’s bones were not broken by branches, the child’s cries would call demons before warriors.”

  “Demons?”

  “The predators that your gods and goddesses keep away from Canopy, Warmed One. The old woman tells tales of them. Spotted swarms. They snatch a bite of flesh each with their needle teeth and leave nothing but bones behind. Embracers squeeze the life from sleeping women and men. Dayhunters take possums from their nests and children from their cradles, and longarms, who hunt in packs of five, pull monkeys and men by their heads and limbs into five bloody pieces.”

  Unar shivered.

  “And of course,” Ylly continued calmly, leading the way with the heaviest basket, “there are chimeras.”

  Unar followed behind her. “Chimeras aren’t real.”

  “When I belonged to the princess, I accompanied her to the Temple of Odel, Protector of Children. There was the skin of a preserved chimera there. I saw it with my own eyes, Warmed One.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “I suppose so.”

  Unar couldn’t have explained her sudden need to seek it out. It was something to do with the legend of the creature laying two eggs into its own mouth as a female, transforming into a male, and then fertilising the eggs. One of the eggs became male; the other, female. And then the two of them merged into a single offspring. Something about the Temple of Audblayin being shaped like an egg. Something to do with Unar’s conviction that Audblayin would change from female to male in this next incarnation.

  The chimera will be a guardian spirit to me, Unar decided, watching over and helping me in my quest to find the god. The fact that the skin was in the wrong Temple, the Temple of a rival god, was no deterrent.

  “I’ll go to see it,” she said. “Tomorrow night, I’ll go to see it. You’ll tell me the best way to go.”

  Unar had asked for directions to Odel’s Temple before. If she closed her eyes, she could still see it. A day speckled by sun, a month before Isin fell. Beams of light roved over the hovels of the poor only three or four days a year. Maybe it was the crack of sunlight on the ledge that had enticed Isin out of her crib.

  Most babies in Canopy didn’t have cribs. Cages—it’s a cage, little Unar had thought, like a cage for laying fowl. Most babies stayed tied to their mothers morning and night. How else to be certain they wouldn’t fall, if the parents were too poor to pay tribute to Odel? Wide sashes with holes for arms and legs were popular at the local market where Mother wed her axe-heads to smooth, polished handles and Father sold his stacks of fuel. Unar’s parents pooled their meagre earnings to pay rent to their internoder landlord for the one-room hollow with its ill-fitting, west-facing door and single window wide enough to admit pythons but not a grown man’s arm.

  Isin slept in the crib, for Mother couldn’t keep a babe close to the forge fire in the stone-lined workhouse three trees over, where she sweated over costly metals. Nor could she leave her work mid-shaping; she must ignore her baby’s needs lest the steel cool and the tempering fail. And who, in similarly drastic circumstances, could spare the time to look up from their own drudgery to wonder why a child’s hungry cries sometimes leaked from the locked door beside or below their own?

  Unar didn’t like to go with her father, searching for fuel, leaving her little sister behind, but she wasn’t grown; she couldn’t strap the baby to her own body. She might lose her balance and kill them both. That day, the day the sunlight touched the window, Unar and Father had returned to the hovel for lunch, just in time to see Isin pull herself out of the crib and fall, headfirst, onto the floor.

  There was blood. Unar had been frightened. Could babies break? Was her new sister broken? Father had picked Isin up, holding her high so that Unar couldn’t see her. There was just his head brushing the ceiling, his sandals in the blood, and the snake-sound of shushing. Isin hadn’t died.

  Not then. Not yet.

  I’ll tie you to me, Unar had whispered to the baby, days later, and she had tried. Isin had cried at Unar’s attempt, and Mother had seen, and taken the baby, and beaten Unar until she’d lain senseless on that rough, splintery floor. Mother made those axe handles so beautiful and smooth. Why not polish the place where her own children must set their cut and blood-crusted feet?

  If I fixed the floor, foolish girl, do you think we’d be allowed to stay here? Unar remembered her mother growling the season before. The owner, the internoder, could charge twice as much then, and where would we be? Out there in the monsoon!

  Mother was always growling. Unar was always wrong. Despite being wrong, and foolish, and all the rest, Unar was afraid of what would happen if Isin got out again. She asked Father which was the way to the Temple of the Protector of Children. She’d found a ring of rare mushrooms and gathered them carefully in the dirty cloth that held back her hair.

  Father had laughed and shaken his head, refusing to answer. He’d taken the mushrooms and put them in his tea. They simmered into a broth, which he ate where Mother couldn’t see. Unar had looked on, helpless and silent.

  She opened her eyes, returning to the Garden of the present.

  He wasn’t there to steal from her anymore. Audblayin knew where he was. Unar didn’t care if he was dead or alive.

  She dumped the basket of laundry down beside the bare black briars that would bear white flowers later in the dry season but which, for now, made convenient clothes-hanging places. Her arms ached. She found herself rubbing her left shoulder with her right hand, mimicking the habit of Aoun’s.

  It was too late, now, for offerings. Too late for Isin to be saved by Odel. But Unar still, unaccountably, craved the sight of that old demon skin.

  “I will try to remember the way, Warmed One,” was Ylly’s weary reply.

  SEVEN

  UNAR FINISHED pulling weeds.

  Smudging her brow with the back of her hand, she washed in the irrigation channel before lowering its wooden lid into place and setting off for the kitchens to collect her supper rations.

  Sunset painted the wooden terraces of the vegetable garden surrounding the store circle, turning the weathered grey timbers to bronze and making the fruiting oranges and apricots look more orange than they truly were. Unar took a small leaf-bowl of seed porridge and a strip of smoked monkey meat and went to sit by herself on the edge of one of the terraces.

  “Can I join you?” one of the handsome new Gardeners asked her.

  “No,” Unar answered brusquely; the man half scrambled away before he could settle down beside her. She needed to think. Not chatter with new arrivals. Her magic was still weak. How would she trick the Gate into letting her out, into thinking she was a seed blowing on the wind?

  She would have to open it, walk through it, but how to get the key? The Gatekeeper carried the key, but there was no Gatekeeper right now, was there? They couldn’t have had time to choose a new one yet. Some other Servant must have temporarily picked up the lantern. Unar would have to wait and see who came to lock the Gate at dusk.

  She slipped out amongst the slaves, ducking behind bushes when fellow Gardeners came past. She dashed furtively over bridges, so swiftly they were left swaying crazily behind her.

  The Gate had a thicket of black-trunked tree ferns growing behind it. Unar concealed herself behind the luminous, lime-green fronds until the bobbing of a lantern in the gloom betrayed the lone Servant’s approach.

  It was Aoun.

  Unar’s mad plan to somehow pickpocket the key away from the Servant died instantly. She showed herself in the centre of the path before Aoun could reach the wide-open Garden entrance.

  “You should be at the loquat grove,” he said, but Unar thought she detected an amused quirk at the corners of his mouth. She hadn’t cared about his mouth before. In fact, the sight of it stuffed with fish flesh should have been enough to turn her off it forever. But now she noticed the fullness of his lower li
p and the thinness of his upper one, the long lines connecting it to his nose, and the way his stubble grew between the lines, and outside of them, but not on them.

  Stupid things to notice.

  “I should be with you and Oos in the Temple,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”

  “That’s why you’re waiting here to ambush me? You want me to intercede for you somehow?”

  “No! I don’t need you! That is … I need you to lend me the key to the Gate.”

  Aoun’s eyes bulged.

  “You need me to lend you the key?”

  “So I can get past the wards. The Gate looks innocent, doesn’t it? It looks like just anybody could walk out. But not the slaves. And not me.”

  “You chose this. We both did. Where do you want to go?”

  “To Odel’s emergent.”

  “The Temple of a rival god? No, Unar!”

  “Listen, Aoun. My sister fell because my parents didn’t go there. I want to go and say a prayer for her. Your parents went there for you. They went there and gave gifts to the Protector of Children. They kept you safe.”

  In the year of Aoun’s birth, the king of Ehkisland had ordered all the citizens of that niche to reserve their tributes solely for Ehkis. The goddess Ehkis’s incarnation had not been found, the rains were late, the trees were dying, and the king’s subjects were forbidden to waste their worship on other gods and goddesses. All efforts must be focused on bringing the rains.

  Aoun’s parents had defied the king and been executed for that defiance, but their final act had protected him.

  “They kept me safe. My brother wasn’t so lucky,” he said. His right hand, holding the upraised lantern by its bronze handle, tried to creep across to his left shoulder, but the sway of the lantern made the candlelight flicker and his hand stilled. “Odel’s power kept us from falling, but it didn’t stop him from drowning.”

  Executed for refusing to pay tribute to Ehkis. And after they had died, one of their sons had drowned in a flood caused by excessive tributes to the rain goddess. There was no justice outside Ilan’s niche. Aoun was crazy to think that obedience would keep him safe when disobedience was sometimes imperative.

  “You lived,” Unar said. “You didn’t drown. You didn’t fall. Even orphaned. Even alone. Please let me out. Just this once. I’m asking you respectfully. I didn’t try to hit you over the head and steal the key.”

  Aoun rubbed his temple with his left hand ruefully.

  “The key is magical, Unar. There is no physical key. You know that the Garden rewards those who are true to themselves, and it’s in me to be law-abiding since my brother died. I’ve learned my family’s lesson. Don’t defy the goddesses and gods.” His face was open. Earnest. He rattled the lantern a little. “Servant Eilif determined that I was best suited to carry the secret of the key. It was my first lesson today.”

  “Oh,” she said, feeling stupid.

  He tilted his head and considered her for a long silent moment.

  “Go on, then,” he said at last. “I’ve opened it for you. Go through.”

  “What?”

  “Go through. Go to Odel’s Temple. Say a prayer for your sister. It’s far away. You won’t be back until a few hours before dawn. I’ll come back to open the Gate for you.”

  “Oh. You don’t have to do that. I can climb back in.” Getting out required Unar’s knack of magical disguise, because the wards were designed to keep slaves, Servants, and Gardeners safely inside. Getting in, however, required only that a person be innocent of the three crimes that the wards probed memories to find.

  Aoun looked incensed.

  “Climb over the Gate, like a raiding Understorian? Like a thief seeking tributes? Have you done it before?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, Unar.” His mouth flattened. “This explains why you weren’t chosen. You haven’t given your heart to this goddess.”

  “He will be a god this time,” Unar retorted, stung. “You think you’ll be his Bodyguard, Aoun, but you won’t. That’s not why I wasn’t chosen. It’s because—”

  Aoun didn’t argue; he pushed her through the Gate. Without so much as putting a hand to it, his magic giving him the strength of ten ordinary men, he closed it in her face.

  EIGHT

  THE PATHS of the city followed the flat tops of interwoven branches.

  Unar trotted along with her head down, muttering Ylly’s directions under her breath to keep from forgetting them. She wore a green, sewn-leaf jacket over dark red tunic and green trousers that identified her as a Gardener, as she had when she’d trespassed into Understorey, but it would only give her protected status within the boundaries of Audblayinland, her own goddess’s rainforest niche.

  The directions took her along the lower roads where stricken, slaves, and out-of-nichers tended to walk. Citizens and internoders urinating and defecating off the edges of the higher paths were a hazard of the lower roads, but the only likely hazard for Unar. Robbers had no incentive to accost the poor, and slaves couldn’t be sold without birth or capture carvings that matched the magically embedded sigils on their tongues.

  Lower roads were safer, even at night. Even without the torches set at intervals along the high roads and kept bright by the cold fire of Airak, God of Lightning.

  “Cross the border of Audblayinland at the Falling Fig,” Unar repeated again in a whisper. The Falling Fig wasn’t actually falling, but it formed a great crossroads, with the widest spread of any of the great trees. Its root-curtains fell like waterfalls towards Floor in five different, intersecting niches.

  There was no rain this time but no moonlight, either. By touch, Unar climbed a ladder woven from lianas, emerging through maidenhair ferns and orchids onto a walkway that led to a small slave’s gate. It was little more than a hole bored through one of the fig’s many trunks, with a small plate over the archway to indicate she was passing into Ehkisland.

  She couldn’t read it. Despite Teacher Eann’s good intentions, she’d never learned. But her sense of direction was good, and she’d been into Ehkisland quite recently, albeit by a higher and grander gate. Her awareness of the Garden diminished as she crossed. She startled a crowded stricken family that had built a cooking fire in the shelter of the Gate, not expecting anybody to pass at this hour.

  “The snake path, to Odelland?” Unar asked the woman, who stood gawping, holding two birds that she’d charred in their feathers.

  The woman told her the way, the same way told by Ylly, and Unar paid her in dried monkey meat she’d been given for her supper.

  “Ehkis bless you,” the woman said.

  “And you,” Unar said, squirming a little. She should have named Audblayin. Maybe Aoun was right, and she hadn’t given her heart to her master. Then she heard the nyaaa! of a newborn baby and froze where she was on the branch. “You have a little one?”

  “He’s my grandson. Born this morning. His mother sleeps.”

  Unar stared at the baby’s blotchy, puckered face as it turned towards the fire in what must have been his older sister’s arms. Unar had been an older sister like that. She’d squeezed little Isin so tightly.

  “What’s his name? I’m going to Odel’s emergent. I’ll pay tribute for him.”

  The girl that held the baby told Unar his name.

  “Don’t let him fall,” Unar said.

  “I won’t,” the girl said fiercely.

  “He might be a god.”

  The woman who had given directions squawked a laugh.

  “A god? Don’t be putting ideas in her head. Gods don’t walk among the stricken.”

  Unar took one last look at the baby. It was too early. She couldn’t search for him yet.

  The wind was cold, and the snake path beckoned.

  NINE

  ODEL’S EMERGENT was a sweet-fruit pine.

  It was a softwood, and Unar climbed the spiraling plank stairs that had been hammered easily into the upper trunk of the great tree. The Temple, shaped like a yellow carp standin
g on its nose, fluked tail to the sky, and eyes the open doors through which the worshippers walked, was abandoned at this hour.

  Inside, on a raised platform, the embers of a bonfire died in a bronze dish that floated in a shallow pool. Around it, food tributes had been set carefully, some on priceless platters, others on fresh-picked leaves.

  Unar unwrapped her barely touched seed porridge and put it beside the other tributes, bowing her head and uttering the name of the boy she had met along the way. Then she went looking for the chimera skin. Ylly said it was outside The Temple proper, in a tunnel that went through the heart of the tree and emerged at Odel’s Test. Long ago, the wealthy had boasted of their patronage by throwing their children off the balcony there and watching them float in a bubble of Odel’s protection.

  The practice was frowned on in Unar’s time, but the tunnel remained nearby. Unar had brought her machete, ropes, and bore-knife, in case branches had broken or passageways had been strangled by vines in the years since Ylly’s visit. She climbed into the undamaged crown of the tree until she had a good view of the Temple surroundings, and sat cross-legged on a branch to look and to think. She was tired, physically and mentally, but the lure of the chimera hadn’t faded.

  Then she saw somebody walking on a branch road towards the Temple, carrying a lit taper that made the smallest possible amount of light. The figure was pale. A naked slave—no, a man clothed completely in high-necked, long-sleeved robes, a tunic and waist-wrap of pale pink. The colour of dawn, the colour of the orchid mantis, the colour of women’s parts he’d never see or touch, for gods and goddesses swore the same oaths of virginity as their Bodyguards.

  He stopped on the path beneath her and looked up. His square face was middle-aged and kindly.

  “You don’t look like a killer,” he said, raising the taper in his gloved hand. Whenever Odel ventured into the thick of the populace, he had to keep his skin covered. Like other incarnated deities, he could only be touched by sunlight and rain. It would be a shame for his Bodyguard to have to toss some innocent down to their death because of an accidental skin-to-skin contact.