UNAR SQUATTED to watch Esse work.
How would the five of them go down? He was the only one with the serpent-tooth spines that let him cling to the tree like a spider. Hasbabsah’s had been snapped off when she’d first been captured and made a slave. Esse took a sharp axe from his pack, cut away a slab of tallowwood bark that would have done for a sleeping mat, and began to chisel something from the side of the tree above their heads.
It seemed forever before the short plank, pointed at one end and barely wide enough to hold a single person, was ready to be separated from the tree. Esse paused to push his pursed lips into a bark crevice, drinking the rainwater. Unar and the others did the same. They waited, wet and miserable, while he meticulously shaped another five short planks.
Unar thought about Aoun discovering that she and the two slaves were gone. She imagined him having to tell Servant Eilif that he had failed. It serves him right. Let him torture himself wondering if she and Oos had died or lived.
Edax, though. Edax deserved an explanation. When Unar failed to appear at their secluded meeting place, he might wonder how he’d offended her, when he hadn’t offended her at all. The opposite.
He wouldn’t know that she was below the barrier, as he was, but too far away for him to hear her and with no magic to stretch out to him. In fact, the pool below Ehkisland where Edax had taught her to dive, swim, and move with a man in intimate ways might be near the Understorian town, Gannak, which Esse had said was the closest town, if not the town where Hasbabsah had come from, Nessa.
It occurred to Unar that she could have visited Nessa at any time. She’d never thought that news of it might comfort Hasbabsah, or that she might carry a message from the old woman to her folk. That was because unenslaved Understorians were dangerous and savage.
“Step down,” Esse told her quietly.
He’d used his axe to make holes in the tree trunk. Then, he’d wedged the six little planks into the holes to make a sort of suicidal spiral staircase. Unar stepped down until she stood on the second-lowest plank. The others were arrayed behind her, with Ylly on the second-highest plank.
“Pull out the highest plank and pass it down to me, potplant.”
“Potplant?”
“An Understorian slave grown like an exotic specimen in the soil of the cursed Garden, are you not?” Esse smiled at Ylly. Unar took hold of the front edge of the plank as it was passed down to her, and Esse hacked another hole, lower down, to wedge the plank into.
In this manner, they progressed slowly and carefully, until, by midmorning, they stood at the river’s edge far below the place where Esse had netted them. Unar saw a wooden ramp, narrow and covered with moss and lichen, leading straight into the flow.
“Hold the railing tight,” their guide advised. “Yes, you must get wet again, but you will become warm and dry inside. We keep the fire burning for the whole of the monsoon. Do not think I have enjoyed cutting and drying the fuel. Go on. Go past me. I must bring the planks in.”
Unar brushed him as she passed. His thin, stick-body was completely unyielding; even his belly was hard with muscle. It was like brushing past a sapling. She stared at the rushing water of the vertical river. The ability to swim wouldn’t protect her if she slipped from the platform and was washed down to Floor.
She seized the platform railing and dragged herself through the flow. Her feet left the floor. The weight of water was like hammers on her head. She kicked, hard, and found the platform again, propelling herself towards the tree trunk just as her fingers lost their grip.
The tree trunk was hollowed away. She fell, gasping like a landed fish, into a room lit only by luminous fungi.
Men’s boots and cloaks hung from hooks in the circular wall. Shelves held sacks and woven items unidentifiable in the gloom. Wet underclothes were draped over a drying rack, and Unar hesitated before plunging into the black corridor that was apparently the only way for her to go—were there hairy, naked Understorian warriors inside? Esse had said that they would stay with him until the rain stopped, but how many fellow trappers, fishers, and hunters shared his quarters?
She couldn’t use her magic to find out. The place where it had been no longer felt hollow. It felt like nothing, like before she’d felt the seed inside her for the first time. Unar knew that if she tried to enter Canopy, the border would throw her back as violently as the princess’s curtains had.
Before she could start towards the corridor, Oos and Hasbabsah crashed into her back. They sprawled together on the floor; it was unpolished, and splinters found their way into Unar’s face. She stumbled into a pile of sacks and sat there, trying to work the wood out from under her skin, swearing until she remembered Edax’s tear-shaped scars and became distracted by wondering if their making had been painful for him to endure.
“I think I will just sleep here,” Hasbabsah wheezed, staying where she was, facedown on the floor.
Ylly exploded out of the curtain of river water, spluttering and shaking.
Esse came after her with his arms full of boards. He narrowly skirted the slumped shape of Hasbabsah and leaned the boards against the shelves, shaking his short, dark hair like a wet tapir. He helped the groaning old slave to her feet and led her down the corridor without a word.
At the end of it, he opened a door to a second room filled with heat and light. It smelled powerfully of spices and smoked fish.
Unar was irresistibly drawn with the others, single file, towards it.
“Have we leave to sit at your table?” Hasbabsah asked.
“Our table is yours while the bucket fills,” said a deeper, heartier voice than Esse’s.
When Unar reached the doorway, she saw a stone hearth bigger than a slave’s bedroom. It dominated the far wall. She wasn’t sure she’d ever seen so much precious stone in one place. Perhaps they had traded it from Floor. This big room was as dry, open, and bright as the first space had been dark, cramped, and dank. A bored chimney carried away the fragrant smoke from the fire, but not before it passed through three tiers of gutted river fish on iron spits. Crates of dried broadleaves sat to the left of the hearth; dried, wrapped meat portions filled cloth sacks to the right. There were embroidered hangings on either side of the hearth, too, that might have been decorative or covered entryways to other corridors.
In the centre of the room, a coarse cross-section of quandong wood served as a table, its surface broad enough to host a demon sacrifice. The slab held dark, dried blood in its crevices, as though it had been used for butchering before.
Two men sat at the table, at the point farthest from the fire. Thankfully, neither was completely naked; they wore short waist-wraps and nothing else. One was an enormous, red-haired brute with a beard and pale arms patterned with inked beasts. The other was small with a smooth chin, yellow hair, and clear eyes the colour of clouds.
“I said that our table is yours,” the brute repeated in a gentler voice, and Hasbabsah sank into a four-legged chair by the fire with a relieved groan. Ylly went to stand slightly behind her, her back to the flames, shaking her wet hair and looking wary.
Oos gripped Unar’s hand tightly. They stood, rigid, by the door as Esse closed it behind them.
“Some ugly-looking fish you have caught, Esse,” said the yellow-haired man, his expression curious.
“Don’t kill us,” Oos blurted at once. “We can pay you. Just these two slaves for now, but later, when you take us back to Canopy, we’ll pay more.”
“I see no slaves here.” The yellow-haired man looked amused.
“Don’t skin us alive. Don’t throw us to demons. The goddess we serve—”
“Girl child,” Hasbabsah interrupted, “these three brothers have offered us all monsoon-right by asking that we sit at their table. You answer them with insult. They have pledged to share food and water with you until the monsoon is ended. It means that if food runs low before the rains stop, we will all starve together before they throw you to the demons.”
“Your gods and goddesses have no power here,” Esse said, opening a bag of fresh fish before the fire.
“I’ve made no pledge not to throw her to the demons,” Ylly said.
“We will not run low on food,” the deep-voiced, red-haired man boomed, leaning back from his crumb-covered, empty plate. “Introductions are in order. But not before all are seated.”
He turned unblinking brown eyes on Unar and Oos until they shuffled, still hand in hand, over to an empty pair of stools. Then he stared at Ylly until she sat down, too.
“I am Bernreb,” he said, “second son of Moonoom.”
“I am Marram,” the yellow-haired man said, smiling into the silence that followed Bernreb’s pronouncement. “Third son of Moonoom. Over there, gutting the fish for your breakfast, is Esse, first son of Moonoom.”
“I am Hasbabsah of Nessa,” Hasbabsah said.
“I’m Ylly, daughter of Ylly.”
Oos squeezed Unar’s hand so tight that Unar couldn’t feel it anymore and said nothing.
“You don’t look like brothers,” Unar said, avoiding giving her name. “You all look different. How can you all be sons of Moonoom? You look like you all had different fathers.”
Bernreb guffawed.
“Canopy must indeed be a strange and wondrous place. I never heard of three brothers all having the same father.”
“Fathers die so quickly,” Marram said.
“Moonoom was our mother,” Esse muttered, throwing fish guts into the fire.
“Oh.” Unar took a deep breath. She reminded herself that the floor her feet stood on was the very same sapwood that the Garden stood on. This was still her place. The heart that beat within the great tree was her heart. “I am Unar of the Garden. This is Oos.”
“Then we are all well met,” Bernreb said.
“Is there nobody else living here?” Ylly asked.
From some other, unknown place in the home wafted the bawls of a baby crying.
Unar shared a glance with Oos.
“Excuse me,” Bernreb said. “I only just put her down. The sound of our voices must have woken her. We try to keep her in the back where the demons will not hear her crying and come to investigate.” He stood up from the table, passed through one of the embroidered hangings, and returned with a bundle in his bulging, tattooed arms.
Unar stared at the bundle. The blanket-edge bore the family weaves of the House of Epatut. She hadn’t cared about family colours and emblems; hadn’t taken them with mother’s milk, as Oos had.
But she recognised these.
“Now you have seen her,” Bernreb said, “I must clean her. Excuse me.”
Ylly stood up abruptly, went to Bernreb, and lifted the baby’s fat brown body out of the wrappings. This child had been all but newborn when she fell at the end of the last monsoon, and now looked none the worse for it. Her bared bottom had an odorous, muddy smear across the cheeks, but Ylly ignored it.
“She’s from Canopy,” Ylly said, with eyes only for the baby, cooing and swishing until the cries turned to uncertain smiles. Bernreb looked bemused, but he made no move to take the baby back. Perhaps he felt that babies belonged in the arms of women. Or perhaps, since it appeared they would all be living together for five months, he simply saw no sense in stopping Ylly from taking on some of his duties. He couldn’t know how Ylly had longed to hold her true granddaughter, how she’d kept bitterly silent ever since Sawas was sold away.
“Did you steal her?” Oos asked. “Did you steal those blankets?”
“Oos,” Unar said with wonder, extricating her bruised hand, remembering the wrappings full of rotten quandongs and satinashes she’d let fall amidst crushing disappointment. “You know whose baby this is, better than me. She is Imeris, daughter of Epatut. She survived the fall.”
“She survived a fall,” Bernreb agreed heartily. “We had not given her a name.”
“She is Imerissiremi,” Ylly said at once. “Issi for short.”
“Wife-of-Epatut dropped her in the market,” Hasbabsah said. “Not at the Garden. You didn’t find her caught in this tree. How did you find her?”
“I found her ten days ago in the mouth of a chimera that I killed,” Bernreb said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his hands behind his head, cracking his knuckles. “A chimera’s milky saliva nourishes its eggs, passing through the soft shells. Seems good enough for a human babe to survive on at that.” His eyes followed Ylly, who had left the door open carelessly as she carried the child towards the entry room. Unar heard bucket handles swing and the splash of water.
“Is she leaving?” Unar whispered to Esse, who was half bent in the act of placing a roasted fish on a dried leaf-plate in front of her. “Is she mad? Is she leaving with the baby?”
Esse paused to glance down the pitch-black corridor.
“She is washing the baby’s backside,” he said. “We would trust a potplant a hundred times over before we trusted you, Gardener. Eat your fish.”
Unar ate the fish. It tasted like flowerfowl bile mixed with cactus jelly, but she was so hungry she burned her tongue and her fingers in her haste, pausing only to extricate tiny bones from her mouth and line them up on the edge of her plate.
“You did not kill a chimera,” Hasbabsah said, wiping fish grease from her chin with her sleeve.
“Did I not?”
“The chimera is life. Life must come from the ashes of its death, or the curse falls on the family of the one who slays it.” Hasbabsah began to cough so uncontrollably that she couldn’t speak. Unar worried about a fish bone, but Hasbabsah waved Marram back when he stood up and made as if to assist her.
“Life did come from it,” Bernreb said. “The child, from its mouth, as I said. She is lucky, and she is life. We will keep her. We will care for her.”
Unar noticed that one of the tattoos on Bernreb’s arms showed a sinuous, reptilian shape with flattened ears and claws like knives, long teeth in a mouth that opened up the whole head like a hinge, and multicoloured scales from snout to prehensile tail.
It was fresher than the others, the skin around it still red and puckered.
“Your markings,” she said. “They show the demons you’ve slain.”
“I was sent away from Gannak because of this one.” Bernreb grinned and sat forward, pointing to a depiction of a man on his biceps; a man whose head with its curving, banana-shaped hat had been separated from his body. “The Headman of Gannak told me I must serve with him, on pain of death, on his fool errand to kill a Canopian god. I did not want to go with him. Nor did I wish for death. Now we three live in exile.”
Ylly returned to the hearth room, pulling the door closed behind her.
“What do you feed the child?” she asked. “Issi is hungry.”
“We fed her the eggs of the chimera, at first. Now she has nut paste. Fruit mush. Insects trapped in sap and boiled in monkey oil.”
Unar sucked on the fish head and waited for Ylly to deplore these barbarian foodstuffs. Babies in Audblayinland were breast-fed until their second birthday. Then again, they didn’t have Sawas with them. Breastfeeding wasn’t an option.
“She is healthy,” Ylly said. “She’s bright. Those foods you’ve been giving her must be good for her. Where can I find them?”
“Let me,” Hasbabsah said, but she was bent over by coughing again.
“You must rest, Hasbabsah of Nessa,” Marram said. “I will prepare pallets for you. We have already sacrificed our storeroom, in the deepest part of the tree, for the baby’s safety and comfort, so there is no harm putting our monsoon guests in there, too. You must put up with her noise in the night, as we do, I am afraid.”
“I can help,” Oos offered, putting her hand on Ylly’s as the older woman passed, but Ylly rounded on her with teeth bared.
“You and your ilk took my granddaughter from me. You’ll have nothing to do with this child, do you understand me? You won’t even look at her. Not even speak her name. Now go find some sandpaper fig leaves for those soft hands of yours. Your beauty will fade soon enough, but you might find an application for it here, better than in the Garden.”
Oos swallowed hard. She dry-washed her hands, looking with fear and awe at Ylly as though seeing her for the first time.
“All of you need rest,” Bernreb said, shifting uncomfortably. He tried to catch Esse’s eye, but Esse was at the fire, roasting more fish, still seeming amused.
He brought Unar and Oos another fish each.
“Monsoon-right,” Esse said to his left shoulder, “is better treatment than these Gardeners deserve. I had thought to feed them on rotted leaves and old bones, as potplant and her ilk are fed. Not as equals. My brother Bernreb is soft.”
“He killed a chimera,” Unar said. “And made the shape of it in his flesh with needles. You think he’s soft?”
“He killed the chimera out of brotherly love. Marram needed the skin.”
“What for? To make himself invisible? So that he can creep up on Canopy and kill one of our gods?”
Esse gently touched the collar of Unar’s Gardener’s tunic, by chance a finer variety, where a green sprouting seed had been worked into the red. Unar watched him do it without shrinking back or slapping his long-fingered hand away.
“Marram could kill a god—or a goddess—if he cared to,” he said. “But he does not need to be invisible for that. That is not why he needed the skin.”