WHEN OOS woke, she emerged into the workroom where Unar was busily stripping fibres from the strap-like leaves.
Oos’s white robe was stained by bark, glue, and fish slime. The beads and ribbons in her hair had congealed with woodchips and pallet-straw into an awful-looking, trussed-up, kicked-beehive shape.
“I’m hungry,” she said to Unar in a small voice.
“Go on, then,” Unar replied, jerking her head towards the hearth room. “They’re in there, the three of them. There’s fruit and fish.”
Since his return with the leaves via the fishing room, Marram had shrugged off his clothes, dried himself, dressed in a clean waist-wrap by the fire, slept for three hours in the bedroom barred to guests, and then risen, refreshed, as if three hours sleep per day were all that he needed. Bernreb had passed Unar once or twice to check on the baby, Issi, only to find Ylly had everything in hand. As for Esse, Unar didn’t think he’d slept at all.
“I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to see them. Can’t you…?”
Unar sighed and put the leaf to one side. After six hours or so of stripping, her fingers had blisters aplenty, but there was something soothing in the leaf sap that allowed her to keep working stubbornly through the pain. She needed that knife back. From her sitting position on the wooden floor, she looked up at Oos.
“We wouldn’t be here at all if only you’d helped instead of hindered.”
“How can you say that? You’re the one who dragged us into the river, to death, as far as you knew, but you did it anyway. Besides, how could I turn against the Servants? I am a Servant. I can’t turn against myself.”
Unar didn’t say haughtily that they wouldn’t have died because she had a destiny, even if she was the only one who could see it. Aoun knew. Aoun said that the wards had stood four hundred years, that Unar had the power to destroy everything, that she was practically the goddess reborn.
“You can still think for yourself, can’t you?” Unar tossed her head angrily. “You can decide which traditions are important and which are needlessly cruel. Is Audblayin a god in want of human sacrifices?”
“Of course not—she is the giver of life!”
“Then you failed her when you failed to give life to Hasbabsah. Can’t you hear her, coughing, dying in the other room? You can’t fool me, Oos. We were friends for too long. It’s not those men you’re afraid of, it’s watching an old woman die.”
They glared at each other for a moment. Then Oos brushed past Unar, kicking her pile of fibre in petty vengeance as she went. Unar scraped the pile together again, silently, on her hands and knees, before moving to where she could eavesdrop on the conversation in the hearth room.
“Is it morning?” Oos’s voice sounded timid through the curtain.
“The last dawn that your ex-slave is likely to see,” Esse said. Hasbabsah’s hacking halted the conversation momentarily.
“If I could send a message up to the other Servants,” Oos said into the pause. “Servant Eilif could come down here. She could do something to help.”
“No message,” Bernreb said. “If the Servants knew we were down here, they would poison the river, or dam it, for a chance of getting rid of us. Parasites on their very own tree!”
“Servant Eilif, as you call her, would not venture where her magic could not protect her,” Esse said. “Not for the sake of a slave. Or is it you in need of help? A thousand soldiers could not carry you through the barrier now, even if they left us dangling with our throats cut.”
“There must be a way.” Oos’s voice became so quiet that Unar had to lift a corner of the embroidered hanging. “Hasbabsah came to Canopy from Understorey, once.”
“There is a way—” Marram began to say, kindly, but Esse interrupted.
“If Hasbabsah decides to tell you how she did it,” he said sharply, “I will not stop her. But we three will not tell you. You had better do everything you can think of to help her to get well.”
“Magic is the only thing I can think of!”
Nobody had anything to say to that. There was no magic in Understorey.
Or was there?
Unar sat back down on the floor and took a deep breath. She pinched her left forearm with the fingers of her right hand, feeling the two long bones beneath the skin. She closed her eyes and ground her jaw; teeth were bones, too. Focus on the bones. Bones and magic.
Nothing.
Issi started crying in the former storeroom, now guestroom. Unar heard the shuffling sounds of Ylly dragging herself upright, murmuring platitudes over the cot, lifting Issi into her arms. Then there was the pungent smell of soiled wrappings being changed, just as Bernreb pushed the hanging up onto its hook and passed through the workshop. He nodded briefly to Unar before ducking into the storeroom.
“I will take those,” Unar heard him say.
“Take the baby,” Ylly said. “I’ll wash these now and hang them up right away.”
“The old woman,” Bernreb said. “Her fever has not broken. She takes water, but she will not wake. I do not know what to do.”
“Neither do I.”
Silence.
Issi complained again, loudly.
“I will feed you, then, little black duck,” Bernreb said soothingly. “Getting to be a fat, heavy little chick, are you not? With only a few little fuzzy feathers. It is no good talking to me in the language of the chimera. You are with your own kind now.”
“Ba,” the baby said.
“Bernreb,” Bernreb encouraged her.
“Ba.”
“Close enough.”
Bernreb took Issi back past Unar to the hearth room, with Ylly not far behind him. They left the curtain on its hook, and Marram’s voice floated through the open doorway.
“I think it is the smell of the baby bringing that dayhunter around to this side of our tree.”
“Did you see it?” Esse asked.
“I saw scales rubbed onto bark, three and four trunks from here. Claw marks. Long streaks of dayhunter waste with insects trapped in it, only hours old and not set. The same fully grown male animal that left marks around your nets, Esse. It is not afraid to swim from tree to tree down at Floor.”
“Surely our pet corpse-lover has better pickings at Floor than at this level. Surely it remembers that it has never, in its long life, found anything to eat below the Garden.”
“No matter how we try to hide the baby’s smell in the centre of the river, I think it smells her anyway. Its ancestors spent many centuries plucking bald newborns from hollows in trees. I think even fresh corpses from the fighting at Floor cannot tempt it away from its goal. And Bernreb’s weapons will not puncture its hide.”
“Tonight, I will reset the traps sprung by the Canopians. Trussing it, weighting it, and drowning it remains our best option.”
“I agree.”
Esse sighed. “I need sleep. You should put this Burned One to work with the other one, Marram. Idleness breeds mischief.”
“Not Burned One,” Oos corrected him, her distress obvious. “Warmed One.”
“Warmed One,” Esse repeated mockingly, his voice coming from higher up as if he’d gotten to his feet. “I put some cockles in the fire. To feast on flesh of Floor. One was cold and one was warm. One placed after and one before. I burned one, I splayed one. I’ll turn one, I’ll trade one. All by the Old Gods sowed and made, found by me with my trusty spade.”
“It is a rhyme,” Marram said. “He is not threatening you. Look at me, Servant Oos of the Garden. Forget him and forget the dayhunter. You are in no danger.”
“Marram always wanted a wife,” Esse said, laughing his nasal laugh.
“Go to bed, Esse.”
“Now he thinks he will not have to wait for that squeaky infant to grow up. But the truth is that someone like you can never see him as anything but a slave.”
Esse’s chair scraped as he pushed it back in to the table. There was silence from Marram and Oos. Unar stripped the fibre, her head bowed over the stems, more slowly than she had at first but still working. Esse thought he knew everything, but he was wrong about Oos. Unar had made a similar accusation, and while it was true that Oos had traded Sawas and her child with as much consideration as she might show a hand of plantains, she’d done it for Unar. She had a good heart. She hadn’t known, as Unar had, that those acting, however treacherously, from a place of motherly devotion could be forgiven anything.
That Unar would have battled any demon, sacrificed any dream, if only her mother had wanted her.
Oos would come around, soon enough. She would grow calm. She would feel safe. She would realise that the strata of human life in the Garden were artificial. That her refusal to share knowledge with Unar was wrong. They’d become a team again. Oos would help Unar to first heal Hasbabsah and then find the reincarnation of Audblayin. Aoun would be sorry he’d stayed behind.
“I cannot be your wife,” Oos blurted out.
“I am not asking you to be,” Marram said. “And if I did, it would be entirely your choice to make.” He was silent for a while, then asked, “Is it true that no music is permitted in the Garden?”
“It’s true.” Oos sounded relieved. “But I played the bells as a child.”
“Then let me lend you my thirteen-pipe flute. It is not difficult to play.”