“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.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
UNAR LAY on her pallet in the dark, cosy storeroom, listening to Ylly swish and shush the baby, and to Hasbabsah’s terrible coughing.
Despite the disturbances, she should have fallen asleep instantly, but her head whirled with thought. The monsoon would last five long months. There was no way for her to leave the home of the three brothers before then. And why should she leave? Why should she go back to Canopy at all, until the reincarnation of Audblayin was old enough for her to find?
What would the brothers do with Oos and Unar when the rain stopped? Push them out the front door?
She had no forearm spikes with which to climb, nor skill with an axe. Perhaps she’d better learn. Hasbabsah had said there would be no trunk crossings in the wet, but what about in the dry? How did one travel from tree to tree in Understorey, where there were, apparently, no bridges to bring demons to the door?
Unar would have liked to visit Edax at the edge of their swimming pool, though it must be overflowing by now, rejoining a vertical river like the one outside the three brothers’ door. Fish would half swim, half climb with their fins or thin speckled legs up the river to lay their eggs in the upper pools. Then, the following year, the hatchlings would abandon the pool, too big to survive on rotting leaves and insect larvae. Many would end up in nets like Esse’s, but others would make it all the way down to Floor.
Was that her way back into Canopy? To fool the barrier at the rain goddess’s domain into thinking she was a fish, just as she had fooled the Garden Gate into thinking she was a seed? She could swim. She could imagine a fish’s thoughts. By then she would smell like a fish, from eating so many.
Unar bit her lower lip. It wasn’t simply climbing and axe-work she would have to learn if she was to persist in her search for Audblayin and prove herself the rightful Bodyguard of the god. She must continue her quest for magical knowledge.