“You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Oos.
The glance that Oos gave Unar was frightened, not pleased. Unar didn’t know why. Was Oos frightened of her? Of her anger? Or frightened for her? Frightened of what punishments might be meted out if Unar publicly rebelled?
“You will serve,” the Bodyguard told Aoun.
Unar had time to think about ways in which she might rebel. She might leap off the edge of the platform and die in a broken, bleeding mess on top of the corpse of the goddess. That would show them. What could they do about that?
They might catch her with magic and prevent her from falling. How could they not know her destiny? How could they not sense that she was greater than Oos, greater than Aoun, greater than all of them?
The ones who had been chosen separated themselves from the ones who would go back to the Garden. Oos and Aoun received white robes from the ex-Servants who would shortly pass through the Gate on their way to examine every cradle from beggar’s to queen’s. Unar couldn’t bear to raise her eyes to them. She stared down through the hole at the lifeless shape below.
Audblayin, hear me. She moved her lips without sound, invoking the birth god inaudibly. I’ll prove myself to you, I swear. I’ll show them. I’ll be the one to find you. I have an advantage! I already know you’re reborn a man.
A hand seized hers in a brushing of robes. It was Oos on her way back down the stairs, white-robed in the company of Servants. Her eyes locked with Unar’s, begging for forgiveness, and for patience.
Then she was gone.
Unar’s new conviction wavered as she realised she’d have to face the moat alone. She wondered if she might drown herself and be eaten by fish, polluting the purifying moat with her death. But the returning Gardeners were permitted to wade through the shallow part of the moat, the ford where women seeking enhanced fertility were allowed to cross and enter the Temple, and she couldn’t drown where she was able to stand.
She couldn’t drown. She had to show them. She would teach herself. She was like a seed.
Ambitious. Desperate. Single-minded. Strong.
SIX
UNAR SLEPT early and woke when it was still dark.
Unfamiliar shapes snored in the hammocks to either side of her. Newly admitted Gardeners. Unar hated them. Oos hadn’t snored. The fresh arrivals’ magic hadn’t been wakened yet. She could have put seeds in their nostrils and germinated the shoots into their brains.
Scowling, she climbed out of her hammock and left the loquat grove, only to find the pasty-faced slave woman, Ylly, beating clothes against a rock by the waterfall to clean them. Dirty water fell through empty air down to one of the pools. Tiny, chirping, insectivorous bats flew through the edges of it, snatching mouthfuls of water on the wing.
“I suppose this is the old woman’s work, too?”
Ylly shrank back, folding herself into an uncomfortable bow with her forehead in the moss.
“I’ll accept your punishment, Warmed One,” she said. “If not for me, you would have been chosen to serve today. When I saw you didn’t have enough magic to swim through the moat, I knew the disaster that would fall on you. The young gap-axe trees were knee-high in the morning!”
“Sit up. It wasn’t your fault. It was their fault. They’re stupid. How can stupid select for smart? Can a monkey choose a checkers player?”
Ylly sat back on her heels and risked the suggestion of a smile.
Unar remembered another woman sitting back on her heels in that spot.
Another hesitant smile.
The vizier’s daughter, beautiful and haughty, had clutched a wooden rod in her right hand and the rim of a wide, evil-smelling glass bowl in her left.
She’d also had a black eye that Unar knew was payback from the other Gardeners for some decision the king of Audblayinland had made two generations ago. Having received more than her share of beatings in life, Unar wouldn’t have cared about one black eye on a rich girl; only, she’d expected a vizier’s daughter to run to her superiors at the first sign of trouble, and this one had not. She’d taken the punishment with unusual equanimity.
Inside Oos’s bowl had been half a dozen handfuls of fresh, scarlet poinsettia leaves and something that had once resembled a lopsided, misshapen man’s tunic. The red tunics handed out to the Gardeners were sometimes made of leathery, stitched-together leaves, and sometimes the wispy, white wool inside seedpods. This one was the latter.
Oos had altered it to a slim-fitting woman’s shirt that crossed over in front, tied with ribbons, and boasted a roomy bust and tight waist. Unar had seen the vizier’s daughter working on it under the eaves of the pavilion during their break for midday meal.
They don’t mind which style we use, so long as the colours are correct, she had said shyly. One who walks in the grace of Audblayin thought it would better glorify the goddess if the colours didn’t fade, too. This mordant was gifted as tribute in the Temple. Servant Eilif said one who walks in the grace of Audblayin could use it.
What is it?
Green vitriol. It is of iron and the milk of mudwasp stings. One of my minder-women used to make it.
I’ve never made anything like that before, Unar said, wrinkling her nose. But I have mixed leaves and mud to make a poultice for bringing bruise swellings down.
Unar had helped Oos with her swollen eye. Oos had offered to treat Unar’s red Gardener’s shirt so that the colour wouldn’t fade. And that was the last involvement with laundry that Unar had had, because it was slave’s work.
Until now.
“I’m almost finished,” the slave woman said.
Unar came closer to the baskets of clothes. They were the dirty slept-in clothes she and the other Gardeners had shucked off by the moat the previous morning. She picked up a shirt. It was Aoun’s.
He wouldn’t need it again. He wouldn’t return to the Garden to toil with his hands again; only to toil with his magic. The sleeve was worn over the upper arm on the left side. He still missed his brother, the one who had drowned.
We used to fight all the time, he told Unar once when they’d been given the job of finding some escaped flowerfowl together. My mother kept a great sack full of all the wishbones from every fowl she ever ate, and we’d snap a dozen a day, deciding who would get a new shirt or which of us would have a bath first and which would get the dirty water.
He’d gone shirtless while they climbed after the foolish, easily frightened birds that day, and Unar hadn’t bothered to look. As a Servant, he’d be wrapped up tight in a white robe all the time; now, when it was too late, was when she wanted to look?
Unar sighed. She wet the shirt and began beating it, hard, against one of the rocks that protruded into the stream of falling water. It felt good. Like she was beating the fat Bodyguard.
“Forgive me, Warmed One,” Ylly said, “but you shouldn’t strike so hard. You’ll distort the weave.”