Unar was taken aback by the instant recognition, but she had no energy to ask questions. What did she care, or need to know, about neighbouring gods and their Servants, anyway? Her place was here in the Garden. As a Gardener, she could sense struggling life and strengthen it. Soon enough she would be a Servant and germinate more than just plants; she would help to kindle human life. When she finally became the Bodyguard, the only one to have direct contact with the deity who stayed inside the egg-shaped Temple at all times, she would be able to ask: Had her sister, Isin, been reborn?
For just as the death god dreamed the names of those who passed into the ether, Audblayin dreamed the names of those who returned to be born again.
Oos, in contrast, hadn’t come to the Garden with ambition. She was fifteen years old. Only a year younger than Unar, she was delighted, like a child, by flowers, the feel of soil, and the sight of fish swimming. The daughter of a king’s vizier, she had an extensive knowledge of politics, astronomy, and religion. She’d come to the Garden in pursuit of beauty.
Unar’s mother was an axe maker, her father a fuel finder. Both were stricken, which meant they were free, but just barely. They didn’t own houses, like citizens. They were certainly not internoders, who owned whole sections of trunk between two branches, nor were they crowns, who owned the tops of entire trees. They were neither royalty nor gods.
They still should have found the food somewhere. Somehow. They should have paid tribute to the god Odel, the Protector of Children, so that Isin could live.
Unar would find Isin. New body or old. They would be together again.
As she relaxed in the hammock, she let images of her family’s hovel surround her. Unar’s earliest memory was of a cramped room: a wooden hollow all yellow lamplight and sooty shadow. The rocking and the creaking of the tree sometimes seemed to possess Mother. Her rocking and creaking with baby Isin in the chair moved in time with the great tree, as if their unity was something that might calm the tree in the storm. Little Unar knew that agreeing with Mother, mirroring her, sometimes calmed Mother.
Perhaps Mother thought rocking and creaking would calm the rocking, creaking room. Unar, blanket-wrapped, had crouched by the kettle and ashes a few paces away, mesmerised by the baby’s bright eyes and the puzzlement on the small, unformed face. Isin’s doughy cheek slumped against Mother’s right shoulder like dropped, unfired clay.
Baby’s puzzlement deepened. She vomited a splash of white breast milk onto Mother’s dark shawl. Then her little furrowed brow relaxed. All was well with her. She might as well have laughed with relief. Unar had laughed.
Is something funny? Mother shouted. Are you laughing at me? Here. Take her.
Unar took Isin while Mother rinsed the corner of her shawl in a bucket. Isin’s head wobbled and her inturned, useless feet fell out of her wrap, dragging near the rough, splintered floor. Unar was five years old, almost six, barely tall enough to hold her sister out of the dust. They stared at each other until Isin went cross-eyed and Unar had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing again.
We’ll laugh together, she thought. When you’re big enough. We’ll laugh at all the funny things.
A few months later, though, Isin had fallen, and Unar felt like she would never laugh again.
Oos’s voice, insistent, brought Unar back from her dark recollections.
“Unar?” Oos ventured.
“Mmm?”
“Did your oaths bind? While you were in Understorey? Could you have broken them?”
“There’s nothing out there that I want to steal,” Unar said scornfully. “And nobody I want to rape. I have no enemies to murder.”
“One who walks in the grace of Audblayin was only asking,” Oos replied, too quickly. “One only wanted to know how it felt. Did it feel like it did before? Before you came to the Garden, I mean. Could you care about things that weren’t birthing or sprouting? Could you think wicked thoughts?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Unar admitted, her eyes closing as she slipped into sleep. “All my thoughts are wicked.”
FOUR
BY MORNING, the Waker of Senses was dead.
The high-pitched harmonising of trumpet fruit roused the Gardeners from their hammocks. Oos emerged gracefully, slipping the red woven shirt she’d adjusted to flatter her form on over soft, knitted, seedpod-down undergarments, but Unar, barely having slept, tipped drunkenly out of hers, only to have the breath punched out of her by the ground.
“What’s that racket?” she croaked, palms pressed to her ears, the direct sunlight blinding. She blinked rapidly up in the direction of what she thought was Oos’s indulgent smile. Oos was taller than she was, curvier, and surrounded by a sweet-smelling cloud, the coconut oil she combed through her tresses. Her long hair leaped straight up like a black flame in the dry season and curled down like wet vines in the monsoon; Unar half suspected her of using magic on it. Thick, black eyebrows framed Oos’s enormous, guileless eyes, a smooth, broad nose, and bee-stung lips the carmine colour of cut tamarillos.
But Oos wasn’t the only one looming over her.
“It’s the transition call,” said a calm male voice from even higher up than Oos’s. “Audblayin has gone into the ether. By sundown, he or she will be born again, though we won’t find him or her for another twelve or thirteen years.”
Aoun. The lanky boy who’d waited with Unar at the Gates. They’d rarely spoken since. Aoun spoke rarely to anyone. There had been the incident with the fish. And the bulrushes. Only crazy people from Ehkisland who lived by the side of lakes could eat fish or the nauseating, glue-paste-tasting roots of bulrushes.
“Why don’t you lecture me for twelve or thirteen years, instead of helping me up off the ground?”
“Aoun doesn’t touch the flesh of mortals,” Oos teased from somewhere behind Unar. “He thinks he’s a god.”
“I don’t think that,” Aoun said. No, Aoun didn’t think he was a deity. Unar had hoped she was, once, and been disappointed to learn she was unusual, yes, but not extraordinary. Which was why she could never tell Oos about her ambition to be the Bodyguard. Oos might look at her in a pitying way, the same way Aoun had looked at her when he found out about her mother wanting to sell her as a slave, and she couldn’t stand being pitied. Better her friends looked at her with admiration when she succeeded.
When Unar and Aoun had pledged their lives to the Garden together, he an orphan and she a short step ahead of the slave block, he’d been shorter than she, his face pimply and his voice reedy. Four years later, he towered head and shoulders above her. His curls, once sun-bleached, stayed black these days, and he spoke as deeply and ponderously as a tree bear.
His hand, where it grasped her forearm, was as big as a tree bear’s, too. He lifted her easily to her feet, where she swayed and made whimpering noises, still covering one ear against the wild music. It was normally so quiet. Singing and the use of instruments in the Garden were forbidden.
“We’ve got to go to the Temple, Unar,” Oos said, giggling, pulling Unar along behind the other Gardeners. “This way.”
“I forget what happens.”
“Isn’t it exciting? I can’t wait to see the inside of the Temple.”