THE GARDEN Gates were high and glittered in the moonlight with inset metals.
Elaborate carvings provided purchase for Unar’s fingers and toes. It was probably sacrilege for her bark-encrusted bare soles to soil the life-giving lips of the engraved goddess, but she didn’t care. All she could think about was the baby who had fallen and the smirk on Edax’s face as she’d let the seeds scatter.
At the top of the Gate, the wards interrogated her memory, invading her mind.
Have you stolen food?
Have you stolen the sovereignty of another’s body?
That question irritated her. If she’d been made a slave, as her mother intended, she could have been sold to the Garden and her bodily sovereignty stolen daily. But the Garden cared only for the sanctity of free Canopians.
Have you stolen human life?
“None of those things,” she whispered, clutching her head as images of everything from her sister Isin’s cross-eyed baby face to the withered seedlings flared and died. At last, the wards permitted her to drop down from the lintel into the Garden.
The Garden grew in the hollowed-out trunk and crown of a lopped-off tallowwood two hundred paces in diameter. It was the tallest tree in the niche of Audblayinland, one of thirteen sovereign kingdom niches that comprised the great city of Canopy, and despite losing half its leaves in the lopping, it was kept alive, growing, and malleable by the birth goddess’s power.
Delicate suspended bridges connected the two dozen smaller gardens, planted in lopped lateral branches, to the central circle of the main garden. Soil was cultivated in the hollows, providing foundations for ferns and flowering miniature trees from Understorey and Floor. Open to the sky, except in the places where peaked pavilions stood, the Garden was watered by rain during the monsoon. In the dry season, slaves carried water from pools in the crotches of leafy lower laterals by screw pumps and buckets on chains.
At the very heart, surrounded by a moat filled with rainbow-hued fish, stood the egg-shaped Temple of Audblayin, Waker of Senses, the birth goddess, sometimes a god, carved of a piece from the lustrous white sapwood and pale yellow heartwood of the tree.
Unar hoped that the lone sentry, the sleepless Bodyguard of the goddess, would be hypnotised by the beauty of the moon this night and fail to spot the miscreant Gardener who crept back towards her hammock in the loquat grove. Unar had seen the goddess only once. It was the morning after an assassination attempt by a pregnant woman who had hoped to gain Audblayin’s soul for her imminent child. The Bodyguard hadn’t been with Audblayin when Unar saw her. Whispers said he had gone to punish the woman’s family. It was he who had foiled the attempt itself, tossing the perpetrator out of one of those crescent-shaped windows to break her neck on the steps below.
Audblayin had emerged from the Temple at dawn to reassure her Gardeners and Servants. Her many-layered robe of eggshell-white and frost-green had a high, constrictive neck. It held her aged face in a receptacle like a benevolent, overripe aubergine. She’d made no motion to aid the growth of any tree or vine, yet all green things in close proximity had sent new growth creeping towards her. Out of season, luminous blue flax lily fruits burst into being on the ends of long black stems, and flowerfowl came nervously out from among the possum-paw plants and golden guinea-flowers to lay their eggs at her feet.
Later in the morning, when the goddess had gone back into the Temple, Gardeners and slaves relished the eggs and fruit. Only Unar stared at the crescent-shaped window and wondered whether Audblayin’s Bodyguard was short or tall, educated or unlettered, born an internoder or born stricken, a superior warrior or a superior mage.
Memories faded. Right now there wasn’t time for Unar to stare at the window, not when she feared the Bodyguard might be staring back. She’d wasted enough of the night on her futile mission without being caught and punished as well.
As she skipped across a slender bridge that chimed gently and swayed under her weight, she barely avoided a collision with a slave.
The woman was cloaked and hooded. Dirty hands flew to her face an instant before she fell to her knees. White hands looked unfinished to Unar, like portrait outlines on parchment waiting for the mixing of the colours. Unar’s friend Oos had made portraits on monkey-vellum upon arriving in the Garden. Those portraits, added to her manner of speaking, earned Oos the instant enmity of the other candidates. Plenty of them would have, prior to their calling, enjoyed a few extra animal skins, the source of the vellum, for warmth. They resented the vizier’s daughter who wasted them on trifles.
“Forgive me, Warmed One,” the slave said. She lowered her hands, revealing a bleached, hawkish face, and gazed up with white-lashed, watery, pale eyes.
Unar had noticed this particular slave before, one of five ageing beauties that had been left as a tribute at the Temple before Unar was born. They were the purchase price for the fertility of a Canopian princess, and in two decades, the five women had grown expert in tending plants.
Unar examined this one closely for the first time. The woman had the baby-sick skin but not the deep forearm scars of Understorian warriors with retractable “claws” for scaling trees. She couldn’t be a slave taken in war, but instead must have been born a slave. Nobody had set the snake’s teeth in place at puberty to form a grown fighter’s magically grafted climbing spines.
“What are you doing?” Unar asked.
“Gardening, Warmed One.”
“By moonlight?” Unar demanded, even as the rain clouds that had been covering and uncovering the moon all night cloaked it once again. Though the monsoon was over, there would be a few final, intermittent showers. “Is this Understorey superstition passing for true magic?”
“No!”
“Then explain what you’re doing.”
The slave looked everywhere but at Unar.
“One of the other women from my previous household.” The dirty hands clenched on the slave’s knees. “The oldest one. She can’t work as she once did. She couldn’t turn the crank handle to bring up water, so I did it for her. It took me all day.”
“So?”
“So I was left with no time to prepare the soil and plant the seeds that were given to me to complete the spiral pattern. I buried them in a single hole. Now I have to dig them up again, loosen the earth, and plant them properly before morning, but I can’t find where I buried them. I need a lantern, or when daylight comes, they’ll find out about the old woman. They’ll push her off the edge of the Garden.”
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.