AFTER SUPPER, when it seemed like time for sleeping, though Unar couldn’t guess the hour with the constant falling water sounds of rain and river and gloom of the interior, she lay down on her pallet in the storeroom with the others, staring up at the living ceiling that was connected to the well-tended beds of the Garden.
The wood was oil-rich. It shone a polished yellow-brown, lacquered in places where the sapwood must have oozed for a while after it was cut, until the gum hardened in the air. The dwelling was a shallow one, not penetrating anywhere near the heartwood of the tallowwood trunk, but blessedly free of insects. Unar supposed they had the river to thank for that. Not a single flying creature fluttered near the flames. The candles, true tallow, stuck fast by their bear- and tapir-fat drippings, weren’t especially bright, but they seemed brighter against the soot-stained niches where they sat.
Unar’s pallet was made up of straw beneath bear pelts, black with yellow circles on them, and she couldn’t tell if they still smelled of bear, if the stench was the candles, or if it was her own smell. She didn’t want to shed her red Gardener’s shirt just yet, though it had gathered rainwater, glue, humus, solvent, fish grease, and leaf sap so far.
While she wore it, she could pretend she was still somewhat part of what she’d left behind.
“Oos,” she whispered, not wanting to wake the baby. Nor Ylly, snoring softly on the other side of the cradle, who hadn’t spoken a word to either one of them all day. She blamed them for Hasbabsah’s state, and Unar couldn’t fault her for doing it. “Oos, are you awake?”
Oos’s back was turned to Unar, but her fingers tightened on a corner of her blanket.
“No.”
Unar smiled. It was like old times in the hammocks in the loquat grove, like their early years in the Garden before Oos was made a Servant and Unar was left behind. Unar had wanted to sneak a look at the goddess, and at her Bodyguard, too, until Oos had reminded her about the moat. About the fish. Do you think she can fly? Unar had asked, and Oos had snorted and said, No.
“Oos, won’t you please tell me everything you learned about healing so we can both find a way to make the magic work and heal Hasbabsah?”
“Are you stupid?” She rolled over angrily. “The magic won’t work for you, for me, for anyone, Unar! Maybe not ever!”
“You don’t know that.”
“And why should one who walks in the grace of Audblayin want to heal Hasbabsah?” Oos’s tone had turned haughty. “Why should I care if she dies? She’s supposed to die, for betraying the Garden. You and me, too. If there’s justice, we’ll all die.”
“You don’t really want to die,” Unar said calmly, “or you’d have jumped into the river already.”
“I want you to die. You ruin everything you touch.”
Unar seized Oos’s wrist, keeping a hold on it despite Oos’s attempt to pull away.
“Did we betray the Garden?” Unar demanded. “We saved it from becoming stained with slaves’ blood. The Garden is still pure. Did we somehow admit murderers, rapists, or thieves?”
“You stole two slaves. You are a thief.”
Unar fought to keep from laughing in her face.
“I am a thief if a person is a thing to steal.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Oos,” Unar said urgently, “tell me what you know. Hasbabsah doesn’t have much time. Please.”
Oos freed herself with a sharp twist. “Never,” she said, turning her back again.
Unar listened, but she couldn’t even hear any coughing now. Nor harsh breathing. If Hasbabsah died, all her efforts were wasted. The extra chores, which had left Unar unsuitable for selection. The nights and nights of washing clothes by moonlight with Ylly and the lunatic leap from the lip of the Garden.
“If it was your grandmother dying, I’d want to help her,” Unar said. “She stood outside the Gates and cried that you were killing her, remember? She said you were the birdsong in her heart and that, without you, her heart would turn black and silent. Like Hasbabsah’s tongue, Oos. It’s wrong to mark slaves in such a way, can’t you see?”
“I remember your mother came to the Garden,” Oos said. Her voice was muffled. “I remember her at the Gates. She said she could have sold you for one thousand weights of silver but that you’d run away. She demanded that Audblayin pay for you and cursed us all when the Servants told her it was too late. I wish she had sold you. I wish it was you with a black and silent tongue. Be quiet now. I want to sleep.”
Unar sighed.
She gave up the conversation, rolling flat onto her back. Staring at the ceiling again, she imagined the patterns of sap were the shapes of herself and Aoun on that first morning, when they had waited outside the dew-covered Gates for the dawn.
We’re so high up, Unar had said, staring at the sky. And so exposed.
Look, Aoun had marvelled, nudging her. The sun.
It had risen over the endless forest’s distant horizon, first making the trees black and stark, then burnishing their many shades of green. Both children had been astonished by the unfiltered heat of it, even so soon after dawn.
If they let us stay, Unar said, we’ll be warm all the time.
We’ll be Warmed Ones, Aoun had said, grinning.
The Gatekeeper, the woman with the lantern, had been an indistinct shape in the shadow of the half-open Gate.
Applicants, she had muttered. When we haven’t even announced the deaths of the old Gardeners. How did you know to come, fledglings?
Unar and Aoun had looked at one another. They hadn’t known that old Gardeners must die before new Gardeners could be admitted.
We just…, Unar began uncertainly.
Came, Aoun finished awkwardly.
Has the plague been through your houses? demanded the Gatekeeper. Are you in good health?
Yes, they both said at once. The Gatekeeper put her cupped palm through the gap in the Gate. She held a handful of soil.
How many seeds do I hold? she’d wanted to know.
Three, Aoun said.
Three, Unar said, wide-eyed with astonishment that she should be able to answer such a question, having expected a lengthy, labouring trial period before any testing took place. That way, if she failed to gain entry, at least she would have time to formulate another plan to stay free. Three, she said again, and they are passionflower seeds, and there are fern spores in the soil, but you did ask about seeds and not spores.
Yes, the Gatekeeper agreed. I did ask about seeds. The pair of you may enter the Garden. Give thanks to Audblayin.
Unar and Aoun had given thanks, profusely. They’d gripped one another by the hand as they stepped over the threshold, and Unar had felt that sense of smelling deeper than ordinary smell, the one with which she’d scented the seeds, sweep down into her chest and coil behind her breastbone. She felt reassured of that other sense, the one that ordinary people didn’t have, and remembered that first fierce prickle of providence.
After the announcement had been made that six Gardeners had died of plague, more applicants came to the Gate. Oos had been among them. Rich crown and internoder girls, robed in silk, giggling, painting their lips with pomegranate juice to make them pink and pretty.
Unar ate a pomegranate on the inside of the Gate, spitting the chewed seeds with hardly a care except to avoid getting them on Aoun, who sat beside her, his eyes closed and his oily, spotty face blissful in the sun.
They’re fools, Unar observed. Do they think the Garden needs human flowers?
Were we less foolish, Aoun asked without opening his eyes, when we stood there, not ten days ago?
The Garden needs us, Aoun. The Garden needs this.
She had taken his hand again. The source of power inside of her, between her breasts, had fluttered, and she felt an answering flutter in Aoun, lower down in his belly, and was startled all over again, for she hadn’t been able to feel that, the last time she had held his hand as they passed through the Gate.
And that had been the last time she had deliberately taken his hand. His hammock had been far away from hers in the loquat grove. He rarely spoke to anyone at mealtimes or during lessons, so conscientious was he and so intent on submitting his will to the deity’s.
Oos, who could talk happily about anything and everything, had become Unar’s only real friend.
Until now.
In the home of the three huntsmen in Understorey, Oos’s soft snores joined Ylly’s, and Unar stared at the ceiling as if she might, with enough effort, see through the solid, living tissue of the tree to where Aoun might stand, right now, by the Gate, in the monsoon rain.
Had announcements been made that one Servant and one Gardener had fallen from Audblayin’s emergent? Were the young and curious queuing already at the Gate where Aoun would test them with a handful of dirt?
Unar thought about how much bigger his hands were now and sighed again. She pictured him, naked and brushed with pearl dust, poised to dive into the moat, and shivered with yearning.
He would not desire her. Not for as long as the magic of the Garden held him. But what if he, too, ventured into Understorey? What if Unar led him to the place where Edax had led her? Beneath her blankets, she tucked one hand between her thighs, imagining it was Aoun’s.
She hesitated. It was hopeless even to imagine. He was Gatekeeper, and would not leave the Garden, ever. Not until he died, or was sent, like the prior Gatekeeper, to search out a new incarnation of Audblayin.
But what if he did leave? What if he came into Understorey in search of her?
Unar closed her eyes, the better to imagine Aoun descending on pulleys and ropes to the platform outside the river entrance. He’d wonder who had built it and why it was there. And Unar would sense his nearness. She would appear, wet and gasping, beside him, and he would feel what he’d never felt before, and take her into his arms.
Parting flaps with her fingers beneath the bedclothes, Unar found their inner, silken counterparts already slippery with lust, and felt a brief surge of rage at the Garden, and the Servants who maintained its chastening spells. Was it Servant Eilif who, by casting the magic, had made Unar so disinclined to touch herself or others, ever, that she didn’t even know what these parts of her own body were called? Flaps? The only word for women’s parts she’d ever heard was “hole,” and it was thanks to Edax that she even knew how to find that.
Oh, yes, there it was, secret and tight, unchanged by the stretching that the rain goddess’s Bodyguard had given it. Aoun would find it, one day; he would make it his own place; it was where he belonged, only he didn’t know it; couldn’t know it, until he left the Garden and came to find her.
Unar’s breath caught as Bernreb walked, bold and oblivious, into the room.
His bulk blotted out the light from the tallow candles. Unar squeezed her legs together. Hopefully the biggest of the brothers would be too busy checking on the baby to notice what she was doing.
No such luck. He looked at her and his eyes widened.
“You are Unar, is that right?”
“Yes,” she whispered furiously.
“Do you need a father for your child?”
“No!”
“I am only asking. Just in case. You did not seem particularly interested in the baby. Not like Ylly. But here you are, obviously frustrated—”
“I’m not interested in babies!” Not unless they were reincarnations of gods, anyway. “And I’m not frustrated.”
“As you say.” His impudent smile made Unar want to throw something heavy at him. “Women do not often visit during the monsoon. Esse has moonflower, though, when you need it, to soak up and disguise the scent of your bleed. If you change your mind, you know where I sleep.”
Unar scowled in his direction long after he was gone. Change her mind, indeed. How could she ever be attracted to Bernreb, with his pinkish, fishmeat-coloured skin? You know where I sleep? Pah!
She put her hand under her pillow and tried not to smell her fingers. Moonflower, to soak up and disguise the scent of her bleed. Thanks to the combined controlling nature of her tight-lipped, hateful mother and the unforgiving Servant Eilif, a stupid, bearded brute from Understorey knew more about her bodily functions than she did herself.
It took a long time for Unar to fall asleep. As she hovered on the brink of it, she thought she heard the sound of Marram’s thirteen-pipe flute. It was haunting, like wind over hollow bones.
Something like a deep sense of smell stirred inside Unar’s chest, but it wasn’t quite Canopian magic.
It was colder. Blacker. Lighter.
Like being weightless in a pool with no water. Or floating in an egg-shaped Temple where the light never shone.
* * *
IN THE morning, Unar emerged to find Hasbabsah, not dead, but awake and cognizant, out of her chair and kneeling by the fire with an entranced expression on her sagging, yellowish face.
Oos sat up at the enormous table, sullenly prodding pieces of fruit around her leaf-plate, while Marram held open a rotted-looking old palmwood chest. It appeared to be the chest contents that had stirred the sickly ex-slave from her stupor.
“What’s in there?” Unar asked.
“My mother’s birth-crown,” Marram answered. “Moonoom gave it to me when we went into exile in case one of us fathered a child. The crown is part of the ceremony welcoming a life. The newborn passes through it.”
Ylly came through the curtain with Issi in her arms.
“Hasbabsah,” she cried. “What are you doing out of your blankets?”
“Come and see, Ylly,” Hasbabsah said in a slurred, slightly delirious voice, and both Unar and Ylly were drawn towards the hearth to look inside the chest.
Unar had expected something shinier. The so-called crown was a ratty, shrivelled circle woven of the same brownish-green leaf fibre she’d been stripping for Esse. Black-flecked, emerald night-parrot feathers and dried gobletfruit were knotted around the edges. It would barely have sufficed as a stricken man’s tribute in the Temple. The chest also contained an assortment of musical instruments, none of which would have been allowed in the Garden at all.
“Ylly,” Hasbabsah said, “let these men perform the ceremony to birth you into your new Understorian life. Let them lower the crown over your head.”
Marram’s gaze flicked between Hasbabsah and Ylly.
“We have the means to make the markings,” he admitted after a while. “White clay and orange ochre from Floor. Indigo from Canopy. My mother told—”
“Your mother told you to keep them for your wedding, boy, but these women can help you to get more when—” Hasbabsah’s interruption was interrupted in turn by a coughing fit that forced her to let go of the edges of the chest. She covered her mouth to keep the bloody sputum from spraying over all of them. Ylly passed the baby to Oos without a word of acknowledgment and forced Hasbabsah back into her chair, bringing water for Hasbabsah to sip and rubbing her back until the coughing eased.
“I don’t think your hand will be steady enough, old woman,” Marram said, smiling sadly.
“Your hand will do,” Hasbabsah managed, and he gaped at her in sudden distress. She gulped at the water and went on in a rush, “I have heard that in Gannak a man does not paint a woman’s face except on the occasion of their marital consummation, but that is not the custom in Nessa.”
“I was born in Het,” Marram said, but Hasbabsah ignored him, speaking over him.
“Do this for me, Marram, third son of Moonoom. Bring my old friend’s daughter to this life soon, today, before I leave it.”
Marram, contrite, did as she asked. He mixed different kinds of coloured dirt with oil and traced them on Ylly’s arms and face. He combed out her hair. Until then, it had resembled an egret’s straw nest tangled with white moulted feathers; when Marram finished winding it tightly around crossed pairs of polished purpleheart sticks, it formed a complex tower of violet and silvery-yellow almost too wide for the crown to fit around. He wrapped her tightly, breast to ankle, in an indigo silk blanket woven with the same white and orange designs he had drawn on her.
Then he stood behind her, his back to the fire. Only the top half of his face showed above Ylly’s carefully arranged hair. He lowered the ugly woven thing from the chest around her neck, saying sentences that sounded the same backwards and forwards, and made no sense to Unar at all.
Hasbabsah glowed with contentment, though, and Ylly seemed as shy and pleased as a girl half her age.
Marram blushed deeply when his hands came to rest on Ylly’s painted collarbones, but Unar suspected it wasn’t over what he considered to be the inappropriate intimacy with Ylly. He wasn’t looking at Ylly at all. His cloud-coloured eyes lingered on Oos.
Oos, for her part, had eyes only for Ylly.
Probably just wished she was still in the Garden so she could try doing her hair with those fancy crossed sticks.
And then Hasbabsah slipped back into unconsciousness, and the small happiness brought by the ceremony turned to cheerless deathwatch once again.