“Oh. Sorry.”
They beat clothes together in silence for a while. Ylly wrung them out and placed them in another basket. When the shirts were done, she brought out the red robes that the Gardeners had worn to the ceremony, their hems feathered and pale with mother-of-pearl dust.
Unar sighed again as she remembered the sight of a glittering Aoun diving into the water. It was a new and strange sensation, being so fixated on his beautiful form, on the slabs of muscle that covered his once-skinny ribs, on his bulging arms and the shadow of a man’s growth deepening the darkness down his throat. How long would she have to wait before all such urges were repressed once again? She had no time for distractions if she was to meet her destiny. Hopefully this wouldn’t go on until Unar brought Audblayin back to the Garden.
“Ylly,” she mused, to distract herself. “It’s a funny name. I never heard of it before.”
“It was my mother’s name, Warmed One,” Ylly said. “Her only gift to me, other than the gift of my life. We of the Understorey believe it’s good luck to have names that sound the same forwards and backwards. Warriors should be able to travel up and down the trunks of the great trees.”
“Do you really think that if your name was Unar, you’d be able to go up trees but not down again? That is just as stupid as the Bodyguard.”
“Whatever you say, Warmed One.”
“You know what else is stupid?” Unar went on, feeling her face become heated. “Pushing old women off the edge of the Garden when they’re too weak to wash clothes. Surely there’s other work she could do, elsewhere. Cooking. Caring for children.”
“She cannot be sold elsewhere, Warmed One. She knows the secrets of the Garden.”
“What secrets?” Unar said scathingly. “She doesn’t know any secrets.”
Neither do I, she thought. But I’m going to discover them. Somehow.
They lapsed into silence again as they cleaned the thicker, heavier robes. Unar found Oos’s robe, smaller than the others and, like the shirts, more fashionably tailored, and wondered if her friend would enjoy sleeping in the feather beds of the Temple, and whether she’d get fat from an oversupply of food tributes, too.
“Ylly,” she said at last when the laundry was done and they bent to lift the heavy baskets and take them to the drying bushes, “what would happen to a baby who fell from Canopy? If your mother’s people found it alive, would they care for it?”
“An adopted fallen baby is even luckier than a good name, Warmed One. But I must tell you that they rarely survive. If the babe’s bones were not broken by branches, the child’s cries would call demons before warriors.”
“Demons?”
“The predators that your gods and goddesses keep away from Canopy, Warmed One. The old woman tells tales of them. Spotted swarms. They snatch a bite of flesh each with their needle teeth and leave nothing but bones behind. Embracers squeeze the life from sleeping women and men. Dayhunters take possums from their nests and children from their cradles, and longarms, who hunt in packs of five, pull monkeys and men by their heads and limbs into five bloody pieces.”
Unar shivered.
“And of course,” Ylly continued calmly, leading the way with the heaviest basket, “there are chimeras.”
Unar followed behind her. “Chimeras aren’t real.”
“When I belonged to the princess, I accompanied her to the Temple of Odel, Protector of Children. There was the skin of a preserved chimera there. I saw it with my own eyes, Warmed One.”
“Is it still there?”
“I suppose so.”
Unar couldn’t have explained her sudden need to seek it out. It was something to do with the legend of the creature laying two eggs into its own mouth as a female, transforming into a male, and then fertilising the eggs. One of the eggs became male; the other, female. And then the two of them merged into a single offspring. Something about the Temple of Audblayin being shaped like an egg. Something to do with Unar’s conviction that Audblayin would change from female to male in this next incarnation.
The chimera will be a guardian spirit to me, Unar decided, watching over and helping me in my quest to find the god. The fact that the skin was in the wrong Temple, the Temple of a rival god, was no deterrent.
“I’ll go to see it,” she said. “Tomorrow night, I’ll go to see it. You’ll tell me the best way to go.”
Unar had asked for directions to Odel’s Temple before. If she closed her eyes, she could still see it. A day speckled by sun, a month before Isin fell. Beams of light roved over the hovels of the poor only three or four days a year. Maybe it was the crack of sunlight on the ledge that had enticed Isin out of her crib.
Most babies in Canopy didn’t have cribs. Cages—it’s a cage, little Unar had thought, like a cage for laying fowl. Most babies stayed tied to their mothers morning and night. How else to be certain they wouldn’t fall, if the parents were too poor to pay tribute to Odel? Wide sashes with holes for arms and legs were popular at the local market where Mother wed her axe-heads to smooth, polished handles and Father sold his stacks of fuel. Unar’s parents pooled their meagre earnings to pay rent to their internoder landlord for the one-room hollow with its ill-fitting, west-facing door and single window wide enough to admit pythons but not a grown man’s arm.
Isin slept in the crib, for Mother couldn’t keep a babe close to the forge fire in the stone-lined workhouse three trees over, where she sweated over costly metals. Nor could she leave her work mid-shaping; she must ignore her baby’s needs lest the steel cool and the tempering fail. And who, in similarly drastic circumstances, could spare the time to look up from their own drudgery to wonder why a child’s hungry cries sometimes leaked from the locked door beside or below their own?
Unar didn’t like to go with her father, searching for fuel, leaving her little sister behind, but she wasn’t grown; she couldn’t strap the baby to her own body. She might lose her balance and kill them both. That day, the day the sunlight touched the window, Unar and Father had returned to the hovel for lunch, just in time to see Isin pull herself out of the crib and fall, headfirst, onto the floor.
There was blood. Unar had been frightened. Could babies break? Was her new sister broken? Father had picked Isin up, holding her high so that Unar couldn’t see her. There was just his head brushing the ceiling, his sandals in the blood, and the snake-sound of shushing. Isin hadn’t died.
Not then. Not yet.